Forty Words for Sorrow

3

SECURING A PERIMETER AND arranging a twenty-four-hour watch on the island took longer than anyone expected; everything about police work takes longer than expected. In the end Cardinal did not get home until one o’clock in the morning, too keyed-up to sleep. He sat himself in the living room with two fingers of Black Velvet straight up and made notes about what he would have to do next day. The house was so cold, even the rye couldn’t warm him.

Kelly would be back in the States by now.

At the airport, Cardinal had watched his daughter heave a suitcase onto the baggage scale, and before she could even lift the next one, a young man in line behind her had picked it up and placed it on the scale for her. Well, Kelly was pretty. Cardinal had the usual father’s prejudice about his daughter’s looks, and he believed any objective person would find his daughter as lovely as he did. But having a pretty face, Cardinal knew, was like being wealthy or famous: people were always offering to do things for you.

“You don’t have to hang around, Daddy,” she had said as they descended the stairs to the waiting area. “I’m sure you have better things to do.”

Cardinal hadn’t had anything better to do.

Algonquin Bay’s airport was designed to handle about eighty travellers at a time, but it rarely had that many. A tiny coffee shop, boxes for The Algonquin Lode and the Toronto papers, and that was about it. They sat down, and Cardinal bought The Toronto Star, offering his daughter a section, which she declined. It made him feel as if he shouldn’t read either. What was the point of staying if he was just going to read the paper?

“You’re all set for your connections, then?” he asked. “You have enough time to change terminals?”

“Tons. I have an hour and a half in Toronto.”

“That’s not too much. Not by the time you get through U.S. customs.”

“They always put me straight through. Really, Daddy, I should go into smuggling.”

“You told me you got stopped last time. Almost missed your connection.”

“That was a fluke. The customs officer was a mean old battle-axe who wanted to give me a hard time.”

Cardinal could picture it. In some ways Kelly was becoming the kind of young woman who annoyed him—too smart, too educated, too damn confident.

“I don’t know why they can’t have a flight directly from Toronto to New Haven.”

“It’s not exactly the centre of the universe, sweetheart.”

“No, it only has one of the best colleges in the world.”

And it cost a damn fortune. When Kelly had finished her BFA at York, her painting instructor had encouraged her to apply to Yale’s graduate program. Kelly had never dreamed she would be accepted, even when she put together a portfolio and hauled it down to New Haven. It had occurred to Cardinal to deny her, but not for long. It’s the art school, Daddy. All the big-name painters went there. You may as well study accounting if you don’t go to Yale. Cardinal had wondered if that could possibly be true. To him Yale meant indolent snobs in tennis outfits; it meant George Bush. But painting?

He had asked around. Quite true, he had been assured by those who would know. If one wanted to be visible in the international art scene, which really meant the U.S. art scene, an MFA from Yale was the way to go.

“Really, Daddy, why don’t you go home? You don’t have to stay.”

“It’s okay. I want to stay.”

The boy who had helped with Kelly’s luggage had now taken up a seat facing them. If Cardinal left, the kid would be sitting next to his daughter like a shot. I’m a possessive bastard, he accused himself, nursing these miniature panics over the women in my life. He was the same way about his wife, Catherine.

“It was good of you to come home, Kelly. Especially in the middle of term. I think it really made a difference to your mom.”

“Do you? Pretty hard to tell, she seems so out of it these days.”

“I could tell.”

“Poor Mom. Poor you. I don’t know how you stand it, Daddy. I mean, I’m away most of the time, but you have to live with it.”

“Well, that’s what you do. Better or worse, sickness and health. You know how it goes.”

“A lot of people don’t live by that stuff anymore. I know you do, of course. But Mom really scares me sometimes. It must be so hard for you.”

“It’s a lot harder for her, Kelly.”

They sat in silence. The boy pulled out a Stephen King novel; Cardinal pretended to read the Star, Kelly stared out at the empty tarmac where thin flurries of snow swirled in the ground lights. Cardinal began to hope the flight would be cancelled, that his daughter would have to stay home another day or two. But Kelly had lost any affection for Algonquin Bay. How can you stand this dinky little backwater? she’d said to him more than once. Cardinal had felt the same at her age, but then ten years on the Toronto police force had convinced him that the dinky little backwater where he grew up had its virtues.

The plane finally arrived, a propeller-driven Dash 8 that seated thirty. In fifteen minutes it would be gassed up and ready to take off.

“You have enough cash? What if you get stuck in Toronto?”

“You worry too much, Daddy.”

She hugged him, and then he watched her wheel her carry-on through security (which consisted of two uniformed women not much older than she was) and head for the door. Cardinal moved to the window and watched her cross through the blowing snow. The boy was right behind her, damn him. But outside, brushing the snow from the windshield with his glove, Cardinal had condemned himself for being a jealous twerp, a smothering parent who couldn’t let his child grow up. Cardinal was a Catholic—a lapsed Catholic—and like all Catholics, lapsed or devout, he retained an almost gleeful ability to accuse himself of sin, though not necessarily the sin he had actually committed.

Now, the whisky sat half finished on the coffee table. Cardinal had drifted off. He rose stiffly from his chair and went to bed. In the darkness, images came: headlights on the lake, the body fixed in ice, Delorme’s face. But then he thought of Catherine. Although his wife’s circumstances were at this moment anything but happy, he forced himself to imagine her laughing. Yes, they would go away somewhere together, somewhere far from police work and their private sorrows, and they would laugh.