by Moss, John
“Sweden in winter must be beautiful, but you look like hell,” Miranda offered by way of an apology for her complicity in his wounded condition, which, as far as she knew, was simply to have inveigled him to take Birgitta’s case in the first place.
He offered no explanation for Hannah’s predicament. He loosened his coat and gazed out the car window at the snow gusting and swirling across sixteen lanes of pavement. Canada in winter could be beautiful too.
After she dropped him off, he checked his mail. There was a postcard from Hawaii, signed with a Happy Face. He stepped out of the elevator and walked through the door into his condo, leaving it unlocked behind him. He hung up his sheepskin, walked through, and looked out over the magnificent view of the harbour. He could detect the scent of lilacs.
We’re home, Harry.
I love you, Karen Malone, wherever you are.
I love you too, Harry. I love you too.
He carried his bags into the bedroom and carefully unfolded his nubuck jacket, which had been retrieved from the Hotel St. Clemens in Visby. He’d forgotten to declare it at customs. He walked back out into the living room, drew the pewter-grey, slub-silk drapes against the midday sun, and settled onto the sofa for a nap. He didn’t want to concede that he was bone-weary or that right now the bedroom in daylight would accentuate his loneliness. He gazed around at his Scandinavian furnishings. They made his antique Heriz carpet look new. The pain running up from his toes was curiously reassuring. His Blackwood etchings warmed him with their raw emotion and sadly lyrical beauty. He closed his eyes and before long he could hear from a great distance the words of Psalm 22, the words of Christ’s roaring from the cross, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Perché me ne rimuneri cosi? Perché, perché, Signor?
He drifted into a black sleep.
JOHN MOSS WRITES MYSTERIES BECAUSE NOTHING BRINGS life into focus like murder. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2006 in recognition of his career as a professor of Canadian literature with over a score of books in his field, John moved progressively away from literary criticism to creative writing and the mystery genre. He and his wife, Beverley Haun, whose book Inventing Easter Island grew out of her work as a cultural theorist, share a stone farmhouse with an Airedale and a Kerry Blue terrier and numerous ghosts in Peterborough, Ontario. He was a scuba instructor and an endurance athlete (Boston Marathon, eleven times; the original Ironman, once; Canadian Ski Marathon, gold bar; numerous treks in the barrenlands and many long-distance loppets closer to home). John is an amateur house builder, Bev is an inspired potter, and they still enjoy canoeing, cross-country skiing, and long hikes in interesting places around the world. In 2017 they did the Wainwright coast-to-coast walk across England and would like nothing better than to do it again.
www.johnmoss.ca
Other books by John Moss
The Jewel in the Cave
The Girl in a Coma
Blood Wine
The Dead Scholar
Reluctant Dead
Grave Doubts
Still Waters
Being Fiction
Invisible among the Ruins
The Paradox of Meaning
Enduring Dreams
A Readers Guide to the Canadian Novel
Bellrock
The Ancestral Present
Patterns of Isolation
Forthcoming in the Lindstrom Trilogy
LINDSTROM’S PROGRESS Responding to the unlikely invitation from a woman in Vienna to prove she murdered her lover, Harry Lindstrom is drawn into the threatening shadows surrounding Madalena Strauss, a striking detective who appears to have stepped out of a painting by Klimt. The comforting spectre of his dead wife, Karen, grows restless being his confidante as he becomes ensnared in the woman’s story of unspeakable revelations she wants brought to light with his compliance. When Madalena disappears, Harry leaves the city of shadows, with its memories of historical atrocity and imperial grandeur, and returns to Toronto. As terrible perplexing events unfold closer to home, he returns to Austria for answers, first to Vienna, then Salzburg, then deep into salt mines near the ancient village of Hallstadtt where stories from the past and present come together with harrowing finality.
LINDSTROM UNBOUND In the third novel in the Lindstrom trilogy Harry has retreated to the idyllic Polynesian island of Bora Bora to savour and lament the lost past. He finds himself drawn into a strange relationship with a raven-haired, B-list movie actress and her invalid husband. Harry learns from the amiably grotesque Inspector Theophil Queequeg that they are leaders of a virulent religious movement, and the woman is far more dangerous than he could ever have imagined. Back in Toronto, she reappears as a university professor with a disturbing capacity to make Harry wonder about the moral justifications for murder. Separately, they travel to England where they challenge the horrific intentions of the cult, and the pitiless woman of many disguises resolves major issues connected with his own family tragedy. His deceased wife, Karen, recedes into memory, enabling him to move out of the shadow of death and into the light, to place the past in the past and move on.