Page 48 of Not a Word

So if something happened that required McCabe’s talents, odds were she’d get the call. And she was still waiting to hear back from the forensics people to let her know if they’d learned anything of note in the Chartwell case.

Late yesterday she’d spoken to the doctor who ran the clinic where Leah Kennard worked, but he didn’t know much about her personal life and wasn’t even aware she had a relationship with anyone, let alone Brent Chartwell. Even during their short in-person chat, McCabe got the impression the doctor was somewhat self-consumed and didn’t have a clue what his staff members’ lives were like, although he was the same doctor who had prescribed the Xanax the detective had found in Leah’s medicine cabinet.

“Yes,” the doctor said, “she had some issues with anxiety, but nothing particularly alarming. I wouldn’t have described her as suicidal.”

She also spoke to Billy, the one whose name came up in Leah’s texts. She was a cousin in Winnipeg who had a two-year-old boy, and Leah liked to receive pics and video of the toddler whenever Billy thought to send some. Billy said that growing up, she and Leah had been close, and while they stayed in touch, she had few details about Leah’s personal life these days. She knew both her parents had died, and that she had no siblings. Billy did know about the guy from the Toyota dealer and was relieved when Leah had told her they were through, but she had no information about Chartwell.

McCabe wanted to still believe this was a straightforward murder-suicide, something she could wrap up and put a bow on in short order. But her conversation with the dead man’s wife nagged at her.

Why did Catherine Chartwell ask whether Leah Kennard had a passing resemblance to her? Was it a personal thing? Why does your husband have an affair if the person he’s having it with looks a lot like you? Or was it something more serious than that?

Did Catherine Chartwell believe Kennard was mistaken for her?

Brent Chartwell could hardly have misidentified her.

So if Catherine was onto something, it would follow that Brent Chartwell had not shot Leah. There had to have been someone else in that room who’d pulled the trigger on that Beretta.

But then what? Brent is so distressed that he asks the killer for the gun so he can take his own life?

Yeah, that made a lot of sense.

And if some third party shot Brent and set it up to look like a suicide, well, he’d done a damn good job of it.

I’m overthinking this.

McCabe put on a pot of coffee, and when it was ready—she took it black—she sat at the kitchen table with her mug and a banana and read the news on her tablet. She wasn’t much of a breakfast person. Caffeine and a piece of fruit were enough most days, even on a weekend, when she had time for something more substantial. Maybe, when Moira materialized, McCabe would actually prepare something. By the time her fourteen-year-old daughter made it down here, it would be closer to lunch, anyway. McCabe could whip up some scrambled eggs, warm up some pancakes. The trendy food shop she frequented sold pancakes that just had to be reheated. Were they as good as homemade? Not even close. Were they easier? Oh yeah. And if toaster pancakes were further evidence of her failures as a mother, so be it.

But she did feel obliged to do something nice for Moira. It had been a rocky week for them, what with McCabe hunting her down on Thursday night, finding her out back of a friend’s house, the whiff of pot in the air. McCabe didn’t have a huge problem with the stuff—there were cannabis shops all over the place now, even here in Yorkton Hill—but that didn’t mean she wanted her daughter smoking it at her age. She didn’t want Moira smoking anything at her age. Or drinking either.

God, teenagers.

If McCabe’s own parents were still alive, they’d be eating this up. Payback time. Looking back, McCabe could see she’d been a handful, done things worse than Moira—taking a bus across the border to Buffalo for two nights with her boyfriend when she was sixteen probably topped the list—so Moira still had plenty of runway ahead of her to outdo her mom when it came to bad behavior. McCabe sometimes believed she became a cop because if she hadn’t, she’d have been arrested by one eventually.

It would all be a lot easier if she weren’t doing this alone.

Maybe, when you go into a marriage to a man who makes his living as a professional gambler with your eyes wide open, you deserve what you get. The thing was, Ned was one hell of a poker player, and McCabe had thought at the time, hey, it’s kind of a sport, right? Some people are better at it than others. It wasn’t like buying a lottery ticket or playing a slot machine. It took skill and patience, an understanding of mathematical probabilities. You had to know how to read people, and McCabe, as an investigator, certainly knew a thing or two about tells, about bluffing. She hadn’t known, before she met Ned, that there were actually people who did this for a living, that it was their job, but she started to read up on it and learned it was a real thing.

But in order to make a real go of it, Ned had to travel. He was always heading somewhere for a poker tournament. Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City, Monaco. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost, but he always came out ahead in the end. The ones who always lost were Janice and Moira.

Eventually, Janice realized she couldn’t live like that. Either get a real job and live with us, or live on the road and don’t come back.

Ned chose Door Number Two.

He sent home money pretty regularly, and once or twice a year he’d show up and be the Hero Dad, but when it came to day-to-day parenting, he was AWOL.

Around ten, she heard a toilet flush upstairs.

Moira shuffled into the kitchen five minutes later, still in her sleeping tee, poured herself some coffee from the pot, and sat at the table, all without saying a word.

“Morning,” McCabe said with restrained cheerfulness.

Moira said, “Mmmf.”

McCabe didn’t have to ask what she’d been up to the night before. After Thursday night’s episode, Moira was grounded for the weekend. If she’d been up late, it had been from watching TV or scrolling her phone, texting her friends about the various human rights abuses she was enduring. Maybe she’d been emailing Amnesty International, McCabe thought.

“Pancakes?”

Moira said, “The toaster ones?”