Forty Words for Sorrow

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Anyone breaking into this house would be likely to go through the back: there was nothing there but the high hedge and the railroad tracks. And thieves liked basement windows. Trouble was, the basement windows were buried below the snow. Using the heel of his boot, Cardinal dug a trench along the back wall of the house.

‘Damn.’ He’d scraped the back of his leg on the thick crust of ice. About four feet from the corner he found the top of a window. After clearing away the crust, he pulled the rest of the snow away with his hands.

‘Gotcha,’ he said quietly.

The Provincial Court in Algonquin Bay is on McGinty Street. It’s a modern, plain brick building with no pretensions; it might be a school or a clinic. Perhaps in compensation for its plainness, the sign that announces it as Provincial Court, District of Nipissing, is the size of a highway billboard.

The receptionist told him Justice Paul Gagnon was in traffic court until lunch, and lunch was booked for a meeting.

‘See if he’ll squeeze me in, will you. It’s for the Katie Pine case.’ Cardinal knew Gagnon would never grant him a search warrant to pursue some runaway Mississauga youth who was now over the age of sixteen. He filled out the necessary form and, while waiting for court to get out, called in to headquarters. Delorme was out on the Woody case and was not expected back for at least another hour. Cardinal felt a twinge of guilt for leaving her out of this; she’d been upset about handling his backlog.

Justice Gagnon was a small man with very small feet and a toupee that was two shades lighter than his hair. He was a few years younger than Cardinal, a completely political animal whose robe drowned him as if he were a child. His voice was a reedy pipe.

‘Sounds pretty feeble, Detective.’ Gagnon hung his robe on a coathook and put on a camel-hair sports coat. ‘You think the person who killed Katie Pine and abducted Billy LaBelle may have stayed in the Cowart house? And you base this on information received second-hand from Ned Fellowes at the Crisis Centre – information that doesn’t even relate directly to the killer but to another missing person, this Todd Curry.’ Gagnon checked his tie in the mirror.

‘The house was broken into, your Worship. I’m sure the parties contesting the will would want that investigated anyway. But if I go through them, it’s going to take a long time and upset people who are already upset about the will.’

Gagnon’s skeptical eye fixed him in the mirror. ‘For all you know, it may be one of the family who broke in. Maybe to haul off some contested stick of furniture. Family heirloom. Who knows?’

‘The window is only about ten inches high, maybe two and half feet wide.’

‘Jewellery, then. Grandpa’s pocket watch. My point, Detective, is that you have no substantive reason to suspect a killer was there.’

‘It’s the only place I have reason to suspect the killer set foot, other than the shaft head on Windigo Island. He likes deserted buildings maybe. The Curry kid was last seen alive saying he was going to stay in an abandoned house on Main Street.’

Gagnon sat down behind a desk that dwarfed him and examined the form. ‘Detective, this address is on Timothy.’

‘It’s at the corner of Main. It looks like it’s on Main. The Curry kid was from out of town. He probably thought it was Main Street.’

Justice Gagnon looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got to run. I have a lunch with Bob Greene.’ Bob Greene was the local member of parliament, a voluble fool of the back benches.

‘Just sign the warrant, your Worship, I’ll be out of your hair. We have zero leads on Billy LaBelle, and as for Katie Pine, this is it. This is all we’ve got.’ Katie Pine was the magic number – Katie Pine and Billy LaBelle were a combination that would slip the tumblers in Gagnon’s tiny heart. Cardinal could hear the mechanism turning over: famous case equals opportunity. Opportunity seized equals advancement. Personal advancement equals justice.

The JP furrowed his toy brow, timing his resistance like a modestly talented actor. ‘If there were people living in this house, no way would I sign this. No way would I let you disrupt a sovereign household on grounds this tenuous.’

‘Believe me, your Worship, I know how tenuous this is. I wish I had something ironclad to give you, but unfortunately the killer decided not to leave his name and address next to Katie Pine’s body.’

‘That’s not a high moral tone, I hope. You’re not lecturing me, are you?’

‘God, no. If I wanted to lecture JPs I’d have been a politician.’

Justice Gagnon vanished into his overcoat as if into a fog, then re-emerged decisively from cuffs and collar. He snatched up the bible from his desk and shoved it at Cardinal. ‘Do you swear the contents in the application are true, so help you God?’

Five minutes later Cardinal was back at the Cowart place, scooping snow away in handfuls from in front of the basement window. His knees were numb as wood. The snow was stratified into alternate layers of powder and ice. Cardinal went back to the car and retrieved a shovel from the trunk.

There were crowbar marks at both ends of the two-by-four that held the plywood in place, and the nails were loose. The two-by-four came away easily, then the plywood. There was no pane of glass behind it.

Cardinal removed his down coat, and the frigid air sucked the breath out of him. He dropped to his knees and crawled backwards into the opening, lowering himself inside. Snow got under his shirt and into his pants, melting against his skin. He could feel a platform, possibly a table, under his feet. Whoever had broken in had probably put it there to ease his exit.

Cardinal pulled his coat inside after him, fought with the zipper, then stood there on the table flapping his arms and exclaiming at the cold. The few footcandles of light that squeezed through the window did little to ease the darkness.

He climbed down from the table – a laundry table, he could now see – and switched on his flashlight. It was a heavy-duty instrument that took six D-cells and on occasion had doubled as a billy club; the glass was cracked and the tube dented. It swept a white beam like a cape over the silent furnace, the washer and dryer, a tool bench he immediately envied. There was a drop saw he’d seen going at Canadian Tire for close to five hundred.

Even in the cold he could smell the stone and dust, the raw old wood, the laundry smells from the washer and dryer. He opened a door, breaking old spiderwebs with his flashlight, and found shelves of preserves – peaches, prunes, even a gallon of red peppers that looked like fresh hearts.

The stairs were new, unfinished and open. The flashlight beam revealed no obvious footprints, but Cardinal kept to the edges and took the stairs two at a time to preserve any marks he might have missed.

The door opened to the kitchen. Cardinal stood for a moment to take in the feel of the house. Cold and dark, it exuded despair. Cardinal held in check the excitement of the chase, the sense of something about to happen. He had long ago learned to distrust such feelings; they were almost always wrong. Evidence of intruders did not mean a killer had been here, or even the errant Todd Curry.

The kitchen looked untouched. A thin layer of dust covered every surface. A narrow flight of stairs was tucked in the corner with a cupboard underneath. Cardinal lifted the latch with the toe of his boot, revealing neat rows of canned food. On the wall above the cupboard, a calendar from a local sporting goods store showed a man fishing in a plaid hunter’s jacket with a little boy laughing beside him. A sudden memory of Kelly, a summer vacation, a cottage; her little girl’s excitement at catching the fish, her squeamishness at baiting the hook; how his daughter’s brassy hair had flashed against the deep blue sky. The calendar showed July, two years ago, the month the owner had died.

In the plastic garbage pail he found nothing but a crushed donut carton from Tim Hortons.

The dining room was furnished with heavy old furniture, and Cardinal, no expert in such matters, had no idea if it was antique or reproduction. The painting on the wall looked old and vaguely famous, but Cardinal was no art critic either. Kelly had been appalled one day to discover he had no idea who the Group of Seven were, stars of Canadian art history apparently. The glass doors of a cabinet displayed pretty glassware, neatly arranged. Cardinal opened a cupboard and found bottles of Armagnac and Seagram’s VO. The chair at the head of the table was the only one with arms, and the fabric was a good deal more worn than the others. Had the old man continued to eat at the place of honour long after his family had dispersed? Had he sat here, imagining his wife and children around him?