“Sure. Which one?”
“My favourite.”
I don’t need to open a book to tell this story. This story I know by heart. This story I will always know by heart.
“Bill never likes to leave town the same way twice,” I say. “He strides out with an urgency I find hard to match. He leads me through the tamarack woods. He leads me through the meadow bog. He leads me through the tall prairie grasses.”
The breeze blowing in the window is warm, fragrant with night flowers. If I close my eyes, I can imagine it is the house in Canwood and I am a boy again, stepping down off the front porch, on my way to Sugar Hill.
Author’s Note
THIS STORY IS based on a murder that took place in Canwood, Saskatchewan, in 1947, and on the LSD drug trials that were undertaken in the Weyburn Mental Hospital through the 1950s. Although I have taken details of the murder from the historical record, and used the line of questioning from the transcripts of the preliminary trial, this novel tries to be faithful not to these things but to the memory of one Hugh Lafave, who was a boy in Canwood at the time of the murder and was later a superintendent at the Weyburn Mental Hospital. Hugh knew the murderer, a man known locally as Rabbit Foot Bill.
Acknowledgements
I WOULD LIKE to thank my agent, Clare Alexander, and my editor, Jennifer Lambert, for their encouragement and assistance. The book is better because of their efforts and belief in the story. Thanks also to managing editorial director Noelle Zitzer.
The Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan hold the trial documents paraphrased in this novel. I would like to thank them for providing me with a copy of them.
Hugh Lafave has spent years recounting his story of Rabbit Foot Bill to me, and this book wouldn’t exist without him or without the support and enthusiasm of Carol Drake. I am indebted to both of them and grateful for the time we’ve spent together.
Thanks to the people who make my life work: Mary Louise Adams, Nancy Jo Cullen, Eleanor MacDonald, Kirsteen MacLeod, Susan Olding, Marco Reiter, Sarah Tsiang. Thanks, Charlotte.
For this book, I would particularly like to thank Su Rynard, who collaborated with me on an earlier version of this story in the form of a screenplay. Most of what works in the novel is thanks to her and to our long and considered discussions about truth and fiction.
About the Author
HELEN HUMPHREYS is an acclaimed and award-winning author of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Her work includes the novels Machine Without Horses, The Evening Chorus, Coventry, and Afterimage, and the non-fiction books The Ghost Orchard and The Frozen Thames, as well as the memoir Nocturne. She has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, a Lambda Literary Award for Fiction, and the Toronto Book Award, and she has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Trillium Book Award, and CBC’s Canada Reads. The recipient of the Harbourfront Festival Prize for literary excellence, Helen Humphreys lives in Kingston, Ontario.
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Also by Helen Humphreys
FICTION
Leaving Earth
Afterimage
The Lost Garden
Wild Dogs
Coventry
The Reinvention of Love
The Evening Chorus
Machine Without Horses
NON-FICTION
The Frozen Thames
Nocturne
The River
The Ghost Orchard
Copyright
Rabbit Foot Bill
Copyright © 2020 by Helen Humphreys.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
FIRST EDITION
Cover art: Adobe Stock (rabbit), iStockphoto (paper)
EPub Edition AUGUST 2020 EPub ISBN: 978-1-4434-5156-7
Version 06172020
Print ISBN: 978-1-4434-5154-3
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Rabbit Foot Bill : a novel / Helen Humphreys.
Names: Humphreys, Helen, 1961- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020018539X
Canadiana (ebook) 20200185403
ISBN 9781443451543 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781443451567 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS8565.U558 R33 2020 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
LSC/H 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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