Giles Blunt - Forty Words for Sorrow

But less than a week after the dog was dead, Eric was tormented again with a ferocious aching in his chest. Jane had gone back to ignoring him, treating him as if he were a clod of dirt under her heel. He swallowed his pain until he could stand it no more, until finally he determined that- for one night, at least- Jane would pay attention. Beyond this, he did not really know what he was going to do. He was going to play it by ear.

He stayed awake one night until his foster father's grizzly-sized snores shook the walls of the house. Then he put on his jeans and a shirt- even his socks- and tiptoed down the hall to Jane's door. The door had no lock, he knew, none of the bedrooms had locks.

Sometimes Jane stayed awake reading or listening to her pink plastic radio, but there was no light under her door now. Eric did not even pause. He turned the knob, stepped right into her room, and closed the door. His eyes were already adapted to the dark, and he could clearly see the outline of Jane's hip beneath the covers. She was curled up facing the wall, her features hidden behind a curtain of blond hair.

The room smelled of running shoes and baby oil. Eric stood perfectly still for a long time, watching the rise and fall of Jane's rib cage, listening to the soft swell of her breath. She's fast asleep, Eric thought. I can do anything I want.

He held his hands out just above the outline of her body as if she were a radiator and he could absorb her heat. Then he touched her hair, hooking a yellow strand over his index finger and breathing in the smell of Halo shampoo.

There was a hitch in Jane's breathing, and Eric froze. You're just having a dream, he almost said out loud, it's just a dream and there's no need to wake up. But she did wake up. Her eyes opened, and before he could stop her, Jane sat up and screamed. Eric covered her mouth, and she bit his hand and cried out, "Mom! Dad! Eric's in my room! Eric's in my room!"

A long night followed, a night fraught with tears and raised voices, and in the end, Eric's claim that he had been sleepwalking was not believed.

And so, to his astonishment, Eric Fraser was banished from his fourth and final foster home, not for the abduction and torture of their pet dog, nor for the abduction and torture of their cat, nor for burning their neighbor's field. He was exiled for the apparent felony of setting foot in their daughter's bedroom.

That was it for foster homes. Instead, Eric was shipped to one group home after another, where his behavior quickly deteriorated. More animals went missing, more fires were set. A smaller boy who made fun of Eric for wetting the bed was tied up and beaten with an electrical cord.

This last offense landed Eric in the Juvenile Court at 311 Jarvis, his third and last appearance. He was found to be a young offender under the meaning of the Act and consigned to Saint Bartholomew Training School in Deep River, where he remained under the care and guidance of the Christian Brothers until he was eighteen years old.

The only good thing that happened to him in Deep River was that a fellow inmate named Tony taught him how to play guitar. When they got out of St. Bart's, they moved down to Toronto and formed a grunge band, but the rest of the members were more talented than Eric, and it was only a matter of weeks before they got rid of him. After a succession of progressively less interesting jobs, and a succession of smaller and smaller rooms, he began to feel that he was drowning in Toronto. Oh, that suffocating sensation, as if his lungs were closing down. He made no friends. He spent his evenings alone, with magazines that arrived in plain packaging, his fantasies turning darker and darker.

Toronto was killing him, he decided. He would move to someplace with lots of fresh air, where you wouldn't feel like you were choking all the time. In his methodical way, he made lists of small cities and their various amenities, finally narrowing his choices down to Peterborough and Algonquin Bay. He decided to visit them both, but the day he arrived in Algonquin Bay he had seen the help-wanted ad for Troy Music, and that had made up his mind. When he met Edie in the drugstore a week later, some inner part of him had suddenly felt stronger. Those first flickers of utter devotion in her eyes gave him the sense that this was someone he could share his destiny with. Whatever it might be.

But Eric Fraser did not like to think of the past. Those terrible, suffocating years in Toronto, the hostility of St. Bart's. It was as if there had been a bureaucratic mix-up and he had been assigned a cramped little life that had been meant for someone else. His own life, his real life, had been stolen.

And all of it could have been prevented, he thought, as he drove past the old CN station on the way to Edie's. The whole damn mess need never have happened, if only he'd been smart enough to tape Jane's mouth shut.

LISE Delorme had not spent a lot of time on stakeouts. She was discovering on Wednesday night that she was not much good at standing around waiting, especially in the middle of the night in an unheated storefront next door to the New York Restaurant. Luckily, the warm snap- assisted by a space heater- made it just about bearable.

The New York Restaurant has been a favorite with Algonquin Bay's criminal element for as long as anyone can remember, certainly stretching back well before Delorme's time. No one quite knows why, but they know it isn't because of the food, which must give pause to even the most hardened ex-con. McLeod claimed the steaks were Aylmer-issue policewear. Perhaps the big-city name lends it- to the mind of a small-city thug- a certain glamour. It is doubtful in the extreme that any of Algonquin Bay's casual assortment of lawbreakers has been anywhere near New York City; they're no more keen on high-crime cities than anyone else.

Musgrave thought it was the two entrances. The New York is the only Algonquin Bay eating establishment that you can enter from the bright lights of Main Street at one end and exit into the darkness of Oak Street at the other. Delorme thought it might be the gigantic gaudy mirrors on one wall that made the place seem twice its actual size, or the red vinyl, gold-flake banquettes that must have dated from the fifties. Delorme had a theory that bad guys were in many ways like children and shared the toddler's taste for bright colors and shiny objects, in which case the New York Restaurant, from its gold-tasseled menus to its dusty chandeliers, is a felon's natural playpen.

And of course the New York is open round the clock, the only restaurant in Algonquin Bay that can make that claim, which it does boldly, in a flashing crimson neon invitation- or warning: "The New York Never Sleeps."

Whatever the reason for its popularity, the New York is as a result of great interest to the various law enforcement agencies as well. Cops are encouraged to eat there, and often do, smack in the midst of people they have put in jail. Sometimes they chat with each other, sometimes merely nod, sometimes exchange cold stares. Unquestionably, it is a place where a smart cop might overhear useful information.

"Couldn't have picked a better location," Musgrave said. "Anyone spots you, it's easy to explain how you happen to be in the company of a creep like Corbett. Not that anyone's going to see them at two A.M. on a cold Wednesday morning."

The former linen shop next to the New York Restaurant had been empty for six months, and the landlord, a bank, had happily provided the Mounties with a key. To cover their activities, they had boarded up the window with an OPENING SOON sign. The only lights in the place came from clip-ons above the electronic gear. Delorme was waiting in the shadows, along with Musgrave and two Mounties dressed in workman's coveralls who- probably on orders- said not a single word to her. The "contractors" had been in place since noon; Delorme had come at nine P.M., entering through a back hall shared with a candle shop. Pleasant smells of sawdust and bayberry hung in the air.