Forty Words for Sorrow

"Do you? Pretty hard to tell, she seems so out of it these days."

"I could tell."

"Poor Mom. Poor you. I don't know how you stand it, Daddy. I mean, I'm away most of the time, but you have to live with it."

"Well, that's what you do. Better or worse, sickness and health. You know how it goes. "

"A lot of people don't live by that stuff anymore. I know you do, of course. But Mom really scares me sometimes. It must be so hard for you."

"It's a lot harder for her, Kelly."

They sat in silence. The boy pulled out a Stephen King novel, Cardinal pretended to read the Star, and Kelly stared out at the empty tarmac where thin flurries of snow swirled in the ground lights. Cardinal began to hope the flight would be canceled, that his daughter would have to stay home another day or two. But Kelly had lost any affection for Algonquin Bay. How can you stand this dinky little backwater? she'd said to him more than once. Cardinal had felt the same at her age, but then ten years on the Toronto police force had convinced him that the dinky little backwater where he grew up had its virtues.

The plane finally arrived, a propeller-driven Dash 8 that seated thirty. In fifteen minutes it would be gassed up and ready to take off.

"You have enough cash? What if you get stuck in Toronto?"

"You worry too much, Daddy."

She hugged him, and then he watched her wheel her carry-on through security (which consisted of two uniformed women not much older than she was) and head for the door. Cardinal moved to the window and watched her cross through the blowing snow. The boy was right behind her, damn him. But outside, brushing the snow from the windshield with his glove, Cardinal had condemned himself for being a jealous twerp, a smothering parent who couldn't let his child grow up. Cardinal was a Catholic- a lapsed Catholic- and like all Catholics lapsed or devout, he retained an almost gleeful ability to accuse himself of sin, though not necessarily the sin he had actually committed.

Now, the whiskey sat half-finished on the coffee table. Cardinal had drifted off. He rose stiffly from his chair and went to bed. In the darkness, images came: headlights on the lake, the body fixed in ice, Delorme's face. But then he thought of Catherine. Although his wife's circumstances were at this moment anything but happy, he forced himself to imagine her laughing. Yes, they would go away somewhere together, somewhere far from police work and their private sorrows, and they would laugh.

4

DON (short for Adonis) Dyson was a youthful fifty, trim and wiry as a gymnast, with a gymnast's agile movements and sudden graceful gestures, but as the detectives under his command never tired of pointing out, he was no Adonis. The only thing Detective Sergeant Don Dyson had in common with the carved Adonises found in museums was a heart as cold as marble. No one knew if he had been born that way or if fifteen years as a Toronto homicide detective had added frost to an already chilly disposition. The man hadn't a single friend- on the force or off- and those who had met Mrs. Dyson claimed that she made her husband seem drippingly sentimental.

D. S. Dyson was fussy, declamatory, bald, and calculating. He had long fingers, spatulate at the tips, of which he was inordinately vain. When he handled his letter opener or toyed with a box of paper clips, those fingers took on a dangly, spidery aspect. His bald head, trimmed with a geometrically exact circle of hair at the sides and back, was a perfect orb. Jerry Commanda loathed him, but Jerry was intolerant of authority in general, a trait Cardinal put down to his Native heritage. Delorme insisted she could use Dyson's head for a mirror to pluck her eyebrows- not that she did pluck her eyebrows.

That same mirrory dome was tilted toward Cardinal, who was seated in a chair placed at an exact forty-five-degree angle to Dyson's desk. No doubt the detective sergeant had read somewhere that this angle was good leadership psychology. He was an exact man with exact reasons for everything he did. A honey-glazed doughnut was parked on the corner of his desk, waiting for the clock to strike exactly 10:30- not a minute earlier, not a minute later- when he would consume it along with the thermos of decaffeinated coffee parked beside it.

At this moment, Dyson held his letter opener suspended between his outstretched palms, as if he were measuring his desk with it. When he spoke, he appeared to be addressing himself to the blade. "I never said you were wrong, you know. I never said that little girl wasn't murdered. Not in so many words."

"No, sir. I know you didn't." Cardinal had a tendency, when irritated by authority, to become extremely polite. He fought that tendency now. "You only put me back on burglary as a spiritual exercise."

"Do you remember what kind of expenses you were running up? This was and is the age of cutbacks. We can't pretend we're the Mounties; we can't afford it. You allocated all your investigative resources to this one case."