Forty Words for Sorrow

In Memoriam

Philip L. Blunt
(1916–2000)            

1

I
T GETS DARK EARLY IN
A
LGONQUIN
Bay. Take a drive up Airport Hill at four o’clock on a February afternoon and when you come back half an hour later, the streets of the city will glitter below you in the dark like so many runways. The forty-sixth parallel may not be all that far north; you can be much further north and still be in the United States, and even London, England, is a few degrees closer to the North Pole. But this is Ontario, Canada, we’re talking about, and Algonquin Bay in February is the very definition of winter: Algonquin Bay is snowbound, Algonquin Bay is quiet, Algonquin Bay is very, very cold.

John Cardinal was driving home from the airport where he had just watched his daughter, Kelly, board a plane bound for the United States by way of Toronto. The car still smelled of her—or at least of the scent that had lately become her trademark: Rhapsody or Ecstasy or some such. To Cardinal, wife gone and now daughter gone, it smelled of loneliness.

It was many degrees below zero outside; winter squeezed the car in its grip. The windows of the Camry were frosted up on both sides, and Cardinal had to keep scraping them with an ineffective plastic blade. He went south down Airport Hill, made a left onto the bypass, another left onto Trout Lake Road, and then he was heading north again toward home.

Home, if you could call it that with both Catherine and Kelly gone, was a tiny wooden house on Madonna Road, smallest among a crescent of cottages set like a brooch along the north shore of Trout Lake. Cardinal’s house was fully winterized, or so the real estate agent had told them, but “winterized” had turned out to be a relative term. Kelly claimed you could store ice cream in her bedroom.

His drive was hidden by four-foot-high snowbanks, so Cardinal didn’t see the car blocking his way until he almost rear-ended it. It was one of the unmarkeds from work, great pale clouds of exhaust blasting out from behind. Cardinal reversed and parked across the road. Lise Delorme, the Algonquin Bay police department’s entire Office of Special Investigations, got out of the unmarked and waded through the exhaust toward him.

The department, despite “great strides toward employment equity,” as the bureaucrats liked to phrase it, was still a bastion of male chauvinism, and the general consensus around the place was that Lise Delorme was too—well, too something—for her job. You’re at work, you’re trying to think, you don’t need the distraction. Not that Delorme looked like a movie star; she didn’t. But there was something about the way she looked at you, McLeod liked to say—and for once McLeod was right. Delorme had a disturbing tendency to hold your gaze just a little too long, just a split second too long, with those earnest brown eyes. It was as if she’d slipped her hand inside your shirt.

In short, Delorme was a terrible thing to do to a married man. And Cardinal had other reasons to fear her.

“I was about to give up,” she said. Her French Canadian accent was unpredictable: one hardly noticed it most of the time, but then final consonants would disappear and sentences would sprout double subjects. “I tried to phone you, but there was no answer, and your machine, it’s not working.”

“I switched it off,” Cardinal said. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”

“Dyson told me to come get you. They’ve found a body.”

“Got nothing to do with me. I don’t work homicides, remember?” Cardinal was trying to be merely factual, but even he could hear the bitterness in his voice. “You mind letting me through, Sergeant?” The “Sergeant” was just to nettle her. Two detectives of equal rank would normally address each other by name, except in the presence of the public or around junior officers.

Delorme was standing between her car and the snowbank. She stepped aside so Cardinal could get to his garage door.

“Well Dyson, I think he wants you back.”

“I don’t care. You mind backing out now, so I can plug my car in? I mean, if that’s okay with Dyson. Why’s he sending you, anyway? Since when are you working homicides?”

“You must have heard I quit Special.”

“No, I heard you
wanted
to quit Special.”

“It’s official now. Dyson says you’ll show me the ropes.”

“No, thanks. I’m not interested. Who’s working Special?”

“He’s not here yet. Some guy from Toronto.”

“Fine,” Cardinal said. “Doesn’t make the slightest difference. You gonna get lost now? It’s cold, I’m tired, and I’d kind of like to eat my supper.”

“They think it could be Katie Pine.” Delorme scanned his face while Cardinal took this in, those solemn brown eyes watching his reaction.

Cardinal looked away, staring out into the blackness that was Trout Lake. In the distance the headlights of two snowmobiles moved in tandem across the dark. Katie Pine. Thirteen years old. Missing since September 12; he would never forget that date. Katie Pine, a good student, a math whiz from the Chippewa Reserve, a girl whom he had never met, whom he had wanted more than anything to find.

The phone began to ring inside the house, and Delorme looked at her watch. “That’s Dyson. He only gave me one hour.”

Cardinal went inside. He didn’t invite Delorme. He picked up the phone on the fourth ring and heard Detective Sergeant Don Dyson going on at him in his chilly quack of a voice as if they had been separated in the middle of an argument and were only now, three months later, resuming it. In a way, that was true.

“Let’s not waste time going over old ground,” Dyson said. “You want me to apologize, I apologize. There. Done. We got a body out on the Manitou Islands, and McLeod is tied up in court. Up to his ears in Corriveau. Case is yours.”

Cardinal felt the old anger burning its way into his veins. I may be a bad cop, he told himself, but not for the reasons Dyson thinks. “You took me off homicide, remember? I was strictly robbery and burglary material, in your book.”

“I changed your case assignments, it’s what a detective sergeant does, remember? Ancient history, Cardinal. Water under the bridge. We’ll talk about it after you see the body.”

“‘She’s a runaway,’ you said. ‘Katie Pine is not a homicide, she’s a runaway. Got a history of it.’”

“Cardinal, you’re back on homicide, all right? It’s your investigation. Your whole stinking show. Not that it has to be Katie Pine, of course. Even you, Detective Has-To-Be-Right, might want to keep an open mind about identifying bodies you haven’t seen. But if you want to play I Told You So, Cardinal, you just come into my office tomorrow morning, eight o’clock. Best thing about my job is I don’t have to go out at night, and these calls always come at night.”

“It’s my show as of this moment—if I go.”

“That’s not my decision, Cardinal, and you know it. Lake Nipissing falls under the jurisdiction of our esteemed brothers and sisters in the Ontario Provincial Police. But even if it’s the OPP’s catch, they’re going to want us in on it. If it is Katie Pine or Billy LaBelle, they were both snatched from the city—
our
city—assuming they
were
both snatched. It’s our case either way. ‘
If
I go,’ he says.”

“I’d rather stick with burglaries, unless it’s my show as of this moment.”

“Have the coroner toss a coin,” Dyson snapped, and hung up.

Cardinal yelled to Delorme, who had stepped in out of the cold and was standing diffidently just inside the kitchen door. “Which one of the Manitous are we on?”

“Windigo. The one with the mine shaft.”

“So we drive, right? Will the ice take a truck?”

“You kidding? This time of year, that ice would take a freight train.” Delorme jerked a mittened thumb in the direction of Lake Nipissing. “Make sure you dress warm,” she said. “That lake wind, it’s cold as hell.”

2

F
ROM THE GOVERNMENT DOCK
to the Manitou Islands seven miles west, a plowed strip lay like a pale blue ribbon across the lake; shoreline motels had scraped it clear as an inducement to ice fishers, a prime source of revenue in winter months. It was quite safe to drive cars and even trucks in February, but it was not wise to travel more than ten or fifteen miles an hour. The four vehicles whose headlights lit the flurries of snow in bright cubist veils were moving in slow motion.

Cardinal and Delorme drove in silence in the lead car. Delorme now and again reached across to scrape at the windshield on Cardinal’s side. The frost peeled off in strips that fell in curls and melted on the dash and on their laps.

“It’s like we’re landing on the moon.” Her voice was barely audible above the grinding of gears and the hiss of the heater. All around them the snow fell away in shades that ranged from bone white to charcoal grey and even—in the dips and scallops of the snowbanks—deep mauve.

Cardinal glanced in the rear-view at the procession behind them: the coroner’s car, and behind that the headlights of the ident van, and then the truck.

A few more minutes and Windigo Island rose up jagged and fierce in the headlights. It was tiny, not more than three hundred square metres, and the thin margin of beach, Cardinal remembered from his summer sailing, was rocky. The wooden structure of the mine’s shaft head loomed out of the pines like a conning tower. The moon cast razor-sharp shadows that leapt and shuddered as they approached.

One by one the vehicles arrived and parked in a line, their collective lights forming a wide white rampart. Beyond that, blackness.

Cardinal and the others gathered on the ice like a lunar landing party, clumsy in their calf-high boots, their plump down coats. They shifted from foot to foot, tense with cold. They were eight: Cardinal and Delorme, Dr. Barnhouse, the coroner, Arsenault and Collingwood, the scene men, Larry Burke and Ken Szelagy, patrol constables in blue parkas, and, last to arrive in yet another unmarked, Jerry Commanda from OPP. The OPP was responsible for highway patrol and provided all police services for any townships that lacked their own police force. The lakes and Indian reservations were also their responsibility, but with Jerry you didn’t worry about jurisdictional disputes.

All eight now formed into a gap-toothed circle, casting long shadows in the headlights.

Barnhouse spoke first. “Shouldn’t you be wearing a bell around your neck?” This by way of greeting Cardinal. “I heard you were a leper.”

“In remission,” Cardinal said.

Barnhouse was a pugnacious little bulldog of a man, built like a wrestler with a broad back and a low centre of gravity, and perhaps in compensation he cherished a lofty self-regard.

Cardinal jerked his head toward the tall, gaunt man on the outside of the circle. “You know Jerry Commanda?”

“Know him? I’m sick of him,” Barnhouse bellowed. “Used to be with the city, Mr. Commanda, until you decided to go native again.”

“I’m OPP now,” Jerry said quietly. “Dead body in the middle of the lake, I think you’ll want to arrange for an autopsy, won’t you, Doc?”

“I don’t need you to tell me my job. Where’s the fine flat-foot who discovered the thing?”

Ken Szelagy stepped forward. “We didn’t discover it. Couple of kids found it round four o’clock. Me and Larry Burke here got the call. Soon as we saw, we made a perimeter and called it in. McLeod was in court, so we called D.S. Dyson and I guess he called in Detective Cardinal here.”

“The talented Mr. Cardinal,” Barnhouse murmured ambiguously, then added: “Let’s proceed with flashlights for the moment. Don’t want to disturb things setting up lights and so on.”

He started toward the rocks. Cardinal was going to speak, but Jerry Commanda voiced the thought for him. “Let’s keep it single file, guys.”

“I’m not a guy,” Delorme noted tartly from the depths of her hood.

“Yeah, well,” Jerry said. “Kinda hard to tell the difference right now.”

Barnhouse gestured for Burke and Szelagy to lead the way, and for the next few minutes their boots squeaked on the hardpack. Blades of cold raked Cardinal’s face. Beyond the rocks, a distant string of lights glittered along the edge of the lake—the Chippewa Reserve, Jerry Commanda’s territory.

Szelagy and Burke waited for the others at the chain-link fence surrounding the shaft head.

Delorme nudged Cardinal with a padded elbow. She was pointing to a small object about four feet from the gate.

Cardinal said, “You guys touch that lock?”

Szelagy said, “It was like that. Figured we better leave it.”

Burke said, “Kids claim the lock was already broken.”

Delorme pulled a Baggie out of her pocket, but Arsenault, a scene man and, like all scene men, ever prepared, produced a small paper bag from somewhere and held it out to her. “Use paper. Anything wet’ll deteriorate in plastic.”

Cardinal was glad it had happened early and that someone else had stopped her. Delorme was a good investigator; she’d had to be in Special. She’d put a former mayor and several council members in prison with painstaking work she’d done entirely on her own, but it didn’t involve any scene work. She would watch from now on, and Cardinal wanted it that way.

One after another they ducked under the scene tape and followed Burke and Szelagy around to the side of the shaft head. Szelagy pointed to the loosened boards. “Careful going in—there’s a two-foot drop and then it’s sheer ice all the way.”

Inside the shaft head, the flashlight beams formed a shifting pool of light at their feet. Gaps in the boards made the wind moan like a stage effect.

“Jesus,” Delorme said quietly.

She and the others had all seen traffic fatalities, the occasional suicide and numerous drownings—none of which had prepared them for this. They were shivering, but an intense stillness settled over the group as if they were praying, no doubt some of them were. Cardinal’s own mind seemed to flee the sight before him—into the past, with the image of Katie Pine smiling in her school photograph, and into the future, with what he would have to tell her mother.

Dr. Barnhouse began in a formal voice. “We are looking at the frozen remains of an adolescent—Damn.” He rapped sharply at the microcassette in his gloved paw. “Always acts up in the cold.” He cleared his throat and began again in a less declamatory manner. “We’re looking at the remains of an adolescent human—decay and animal activity preclude positive determination of sex at this time. Torso is unclothed, lower part of the body is partially clothed in denim jeans, right arm is missing, as is the left foot. Facial features are obliterated by animal activity, mandible is missing. Christ,” he said. “Just a child.”

Cardinal thought he heard a tremor in Barnhouse’s voice; he would not have trusted his own. It wasn’t just the deterioration—all of them had seen worse; it was that the remains were preserved in a perfect rectangle of ice perhaps eight inches thick. Eyeless sockets stared up through the ice into the pitch dark over their heads. One of the eyes had been pulled away and lay frozen above the shoulder; the other was missing entirely.

“Hair is detached from the skull—black, shoulder length—and pelvis shows anterior striations, which may indicate a female—it’s not possible to say without further examination, precluded at this time by the body’s being fixed in a block of ice formed by conditions peculiar to the site.”

Jerry Commanda swung his light up to the rough boards overhead and back down to the depressed concrete platform below them. “Roof leaks big time. You can see the ice through it.”

Others swung their lights up and looked at the stripes of ice between the boards. Shadows leapt and darted in the eyeless sockets.

“Those three warm days in December when everything melted,” Jerry went on. “The body probably covers a drain, and when the ice melted, the place filled up with water. Temperature dropped again and froze it right there.”

“It’s like she’s preserved in amber,” Delorme said.

Barnhouse resumed. “No clothing on or near the remains, except for jeans of blue denim that—I already said that, didn’t I. Yes, I’m sure I did. Gross destruction of tissue in the abdominal region, all of the viscera and most major organs missing, whether due to peri-mortem trauma or post-mortem animal activity impossible to say. Portions of lung are visible, upper lobes on both sides.”

“Katie Pine,” Cardinal said. He hadn’t meant to say it aloud. He knew it would provoke a reaction, and it came at full volume.

“I hope you’re not telling me you recognize that poor girl from her high school yearbook. Until such time as the upper jaw may be matched with dental records, any identification is out of the question.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Cardinal said quietly.

“There’s no call for sarcasm, Detective. Remission or no, I’m not putting up with sarcasm.” Barnhouse turned his baleful eye once more upon the object at their feet. “Extremities, those that remain, are nearly skeletonized, but I believe that’s a healed green-stick fracture in the radius of the left forearm.” He stepped back from the edge of the depression and folded his arms belligerently in front of his chest. “Gentlemen—and lady—I’m going to remove myself from this investigation, which will clearly require the services of the Forensic Centre. As Lake Nipissing falls under the jurisdiction of the Ontario Provincial Police, I’m officially turning the investigation over to you, Mr. Commanda.”

Jerry said, “If this is Katie Pine here, the investigation belongs to the city.”

“But surely Katie Pine is one of yours? From the reserve?”

“She was abducted from the fairground by Memorial Gardens. That makes it a city case—has been since she disappeared. Cardinal’s case.”

“Nevertheless,” Barnhouse insisted, “pending positive identification, I’m turning it over to you.”

“Fine, Doctor,” Jerry said, “John, you can run it. I know it’s Katie.”

“You can’t possibly know. Look at the thing.” Barnhouse pointed with his recorder. “Except for the clothes, it barely looks human.”

Cardinal said softly, “Katie Pine fractured the radius in her left arm when she was learning to skateboard.”

Five of them were scrunched in the ident van. Barnhouse had gone, and the two uniforms were waiting in the stake truck. Cardinal practically had to shout over the roar of the heater. “We’re going to need rope: as of now, the whole island is our perimeter. There was no blood and no sign of struggle in the shaft head, so this is probably not the murder scene, only a dump site. Even so, I don’t want any curious snowmobilers zipping through the evidence, so let’s get it good and secure.”

Delorme handed him the cellphone. “I’ve got Forensic. Len Weisman.”

“Len, we’ve got a body here frozen solid in a block of ice. Adolescent, probable murder. If we cut the block of ice and ship it to you entire in a refrigerated truck, can you handle something like that?”

“No problem. We’ve got a couple of variable coolers that go well below freezing. We can thaw it out at a controlled rate and preserve any hair and fibres for you that way.” Surreal to hear a Toronto voice in this lunar landscape.

“Great, Len. We’ll call with an ETA when we’re ready to roll.” Cardinal handed the phone back to Delorme. “Arsenault, you’re the scene expert. How do we get her out of there?”

“We can cut her out in a cube easy enough. Problem will be separating the cube from the concrete underneath.”

“Get a guy from the city to cut it, they cut concrete all the time. And you can clear your calendars, everybody: we’re going to have to cull the snow.”

“But she was killed months ago,” Delorme said. “The snow won’t tell us anything.”

“We can’t be sure of that. Anybody have a good contact at Armed Forces?”

Collingwood raised a hand.

“Tell them we need a huge tent. Something the size of a circus tent that’ll cover the whole island—last thing we need is any more snow on the scene. Also a couple of their biggest heaters, ones they use to heat their hangars. We’ll melt the snow and see everything that’s underneath.”

Collingwood nodded. He was sitting closest to the heater, and his glove was steaming.