Forty Words for Sorrow

Three months before, Catherine had been bright and cheerful, her normal self. But gradually, as it often did in winter, her cheerfulness had ballooned into mania. She began to speak of traveling to Ottawa. It became her sole topic of conversation. Suddenly, it was vital she see the prime minister, she must talk sense into Parliament, she must tell the politicians what had to be done to save the country, save Quebec. Nothing could jog her from this obsession. It would start every morning at breakfast; it was the last thing she said at night. Cardinal thought he would go mad himself. Then Catherine's ideas had taken on an interplanetary cast. She began to talk of NASA, of the early explorers, the colonization of space. She stayed awake for three nights running, writing obsessively in a journal. When the phone bill arrived, it listed three hundred dollars' worth of calls to Ottawa and Houston.

Finally, on the fourth day, she had spiraled to earth like a plane with a dead engine. She remained in bed for a week with the blinds pulled down. At three o'clock one morning, Cardinal awoke when she called his name. He found her in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub. The cabinet was open, the rows of pills (none of them in themselves particularly lethal) waiting. "I think I'd better go to the hospital," was all she had said. At the time, Cardinal had thought it a good sign; she had never before asked for help.

Now, Cardinal sat next to his wife in the overheated sunroom, humbled by the magnitude of her desolation. He tried for a while longer to get her to speak, but she stayed silent. He hugged her, and it was like hugging wood. Her hair gave off a slight animal odor.

A nurse came, bearing a single pill and a paper cup of juice. When Catherine would not respond to her coaxing, the nurse left and returned with a syringe. Five minutes later, Catherine was asleep in her husband's arms.

The early days are always bad, Cardinal told himself in the elevator. In a few days the drugs will soothe her nerves enough so that the relentless self-loathing will lose its power. When that happens she will be- what?- sad and ashamed, he supposed. She'll feel exhausted and drained and sad and ashamed, but at least she'll be living in this world. Catherine was his California- she was his sunlight and wine and blue ocean- but a strain of madness ran through her like a fault line, and Cardinal lived in fear that one day it would topple their life beyond all hope of recovery.

8

IT wasn't until Sunday that Cardinal got the opportunity to review background material. He spent the entire afternoon at home with a stack of files labeled PINE, LABELLE, and FOGLE.

In a city of fifty-eight thousand, one missing child is a major event, two is an out-and-out sensation. Never mind Chief R. J. or the board of commissioners, never mind the Algonquin Lode or the TV news, it was the entire town that wouldn't let you rest. Back in the fall, Cardinal could not so much as shop for groceries without being peppered with questions and advice about Katie Pine and Billy LaBelle. Everyone had an idea, everyone had a suggestion.

Of course, this had its bright side: There was no lack of volunteers. In the LaBelle case, the local Boy Scouts had spent an entire week treading step by step through the woods beyond the airport. But there were drawbacks, too. The station phones never stopped ringing and the small force had been overwhelmed with false leads- all of which had to be followed up sooner or later. The files filled up with stacks of supplementary reports-sups, as they were not very affectionately called: follow-ups on tips that led like a thousand false maps to dead ends.

Now, Cardinal sat with his feet to the fireplace and a fresh pot of decaf on the stove, weeding through the files, trying to winnow the stack of data into facts: From these solid facts, newly regarded, he hoped to extract one solid idea, one fragment of a theory, because so far he had none.

Armed Forces had graciously lent them a tent big enough to cover Windigo Island and two heaters formerly used to heat hangars for the local squadron of F-18s. Down on their knees like archaeologists, Cardinal and the others had culled the snow foot by square foot. That took most of the day, and then, turning up the heaters bit by bit, they had slowly melted the snow and examined the sodden carpet of pine needles and sand and rock that lay beneath. Beer cans, cigarette butts, fishing tackle, bits of plastic- they were buried in trash, none of it tied to the crime.

The lock had yielded no fingerprint.

This, then, was Cardinal's first sad fact: Their painstaking search had rendered not a single lead.