Forty Words for Sorrow

6

TO REACH THE CHIPPEWA RESERVE, you follow Main Street west past the railroad tracks and make a left just after the St. Joseph’s mother house, formerly a Catholic girls’ school and now a home for retired nuns, at the junction with Highway 17. There are no signs to the Chippewa Reserve, no gates; the Ojibwa have suffered so much at the hand of the white man that to lock the door against him now would be pointless.

The most remarkable thing about entering the reserve, Cardinal often thought, is that you don’t know you’re on the reserve. One of his very first girlfriends had lived up here, and even then he hadn’t registered its status as a separate enclave. The prefab bungalows, the slightly battered cars parked in the drives, the mutts chasing each other over the snowbanks—these could belong to any lower middle-class neighbourhood in Canada. Of course the jurisdiction changed—law enforcement here was in the hands of the OPP—but you couldn’t see that. The only visible difference from any other part of Algonquin Bay was, well, the place was full of Indians, a people who for the most part moved through Canadian society—or rather, alongside it—as silent and invisible as ghosts.

A shadow nation, Cardinal thought. We don’t even know they’re there. He had stopped a hundred yards past the turnoff, and now, since the day was sunny and a seasonable minus ten, he was walking with Jerry Commanda along the side of the road toward a perfectly white bungalow.

When not encased in a down parka, Jerry was extremely thin, almost frail-looking—a deceptive morphology, because he also happened to be a four-time provincial kick-boxing champion. You never saw what Jerry did exactly, but the most recalcitrant villain, in the course of a disagreement with him, would suddenly turn up horizontal and in a highly vocal mood of compliance.

Cardinal had never been partnered with him, but McLeod had, and McLeod claimed that, had they lived two hundred years earlier, he would have probably turned on his ancestors and happily fought the white man at Jerry’s side. The detectives had held a big party for Jerry when he left, a party he did not attend, being no lover of sentiment or fuss. When he moved to OPP, he could have taken an assignment at any of the townships the provincial force covered, but he had asked to work exclusively on reserves. He got the same pay as the municipal police, except—a point on which he was infuriatingly verbose—he was exempt from income tax.

Last night, Jerry had irritated him by pretending he hadn’t been aware of Cardinal’s exile from homicide. Jerry’s sense of humour tended to be opaque. And he had a disarming habit, perhaps ingrained in him from countless hours of tripping up suspects under interrogation, of changing topics suddenly. He did so now, by asking about Catherine.

Catherine was fine, Cardinal told him, in a tone that suggested they move on to something else.

“What about Delorme?” Jerry asked. “How’re you getting along with Delorme? She can be kind of prickly.”

Cardinal told him Delorme was fine too.

“She has a nice shape, I always thought.”

Cardinal, though it made him uncomfortable, thought so too. It was no problem having an attractive woman working in Special—with a separate office, separate cases. It was another to have her for a partner.

“Lise is a good woman,” Jerry said. “Good investigator, too. Took guts to nail the mayor the way she did. I would have chickened out. I knew she’d get tired of that white-collar stuff, though.” He waved to an old man walking a dog across the street. “Of course, she could be investigating you.”

“Thanks, Jerry. That’s just what I wanted to hear.”

“Got our new street lights working,” Jerry said, pointing. “Now we can see how homey it’s getting around here.”

“New paint jobs, too, I notice.”

Jerry nodded. “My summer project. Any kid I caught drinking had to paint an entire house. Made them all white because it’s more painful. You ever try to paint a house white in the summer?”

“No.”

“Hurts your eyes like a bastard. The kids hate me now, but I don’t care.”

They didn’t hate him, of course. Three dark-eyed boys carrying skates and hockey sticks had been following them since Jerry came out of his house. One of them threw a snowball that hit Cardinal in the arm. He packed some snow together in gloveless hands and hurled one back, way off the mark. Must have been ten years since he’d thrown anything other than a tantrum. A skirmish ensued, Jerry taking a couple of missiles indifferently in his skinny chest.

“Ten to one the little guy is your relative,” Cardinal said. “Little smartass there.”

“He’s my nephew. Handsome like his uncle, too.” Jerry Commanda, all hundred and forty pounds of him, was indeed handsome.

The boys were chattering in Ojibwa, of which Cardinal, no linguist, understood not a word. “What are they saying?”

“They’re saying he walks like a cop but he throws like a girl, maybe he’s a faggot.”

“How sweet.”

“My nephew says, ‘He’s probably going to arrest Jerry for stealing that fucking paint.’” Jerry continued translating in his monotone. “‘That’s the cop that was here last fall—the asshole that couldn’t find Katie Pine.’”

“Jerry, you missed your calling. You should have been a diplomat.” Later, it occurred to him that Jerry might not have been translating at all; it would have been like him.

They walked around a shiny new pickup, approaching the Pine house now.

“I know Dorothy Pine pretty well. You want me to come with you?”

Cardinal shook his head. “Maybe you could stop in later, though.”

“Okay, I’ll do that. What kind of person kills a little girl, John?”

“They’re rare, thank God. That’s why we’ll catch him. He’ll be different from other people.” Cardinal wished he were as certain of this as he sounded.

Asking Dorothy Pine last September for the name of her daughter’s dentist—so he could get her chart—was the hardest thing Cardinal had ever had to do. Dorothy Pine’s face, the heavy features scarred by a ferocious, burnt-out case of acne, had expressed no trace of grief. He was white, he was the law, why should she?

Until then, her only experience of the police had been their sporadic arrests of her husband, a gentle soul who used to beat her without mercy when drunk. He had gone to Toronto to find work shortly after Katie’s tenth birthday and had found instead the business end of a switchblade in a Spadina Road flophouse.

Cardinal’s finger shook a little as he rang the doorbell.

Dorothy Pine, a tiny woman who barely cleared his waist, opened the door and looked up at him and knew instantly why he had come. She had no other children; there could be only one reason.

“Okay,” she said, when he told her Katie’s body had been found. Just the one word, “Okay,” and she started to shut the door. Case closed. Her only child was dead. Cops—let alone white cops—could be of no assistance here.

“Mrs. Pine, I wonder if you’d let me in for a few minutes. I’ve been off the case for a couple of months and I need to refresh my memory.”

“What for? You found her now.”

“Well, yes, but now we want to catch whoever killed her.”

He had the feeling that, had he not mentioned it, the thought of tracking down the man who had killed her daughter would never have entered Dorothy Pine’s head. All that mattered was the fact of her death. She gave a slight shrug, humouring him, and he stepped past her into the house.

The smell of bacon clung to the hallway. Although it was nearly noon, the living-room curtains were still drawn. Electric heaters had dried the air and killed the plants that hung withered on a shelf. The place was dark as a mausoleum. Death had entered this house four months ago; it had never left.

Dorothy Pine sat down on a circular footstool in front of the television, where Wile E. Coyote was noisily chasing the Road Runner. Her arms hung down between her knees, and tears plopped in miniature splashes onto the linoleum floor.

All those weeks Cardinal had tried to find the little girl—through the hundreds of interviews of classmates, friends and teachers, through the thousands of phone calls, the thousands of flyers—he had hoped that Dorothy Pine would come to trust him. She never did. For the first two weeks she telephoned daily, not only identifying herself every time but explaining why she was calling. “I was just wondering if you found my daughter, Katharine Pine,” as if Cardinal might have forgotten to look. Then she’d stopped calling altogether.

Cardinal took Katie’s high-school photograph out of his pocket, the photograph they’d used to print all those flyers that had asked of bus stations and emergency wards, of shopping malls and gas stations, Have You Seen This Girl? Now the killer had answered, oh yes, he had seen this girl all right, and Cardinal slipped the photograph on top of the television.

“Do you mind if I look at her room again?”

A shake of the dark head, a shudder in the shoulders. Another tiny splash on the linoleum floor. Husband murdered, and now her daughter too. The Inuit, it is said, have forty different words for snow. Never mind about snow, Cardinal mused, what people really need is forty words for sorrow. Grief. Heartbreak. Desolation. There were not enough, not for this childless mother in her empty house.

Cardinal went down a short hallway to a bedroom. The door was open, and a yellow bear with one glass eye frowned at him from the windowsill. Under the bear’s threadbare paws lay a woven rug with a horse pattern. Dorothy Pine sold these rugs at the Hudson Bay store on Lakeshore. The store charged a hundred and twenty bucks, but he doubted if Dorothy Pine saw much of it. Outside, a chainsaw was ripping into wood, and somewhere a crow was cawing.

There was a toy bench under the windowsill. Cardinal opened it with his foot and saw that it still contained Katie’s books. Black Beauty, Nancy Drew, stories his own daughter had enjoyed as a girl. Why do we think they’re so different from us? He opened the chest of drawers—the socks and underwear neatly folded.

There was a little box of costume jewellery that played a tune when opened. It contained an assortment of rings and earrings and a couple of bracelets—one leather, one beaded. Katie had been wearing a charm bracelet the day she disappeared, Cardinal remembered. Stuck in the dresser mirror, a series of four photographs taken by a machine of Katie and her best friend making hideous faces.

Cardinal regretted leaving Delorme at the squad room to chase after Forensic. She might have seen something in Katie’s room that he was missing, something only a female would notice.

Gathering dust at the bottom of the closet were several pairs of shoes, including a patent leather pair with straps—Mary Janes? Cardinal had bought a pair for Kelly when she was seven or eight. Katie Pine’s had been bought at the Salvation Army, apparently; the price was still chalked on the sole. There were no running shoes; Katie had taken her Nikes to school the day she disappeared, carrying them in her knapsack.

Pinned to the back of the closet door was a picture of the high school band. Cardinal didn’t recall Katie being in the band. She was a math whiz. She had represented Algonquin Bay in a provincial math contest and had come in second. The plaque was on the wall to prove it.

He called out to Dorothy Pine. A moment later she came in, red-eyed, clutching a shredded Kleenex.

“Mrs. Pine, that’s not Katie in the front row of that picture, is it? The girl with the dark hair?”

“That’s Sue Couchie. Katie used to fool around on my accordion sometimes, but she wasn’t in no band. Sue and her was best friends.”

“I remember now. I interviewed her at the school. Said practically all they did was watch MuchMusic. Videotaped their favourite songs.”

“Sue can sing pretty good. Katie kind of wanted to be like her.”

“Did Katie ever take music lessons?”

“No. She sure wanted to be in that band, though.”

They were looking at a picture of her hopes. A picture of a future that would now remain forever imaginary.