A Dream of Death (17 page)

The drive home took far longer than it should have as I
pulled over on the highway twice. There were no windshield wipers to clear my
eyes. The weather always intrigued me, how our emotions are so closely tied to
it: a rainy day brings us down, a sunny day boosts our spirits.

Today the weather seemed to be reacting to me.

It had been sunny when I drove down to Chatham and now, as I
drove home with tears in my eyes, the clouds grew dark and the rain began to
fall. When the tears became too thick to see through and I found myself stopped
on the shoulder, the rain came down in a deluge, drops the size of golf balls
pounding on the roof and windshield.

The rain didn’t cease as I pulled into the driveway and
stepped out of the car. I made no attempt to move quickly to evade the water.
Instead I stood in it, looking to the sky for answers as the water poured over
me. My clothing became heavy and dragged down on my shoulders. I was fixated,
unwilling or unable to move for minutes until my phone ringing broke through. I
answered the phone, hoping it hadn’t been ruined in the rain. It was a call I
had to take.

“Kara?”

“No, it’s Chen.”

A bolt of lightning struck in the distance and the thunder
rolled in.

“Sounds like this weather is province-wide,” he said. “We
found the bodies, Link, buried beside a large rock.”

I could only mumble a sound of understanding. At least it
had been a rock, not the tree in my dreams.

“The rain came in right after, with any luck we’ll excavate
tomorrow. The one boy’s clothing was pretty intact, took a sample from what
looked to be his underwear and it’s on its way to CFS right now.”

The killer’s DNA, Jeffries’s DNA, would be on it.

It was a fate I had narrowly missed.

“Good job, Chen.”

“Keep you posted?”

“Sure, thanks.” I hung up the phone.

I dialed Kara next but there was no answer. Her home number
yielded the same result. I would have left a message if I’d had any idea what
to say.

I unlocked the door and stepped inside trailing water behind
me. My clothes clung to my body. I wrestled them off and left them in a heap at
the door then walked upstairs to the bathroom and toweled myself dry.

The pillow was soft beneath my head as I fell asleep.

* * *

The phone rang beside my head and woke me to face the red
glare of my alarm clock: 9:07 p.m. I had slept through the rest of the
afternoon and nearly into the night. The phone rang again, reminding me of its
presence.

“Hello?”

“Link, it’s Kara.”

A million questions came to mind but only one was important.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m great, better than great.”

She sounded incredible, a new woman.

“I spent some time thinking, Link, a lot of time.” I waited,
holding my breath. I heard no breathing on the other end either. “I don’t want
to be that woman, the one that breaks up the marriage and ruins everyone’s
life.”

“You wouldn’t be doing it alone.” ‘It takes two to tango’
sounded too clichéd.

“Doesn’t matter. You’re right, Link, you need to stay with
Kat. Make it work. If you can’t, I’ll still be here… for a while anyway.”

“Thanks, Kara.”

My heart was breaking. I felt like such an ass, blamed
myself for the entire thing. If only things hadn’t happened the way they did—if
only I hadn’t been so weak.

“I saw my father again today.”

I had to speak, eager to share my news and apprehensive of what
it might mean.

She said nothing, waited for me to continue.

“He recognized me, Kara. He spoke to me and apologized for
what had happened. He slipped away again before he could tell me what
happened.”

“Don’t stop going. Maybe you can get him to break through
again.”

“I hope so. He remembered it. Christ, he remembered. I need
to know the truth.”

Neither of us knew what to say, and we each hung up in near
silence. I took hold of my crutches and brought myself out of the bed and
downstairs. I was still nude and saw no reason to dress, the hot tub and stress
relief were my only destinations for the night. Pouring a dram of scotch into a
glass, I made my way outside with a single crutch and a desire not to spill my
drink.

The water wrapped around me as I sunk into it, its warmth
soothing my body and mind. With glass in hand I raised my arm to the sky, a
toast to myself, to my father and to the universe or whatever power had given
us that one moment together. Maybe that power could grant us one more.

I sipped the drink, not wanting a repeat of the last time my
emotions left me thirsty. The stars in the night sky disappeared before my eyes
behind thin wisps of clouds only to reappear later. If I focused on the clouds,
barely moving in the windless night, the stars themselves seemed to move as the
clouds stood still.

Everything comes down to perspective.

The phone woke me the next morning just after seven. I
didn’t want to answer it, I just wanted to sleep. I rolled over and checked the
caller ID. My father’s retirement home.

“Hello?”

“Lincoln? It’s Anita.” She was the woman I had first seen
when I returned to visit my father, the one that drew the attention of my
father’s roving eye. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your father passed away
last night.”

A lump formed in my throat and I couldn’t speak. She waited.
The professional in me, who had made calls and visits like this, recognized her
silence as a sign of experience. It took a minute before I was able to speak.

“Was it the fever?”

“The doctor thinks so, he was getting very weak.”

I had investigated dozens of deaths from a variety of
causes: homicide, suicide, natural causes. The role of the police was simple:
determine if there was anything suspicious, assist the family, await the
coroner’s attendance and, if the coroner deemed it natural, help the family get
in contact with a funeral home. Once the body was removed, my job was done.

Now, faced with the terrible news I was used to bringing to
others, I was lost. Their role had become mine and I didn’t know what to do.

“What’s next?”

“There’s a very good funeral home in town. We can call them
if you like. Your father didn’t have anything arranged.”

“Okay,” I said. “Call them, please. Should I come down?”

“It’s not necessary. The funeral director will likely have
your father removed before you would arrive. I’ll have them call you and you
can arrange to see him there, if you’d like.”

“I’d like that,” I said. “Thank you.”

I hung up the phone and cried myself back to sleep.

* * *

My father was buried three days later. I had called Kat and
the kids to tell them, but there was no reason for them to come home. Link had
only met my father a few times and Kasia never. Once the Alzheimer’s took hold,
Kat and I felt it would be too difficult for them to understand.

Kat wanted to come, to stand by me, but I told her to stay.
The kids were enjoying themselves and I didn’t want to spoil that. And I wasn’t
ready for her to come back yet, there was still more I had to do to prepare
myself.

My knees weren’t used to begging. Practice would make
perfect.

The church was full of people—friends and family I hadn’t
seen in years and a number of coworkers who had come to give their condolences.
I made the rounds, accepting their sympathy and thanking them for coming. It
was still hard to accept. I had just come back into his life and now he was
gone. The things we take for granted.

The time came for me to speak. I made my way to the front of
the church, laid my crutches beside the altar and rested on it just enough to
support my weight.

“I lost my father a long time ago,” I said. “Many of you
knew of his battle with Alzheimer’s disease that left him a shadow of himself.
I gave up on him years ago, finding too much pain in never being recognized
when I went to visit. I was selfish, and it was out of selfishness that I
recently found myself back at the nursing home trying to reconnect with him.

“I spent a lot of time with him in his last few weeks and I
was able to see in him the man I had once known, the man I had always loved and
looked up to. He did so much for me, took huge risks in order to protect me.
Right or wrong, his reasons were just.”

I looked out over the crowd and saw the familiar faces I had
needed to see. Kara sat with her eyes fixed to me as if channeling the strength
I would need to finish the eulogy, and Chen sat, hat in hand, in his dress
uniform. I looked back down at the altar.

“The last time I saw him, he was lying in his bed sick with
a fever. Maybe I dreamed it, maybe somehow the fever broke through the
barriers, but he knew me, he spoke to me as his son for the first time in
years. Even though I have barely set foot in a church in all my years and
question the nature of miracles, I know that somehow, wherever it came from, I
was given one. I should have known then that it was the last time I would see
him. It was as if he had one last thing he needed to do, one thing he needed to
say before he could finish his journey.

“Thank you all for coming; you have honoured his life with
your presence and kind words.”

I made my way back to the first pew, taking a seat beside
Kara. Her hand on my leg told me I had done well and I hoped, if my father was
listening, I had done him and his legacy proud.

The service finished and everyone began to file out of the
church. Only very close family and friends would be attending the internment.
Kara and I were last to leave and we took her car, Kara driving behind the
hearse to the burial plot. The preacher spoke, read verses from the Bible and
shook some dirt over the casket once it had been lowered into the ground.

I stood transfixed on the grave, an open hole with my father
lying inside it. As time went on Kara and I were left alone with my father’s
body, the gravestone bearing a fresh inscription of his life and death.

Beloved son, father and husband. October 26, 1936—July 2,
2011.

Piles of dirt surrounded the grave and two shovels lay off
to the side. I walked over to one of the shovels and traded it for a crutch. I
was able to balance well enough on my cast now.

I dug into the dirt and spread the first pile on to the
casket, a cacophony of sounds as dirt and rocks hit the wooden exterior. I kept
shoveling until the casket disappeared beneath the dirt. Kara joined me, the
other shovel in her hands, helping me fill the grave and say goodbye to my
father in my own way.

Death wasn’t clean. He had dirtied his hands for me once,
and now I would do it for him.

The sun was setting as the last pile of dirt disappeared. A
mound of fresh soil and a stone were all that remained, an eternal marker to my
father’s life. I knelt down in the grass and pressed my hand into the mound of
dirt.

“Goodbye,” I said, and removed my hand, leaving the print
behind. I stood up and looked at the fading sun, bright orange as it fell
beneath the horizon. Kara put her arm around my waist and I reciprocated. She
had stood fast as my pillar today.

We brushed the dirt off of ourselves and stepped into the
car. The next step, and it was one I was dreading, was returning to the nursing
home to collect my father’s belongings. I had buried my father beside my
mother, in a cemetery in Chatham not far from the house I grew up in. It was
only a short drive to the nursing home and the few minutes passed almost
instantly.

I wanted to do it myself—go in, get what I needed and get
out—but I couldn’t. Kara had to help, I couldn’t carry a thing and still use my
crutches. Anita had called yesterday and told me everything was packed up and
that there wasn’t much. She was right.

When we walked into his room, I saw what remained of him—two
boxes and a duffle bag. There was a faint smell in the air, aftershave or
something, but it was enough to bring the memories flooding back. I began to
cry, short-lived tears interrupted by a knock on the open door.

“Mr. Munroe?”

“Oh.” I rubbed the tears away. “Hi, Anita.”

“When we were packing everything, I found a letter in his
drawer. I’m assuming it’s for you. It’s inside the smaller box, right on top.”

“Thanks, I’ll take a look at it.”

“I just wanted to let you know. Sometimes people don’t look
in the boxes for a while. It’s too painful, maybe.”

I could see that she was getting upset. As painful as it was
for family to go through the boxes, it was probably just as painful for her to
pack them. In the last few years she’d seen my father a thousand times more
than I had.

I walked up to Anita and took her hand in mine. “Thank you,
for everything.” For taking care of him when I couldn’t, for seeing him every
day when it had been too painful for me, for being strong when I was weak.

Anita smiled and nodded then turned and walked down the hall
back to her desk in the lobby. She had barely taken her first step before I had
the box open and the letter in my hand.

I stared at the yellowed envelope, the faded ink, the
unmistakable handwriting—“Lincoln” on the front in my father’s sloppy yet
distinguished cursive. I held the letter up to the light but nothing showed
through. I flipped the envelope over and smiled at the red wax seal, an ‘L’
pressed into the wax. How old-fashioned.

The wax crumbled as I opened the envelope and removed the
hand-written letter.

“Lincoln,” I read aloud. “I’m sorry I never told you the
truth. I’m a coward and if you’re reading this I’ve gone to the grave a coward.
Our camping trip, we were in Algonquin Park, summer of eighty-four. You walked
away from the tent one night, I never understood why, but I woke to you
screaming. The moon was full, enough light to see by. I ran after you, trying
to find you in the night.”

I paused and Kara stayed silent, waiting for me to regain my
composure and continue.

“I searched and searched and couldn’t find you. Then I heard
you scream again and a man yelling. He called you a filthy nigger, said that
you ruined everything, that he wanted a white boy. There was so much anger in
his voice, and it made me so angry to hear him call you that after everything
our family has gone through. When I got to him, you were lying on the ground,
unconscious and beaten. He was cutting your pants off, Lincoln, with a large
knife. I had no choice. I jumped on him and hit him as hard as I could.

“We fell to the ground fighting. I was losing, he was
stronger than me. He’d dropped the knife when I hit him.”

The letter stopped here, briefly at least. It was a slight
break, imperceptible to some perhaps. Like the way the ink that followed was
just barely darker, the writing more deliberate.

“I managed to get him off of me, and I rolled for the knife.
He had gotten up and tried to jump on top of me but I rolled out of the way. I
stabbed him in the back, Lincoln.”

I couldn’t breathe. Reality had knocked the wind out of me.

“I buried him while you lay there, unconscious. I found a
shovel in his tent, I could only assume what he was going to do with it. I
finished burying him as the sun was coming up, then threw the knife in the
river. I packed up his camp and woke you up. You never asked about the extra
backpack. I threw it in the first dumpster I found along the way to the
hospital. I told them you fell down a ravine. The scar on my chest, Lincoln,
the one I never told you about, was from the fight. I wore it proudly,
Lincoln.”

I remembered the scar, a raised line on the right side of
his chest. I’d asked about it but never got an answer.

“I’m sorry, Lincoln. I always told myself I was protecting
you but now I wonder if I was only protecting myself by keeping it a secret. I
didn’t want you to know what had happened, you never asked and you never seemed
to remember, but I never wanted to face what I had done, hiding it like that.
I’ve done many things in my life I regret but nothing more than keeping this
from you. I hope you can forgive me. I love you, Dad.”

I used my sleeve to dry my eyes and wipe my nose. We didn’t
speak for minutes, the silence of her understanding comforting me.

“Looks like I got my man,” I said at last.

“What are you going to do?”

“Head to Orillia tomorrow and tell the Commissioner.”

“You think it’s a good idea to go right to the top?”

“I have to. Thanks for standing by me.”

I didn’t give her a chance to protest or say goodbye. There
was too much going through my mind for me to deal with Kara’s concerns as well.
I knew what I had to do. I would relax tonight, raise a glass to my father, who
did what he thought best, and tomorrow, tomorrow I would let the truth be known
after so many years.

But first, I had another confession to make. I reached into
my pocket and pulled out my father’s watch. It had just felt right to have it
during the funeral, and now I passed it to Kara.

“I found this at the crime scene in Algonquin. It’s my
father’s.”

“You took it?” She was incredulous. I was responsible for
the deaths of two men but taking evidence from a murder scene was apparently my
greatest crime.

“I had to, or at least I thought I did. I knew it meant
something.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Take it to Chen. They’re excavating the bodies of the two
boys tomorrow. I-”

“Are you going to tell him everything?”

“I have to. Chen and I have known each other a long time.
I’ll give him the watch and hope he logs it into evidence like he found it that
day.”

“And your prints?”

“It’s too dirty to lift anything from.”

“You’re still asking him to lie, to risk his job.”

I nodded, words were not needed.

“What about a trial?”

“There won’t be one, so no judge or jury to convince of the
evidence. I was only eight, they can’t charge me. And my father’s dead now.”

“And what about then, it was a long time ago. Could they
charge you?”

Kara was concerned. In the event of a cold case, people are
tried under the law as it stood on the date of the offence.

“The Young Offender’s Act came in a couple of months before,
changed the age from seven to twelve for being able to charge a child.”

Kara forced a slight smile. “You’ve thought about this.”

“I had to. I’m going to leave first thing in the morning.”

“Let me come, Link.” She took my hand as I stood above her.
“I’ll support you. As a friend or a partner. Whatever you need.”

“Thanks.”

I held my hand out—I needed the watch back. It would be hard
to give it to Chen. It was a piece of my father I didn’t want to let go of.