by Bob Kroll
“Or a tag,” Peterson said. “You never know.” He leaned toward the monitor. He closed his eyes to listen.
“Gone,” the girl said. “Nothing. Albulla guberoa. Elbae dar albulla. Niandalba nescato.”
“What the hell is she saying?” Peterson asked. He looked at the monitor.
“It sounds Indian,” Billy said.
There was a tap on the door and a female cop entered the editing room and caught Peterson’s attention. “Anna Gray is here to see you.”
“Who?”
“She said she was with you in the Broken Promise. She’s in the coffee room.”
Peterson hurried along the hallway to where the woman was sitting in a quiet corner of the room, cradling a coffee. Peterson sat beside her, struggling to hold himself together.
“I’m Detective Peterson,” he said.
She kept her hands wrapped around the coffee cup. “My name is Anna. Anna Gray.”
He played his eyes over hers and sensed miles of distance between them. “Are you all right?”
Anna shrugged off the question. The hard, flat overhead lighting accentuated the shadows under her eyes, the laugh lines, and the grief tightening her lips. Her hands were plain, unmanicured.
“I’m sorry about what happened last night,” Peterson said. “You never should have seen that.”
“Seen it?” Anna’s voice cracked. Her mind seemed to go away for a moment and then came back.
Peterson could not take his eyes off her. He studied her face, her gestures. He saw her lips trembling, her fingers fidgeting over the coffee cup, her shoulders twitching, her eyes looking inward at images that frightened her, then searching the room for a comfortable place to settle.
“You’re not all right are you?”
“No, I’m not all right,” Anna said. She looked on the verge of collapse. “I want to cry but I can’t. I want to scream but I can’t. I want to let something out but I don’t know how to do it.”
She looked away sharply, as though she’d seen something fleeting from the corner of her eye. She turned back to Peterson. “All night I prayed and prayed not to remember. I didn’t sleep. I just kept praying.”
“You have to give it time,” he said. “It will dull down, but it takes time.”
Anna looked doubtful. He wondered about prayer, if it really helped or just covered over the loss the way dirt covers the dead.
“Were you praying for her?”
Anna looked past Peterson at the busy office, at a uniformed cop standing before a window that was bloomy with sunlight; at a thin young woman in too flimsy a dress for this time of year scrolling through photographs on a computer screen; at a large whiteboard hanging on a far wall, wiped clean and ready for inscription.
“She spoke to us,” she said. “I don’t know what she said, but she spoke to us as though she wanted us to know.”
“She was dying,” Peterson said, uncomfortable with what he was feeling. He too sensed there was something the girl had wanted him to know, and it disturbed him. “People say crazy things when they’re dying.”
“I just thought you would know what she said.”
“I don’t even know who she was.”
“But the way she said it —”
He cut her off. “It was a different language. I have no idea what she said.”
Anna closed her eyes, retreated into silence. Peterson waited. When she opened them, she seemed to see the busy office and him for the first time.
“I didn’t know where to go. Peggy saw your name in the paper, and I came here but I don’t know why. I keep praying to understand. I keep hearing her voice. Oh God, I keep hearing it.”
“It takes time,” Peterson said, his voice more caring. The practised voice he had learned as a uniform cop and used at front doors when he came bearing bad news. He reached for her hand but stopped short, sensing she might pull away.
“And I keep seeing her,” Anna said. “I keep trying to feel who she is.”
“Who do you feel she is?” Peterson asked.
“Someone lost. Confused. Someone desperate to make sense of what she’s doing. Someone so hurt that she can’t bear it.”
Peterson noticed the different shading she gave these words. He wondered if she knew this girl. He asked.
Anna shook her head. “Not her. But so many like her. I see them every day. Just so lost. So desperately lost.”
“I see them too. Their tougher side perhaps. Desperate, like you say. Willing to do anything. But I don’t let it get to me. I do my job, and then I walk away.”
Anna stiffened. She pushed the coffee aside and stood as if to go, but she kept her eyes on him, searching his face.
“I’m sorry,” Peterson said. “What we saw the other night I see all the time.”
Anna slowly shook her head. “Don’t! Don’t make yourself into something you’re not. I saw what you did. I saw you hold her. I saw you cry. I heard what you said to her. Or am I talking about someone else?”
They stared at each other for the longest time, each so fragile before the other, each wanting to express something they could not put into words.
Chapter
TWELVE
Peterson stood in Carmichael’s darkened office before the large unsigned painting of coloured boxes set against a dark, agitated sky.
Carmichael sat comfortably in one of the two armchairs, his legs stretched out, his left arm thrown casually over its back.
“This one comes too close to home,” Carmichael said.
“Word spreads fast.”
Carmichael smiled a disapproving smile. Peterson saw it. “I’m worried about the effect investigating this suicide will have on you.”
“I need to work.”
“You need a rest.”
“I’m not a desk jockey.”
“Your mental health is at stake.”
Peterson muttered something and advanced toward the vacant armchair. He gripped its back with both hands as though to steady himself, to stop himself from lifting off the floor in a weightless moment of fear. Fear that he would say what needed saying and betray himself.
“Are you sleeping?” Carmichael asked.
Peterson shrugged.
“Nightmare or dream?” Carmichael asked.
“What would you call it?”
“You tell me.”
“I wake up seeing her. Feeling the blood. Seeing her skin lose its shape. Her eyes on mine. And her voice … saying something I can’t hear.”
Carmichael drew in his legs and straightened in his chair. “Your wife, your daughter, or the girl in the Broken Promise?”
“I don’t know. All of them at the same time. I can’t tell which one.” He looked off Carmichael and stared at nothing.
Carmichael inched forward in his chair, fixing Peterson closely, speaking softly. “Dream or nightmare?”
“Nightmare, for Christ’s sake! I’m helpless. I can’t do anything, for any of them. I try, but I can’t.”
“Because you weren’t there?”
“Because I am there. Because I’m not there. Because she didn’t want me there.”
Peterson searched the dark corners of the office as though looking for something he had lost. Little feet padding across the kitchen floor. A beige afghan drawn over his wife’s shoulders into a snuggle of warmth. Spilled wine dripping off the table and shattering into shapes and symbols that were shrieking, scolding, mocking.
Carmichael let the silence have its due. He studied Peterson’s face and waited for his mind to slip back to the present, the way sunlight slips from behind a cloud and through a window without breaking it.
“Do you want to talk about your wife?”
Peterson avoided Carmichael’s gaze. “Read the file.”
“I’ve read it.”
“Then you know.”<
br />
“Know what?”
“I don’t want to go there.”
“Go where?”
“Where you want me to go.”
“And where is that?”
“That’s enough, all right? I’m done with dragging it up and hanging it out for all to see. There he is — Peterson. Fucked up Peterson, you know, the cop with the dead wife. Car crash. A blue Buick and a cement truck. I didn’t have to read the report. I knew. I just knew!”
“What did you know?”
Carmichael watched Peterson’s shoulders sag and his hands fidget. “Do you wish it had been you driving her car and not someone else?” Carmichael asked.
Peterson lifted his eyes from his bandaged hands to Carmichael. “What do you think?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Sometimes.”
“When?”
“I walked away from her grave and I got back on the job. I handled it.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“A desk job?”
“Yeah, but I made something of it. Two months, and you know what, I dug out a ten-year-old cold case and cracked it.”
“And during these two months, while you were at your desk, working hard, it was day and night from what I understand —”
“That’s right!”
Peterson circled the armchair and eased into it, leaning forward, now face to face with the shrink. “Round the clock. I didn’t let it go. Not like everybody else. I couldn’t let it go. I needed to focus, concentrate, shift everything. I gave every waking moment to that case. And I stuck with it until I could punch holes in that son-of-a-bitch’s alibi.”
They were now so close their eyes filled with each other’s stare.
“And during these two months after burying your wife,” Carmichael said, “during all this time, while you were at your desk, day and night, working around the clock, cracking a cold case, punching holes in that son-of-a-bitch’s alibi, where was your daughter?”
Peterson stared at Carmichael, stared at him the way one stares into the darkness of a theatre after the lights go out. Searching the dark for movement among the shadows. And waiting. Waiting for the slow fade-up of a follow spot to direct attention to the corner of the stage where a child is silently standing.
Chapter
THIRTEEN
For a few minutes, Peterson sat in the car outside Angela Harding’s home with the photos on his lap. He couldn’t bear to look at them. Yet he could not help looking at them, fixing their faces in his mind. Then he shoved them into his coat pocket and climbed from the car. He rang the bell and waited. This time the housekeeper answered.
“Who should I say is calling?”
“Detective Peterson.” He flashed his badge. “Are you the one that goes to church with Mrs. Harding?”
The pudgy-faced woman was instantly defensive, as though Peterson had questioned her faith. “I just go with her. I sit in the back. I’m not Catholic.”
“Did you ever notice that she often leaves her shawl behind?”
The housekeeper blushed and lowered her eyes. She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. She led him to the front room and to the same pink damask armchair. He didn’t sit. This time he looked the room over, taking in the oil paintings and multimedia artwork on the walls, the intimate chair groupings with small side tables for drinks and finger food, the gas fireplace with its oak mantel. Brass lanterns sat at each end of the mantel, and in the centre was an antique clock stuck at 9:04. The room told him nothing about the Hardings other than that they were wealthy.
“More questions about my private life?” She caught him studying one of the paintings, an uninspiring scene of flowers set in a window overlooking a beach. Peterson thought still-life was an apt description.
“I just need to clear up something you said.”
She gestured for him to sit in the armchair and lowered herself into the one opposite. She seemed to spread into it, at least her expensive blue warm-ups did. She was dressed for comfort, not exercise, confirmed by the reading glasses hanging around her neck.
He pulled a notebook from his green jacket, recently retrieved from the dry cleaners, and pretended to consult it. “You said you didn’t know Father Boutilier. You said you didn’t speak to one another and so you had no reason to like or dislike him.”
“That’s right.”
“What about when you were younger? Did you know him then?”
For a second, Angela Harding lost her expression of gracious cooperation. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Peterson caught the facial stutter. “You said you grew up in this parish.”
“I did.”
“And you didn’t know him?”
She weighed the question for a moment or two, as though waiting for Peterson to say more. He didn’t bite. She scratched her right palm.
“I may have. I can’t be sure.”
“Mrs. Harding, this is a murder investigation. Here’s how it works. I ask questions and you answer. When a suspect doesn’t answer or doesn’t tell the truth, that adds to my suspicion.”
“Am I a suspect?”
“Top of the list.”
She caught her breath. “Do I need a lawyer?”
“You can call a lawyer if you want, but that will take this little chat from the comfort and privacy of your home to an interrogation room at Police Headquarters. That usually has the press sniffing for a story, especially if it involves one of the city’s prominent citizens. The choice is yours, Mrs. Harding. But one way or another, we are going to have this little chat.”
He waited for that to sink in and for her to fathom the social consequences of being hauled into headquarters, lawyer or not. Then he got up. He’d taken one step toward the door when she responded.
“Please!”
He turned and saw her looking the way he had seen so many other rich socialites whose secrets were threatened — pale, chewing their lips, kneading their hands, staring into a past loaded with regret.
He tried making it easier. “What you say won’t go beyond this room, not unless it bears directly on the investigation.”
She nodded. He crossed the room and closed the door on the housekeeper’s ears. He pulled the photos from his pocket and returned to sit opposite her. He let her break the silence.
“I knew him back then.” Her eyes filled.
Peterson held out the photos. “We found these hidden in his dresser.” He showed her the photos one at a time, studying her reaction. “Do you know these girls?”
She looked away and nodded.
“Is one of them you?”
She recoiled, as though to hide from the sordidness that Peterson held in his hands. Then she drew a deep breath and tried to compose herself. A girlish innocence replaced the silkiness in her voice.
“I trusted him,” she said. “I thought I was special. I didn’t know about the others. None of us did. Not until later.”
Her voice broke, and it took a few moments for her to get her composure back. Peterson let her have the time.
“Can you believe I confessed what I did — to him? And he forgave me.”
She fought back the tears.
“They sent him away. Susan Publicover told one of the nuns. At least that’s what I found out later, years later. He was just gone. Another parish. A routine transfer the pastor called it. No scandal. God forbid that should happen to the Catholic Church.”
She looked away through the window then dropped her eyes to the photos. Her voice was almost dreamy. “I knew. Not knew, but I sensed something about the others. I could tell just by looking at them.”
Now she looked at the photos, hurrying from one face to another, from one past moment to another, her eyes widening with shock and closing with shame, irresistibly drawn to the deception of inn
ocence.
“We were in our thirties when Agnes died. Breast cancer. That’s when it all came out. Only four of us from the neighbourhood went to her funeral, the ones who had the most to forget. I still wasn’t certain about the others, about Agnes, until Susan Publicover started on about him and what he’d done to her and Agnes. Then it was like a flood. It was the first time I ever talked about it. And I never did again until he came back.”
Peterson took a chance and asked, “And when he came back, who did you tell?”
She met his gaze. “Some older women who were members of the Rosary Society when I was a girl. I knew he would find out. They’re in a nursing home he visits.”
“Did that even the score?”
“At first.”
Peterson plowed a little deeper. “But that wasn’t enough was it?”
She shook her head. “I went back to church. Sat in the same pew week after week. And I made sure he knew who I was.”
“You said you had never talked with him?”
“I didn’t. I dropped envelopes into the collection basket, pink ones with my maiden name on them.”
“He never spoke to you?”
“No. He didn’t even look my way, not directly. But he knew I was there, watching him.”
Peterson waited.
“None of the others would come. Only two are still in the city. It was too much for them to see him saying mass, being a priest, when we knew what he really was.”
“Who were the others?”
She shook her head. “They’ve suffered enough.”
“I’ll find out anyway.”
“You turn every stone.”
“More than once.” He handed her the notebook and pen he had been holding. “Write them down.”
She put her glasses on. When she finished writing she closed the notebook and handed it and the pen to him. “Don’t disrupt their lives. They don’t deserve it.”
“If they didn’t kill Father Boutilier, they have nothing to worry about. Neither do you.”
She considered this carefully. “I don’t know what I felt toward him, but it wasn’t something as vicious as hate. I just wanted him to see me sitting there, to torture him by just being there. That was enough. It was more than enough.”