Forty Words for Sorrow

19

“I MUST SAY, IT’S ALL VERY FASCINATING,” the librarian said. She was plump and pale, with bright blue eyes that shone behind a pair of glasses that were unflattering in the extreme. “Not to be ghoulish or anything, but there’s nothing quite like a good murder to prick the intellect, get the brain humming, don’t you find?”

“Did somebody mention a homicide?” Delorme said quietly. “I didn’t say I was investigating a homicide.”

“Oh, come now. You and that other detective were on channel four the night they found the Pine girl. Dreadful business. And when the boy was found in that house. No, no, Detective, you don’t forget a thing like that. This isn’t Toronto, you know. Have you definitely connected the two? It just gives one the shivers.”

“Ma’am, I can’t talk about an investigation in progress.”

“No, no, of course you can’t. You police have to keep certain details to yourself—otherwise any old nut could confess and who would ever know the truth? But what could possibly be the motive in such a case? I mean, the boy was sixteen—approximately sixteen, I believe they said in the Lode—but that’s still a child, and what kind of monster kills a child? Two children. The Windigo Killer, the National Post calls him. Ugh, it makes your blood run cold. You must have some theory you’re working on?”

The librarian, surrounded by stacks of Agatha Christie and Dick Francis, living out her days among towers of Erle Stanley Gardner and P. D. James, seemed to imagine that Delorme had stepped out of a mystery novel for the sole purpose of enlivening her day. A fine sweat beaded on her upper lip.

“Ma’am, I can’t discuss that case with you. Are you coming up with anything?”

The librarian’s attack on her keyboard was like a murder lifted from one of her authors—a multiple stabbing. “This computer system,” she said with a frustrated hiss, “is less than state-of-the-art. Quite wretched, in fact. Oh, damn this thing.”

Delorme left the librarian inflicting futile injuries on her keyboard and found the bins of CDs. Around her, readers drifted in and out of the stacks. Delorme had spent a lot of time here as a teenager, even though the library was notoriously short on French books. She had preferred to do her homework here, among the smells of print and paper, the quiet rustle of pages, rather than at home with the hockey game blaring on television and her father yelling at his beloved Canadiens. Of course, Delorme had done a lot of daydreaming here too. She couldn’t wait to go away to college, and then she had surprised herself in her final year at Ottawa U. by realizing she was homesick. It was sometimes weird to be a cop in your hometown—she had arrested more than one former classmate—but the big city was not for her. She had found the people in Ottawa far colder than anything Algonquin Bay could throw at her.

The library’s CD collection yielded no Pearl Jam, no Rolling Stones, but yes, she did come up with the Anne Murray album. The plastic cover was smudged and smeared with a thousand fingerprints. She slipped it into an envelope and went back to the counter.

“My goodness, you’re impounding something? You’ve found actual evidence?”

“The Anne Murray album. I didn’t see any of the others.”

“It seems we don’t carry the other two. We never had the Pearl Jam, no surprise there, and the Rolling Stones we used to have, but it was so popular it got damaged or worn out or something and it was removed from circulation …” She prodded her keyboard mercilessly. “… two years ago. Now, tell me, Detective. Can it really be true you police don’t know how that little girl died?”

“Ma’am …”

“I know, I know. Just too curious for my own good. But I did dig up those names for you.” She adjusted her glasses and peered at a piece of paper on which she had noted the information. “The album you have there was borrowed by Leonard Neff, Edith Soames and Colin McGrath. As it happens, I remember Mr. McGrath. His behaviour was unruly. We had to ask him to exit the premises.” She pronounced it premi-sees.

“Unruly in what way? Had he been drinking?”

“Oh, no doubt Mr. McGrath was intoxicated. But there’s no excuse for obscenities of that kind. I nearly summoned some of your colleagues—my hand was positively trembling over that dial.”

“And the others—Miss Soames and Mr. Neff. Do you remember anything about them?”

The librarian closed her eyes as if in prayer, then said with conviction, “Not a thing.”

Delorme pulled out her notebook. “I’m going to need addresses on all three.”

Delorme had ignored Algonquin Bay’s retail music outlets. None of the albums was new, all three were extremely popular, and there was no reason to believe they were even purchased in town. Cardinal—except for the possible radio angle—had finally discounted the music altogether. If Delorme had found that all three albums were held by the library and all three had been checked out around September 12 to the same person, that might have meant something. But tracking a single piece of music to the library carried no weight at all. After six years in Special Investigations, Lise Delorme knew a dead end when she saw one.

And yet, following up on the library CD made her heart beat a little faster. The library CD was something she could hold in her hand; it gave the illusion of direction because it led somewhere right now, not a week from now. And besides, the library CD was her only lead.

Mr. Leonard Neff’s address was a modern brick bungalow in Cedarvale, an affluent subdivision of mewses, courts and places laid out with sterile precision at the top of Rayne Street. There was a hockey net set up in the driveway, where a couple of boys in Montreal Canadiens jerseys were firing slapshots at each other. The Taurus parked out front had ski equipment strapped to the roof rack. Apparently a sporting family, the Neffs. The windows of the house were modern and triple-glazed, not likely to rattle with every passing truck. In any case, Cedar Crescent, Cedar Mews and Cedar Place (the town council apparently did not waste its creative energy on the naming of streets) attracted little traffic of any sort, certainly not trucks.

Delorme’s second stop was the home of the unruly Mr. McGrath. This turned out to be a small apartment house at the turnoff to Airport Road. Delorme got out of the car and listened a moment. The drone of an Air Ontario plane coming in for a landing. Highway 17 was less than fifty yards away; the traffic was a constant hiss. A woman heavily burdened with groceries tottered up the front steps and struggled with her keys. Delorme rushed to hold the front door open for her and entered the building enveloped in the woman’s gratitude. Mr. McGrath’s apartment was on the first floor, at the far end of the building. Delorme stood in the hallway, listening. No traffic, just sounds from other apartments: a vacuum cleaner, the cry of a parakeet, the metallic chatter of a TV game show.

The last name on the list sounded like a little old lady: Edith Soames. All right, I know it’s a dead end, Delorme told herself, there isn’t a chance in hell that Todd Curry or Katie Pine was killed by some little old lady, but sometimes you just go with what you have, you take a flyer, you see what happens.

The Soames address was just two blocks east of the house Delorme had grown up in, and she was sidetracked for a few moments by nostalgia. She drove past the rock cut where at the age of six Larry Laframboise had given her a split lip. On the corner was the North Star Coffee Shop, where she had overheard Thérèse Lortie—formerly a friend—saying Lise Delorme could be a real slut sometimes. Half a block further: the park bench where Geoff Girard had told her he didn’t want to marry her. She recalled the sudden heat of tears streaming down her face.

She drove by her old house and tried not to look, but at the last minute she slowed the car and stared. The place looked more rundown than ever. She and Geoff used to sit on that dilapidated front porch for hours, feeling each other up under a blanket. One night her father had come out and chased him halfway down to Algonquin Avenue, sixteen-year-old Lise screaming at him the whole time. It was on that porch that she had first had sex—with another boy, not with Geoff. Maybe Thérèse Lortie had been right.

Well, her father was long gone—vanished out west to Moose Jaw or somewhere—and her mother was dead. Geoff Girard was married and father to about fourteen bright blond children out in Shepard’s Bay. The house had long ago been divided into flats, as had most of the old houses in the neighbourhood.

The Soames house was as rundown as the rest of the block. The facade of fake red brick had blackened with age and was peeling around the windows, which were the heavy ancient storm variety. Delorme had a sudden memory of her father teetering on a ladder with one of those huge windows clutched in his hands. When traffic went by, they rattled.

The door opened and a little old lady was helped onto the porch by a woman in her twenties, perhaps a granddaughter or visiting nurse. Their progress was hampered by heavy winter coats and the old woman’s terror of slipping on the icy steps. The young woman steadied her elbow and frowned impatiently at the faltering steps.

Delorme got out of the car and waited for them on the sidewalk. “Excuse me,” she said, flashing her badge. “I’m working on a string of burglaries in this neighbourhood.” It was true that Arthur Wood had looted several apartments in the area, but Delorme didn’t mention that the burglaries had occurred three years previously.

“What’s that?” the old woman yelled. “What’s she saying?”

“Burglaries!” the younger one shouted back. She made a face of helplessness at Delorme, a face that said, Old people—what can you do with them? “We haven’t had any break-ins,” she said.

“Have you seen anything unusual? Vans hanging around? Strangers watching the street?”

“No. I haven’t noticed anything strange.”

“What’s that! What’s she saying? Tell me what she’s saying!”

“It’s okay, Gram! It’s nothing!”

Delorme gave them the ritual warning to keep their doors and windows locked. The young woman promised they would. Delorme felt a twinge of pity: a bad case of eczema or some other disease had damaged her face. Her skin looked as rough as elephant hide, and there were raw patches, as if it had been scrubbed brutally with wire wool. The woman was not ugly, but the hangdog look and the averted eyes spoke of an inner conviction that she was. The world was unlikely to offer her anything other than this crabbed existence with her aged grandmother, and the young woman knew it.

“What’s she saying? Tell me what’s she’s saying!”

“Come on, Gram! The store’ll be closed by the time we get there!”

“Tell me what’s going on! I like to know what’s going on, Edie!”

So, the younger one was Edith Soames. Well, as grandmother and granddaughter they might both have that name; it made no difference. A lonely young woman had once borrowed from the library one of the most popular records in the country, a record thousands of people had bought or borrowed or taped. It meant nothing.

Delorme left them to their slow struggle toward MacPherson Street. It would have been so nice to report to her suspicious partner that she had made some headway. But Delorme turned the corner, swerving a little on the icy road, certain that the morning’s progress amounted to exactly zero.