By the Time You Read This

19

IT’S NO SECRET THAT a certain type of man, or another type of man in a certain type of mood, will seek out exactly the person, place or thing that is most likely to bring him the maximum pain. A drunk will head to the bar, a compulsive gambler to a loved one’s savings account, a forlorn lover to the scene of parting. John Cardinal was in the basement the next afternoon, standing motionless in the dim light and chemical smells of Catherine’s darkroom.

The darkroom had been hers and hers alone, and he had never set foot in here uninvited.

Although Catherine would sometimes chat about a project beforehand, she never talked about her work in the darkroom. She was like a chef who doesn’t want anyone else in the kitchen, preferring to bring out the perfect meal as if it has been conjured out of thin air. She liked to come upstairs with a fistful of new prints and spread them out on the kitchen table. Then she would stand back while Cardinal examined them one by one.

If Cardinal was too slow to form an opinion, she would speak her own over his shoulder. “I like the fire escape in that one, the diagonal is so dramatic.” Or “Look at the cyclist in the background, heading in the opposite direction. I love accidental things like that.” Half the time Cardinal sensed that he was admiring the wrong thing: how cute the little kid was, how pretty the snow. But Catherine didn’t seem to mind.

There were several prints of the same photograph clipped to a line over her sinks, which Cardinal had installed for her years ago. The prints were black-and-white, and showed a brick wall in the foreground, a man approaching in the background, maybe half a block away. Man and wall were equally in focus, and Cardinal knew from his own limited experience that that was hard to do. It gave a slightly dislocated feel to the image, as if man and wall were equally inhuman. The man’s head was down, his face hidden by the kind of hat people rarely wear these days. An ominous picture… or maybe it just seemed that way in retrospect.

“What are you doing down here?” Kelly was leaning in the doorway, looking effortlessly lovely in white shirt and blue jeans. Catherine twenty years ago.

Cardinal pointed to the shelves that lined one wall, the tall closet for cameras and lenses, the wide shelves for storing prints. The bins for frames.

“I built those for her,” he said.

“I know,” Kelly said.

“Catherine designed it, of course. I mean, it was her workspace.”

“She was happy here,” Kelly said, and Cardinal felt a crimp in his heart.

“I’m going to ask you to do me a favour, Kelly. Not now, but a few months from now, maybe.”

“Sure. What do you need?”

“I don’t know anything about photography. And to tell you the truth, I liked every single picture Catherine ever took. She saw it, she thought it was worth photographing, to me it was valuable. But you’re an artist.”

“Struggling painter, Dad. Not a photographer.”

“You have an artist’s eye. I was hoping sometime, not now, you could go through Catherine’s photos and select the best ones. I was thinking—next year, maybe—we could put on a show of her work at the university or the library.”

“Sure, Dad. I’d be happy to do that. But I don’t think you should be hanging around down here. Everything’s still too raw, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. It is.”

“Come on,” she said, and actually took his hand and led him out of the darkroom. It all but undid him.

Kelly was right, though. He found it easier to breathe upstairs, in the domain that had been half his. He went into the living room and looked over the titles on the bookshelves. Catherine bought most of the books in the house. The majority were photography books, but she had also bought books about yoga, Buddhism, the novels of John Irving, and a lot of psychology, too—books about depression and bipolar disorder. He took down Against Self-Slaughter by Frederick Bell.

There were several other books listed on the flyleaf, all of them with academic-sounding titles, but this one appeared to be aimed at a general audience, its tone calm, reassuring and surprisingly self-revelatory. The first few pages related how Bell’s father had committed suicide when he was eight, and his mother ten years later when he was beginning university. Not surprising that such a background might lead one to labour, as Bell put it in the introduction, “in the fields of grief and despair.”

Cardinal flipped through. The book was organized around several case studies, each chapter beginning with a description of a suicide attempt that brought the patient into Bell’s practice. There was also a section dealing with partners of suicides, with particular emphasis on people who had married more than one person who had committed suicide. “Some people with deep, repressed suicidal fantasies of their own,” Bell wrote, “need to be near people who are able to kill themselves. Unable to hurl themselves over that mortal precipice, they need someone to commit suicide for them.”

Cardinal decided it probably wasn’t the best thing for him to be reading just then.

He went into the kitchen, where Kelly had settled herself over a sketchbook. He picked up the mail from the counter where she had stacked it. Most of it was for Catherine: a photography magazine, notices from the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum of upcoming shows, a bill for her MasterCard, as well as various mass mailings from Northern University. There were a couple of square envelopes addressed to him, more cards.

He was looking for his letter opener when the phone rang.

It was Brian Overholt, a Toronto homicide cop Cardinal had known forever. They had worked vice together more than twenty years ago, and after that narcotics. Together they had made an effective team, and Overholt was one of the few Toronto colleagues he missed. Cardinal had called him about Connor Plaskett.

“John, I got an answer for you. Plaskett is indeed an experson. Got run over by an Escalade in the club district here a couple of weeks ago. Hung in on the critical list for a while, but he died a week ago last Saturday.”

“Was he into anything down there I should know about?”

“Not that we know of. His associates scattered into the woodwork when he got run over, so draw your own conclusions. They clearly didn’t want to pass the time of day with law enforcement.”

“You catch the driver?”

“No, but it’s just a matter of time. Anything else I can do for you? Hello? You still there?”

Cardinal had opened one of the envelopes addressed to him and now he was staring at the card it had contained.

“Uh, yeah, Brian. Listen, thanks a lot. Any time I can return the favour.”

“Sure. Next time I’m looking for an Eskimo, I’ll hold you to it. Hey, how’s Catherine?”

“Gotta run, Brian. Something just came up.”

This card was postmarked Mattawa, just as the first one had been, again a semi-glossy Hallmark of the sort available at any large drugstore, not to mention every stationery store in the nation. So the sender had bought at least three. Maybe he had bought them all at the same time in the same store. A clerk might notice someone who bought three sympathy cards at once.

Cardinal tried to keep his mind fixed in investigative mode and not react to the words inside the card.

What a terrific husband you must have been, it said. Same set-up as before, original message of the card covered up with a typed message. She preferred death to living with you. Think about it. She literally preferred to die. That should give you some idea of what you’re worth.

Cardinal went to the window and tilted the card this way and that in the light. Yes, he could just make out a thin line across the capital letters. Almost certainly the same printer, and even if not, almost certainly the same sender. Whoever it was, it could not be Connor Plaskett, who had died before Catherine. Connor Plaskett, as Brian Overholt had so eloquently put it, was an ex-person.

She preferred death to living with you.

“Oh, fuck you!” Cardinal slammed his fist on the fridge, sending magnets, notes and snapshots to the floor.

“Dad, are you all right?”

Kelly had leapt up from her chair and was regarding him with dark, alarmed eyes.

“I’m fine.”

She put a hand to her heart. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you swear like that.”

“You may have to get used to it,” he said, shrugging on his jacket.

“You’re going out?”

Cardinal grabbed his car keys.

“Don’t hold supper for me,” he said.