by Gerald Lynch
Kevin didn’t look up; he watched only Kelly, his beautiful daughter.
“I’d better let Forensics in before rain degrades evidence,” Frank said. “Look, you two, I can’t tell you how torn up I am about this. Can we get together later? Maybe save all talk till then? Okay?… Kelly?”
Kevin spoke without shifting his gaze from Kelly: “Sure we can, old friend. And thanks, Frank. We all need to talk about this. But where?”
Kelly lowered her face and met his gaze: “At my place. Home.”
“Sure,” Kevin said. “That’ll be good.”
Frank walked off, once again waving on the waiting crews. He called over his shoulder, “Why don’t you two collect yourselves in the Pavilion Restaurant while I run some interference here. This place is swarming with Macro already. I’ll tell Constable Ali to drive right up to the restaurant door for you, Kevin. Remember, no more painful talk for now! We all need some time for decompression, and only afterwards the debriefing.”
Kelly called, “Thanks, Frank, you’re a dear!” Which made Frank hunch his shoulders. “We’d better run for it, Kevin!”
Her tone had distracted him from contemplation of the blue tarp. “Let Frank run for it. I like rain. Let’s pray it marks a real end to what will surely be dubbed The Third Drought.”
She placed a hand above her head, like a cheating child taking her height against a door jamb, and squinted at him: “Oh, you pray for good weather now, do you, Daddy dear?” She tittered into the edge of her hand as she hurried off.
Maybe that’s a good sign: she could be flirting with honest hysteria; understandably, seeing her brother dead and all. Or it was that paradoxical thing in death that makes the living light-hearted…black humour. That’s all. Dear God, Kevin really prayed, let that be all.
He hurried after her, calling, “Kelly, would you like to have Constable Ali drive us back to my place first for a while?” That would cost him, because he needed to get back to Omphalos.
“It’s all right, Dad, I have my car!”
But Frank had said he’d sent a car?… He must get answers from her before she got away.
Chapter 21
The Pavilion Restaurant had been closed to the public. Already Macro media and the curious crowded the parking lot, careless of the rain, even enjoying it. Kevin and Kelly moved along a corridor of shielding police arms, stepped through the leafy lobby, past the dining area and out onto the patio deck. They stood under the awning by the corner where they’d sat for the aborted lunch only two days before. The wet-canvas smell again reminded him of camping in Algonquin Park, which they’d managed a few times as a family. Bill always looked after the firewood, Kelly the marshmallows. He would stretch out on a lawn chair with a beer and make a joke of ordering them about. Cynthia did everything.
Below in the near distance, on the temporary beach, a yellow slicker-clad forensics team swarmed a sky-blue dot. The sky itself was not sky-blue but all shades of dark, and blacker still in the distance. What had been a welcome breeze was already a raw wind, tending from the northwest and sweeping a grey veil of rain back and forth across the revived face of the lake.
“What a difference from last time, eh…Dad?” She moved off easily, but having to touch things.
He watched her. “I’ve seen a vid, Kelly. What were you, your mother and Frank doing with Eugene DeLint inside the Omphalos Dome exactly one year ago today — the very day you and I were denied the search warrant?”
“What?” Her shoulders buckled slightly but she kept her face averted.
He waited till she turned, then looked into her light grey eyes: his grey eyes.
“Okay already, Dad! Guilty as charged. After making my big impression in the sexual-interference suit against DeLint seven years ago, I left Omphalos but was secretly kept on a retainer. I couldn’t tell anyone. Not exactly kosher, I agree, what with my being in the Crown prosecutor’s office and all, but we are talking Omphalos. Besides, I needed the money. It was only for a few years. Then on the day Judge Mender denied our search warrant, DeLint called and said no hard feelings and invited me to a little reconciliation party, he called it. I was nervous about going back to Omphalos alone, so Mom came along as a favour to me. For everyone’s peace of mind, we all agreed on Frank as a sort of chaperone.”
“I’m relieved to hear that, Kelly, you don’t know how much. But you went there knowing why I wanted into Omphalos? The link with the Widower?”
“Just what is this, Kevin? The Widower again? For fuck’s sake, Dad — that’s your son, my brother, down there!”
He watched only her steady grey eyes, his eyes, his daughter, his beautiful daughter. “Kelly, I have no hard evidence yet, but I am certain now that Eugene DeLint was the Widower and your mother’s true murderer.”
She missed just one beat. “If you say so, Kevin, but you’ve been wrong before in the Widower case, disastrously so.”
He knew then that she knew more, and his heart shuddered. Standing there he felt his whole nervous system intricately entwined with hers, like the entangled confusion of the four chestnut trees in front of their old home on Lundy’s Lane. Not just involved abstractly; he felt her life and its troubles like he knew without looking where his fingers ended, how far he’d have to reach just to touch her with the tips. But he knew too that if he was finally to get to the bottom of the Widower case, he could not afford this sentimentalism, this intimate identification with her. Nor could he afford the luxury of holding himself responsible. Not yet. So he said,
“That’s true, dear.”
And she smiled a rainy-day smile. “There you go then! No offence, Kevin, but you really have fucked up repeatedly and royally on the Widower. DeLint the Widower? DeLint Mom’s killer? That, I do not believe. That is evidence only of your continuing obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kevin. Wonky factioning. And, I might add, of another humongous conflict of interest! What would Judge Mender say?”
As always, she had easily broken his resolve. “What do you know about Bill and Don McNicol and Dr. Randome?”
“Bill and Ewan? Nothing, why do you ask?” But she’d hurried it, and left out McNicol.
“In some writing McNicol left, he said you’d arranged for Bill to be treated by Dr. Randome.”
She emphasized wildly: “Oh, I see. Now I’m the femme fatale in some madman’s pulp fiction about Omphalos and the big bad Widower? Da-ad, listen to yourself!… Okay, let’s pretend for a minute I’m not your child, not your only daughter; in fact, your only living family. I’m a witness. Or am I a suspect?”
He smiled genuinely, with the kind of love a father could have for such a performing child: full more of admiration now than affection. “Yes, dear.”
“Okay, the whole truth then.” She reached and held the awning’s flimsy support pole, and her voice seemed to come from elsewhere, that place where Mania was under house-arrest but slipped its electronic manacles to carouse in the early hours: “It happened towards the end of the Widower case. You were driving us all insane!” She paused. “Remember?”
“Yes. Proceed.”
It was her turn to smile and shake her head. “That’s all you have to say, Kevin? You made your whole family crazy, mad as wet wasps with each other, and all you can say to your daughter, your only living family, is proceed?” But she cackled again. “We all needed help, counselling! I turned to Ewan and he saved our sanity! Well, for a time.”
The wild swings in her mood were accompanied by a tightening around his head, then rigidity in his whole body…and again he was that squirming thing in shrinking nightmarish space, pursuing what he didn’t want to know, pursued by a near-familiar monster.
“Kelly, please, just tell me what you know — the truth. I have had to imagine lately the possibility that you were more involved than maybe even you knew. And I don’t like that one little bit.” He paused. He had to risk it: “I’m sure Frank’s in deep
trouble, that he’s been double-dealing for a long time.”
She swung on the pole to face him. Smiling condescendingly, she touched three fingers to her mouth, though her eyes were still his steady eyes. “Frankly, Dad, I don’t give a good goddamn about Frank.” And laughed, so unlike Kelly.
He let her settle, and must breathe deeply himself, because he remembered making the same groaner of Frank’s name at the DeLint scene.
“Dear, if you’re not up to this right now…?” He cupped her elbow; she jerked it away and stood free of the pole, out in the rain, which poured now.
“Okay-okay! It was over a year ago. I called in my last favour from Eugene and asked if he would ask Dr. Randome to treat Bill. I knew Ewan was the best shrink in the world. But I had no inkling that Omphalos was connected to your precious Widower — I mean, till you had me seek the search warrant. But Eugene DeLint the Widower? I’m still processing that, Dad, and I’m not convinced. The man is a boob, if a creepy one.”
Kevin caught her elbow, gripped it. “But there are holes in your story, dear, contradictions, don’t you see? Did you ask DeLint for Dr. Randome’s help or Randome directly?”
She again tore her elbow away. “My story? What story! Poor Bill was hanging on by his chewed fingernails by then. But of course you wouldn’t have noticed that, not with your dear Widower occupying your every thought. Bill had nothing since he quit grad school. He’d got into serious trouble with the law, stealing from the Mighty Turnip’s lab and selling to Haitians. That’s right. You didn’t know the whole story. Frank knew. And despite Frank’s best efforts, Bill had been zoned for life from the Macro and had no way of making a living on this continent. Another reason he was going to work for the Haitians. Our Bill got thief-thick with some very big bad boys. Soon Mom was asking Frank for help on a weekly basis, and begging him not to tell you. We were sure if you knew the half of it you’d kill him!”
“Who, Bill? Me hurt Bill?”
“I said kill him, and I meant kill him! You don’t remember the state you were in during the final weeks of the Widower, do you, Kevin? And you didn’t care either what Mom was going through. Ewan tried to help, and Bill’s treatment eventually involved Mom. It didn’t take long for Ewan to see that, for any hope of success, you had to join us for some family sessions. He wanted to help us act like a loving family.”
“I’m almost relieved to hear this, dear. But we didn’t have to act like a loving family?”
Though Kelly still held the pole, it was Kevin learned what it meant to twist in the wind.
Kelly toned down. “Things started going bad for us in those sessions with Ewan. Then Judge Mender dismissed the search warrant. The Widower killings ended unsolved, your first big loss. You were having a breakdown, Kevin, whether you admit it or not. And drunk all the time, the three of you.”
“You too.”
She grinned. “The infallible memory is failing you there, Daddy. I’ve taken up the sport only since. I had to witness the drunken Beldon family romance while sober. Anyway, Mom kind of lost it when Ewan said he saw no way ahead but to bring you in because Bill’s sanity depended on it, maybe his life. Talk of prescient, eh?” She looked out at the forensics team. “That’s when Mom took off to visit her niece in Santa Barbara. Then…then the end of my fucking story, holes and contradictions and all, okay! Because we know how that story ended!”
“Okay, Kelly, thanks for that, it really is a great relief to me. But listen carefully now. Eugene DeLint was the Widower. Just when I was close to nailing his ass to that Dome for all the world to see, suddenly Dr. Randome’s treating my whole family? You think that was your doing, but it was the Widower’s doing. Dr. Randome has much to answer for, though I don’t doubt that he was another of DeLint’s — the Widower’s — victims. You too. It wasn’t your fault, but DeLint fooled you into thinking him only a…a harmless boob.”
That calmed Kelly. She gazed out on nothing, away from the group on the beach. Kevin decided he could risk the truth.
“Don’t you see, Kelly: it was me DeLint was after all along! DeLint the Widower became obsessed with me, not me with him! For him, I was the rule of law. He believed himself above the law, he thought he was the law. He manipulated Dr. Randome into bringing Bill and Mom and you yourself under his control! DeLint did something to Cynthia to make her kill herself — post-hypnotic suggestion, drugs, whatever! He called your mother the morning she died and triggered her so-called suicide! Then DeLint did the same to McNicol and Anna Kynder. Only it backfired with McNicol, who knew a little voodoo himself.”
Kelly jigged her jaw and glanced sideways at him, as might a mother at a child who’d taken advantage of her distraction to sneak something.
Kevin pressed on: “Same with poor dear Bill there, dead with my own service revolver. That’s the Widower’s last mocking message to me — from beyond the grave! Some form of post-hypnotic suggestion again, powerfully reinforced and triggered, probably helped by drugs. DeLint the Widower was madder than hell at me for messing with his murderous little setup here in Ottawa, ever since the Widower investigation began. The search warrant on his precious Omphalos clinched it for him! So I was made the last widower!”
Kelly’s face was working harder now; she shivered, hugged herself. She walked over to the patio railing, turned and leaned back against it, crossing her arms on her scant chest. She smiled into the teeth of the wind and rain whipping from all directions.
“You. Dear God, how could I not have seen it was all about you? But of course! Now I see. The Great Detective, Kevin Beldon, it’s always all about him! No matter that I won a fair competition for the position at Omphalos. I saved DeLint’s ass and the whole of Omphalos long before any mention of any Widower. I tried to get the best treatment in the world for Bill and Mom when your madness was threatening to destroy our family!”
Involuntarily his arms pressed to his sides, and he saw only a smothering darkness ahead, felt only a crushing weight above and a consuming nothing closing fast behind. He must get through this. He must get the two of them through.
She walked slowly towards him, roaring: “That’s the only part that’s about you, Kevin! Mom is dead because of your obsession with the Widower! And now Bill’s dead too! How was I to know that Gene was the Widower and using us all and manipulating Ewan too! Here,” she screamed, throwing wide her arms, “arrest me! Put me away! Go for the death penalty! I’ll prosecute myself, for fuck’s sake!”
She’d used up all the air, there was none left for his squeezed lungs. All he could manage was a defeated, “Kelly.” But that Gene: what, dear God, was he to make of that Gene?
The rain had darkened her red hair, pasting it across the forehead, and her blouse had turned transparent against the embossed ribs and darker bra. He stepped to her and forced her pointing arm down, hugged her close. She was like a stack of sticks, this latest edition of Beldon bones, the last. She would accept only to stand stiffly against him.
So close to his ear her voice sounded otherworldly: “Dad, I had no idea DeLint might be the Widower. Or that he had gotten to Judge Mender. Or that he would go to any length…Bill. I’d have died myself before ever letting anyone hurt Mom. You have to believe me, Daddy.”
Now she wass blubbering, his big beautiful baby.
Trying to speak was like the effort to act in that paralyzing nightmare. It took debilitating will to force out what he couldn’t believe, what he didn’t believe: “Of course I believe you, dear.”
She pulled away then. He reached to brush the matted hair from her brow but before he could touch her she knocked his arm to the side. He was as bewildered as he’d ever been: finding Cyn with a messy hole in her chest, or Bill dead by the same gun. Baffled to a standstill.
“I don’t want your pity, Kevin. I’m leaving now to make the arrangements for Bill.” She moved off.
“Kelly?”
She turned at the
entrance to the dining room, said nothing.
He said, “What do you want from me?”
She shifted her line of sight slightly and he knew she’d again fixed the yellow-slickered forensics team on the beach, the beach that’s shrinking even as they spoke. “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it, Kevin?”
“Can’t we at least ride back together?”
“I’ve got my own car.”
“Of course, you said.”
As she turned back to the door, it opened and Frank stepped out of the dining room.
“Speak of the devil!” She smiled broadly, and Frank returned a weak grin.
Kevin went over to them.
Kelly said, “I was just leaving, Frank, to make the arrangements for Bill’s cremation. I’m assuming forensics will be through with the body by tomorrow morning?”
“Before then. I’ll put a rush on it.”
“Father here still needs a ride home.”
Kevin was blanked again by her monstrous talent, this inappropriate shift to lightness.
Frank said, “I’ve already ordered Constable Ali to wait,” and walked off with a slight shake of his head.
“Kelly, I’ll meet you back at the house later?”
“Our home sweet home,” she said.
They went to the front entrance. From behind the door he watched her scrum expertly with Macro media, his beautiful daughter who could do anything she set her mind to. So engaging was she that no one noticed when he dashed to Constable Ali’s squad car and slipped into the back seat.
Anything she set her mind to?
His forehead in his left hand, Kevin all but groaned, “Omphalos.”
Ali spoke liltingly as he glanced in the rear-view: “Keats! I remembered it too! Oh who can nail thee at night in my arms! It’s a…a…love poem?”
Ali sobered and kept eyes front as they drove from the parking lot. “I’m to return for Ms. Beldon?”
“No. Ms. Beldon looks after herself.”