Blackfly Season

13

CARDINAL WENT 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, eating breakfast alone, cong home alone. Solitude, in his imagination at least, always seemed so attractive. An effect of the movies, he supposed. You watch a solitary character onscreen, 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 wood stove and its angular rooms was cozy, comfortable. And the location out on Madonna Road ensured that—much of the time, at least—it was blessedly quiet. 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 cellphone but she wanted nothing to do with them. “A cellphone?” 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. After 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 babysitter. 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 had been young and they had lived 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 age 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 had been lucky enough to go under the care of Dr. Carl Jonas at the Clarke Institute. He was a long-haired, pink-faced 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 had 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 finance 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 drug rehabilitation 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’d had to leave Yale before completing her graduate degree.

That had been 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 wood stove.

“Smart move,” he said aloud. “Really won her over that time.”

Later, in bed, Cardinal tried to read—a true crime book Delorme had recommended—but the words kept disintegrating and getting pushed off the page by thoughts of Kelly. He hated to imagine her scrounging to make the rent in an unforgiving town like New York. On the other hand, he could understand why she would loathe the idea of asking him for money, and that understanding lodged like a sharp object somewhere in his rib cage.

Gradually his thoughts turned to Jane Doe. The redhead was roughly Kelly’s age, but seemed less sophisticated. Even innocent and unworldly. Of course, that could be a result of her brain injury. Who would want to kill her? A jealous lover? Some paranoid, possessive loser who couldn’t stand to see those sweet green eyes look at another man? It was hard to imagine how she could have got caught up with the Viking Riders.

Two images haunted Cardinal as he fell asleep: Jane Doe with her pale skin and her blazing red hair spread out against the pillow. And the X-ray of her skull, the bullet glowing in her brain.