by Anne Emery
“Are you going to call the cops on us?”
“Oh, I think we can settle matters without any need for law enforcement.”
They came up and shook hands, and we all went inside except those two and Father Burke. Father stayed outside and talked to them some more. He must have got their names.
(Monty)
I was dictating a pretrial brief for a leaky-condominium case when Brennan arrived at my office. I spoke my last few words into the dictating machine, then turned it off and popped the tape out for my secretary to transcribe.
“What was all that about?” he asked.
“Another condo building has developed leaks. It’s three years old.”
“Newgrange,” he said.
“What?”
“Burial chamber in Ireland, made of turf and stones. It’s been watertight for five thousand years. If they could do a proper job of it then, what the hell is wrong with them now?”
“Don’t get me started on it.”
“I have to talk to you.”
“What is it?”
“Did you ever hear anything about young people paying for access to the Delaney family?”
“What?”
“A couple of Beau’s young fellows came in to Four-Four Time today. They were being chased by two other boys. I got things calmed down, then spoke to them privately. The long and the short of it is this: the boys say they paid fifty dollars each to get a ride in the Mercedes, and later they each paid another hundred dollars that was supposed to win them a hearing. A chance to plead their case for acceptance into the family as foster children.”
I sat there horrified.
Burke went on: “The two young lads have desperate home lives. Well, one of them is in some class of a group home, and the other has a mother who’s on crack; she and her boyfriend are pounding each other and their kids from the time they get up to the time they pass out again. Not hard to see why they took the bait. They wouldn’t tell me how they came up with the payments, but I think we can conclude they didn’t hold a bake sale.”
I finally found my voice. “Who did they pay the money to? Please don’t tell me it was Beau Delaney. Family is sacred to him. And those amounts of money? Delaney wouldn’t take his hand out of his pocket on a frosty day to receive —”
“It wasn’t Delaney. The boys couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me who it was. I told the young lads I’d get the money back to them and put it in an account. So whenever you suss out what happened, let me know and I’ll contact the pair of them.”
“Sure,” I answered. But I was barely listening. All I cared about was that it wasn’t Beau Delaney. And it was a guy, so I didn’t have to waste two seconds on the bizarre notion that it might have been Peggy, and that Delaney found out and confronted her at the top of the stairs. So if it wasn’t Beau or Peggy, how could it possibly hurt our case?
Chapter 10
(Monty)
That evening, Brennan and Pat Burke joined me and Normie in my backyard. The property is bounded by the waters of the Northwest Arm, the long, narrow body of water separating the western side of the Halifax peninsula from the mainland. We sat in my Adirondack chairs with our drinks, and enjoyed the mild April weather.
“What a grand spot this is, Monty,” said Patrick. “It’s therapeutic just sitting here and gazing at the water. I may decide to miss my flight to New York tonight.”
“Thanks, Pat. Feel free to send your patients up for a spot of relaxation.”
“I may do that. Is it always this balmy in April?”
“Ha!” I responded. “It could be like this, it could be raining or snowing, or both. Or — look out to the ocean — what do you see?”
“A line of clouds, it looks like.”
“Fog. A fog bank just sitting out there. If it moves in, that will be the end of all this happy talk about the weather. Even downtown, on the other side of the peninsula, they can probably feel the chill breeze coming off it.”
“We’ll enjoy the good times while they last, then,” he said.
“More seriously, though, Pat, I don’t know how to begin to thank you for coming up here and helping us out with Normie. We’ll sort things out in terms of compensation, your flight and all that.”
He waved me off. “No worries. I was due for a visit anyway. And Bren was overdue for his physical.”
“You’re his family doctor, are you, in both senses of the word? Quite a distance between doctor and patient.”
“Doesn’t make much sense, does it? But if I don’t insist, he’ll never go for a checkup. Have you ever heard of him going to see a doctor here?”
“No, but then he strikes me as the type who wouldn’t mention it. Or anything else to do with health or sickness.”
“No, of course not. He wouldn’t mention it if he had a double lung transplant. ‘Brennan, would you like to go over to the Midtown for a pint and a smoke?’ ‘Ah, no, not today.’ That would be all you’d hear on transplant day.”
Typically, Brennan ignored the exchange.
“Do you know how to do that stuff?” Normie asked. “Listening to hearts and fixing broken arms and all that? I thought you just knew how to deal with people’s heads.” She stopped abruptly, and her face reddened. She must have thought she was out of line, but of course she wasn’t, and Pat smiled at her.
“Well, now, you wouldn’t want me operating on Brennan if he needed that lung transplant — necessitated by his refusal to give up smoking — for instance. Nor would you want me to give you a triple bypass operation. You’d best go to a heart specialist for that! But in fact psychiatrists are medical doctors first. That’s how we start out. Then we go on to study psychiatry. So I know the medical stuff, too.”
“That makes sense. I get it now. Daddy, what time is it? I said I’d phone Kim after her dance lesson.”
“It’s just after seven o’clock.”
“Okay, I’m going to see if she’s home now.”
When she left us, I asked Patrick: “So, Pat, where do you come down on the question of psychic phenomena, clairvoyance and all that?”
“I guess I would describe my position as ‘cautiously open-minded.’ Ask most of my colleagues what accounts for a person hearing voices or having visions, and I think you know what they’ll say: psychosis. Quite rightly, most of the time. So they wouldn’t welcome me making an address to the American Psychiatric Association on the subject of clairvoyance! There are a lot of charlatans out there, and a lot of wackiness around the whole subject, as is evident from the tabloid press. So we have to tread carefully. I’ve never had a psychic moment in my life. But it strikes me that some people have insights that can’t be explained by coincidence. Sometimes the theories put forward to debunk these stories are just as fanciful and lacking in proof as the wildest of psychic claims. And there is nothing I’ve ever seen in Normie that would suggest she is lying or psychotic! Even this fellow” — Pat inclined his head towards his brother — “falls short of a finding of psychosis.”
“Give it to me straight, Doc.”
“And I know he is, shall we say, ‘sensitive’ to otherworldly phenomena, as left-brained as he otherwise appears to be. I suspect he finds Normie’s claims quite credible.”
“I do,” Brennan replied. “There’s a whole lot of codology — foolishness — associated with this stuff, but I believe it’s the real thing with Normie. She has the sight, just like the old spook in Cape Breton, her great-grandmother.”
“She comes by it naturally, then! I saw something of it myself, when you were all in New York for the wedding. There we were at the table, and she was able to intuit a great deal about our brother, Francis, including the Irish-language pet name our mother used for him when he was a child. I checked with Mam afterwards, and she was adamant that she had never used the phrase in Normie’s hearing. She hadn’t said it in years. What was it, Bren?
It meant ‘child of my heart.’”
“Leanbh mo chroí.”
“Right. Could she have heard that bit of Irish around the Collins household?”
“Not much chance of that. Monty hasn’t had our advantages, Padraig. Never mind that he bears the name Montague Michael Collins. His da obviously banjaxed the job of passing on our ancestral history to his poor, benighted son. Or maybe he did, but the lad wasn’t listening.”
“There you go. She’d never heard it before, and she came out with it, and she spooked the hell out of Francis when she did it. So I’ll talk to Normie again, and see what she has to say. Who knows, we may find out she’s seeing events that really happened, or that will happen, and I’ll be able to present a paper to the American Psychiatric crowd after all!”
(Normie)
I was in my bedroom at Daddy’s house. There’s a whole wall that he lets me draw and paint on, which was really fun. Except now I had the wall full of pictures, and I wanted to put more on there and didn’t know where. I was trying to figure it out when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and I knew they weren’t Dad’s. There was a knock at the door even though it was open. It’s nice to know some people are really polite.
“Hi, Dr. Burke.”
“Hi, Normie. Would it be all right if I talked with you for a few minutes?”
“Okay.”
He sat in my chair. “I’d like to help you, Normie. I know the things you see are upsetting you.”
“They think I’m crazy! Like the people in the movies who say they’re hearing voices, and everybody looks at each other and makes a face like ‘woooo, this guy’s loony!’”
“Your mum and dad have talked to me, and so has my brother, and they don’t think there’s anything crazy about you at all! They believe what you’re saying, and so do I.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yep. And you know something?”
“What?”
“I work with the kind of people who are sometimes called crazy. Not a very nice way to talk about them, is it? Especially since it’s not their fault. They are people who have problems, sometimes mental illnesses. And I can tell that you’re not like them in any way.”
“Honest?”
“Honest.”
“That’s good.”
“So, Normie, how are you enjoying the choir school? This is your first year, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and it’s great! I love it! We learn a whole lot of regular stuff like math and history, but then we get to sing, in Latin and Italian and French and German. Me and Kim both switched to the choir school this year.”
“So you have your best friend with you?”
“Yeah. She’s kinda scared of Father Burke — well, your brother.”
“You tell him to stop scaring Kim, or I’ll tell our mother on him! She’ll get him sorted.”
I laughed because he was joking.
“So things are going well at school for you.”
“Yep.”
“And you have Kim for a friend. Other friends, too?”
“Yeah, some from my old school and some at the new school. And some more at Four-Four Time, the music program we do after school with kids from all over the city.”
“Lovely. And you have a big brother who takes good care of you . . .”
“Yeah, Tommy’s a really good brother. He teases me sometimes, but in a funny way, not in a mean way. And he has a really nice girlfriend, Lexie.”
“Good, good. And you have a baby brother. That must be fun. Are you enjoying being a big sister?”
“Oh, yes! Dominic is so cute. I really love him. I couldn’t stand it if . . .”
No! I stopped myself before I started to blurt out anything about Dominic. I figured I’d better not say anything else about him, or all that stuff about Giacomo. Mum didn’t want Daddy to know, so I knew it was supposed to be a secret between Mum and Father Burke, because he was trying to help her save the baby. I probably wasn’t even supposed to know it myself, but I was there when Giacomo came to the house, so I found out about it that way, and by listening in. And I wasn’t supposed to listen in on people, so I really, really didn’t think I should mention it to Dr. Burke, even though he would be a good person to talk to about it.
Oh no! I could feel myself starting to cry.
“Are you all right, Normie?” he asked.
“Yes, I was just thinking of . . . a sad song. Talking about the baby, but not just him . . . about Tommy and Lexie, too, and Kim . . . made me think of it.”
“Music can certainly bring our feelings out into the open, can’t it? Especially if we have something at the back of our minds already. What song were you thinking of, sweetheart?”
Oh, no, now I had to make up something. “It’s an old song, about, um, somebody going away for the whole summer and being lonesome for their girlfriend and brother and friends. But it’s okay because they all get together again at the end of the summer. So, even though it’s a sad song, it has a happy ending!”
“That’s nice. Because that’s one of the most painful things in life, isn’t it? Maybe even the most painful — being separated from the people we love.”
“But nobody’s going away here! So it’s just a song.”
He nodded his head and didn’t say anything. I wondered if he already knew about Giacomo and the baby. But I couldn’t take the chance of being the one to let out the secret if he didn’t know.
But he talked about something else. “You’ve been pretty lucky with your health, I’ll bet, Normie. You’ve never spent a lot of time in the hospital, I’m guessing.”
“No, never! Except for that big machine. That was scary.”
“I’m sure it was. It’s great how it turned out, though, good results right down the line. But I think everybody expected that. Sometimes you have to have tests just so the doctors can check things off and move on.”
“Yeah, it turned out good at the end.”
“Did you ever have the measles, chicken pox, things like that?”
“I had both of those. Back when I was little.”
“Have you ever been troubled by headaches?”
“Sometimes when I’m seeing all those bad things.”
“Anything else?”
“No, except for having a cold and being sick to my stomach with the flu. I hate being sick.”
“I don’t blame you. I do too! Can you tell me this, Normie? We all feel sad sometimes. How about you? Are there many times when you feel sad?”
“Only when I worry about . . . well, the baby was sick, and I was sad and worried about him. And I feel sad when I hear of people getting killed or beat up, especially when it happens to little kids. I don’t mean it’s okay when it happens to grown-ups!”
“No, I understand. If you were writing a book titled Normie Collins: A True Life Story, would you describe yourself as a happy person?”
“Oh, yeah! Almost always! Except when things happen to upset me. Like these bad dreams. The things I see.”
“Now, about those dreams or visions. We don’t have to wonder whether you’re seeing or feeling these things, because we know you are. Are these kind of like movie scenes that appear in your mind, as if you’re seeing them with your eyes?”
“Yes, I can see what’s going on. Or at least I can see part of it.”
“What about sounds? Do you hear things? Voices, or noise of any kind that you think maybe other people can’t hear?”
“I can hear voices, but I don’t like telling people that. You know why.”
“Oh, I know. But, really, if you’re seeing something happening, it’s probably quite natural that you would hear something too. Would you say so?”
“That’s right. I can hear people yelling and sounding mean.”
“What about this? Do you ever find that things don’t taste
the way they should? Or do you notice strange smells? Anything of that nature?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Why don’t you describe the things you see and hear, so I can try to picture them.”
“But Daddy’s going to be mad at me!”
“Why would you think that, sweetheart?”
“Because . . .”
He didn’t ask me “because what?” He didn’t make a face that said “I wish she would hurry up.” He just sat there, as if he didn’t have anything else to do for the whole night. It was quiet, and then I felt like talking again. I figured he wasn’t going to get me in trouble.
“Because . . . sometimes I think Mr. Delaney is bad!” There, I said it! I hadn’t even said it to myself before.
“Maybe he is,” Dr. Burke said.
What? I couldn’t believe it! He said it as if it was normal! Maybe it was okay to think it: Mr. Delaney could be bad.
“But he can’t be! Daddy says he didn’t do it. Didn’t kill Mrs. Delaney. And besides, he’s Jenny and Laurence’s dad! They are really good kids and they’re my friends. None of my friends’ dads are bad!”
“Well, you and I know some people are bad. Just a few of course, in any large group. And some of those bad people have kids. So it could be that you’re right, even if you don’t want to be right.”
“But I must be wrong. Mr. Delaney is always really nice to his kids, and he’s nice to me, too. If he was bad, I’d know!”