Twelve
Reece
Mom was ashen-faced when she got into the car. She took her seat, closed the door, put on her seat belt. Didn’t so much as
glance at me, just stared straight ahead through the windshield, and said nothing.
I didn’t see the point in asking whether she was okay. I didn’t know whether to pepper her with any other questions, either,
although I had plenty. But soon enough she’d be bombarded with them from McCabe.
“Will they still be there?” she asked.
“The detective, I’m sure, because she wants to talk to you. And there are plenty of other police on the scene. Cars on the
street, police tape strung up.”
Mom looked pained, no doubt thinking about the shame of it all. She said, “I wasn’t talking about them.”
Oh, I thought. The bodies.
“That depends,” I said. “They’ll have to do whatever it is they do. Take pictures, study the scene. But I think they . . .
I think they’ll be taken away pretty soon. I don’t think they’re keeping them there for you to see them. I was able to identify
Dad. They might want a more formal identification, later, at, you know, the morgue.” I didn’t want to say the word, but it
seemed we were well past the euphemism stage.
Mom barely nodded.
Tentatively, I asked, “Did you know Dad was seeing somebody?” She’d already told me on the phone she didn’t know who Leah Kennard was, but she could still have known, or at least suspected, Dad was seeing another woman.
She pressed her lips together tightly for a moment, still didn’t look my way, and said, “Your father’s personal life was his
business, not mine.”
I took my eyes off the road long enough to shoot her an Are you kidding me? look.
“You knew?”
“I’m not saying that. People are people. Nobody’s perfect.”
“But if Dad—”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Reece.”
“The police will want to talk about it.”
“I’m sure they will.”
Then, for the first time, concern crossed her face and she looked my way. “What about Holden?”
“I went to see him, but I didn’t have a chance to tell him what happened to Dad,” I said. “The police tracked me down there—I’d
left the scene, when you called me, without their permission—and I had to go. But unless someone else goes by Holden’s in
the meantime, I don’t think he’s going to be finding out any other way.”
“How was he?” she asked hesitantly.
I knew what she was really asking. “He was . . . you know.”
“High as a kite?”
“Maybe not that high. But kinda.”
“And you’re sure he doesn’t know?”
I nodded.
She nodded resignedly. “I’ll have to send him away again.”
“I know you keep trying that, Mom, but it never takes. Like you said, people are people. Nobody’s perfect.”
“What, I should give up on him?”
“People have to want to change. You can’t force them. Maybe it’s time for a different approach.”
“And what would that be?”
She had me there.
We turned onto my parents’ street. There were still a couple of cruisers out front, the yellow tape still strung up around the perimeter of the yard.
The street crime tape was down now, though, and now there were two TV news vans there.
One from CP24, the all-news cable station, and, ironically, WorldWide.
This definitely wasn’t a news story I’d be writing up for them.
A couple of female reporters with cameramen were being held back behind the yellow tape.
I knew the one from WorldWide and kept my head down in the hopes she wouldn’t recognize me.
“I’ll go see Holden after I’ve talked to the detective,” Mom said.
“I’ll wait, take you over.”
“I don’t know how long they’re going to want to talk to me.”
“I’m okay waiting. I can—”
“I’ll get an Uber. Or maybe the police will drive me.”
“What else can I do? Do you want me to get in touch with Heffernan & Sons?”
The town’s best-known funeral directors.
“I know my responsibilities and obligations,” she said curtly, still staring straight ahead. Her voice sounded almost robotic,
like she’d gone into some kind of self-induced trance as a way to get through this. “If there’s anything I need I will let
you know.”
I pulled the car over to the curb, got out quickly, intending to come around in time to open the door for her, but she was
half out by the time I got there. The uniformed cop who’d found me at my brother’s place greeted us and said Detective McCabe
would be back shortly.
“I rushed back and she’s not here?” Mom said. Of course. Now that she’d finally turned up, she’d rushed.
“Is my husband still in the house?” she asked.
The cop shook his head. “No, ma’am. The bodies have been removed.”
“Then I’ll wait inside.”
“No, ma’am.”
“I can’t enter my own home?”
“If you could just wait for the detective.”
“May I even set foot on my own property?”
The cop nodded, lifted the yellow tape to allow her to duck under.
I followed. She walked across the front lawn, paused briefly to look at the open front door, then went around the side.
The gate to the backyard was open. The police, out of a sense of thoroughness, must have wandered the entire property looking for who knows what.
We walked beyond the deck, across the yard, and stood by the edge of the pond.
It was maybe the size of half a dozen swimming pools, surrounded by woods on three sides, and no more than five feet at its
deepest point. We’d wondered why it never dried up, but Dad had explained that it was connected by an underground channel
to the creek that eventually wound its way to the lake.
Holden and I thought it was cool when we were kids, having our very own pond, although a pool might have been nicer. The pond
wasn’t much good for swimming. The bottom was soft and mucky. If you walked out into it, you’d be up to your knees in no time.
But as kids, we made the best use we could of it, incorporating it into our adventures. Dad bought a small wooden rowboat,
barely six feet long, that Holden and I and our friends would use to paddle out to the middle and pretend we were in Lake
Ontario or even the ocean.
We each had a fishing pole, but we never caught a damn thing and gave up over time. The pond was not stocked with fish, although
one time Dad brought back some live perch he’d caught on a fishing trip with friends, dumped them into the pond, and said
maybe we should give it one more try. We didn’t hook into any of them, but it wasn’t long before they were floating sideways
on the surface.
That little rowboat was still here, pulled up a few feet from the water, a rotted reminder of the past. There’d been discussions over the years about junking it.
The paint had mostly peeled from it, the wood graying, the paddles—one of them in two splintered pieces—left in the bottom.
My parents had either become sentimental about it or just couldn’t be bothered to have it taken away, but to make it less of an eyesore Mom had scattered topsoil in the bottom and planted flowers, some of which grew high enough to be seen from the deck.
It struck me as oddly peaceful, standing here with my mother, away from the squawk of the police cars, the yellow tape, the
officers milling about out front.
“We should have had a pool,” Mom said, as though reading my mind. “I asked your father so many times to have one put in, but
he’d say, we’ve got the pond. He loved to sit on the deck and look at it, said it was like having his own private lake. He
was never much of a swimmer anyway. He just liked the view. I think it was just a breeding ground for mosquitoes.”
I said nothing.
“I wonder what the new people will do with it. Fill it in? Could you do that? If you had enough dirt?”
“New people?”
“I can’t live here,” she said. “Not anymore. Where your father shot his whore and then himself?”
I took her point.
“I’ll get it on the market as soon as I can. Stay in a hotel until I’ve found another place, rent an apartment. See what’s
for sale at the Yorkton Towers.”
The most expensive condos in town. Right downtown, overlooking the harbor, where the town’s one-percenters kept their yachts
and sailboats.
She paused, and I wondered whether she was waiting for an offer of temporary accommodation with Diana and Gage and me. It
was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t quite spit it out. There was enough tension in the house now. I saw us moving
into a rough patch with Gage. Bringing Mom into the mix wouldn’t help. And there was no way she’d stay with Holden, even if
he offered. A “pigsty,” I’d once heard her call his place. Let her get a hotel if that was what she wanted.
We heard someone approaching from behind and both turned. I recognized Detective McCabe and introduced Mom.
“Sorry for your loss,” McCabe offered.
“About time someone said it,” Mom replied.