Lament for Bonnie

by Anne Emery

  “You little bumblefuck, you never get anything right! What made you decide on that Campbell house for your scene? The ex-wife was still using the place, for fuck’s sake. You should have known that; you were banging the daughter. You dropped a piece of cloth in your rush to get away from there, and we lost time while the cops got distracted at that house.” His tone changed and he sounded amused. “Lost a few of our news clippings there on the way out. So your poor old teddy bears didn’t have their reading material.”

  I hazarded a look at Brennan and Maura. I had to assume they were thinking the same way I was, that the rage this father and son had for one another would propel them to attack each other before they would go for anyone else. When that happened, we would make our escape. I desperately wanted to move the children out of there, but the situation was so volatile that I could not predict the consequences of any sudden move. Not with Drummond in the middle of the room brandishing a knife.

  “Who gives a shit?” Kaulbeck was screaming by this time, into the face of the man who had sired him. “None of that matters anymore. Because I went to Halifax, and guess what I found? The phony passport you got for yourself! You were going to fuck off with all the money and leave me with zilch. Just like you never came through with that Mercedes! No way was I going to do all the work, sneak the ransom note into the old bitch’s house, and then have all the fucking money sent to you. I had to wait and figure out how to get the money to come to me!”

  “You promised me, Daddy!” Lyle Drummond mimicked in the voice of a child. “You in a Merc! Cops see white trash like you in it, they’ll pull you over thinking you stole it. The bank’s gonna take that Audi back, and you’ll be driving a donkey cart. Or how about my mommy’s LTD?”

  Then Lyle turned to the other people in the room, and his mood changed again. He spoke in a quiet voice laced with menace. “Now, I’m going to walk out that door.” He looked with contempt at his mother. “Lee fucked this up, and he’ll pay for that. Big time. But you have your precious granddaughter back. No harm done. And I know you’re not going to want your shame made public. So there aren’t going to be any sirens or red lights following me out of here. It’s our own dirty little family secret, right, Mom?”

  The typical, breathtaking arrogance of the psychopath. He really believed he would get away with it.

  “And if I ever do get locked up again, keep in mind all the pain I can cause when I get out. I won’t stop at kidnapping next time. And, by the way, I don’t give a fuck what happens to that!” he said, waving a dismissive hand at Kaulbeck.

  “You fucking bastard! You did nothing but put me down my whole life! I brought the kid back, and I’m going to get the fifty thousand dollars in reward money, so goodbye and fuck you!”

  “Yeah, right. You think the cops are going to pay the reward to you when they find out you’re the guy who snatched her? You’re even dumber than I thought!”

  Kaulbeck was purple with rage and his hands were curled into claws at his sides. “I’m not dumb! You are! You’re not going to be talking to any cops!”

  “Why’s that? You going to do a slash job on me like you did to the last guy who tried to talk? All your yapping about your medical knowledge and you couldn’t even find the jugular vein in Gouthro’s neck. How many jabs did it take before you found it, Doctor Kaulbeck?”

  Kaulbeck emitted a high-pitched wail and launched himself at Lyle Drummond. I watched with macabre fascination as the loveless father and loveless son turned on one another. Drummond raised the sgian dubh in his right hand and plunged it downwards at Kaulbeck’s heart, but Kaulbeck leapt back and avoided the blade. The momentum of Drummond’s action propelled him forward and Kaulbeck gave him a hard shove on the left side. Drummond lost his balance and fell to the floor on his back. Kaulbeck jumped on top of him and straddled him. The knife had disappeared beneath them. Kaulbeck pounded his father’s face with his fists, and Drummond hollered in pain and rage.

  Morag

  Let the pair of them fight it out.

  Lyle, the cold, unfeeling child. I remember the heart-wrenching letters I got from my poor little Ginny. I scratched together the money to go up to Toronto on the train. It took days to get there. I saw the kid then. As soon as I saw him, I knew what he was. A preschool child with a criminal mind. A being that was completely self-involved, without a shred of compassion for any other being, large or small, animal or human. I tried to get Ginny to see a doctor, see somebody, to help her manage. I knew there was nothing anybody could do about him.

  After Bonnie disappeared, I gradually began to sense his presence, to sense that evil around us again. But he was dead! Had his droch spiorad, his evil spirit, come back to take revenge? He had come back, sure enough. Not as a ghost but as something alive, materializing at my door with eyes as cold and remorseless as the eyes of a wolf.

  Did he really mourn the loss of a loving family? Of course not. Love had no more meaning to him than truth or mercy. But with the self-obsession of his kind everywhere, with the grandiose view he took of himself as a cut above common humanity, he could not forgive being rejected by his mother or by anyone else. Being thrown away as defective. Why would he come out in the open here and risk being arrested? Once Lee Kaulbeck snatched Bonnie from the hiding place, Lyle had lost the only bargaining chip he had. But there was one thing he could still do, exactly what he had done here: stage a scene of revenge in front of his mother.

  Lee, that droch son of his. Made of the same material. Missing the same spark of humanity. There is a genetic element to all this. I have seen it before. Not every child will bear the defect, but one might. And with Lyle sowing his evil seed through the population of Ontario, the odds were with him. He found Lee and moulded him in his own image. He was looking into that mirror image now.

  The sound of fists slamming into flesh and bone, and the grunts and roars coming from the pair of them, were sickening to hear. The two little girls were trembling and crying. Maura leapt up and took hold of them. She signalled to Ginny, who hustled them out of the room. Those poor wee girls, seeing things that they should never see, that no one should ever see. How would they begin to get over this?

  The men on the floor scratched and bit, tore at one another with tooth and nail. Two creatures returned to the state of nature, engaged now in a life and death struggle, every muscle, bone, and limb employed for the destruction of the other.

  Monty moved towards the fight, but Maura held him back. Their friend Father Burke went forward then, but I said to him, “Leave it be, Father. There are no souls for you to save here.”

  And the priest looked back at me, and I saw in his eyes that he understood. He, too, has an dà shealladh, the second sight. He knew that what was rolling around on the floor in front of us, roaring and bellowing, was not truly human. Burke nodded to me ever so slightly. By the grace of God, perhaps, the family would be spared a trial. By the grace of God, perhaps, there would be nobody left to try.

  Then there was a reversal of fortune. It was Lee Kaulbeck flat on his back, Lyle Drummond on top of him. Drummond scrabbled around and got the sgian dubh in his fist. He raised it over his son’s throat and drove it down into his flesh. We heard a scream of such agony that it must have resounded in the chambers of hell itself. Lyle twisted the blade, then yanked it out of his son’s neck. He bared his teeth and sank them into the wound.

  Monty Collins and Father Burke, lawyer and priest, were stock still, transfixed by the scene as if a portal had opened and they were seeing, for the first time, what we are when we live without law or morality.

  The front door flew open. Dougald MacDougald and Pierre, the other Mountie, came flying in. Dougald was calling out Lee Kaulbeck’s name. They stopped in their tracks and stared down at the two creatures on the floor. Then they pulled Lyle Drummond off the body of Lee Kaulbeck. Blood was dripping from Lyle’s teeth and lips. The wolf had ripped the throat out of its offspring.

/>   Chapter XIII

  Bonnie Clan Donnie MacDonald

  How could I have an uncle who’s a psycho? Nobody else in my family is like that. Well, except Lee; I guess I have to admit that he’s my cousin. But he was bad because of that creature Lyle and whoever Lyle’s own father was, not because of my grandmother Ginny’s side of the family. My worst fear now that it’s over is that I’ll have to go to court and see Lyle Drummond and give evidence on the stand against him, and he’ll be there staring at me with those cold, pitiless eyes. And then, whenever they let him out of prison, he’ll come and get me. But my dad says I don’t have to worry, that “one way or the other” Lyle Drummond will never again draw a breath outside the walls of a prison. Dad will make sure of it.

  Mum and Andy brought somebody to the house to talk to me, just me and her. She introduced herself as a counsellor but I think she’s really a psychiatrist, and they don’t want me to know that. They don’t want me to think that they think the month I was kidnapped made me crazy. But whatever she really is, she is so nice that it was great to talk to her and tell her all about what happened. I start to shake whenever I try to think about it. And I can’t bear being alone. But I started to feel better even after seeing her once. She doesn’t think I’m crazy. It’s the nights that are bad, the nightmares. I want to keep seeing her as long as I keep waking up terrified. She helped my cousin Normie, too, because Normie was there when Lyle the monster blasted his way into Kinlochiel.

  Everybody in the family has been so good to me; they all missed me and were scared to death about what might have happened to me. I don’t even want to think about what that was like for Dad and Mum and Andy. When we were all in the kitchen at home, Robbie played a piece he wrote for the pipes. He said he called it a lament, but not because he thought I was dead. A lament is to express grief or sorrow, and that’s how they all felt about me being gone. It is a very sad and beautiful piece, and I will love it all my life. Then he composed another one for me, right on the spot, “Bonnie’s Homecoming Reel.” And he said, “Step ’er down!” And I was longing to get up and dance. I didn’t know if I could do it. Dance after all I’d been through? I could feel my legs trembling. What if I had lost it, the gift of dancing? What if he had taken it from me forever? Everybody waited. I got up. And the shakes went away. And I danced. Everybody clapped along. And Normie was there, and I got her up dancing with me. And Robbie said, “Normie Ruadh, you’re right some good, dear,” and she is. I’m teaching her a few new steps, and she loves it. She’s allowed to stay here in Cape Breton for an extra week. Her mum and dad said it’s to make up for lost time that she missed having with me.

  And Normie sang me to sleep last night. She sat by my bed and held my hand and sang the “Cape Breton Lullaby.” All about little lost lambs and their troubled mammies going out to round them up and bring them home where they’ll be safe. Normie was so kind and so sweet with her red curls and her little glasses perched on her nose and her beautiful hazel eyes looking at me. This is somebody whose worst fear in life is that she’s going to hurt somebody’s feelings. She never will. Normie will never hurt anyone. And I hope to God she never, ever has to learn what it is like to be the one who gets hurt.

  Being with Normie made me think of a line in a poem I read when I wrote my essay on William Butler Yeats: “The world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” The poem is called “The Stolen Child.”

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following people for their kind assistance: Joe A. Cameron, Joan Butcher, Rhea McGarva, John Elliott, Joe Murphy, Marian Mancini, David MacIntyre, George M. MacDonald, Mary Lou Emery, Mike Mills, and Claudia Richard. Thanks as well to my insightful and keen-eyed editors, Cat London and Crissy Calhoun.

  This is a work of fiction. Any liberties taken in the interests of the story, or any errors committed, are mine alone.

  The Collins-Burke Mystery Series

  Sign of the Cross

  Obit

  Barrington Street Blues

  Cecilian Vespers

  Children in the Morning

  Death at Christy Burke’s

  Blood on a Saint

  Ruined Abbey

  Lament for Bonnie

  About the Author

  Named “one of Canada’s finest novelists” (Ottawa Review of Books), Anne Emery is a lawyer and the author of the Collins-Burke mystery series. She has won an Arthur Ellis Award, an Independent Publisher Book Awards silver medal, and a Dartmouth Book Award. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

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  Copyright © Anne Emery, 2016

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Emery, Anne, author

  Lament for Bonnie / Anne Emery.

  (A Collins-Burke mystery)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77041-168-5 (hardback);

  ISBN 978-1-77090-897-0 (PDF);

  ISBN 978-1-77090-896-3 (ePub)

  I. Title. II. Series: Emery, Anne. Collins-Burke mystery series.

  PS8609.M47L36 2016 C813’.6 C2016-902364-8 C2016-902365-6

  Cover and text design: Tania Craan

  Cover image: © Fotosearch/Getty Images International

  Author photo: Precision Photo

  The publication of Lament for Bonnie has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and b
y the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Ce livre est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada. We also acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,737 individual artists and 1,095 organizations in 223 communities across Ontario for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.