Afterward, she and Tara had been in the parking lot, about to drive away, when Tara said, “Here comes that man, Mommy.”

  “What man, sweetheart?”

  “The man in the store. He’s running.”

  Wendy had turned to look and he waved at her and came up puffing. A grin. The window rolling down, the bag handed over, the thanks. It all took less than a minute, and she would not have given it another thought if it hadn’t been for their next encounter.

  And this time he was a white knight.

  She and Tara had gone out in a boat on Trout Lake. She had rented a small motorboat from the marina, just a fifteen-horse on the back. They’d had a wonderful day, putt-putting around the tiny islands near Four Mile Bay. Wendy had beached the boat on a sandy point, and the two of them had become absorbed in a game of “Indians.” Mostly it was a game of hide-and-seek, but it stretched on and on and Wendy had not noticed the storm clouds coming up.

  They were only a few hundred yards from the island when the motor quit. Wendy tried and tried to start it, until her arm was just about falling off, but she found a bad rip in the fuel line and knew they wouldn’t be going anywhere unless it was by rowing.

  But the oars turned out to be heavy and unwieldy, and they hurt her hands. She simply could not get the boat moving with any speed. The air grew thick and dark and there were flashes of lightning beyond the hills. Pulling with all her strength on the oars, Wendy overbalanced and fell backwards in the boat. Both oars came out of the oarlocks and went into the water. She and Tara were paddling after them by hand. Tara’s efforts were more counterproductive than useful, and Wendy was becoming genuinely frightened. In a matter of minutes the wind had blown them a long way from shore, there were few houses visible and there wasn’t another soul on the lake. Everyone else had had the sense to clear off.

  She heard it before she saw it. A low roar, louder and louder. She looked up and there was nothing but the grey and purple turmoil of clouds. Then the plane dropped through them and nearly deafened them as it flew by. It disappeared to the north between two more islands, and Wendy had a faint hope that he would report their marooned “vessel” to someone at the marina who could come and get them. By the time she had retrieved the drifting oars and put them into the locks, raindrops had begun pelting down—heavy drops the size of marbles.

  “Wow,” Tara said, over and over again. “I’m not scared, Mommy. Hey, Mommy, I’m not even scared.”

  “That’s good, honey,” Wendy had said, although she considered it more rational to be frightened at this point, both of them soaked through, lightning pogo-ing over the hills toward them, and their aluminum boat the highest point on a flat surface.

  Blisters were stinging the palms of her hands when they again heard a motor, much quieter this time.

  They had rounded the point that took them into the main bay when they saw the plane ploughing its way toward them, pontoons sending up white frills on black water. It came within twenty yards of them, propellers roaring. The plane seemed to pivot on one pontoon, then the tiny side door opened and a man leaned out.

  “Storm’s gonna break any minute, and it won’t be pretty. You better let me tow you in, all right?”

  In no time at all he had tossed them a tow rope that Wendy tied to the metal ring on the prow. They were no more than twenty feet apart when she did this, and she could feel Frank staring at them.

  “Do I know you?” he said. “Have we met somewhere?”

  “Possibly. It’s not that big a town, is it.”

  He snapped his fingers. “The No Frills. You were ahead of me at the checkout line. You forgot one of your bags.”

  “I remember you,” Tara said. “You brought our bag.”

  “That’s right,” Frank said. “I remember you, too. Are you ready for a tow?”

  “I am!” Tara said. “Are you going to take us up in the air behind you?”

  “No. I’m just going to drive across the bay here on the pontoons.”

  “Oh.” Tara plunked down on the aluminum seat, disappointed. The rain made her hair cling to her perfectly round skull.

  “We’re ready,” Wendy said.

  Frank closed the door, the propellers roared again and soon they were following along in the V of his wake. The wind from his propellers competed with the winds of the storm, whipping wet strands of hair across their faces. It was nearly as dark as night. Along the shore, photosensitive dock lights winked on.

  “I wish he’d fly up in the air,” Tara said. “That would be awesome.”

  “I don’t think the plane’s strong enough for that, honey.”

  “We could fly over the hills and all the way home in the boat.”

  It took less than fifteen minutes to cross the bay, a distance that would have taken them an hour of rowing. Frank hooked his plane onto his buoy at the marina, then hauled their tin boat in.

  “Can you make it to the dock from here?” He had to shout over the thunder. “I have to take my little painter in, or I’ll have no way of getting to the plane next time.”

  “I think we can make it,” Wendy said. “Thank you so much!”

  He hauled them toward the plane as he coiled up the rope. Wendy untied it and he reached down to shake her hand.

  “Frank Rowley,” he said.

  “Wendy Merritt. And this is Tara.”

  And that was how Frank Rowley had flown into their lives.

  Wendy started scouring a pot that was too big for the dishwasher. Frank came in wearing his wig. His sixties tribute band was playing the Chinook this week, and he liked to wear his John Lennon wig onstage. That was how his hair had looked before he lost most of it at the early age of thirty; he’d shown her pictures.

  “Are you off to your gig?” Wendy said.

  “In a minute. Stuff’s already in the car. I want to show you something.” He pulled two coupons out of his back pocket. “Bob Thibeault gave me two free passes for WonderWorld next weekend—well, actually Friday and Saturday.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” Wendy said. “I can’t go next weekend. It’s the conference.”

  Wendy had the autumn teachers’ conference coming up. On Friday the schools would be closed for a professional development day.

  “I know, honey. But I wanted to run something by you. I’ve been thinking—we’ve been together eight months now, and I think Tara and I are getting along pretty well.”

  “More than pretty well, honey. She’s crazy about you.”

  “Do you think?” Frank said, visibly pleased.

  “She always wants to know where you are. Always asks when you’re coming home. I think she still doesn’t quite believe you’re real. And she thinks maybe you’ll disappear like her other dad did.”

  “Well, that’s kinda what I was thinking. Tara and I haven’t had a chance to really do any bonding stuff, just the two of us, you know?”

  “Well, you’ve taken her up in the plane, you’ve done a couple of hikes. And you took the cruise on the Chippewa Princess.”

  “That’s true. But those are just a couple of hours. I think it would be really great to spend a couple of days together. I think it might really make us a unit, you know? A real dad and daughter.”

  Wendy leaned back against the counter, arms folded. The thought of Tara going away for a couple of days—to another town—made her nervous. Her daughter had been to day camps. And she’d slept over at friends’ houses. But she’d never gone out of town without Wendy. And WonderWorld was two hundred miles away, almost in Toronto. She said as much to Frank.

  “Well, okay,” he said, disappointed. “If you feel she’s not ready. I just thought it was a great opportunity. But hey, I can give these away, no problem.”

  “No, no, don’t do that.”

  “Well, if we’re not going to use them.”

  What am I worrying about? Wendy chastised herself. Frank’s the most responsible guy I’ve ever met.

  “I’m just being silly,” she decided. “Of course she can go. I think the two of you would have a great time. Except—are you willing to spend two days at an amusement park?”

  “I have to admit, it wouldn’t normally be my idea of a good time. But it seems like such a great opportunity for me and Tara to get to really know each other.”

  The television went off in the living room. Tara came in, clutching a stuffed lion. She laughed when she saw Frank. “You’re wearing your hair!”

  Frank primped a little. “How do I look? Ozzy Osbourne?”

  “I love it,” Tara said, tugging at it.

  “Oops, careful, honey. It’ll fall over my face and I won’t be able to see where I’m driving.”

  “Mommy, can I get a cellphone? I want a Harry Potter cellphone.”

  “No you don’t. You’ve just seen a commercial.”

  “I do! I do! Then I could call Courtenay and Bridget.”

  “You can call them now.”

  “It’s not the same. Mommy, please, can I?”

  “Actually, Frank has something better. You want to tell her, Frank?”

  Frank crouched down to be on Tara’s level, the way he always did when he spoke to her. “How would you like to go to WonderWorld this weekend, just you and me?”

  “WonderWorld? Are you serious? That would be triple awesome!”

  “Well, think about it a second,” Wendy said. “Would you be okay just going with Frank? Mommy can’t go, because of work.”

  “I wanna go! I wanna go! When? Tomorrow?”

  “Friday,” Frank said. “We’ll have all day Friday and all day Saturday together. Won’t that be fun? Maybe I’ll even wear my hair for you.”

  42

  PATIENTS TURNING UP DEAD and Frederick completely unconcerned. It’s Manchester all over again, Dorothy Bell thought, as her mind tumbled back to their life in England. In England, Frederick had been unconcerned when three patients killed themselves in little more than a week. He had been unconcerned when the mother of one young suicide stood outside the hospital with a sign that read: Dr. Bell Murdered My Son. And he had been unconcerned when his colleagues pointed out the high rate of death among his patients.

  He developed some stock responses. You try to help people and this is the thanks you get, he would say, with a heavy sigh and a world-weary shrug. Nobody understands what a lethal killer depression is, he would say. Most doctors won’t even take it on. He painted himself as a swashbuckling surgeon venturing with his knife into hostile territory where others fear to tread.

  And yet he had been unconcerned in Swindon when a teenaged girl in his care had blown up her entire house in the course of gassing herself. And unconcerned when a man in his late fifties, about to become a grandfather, had blown his head off in his daughter’s backyard. And unconcerned when nurses at the Manchester hospital, where Dorothy also worked, began referring to him as Dr. Death. She had told him about it, and he had merely shrugged that world-weary shrug and said, “Against stupidity, the gods themselves labour in vain.”

  The only time Frederick had seemed at all worried was when colleagues at Manchester had demanded an inquiry from the National Health authorities into his habit of prescribing seven times more sleeping pills than psychiatrists with similar caseloads. “There are no psychiatrists with similar caseloads,” he had fumed, even as they were packing for Canada. “Depression causes sleeplessness. What am I supposed to do, let them go psychotic with insomnia?”

  This was around the time Dr. Harold Shipman had been on trial for murdering some 250 patients with massive overdoses of heroin. Shipman had been known as a good, kindly doctor who made house calls. Indeed, many of his patients died even as he was visiting them, or shortly after. His plump wife had stood stolidly by him, attending his lengthy trial every day, never saying a word to the media.

  And now here was Frederick with that boy who killed himself a couple of summers ago, and that Mr. Keswick, and that policeman’s wife, and that poor Dorn boy who shot himself in the laundromat. How could her husband be so untroubled by it all? Of course he wasn’t Harold Shipman, he wasn’t going around killing people, but he must be doing something wrong for so many of his patients to be killing themselves.

  She remembered saying to herself, when Shipman was convicted, that unlike Mrs. Shipman, she would have known, she would have done something.

  I’m doing something now, she told herself as she slipped into Frederick’s office. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing, but she could not—no, would not—sit still again while bodies started piling up. She was not going to be Mrs. Shipman.

  She unlocked the closet where Frederick kept his session recordings. So obsessive, the way he watched them. Years ago, back when he had been using videotape, she had worried that they were pornographic movies, but a few listens at his office door had quelled that particular fear. No grunts and groans, no cries of not quite credible ecstasy. The only sounds that issued under and around his heavy door were the murmur of confession, the voice of reassurance, the tears of despair.

  The discs were identified by file numbers, not by names; it would be a simple matter to match them up to the files in his cabinets.

  Frederick wasn’t due back from hospital rounds for hours. She took the first disc out of its sleeve and popped it into the player. Then she went over to the couch, where so many of her husband’s patients had wept and confided, and sat down to watch.

  43

  EVEN THOUGH CARDINAL’S CASELOAD was lighter than usual, he still had to pay attention to the petty crimes that are the usual fare in a small city. Break-ins, robberies and assaults demanded investigation, and reams of paperwork had to be completed for court.

  In the morning, he had helped track down the former Mrs. Rowley, but Delorme didn’t need him at the moment, so he was making quiet inquiries on the background of Dr. Bell. Internet searches led him to abstracts of papers the doctor had given, boards he had belonged to, degrees he held, and all his affiliations, past and present. He focused on the earliest of Bell’s associations—the Kensington Clinic in London, England. Unfortunately, both the doctors who had been there during Bell’s tenure informed Cardinal that they were far too busy to discuss a former colleague.

  He had better luck with Dr. Irv Kantor at the Swindon General Hospital. Dr. Kantor spoke in the sorrowful tones of a former friend.

  “I thought Frederick was a good psychiatrist,” Dr. Kantor said. “Hard-working, smart, productive, caring. Nobody had a better understanding of depression. No one.”

  “But you sound doubtful,” Cardinal said.

  “Well, then there was all the trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Frederick was a resident here, but he received a reprimand for over-prescribing—which meant he would never get a staff position.”

  “Over-prescribing what?”

  “Sleeping pills. I think the disciplinary committee thought he must’ve been an addict himself from the amount he was prescribing, but he wasn’t. He was just giving them to an awful lot of patients. A number of them committed suicide with the pills he prescribed.”

  “Was he charged with malpractice?”

  “One patient’s family tried to bring a charge, but they couldn’t get any psychiatrist to testify that it’s a gross error to prescribe sleeping pills to someone who is not sleeping—even if they are depressed. The most any of us could say is that we might not have prescribed so many pills. It might have been misjudgment, but not malpractice.”

  “I’m surprised you’re telling me about it, then.”

  “If that were all there was to it, I wouldn’t. But we live in a post-Shipman world—you’re aware of the physician who killed hundreds of patients?”

  “Yes, I read about it. There had been suspicions about him for some time, as I recall, but one hospital did not inform another, is that right?”

  “That’s right. Nobody talked to each other. And there was more about Frederick. He left Swindon shortly after the committee’s report. We had all liked him, but we also all breathed a sigh of relief when he left. He joined the Manchester Centre for Mental Health—it’s the biggest psychiatric hospital in the north. A couple of years after he went there, they had an extraordinary number of suicides, something like four times the rate in similar hospitals. There was a story in the papers and demands for a National Health investigation, but it didn’t happen for some reason. Frederick moved away, and I believe the matter was dropped.”

  “Where did he move to?”

  “I don’t know. Once he left here, our paths never crossed again.”

  Cardinal put in a call to the Manchester hospital. The personnel department would tell him only the years of Bell’s employment, the Standards and Practice Committee chair refused to give anything at all without a British warrant, and the chief of psychiatry did not return his call.

  Cardinal knew that the relationship between those who diagnose patients and those who actually look after them is often bumpy, if not openly hostile. Which was why his next call was to the head of nursing.

  Police in Ontario are not normally allowed to gain information by outright subterfuge, and it was an indication of Cardinal’s overstressed state of mind that he, usually a stickler in matters of procedure, gave it barely a moment’s thought.

  The Manchester head of nursing was a woman named Claire Whitestone, who had a mannish voice and a tone that suggested she had fifteen other things she would rather be doing than talking to one George Becker, assistant chief of nursing at Algonquin Bay Psychiatric.

  “Algonquin Bay,” Sister Whitestone noted. “Sounds like a place where you might run into igloos and polar bears.”

  “Bears and Indians,” Cardinal said. “No igloos.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “We’ve got a serious problem over here and I need some help from your outfit. Some information. And your administration, your physicians? Well, it’s like talking to a brick wall.”

  “You’ll get no sympathy from me, mate. I bang my head on those same walls every single day. Banes of my bloody existence. What’s the problem?”