Forty Words for Sorrow

57

EXTRACTING A LARGE, HEAVY object from four hundred feet of water is difficult at the best of times. When the temperature is twenty below zero and the surface has been frozen, thawed and refrozen, it doesn’t get any easier. When the ice was strong enough, Lands and Forests had set up a towing rig at the edge of the lake—a twelve-ton truck with several miles of steel cable spooled on its back. They paid out the cable hundreds of feet across the ice, where it was then slung over a block-and-tackle affair that had been rigged over a hole about fifteen feet wide. Above the far hills, the sun looked as pale and cold as the moon.

Twenty degrees centigrade below zero is not unusually cold for Algonquin Bay, but Cardinal’s recent exposure to freezing water had sensitized him to low temperatures. He stood on a small dock below the pumphouse, shivering from head to foot. Delorme, with her arm in a sling, and Jerry Commanda, hands jammed in pockets, stood in front of him, breath feathering out in the stiff little breeze that kicked off the lake. Even though Cardinal was wearing long johns underneath his regular clothes and a down coat on top, he felt utterly exposed.

The Lands and Forests team was gathered around the hole in the ice. In their pressurized suits the divers looked like something out of Jules Verne—Victorian astronauts. Their helmet lamps glowed dully in the wash of late afternoon light. They tested their tethers with a couple of sharp yanks and then stepped through the hole. Black water closed over their heads like ink.

“Better them than me,” Cardinal muttered.

“It was really nice of you to test the water first, though,” said Jerry Commanda. “Lot of guys wouldn’t have done that.”

An aroma of coffee and donuts strayed down the hill, and all three cops turned like dogs hearing the rattle of the food dish. A Lands and Forests guy yelled at them to come and get some, and they didn’t have to be told twice. Cardinal wolfed down a chocolate donut and burned his tongue on the coffee, but he didn’t care. The heat coursed through him like a thrill.

Forty-five minutes later the sky was darkening, the hills becoming indistinct. A shout went up, and the back end of Fraser’s van emerged from the lake. Slowly the rest of the vehicle appeared, mud and water streaming from the joins of doors and windows. The team steadied it, tugging on other cables the divers had attached. The spool on the back of the twelve-ton started to turn.

The divers’ helmet lamps looked bright as headlights now, and someone told them to switch them off. The team laboured under floodlights that swayed on small tripods. Suddenly the van pitched to one side and the body of Eric Fraser slid half out of the open side door, water streaming from one black sleeve.

“Shit,” said Jerry Commanda. “Nearly dropped him in the drink again.”

Slowly, the spool creaking with every turn, the van was winched backward across the ice. Cardinal was remembering that first night when Delorme had called for him and they had travelled like explorers to view the frozen remains of what had once been a little girl. It began on ice, Cardinal thought, and it’s ending on ice.

The body was pulled from the van and laid out on the dock like a fish. The skin was grey except over the prominent bones—forehead, jaw, nose—where it was stretched to an impossible white. A coroner examined him—not Dr. Barnhouse this time, but a young man Cardinal had never worked with before. He went about his business in a calm, thorough way, without Barnhouse’s bluster.

Cardinal had always thought he would have some telling remark to make over the dead body of Eric Fraser—because, yes, it was a sight he had imagined more than once. But looking down at the frail, vanquished body, Cardinal found he had nothing at all to say. He knew what he was supposed to feel. He was supposed to feel that the monster had got off easy. He was supposed to wish the monster were still alive, so he could not escape earthly punishment. But everything about the body—the pale skin, the narrow wrists—said that this had been a human being, not a monster. So Cardinal’s feelings were a confusion of horror and pity.

No one spoke for a long time, and then it was Lise Delorme who summed the moment up. “My God,” she said in a voice barely audible. “My God, he’s so small.”

Finally, the coroner said to cover him up.

As Cardinal turned, he caught a glimpse of the first headlights rounding the bay. Soon it would be rush hour. Thank God they had managed to pull this off without too many onlookers. You always get one or two, no matter what, so as he turned from the body of Eric Fraser and headed back up the hill toward his car, Cardinal was not surprised to see a lonely figure—a short, plain woman—standing at the roadside, staring down at the activity below, clutching a handkerchief in one mittened hand as though she were grieving.