Giles Blunt - Forty Words for Sorrow

"I'd rather stick with burglaries, unless it's my show as of this moment."

"Have the coroner toss a coin," Dyson snapped, and hung up.

Cardinal yelled to Delorme, who had stepped in out of the cold and was standing diffidently just inside the kitchen door. "Which one of the Manitous are we on?"

"Windigo. The one with the mineshaft."

"So we drive, right? Will the ice take a truck?"

"You kidding? This time of year, that ice would take a freight train." Delorme jerked a mittened thumb in the direction of Lake Nipissing. "Make sure you dress warm," she said. "That lake wind, it's cold as hell."

FROM the government dock to the Manitou Islands seven miles west, a plowed strip lay like a pale blue ribbon across the lake; shoreline motels had scraped it clear as an inducement to ice fishers, a prime source of revenue in winter months. It was quite safe to drive cars and even trucks in February, but it was not wise to travel more than ten or fifteen miles an hour. The four vehicles whose headlights lit the flurries of snow in bright cubist veils were moving in slow motion.

Cardinal and Delorme drove in silence in the lead car. Delorme now and again reached across to scrape at the windshield on Cardinal's side. The frost peeled off in strips that fell in curls and melted on the dash and on their laps.

"It's like we're landing on the moon." Her voice was barely audible above the grinding of gears and the hiss of the heater. All around them the snow fell away in shades that ranged from bone white to charcoal gray and even- in the dips and scallops of the snowbanks- deep mauve.

Cardinal glanced in the rearview at the procession behind them: the coroner's car, and behind that the headlights of the ident van, and then the truck.

A few more minutes and Windigo Island rose up jagged and fierce in the headlights. It was tiny, not more than three hundred square meters, and the thin margin of beach, Cardinal remembered from his summer sailing, was rocky. The wooden structure of the mine's shafthead loomed out of the pines like a conning tower. The moon cast razor sharp shadows that leapt and shuddered as they approached.

One by one, the vehicles arrived and parked in a line, their collective lights forming a wide white rampart. Beyond that, blackness.

Cardinal and the others gathered on the ice like a lunar landing party, clumsy in their calf-high boots, their plump down coats. They shifted from foot to foot, tense with cold. They were eight, including Cardinal and Delorme: Dr. Barnhouse, the coroner; Arsenault and Collingwood, the scene men; Larry Burke and Ken Szelagy, patrol constables in blue parkas; and last to arrive in yet another unmarked, Jerry Commanda from OPP. The OPP was responsible for highway patrol and provided all police services for any townships that lacked their own police force. The lakes and Indian reservations were also their responsibility, but with Jerry you didn't worry about jurisdictional disputes.

All eight now formed into a gap-toothed circle, casting long shadows in the headlights.

Barnhouse spoke first. "Shouldn't you be wearing a bell around your neck?" This by way of greeting Cardinal. "I heard you were a leper."

"In remission," Cardinal said.

Barnhouse was a pugnacious little bulldog of a man, built like a wrestler with a broad back and a low center of gravity and perhaps in compensation cherished a lofty self-regard.

Cardinal jerked his head toward the tall gaunt man on the outside of the circle. "You know Jerry Commanda?"

"Know him? I'm sick of him," Barnhouse bellowed. "Used to be with the city, Mr. Commanda, until you decided to go native again."

"I'm OPP now," Jerry said quietly. "Dead body in the middle of the lake, I think you'll want to arrange for an autopsy, won't you, Doc?"

"I don't need you to tell me my job. Where's the fine flatfoot who discovered the thing?"

Ken Szelagy stepped forward. "We didn't discover it. Couple of kids found it round four o'clock. Me and Larry Burke here got the call. Soon as we saw, we made a perimeter and called it in. McLeod was in court so we called D. S. Dyson and I guess he called in Detective Cardinal here."

"The talented Mister Cardinal," Barnhouse murmured ambiguously, then added: "Let's proceed with flashlights for the moment. Don't want to disturb things setting up lights and so on."

He started toward the rocks. Cardinal was going to speak, but Jerry Commanda voiced the thought for him. "Let's keep it single file, guys."

"I'm not a guy," Delorme noted tartly from the depths of her hood.

"Yeah, well," Jerry said. "Kinda hard to tell the difference right now."

Barnhouse gestured for Burke and Szelagy to lead the way, and for the next few minutes their boots squeaked on the hardpack. Blades of cold raked Cardinal's face. Beyond the rocks, a distant string of lights glittered along the edge of the lake, the Chippewa Reserve, Jerry Commanda's territory.

Szelagy and Burke waited for the others at the chain-link fence surrounding the shafthead.

Delorme nudged Cardinal with a padded elbow. She was pointing to a small object about four feet from the gate.

Cardinal said, "You guys touch that lock?"

Szelagy said, "It was like that. Figured we better leave it."

Burke said, "Kids claim the lock was already broken."

Delorme pulled a Baggie out of her pocket, but Arsenault, a scene man and like all scene men ever-prepared, produced a small paper bag from somewhere and held it out to her. "Use paper. Anything wet'll deteriorate in plastic."

Cardinal was glad it had happened early and that someone else had stopped her. Delorme was a good investigator; she'd had to be in Special. She'd put a former mayor and several council members in prison with painstaking work she'd done entirely on her own, but it didn't involve any scene work. She would watch from now on, and Cardinal wanted it that way.

One after another, they ducked under the scene tape and followed Burke and Szelagy around to the side of the shafthead. Szelagy pointed to the loosened boards. "Careful going in, there's a two-foot drop and then it's sheer ice all the way."

Inside the shafthead, the flashlight beams formed a shifting pool of light at their feet. Gaps in the boards made the wind moan like a stage effect.

"Jesus," Delorme said quietly. She and the others had all seen traffic fatalities, the occasional suicide, and numerous drownings- none of which had prepared them for this. They were shivering, but an intense stillness settled over the group as if they were praying; no doubt some of them were. Cardinal's own mind seemed to flee the sight before him- into the past with the image of Katie Pine, smiling in her school photograph, and into the future with what he would have to tell her mother.

Dr. Barnhouse began in a formal voice: "We are looking at the frozen remains of an adolescent- Damn." He rapped sharply at the microcassette in his gloved paw. "Always acts up in the cold." He cleared his throat and began again in a less declamatory manner. "We're looking at the remains of an adolescent human- decay and animal activity preclude positive determination of sex at this time. Torso is unclothed, lower part of the body is clothed in denim jeans, right arm is missing, as is the left foot. Facial features are obliterated by animal activity, mandible is missing. Christ," he said. "Just a child."

Cardinal thought he heard a tremor in Barnhouse's voice; he would not have trusted his own. It wasn't just the deterioration- all of them had seen worse: victims of hunting accidents, drowning victims- it was that the remains were preserved in a perfect rectangle of ice perhaps eight inches thick. Eyeless sockets stared up through the ice into the pitch dark over their heads. One of the eyes had been pulled away and lay frozen above the shoulder; the other was missing entirely.