Page 31 of Not a Word

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.

Thirteen

Before Detective McCabe had returned to the Chartwell home, she’d gone to the local Toyota dealership in search of Ray Stanhope, Leah Kennard’s former boyfriend who’d lived with her, for a period of time, at her Galen Street address.