Forty Words for Sorrow

by Giles Blunt

  "Exactly. Drum roll, please."

  Kendall turned to Dyson. "Didn't you tell me there were rumors about Cardinal when he worked in Toronto?"

  "We did our homework, Chief. There was nothing substantial."

  Musgrave didn't even slow down. "Age of globalization. Perfect Circle are doing the grand tour from Hong Kong to B.C. to strengthen their linkage in Vancouver. Solid information says they're headed for Toronto, stopping off for a courtesy call in Algonquin Bay. According to this information, Corbett and the Yellow Peril have a meet set for the Pine Crest Hotel- the Pine Crest! It's like they're the ladies' auxiliary or something. Perfect Circle guys arrive on time. Appointed hour rolls around, JFO stakes out the hotel. No, we did not do the Musical Ride. And no, we were not in full-dress uniform. This was a strictly old-clothes operation. Guess what happens?"

  Delorme didn't say anything. Corporal Musgrave was enjoying his pedagogical act; it wouldn't do to interrupt the flow.

  "Nothing happens. No Corbett. No Perfect Circle. No meeting. Once more, the combined forces of the RCMP, the OPP, and the Algonquin Bay Police Department have come up empty. Dumb flatfoots. So stupid. Can't get anything right."

  The chief was standing by the fireplace, poker in hand, his face in shadow. It was rare to spend more than ten minutes with R. J. and not hear that preposterous laugh of his, but hearing Musgrave's Horseman's Tale had clearly depressed him. He said in a subdued voice, "It gets worse."

  It did indeed get worse. Another piece of solid information. Another date and time. The single change: This time, Jerry Commanda was back playing left wing for the OPP. Another raid. Another zero. "This time," Musgrave added, "Corbett files suit for harassment."

  "I remember that," Delorme said. "I thought that was pretty funny."

  Dyson glared at her.

  Musgrave shifted in his chair. It was like watching a continent change shape. "You've got the facts. I'll let you draw your own conclusions. You have any questions?"

  "Just one," Delorme said. "What exactly do you mean by 'solid'?"

  That was the only time the chief had laughed that night. Nobody else cracked a smile.

  Now, two months later, Delorme was feeding the shredder in her Special Investigations office and hoping without much optimism that her new partner would come to trust her. As she carried a wastebasket full of shreds to the incinerator, she saw Cardinal putting on his coat. "You need me to do anything?" she asked him.

  "Nope. We got a positive ID back on the dental records. I'm just going out to tell Dorothy Pine."

  "You sure you don't want me to come?"

  "No, thanks. I'll see you later."

  Terrific, Delorme muttered to herself as she dumped the trash. He doesn't even know I'm running a check on him and still he doesn't want me for a partner. Great start.

  6

  TO reach Chippewa Reserve, you follow Main Street west past the railroad tracks and make a left just past the St. Joseph 's mother house, formerly a Catholic girls' school and now a home for retired nuns, at the junction with Highway 17. There are no signs to Chippewa Reserve, no gates; the Ojibwa have suffered so much at the hand of the white man that to lock the door against him now would be pointless.

  The most remarkable thing about entering the reserve, Cardinal often thought, is that you don't know you're on the reserve. One of his very first girlfriends had lived up here, and even then he hadn't registered its status as a separate enclave. The pre-fab bungalows, the slightly battered cars parked in the drives, the mutts chasing each other over the snowbanks, these could belong to any lower middle-class neighborhood in Canada. Of course the jurisdiction changed- law enforcement here was in the hands of the OPP- but you couldn't see that. The only visible difference from any other part of Algonquin Bay was, well, the place was full of Indians, a people who for the most part moved through Canadian society- or rather, alongside it- as silent and invisible as ghosts.

  A shadow nation, Cardinal thought. We don't even know they're there. He had stopped a hundred yards past the turnoff, and now, since the day was sunny and a seasonable minus ten, he was walking with Jerry Commanda along the side of the road toward a perfectly white bungalow.

  When not encased in a down parka, Jerry was extremely thin, almost frail-looking, a deceptive morphology because he also happened to be a four-time provincial kickboxing champion. You never saw what Jerry did exactly, but the most recalcitrant villain, in the course of a disagreement with him, would suddenly turn up horizontal and in a highly vocal mood of compliance.

  Cardinal had never been partnered with him, but McLeod had, and McLeod claimed that, had they lived two hundred years earlier, he would have probably turned on his ancestors and happily fought the white man at Jerry's side. The detectives had held a big party for Jerry when he left, a party he did not attend, being no lover of sentiment or fuss. When he moved to OPP, he could have taken an assignment at any of the townships the provincial force covered, but he had asked to work exclusively on reserves. He got the same pay as the municipal police, except- a point on which he was as infuriatingly verbose as his race is said to be silent- he was exempt from income tax.

  Last night, Jerry had irritated him by pretending he hadn't been aware of Cardinal's exile from homicide. Jerry's sense of humor tended to be opaque. And he had a disarming habit, perhaps ingrained in him from countless hours of tripping up suspects under interrogation, of changing topics suddenly. He did so now, by asking about Catherine.

  Catherine was fine, Cardinal told him, in a tone that suggested they move on to something else.

  "What about Delorme," Jerry asked. "How're you getting along with Delorme? She can be kind of prickly."

  Cardinal told him Delorme was fine, too.

  "She has a nice shape, I always thought."

  Cardinal, though it made him uncomfortable, thought so, too. It was no problem having an attractive woman working in Special- with a separate office, separate cases. It was another to have her for a partner.

  "Lise is a good woman," Jerry said. "Good investigator, too. Took guts to nail the mayor the way she did. I would have chickened out. I knew she'd get tired of that white-collar stuff, though." He waved to an old man walking a dog across the street. "Of course, she could be investigating you."

  "Thanks, Jerry. That's just what I wanted to hear."

  "Got our new streetlights working," Jerry said, pointing. "Now we can see how homey it's getting around here."

  "New paint jobs, too, I notice."

  Jerry nodded. "My summer project. Any kid I caught drinking had to paint an entire house. Made them all white because it's more painful. You ever try to paint a house white in the summer?"

  "No."

  "Hurts your eyes like a bastard. The kids hate me now but I don't care."

  They didn't hate him, of course. Three dark-eyed boys carrying skates and hockey sticks had been following them since Jerry came out of his house. One of them threw a snowball that hit Cardinal in the arm. He packed some snow together in gloveless hands and hurled one back, way off the mark. Must have been ten years since he'd thrown anything other than a tantrum. A skirmish ensued, Jerry taking a couple of missiles indifferently in his skinny chest.

  "Ten to one the little guy is your relative," Cardinal said. "Little smart-ass there."

  "He's my nephew. Handsome like his uncle, too." Jerry Commanda, all hundred and forty pounds of him, was indeed handsome.

  The boys were chattering in Ojibwa, of which Cardinal, no linguist, understood not a word. "What are they saying?"

  "They're saying he walks like a cop but he throws like a girl. Maybe he's a faggot."

  "How sweet."

  "My nephew says, 'He's probably going to arrest Jerry for stealing that fucking paint.' " Jerry continued translating in his monotone. " 'That's the cop that was here last fall- the asshole that couldn't find Katie Pine.' "

  "Jerry, you missed your calling. You should have been a diplomat." Later, it occurred to him that Jerry might not ha
ve been translating at all; it would have been like him.

  They walked around a shiny new pickup, approaching the Pine house now.

  "I know Dorothy Pine pretty well. You want me to come with you?"

  Cardinal shook his head. "Maybe you could stop in later, though."

  "Okay, I'll do that. What kind of person kills a little girl, John?"

  "They're rare, thank God. That's why we'll catch him. He'll be different from other people." Cardinal wished he was as certain of this as he sounded.

  ASKING Dorothy Pine last September for the name of her daughter's dentist- so he could get her chart- had been the hardest thing Cardinal had ever had to do. Dorothy Pine's face, the heavy features scarred by a ferocious, burnt-out case of acne, had expressed no trace of grief: He was white, he was the law, why should she?

  Until then, her only experience of the police had been their sporadic arrests of her husband, a gentle soul who used to beat her without mercy when drunk. He had gone to Toronto to find work shortly after Katie's tenth birthday and had found instead the business end of a switchblade in a Spadina Road flophouse.

  Cardinal's finger shook a little as he rang the doorbell.

  Dorothy Pine, a tiny woman who barely cleared his waist, opened the door and looked up at him and knew instantly why he had come- she had no other children, there could be only one reason.

  "Okay," she said, when he told her Katie's body had been found. Just the one word, "Okay," and she started to shut the door. Case closed. Her only child was dead. Cops- let alone white cops- could be of no assistance here.

  "Mrs. Pine, I wonder if you'd let me in for a few minutes. I've been off the case for a couple of months and I need to refresh my memory."

  "What for? You found her now."

  "Well, yes, but now we want to catch whoever killed her."

  He had the feeling that, had he not mentioned it, the thought of tracking down the man who killed her daughter would never have entered Dorothy Pine's head. All that mattered was the fact of her death. She gave a slight shrug, humoring him, and he stepped past her into the house.

  The smell of bacon clung to the hallway. Although it was nearly noon, the living room curtains were still drawn. Electric heaters had dried the air and killed the plants that hung withered on a shelf. The place was dark as a mausoleum. Death had entered this house five months ago; it had never left.

  Dorothy Pine sat down on a circular footstool in front of the television where Wile E. Coyote was noisily chasing the Roadrunner. Her arms hung down between her knees, and tears plopped in miniature splashes onto the linoleum floor.

  All those weeks Cardinal had tried to find the little girl, through the hundreds of interviews of classmates, friends, and teachers, through the thousands of phone calls, the thousands of fliers, he had hoped that Dorothy Pine would come to trust him. She never did. For the first two weeks she telephoned daily, not only identifying herself every time but explaining why she was calling. "I was just wondering if you found my daughter, Katharine Pine," as if Cardinal might have forgotten to look. Then she'd stopped calling altogether.

  Cardinal took Katie's high-school photograph out of his pocket, the photograph they'd used to print all those fliers that had asked of bus stations and emergency wards, of shopping malls and gas stations, Have You Seen This Girl? Now the killer had answered, oh yes he had seen this girl all right, and Cardinal slipped the photograph on top of the television.

  "Do you mind if I look at her room again?"

  A shake of the dark head, a shudder in the shoulders. Another tiny splash on the linoleum floor. Husband murdered, and now her daughter, too. Eskimos, it is said, have forty different words for snow. Never mind about snow, Cardinal mused, what people really need is forty words for sorrow. Grief. Heartbreak. Desolation. There were not enough, not for this childless mother in her empty house.

  Cardinal went down a short hallway to a bedroom. The door was open, and a yellow bear with one glass eye frowned at him from the windowsill. Under the bear's threadbare paws lay a woven rug with a horse pattern. Dorothy Pine sold these rugs at the Hudson Bay store on Lakeshore. The store charged a hundred and twenty bucks, but he doubted if Dorothy Pine saw much of it. Outside, a chainsaw was ripping into wood, and somewhere a crow was cawing.

  There was a toy bench under the windowsill. Cardinal opened it with his foot and saw that it still contained Katie's books. Black Beauty, Nancy Drew, stories his own daughter had enjoyed as a girl. Why do we think they're so different from us? He opened the chest of drawers- the socks and underwear neatly folded.

  There was a little box of costume jewelry that played a tune when opened. It contained an assortment of rings and earrings and a couple of bracelets- one leather, one beaded. Katie had been wearing a charm bracelet the day she disappeared, Cardinal remembered. Stuck in the dresser mirror, a series of four photographs taken by a machine of Katie and her best friend making hideous faces.

  Cardinal regretted leaving Delorme at the squad room to chase after Forensic. She might have seen something in Katie's room that he was missing, something only a female would notice.

  Gathering dust at the bottom of the closet were several pairs of shoes, including a patent leather pair with straps- Mary Janes? Cardinal had bought a pair for Kelly when she was seven or eight. Katie Pine's had been bought at the Salvation Army, apparently; the price was still chalked on the sole. There were no running shoes; Katie had taken her Nikes to school the day she disappeared, carrying them in her knapsack.

  Pinned to the back of the closet door was a picture of the high-school band. Cardinal didn't recall Katie being in the band. She was a math whiz. She had represented Algonquin Bay in a provincial math contest and had come in second. The plaque was on the wall to prove it.

  He called out to Dorothy Pine. A moment later, she came in, red-eyed, clutching a shredded Kleenex. "Mrs. Pine, that's not Katie in the front row of that picture, is it? The girl with the dark hair?"

  "That's Sue Couchie. Katie used to fool around on my accordion sometimes, but she wasn't in no band. Sue and her was best friends."

  "I remember, now. I interviewed her at the school. Said practically all they did was watch MuchMusic. Videotaped their favorite songs."

  "Sue can sing pretty good. Katie kind of wanted to be like her."

  "Did Katie ever take music lessons?"

  "No. She sure wanted to be in that band, though."

  They were looking at a picture of her hopes, of a future that would now remain forever imaginary.

  7

  WHEN he left the reserve, Cardinal made a left and headed north toward the Ontario Hospital. Advances in medication coupled with government cutbacks had emptied out whole wings of the psychiatric facility. Its morgue did double duty as the coroner's workshop. But Cardinal wasn't there to see Barnhouse.

  "She's doing a lot better today," the ward nurse told him. "She's starting to sleep at night, and she's been taking her meds, so it's probably just a matter of time till she levels out- that's my opinion, anyway. Dr. Singleton will be doing rounds in about an hour if you want to talk to him."

  "No, that's all right. Where is she?"

  "In the sunroom. Just go through the double doors, and it's-"

  "Thanks. I know where it is."

  Cardinal expected to find her still adrift in her oversize terry dressing gown, but instead, Catherine Cardinal was wearing the jeans and red sweater he had packed for her. She was hunched in a chair by the window, chin in hand, staring out at the snowscape, the stand of birches at the edge of the grounds.

  "Hi, sweetheart. I was up at the reserve. Thought I'd stop in on the way back."

  She didn't look at him. When she was ill, eye contact was agony for her. "I don't suppose you've come to get me out of here."

  "Not just yet, hon. We'll have to talk to the doctor about that." As he got closer, he could see that the outline of her lipstick was uncertain, and her eyeliner was thicker on one eye than the other. Catherine Cardinal was a s
weet, pretty woman when she was well: sparrow-colored hair, big gentle eyes, and a completely silent giggle that Cardinal loved to provoke. I don't make her laugh enough, he often thought. I should bring more joy into this woman's life. But by the time she had begun this nosedive, he had been working burglaries and was in a bad mood himself most of the time. Some help.

  "You're looking pretty good, Catherine. I don't think you'll be in here too long this time."

  Her right hand never stopped moving, her index finger drawing tiny circles over and over again on the arm of the couch. "I know I'm a witch to live with. I would have killed me by now, but-" She broke off, still staring out the window. "But that doesn't mean my ideas are insane. It's not as if I'm… Fuck. I've lost my train of thought."

  The swear word, like the obsessive circling movement of her hand, was a bad sign; Catherine didn't swear when she was well.

  "So pathetic," she said bitterly. "Can't even finish a sentence." The medication did that to her, broke her thoughts into small pieces. Perhaps that was why it worked, eventually; it short-circuited the chains of association, the obsessive ideas. Nevertheless, Cardinal could feel the hot jet of anger gushing inside his wife, blotting everything out like an artery opened in water. Both of her hands were making the obsessive circles, now.

  "Kelly's doing well," he said brightly. "Sounds practically in love with her painting teacher. She enjoyed her visit."

  Catherine looked at the floor, shaking her head slowly. Not accepting any positive remarks, thank you.

  "You'll feel better soon," Cardinal said gently. "I just wanted to see you. It was a spur of the moment thing. I thought we could have a chat. I don't want to upset you."

  He could see Catherine's thoughts growing heavier. Her head sank lower. One hand now covered her eyes like a visor.

  "Cath, honey, listen. You will feel better. I know it feels like you won't just now. It feels like nothing will ever be right again, but we've got through this before and we'll get through it again."