Black Fly Season (13 page)

Delorme slipped the postcard into an evidence bag and tagged it.

A few minutes later she discovered a condom underneath a bush. Even wearing latex gloves, she wasn’t about to touch that one. She picked it up with a pair of ident’s tongs. ‘Probably belongs to the same guy as the postcard,’ she said. Collingwood looked up for a moment, then went back to sifting dirt with a sieve.

‘Collingwood, did anyone ever tell you you talk too much?’ Delorme dropped the condom into an evidence bag.

Half an hour went by, then Collingwood offered up a single syllable: ‘Hair.’ He held a pair of tweezers in the air; Delorme couldn’t see anything else.

‘How long?’

He shrugged. ‘Twelve, fourteen inches. Black.’

‘Good. Let’s hope we can eventually connect it to a person.’

Another half hour.

‘So, you don’t make anything out of these drawings?’ Szelagy said. Ken Szelagy, the biggest man on the detective squad, was usually the most talkative. But today he was fascinated by the cave wall and it had been keeping him uncharacteristically quiet. ‘You don’t find something creepy about all these weird birds and snakes? Don’t you think they mean something?’ ‘Yes, I think they mean something,’ Delorme

said, ‘to whoever drew them. But personally I

don’t make anything out of them because I’m not into astrology or whatever they’re about, and until we find someone who is, I’m not even going to hazard a guess.’

‘What’re those things?’

Delorme was dropping some bits of shell into a baggie. ‘They look like seashells to me.’

‘Kinda colourful ones. Makes you wonder how the hell they got out to the middle of the woods.’

Delorme slapped at a fly and missed. ‘Well, someone brought them here. The trouble is, we’ve no way of knowing if it was the killer or just some innocent hiker.’

‘Yeah. That’s the trouble with all this stuff. But about all these arrows and tomahawks the guy scratched on the wall, I’m thinking we should ask a certain person of the Indian persuasion.’ He jerked his chin toward the mouth of the cave.

Delorme turned around and saw Jerry Commanda standing there, hands on hips, his slim build silhouetted against the waterfall. With the quiet roar of the water, Delorme hadn’t heard him approach.

‘Who bought it?’ he said.

‘Wombat Guthrie,’ Delorme said. ‘You know him?’

Jerry nodded. ‘Wombat Guthrie was a noxious individual from the time he was three. It’s amazing he lived as long as he did. You called me in from Reed’s Falls to tell me this?’

‘I didn’t call you, Szelagy did. What’s so hot in Reed’s Falls?’

‘Drugs. It’s always drugs. I wish people would take up a new vice.’

‘You know we have your picture up in the boardroom, now?’

‘That must be the nude shot. I asked Kendall not to do that. Now I feel so cheap.’

‘Reason I called, Jerry,’ Szelagy indicated the cave wall. ‘We can’t make head or tail of these hieroglyphics. Figured maybe you could help us.’

Jerry stepped up to the wall and peered at the markings. He stood there for a long time, hands folded behind his back like a math teacher checking a student’s work. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Very intriguing.’

Szelagy looked at Delorme and back to Jerry, waiting for more. When nothing came, he said, ‘What’s intriguing? Why is it intriguing?’

Jerry squatted to look at some of the marks near the bottom of the wall. ‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen petroglyphs like this since … well, I can’t remember the last time.’

‘See, I knew it was some Indian thing,’ Szelagy said to Delorme. Then, to Jerry: ‘What’s it say? Can you translate? This is great.’

,”’

‘I think so.’ Jerry pointed at the first three rows of arrows. ‘See here? This is a reference to space. And over here, he’s referring to time. Yes, absolutely. It says, “Meet me at Tim Hortons, three o’clock on Saturday.’

‘Get the hell outta here,’ Szelagy said. ‘No way it says that.’

Jerry shrugged. ‘Could be saying Starbucks. My hieroglyphics are a little rusty.’

Delorme shook her head. ‘Very good, Jerry. Thanks for making the trip.’

‘Oh,’ Szelagy said. ‘I get it. You’re making a joke. You don’t know what these symbols mean?’

‘Haven’t the foggiest,’ Jerry said. ‘I know that may shock you, I mean, since it has bows and arrows and all.’

‘Hey, I didn’t call you just because you’re Indian,’ Szelagy said. His face was turning red. ‘I called because you used to know all sorts of aboriginal stuff. I remember you used to be always carrying big fat books about native history and that.’

‘Well, those marks don’t mean anything to me. I’ve never seen anything like them. Bows, arrows, hatchets, but other than that, is there any reason to think it’s even Indian in origin? I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m just saying I wouldn’t know. It’s not Ojibwa stuff, I can tell you that. And probably not any of the central or eastern people. But if it’s from out west or from somewhere in the States, I wouldn’t know.’

‘Who would know?’ Delorme said quietly. ‘If it was your case, who would you take it to?’

‘You could try our behavioural sciences unit in Orillia. They keep up on all the Satanism and supernatural crap the serial killers go in for. Ask

for Frank Izzard. He’s a smart guy.’ Jerry caught a black fly in his fist and flicked it away. Then he turned and headed back down the hill.

‘One thing you can say about Jerry,’ Szelagy said when he was gone, ‘he’s his own man. Real different sense of humour.’

Cardinal came home that night to an empty house. The message light was flashing on the phone and when he hit the button it was his daughter, Kelly. She was twenty-six, a painter, and lived in New York City. Her message said she was just calling to chat - to Catherine, she meant, not to Cardinal - but most likely she needed money.

He warmed up some shepherd’s pie from the fridge, opened a Creemore, and sat down at the kitchen table with the Algonquin Lode, but found he couldn’t concentrate on the articles. He would read a few lines and then skip ahead to another story, another photograph.

It’s funny, he thought, fifty years old you pretty much consider yourself a grown-up. Independent. In fact, a lot of the time he wished Catherine would take a trip somewhere. He liked the idea of waking up alone, breakfast alone, coming home alone. Solitude, in his imagination at least, always seemed so attractive. An effect of the movies, he supposed. You watch a solitary character on screen, even just going about their daily routine, it always seems so

interesting, so important. But the reality was that when Catherine was away, Cardinal felt restless and dissatisfied, anxious even. Was she looking after herself? Taking her medication? Why can’t I leave it alone?

The little lakeside house with its woodstove and its angular rooms was cosy, comfortable. And the location out on Madonna Road ensured that it was blessedly quiet most of the time. But tonight the quiet irritated him. He missed the sound of Catherine fussing with her plants, playing Bach on the stereo, chatting to him about photography, about her students, about anything at all, really. And as for Kelly, well, Kelly wouldn’t have called if she’d realized her mother was away.

When he had finished his supper Cardinal called the Delta Chelsea Hotel in Toronto. They put him through to Catherine’s room but there was no answer. He had tried to get Catherine to buy a cell phone but she wanted nothing to do with them. ‘A cell phone?’ she’d said. ‘No, thank you. When I’m alone I want to be alone. I don’t want to be getting phone calls.’ He left a message saying he missed her and hung up.

She was probably out with some of the students; she had mentioned wanting to get photographs of the waterfront at night. Cardinal hoped she wasn’t having a drink with her class. Alcohol did not mix Well with the medication. It tended to make her a Little manic and then she’d stop taking the lithium, ter that, the fragile connections that tethered his

wife to reality would break loose until she came crashing to earth and a bed in the psychiatric hospital. It had happened more times than he cared to remember, but he couldn’t keep her on a leash and he couldn’t be her baby-sitter. Luckily, when she was well, Catherine was level-headed and knew what she had to avoid.

Cardinal stared at the phone. He wanted to call Kelly, but knew she didn’t want to speak to him. This provoked an inner slide-show of memories from when Kelly was young and they had been living in Toronto: Kelly knee-deep in a creek in one of Toronto’s many ravines, a squirming frog raised in her triumphant little fist. Kelly on the observation deck of the CN Tower, tiny arms outstretched as if she could lift the vast blue basin of Lake Ontario to the sky. Kelly inconsolable at the age of fourteen over the wayward heart of some youthful, athletic cad.

Catherine had been in hospital for much of Kelly’s growing up, and Cardinal and his daughter had become very close. Raising a little girl mostly on his own had been fraught with difficulties, but Kelly’s happiness had become the paramount object in Cardinal’s life. Eventually Catherine was lucky enough to go under the care of Dr Carl Jonas at the Clarke Institute. He was a longhaired, pinkfaced man with a salt-and-pepper beard and a pungent Hungarian accent, who had the knack of finding the right balance of therapy and medication quicker than anyone else.

But there had come a time when Catherine had sunk into the worst bout of depression Cardinal had ever seen. A case of the blues had lingered too long, and then she had taken to her bed and nothing Cardinal did could raise her spirits. Soon she was unable even to speak. It was as if she had been lowered into the depths in a bathysphere, the sides threatening to crumple under the stupendous pressure of her sorrows. And Dr Jonas had been away in Hungary for a year on a teaching assignment.

Catherine had been trundled from one clinic to another and she got no better. On the verge of despair - and hounded by Catherine’s American parents, who were possessed by a fierce love for their daughter combined with the Yankee certainty that a non-American thing was an inferior thing - Cardinal had had Catherine admitted to the renowned Tamarind Clinic in Chicago. The bills were breathtaking, so extreme that at first they had seemed a joke, then the stuff of nightmare. There was no way Cardinal could ever pay them on his salary; he and Catherine would never own a house, never get out of debt.

He had been working narcotics with the Toronto police department for several years by then. He had slammed the prison gates on dozens of cocaine and heroin dealers. Staggering sums of cash had been offered to him to look the other way; Cardinal had turned them down every time. Turned them down and locked the bad guys up.

Then one night - a night he had regretted every day of his life since - his resistance had crumbled.

He and the other guys on the squad had raided the headquarters of a murderous thug named Rick Bouchard. In the barely controlled mayhem that ensued, Cardinal had come across a suitcase full of cash hidden under the floorboards of a closet. He had pocketed a few huge stacks of bills, and turned the rest in as evidence.The case was made, and Bouchard was put away.

For a time, Cardinal had managed to rationalize the theft. He had paid off Catherine’s medical bills and invested the rest to pay for Kelly’s education. Eventually she went to the finest art school in North America, taking a graduate course at Yale. But then Cardinal’s conscience, which had been tormenting him for years, finally broke through his wall of denial.

He wrote a letter of confession to Catherine and to Kelly. He also wrote a letter of resignation to Algonquin Bay’s police chief and gave what remained of the stolen money to a drugrehabilitation program. Delorme had intercepted that letter and talked him out of quitting the force. ‘You’ll just be depriving us of a fine investigator,’ she had said. ‘It won’t help anything.’ Unfortunately, Cardinal’s daughter was the one who had ended up suffering for his crime: she had had to leave Yale before completing her graduate degree.

That was nearly two years ago. Kelly had moved

from New Haven to New York and had not spoken to him since. Well, that wasn’t quite true; there had been times when she couldn’t avoid speaking to him. She had come back to Algonquin Bay for her grandfather’s funeral. But the warmth was gone. There was a brittle tone in her voice, now, as if being betrayed had somehow damaged her vocal cords.

Cardinal snatched up the phone and dialled Kelly’s number. If one of her roommates answered, she would not come to the phone. There would be a pause, and then he’d get something lame like, ‘I’m sorry. I thought she was here. She must have gone out.’

But it was Kelly who picked up.

‘Hi, Kelly. It’s Dad.’

The pause that followed opened under Cardinal like an elevator shaft.

‘Oh, hi. I actually just called to ask Mom something.’

That voice. Give me back my daughter!

‘Mom’s away right now. She took her class down to Toronto.’

‘When will she be back?’

‘Day after tomorrow.’

‘Okay, I’ll call back in a couple of days.’

‘Hang on a second, Kelly. How are things going?’

‘Fine.’

‘Any luck on the art front?’ Cardinal immediately regretted the question.

‘The Whitney hasn’t exactly been banging down my door, if that’s what you mean.’

Cardinal hadn’t a clue what the Whitney might be. ‘I just meant are you working well and are you enjoying it?’

‘Everything’s fine.’

‘Are you making some contacts, at least? People who can help you?’

‘I have to go, Dad. We’re heading out to a movie.’

‘Oh. What are you going to see?’

‘I don’t know. Some Gwyneth Paltrow thing.’

‘Are you okay for cash? Do you need money?’

‘I have a job, Dad. I can look after myself.’

‘I know, but New York’s expensive. If you need help, you can always ‘

‘I gotta go, Dad.’

‘Okay, Kelly. Okay.’

She hung up.

Cardinal put the phone down and sat staring at the woodstove.