By the Time You Read This (31 page)

50

F
RANK
R
OWLEY LIFTED HIS
guitar case into the trunk of the car and laid it flat. Then he loaded the miniature pink suitcase decorated with Disney creatures for Tara. She was standing in the driveway now in her pink ski jacket, the wind whipping her blond hair across her face. Finally, he wedged his own suitcase in beside the guitar. He had packed it carefully, sliding his laptop between a couple of pairs of jeans, and hiding the new webcam in a pair of balled-up socks. Soon he and Tara would be on the road, alone together, and Rowley’s heart was pounding at the prospect.

“Pretty big suitcase for two days,” Wendy said. She hadn’t bothered to put on a coat. She stood behind Tara, hugging her daughter’s oversized teddy bear to keep warm.

“You know me. I always overpack.”

“It’s so windy,” she said. “Maybe you shouldn’t set out tonight.”

“Nonsense,” Rowley said. “Best time to go. No traffic, and we’ll get there in plenty of time to have a good long sleep. Then first thing in the morning we’re gonna be banging on WonderWorld’s gate to let us in. Aren’t we, Tara?”

“Yes! Yes!” Tara shouted. “Wild Mouse!”

“It’s gonna work out great,” Frank said to Wendy. “We get all day Friday at WonderWorld, and Saturday morning, and then Saturday afternoon I play my wedding. She’ll be fine. They only booked us for two hours, and Terry’ll look after her.”

Terry was the bass player’s wife who insisted on coming to all the gigs, her husband being a solid musician but a wayward mate.

“The wind’s blowing your wig all crooked,” Wendy said.

“I know, I know.” Rowley reached up and adjusted the hairpiece.

“It looks cool!” Tara said.

“I don’t know why you’re wearing it. You’re not playing till Saturday.”

“Because Tara likes it, and I promised I would. Didn’t I, Tara?”

“Yes, you did.”

“Okay, hotshot. Hop in.”

“I want to put Teddy in first.”

Wendy opened the back door and the bear was solemnly strapped in. Then she buckled her daughter into the front passenger seat.

“You be good, now, you hear.”

“I will.”

Wendy gave her a hug and a kiss on the head. “I’m gonna miss you, sweetums.”

“Mommy, it’s only for two days!”

Frank smiled at Wendy with a kids-what-can-you-do sort of smile.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll look after her.”

A car swung into the driveway followed by a black and white patrol car. Rowley shielded his eyes with his forearm against the headlights. The silence of their approach, the decisiveness of their stopping—he knew the police were not here by mistake. He also knew there was only one thing it could be about, and felt the first prickle of fear on his skin, and sweat breaking out between his shoulder blades.

“Can we help you?” he said, before he recognized the woman coming toward him. “Oh, hey, I remember you. You’re the detective from the marina.”

“That’s right,” Detective Delorme said. But she turned immediately to Wendy and introduced herself, holding up her ID. “Ma’am, is that your daughter in the car?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Would you take her inside, please?”

“Why? What’s going on here?”

“Take her inside please. I’m here to arrest Mr. Rowley, and I don’t want to do it in front of your daughter.”

“Arrest him! You can’t arrest him. He hasn’t done anything.”

“Go ahead and take her inside,” Rowley said. “I’ll sort it all out at the station.”

“But what’s going on?”

“Honey, take her inside.”

Rowley watched Wendy scoop Tara out of the front seat. The howls of protest started before they were halfway to the house.

“Frank Rowley, you’re under arrest for the production and distribution of child pornography. We’ll be seizing any computers, cameras, hard drives, discs or other storage devices in your possession. Further charges of child abuse and sexual assault will be laid at the discretion of the Crown attorney.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rowley said. “I never touched that girl.”

“We’re not talking about this girl,” Delorme said, and snapped the cuffs on him.

51

C
ARDINAL WAITED, LISTENING.
Old houses creak; it might have been nothing. Bell could already have fled, taken a cab to the airport.

A definite footfall.

He crossed the hall in three silent steps and opened the remaining door. A half flight of stairs led to a landing. Once more keeping to the edges, he moved toward the third floor. He could see nothing beyond the landing. When he reached it, he took a deep breath and turned toward the next flight, Beretta up.

“I thought it would be you,” Bell said.

The doctor was seated on the top step, an automatic in his hand—a Luger, if Cardinal was not mistaken—pointed right at Cardinal’s chest.

Had it happened a few weeks previously, Cardinal knew, the sight of Dr. Bell’s Luger pointed at his chest would have made him tremble. But standing on the steps below the doctor, he realized that, at this moment, he didn’t care.

“One thing you should know,” he said. “I have a significant advantage over you right now.”

“Why? Because you don’t care whether you live or die?”

Once again the doctor had read him perfectly.

“I assure you,” the doctor continued, “I am quite at the same point. I too have lost a wife.”

“‘Lost’ isn’t quite the word, is it? I know why you murdered your wife. She took your trophies. You’ve been collecting them for years. Mementoes of your triumphs. Your victories.”

“If you are referring to my discs, a more intelligent man would realize they are a teaching aid.”

“You don’t have any students.”

“Teaching aids for myself. Some of us do try to keep learning, you know, by reviewing sessions with particularly difficult clients.”

“Easy to gloat, too. To see how you encouraged your patients to kill themselves, all the while pretending to help them.”

“What I do is clarify. By reflecting a patient’s true feelings back at him or her, I give them the power to act on those feelings. New options can open up. Some may find new ways to ease the pain, if not to find earthly bliss. Others may choose to kill themselves, and that’s entirely their choice and their right.”

“Those discs clearly show you pick and choose which feelings to reflect. All the negative ones. Their blackest thoughts. You encourage them. ‘Write me out a suicide note. Let’s make it real, here. Let’s put it into words. Let’s take a real step toward actually doing it. Think of all the good things that’ll come out of it. An end to pain, for one. Ease the burden on your family, for another.’”

“True, in a lot of cases. Those are legitimate concerns.”

“And you make sure they have a lot of pills handy, in case they’re squeamish about blood, or …”

“Or what? Disfigurement? Yes, when they jump, it does terrible damage to the facial bones, doesn’t it?”

Cardinal’s finger tightened on the Beretta.

“Or you put them on an antidepressant. And then suddenly change it, or take them off it. Excellent way to put people over the edge.”

“Detective, if I made all my patients feel suicidal, I’d have no practice at all. If I really made people feel worse, no one would come back to me.”

“They don’t come back to you. They die.”

“Wonderful. Sherlock Holmes uncovers the truth about depression. Depressed patients kill themselves.”

“Yours do. They have to, don’t they.”

Bell raised the Luger so that it was now aimed at Cardinal’s face.

Cardinal jerked his Beretta up to firing position.

“I could kill you now,” he said, “and it would be justifiable homicide. I wouldn’t even have to lie about it.”

“Go ahead, then,” Bell said. His gun hand was wavering.

Cardinal noticed as from a great distance the fury burning through him, as if he were observing a wildfire from a helicopter.

“I know you want to kill me,” Bell said.

“And you want me to. It’s called suicide by cop. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? I read in your book how both your parents killed themselves—that might be a good reason for studying the treatment of depression. On the other hand, it might be a good reason for hating people who get depressed. And it might be a good reason for wanting to kill yourself.”

“You read that in my book too. The so-called suicide gene.”

“You’ve wanted to kill yourself for a long time, but, unlike so many of your patients, you can’t do it. Just like you say in your book: some people need to be around people who are capable of killing themselves. You need them to do it
for
you. You egg them on, manoeuvre them, manipulate them, all the time pretending to help them. But it’s you you’re trying to help. You’re trying to finish the one suicide you’ve always wanted to commit but never had the guts to follow through on. I wonder if you knew that way back when you first became a psychiatrist.”

“What have you got, Detective? A grade ten education? Do you really imagine you can analyze me?”

“I don’t have to. You can do it yourself. Why else would you devote your life to people you clearly hate? It must have been quite a strain keeping up that concerned, caring front all these years.”

“You don’t know anything about the people I treat. They’re scum. Whiners. Utterly useless. Utterly selfish. They’ve never done anything for anyone else in their entire miserable lives. Human garbage.”

“How does it make you feel, Doctor? Isn’t that your favourite question? How does it make you feel when they finally kill themselves? These whiners, this human garbage. It must feel—”

“Wonderful,” Bell said. “There’s no feeling like it. I couldn’t describe it to you. Better than sex. Better than heroin. I love it. So why don’t you kill me?”

“And when they won’t kill themselves,” Cardinal went on, “if they’re too strong, like Catherine …”

“It’s not my fault she didn’t get it. She was desperate to kill herself, she just wouldn’t admit it. How many times does she need to be hospitalized before she catches on?”

“That must be very … upsetting for you. It must be extremely—what’s the right word here—frustrating?”

Bell’s face was a portrait of contempt.

“Infuriating?”

Bell shook his head tightly. “You don’t know anything about me. No one does.”

“They know in Manchester. Or they will know, when they finally open their investigation.”

“You think so.”

“I know it. I also know you killed Catherine. Because, as you say, she just didn’t get it. She didn’t get that her therapist
wanted
her to commit suicide, and when she just would not take her own life, it was intolerable for you, and you had to kill her yourself.”

“Wouldn’t you like to think so? If she committed suicide, what does that make you, right? The big detective. The knight in shining armour. What becomes of him if he can’t save his own wife? If she can’t stand living with him anymore? If she hates him so thoroughly she can throw away the rest of her life rather than spend it with him? That’s unbearable, isn’t it, Detective? No wonder you have to believe I killed her.”

“I didn’t say I believed it,” Cardinal said. “I said I know it.”

He held up the tiny Baggie.

“What’s that supposed to be?”

“It’s a memory chip, Doctor. From Catherine’s camera.”

“Why should I care about that?”

“She took your picture when you came out onto the roof. She always did that—photographed whoever was around when she was taking pictures. She photographed everyone. She was essentially a shy person. Her camera was a kind of defence. You knew she took your picture and that’s why you took the camera with you when you left. You went down to where she fell and you took it away. I imagine you were too excited at the time to realize it had broken open, the chip had flown out. You must’ve been awfully disappointed when you got home and realized the camera was empty. I would have loved to have seen that moment. Better than heroin, for sure. Well, I’ve seen what’s on that chip, and your life is essentially over.”

“She was bipolar, Detective. Had been for decades. How many hospital admissions were there, all told? A dozen? Twenty?”

“I didn’t count them.”

“She would have killed herself eventually.”

“Is that what you tell yourself? Is that how you get to sleep at night?”

“Go ahead, then. Shoot me.”

“You want me to?”

“Go ahead. I’m not afraid.”

“Sorry, Doctor. No one’s going to do it for you ever again. You’re just going to have to shoot yourself.”

Cardinal lowered his gun so it was pointed at the floor.

Bell’s gun hand shook harder.

“I’ll kill you,” he said. “You know I can do it.”

“I’m not the one you want to kill, Doctor. I’m not one of your patients. One of your whiners, as you so compassionately call them. Killing me won’t stop the pain.”

With a jerk of his elbow, a marionette move in its suddenness, Bell aimed the Luger in a diagonal at his own temple.

“All these years,” Cardinal said, “it’s what you’ve really wanted, isn’t it.”

Beads of sweat sprung out on Bell’s brow. He squeezed his eyes shut. A single tear rolled down his cheek and into his beard.

“Go ahead. You don’t really want to spend the rest of your life in prison, do you?”

Hand and gun trembled. Bell’s whole body was shaking. Sweat rolled down the reddening face.

“You can’t do it, can you?”

Bell groaned, and a sob escaped from his woolly beard. The Luger dropped to the floor and tumbled down the steps. Cardinal picked it up.

“I think we’ve done some good work today, Doctor. I’d say we’ve got to the root of your problem. Now you’ll have a couple of decades in Kingston to work on it.”

52

T
HE DAYS GO BY
, and the last of the autumn shades into winter. Mid-November now, and not a single leaf remains to fall. Every stem has closed, every branch is black and bare against the clouds. Fallen leaves have gathered along the sides of roads and in the culverts, they have gathered on porch steps and around garage doors. They have gathered on decks and cars and windowsills. It has rained, and the lawns are no longer covered in fluffy, multicoloured layers. Now the leaves are plastered in flat jagged collages on the sidewalks and on the driveways and even in the wheel wells of Algonquin Bay vehicles.

The temperature has dropped, and John Cardinal is wearing his heavy leather coat, the one with something like fur for a lining. After the beauties of October, November is dour, the pretty girl replaced by the sourpuss. Another week or two and the leather coat will be replaced by the down parka, his full Nanook, as Catherine called it.

Cardinal is coming back from a morning walk along the hiking trail that curls up the hill behind his house, a walk he has taken countless times with his wife. Delorme had called him earlier, beating herself, yet again, for jumping to conclusions about Catherine. Then she told him that Melanie Greene is now out of hospital and living at home with her mother. Her new therapist is optimistic.

Mr. and Mrs. Walcott are coming along the other side of the road, walking their horrible dog. They stop bickering when they see Cardinal, in deference to his loss.

“Supposed to snow,” Mrs. Walcott says.

Cardinal agrees with a wave and heads up the slope to his house. Smells of woodsmoke and bacon mingle with the smell of snow. Snow has been about to fall for at least a week now. It’s late this year.

He enters his house and hangs up his coat. He struggles to undo the wet laces of his boots, gets one off, and then the phone is ringing in the kitchen and he walks clump-footed, with one boot still on, laces flapping, to answer it.

It is the only person he wants to hear from right now. “Kelly, how are you? What are you doing up this early?”

“I got your message last night, but it was too late to call.

Cardinal pries the boot off his foot and takes the phone into the living room. The line is not great, full of mysterious crackles, but he sits in his favourite chair and tells his daughter that Frederick Bell’s bail has been set so high he won’t be getting out of jail pending his trial for murder in the first degree.

A moment later he can hear his daughter crying, her sobs echoing up the increasingly bad line from New York. Kelly has still not made the adjustment demanded by the knowledge that her mother was dead not by her own but by another’s hand. Bitter either way, and Cardinal wishes Kelly were with him so that he could give her a hug and tell her it was all right, that everything would be okay, even though it wasn’t and it wouldn’t.

“Kelly?”

The sobbing has stopped, but so has the crackling of static.

“Kelly?”

The line has gone dead.

Cardinal presses the Flash button and dials her number, getting only a busy signal.

Outside, the snow is falling now, small rainlike flakes that fall fast on a slant. If she were there, Catherine would be gathering up her camera, putting on her boots. The first snow always got her outside taking pictures even though they were too “calendarish,” in her opinion, to be any good. Cardinal hears a scrabbling on the roof. Taking the phone with him, he goes to the back door and opens it, surprising a squirrel in the act of chewing insulation from an air conditioning line.

“Beat it,” Cardinal says, but the squirrel just regards him with a black glistening eye. Flakes of snow are melting on his ears and tail.

Cardinal raises the phone to him and the squirrel scampers away, a black squiggle among the leaves, and then there is silence. Or near silence. A soft wind threads itself through the birches, and snow ticks on fallen leaves.

The phone rings in his hand. Cardinal answers it, and the line to New York is open once more.