One #2
imprinted onto my brain I’d never be able to delete. I knew it would be there when I went to sleep that night. Maybe every
night, for the rest of my life.
“I didn’t even know my father had a gun,” I said. “He’s never been, like, the kind of guy who’d own a gun. He wasn’t interested
in them, didn’t collect them, nothing like that.”
“Had your parents been having troubles?”
“Like?”
“Arguments? Anything we’d classify as domestic violence? Had they been talking about a separation, a divorce?”
I shook my head slowly. “I mean, every marriage has its ups and downs.” And for an instant, I thought about my own.
The kinds of disputes Diana and I had, often rooted in how I’d been treated by these two people in that upstairs bedroom who were no longer with us.
“To be honest, for as long as I can remember, they’d kind of been going through the motions. ”
It hit me, at that moment, that if someone were to have asked me whether I thought my parents were still intimate, once I
recovered from the question, I would have said no. Not because they were older, but because I didn’t have the sense their
relationship was particularly loving. I was trying to remember back to a time when I thought it was. My parents lived under
the same roof but in many ways had separate lives, their own friends, different interests. I kept these thoughts to myself
as McCabe continued with her questions.
“Do you know whether your father ever hit your mother? Threatened her?”
“No,” I said emphatically. “No. I never saw anything like that.”
“You never saw your mother with a black eye or something and she said she’d walked into a door?”
“I’m telling you, no.”
“How about money troubles? Were they going through any financial difficulties?”
I shook my head, but my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking of all the people I needed to call. My father’s brother, Frank,
who lived out in Vancouver. Mom’s older twin sisters, Amelia and Geraldine, who’d never married and shared an apartment in
Gatineau. And finally, and most importantly, my brother, Holden.
Holden needed this news like Florida needed another hurricane. His life was fucked-up enough already. This could send him
into another downward spiral; I’d have to find him, tell him in person before he heard about this from anyone else. I’d call
Diana with the news, and let her break it to our son, Gage, if there wasn’t a chance for us to do it together. Gage thought
the world of his grandfather, and this would hit him hard.
And god, the arrangements that would have to be made. What did you tell people in a case like this? Oh hey, Dad just killed Mom, then turned the gun on himself, we’re having a service next week, can you make it?
“What did you do when you saw them?” McCabe asked. “Did you enter the room? Did you touch them?”
“I took a couple of steps in, thinking, should I take their pulse? See if they’re breathing? But it was so obvious, and then,
I started to feel . . .”
“Feel?”
“Like I was going to be sick. I ran into the bathroom, and I threw up.”
She nodded understandingly, closed her notebook, slipped it into her jacket. “I’m going back in for a moment. You stay here,
okay?”
“Sure, yeah.”
“I have more questions.”
I nodded resignedly.
“And let me give you one of these before I forget,” she said and handed me a card that had her name and a phone number on
it.
She got up from the bench, gave me a mournful smile, and went back into the house, leaving me there in a daze. I slowly turned
and looked to the street. The police had strung up that yellow tape like you see in the TV shows, blocking traffic in both
directions, making people turn around and go the other way. This wasn’t a high-traffic area. My parents’ place was on the
outskirts of Yorkton Hill, where the lots were bigger, the homes older, the neighbors spaced well apart. The Chartwells had
lucked out, scoring a place that bordered a pond that led to a nearby creek that eventually found its way to the center of
town, and beyond that, Lake Ontario. So this was not exactly what one would call waterfront property, but it gave the place
where I grew up some distinction.
By comparison, Diana and Gage and I lived in a relatively new suburb where the lots were small and if you wanted water in
your backyard, you got one of those plastic pools that looked like a turtle and was small enough to bring home on the roof
of your car.
Yorkton Hill was about a thirty-minute commute west of Toronto, what they called a bedroom community because so many people drove or took the train to jobs in the city and only came back here to sleep.
In Toronto, a couple found dead in their bed might not even make the evening news, but in Yorkton Hill that sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen.
On average, its residents were better educated, had a higher standard of living.
More one-percenters than other communities.
I guess that meant we were supposed to be happier too.
I got up. I needed to move around, but I wasn’t heading back into the house. I couldn’t go in there. I didn’t know when I’d
be able to. I’d have to at some point, of course. The place would have to be cleared out, put on the market. I didn’t want
to live there, and I was pretty sure Holden wouldn’t. He’d be more interested in the windfall its sale would produce, and
then the bets would be on how quickly he could blow it on meth or crack or whatever it was he was on these days.
My mind went over the detective’s questions, particularly those about whether my parents had been having any serious problems.
I’d said no, but clearly I’d had no idea what was going on between them. What signals had I failed to pick up on? What could
have been going on right in front of me that I was too blind to see, that could have led to something this tragic?
I left my half-finished coffee on the bench and walked out onto the lawn, turned and looked back at the two-story house where
I’d spent so much of my life. My parents had bought this place when I was eight, when Dad was making a fortune working for
that pharmaceutical giant. I’d never lived here again after I’d left to attend university in Kingston, where I’d met and fallen
in love with Diana. We got married and set up house much sooner than we’d planned. That can happen when somebody gets pregnant.
My cell rang. I felt the simultaneous vibration of it in my sports jacket pocket. Diana, I was betting. I didn’t feel ready
to break this to her yet, but there was never going to be a good time. I reached into my pocket to answer, but I was so on
edge I fumbled the phone and dropped it onto the grass.
“Fuck,” I said under my breath. I leaned over, picked up the phone, and looked at the screen, then felt my heart stop as I saw the caller ID. It wasn’t Diana’s name on the screen.
MOM.
I blinked a couple of times, not believing what I was seeing. I slid the bar across to take the call and put the phone to
my ear.
“Hello,” I said tentatively.
“Hey,” said a familiar voice. “You at home? Can you drop by the house and see if your dad’s okay? I’ve been calling and he’s
not picking up.”