Forty Words for Sorrow (4 page)

6

T
O 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.

7

W
HEN HE LEFT THE RESERVE,
Cardinal made a left and headed north toward the Ontario Hospital. Advances in medication coupled with government cutbacks had emptied out whole wings of the psychiatric facility. Its morgue did double duty as the coroner’s workshop. But Cardinal wasn’t there to see Barnhouse.

“She’s doing a lot better today,” the ward nurse told him. “She’s starting to sleep at night, and she’s been taking her meds, so it’s probably just a matter of time till she levels out—that’s my opinion, anyway. Dr. Singleton will be doing rounds in about an hour, if you want to talk to him.”

“No, that’s all right. Where is she?”

“In the sunroom. Just go through the double doors, and it’s—”

“Thanks. I know where it is.”

Cardinal expected to find her still adrift in her oversize terry dressing gown, but instead, Catherine Cardinal was wearing the jeans and red sweater he had packed for her. She was hunched in a chair by the window, chin in hand, staring out at the snowscape, the stand of birches at the edge of the grounds.

“Hi, sweetheart. I was up at the reserve. Thought I’d stop in on the way back.”

She didn’t look at him. When she was ill, eye contact was agony for her. “I don’t suppose you’ve come to get me out of here.”

“Not just yet, hon. We’ll have to talk to the doctor about that.” As he got closer, he could see that the outline of her lipstick was uncertain and her eyeliner was thicker on one eye than the other. Catherine Cardinal was a sweet, pretty woman when she was well: sparrow-coloured hair, big gentle eyes and a completely silent giggle that Cardinal loved to provoke. I don’t make her laugh often enough, he often thought. I should bring more joy into this woman’s life. But by the time she had begun this latest nosedive, he had been working burglaries and was in a bad mood himself most of the time. Some help.

“You’re looking pretty good, Catherine. I don’t think you’ll be in here too long this time.”

Her right hand never stopped moving, her index finger drawing tiny circles over and over again on the arm of the couch. “I know I’m a witch to live with. I would have killed me by now, but—” She broke off, still staring out the window. “But that doesn’t mean my ideas are insane. It’s not as if I’m … Fuck. I’ve lost my train of thought.”

The swear word, like the obsessive circling movement of her hand, was a bad sign; Catherine didn’t swear when she was well.

“So pathetic,” she said bitterly. “Can’t even finish a sentence.” The medication did that to her, broke her thoughts into small pieces. Perhaps that was why it worked, eventually: it short-circuited the chains of association, the obsessive ideas. Nevertheless, Cardinal could feel the hot jet of anger gushing inside his wife, blotting everything out like an artery opened in water. Both of her hands were making the obsessive circles now.

“Kelly’s doing well,” he said brightly. “Sounds practically in love with her painting teacher. She enjoyed her visit.”

Catherine looked at the floor, shaking her head slowly. Not accepting any positive remarks, thank you.

“You’ll feel better soon,” Cardinal said gently. “I just wanted to see you. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I thought we could have a chat. I don’t want to upset you.”

He could see Catherine’s thoughts growing heavier. Her head sank lower. One hand now covered her eyes like a visor.

“Cath, honey, listen. You will feel better. I know it feels like you won’t just now. It feels like nothing will ever be right again, but we’ve got through this before and we’ll get through it again.”

People think of depression as sadness, and in its milder manifestations perhaps it is, but there could be little comparison between a tearful parting, say, or a sense of loss and these massive, devastating attacks Catherine suffered. “It’s as if I am invaded,” she had told him. “It rolls into me like black clouds of gas. All hope is annihilated. All joy is slaughtered.”
All joy is slaughtered
. He would never forget her saying that.

“Take it easy,” he said now. “Catherine? Please, hon. Take it slow, now.” He put a hand on her knee and received not the slightest flicker of response. Her thoughts, he knew, were a turmoil of self-loathing. She had told him as much: “Suddenly,” she said, “I can’t breathe. All the air is sucked out of the room, and I’m being crushed. And the worst thing is knowing what a misery I am to live with. I’m fastened to you like a stone, dragging you down and down and down. You must hate me. I hate me.”

But she said nothing now, just remained motionless, with her neck bent forward at a painful angle.

Three months ago Catherine had been bright and cheerful, her normal self. But gradually, as it often did in winter, her cheerfulness had ballooned into mania. She began to speak of travelling to Ottawa. It became her sole topic of conversation. Suddenly, it was vital she see the prime minister, she must talk sense into Parliament, she must tell the politicians what had to be done to save the country, save Quebec. Nothing could jog her from this obsession. It would start every morning at breakfast; it was the last thing she said at night. Cardinal thought he would go mad himself. Then Catherine’s ideas had taken on an interplanetary cast. She began to talk of NASA, of the early explorers, the colonization of space. She stayed awake for three nights running, writing obsessively in a journal. When the phone bill arrived, it listed three hundred dollars’ worth of calls to Ottawa and Houston.

Finally, on the fourth day, she had spiralled to earth like a plane with a dead engine. She remained in bed for a week with the blinds pulled down. At three o’clock one morning, Cardinal awoke when she called his name. He found her in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub. The cabinet was open, the rows of pills (none of them in themselves particularly lethal) waiting. “I think I’d better go to the hospital,” was all she had said. At the time, Cardinal had thought it a good sign; she had never before asked for help.

Now, Cardinal sat next to his wife in the overheated sunroom, humbled by the magnitude of her desolation. He tried for a while longer to get her to speak, but she stayed silent. He hugged her, and it was like hugging wood. Her hair gave off a slight animal odour.

A nurse came, bearing a single pill and a paper cup of juice. When Catherine would not respond to her coaxing, the nurse left and returned with a syringe. Five minutes later Catherine was asleep in her husband’s arms.

The early days are always bad, Cardinal told himself in the elevator. In a few days the drugs will soothe her nerves enough that the relentless self-loathing will lose its power. When that happens, she will be—what?—sad and ashamed, he supposed. She’ll feel exhausted and drained and sad and ashamed, but at least she’ll be living in this world. Catherine was his California—she was his sunlight and wine and blue ocean—but a strain of madness ran through her like a fault line, and Cardinal lived in fear that one day it would topple their life beyond all hope of recovery.