The ambulance was turning onto the highway and Deacon idled his time watching its taillights receding up the incline leading into the rock cut.
“Looks like I missed all the fun,” Deacon said when the ambulance disappeared around the bend.
“How’s that?”
“Everyone’s leaving.”
“Chain of custody. It’s a police matter now.”
Dylan gulped half the coffee in one go, giving Deacon just enough time to fish his pad and pen out of his pocket. Dylan was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand when Deacon looked back up. There was a gleam in Dylan’s eye too keen to mean anything but trouble.
“Hope I didn’t catch you in the middle of something,” he said.
“Just a good night’s sleep.”
“You weren’t with Rain when I called?”
“Rain? Meadows?”
“You know any other?”
“I wasn’t with her. Why would you even say that? She’s old enough to be my mother.”
“You said it, not me.”
“I was sleeping when you called.”
“Sleeping, huh?”
“I was.”
“So it wasn’t you I saw slipping in through her back door a couple hours ago?”
“No.”
“And it wasn’t you the last two nights neither.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure looked like you in the pictures I took.”
Fronting Deacon his best shit-eating grin, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone.
“You were following me.”
“We call it patrol,” Dylan countered as he thumbed through the onscreen photo gallery.
Deacon had known Dylan since he was twelve and had come to live with George and Adele Cleary—Dylan’s grandparents on his father’s side. Deacon’s parents and younger brother had been killed when his father, driving too fast, had swerved to miss a moose and hit a tree instead. George was a friend of the family, and he’d arranged to adopt Deacon to keep him out of foster care, neither of his parents having had any family willing, or able, to take him in. Dylan was six years his senior and already on his way to the Royal Canadian Regiment, his sights set on the infantry. When he returned from overseas, he enrolled in the police academy in Aylmer and that had led him back to Tildon about the same time Deacon had replaced George as the Chronicle’s only full-time reporter. They’d had plenty of time to get to know each other since, both on and off the job. Over the past few years, Dylan had come to treat Deacon like the younger brother he’d never had which, from Deacon’s point of view, couldn’t have been much different than he’d have treated a new recruit about to go into combat for the first time, needling him without end and otherwise taking every opportunity to remind him how much of a mistake it was for such a scrawny little thing to have enlisted in the first place.
He knew anything he might say would only egg him on and kept his mouth shut, occupying himself by searching his pockets for his smokes.
While he lit one, he watched three of Dylan’s fellow officers playing what appeared to be a game of bocce with stones they’d scavenged from the figure eight’s gravel. One of them, the bulge at his midsection telling him it was Sergeant Marchand, was lobbing a rock. Deacon saw it hit the ground and spin off into the underbrush, Marchand stomping after it, shaking his head and muttering “Merde,” which was the only French Deacon had ever heard him speak.
Beyond them, the headlights of a sedan pried through the trees. It shone over the burnt husk of a minivan, parked in the far corner of the figure eight’s right-side loop, and glinted off a bald crown he knew belonged to Dr. Albert Ross, the county coroner.
Him and George were old fishing buddies, and Deacon had spent many a lazy afternoon sitting by their side while the two old men fished for muskie in the swampy shallows where the south branch of the Mesaquakee River flowed into the lake of the same name. It was there that Deacon had learned that Dr. Ross was the inspiration for Hubert Cairn, a character in The Sons of Adam, the sixth of what George called his Fictions. And like his counterpart, Dr. Cairn had a rather morbid hobby: he collected pictures of dead bodies.
In the book, set in the late seventies, Cairn was a member of Club Mortis, a loosely affiliated network of doctors and police officers, firemen and soldiers, who traded photos of the grisly deceased they’d encountered while on the job. Living in a quaint little tourist town where a kinder, gentler death held more sway than in so many other parts of the world, Dr. Cairn didn’t have much to offer his fellow enthusiasts except the odd snap of a bloated corpse hauled out of the lake or the crumpled remains pulled out of a car crash. That was until the titular group of bikers-cum-doomsday cultists had gone on a murderous rampage that made Charles Manson’s seem like child’s play in comparison.
As the death toll mounted, so too did Dr. Cairn’s renown amongst his peers. In the second to last chapter, he’d expressed his concerns regarding his exploitation of the unfolding drama for personal gain to a big-city news reporter, whose own celebrity was predicated on cataloguing the evil that men do. The reporter confided that he too often dealt with a similar crisis of conscience.
It’s hard, he said, when the worse things get, the better they seem for me. Gnaws on a man’s soul, if you believe in that sort of thing.
Dr. Cairn admitted he did, though not in the biblical sense, and that he felt the same way.
The only advice I can offer, the reporter continued, is to get yourself a hobby, something to look forward to, so that at the end of the day you can leave all the other shit behind.
Advice that was not much use for Dr. Cairn since it was his hobby that had got him into the mess in the first place. Nevertheless, it was of great use to Deacon, providing him with a clue, albeit a cursory one, regarding the dual, and often conflicting, natures of his adoptive father. One was the kind-hearted owner and editor-in-chief of the Chronicle and the other an author of twelve novels in which the depraved acts of violence contained within their, often, apocalyptic narratives were only slightly less disturbing than the deviance of their characters’ sexual appetites. The first time Deacon read them he wasn’t able to sleep for days, fearing what a man who wrote such things—and was then lying in a bed not twenty feet from his own—might have in store for a twelve-year-old boy for whom nobody else seemed to have any use.
While time had eased the worry that George might have something diabolical planned for him, it hadn’t done much to reconcile the mystery surrounding George, The Man, and George, The Writer. An answer to that always seemed to be fleeing forever beyond his grasp. But now, staring out at the van and seeing a bright flash—Dr. Ross taking another photo for his collection—it seemed to be on the tip of his tongue. Something about trying to find a way to make sense out of all the bad, but that didn’t quite capture it. There was more to it than that. It was like—
Then Dylan was nudging him with his elbow and the thought slipped away.
“Here’s one I took through the window,” he said, holding up his phone. “Looks like a porcupine’s crawled up between your legs.”
Averting his eyes from the photo onscreen, Deacon scanned back towards the van. Dr. Ross was at its driver’s side door, talking into his cell, probably recording a few notes. It was something Deacon rarely did, preferring a pad and a pen for the simple reason that you couldn’t tap a pen against a screen while you were trying to think of something intelligent to say. Or, rather, you could, but it didn’t make nearly as satisfying a thwack as his was doing now as he turned back to Dylan.
Dylan must have figured the joke had played itself out and was pocketing his phone.
“They didn’t take the body,” Deacon said, stating the obvious about as close to genuine intelligence as he could muster at one in the morning, his mind a fog of kush and Canadian Club. “The ambulance, I mean.”
“You said in your message that it looked like—”
“Murder?”
“Yeah.”
“Have to wait until the autopsy gets back to know for sure. But dousing yourself with gasoline and setting yourself on fire’d be a fuck of a way to kill yourself.”
Deacon went back to tapping at his pad, cycling his thoughts through a dozen similar scenes he’d witnessed in movies, trying to think of what to say next.
“Someone covering their tracks?” he finally offered.
“I’d say.”
“Any witnesses?”
“There had to be at least one, but I doubt he’s too likely to come forward.”
“Who called it in?”
“Someone driving by, saw the flames.”
“You got a name?”
“And a statement. He left about ten minutes ago.”
“No, I mean for the body.”
“Oh. No, not yet.”
“You run the plates?”
“Golly,” Dylan said, assuming a hillbilly twang, “what a great idee. Now why ain’t we a-tink-a dat.”
“I take it you did then.”
“Name withheld pending notification of the next of kin, you know the drill.”
Thwack. Thwack.
“Can you at least tell me if it was registered to a local address?”
Dylan scratched at his scar like he was picking at a scab.
“It was registered to a property on Brackenburg,” he finally said, adding as Deacon wrote the name down in his pad, “but you didn’t hear that from me.”
Brackenburg was a dirt road not a ten-minute drive west along the 118. It had a sign at its entrance warning, Road Not Maintained In The Winter, Use At Own Risk and mainly served to provide access to the cottages lining the northeastern shore of Lake Rousseau. Deacon underlined what he’d written for no other reason than it gave him a few moments before he’d feel inclined to speak again.
Then:
“So it was a tourist?”
“You say so,” Dylan answered as a cheer arose from the officers playing bocce.
The two constables were slapping their sergeant on the back and Marchand was doing a fist pump. “That’s how you do it!” he exclaimed, and then the game was broken up by Dr. Ross’s Cadillac driving over their stones on his way towards the exit.
Deacon tracked past it, letting his eyes settle again on the van. All he could make out in the smoky dark was a blotch of darker still. He thought about what it must have looked like a short while ago—a ball of fire—and then he tried to think if there was anyone he knew who lived on Brackenburg Road. There was someone, he was sure of it. He tapped his pen against his pad. When that didn’t do the trick he took a drag off his cigarette, but that didn’t help much either.
He dropped the butt at his feet, stubbing it with the toe of his sneaker. When he looked back up, Dr. Ross’s car had stopped at the end of the driveway and the coroner was leaning out the driver’s side window. He was skinny and pale with deep-set eyes underscored by sacks of dark flesh and always reminded Deacon of a ghoul or a grave robber in one of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries George used to give to him to read. He was saying something through the open window, too low for Deacon to hear.
“It’s a helluva mess alright,” Dylan replied to whatever it was Dr. Ross had said.
“It’s a terrible thing really.”
A car was approaching on the highway. Within its glow, Deacon could see Ross shaking his head even as the faint trace of a smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. When the vehicle had passed, he could hear the click of the doctor’s tongue against his teeth.
“But then you know what George’d say . . .”
Knowing exactly what George would say, Deacon wheeled around and pointed his feet in the direction of his Jeep. The gravel crunching underfoot blotted out Dr. Ross’s voice but was powerless against the tenor of Dylan’s response.
“It’s looking to be a long one this year then,” he said, the upturn in his voice making it seem as if nothing could have pleased him more.
There’d been a time when Deacon’s own father would have answered George with the same, and Deacon would have snickered right along with him. But now, imagining Dr. Ross slipping the photo he’d just taken of someone’s charred remains into an album alongside the one he’d taken of his family those years ago, it didn’t really seem all that funny anymore.
RENÉ
It had been a shit day so far.
Being a workday, he’d set his alarm for seven, but he’d awoken just after five. The window over his bed beckoned no light and he could hear the buzz of a fly caught behind its screen. That’s what must have woken him up. He had lain there, listening to it batter against the glass, telling himself he ought to get up and kill it or else he’d never fall back asleep, all the while knowing that it didn’t matter anyway. He was awake now and he might just as well get up as lay there watching the clock’s slow shuffle, growing angrier by the second listening to that damn fly—though it wasn’t really the fly he was mad at, it was his sister Jean.
Four years ago, he’d been convicted of aggravated assault, and while he was serving his time, Jean had adopted his three-year-old son, Tawyne. After René’d got out, nine months ago, she’d agreed to let him see Tawyne for two hours on the first and third Saturdays of every month. His seventh birthday was on June twenty-first and that fell on a Sunday this year, the day after his regularly scheduled visit. It was a sign that had spoken to René of something beyond mere providence and he’d got it in his mind that he should do something special to mark the occasion. He’d called Jean up the Friday before and asked if maybe he could have Tawyne overnight.
“I was thinking,” he’d said, “of taking him up to Gramps’s old fishing shack.”
It was an hour’s walk due north along a trail the old man had blazed himself through the woods extending almost to his back door, built on the shore of a lake too small to bear mention on any map, but which his grandfather called Koué. He had the whole trip planned out. They’d swim and fish off the dock, cook what they’d caught over an open fire for dinner, grill up pancakes for breakfast, and spend Sunday morning out in his grandfather’s canoe, casting into the shallows on the far side of the lake where the biggest fish were prone to linger. After he’d made his pitch to Jean, he saw that it all hung on three seconds of dead air, which was about the time it took for her to speak.
“I don’t think he’s ready for an overnight just yet,” she said, and if René could have reached through the phone he’d have strangled her.
He heard the amplified rasp of Jean taking a deep breath and when she exhaled she said, “How about this? You can have him for four hours on Saturday. I’ll drop him off at eleven. That way you can have lunch together.”
René answered her through gritted teeth: “But I wanted to see him on his birthday.”
“We’ve made plans. We’re taking him to Wonderland. He’s been looking forward to it for weeks. We’ve already bought the tickets.”
“I see.”
“So you’ll take him for the four hours on Saturday?”
“Fine.”
“See you then.”
The phone clicked and it took about all of René’s will not to heave it through the closest window. Now, as the conversation replayed itself in an endless loop to the batter of the fly hammering against the window, he felt the rage surging again, seeing her fat fucking face smiling on the other end of the phone, as if she couldn’t have been happier with the way things had turned out.
He took a deep breath and held it in for the count of five—what the co
unsellor at his anger management classes had taught him to do when he felt his mood going into a tailspin.
“Take a deep breath,” he’d told the circle of inmates, “and count to five, remind yourself what’s at stake, what you stand to lose by coming out guns a-blazing.”
For René, it was seeing his son. The judge had handed him five, but his lawyer said he’d be out in three, “if he stayed out of trouble,” shooting him a nervous look as he said it, like it’d be a miracle if he didn’t serve his full term. Between that look and the counsellor’s advice he’d managed to keep his temper in check, though he hadn’t exactly stayed out of trouble, counting down from five when the shit did go down and telling himself that in three years Tawyne would be seven and in five he’d be almost ten. It seemed a lifetime between the two and he’d hedged his bets by having Trout, the range’s resident tattoo artist, ink a picture of a wolf on each of his hands. He already had the two howling up his neck, which he’d got when he’d turned eighteen and wanted to mark the occasion. While those wolves spoke to him of his clan’s past, full of honour and glory, the ones on his hands spoke to him only of his own. Each was running full tilt towards his forearm, their lips curled back into a vicious snarl, the bush of their tails stretched behind and their tips dipping into the crux between his thumb and forefinger. When he clenched his fists it looked like he’d got those wolves by the tail, which was exactly what he’d told Trout he was after.
Laying there now, clutching those mean old wolves by the tail, he counted down from five and then did it again. By the third time, he’d calmed some. He swung his feet over the edge of the bed, sitting up and reaching for the pack of Dunhills on the ledge beside the clock. It was empty. He crumpled it up and threw it against the wall then stood. He walked into the kitchen and took a fresh pack from the carton in the cupboard over the stove. By the time he was exhaling his first drag, the seed of a new plan was already germinating.
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