By the Time You Read This

9

NEXT MORNING, KELLY CAME into the kitchen in her running gear—black leggings, mauve sweatshirt with a tiny elephant stitched on it—and grabbed an orange off the counter. Catherine bought those oranges, Cardinal thought. Did you buy half a dozen oranges when you were about to kill yourself?

He poured his daughter a coffee. “You want some oatmeal?”

“Maybe when I come back. Don’t want to lug any extra weight around. God, you look exhausted, Dad.”

“You should talk.” Kelly’s eyes looked puffy and red. “Are you managing to sleep at all?”

“Not much. I seem to wake up every half hour,” she said, dropping bits of orange peel into the green bin. “I never realized how physical the emotions are. I wake up and my calves are locked up, and I feel like a wreck even though I haven’t done anything. I just can’t believe she’s gone. I mean, if she came in that front door right now I don’t even think I’d be surprised.”

“I found this,” Cardinal said. He held out a photograph he’d discovered buried in an album crammed with loose pictures, a black-and-white portrait of Catherine, aged about eighteen, looking very moody and artistic in a black turtleneck and silver hoop earrings.

Kelly burst into tears, and Cardinal was taken by surprise. Perhaps in an effort to ease his own grief, his daughter had been comparatively restrained, but now she wailed like a little girl. He rested a hand on her shoulder as she cried herself out.

“Wow,” she said, coming back from washing her face. “I guess I needed that.”

“That’s how she looked when we met,” Cardinal said. “I just thought she was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. The kind of person you’re only supposed to meet in movies.”

“Was she always that intense?”

“No, not at all. She made fun of herself all the time.”

“Why don’t you come running with me?” Kelly said suddenly. “It’ll make us feel better.”

“Oh, I don’t know …”

“Come on. You still run, don’t you?”

“Not as often as I used to …”

“Come on, Dad. You’ll feel better. We both will.”

Madonna Road was just off Highway 69, so they had to run along the shoulder for half a kilometre or so and then make a left onto Water Road, which skirted the edge of Trout Lake. The day was brilliant and clear, the air with a sharp autumn tang.

“Wow, smell the leaves,” Kelly said. “Those hills have every colour except blue.”

Kelly was not by nature a perky young woman; she was making an effort to cheer Cardinal up, and he was touched by it. He was indeed aware of the beauty of the day, but as they ran through the suburb, their steps seemed to beat in time with the words Catherine’s dead, Catherine’s dead. Cardinal felt the contradictory sensations of being both hollowed out and yet extremely heavy—as if his heart had been replaced by a ball of lead.

“When do you have to be back in New York?” he asked Kelly.

“Well, I told them I was going to take two weeks.”

“Oh, you don’t have to stay that long, you know. I’m sure you need to get back.”

“It’s fine, Dad. I want to stay.”

“How about today? You have any plans?”

“I was thinking about calling Kim Delaney, but I don’t know. You remember Kim?”

Cardinal recalled a big strapping blond girl—angry at the world and very political. She and Kelly had been inseparable in their last years of high school.

“I would have thought Kim would have ventured out into the big bad world by now.”

“Yeah, so would I.”

“You sound mournful.” Cardinal accidentally brushed against a recycling bin. A Jack Russell bounced up and down on the other side of the fence, yapping elaborate canine threats.

“Well, we were best friends for a while, but now I’m not even sure if I should call her,” Kelly said. “Kim was the smartest girl at Algonquin High—way smarter than me—head of the debating club, delegate at the junior UN, editor of the yearbook. And now it’s like she wants to be Queen of Suburbia.”

“Not everyone wants to move to New York.”

“I know that. But Kim’s twenty-seven and she’s already got three kids, and she owns two—two!—SUVs.”

Cardinal pointed at a driveway they were just passing: one Grand Cherokee, one Wagoneer.

“All she can talk about is sports. Honestly, I think Kim’s life revolves around curling and hockey and ringette. I’m surprised she isn’t into bowling yet.”

“Priorities change when you have kids.”

“Well, I never want kids if it means you have to check your mind at the door. Kim hasn’t read a newspaper in years. All she watches on TV is Survivor and Canadian Idol and hockey. Hockey! She hated sports when we were in school. Honestly, I thought Kim and I would be friends forever, but now I’m thinking maybe I won’t call.”

“Well, here’s an idea. You feel like making a quick trip down to Toronto?”

Kelly looked over at him. There was a fine film of sweat on her upper lip and her cheeks were flushed. “You’re going to Toronto? What brought this on?”

“Something cooking at the Forensic Centre. I want to deal with it in person.”

“This is to do with Mom?”

“Yeah.”

For a few moments there was just the sound of their breathing—Cardinal’s breathing, anyway. Kelly didn’t seem to be having any trouble. Water Road ended in a turning circle. The two of them slowed and ran in place for a few moments. Beyond the red brick bungalows, with their neat lawns and rows of stout yard-waste bags, the lake was deep indigo.

“Dad,” Kelly said, “Mom killed herself. She killed herself and it hurts like hell, but the truth is she was manic-depressive, she was in and out of hospitals for a long time, and it’s really, ultimately, not so surprising that she wanted out.” She touched his arm. “You know it wasn’t about you.”

“Are you gonna come?”

“Boy, you don’t mess around when you set your mind on something, do you.” She gave it a second. “All right, I’ll come. But just to keep you company on the drive.”

Cardinal pointed to a path that looped away through the trees. “Let’s go back the scenic way.”

All the way south down Highway 11, Cardinal could not think of anything but Catherine. Although think was not the word. He felt her absence in the beauty of the hills. He felt her hovering above the highway; it had always been the road that took Cardinal away from or back to Catherine. But she had not been there this time to wave goodbye, would not be there when he came back.

Kelly fiddled with the radio dial.

“Hey, put it back,” Cardinal said. “That was the Beatles!”

“Ugh. I can’t stand the Beatles.”

“How can anyone hate the Beatles? That’s like hating sunshine. It’s like hating ice cream.”

“It’s just their early stuff I can’t stand. They sound like little wind-up toys.”

Cardinal glanced over at her. Twenty-seven. His daughter was older now than Catherine had been when Kelly was born. Cardinal asked her about New York.

For the next little while Kelly told him about her latest frustrations in trying to make it as an artist. New York was a hard town to be broke in. She had to share an apartment with three other women, and they didn’t always get along. And she was obliged to work at two jobs to make ends meet: she was assisting a painter named Klaus Meier—stretching canvasses for him, doing his books—and also working as a waitress three days a week. It didn’t leave a lot of time for her own painting.

“And doing all this, you never feel the pull of suburban life? The yearning for a small town?”

“Never. I miss Canada sometimes, though. It’s kind of hard to be friends with Americans.”

“How’s that?”

“Americans are the friendliest people in the world, on the surface. At first I found it almost intoxicating—they’re so much more outgoing than Canadians. And they’re not afraid to have a good time.”

“That’s true. Canadians are more reserved.”

I’m acting, Cardinal thought. I’m not having a conversation, I’m acting like a man having a conversation. This is how it’s done: you listen, you nod, you ask a question. But I’m not here. I’m as gone as the World Trade Center. My heart is Ground Zero. He wanted to talk to Catherine about this, but Catherine was not there.

He struggled to focus.

“Somewhere along the line Americans invented a kind of fake intimacy,” Kelly said. “They’ll tell you about their divorce the first time they meet you, or their history of child abuse. I’m not kidding. I had one guy tell me how his father used to ‘incest’ him, as he put it. That was on the first date. In the beginning I thought everyone was really trusting, but they’re not at all. They just don’t have any sense of decorum. Why are you smiling?”

“It’s just funny, hearing you talk about decorum. Unconventional girl like you.”

“I’m actually pretty conventional, when you get down to it. I have a feeling it’s going to be my downfall as an artist. God, look at the trees.”

The drive to Toronto took four hours. Cardinal dropped Kelly at a Second Cup on College Street where she had arranged to meet an old friend, then he headed over to the Forensic Centre on Grenville.

As a piece of architecture, the Forensic Centre is of no interest whatsoever. It’s just a slab tossed up, like so many other government buildings, in the era when poured concrete replaced brick and stone as the material of choice. Inside, it’s a collection of putty-coloured dividers, tweedy carpet, and mordant cartoons cut from newspapers and taped above people’s desks.

Cardinal had been here many times, though not to the documents section, and the very familiarity of the place unnerved him. He was drowning in the deepest agony of his life; everything should have been changed. And yet the security guards, the rattling elevator, the plain offices, desks, charts and displays were exactly as before.

“Okay, so we got three little items here,” Tommy Hunn said, laying them out on the laboratory counter. Unlike the building, Tommy had changed. His hair had got thinner, and his belt was hidden beneath a roll of flab, as if there were a dachshund asleep under his shirt.

“We got one suicide note. We got one notebook in which said suicide note may or may not have been written. And we have one nasty sympathy card with a typed message inside.”

“Why don’t we start with the sympathy card,” Cardinal said. “It’s not going to be related to the other two items.”

“Sympathy card first,” Hunn said. He put on a pair of latex gloves, removed the card from its plastic folder and opened it. “‘How does it feel, asshole?’” he read in a flat monotone. “‘Just no telling how things will turn out, is there.’ Cute.”

He held the note next to the window, tilting it to catch the light.

“Well, it’s an ink-jet printer, I can see that right off. No idiosyncrasies visible to the naked eye. Not my eye, anyway. But let’s do a little detecting.” He held a loupe to his eye and brought the note up to his face. “Here we go. Printer flaw on the second line. Look at the h’s and the t’s.”

He handed Cardinal the loupe. At first Cardinal couldn’t see anything, but when his eye adjusted he could make out a pale, threadlike line running through the crossbars of the h‘s and the t‘s.

“The good news is, if a printer does something like that, it does it consistently. You notice there’s no flaw through the first line of type. But if we had another page the guy printed out, it would show the same flaw on the second line.”

“How helpful is that going to be?” Cardinal asked.

“Without another sample to compare it to? Not helpful at all. And the bad news is, they change the cartridge, they change the flaws. Far as we’re concerned, it’s like they’ve bought themselves a whole new printer.”

Cardinal pointed to the notebook. “What can you do with these?”

“Depends what you want to know.”

“I’d like to be sure the note was written with the same pen as the rest of the notebook. And when it was written in relation to the last entries. If you open it to the one that mentions ‘John’s birthday.’”

“John’s birthday. Ha! Maybe she was addressing it to you!” Hunn flicked through the pages, then held the notebook up to the light the way he had the card. “Oh, yeah. You’ve got impressions here. I can make out ‘Dear John.’ First thing we do is stick ‘em both in the comparator.”

He lifted a wide door on something labelled VSC 2000.

“Look through the window there, when I flick the switch. I can shine several different kinds of light on the samples, see what kicks up. Ink may look identical to the human eye, but even the same make and model of pen will show differences under infrared. The chemistry of different ink batches reacts differently. I can’t tell you how many fraudulent wills I’ve busted using this gizmo. ‘Dear John.’ Gotta love it.”

Cardinal bent over to peer through the window. The writing on the pages glowed.

“These are identical,” Hunn said from behind him. “Same pen wrote the suicide note and the birthday note.”

“Can you tell me which one was written first?”

“Sure. First thing we do is stick it in the humidifier.” Hunn put the notebook into a small machine with a glass front that looked like a toaster oven. “Just needs a minute or so. Indentations will show up way better if the paper is humid.”

The machine beeped, and he took out the notebook. “Now we’ll run a little ESDA magic on it, see what we can see.”

“A little what?”

“E-S-D-A. Electrostatic detection apparatus.”

This was a hulk of a machine with a venting hood on top. Hunn laid the notebook down so that the single page was flat against a layer of foam. Then he spread a sheet of plastic wrap over it.

“Underneath the foam we got a vacuum that pulls the air through. It’ll hold the document and the plastic down tight. Now I take my Corona unit—don’t worry, I’m not gonna open my pants …”

Hunn picked up a wandlike instrument and flicked a switch. “Little mother puts out several thousand volts,” he said over the hum. He waved it over the plastic sheet a few times. There was no change that Cardinal could see.

“Now I take my fairy dust …” Hunn shook what looked like iron filings out of a small canister. “Actually, these are tiny glass beads covered in toner. I’m just gonna cascade ‘em over my set-up here …”

He poured the black powder over the plastic that covered the notebook page. The beads slid off, leaving toner behind in the impressions. There was a flash of light.

“Now I got us a picture,” Hunn said, “and we shall see what we shall see. Have these been dusted for fingerprints?”

“Not yet. Why?”

“The toner’ll often pick up prints—not as good as dusting powder. They have to be pretty good prints for it to work. Take a look.”

A photograph scrolled out of a slot. Cardinal reached for it.

There was a small dark thumbprint to the left of ‘John’s birthday,’ which now appeared in white. There was a short straight line across the whorls where Catherine had cut herself in the kitchen years ago. Catherine’s thumbprint, where she braced the notebook on her lap. She was alive. She was thinking of me, planning for my birthday, imagining a future. Cardinal coughed to cover the cry that threatened to escape his throat. The impression of the suicide note was now complete, clearly inscribed in black toner. By the time you read this …

It’s her handwriting. You know it’s her handwriting. Why are you putting yourself through this?

“Okay,” Cardinal said. “So we know the suicide note was written on top of the later page, which makes sense. The later pages should have been blank when she wrote the suicide note. But can you tell if the ink on the later page, I mean the ink of the birthday note, is on top of the impressions left from the suicide note? Or underneath them?”

“Oh, I like a man who thinks dirty,” Hunn said. “Let’s pop it under the microscope. If the white lines of the birthday note are interrupted by black, that means the indentations were made at a later time than the ink.” Hunn peered into the microscope and adjusted the focus. “Nope. We got black interrupted by white—ink over indentations.”

“So the suicide note was definitely written before the birthday note.”

“Definitely. I’m assuming you know when the mysterious John’s birthday occurred?”

“Yeah. Over three months ago.”

“Hmm. Not your usual run of suicide, then.”

“No. Can I keep the picture you took?”

“Oh, sure. That way the original doesn’t have to be handled so much.” Hunn pulled the notebook out of the ESDA machine and put it back in its folder.

“Do one more thing for me, Tommy?”

“What’s that?”

“Pour some of that fairy dust on the suicide note too.”

“You wanna check it for earlier impressions as well? You already have the birthday thing.”

“I’d really appreciate it. My brothers in arms up north aren’t exactly on the team on this one.”

Hunn looked at him, pale blue eyes calculating. “Okay, sure.”

He repeated the routine of humidifying the note, securing it under plastic, charging it. Then he poured the powder over the plastic.

“Looks like lots of impressions from notes earlier in the notebook. We can stick it under the microscope and be certain which ones came first, if you want.”

“Look at this,” Cardinal said. He pulled out the photo curling from the slot. The suicide note was now in white. But there was something else at the top of the photo, in the centre, outlined in black toner.

“Quite a bit bigger than the other one,” Hunn said. “And no scar. I’m no ident man, but I’d say you’re now dealing with a very different pair of thumbs.”

A little later Hunn walked him down to the elevators, where they waited in silence a few moments. Then the bell pinged, announcing the arrival of the elevator. Cardinal got in and hit the button for the ground floor.

“Say, listen,” Hunn said in the tone of one who has been turning something over in his mind. “That stuff isn’t connected to you, is it? I mean, personally? You wouldn’t be the John in the notebook, would you?”

“Thanks for all your help, Tommy,” Cardinal said as the elevator doors closed between them. “Much appreciated.”

Travelling back to Algonquin Bay the same day meant Cardinal and Kelly spent a total of eight hours together in the car. The ride back was quiet.

Cardinal asked Kelly how things had gone with her friend.

“Fine. At least she hasn’t turned into a vegetable like Kim. She’s still involved in art, and she seems to have some idea of what’s going on in the world.”

Kelly twisted a strand of her blue-black hair as she stared out the window. Cardinal remembered how his own friends had changed at that age. Many had lost interest in him when he became a cop, and a lot of his Toronto associates wrote him off when he moved back to Algonquin Bay.

“You never know about people,” Catherine had said. “Everybody has their own storyline, and sometimes it doesn’t include us—usually when we wish it did. And sometimes it does include us—usually when we wish it didn’t.”

And what about now, Catherine? How do I deal with your being gone?

“Like a cop,” he imagined her saying, with the little half smile she gave whenever she was teasing him. “The way you handle everything.”

But it doesn’t help, he wanted to cry. Nothing helps.

They passed WonderWorld, a vast amusement park just north of Toronto with a fake pointy mountain and gigantic rides. Kelly asked him how things had gone at Forensics, but Cardinal mumbled something noncommittal. He didn’t want to see the look of pity and frustration in her eyes.

When Orillia was behind them, she said, “I suppose this means dinner at the Sundial?”

“Unfortunately not,” Cardinal said. “Sundial’s closed.”

“My oh my. The end of an era.”

They had to settle for bland little sandwiches at a Tim Hortons.

It was dark by the time they got home. The hills and the trees were silent, a salve to the ears after the endless clatter of Toronto. Colder, too. A half-hidden moon lit tendrils of cloud that hung motionless over the water, the lake itself shiny and black as patent leather.

When Cardinal opened the front door, he stepped on the corner of a square white envelope. He picked it up without showing Kelly.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Kelly said, taking off her coat. “Nothing like a day in the car to make you feel grubby.”

Cardinal took the envelope into the kitchen, holding it by the corner. He switched on the overhead light and peered at the address. He was pretty sure he could make out a pale, threadlike line running through the M and the R of Madonna Road.