She gently squeezed his hand before withdrawing hers. “Thank you, Jacques. It’s good to know that we’re still friends. That’s something anyway.” She folded her hands in her lap and lowered her head.
He looked at the bony curve of her jaw and her eyes nearly black in the dim light of the bar. She’d lost a lot of weight. “I think you should marry Gordon.”
She lifted her head and studied him, her eyes amused. “Really? You wouldn’t mind too much?”
The familiar smile on her lips twisted his heart. He swallowed before speaking. “No. Do what feels right, what makes you happy.”
“I don’t know quite what that would be anymore. A call from the hospital saying that they’d gotten it all wrong. It was a screw-up in the lab and my real test results were hiding in somebody’s else’s file.” She tilted her head and shrugged as if dismissing the possibility. “But maybe for Gordon, getting married would mean something.”
“Then do it.” She wouldn’t marry again without his blessing he knew. He could see it in her eyes. “You shouldn’t have any regrets.”
She reached for her glass. “I’m not sure what I’ll do yet, but thank you, Jacques. As for regrets, I have many but it’s past the time when I can do anything about them.” The glass shook as she brought it to her lips and drank, her eyes meeting his and saying everything.
He raised his glass and drank too, not stopping until it was empty. The long draught of bitter beer wasn’t nearly enough to clear the pain clawing at his throat. It couldn’t even begin to dull the impact her words had made on the rest of his life.
4
Wednesday, December 21, 8:20 p.m.
Kala grabbed her duffel bag from the cab of the truck and walked two blocks through the snowy streets to the YMCA-YWCA. The night duty cop had given her directions to the tallest building in the neighbourhood. He said it was impossible to miss. She decided to leave her truck in the police lot until somebody told her otherwise.
An empty gym stood illuminated in the tall windows on the south side. She rounded the corner to find the main entrance. Up stone steps was a bright foyer with posters of flowers and art hanging on concrete block walls and a leaning silver Christmas tree in the centre of the space. The teenage girl on the desk had a bad case of acne but a friendly smile. She handed Kala a pen and clipboard to sign in. “How long will you be staying?”
“End of the week probably.” Kala couldn’t think beyond that. She felt no connection to this job or city. She could see herself getting in her truck and heading back north without much regret. She wouldn’t allow herself give in yet. “I’ll pay for a week in advance.”
“Tenth floor to the right of the elevator,” the girl said, taking Kala’s credit card before handing over a key.
“Thanks.” Kala picked up her bag and headed toward the elevators.
The Spartan blandness of the room and the cramped space were what she’d expected. A single bed with a greyish bedspread was set against the wall with just enough room for a bedside table and chest of drawers scarred by cigarette burns and rings from hot drinks. The overhead lamp cast harsh yellow light that hurt her eyes. She flicked off the switch and crossed the room in the dark to turn on the desk lamp. The bathroom and showers were down the hallway but she was sick with tiredness and stretched out on the bed. She promised herself a five-minute rest before going to clean up. In the room overhead, a radio was playing music that thump-thumped like a heartbeat through the ceiling. Women’s voices grew louder in the hallway, one of them laughing as they moved past her door. Kala closed her eyes and let her mind drift.
She wasn’t sure what woke her — perhaps the elevator rumbling to a stop across the hall or somebody in the corridor — but whatever it was, her eyes snapped open and it took her a moment to recognize the room and its contents. The lamp was still burning. She raised her left arm and looked at her watch. One a.m. She’d slept nearly four hours, as if somebody had knocked her unconscious.
She lay for a moment longer, imagining Jordan’s face and wondering if he was sleeping, if he knew she was gone for good. He probably had an inkling by now because she’d left Nipigon two days before. One day without seeing her wouldn’t have had him overly concerned, but she knew he’d be dropping by the station today to talk to her. He’d be puzzled when he found out that she wasn’t working the shift. Then he’d seek out Shannon, who worked the phones in the office. Shannon would tell him that Kala had gone away for a while, but not where. They’d worked the story out together.
Kala stood and stepped out of her clothes, tossing them onto the chest of drawers. She pulled back the covers and slipped naked between the cotton sheets, reaching to turn off the lamp. Wind whistled through the window pane and rattled the glass. She’d forgotten to close the curtains and the light from a street lamp cast silvery light across the floor. Snow streaked down the glass in wind-blown swirls. She thought about getting up to shut out the night, but closed her eyes instead, snuggling deeper under the covers.
Her mind wandered back over the day. Rouleau looked like someone who kept his cards close to his chest. Better this than a fake bastard who said a lot and meant nothing. She wasn’t sure about having a partner. She liked working alone and avoided teaming up as a rule. Whelan seemed sturdy enough though, if she had to have one.
What would she be doing now if she was back in the North? Maybe finishing her tour of the town and starting down the beach road to check on the spots where kids liked to park and drink or make out in their cars with the heaters on full. She’d signal them with her headlights to pack it in for the night, making sure none got stranded in the drifting snow. She’d always liked the early morning hours of the night shift: the stillness of the woods, the night sky, the stars sparkling in the blackness that swallowed the earth.
A feeling of loss tore through her. She breathed deeply, in and out, slowing her breathing and forcing herself to relax. For a moment, she was back in her little house on the edge of town with her black lab Taiku sleeping on the floor in his spot next to her bed. The same wind rattling against her window in Ottawa became the northern wind off Lake Superior, sweeping through the pine trees and whistling down her chimney.
She rolled onto her side and tried to find a comfortable position on the lumpy mattress. If she found a place to live in this city that allowed dogs, she would drive home and get him from Shannon. The hell with the upheaval and the asphalt, the reasons she had left him behind. If she could adjust to a city, so could Taiku. Already she regretted leaving him, with more pain than she would have imagined.
Geraldine’s legs throbbed like a couple of toothaches. The rest of her didn’t feel much better. She lay next to Max and listened to him snore while she slowly stretched out her legs to try to ease the ache running up her calves. Her body was running on empty while her mind wouldn’t shut off. Where could her father be and why hadn’t he been in touch? Why was Laurel so quick to think something awful had happened to him?
If her dad and Laurel were having marriage problems, as she suspected they were, her dad was capable of changing his life in an instant. He’d left her mother for Laurel without warning. Maybe Laurel was about to find out what this felt like from the other end.
Geraldine rolled closer to the edge of the king-sized bed and swung her legs over the side, careful not to wake Max. Warm milk might help her relax — her and the baby both if she was lucky. The little guy had been kicking and rolling around in her stomach the better part of an hour. She felt for her slippers in the darkness and grabbed her housecoat from the chair where she’d thrown it after her shower, then made her way downstairs to the kitchen. She quietly heated up a saucepan of milk and sliced the leftover apple pie. She’d skip the ice cream though. Her doctor had warned against putting on much more weight on her last visit. Max had probably put him up to it. If she believed the doctor, she was calories away from diabetes.
She chewed the pie slowly and sipped her milk at the kitchen table, fatigue making each bite an effort. Only
four days to Christmas and she couldn’t have cared less. Max said it was her hormones acting up, but she didn’t think so. The malaise had started months before she got pregnant. It had begun when her best friend Karen Walters moved to the East Coast to open a seafood restaurant and she realized that she wasn’t free to do anything so daring. Her life map was drawn the day she married Max.
Being his wife was what she’d wanted from the moment he’d sat next to her in the university cafeteria and started talking to her as if she was one of the pretty girls and not the plain one she knew herself to be. When he’d started seeking her out every day and then asking her to meet him after class, she’d felt such a glow inside. It wasn’t long before he’d consumed her every waking moment. She’d gone a little bit crazy. She knew that now.
She looked around the renovated kitchen and studied the pine cupboards she’d chosen after visiting every kitchen store in the city. For something that had seemed so important to get right at the time, they hardly seemed worth the effort. She’d thought once that a welcoming home would make a difference, but Max wasn’t interested in the house or spending time in it. He had to be in the middle of things, wheeling and dealing. As long as he had access to the Internet, he could be anywhere: the office, a coffee shop, a bar. He used the house as a place to sleep and launch out of in the morning.
She heard footsteps in the hallway, and as if he’d known she was thinking about him, Max appeared in the doorway. He was as dressed down as he ever got in a white undershirt and navy silk pajama bottoms. He ran a hand through his thick hair and grinned at her with sleepy eyes. Her heart still leapt at the sight of him and she wondered how her body could want him while her mind was revolted. Maybe it all came down to hormones as he’d suggested. He slid into the seat next to her and leaned his arm against hers. His smile was the same one that used to charm her. “Can’t sleep?”
“No. Baby’s kicking. Plus I can’t stop wondering where Dad has gotten to. Did he say anything to you about taking off for the day?”
“Not a word. His office door was closed when I got in so I just assumed he didn’t want to be bothered. I had no idea he wasn’t in there. Any apple pie left?”
“In the fridge. Maybe I should call Hunter.”
Max crossed the kitchen and opened the fridge door. He pulled out the pie plate, then cut a large slice and sat down next to her. “What good would that do? Hunter hasn’t spoken to your dad in months.”
“I think Dad visited him lately. Besides, Hunter has a right to know our father’s gone missing.”
“I sincerely doubt your brother’ll care all that much.”
“I just can’t imagine Dad leaving Charlotte this close to Christmas. He told me once that if Laurel ever tried to divorce him, she’d never get custody of Charlotte.” She forced herself to stop talking. Max didn’t like it when she went on about her family.
“Did he think Laurel would leave him?”
“Dad was beginning to see her for the opportunist she is. It took long enough, but he was starting to make plans.”
“Plans?”
“When Daddy makes up his mind, he doesn’t wait for things to happen. He takes charge. It’s what makes him so good in the business world.”
Max cut hard through the pie crust with the side of his fork before turning his head to look at her. He wasn’t smiling. “You call the way he manipulates people ‘taking charge?’”
“What do you mean ‘manipulates?’”
“Everyone your father comes into contact with either bends to his will or gets trampled on. Look at your mother. He discarded her like an old shoe as soon as he’d used up all her money. Now you tell me he was prepared to destroy Laurel.”
“You make him sound like a monster. He’s not like that at all.”
“What I can’t figure out is why you defend a man that everyone else in the world considers the biggest self-serving prick they ever had the bad fortune to come across. He has a way of making us all feel like something under his boot, you included. You take his bad qualities and make them seem like attributes.”
Max threw the fork onto the table and pushed his chair back. “The way he treats you over and over and you take it like a lump. At least Hunter had the balls to get away. You don’t see any of this, do you? Oh, what’s the use. I’m going back to bed.”
Long after Max left her, Geraldine sat at the kitchen table, immobilized by his words. The cold anger in his eyes was beyond anything she’d seen before. This was not the same man who’d courted her with flowers and undying love; the man she’d tied her future to, for better or worse. His ugly words replayed in her head, spreading like indelible ink through her brain. She knew now that she hadn’t been imagining his dislike.
Maybe it would get better if he said what he was thinking instead of giving her the wall. That’s what she’d come to think of his silence — a thick wall that came up whenever he looked at her. She had to change whatever it was about herself that made him look at her that way. She just needed him to tell her what it was. She would change and make him love her again.
God, she needed a drink. Not for the first time, she regretted having thrown out all the alcohol in the house when she’d found out she was pregnant. Cold turkey, they called it. She’d called it torture. All the nights sitting home alone before she was pregnant while Max worked, easing the time away with a bottle of wine that eventually stretched into two and a drinking time that started closer and closer to lunch. She’d hidden the empties from Max, driving to different liquor stores on Monday mornings to return them and replenish her stock for the week. She hadn’t had to hide her drunkenness since he usually turned up after she’d crawled into bed. That time seemed like a dream to her now. The evenings had been hazy and the mornings were just something to get through until she could pop the next cork. What she’d give for a cold glass of pinot now.
She looked down at her swollen belly. Perhaps she was far enough along that a glass wouldn’t hurt the baby. It might even help them both relax. Having a drink might be a kindness. She pushed herself to her feet. First thing in the morning, she’d take a drive into the city and pick up a bottle. She’d tell the cashier it was a gift for a friend’s birthday. It wasn’t really that far off from the truth.
5
Thursday, December 22, 8:25 a.m.
Rouleau leaned on the kitchen counter and looked out the window rimmed in frost. The darkness had lifted enough that he could see chickadees eating birdseed from the feeder that Frances had hung on a low hanging pine bough, now covered in a thick coat of snow. He’d kept the feeder replenished even after she left.
He filled his mug from the coffee machine and took a sip while he looked at all the work he’d been putting off. When he and Frances had moved in five years ago, he’d planned to redo the kitchen and get rid of the blue cupboards and the green and grey tiled floor that puckered in places like a wizened apple. After that, he’d wanted to tackle the fake oak panelling in the front room and rip out the gold shag carpet and spring for new windows and doors. That had been the plan when he put in an offer on the fifties bungalow on a dead end street that ran alongside a bike path. So far all he’d accomplished was contracting out the new roof the summer before.
He ran his hand along the jagged edge of the counter. Time to start getting organized and clean the place up. Might be a good idea if he decided to sell.
He took a final swallow of coffee and dumped the rest into the sink, then grabbed his parka from the back of the kitchen chair on his way to the front door. He checked his cellphone as he walked. One message waiting. He punched in his password and listened to Vermette telling him to be in his office at nine for a briefing. No time to stop for breakfast like he’d planned.
He bent to put on his boots, then stood and closed his eyes, letting the rush of grief fill him. Frances. He wrapped an arm around his stomach, clenching back the pain that rose from somewhere deep in his guts. He let the sick feeling overwhelm him for a few moments before straightening
and taking a deep breath. The intensity lessened. She hadn’t looked ill. Perhaps it was a misdiagnosis after all? Maybe she’d be one of the lucky few to beat the odds. She couldn’t give in yet. She’d always been strong. Do not go gentle into that good night. Dylan Thomas, if he remembered his high school English. Frances would know the whole poem by heart. She had an amazing memory when it came to words on paper.
He used to come home unexpectedly to find her in the kitchen reading from a poetry book she’d picked up at the Sunnyside branch of the public library. Her lips would be moving and her forehead would be fine lines of concentration as she stirred the pot on the stove with her free hand. He’d stand and watch, drinking in the sight of her, the white curve of her neck as she bent over the pages, sliding his eyes down to her full hips, long legs, and bare feet. She’d look up to find him there, her eyes lost in a world he could never follow, then lighting with happiness as she took him in. If he was lucky, she’d read those same lines to him after they made love while the meal simmered on the stove and the afternoon light shifted from lemon yellow to pale pink and grey in the gathering dusk, his head resting on her breast, his arm wrapped loosely around her stomach.
Vermette was talking on the phone when Rouleau entered his office and dropped into the chair across from him. The conversation on Vermette’s part consisted of a lot of head nodding and murmured agreement. Rouleau searched his face. Vermette wouldn’t be happy to be forced into the obsequious end of whatever was being discussed.
He took the time to look at the man across the desk. Early fifties, wiry build, and slightly oversized head, glistening like a soft-boiled egg. Vermette’s pale blue eyes were framed by incongruous long, black lashes that looked as if they’d been combed through with mascara. He favoured tight dark suits and different coloured turtlenecks. Today’s was white with a coffee stain approximately where his navel should be. A man who grew up in the tough east end of the city, he’d broken free of his family and neighbourhood and beaten the odds. By all rights, he should be in jail, not heading up the city’s police force. He should have been someone to admire.
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