Forty Words for Sorrow

Delorme had grown up revering the Mounties. The scarlet uniform, those horses, well, they went straight to a little girl's heart. She had a vivid memory of the first time she saw them perform the Musical Ride in Ottawa, the sheer beauty of such equestrian precision. And then in high school, the glorious history, the great trek west. The Northwest Mounted Police, as they were then known, had ridden thousands of miles to ward off the kind of violence that was plaguing the westward expansion of the United States. They had negotiated treaties with the aboriginals, sent American raiders hightailing it back to Montana or whatever barbaric pit they had crawled out of, and established the rule of law before settlers had even had a chance to think about breaking it. The RCMP had become an icon of upstanding law enforcement around the world, a travel agent's dream.

Delorme had bought the image wholesale; that's what images are for, after all. When, sometime in her late teens, she had seen a photograph of a woman in that red serge uniform, Delorme had seriously considered sending away for an application.

But reality kept breaking through the image, and reality was not nearly as pretty. One officer sells secrets to Moscow, another is arrested for smuggling drugs, still another for tossing his wife off the balcony of a high-rise. And then there was the whole Security Service fiasco. The RCMP Security Service, before it had been dismantled in disgrace, had made the CIA look like geniuses.

She glanced at the fresh-faced creature in the car beside her, wearing a shapeless down coat, blond hair pulled back in a neat French braid. She had stopped for the traffic light at Edgewater and Trout Lake Road, and the streetlights silvered the down on her cheek. Even in that pale wash, Delorme could see herself ten years ago. This girl, too, had bought the straight-arrow image and was determined to make it stick. Well, good for her, Delorme figured. Cowboys armed with brutality and incompetence may have betrayed those true-North ideals, but that didn't make a young recruit dumb for clinging to them. Delorme spurred her on silently: Go get 'em.

They pulled up in front of an impressive A-frame on Edgewater. It looked like something out of the Swiss Alps.

"Don't ring the buzzer, just walk right in. Doesn't want to wake the kids."

Delorme showed her ID to a Mountie at the side door. "Downstairs," he said.

Delorme walked through the basement amid smells of Tide and Downy, then past a huge furnace into a large room of red brick and dark pine that had the leathery, smoky look of a men's club. Fake Tudor beams crisscrossed stucco walls that were hung with hunting prints and marine art. A feeble fire flickered in the fireplace. Above this, a moose head contemplated the head of R. J. Kendall, chief of the Algonquin Bay Police Department.

Kendall had an open, congenial manner and a big laugh that he used all the time, often accented with a backslap. He laughed too much, was Delorme's opinion; it made him seem nervous, which perhaps he was, but she had also seen that genial manner vanish in an instant. When angered, which was thankfully not often, R. J. Kendall was a shouter and a curser. The whole department had heard him tear up one side of Adonis Dyson and down the other for undermanning the winter fur carnival, with the result that it had become a noisy, rowdy affair that made the front page of the Lode for all the wrong reasons.

And yet Dyson still spoke highly of Kendall, as did most people who carried shrapnel wounds from one of his explosions. Once his anger was over, it was really over, and he usually made a gesture or two to soothe ruffled feathers. In Dyson's case, he'd gone out of his way- on TV- to give him credit for downturns in robberies and assaults. It was far more than his predecessor would have done, and Dyson noticed.

Dyson himself was in one of the red leather armchairs talking to someone Delorme couldn't see. He waved a languid hand in her direction, as if midnight meetings were routine with him.

The chief jumped up to shake Delorme's hand. He must have been in his late fifties, but he affected a boyish air, the way some powerful men do. "Sergeant Delorme. Thanks for getting here so fast. And on such short notice. Can I get you a drink? Off-hours, I think we can afford to relax a little."

"No thank you, sir. This time of night, it would just knock me out."

"We'll get right down to it, then. Someone I want you to meet. Corporal Malcolm Musgrave, RCMP."

Watching Corporal Malcolm Musgrave emerge from the red leather chair was like watching a mountain emerge from the plains. He had his back to Delorme, so the granite block of head emerged first, pale hair trimmed to no more than a sandy bristle. Then the escarpment of shoulders, vast cliff-face of chest as he turned toward her, and finally the rock formation of his handshake, dry and cool as shale. "Heard about you," he said to Delorme. "Nice job on the mayor."