By the Time You Read This (19 page)

Of course, it wasn’t free. In the tent at night, she had to earn all that attention and instruction and fun. In the tent, she was expected to pose and perform. In the tent, her job was to please him. And he was always finding new ways for her to please him.

One day, years later, her friend Rachel had shocked her by opening some images she had discovered on the computer she shared with her older brother. Rachel had clicked from one to the next, wide-eyed and giggling and appalled and fascinated. They had both been twelve years old at the time.

“Oh, gross!” Rachel would cry.

“Oh, gross!” Melanie would say too, trying for the same tone. But she could tell she wasn’t seeing the pictures the way Rachel was seeing them. It was obvious from her shock and amazement that Rachel, unlike Melanie, was innocent.

“Do people really do that?” Rachel cried. “It’s so disgusting!”

“Weird,” Melanie said.

“This is just like the most perverted stuff I’ve ever seen! I think I’m going to barf!”

No, Rachel had never seen such things before. But Melanie had not only seen them, she had done them. She’d been doing them since she was seven years old.

Occasionally a shadow rippled across the curtains in the picture window. A man’s shadow.

“Come out,” Melanie said in the car. “Come out, you Bastard, and I’ll tell you what I think of you now.”

That day with the computer images had put a distance between her and her best friend. Rachel had been so disgusted that Melanie was forced to wonder, What would she think of me if she knew? She would be horrified, repulsed. She wouldn’t want anything to do with Melanie ever again.

A new fear had slithered into her heart. Here were all these pictures on a computer: images of ordinary people, some of them teenagers. For the first time Melanie worried that there might be hundreds of pictures of her on the Internet, just waiting for a friend to discover. She had lived with that fear of discovery ever since.

All those pictures, countless pictures. Because it didn’t happen only on special trips. Even at home, whenever her mother was out for a couple of hours, The Bastard would come after her. When hugs and attention were no longer enough, he’d use money. How about some cash for that new CD? Could there be a pair of Lucky Brand jeans in your future? We’ll just have to see how things go. A few days later her mother had asked about those jeans: Those are expensive. Where did you get the money for those?

“Oh, Mel helped me tidy up the basement,” The Bastard said, “and I gave her some money towards them.”

Then there was that time on the boat, that beautiful cabin cruiser The Bastard had borrowed from someone. The three of them in the same cabin, cruising around Trout Lake for days. Mom and The Bastard sleeping on one side, Melanie on the other. She would have been about eleven. In the middle of the night she had awoken with a start. He was sitting on the edge of her bed with his hands in her pyjamas, her mother not three feet away. He must have put some drug in her wine. That night Melanie earned a new pair of Nikes.

And now the sick Bastard was coming out of the house. Five years hadn’t made much difference to his appearance. His jacket was different, a light blue nylon windbreaker, and he had a baseball cap on his head. He never used to wear baseball caps. He came a few steps down the driveway, tilting his head back—breathing in the cool evening air. He stopped, hands in pockets, waiting, stepped over onto the lawn to examine some flaw or other.

Just like a normal person might do, Melanie thought. As if you’re just like everybody else.

She put her hand on the car door and took a deep breath. She would tell him, oh boy, would she tell him. Then she stopped.

A woman came out the side door of the house and joined her former stepfather. She was pretty, maybe forty, with dark hair curling to her shoulders. Her denim jacket and khaki trousers looked good on her. She still had a real figure. Better-looking than Mom, Melanie thought, and it made her sad.

I’m going to tell this new wife everything, absolutely everything. Even if he denies it, even if he calls me insane, she’s going to know it’s true. That pretty face of hers will crumple in shock. The happy gleam in her eye will turn to suspicion, anger, loathing.

Melanie opened the car door. There was no other traffic, no other pedestrians. The happy couple were turned back toward the house now, their postures expectant. Well, here’s something they won’t expect.

Melanie was twenty yards down the road from them, crossing at a diagonal. She ordered her heart to calm down. She did not want to look crazy; it was important that this woman believe her, that she sound rational. Her pace was brisk, businesslike, a young executive headed to a meeting.

The side door of the house opened, and a little girl came out carrying a Nerf ball and paddle.

“Where are we going?” she said in a piping little voice.

“We’re just going for a walk,” the woman said, “it’s such a nice night. You won’t be able to see that ball in the dark, though.”

“Yes, I will.”

“Okay, hon, but you forgot to close the door.”

The little girl stopped and turned back to look at the house.

“Go on and close it, sweetie.”

The girl went back toward the house uncertainly.

“I’ll do it,” The Bastard said, and headed toward the girl.

The blast of a car horn made Melanie jump. Her feet literally left the ground for a split second. She turned just as a car stopped less than a yard from her knees.

“Sorry,” she managed to say. She headed back to her car. “Sorry, sorry …”

The man in the car shook his head and drove on.

Melanie got back into her mother’s car, quivering. The key refused to fit into the ignition. All three members of that pathetic family were staring in her direction. She finally managed to start the car and drove past them, face averted, pretending to fiddle with the radio.

Her pulse pounded in her ears, and she missed the turn back onto Algonquin. She pulled into the parking lot of a Mac’s Milk and sat with the motor running, trying to catch her breath. The Bastard had a new daughter, seven years old or thereabouts. The Bastard had another little girl.

29

K
ELLY PUT THE PRINTS
back and closed the drawer.

“I think that’s the last batch,” she said, “at least here. She’s probably got tons of prints up at the college. Negatives too, I bet.”

“Oh, yeah,” Cardinal said. “She has a couple of filing cabinets up there.”

He had been sitting on a trunk in a corner of the darkroom, watching, even though Kelly had asked him to go away and do something else. He couldn’t help it; he wanted to be around his daughter, especially while she was doing something for her mother.

“You might want to check with the school,” she said. “There may be someone up there who’s up on what she was doing. They might have better insights into her work than me.”

“No way, Kell. You’re an artist, you’re her daughter. Who could know better?”

“A fellow photographer. Someone who worked with her all the time. I just think you might want to check first.

If it still seems like I’m the best person to organize a show, I’ll be happy to do it. In fact, I’d love to do it.”

“She always worked alone. She didn’t like company when she was taking pictures. Or in the darkroom.”

“Please just check, Dad. We want to do what’s best for her work.”

“I will. I’ll let you know.”

“It’s a bit of a surprise to me,” Kelly said, touching the white chest of drawers she had just closed, “but Mom was actually a very organized person.”

“Oh, yes. She liked to know where everything was. Liked to get things done on time. She had her problems, but she wasn’t scatterbrained.”

“She has all of her contact sheets here, filed and dated, and the negatives attached. Prints have negative numbers on the back.”

“Yeah, she’d get very upset if she couldn’t find the exact image she wanted. And she was always ordering her students to keep things shipshape. She wouldn’t tolerate sloppiness.”

Kelly touched a file cabinet with her index finger, her smallest gesture reminiscent of her mother’s.

“Even the more recent stuff. The digital stuff. She’s got discs filed with them, and lists of file numbers inside the jacket. I wish I was that organized.”

“That’s funny. She often wished she was a painter, like you. ‘I’d love to just get down in the mess sometime,’ she’d say. ‘Photography seems so clinical sometimes. All this damn equipment.’”

Kelly opened the tall cupboard in the corner. Inside, neat rows of lenses and filters were interrupted by gaps for the equipment she had taken on her last—her final—project.

That evening, Kelly trundled her small suitcase out to the car and Cardinal drove her to the airport. She had seen him through the funeral and his first two weeks alone, what more could he ask? He tried to make conversation, but her mind was already travelling ahead of her to New York. New York. Not so far geographically, but psychologically she might as well have been in Shanghai.

He stayed in the waiting area with her until it was time for her to go through security. She hugged him fiercely and said, “I’ll call you soon, Dad.”

“Look after yourself down there.”

“I will.”

Cardinal drove slowly back down Airport Hill, but not slowly enough. He didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to face that silence. Instead of making the left onto Highway 11, he continued straight into town.

He drove to Main, and from there along the waterfront. Beneath a moon misshapen by clouds, scattered joggers trotted along the shore and dog walkers stood in small groups surrounded by sniffing, leaping canines. Cardinal turned back into the west end of town and drove back and forth along the side streets. Pretty pathetic, he thought, to be afraid of going home.

He found himself driving past Lise Delorme’s place, a small bungalow on the corner of a quiet crescent off Rayne Street. Her lights were on, and he wondered what she was doing. He had a strong urge to pull into her driveway, knock on her door, but what would he say? He didn’t want to look pathetic in front of Delorme.

What would she be doing? Reading? Watching television? In some ways he knew Delorme very well, they had worked so many cases together. They got on well, laughed a lot. But when you got down to it, he didn’t know how she spent her spare time, didn’t even know if she had a boyfriend right now, although he had seen her chatting with Shane Cosgrove a little more amiably than necessary.

Her company would have been good, though. In this evening hour that didn’t even feel like a particular hour in a particular place, but more like a space between hours, an interregnum between two lives: his life with Catherine and whatever was left.

He stopped at the traffic light on the corner.

“Pathetic,” he said aloud. “Haven’t even been alone five minutes.”

He sat there for quite a while, until he realized the light was green.

His house was silent in a way he had never known. The absence of sound was so deep, it was as if it was not just around him but inside him, through him. It was as if, except for whatever space he occupied at any moment, the world had disappeared.

There was no sound of Catherine in the other rooms. No footsteps of any kind: no slippers, no bare feet, no tap of dress shoes, no stamp of snowy boots. From the darkroom below, no sound of Fleetwood Mac or Aimee Mann. No rattle of developing trays, no whine of hair dryer. No sudden call, “John, come and take a look at this!”

Cardinal tried to read and found he could not. He flicked on the television. A CSI team was busy destroying evidence. He stared at the screen for a while, taking nothing in.

“Trying to act normal,” he muttered. But nothing was normal.

He took Catherine’s photograph from the bookshelf where Kelly had placed it. It was the one of her in the anorak, with two cameras slung over her shoulders.

Did you kill yourself?

All the times she had railed at him for taking her to the hospital, cursed him for interfering in her mania, bridled at his checking on her medication. All those cries and tears over the decades—had she meant them, after all? Had that been the real Catherine? He could not bring himself to believe that the woman he had loved so long could have thrown that love back in his face, could have said, No, your love is not enough,
you
are not enough, I’d rather die than spend another minute in your company. That was what Roger Felt had said on his cards. No, he couldn’t believe that.

And yet he had no proof that it was otherwise. Roger Felt, his number one suspect, had turned out to be nothing more than a vengeful loser. And Codwallader’s manager had confirmed that he had been at work when he said. The security tapes would confirm it.

You wrote the note. But could you really have killed yourself?

Had Catherine had enemies? Cardinal had investigated enough deaths to know that people can surprise you on this count. A small-time drug dealer may turn out to have been the kindest-souled person in the neighbourhood, his death caused not by rivals but by his own pharmaceutical miscalculation.

And then you could have the saint, the woman who does all the charity work, who is always the first to get friends and associates to “sign the card for Shirley,” to organize visits to the hospital, to raise money for the summer camp. Such paragons could turn out to have slept with the wrong woman’s husband—pilfered money, suffered delusions, nursed compulsions—and end up the victim, or the perpetrator, of a homicide.

But Catherine? All right, yes, she had had her turf wars up at the college. Lost them all, too. God knows, she could have a sharp tongue when she was angry, and it was just conceivable that some rival in the art department had been outraged by some ill-considered remark. And she had won prizes for her photography—several provincial, one national—and her work had been exhibited locally many times, and every couple of years in Toronto. When a person wins a prize, someone else may feel robbed.

Cardinal went into the kitchen and made himself a drink. The clink of the ice, the glug of the whiskey, sounded absurdly loud in the silence. He switched on the radio and heard a split second of country music before he switched it off again. He never listened to the radio at night, it was just desperation.

He sat at the kitchen table. Nights when he could not sleep, he would come in here and scrounge up some cookies and milk. The room hadn’t seemed bleak then, with his wife sleeping in the other room. He opened his case file on Catherine. It was thinner than any case file he had ever worked. By definition, if you had a case, you had notes, you had leads, you had some direction. But this file contained almost nothing.

There were the bogus sympathy cards, useless now. There were his notes concerning Codwallader and Felt, footsteps into the same cul-de-sac. And there was the page torn from Catherine’s notebook. The pale blue ink from her favourite Paper Mate. And her handwriting, with its unadorned
j’s
and looped
t’s
.

By the time you read this …

The file contained two versions of the note: the original in blue ink, and the copy that Tommy Hunn had made at the Forensic Centre, white writing on a graphite background, where the toner had brought out the fingerprints invisible on the original. There was Catherine’s thumbprint along the edge, with the small white line where she had cut herself years ago. And the smaller prints along the edges, those would be Catherine’s too; it would be simple to check.

But then there was that thumbprint at the bottom of the note, too large to be Catherine’s. And Catherine was right-handed. When she went to tear the page from the notebook, she would have grabbed it by the right-hand side and pulled. But whose thumbprint was on the bottom of the page, in the middle? If it was not the coroner’s and not Delorme’s or anyone else’s who had been on the scene, who had held Catherine’s suicide note in his or her hand?