None So Blind (8 page)

The sign on the screen door of Navan’s only real estate agent said, P
LEASE
C
OME
I
N
.

Sue Peters and Bob Gibbs did just that. In their nine-month quest for the perfect marital home, they had been through half a dozen real estate agents, ranging from eager twenty-somethings wearing power suits and stilettos to grizzled boomers on their second careers. Sue thought the new truck and the manicured garden sent the right message of prosperity and competence, so she was taken aback by the man who emerged from the back in response to the tinkling bell over the door.

He was well over six feet, with a country plaid shirt hung on his reedy frame and steel-toed boots on his size-thirteen feet. He had a sunken chest and a little potbelly that suggested a fondness for beer. Brushing crumbs from his belly, he blinked at them in surprise, as if they were the first customers to walk through the door in a week.

“Hi there!” he exclaimed, recovering enough to thrust out his hand. Sue winced at the grease and crumbs still clinging to it. The man’s grip was bone-crushing.

“Paul Harris,” he said, his name matching the sign outside. “Welcome to Navan. You two interested in a property around here?”

Sue glanced around the room. Photos and flyers of properties plastered the walls, and large binders cluttered the desk in the corner, nearly burying the computer. The photos depicted everything from waterfront shacks to mansions. None of them, she noticed, had Paul Harris listed as agent.

“We’re looking all over,” she said cautiously. “We like the country feel of Navan.”

“Well, you’ve come to the right place. I know every property listed within a 10k radius and quite a few that aren’t listed. Yet.” He flashed a grin, exposing a perfect white smile.
Dentures?
Sue wondered. She put Harris’s age at around forty-five, which was rather young for dentures, but faint scars on his eye and lip suggested an old injury. Her opinion softened.

Belatedly, he gestured to two chairs in front of his desk and then folded himself in behind. “What kind of place do you folks have in mind?”

Sue glanced at Bob. He always let her do the talking, which sometimes got tiresome, but she sensed Mr. Pickup-truck-and-steel-toed-boots might do better with a man. “You go ahead, honey,” she said.

But right off the bat, Bob stuttered. “A — a place we can grow into. Quiet and out of the way. The house doesn’t have to be big, as long as it has potential to add on. Most important is the land. Maybe five or ten acres? Wooded, natural. My wife wants to have horses.”

Harris was already fiddling with his computer. “Will you be commuting? Where do you work?”

“Downtown Ottawa.” Bob paused. “We’re police officers.”

Harris’s eyes widened ever so slightly. Like all cops, Sue was used to that. People always did a quick inventory of their sins the minute they heard the word
police
. “So, not too far out into the country?”

“No. And with good access to the highway.”

“It’s a balancing act,” Sue added. “We want the acreage and privacy, but we have to be able to get to town fast.”

Harris typed and clicked through several links before swivelling the computer monitor toward them. “Here’s a beauty that just came up. Two acres, new building. It’s a divorce, so they’re anxious to sell.”

The price was outrageous. While Bob dithered, she told Harris so.

“No problem,” he said, flashing those dentures again. “What range are you looking at?”

She gave him a figure. His smile evaporated and his brows drew together. “That does limit our choices.”

“It doesn’t have to be big and fancy. A little old house with some land attached would be perfect.”

He led them through a few other properties, all of them atrocious. A shack that would be better off burned to the ground, and an old farmhouse stuck together with spit and cow dung as far as Sue could tell. Her hopes for country affordability began to fade.

“Isn’t there some place that will at least stay standing while we fix it up?”

Harris pursed his lips in disappointment. “Maybe Limoges or Embrun? They’re up and coming.”

Sue gathered her purse and began to unfold her stiff body. “That’s too far out. But thank you for your time, Mr. Harris.”

Harris tugged his lip. Twiddled his pen. “Well … just between us, there might be something coming up. I can’t promise anything, but I’ve been in to see it. The owner recently lost her husband …”

Sue plunked back into her chair. “The Carmichael place?”

Harris’s eyebrows shot up. “Ah! You’ve seen the place?”

“Well, n — not inside,” Bob hastened to add. “The owner wasn’t interested.”

More twiddling. “It’s a beautiful little property. And the price … the price would be close to your ballpark.”

“But it’s not for sale,” Sue said.

“Not yet. However …” He was tapping the pen now. “The owner’s son was in here just yesterday asking what they could get for it. I told him there could be developer interest — which there could be, so you’d have to act fast if you’re interested. The son seemed pretty pleased with the price and said he just needed time to work on his mother.”

Sue remembered Marilyn Carmichael planted in the middle of her laneway with her arms crossed. Her son had his work cut out for him.

“We can’t compete with developers, though,” said Bob gloomily. “They’ve got deeper pockets and fancier lawyers than us.”

Sue was already scribbling their cell numbers on her card. “Can you call us if it comes on the market? We might be interested.”

The agent glanced at her card before slipping it into his breast pocket. He gave a knowing smile. “I’ll let the son know.”

Sue was at her desk catching up on routine reports when Paul Harris phoned the next day.

“We’ve hit a slight snag on the Carmichael property,” the real estate agent said. “For now. The owner is still refusing to sell. I don’t know why. The place is way too much for her, but the son says she’s still clearing it out and refuses to let anyone in.”

“So maybe in a few months …?”

“Personally, I think if you’re patient and you like the look of it, it will come up before the winter. She won’t want to be there all alone once the snow hits. The laneway is a nightmare to plough and the power goes off every time there’s a —” Harris broke off abruptly, as if recognizing the poor sales pitch he was giving. “Of course, most of the time it’s fine. And the son’s going to keep trying to make her see reason. He’s pretty determined. Wants to get back to Paris, and, between you and me, he sounds like he really wants the money.”

“But it’s his mother’s house, isn’t it?”

“Oh yeah. But I guess she’ll be giving some of the proceeds to her kids. That’s what she always promised them, he says. I’ll let you know the minute anything changes.”

“Okay, but meanwhile we’ll keep looking elsewhere.” No point in appearing too eager. Harris started to rhyme off other properties, but she extricated herself and went to track down Bob.

She found him closeted with Inspector Green and Staff Sergeant Sullivan, but the door to Green’s new office was half open so she poked her head in. They were poring over court testimony Bob had to give the next day. Bob was a competent detective, maybe even thorough to a fault, but defence lawyers terrified him. Tomorrow he was up against the lion of the defence bar and he needed all the coaching he could get to prepare for cross-examination. All three detectives stared up at her in disbelief.

“Sorry,” she muttered when she realized her intrusion. “The real estate lawyer in Navan called. That house is still a no-go, for now.”

“What house?” Green said sharply.

Sue glanced at Bob. Should they risk angering the inspector once again? “The Carmichael house. We didn’t bother her,” she rushed on hastily. “A real estate agent there told us her son is trying to persuade her to sell.”

“Her son? Gordon?”

“I don’t know the name. He lives in Paris.”

“That’s Gordon. I didn’t know he was even in the country. But I can guess what his interest is.”

“Money. But the agent does think he can persuade her.”

Doubt and distaste flickered across the inspector’s face. Sue hesitated before throwing caution to the winds. Nothing ventured, nothing gained had always been her motto. “Are you still in touch with Mrs. Carmichael, sir? Could you —”

“No, Detective, I won’t. Marilyn Carmichael is a strong, sensible woman who will sell that house when and if she’s ready, no matter what that son of hers wants. She’s smart enough to see right through him.”

The hospital call came at eight o’clock the next morning, just as Green was tightening the lid on his travel coffee mug in hopes of escaping the house. The kitchen clamoured with life. Modo was sprawled strategically across the centre of the kitchen floor, hoping for tidbits, and Aviva was pulling her ears. Over her squeals, Tony chattered about his upcoming summer soccer day camp. The microwave hummed and plates clattered.

Hannah, as usual, had yet to put in an appearance. Much to Green’s consternation, she had taken a summer job waitressing at a Byward Market pub. After dusk, the heritage market area came alive with pub crawlers, street people, and prostitutes, along with the crooks who preyed on them all. In response to Green’s fatherly fretting, she had cast him a dark, knowing look that he didn’t dare question. A look that said she’d walked those streets herself and knew every trick.

Over the morning chaos, he didn’t even hear the ring, but Sharon glanced at the phone and sobered instantly. “It’s the Ottawa Hospital,” she said as she picked up.

It could have been work-related — his or hers — but Green felt a jolt of fear. At last week’s Shabbat dinner, his father had merely pushed his food around on his plate, even though Hannah had tempted him with Green’s mother’s legendary roast chicken. Afterwards he had asked to go home right away. Home was a small, lonely senior’s apartment in Sandy Hill, mere blocks from the old tenement where he had raised his only son and nursed his wife through her long death.

In the years since her death, Sid Green had withered to a shell of himself, retreating inside his memories and his TV game shows, growing deafer and frailer. All his cronies were dead, and the vibrant, Yiddish neighbourhood he’d once known was long gone. Even Nate’s Deli, where Green had always taken him for cheese blintzes or smoked meat on rye, had been bulldozed to make way for a Shoppers Drug Mart.

Yet his battered body had refused to cede defeat, and he had insisted that as long as his brain and his two feet still worked, no one was going to park him in some soulless nursing home.

“One day we may have no choice,” the ever-practical Sharon had said after the dinner. “He will fall and break his hip or have a stroke.”

Although Green knew she was right, it didn’t bear thinking about. The idea of his father, who had survived the Nazi camps by sheer force of will, being leached away bit by bit by the cruel thief of age was unbearable. They had considered bringing him to live with them, but the five of them were already cheek by jowl in their old-fashioned house, with its one bathroom, narrow halls, and daunting stairs. Faced with the astronomical cost of the renovations, they had stalled.

All these thoughts rushed through his brain as Sharon handed him the phone. He steeled himself. A brisk, no-nonsense voice from Admissions verified his identity before he heard the words he’d been expecting for months.

“Your father has just been brought to hospital by ambulance. The medical team is working on him, but as his power of attorney for personal care, we need to discuss treatment options.”

Two hours later, after filling in a mountain of forms and repeating his father’s medical history to three different people, he was sitting in the ICU waiting room when an incredibly young woman in green scrubs approached. She looked grave.

“Your father has suffered an ischemic stroke and he’s unconscious. We have administered a thrombolytic, tissue plasminogen activator, to dissolve the clot, but we won’t know the extent of the damage until he regains consciousness and we perform some tests. He apparently collapsed some time during the night, but wasn’t found until 7 a.m. this morning when his personal care worker arrived to help with his morning routine.”

“So it could have been hours.”

She met his eyes. Despite her youth, she didn’t flinch. “Yes. The clot-dissolving medication is most effective during the first four to five hours, after which brain cell death begins to occur. We don’t know in your father’s case.”

Green absorbed this. “Where was he? Did it happen in his sleep?” It was a faint comfort that his father might have slipped away painlessly.

She dashed it. “No. He was found in a chair in his living room. He probably didn’t feel well, perhaps had some nausea, dizziness or headache, and got up to get something. Water or Tylenol.”

“But he didn’t call 911 himself?”

“He may not have realized how serious it was until it was too late and he lost consciousness.”

“So in your opinion, how bad is it going to be?”

She shook her head. “Too early to tell. He is breathing on his own, but his vitals are unstable. We are giving him oxygen and aspirin and keeping him hydrated, but beyond that … I see he has a DNR order and a living will.”

Green nodded. “If there is no hope of meaningful recovery or decent quality of life. My father was very clear on that.”

Again she shook her head. “The next forty-eight hours will tell. But if he has another stroke …”

The doctor wasn’t prepared to offer a prognosis, but Green didn’t need her words to send his thoughts spinning. In one scenario, his father might recover enough to continue his slow decline. In another, he would never regain consciousness and would slip into death in a day or week. But as painful as either possibility was, the nightmare scenarios in between were worse. Paralysis. Loss of speech. A body robbed of volition, a mind of expression.

Feeling numb and disconnected, Green headed toward the nursing station. He knew he should have a hundred questions, but all he felt was a heavy weight of responsibility and loss. He had no siblings, no uncles or cousins, with whom to share that weight.