Giles Blunt - Forty Words for Sorrow

"We just did your hair three days ago. I can't be dropping everything just to do your hair. It's not like you're going out dancing."

"What? What's that?"

"I said, it's not as if you ever go anywhere!"

"Please, honey. Everyone wants to look nice."

"For God's sake."

"Come on, honey. We'll watch Jeopardy together." She fiddled with the remote until the sound from the TV was earsplitting. A newscaster was going on about Todd Curry, promising an in-depth report at six. Yesterday's Lode had carried a high-school picture of him, looking a hell of a lot more innocent than he really was. Was it a drug deal gone bad or is there a serial killer at large? Pulse News at Six.

Edie fetched the basin and washed Gram's hair. It was so thin it took only a few minutes, but she hated the soaked-dog smell. She put the rollers in, while Gram shouted wrong answers at the television.

Edie emptied the basin of dirty water, and when she was on the landing the doorbell rang, making her jump so hard she dropped the basin. She was sure it would be the police. But when she peered through the curtain, her blood leaped. Whenever Eric appears at my door, the chasm I dwell in seems suddenly a shallow, bearable place and not the black pit I imagine when he's gone. All the darkness seems a figment of my imagination. Then there is air, and hope once again. Suddenly, it becomes a livable place, my bottomless pit. What light breaks over the rim!

"I must say, it's all very fascinating," the librarian said. She was plump and pale, with bright blue eyes that shone behind a pair of glasses that were unflattering in the extreme. "Not to be ghoulish or anything, but there's nothing quite like a good murder to prick the intellect, get the brain humming, don't you find?"

"Did somebody mention a homicide?" Delorme said quietly. "I didn't say I was investigating a homicide."

"Oh, come now. You and that other detective were on Channel Four the night they found the Pine girl. Dreadful business. And when the boy was found in that house. No, no, Detective, you don't forget a thing like that. This isn't Toronto, you know. Have you definitely connected the two? It just gives one the shivers."

"Ma'am, I can't talk about an investigation in progress."

"No, no, of course you can't. You police have to keep certain details to yourself- otherwise any old nut could confess and who would ever know the truth? But what could possibly be the motive in such a case? I mean, the boy was sixteen- approximately sixteen I believe they said in the Lode- but that's still a child, and what kind of monster kills a child? Two children. The Windigo Killer, the National Post calls him. Ugh, it makes your blood run cold. You must have some theory you're working on?"

The librarian, surrounded by stacks of Agatha Christie and Dick Francis, living out her days among towers of Erle Stanley Gardner and P. D. James, seemed to imagine that Delorme had stepped out of a mystery novel for the sole purpose of enlivening her day. A fine sweat beaded on her upper lip.

"Ma'am, I can't discuss that case with you. Are you coming up with anything?"

The librarian's attack on her keyboard was like a murder lifted from one of her authors- a multiple stabbing. "This computer system," she said with a frustrated hiss, "is less than state of the art. Quite wretched, in fact. Oh, damn this thing."

Delorme left the librarian inflicting futile injuries on her keyboard and found the bins of CDs. Around her, readers drifted in and out of the stacks. Delorme had spent a lot of time here as a teenager, even though the library was notoriously short on French books. She had preferred to do her homework here, among the smells of print and paper, the quiet rustle of pages, rather than at home with the hockey game blaring on television and her father yelling at his beloved Canadiens. Of course, Delorme had done a lot of daydreaming here, too. She couldn't wait to go away to college, and then she had surprised herself in her final year at Ottawa U. by realizing she was homesick. It was sometimes weird to be a cop in your hometown- she had arrested more than one former classmate- but the big city was not for her. She had found the people in Ottawa far colder than anything Algonquin Bay could throw at her.

The library's CD collection yielded no Pearl Jam, no Rolling Stones, but yes, she did come up with the Anne Murray. The plastic cover was smudged and smeared with a thousand fingerprints. She slipped it into an envelope and went back to the counter.

"My goodness, you're impounding something? You've found actual evidence?"

"The Anne Murray album. I didn't see any of the others."

"It seems we don't carry the other two. We never had the Pearl Jam, no surprise there, and the Rolling Stones we used to have but it was so popular it got damaged or worn out or something and it was removed from circulation"- she prodded her keyboard mercilessly-"two years ago. Now, tell me, Detective. Can it really be true you police don't know how that little girl died?"

"Ma'am…"

"I know, I know. Just too curious for my own good. But I did dig up those names for you." She adjusted her glasses and peered at a piece of paper on which she had noted the information. "The album you have there was borrowed by Leonard Neff, Edith Soames, and Colin McGrath. As it happens, I remember Mr. McGrath. His behavior was unruly. We had to ask him to exit the premises." She pronounced it premisees.

"Unruly in what way? Had he been drinking?"

"Oh, no doubt Mr. McGrath was intoxicated. But there's no excuse for obscenities of that kind. I nearly summoned some of your colleagues- my hand was positively trembling over that dial."

"And the others- Miss Soames and Mr. Neff. Do you remember anything about them?"

The librarian closed her eyes as if in prayer, then said with conviction, "Not a thing."

Delorme pulled out her notebook. "I'm going to need addresses on all three."

DELORME had ignored Algonquin Bay's retail music outlets. None of the albums was new, all three were extremely popular, and there was no reason to believe they were even purchased in town. Cardinal- except for the possible radio angle- had finally discounted the music altogether. If Delorme had found that all three CDs were held by the library, and all three had been checked out around September 12 to the same person, that might have meant something. But tracking a single piece of music to the library carried no weight at all. After six years in Special Investigations, Lise Delorme knew a dead end when she saw one.

And yet, following up on the library CD made her heart beat a little faster. The library CD was something she could hold in her hand; it gave the illusion of direction because it led somewhere right now, not a week from now- and besides, the library CD was her only lead.

Mr. Leonard Neff's address was a modern brick bungalow in Cedarvale, an affluent subdivision of mewses, courts, and places laid out with sterile precision at the top of Rayne Street. There was a hockey net set up in the driveway, where a couple of boys in Montreal Canadiens jerseys were firing slapshots at each other. The Taurus parked out front had ski equipment strapped to the roof rack. Apparently a sporting family, the Neffs. The windows of the house were modern and triple-glazed, not likely to rattle with every passing truck. In any case, Cedar Crescent, Cedar Mews, and Cedar Place (the town council apparently did not waste its creative energy on the naming of streets) attracted little traffic of any sort, certainly not trucks.

Delorme's second stop was the home of the unruly Mr. McGrath. This turned out to be a small apartment house at the turnoff to Airport Road. Delorme got out of the car and listened a moment. The drone of an Air Ontario plane coming in for a landing. Highway 17 was less than fifty yards away; the traffic was a constant hiss. A woman heavily burdened with groceries tottered up the front steps and struggled with her keys. Delorme rushed to hold the front door open for her and entered the building enveloped in the woman's gratitude. Mr. McGrath's apartment was on the first floor at the far end of the building. Delorme stood in the hallway, listening. No traffic, just sounds from other apartments: a vacuum cleaner, the cry of a parakeet, the metallic chatter of a TV game show.