Forty Words for Sorrow

Cardinal had long ago stopped going to Mass, but the habit of continual self-examination and self-blame stayed with him. He was also honest enough to admit that most days these habits only served to make him neurotic, not good. He had reason to be thinking this way at the moment: His tiny house on Madonna Road, far from being a comfort, was freezing. "Winterized lakefront cottage," the ad had said. But when the temperature dropped out of sight, the only way to keep the place warm enough was to get both the fireplace and the woodstove going full blast. Cardinal was wearing lined corduroys and a flannel workshirt over long underwear. Still cold, he had wrapped himself in a terrycloth bathrobe. He was sipping from a steaming cup of coffee, but his hands were frigid. It had taken ten minutes to fill the kettle from his frozen pipes. On this less-than-merciful stretch of Madonna Road, the wind whipped off the lake and pressed right through his windows with their very expensive and completely futile triple glazing.

The surface of the lake was so white it made Cardinal's eyes water to look at it. He drew the curtains closed in an attempt at insulation. Somewhere out there across the frozen lake, somewhere in the middle of town perhaps, the killer was going about his normal day. He, too, might be enjoying a cup of coffee while Katie Pine lay dead and her mother sat grieving, while Billy LaBelle lay buried god-knows-where, and Todd Curry was on a coroner's slab in Toronto. The killer might be listening to records- Anne Murray, anyone?- or hiking through the dazzling snow with his camera slung over his shoulder. Cardinal made a mental note to check the local camera club, if there was one. If the killer took pictures of Katie Pine, he could hardly risk taking them to the drugstore; he would have to develop them himself. Such a person might belong to a camera club.

Thinking of cameras made him think of Catherine. One of the worst things about her illness was how it robbed her of all creative energy. When she was well, the house was always full of photographs in various stages of completion. She would be in and out, cameras hanging from both shoulders, excited about some project or other. Then the illness came and the cameras were the first thing to go, jettisoned like dead weight from a sinking ship. He had called her before breakfast, and she had sounded pretty good; he even allowed himself to think she might be home sometime soon.

BUT now the telephone waited for him with the implacable silence of an executioner. Cardinal had resolved after a long sleepless night that he would call Kelly this morning and tell her she would have to find another, cheaper grad school next term; her Yale days were over. She'd done her BFA at York, no reason why she couldn't go back. From the moment he first took that money, guilt had begun to drip inside him. It was not just the prospect of being exposed by Delorme; there was not much chance of that. But month by month, year by year, the acid of guilt had eaten through the layers of denial, and he couldn't stand it anymore.

The worst thing was knowing that he was not the husband that Catherine loved, the father that Kelly loved. They both had this misconception about him: They thought he was good. Although his crime might be victimless- who was going to care in the long scheme of things whether Cardinal in a moment of weakness had relieved a criminal of a large sum of money?- for years, now, he had been an unknown quantity to the people he loved, an utter stranger. Kelly respected the father and cop he used to be. The loneliness of being unknowable was becoming unbearable.

And so he had resolved to call her and explain what he had done and that he could not afford to keep her at Yale. Christ, the girl has an IQ of 140, can't she figure it out? How does a small-town Canadian cop send his kid to Yale? Did she really buy the story about the money coming from the long-ago sale of his grandparents' house? Did Catherine? Self-delusion must run in the family. All right, he would tell her, let her complete the semester, and then, having wrapped up the little matter of nailing the killer of Katie Pine and Billy LaBelle and Todd Curry, he would confess to Dyson and the chief. He would lose his job, but jail time would be unlikely.

He picked up the phone and dialed Kelly's number in the States. One of her roommates answered- Cleo? Barbara? he couldn't tell them apart- and shouted for Kelly to pick up.

"Hi, Daddy." When did she start calling me that again? Cardinal wondered. They had gone through a brief "Pop" phase, which Cardinal had barely tolerated, then back to the usual "Dad," but lately it was "Daddy." It must be an American thing, he decided, like saying "real good" for "really good" and pronouncing "probably" with the accent on the last syllable, but this was one American mannerism he enjoyed.