By the Time You Read This

52

THE DAYS GO BY, and the last of the autumn shades into winter. Mid-November now, and not a single leaf remains to fall. Every stem has closed, every branch is black and bare against the clouds. Fallen leaves have gathered along the sides of roads and in the culverts, they have gathered on porch steps and around garage doors. They have gathered on decks and cars and windowsills. It has rained, and the lawns are no longer covered in fluffy, multicoloured layers. Now the leaves are plastered in flat jagged collages on the sidewalks and on the driveways and even in the wheel wells of Algonquin Bay vehicles.

The temperature has dropped, and John Cardinal is wearing his heavy leather coat, the one with something like fur for a lining. After the beauties of October, November is dour, the pretty girl replaced by the sourpuss. Another week or two and the leather coat will be replaced by the down parka, his full Nanook, as Catherine called it.

Cardinal is coming back from a morning walk along the hiking trail that curls up the hill behind his house, a walk he has taken countless times with his wife. Delorme had called him earlier, beating herself, yet again, for jumping to conclusions about Catherine. Then she told him that Melanie Greene is now out of hospital and living at home with her mother. Her new therapist is optimistic.

Mr. and Mrs. Walcott are coming along the other side of the road, walking their horrible dog. They stop bickering when they see Cardinal, in deference to his loss.

“Supposed to snow,” Mrs. Walcott says.

Cardinal agrees with a wave and heads up the slope to his house. Smells of woodsmoke and bacon mingle with the smell of snow. Snow has been about to fall for at least a week now. It’s late this year.

He enters his house and hangs up his coat. He struggles to undo the wet laces of his boots, gets one off, and then the phone is ringing in the kitchen and he walks clump-footed, with one boot still on, laces flapping, to answer it.

It is the only person he wants to hear from right now. “Kelly, how are you? What are you doing up this early?”

“I got your message last night, but it was too late to call.

Cardinal pries the boot off his foot and takes the phone into the living room. The line is not great, full of mysterious crackles, but he sits in his favourite chair and tells his daughter that Frederick Bell’s bail has been set so high he won’t be getting out of jail pending his trial for murder in the first degree.

A moment later he can hear his daughter crying, her sobs echoing up the increasingly bad line from New York. Kelly has still not made the adjustment demanded by the knowledge that her mother was dead not by her own but by another’s hand. Bitter either way, and Cardinal wishes Kelly were with him so that he could give her a hug and tell her it was all right, that everything would be okay, even though it wasn’t and it wouldn’t.

“Kelly?”

The sobbing has stopped, but so has the crackling of static.

“Kelly?”

The line has gone dead.

Cardinal presses the Flash button and dials her number, getting only a busy signal.

Outside, the snow is falling now, small rainlike flakes that fall fast on a slant. If she were there, Catherine would be gathering up her camera, putting on her boots. The first snow always got her outside taking pictures even though they were too “calendarish,” in her opinion, to be any good. Cardinal hears a scrabbling on the roof. Taking the phone with him, he goes to the back door and opens it, surprising a squirrel in the act of chewing insulation from an air conditioning line.

“Beat it,” Cardinal says, but the squirrel just regards him with a black glistening eye. Flakes of snow are melting on his ears and tail.

Cardinal raises the phone to him and the squirrel scampers away, a black squiggle among the leaves, and then there is silence. Or near silence. A soft wind threads itself through the birches, and snow ticks on fallen leaves.

The phone rings in his hand. Cardinal answers it, and the line to New York is open once more.