by Kurt Palka
Danny shook his head. He said nothing, just sat at the table looking down at his hands, and she saw him, his tousled hair, a grown man’s face and shoulders now but her little boy still there, like now, around his eyes, squinting at some thoughts he didn’t like, didn’t want to let in.
“We need to be smart here, Danny. And just so you know it, I will be calling Margaret again. And this time we better show some gratitude. You hear me? We have no idea what’s going on here and we need help. You need help. Okay?”
And after a while he looked up at her and nodded okay.
Sixteen
BY THE END of the next day Margaret was back in Sweetbarry. She’d told Hugh briefly what it was all about, and that this was very important to her. She promised that she wouldn’t neglect her work in the least. She would take the files with her and this time also the out-of-office pager so he’d be able to reach her any time, day or night. She’d called him Hughie, which in the right mood he liked, and it mellowed him.
He had looked at her across his desk and seen something in her face and eyes, and he’d sighed and sunk down a bit in his chair. He’d argued a bit, not very much, and in the end he’d agreed.
Now, in stiff old workboots and her father’s canvas coverall, she paced off the distance from the phone terminal on the outside gable wall of the house to the boathouse and added a few yards. From repairs some years ago there was a length of black phone wire left on a spool in the workroom. She rolled it out, and there was enough of it to go through the boathouse wall to the oak desk by the window. She stripped the wire ends with a paring knife and then drove to Telford Herman’s boatyard and told him what she intended to do. Telford listened, then he gave her a hand drill and a three-eighths-of-an-inch auger bit, and to seal the hole in the wall around the wire he gave her a few small wooden wedges and some caulking putty in a tin.
At the second-hand shop behind the co-op she found a push-button phone, an extension cord with the jack box still on it, and a desk lamp. Back home she installed the box and the telephone line and connected the line at both ends. The answering machine she left hooked up in the kitchen.
She scrubbed and polished the desk and oiled the squeak in the spring hinge of the oaken chair, and she cleaned the window with vinegar and water and newspaper. She emptied the desk drawers and set the phone ringer at half volume, and from that phone called her pager. It all worked.
She called their number at the house in Toronto and let it ring, and when the machine picked up she said she’d been home for a few days but now was back in Sweetbarry. Call me, she said to him.
* * *
—
The police diver arrived in a van with the logo of a diving school, and because Aileen’s rock already had two cars and a truck on it, he parked in Margaret’s drive and walked up to knock on Aileen’s door. He was a young man in faded jeans and running shoes. He said sir to the inspector and ma’am to Aileen and her.
She wanted to come along again, but the inspector did not allow it. He said it was a diving run and had nothing to do with Danny. In any case, they could talk later.
* * *
—
As Danny told it afterward, they tied up again at the dock and then the diver put on his wetsuit and mask and flippers and made his first dive. He came up once for air, and the second time when he surfaced he held up an open folding knife and he reached and slapped it wetly on the dock. He went down again. On this dive he came up for air twice, and the third time he held up two brass cartridge shells. At the stern ladder he passed them to the inspector and climbed back into the boat.
* * *
—
She and Sorensen stood by his car on the rock in the last sunlight coming down between the trees.
“I have a favour to ask,” he said.
“A favour? All right, let’s hear it.”
“I’ll give you a bit of background first. We now know more about how the kids died. As I suspected, the blood on the dock isn’t just from them. The large, heavy stain with the shoe print in it is from a third person. None of the kids bled that much, and there are signs of arterial spray and then heavy flow. So let’s say for now that the boy stood in front of the girl and fought back or attacked someone with a knife. There was some sort of violent struggle and then the boy was shot.”
“And the girl with him?”
“Yes. We know that for a fact. From their hands, they weren’t working class. Pen bunions on their right middle fingers suggest they were used to writing. Perhaps students. Perhaps girlfriend and boyfriend, but we don’t know. All of this may mean very little, but it does narrow the field.”
“What were they doing out there?”
“We don’t know that either. I have my suspicions, but that’s all they are for now. The police artist has already made pictures of them as they would have looked alive, and those pictures are in wide circulation.”
“Can I have copies? I want to post them at the community hall. Someone may have seen them.”
“Yes. I’ll have copies sent to you. Along with pictures of the men.”
“Thank you. So what’s the favour?”
“It has to do with the blood on the dock. The arterial spray and the heavy flow. I’m sure Danny will tell you that we found a knife, and so that is of course a clue, and whoever lost all that blood is either dead or has found help with some private doctor or in a hospital. We’ve sent telexes to the hospitals in the area, but so far there’s been no response. Many hospitals report gunshot wounds voluntarily, to protect themselves in case of a crime, but with anything else they’re reluctant to have the police poke around. I know that Mrs. McInnis still works as a nurse, and I’m wondering if she would help us with this. Would you mind asking her? Massive blood loss from some traumatic injury, perhaps to the left side of the body. A deep slash across an artery, I’d say. It’s probably registered as an accident.”
“Shouldn’t that request be coming from you?”
“I don’t think so. Not directly. It’s a bit tricky. Mrs. McInnis doesn’t exactly like me, and it’ll require a fair bit of goodwill on her part because she’ll have to be asking around among her colleagues. And hospital policies and politics being what they are—you know what I’m saying. It might take a bit of persuasion, but as their lawyer you can tell her that finding the hospital will help the case. And it will.”
“You want her to find out from emergency room nurses if there were any admissions with significant blood loss?” “Yes. Even more than significant. Life-threatening. Near-catastrophic, I’d say.”
She studied him for a moment.
“All right,” she said then. “I’ll do it. If we’re successful, there will be a favour that I’m going to ask from you in return. One favour for another. A sort of deal.”
He nodded. “Depends on the favour. But fair enough.” When his car had disappeared up the gravel road, she climbed the stoop to Aileen’s house and opened the door and went inside.
“Life-threatening blood loss,” said Aileen when Margaret had told her what the inspector wanted. “Is that it?” “Yes. Near-catastrophic was the way he put it. Maybe the left side of the body and probably through an artery.” “They won’t be allowed to talk about that. Or want to. There’s strict hospital policies.”
“He’s aware of that. The point is that maybe they’ll talk to you, being another nurse, and to help you out. I think you should try. I think we should do everything we can to help the police clear up this case.”
* * *
—
At the boatyard she parked the Buick and took the hand drill and the tin of putty she’d come to return from the passenger seat. Telford Herman was busy working on a hull on the cradle.
“You’re caulking this one, Telford?”
“We are, yes. She’s still got a wooden hull, not fibreglass.” He ran his hand over the boards. “We do her every other year or so. This time we’ll be replacing her bow piece too. She’s got rot in hers.” He took two steps and
ran his hand down the bow curve.
“Are you using tamarack for that? I just read about that in a book on trees and the uses of wood. I found it in my father’s workshop. And some of his notes on the planting.” He gave her a surprised look. “Tamarack, yes. That’s the right wood for the bow piece. It’s expensive, but at least you can find it again these days. When I was a young lad and my father ran this shop, you couldn’t get any tamarack, not for love or money. All gone. And most of the pines, Norway and white, them too. The British clear-cutting did most of the damage, and then our own lumber mills did the rest. Your father pedalled his bike all over the county, making his secret maps. An old mailman’s bicycle he had. But you’ll know all that.”
“Actually, no, I don’t. Not in any detail. When was that?” “Oh. In the summers and falls when he was still at university, up in Wolfville. Before he married your mother. Using his survey maps to go all over and finding the last saplings of them, seedlings, and not telling anyone. He knew more about trees than any other man. Taught my own dad about winter buds.
“After that he started with all that soil, trucks full of soil going through town, I don’t know how many truckloads. He got them for free from the gravel pit, topsoil, when they were expanding it. People thought he was a bit unusual, Charles. You know. Different. Setting his sight on things and doing them no matter what. Dogged. And his mother, your Grandmother AJ, she was unusual too. I guess that’s where he got the bees in his bonnet from.” “It was eighty-eight truckloads, Telford,” she said. “I read it in his notes.”
She was close to tears and didn’t know why. And Telford Herman, he could tell, because he looked away for a moment and then back at her, and kindly he said, “Well, yes, Margaret. Yes. Why don’t you come and see us sometime? Come to the house and have tea with Mrs. Herman. She’d like that.”
* * *
—
That night in dreams she prepared a birthing bed in the forest. Slim branches of spruce and hemlock on the ground and balsam fir and dried moss on top for softness. Walls of falling leaves and tamarack needles like bead curtains. For the newborn to come, she made a small crib of bent branches of red spruce and willow withes, and she lined it with cushions of moss and the finest new growth of balsam.
She placed the crib next to the bed and then sat down by her rock to wait for the first sign of pink to the east.
* * *
—
When she woke she could at first not remember the dream, but it came to her in fragments while she was in the kitchen making coffee. In her nightgown and robe she stepped into her boots and out the screen door and walked to the water, sipping from her cup. She stood on the rock shelf where she’d sat in her dream and looked out. The sun was just clear of the horizon, still compressed into an ellipsis, and she stood in its long light and closed her eyes and felt complete and at peace for this moment, for the first time in many months.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and another. After a while she opened her eyes.
Thank you, she said.
Going back up to the house she touched the tamarack with its soft needles turning yellow. Up high on the white spruce the cones were losing their green now. Beads of resin sparkling orange in the morning sun.
* * *
—
She dressed in a good dark-grey skirt and white blouse and jacket to go to her desk in the boathouse because it helped her frame of mind, and then she spent most of that day at her desk and on the telephone. She spoke with Jenny about the new files and arranged to have certain pages copied and couriered to her. There was a new corporation transfer, this one for a Hong Kong client who worked through an office in London. And there was a new client in New York.
She ate lunch in her kitchen and by two o’clock she was back at work. To her right, the blackboard where she’d developed her diagrams of legal order, her first ideas of abstraction as a student, was still bolted to the wall and bits of chalk lay on the sill. The connectedness of the threads of the intentions of the law, spirit and practice, all forms and branches of law into the order of a fabric designed for the upholding of specific rules of human interaction. In the early years she had believed fervently in all that.
Once, in her last year at Osgoode Hall, she’d demonstrated her idea in front of the class, and there had been only silence and doubtful looks, but afterward the professor had called her to his office and invited her to talk a bit more about it. He made notes as she spoke. Really? he said every so often. Go on, Miss Joubert.
Seventeen
EVERY MORNING SHE STILL took the wedding ring from the bathroom vanity and put it on her finger and turned it in the light. The traditional left ring finger, as they’d agreed back then, even though the right finger had been fashionable for a while in the fifties. But they would be hard-working professionals with busy right hands. Both with their brand new degrees, his in geology, hers in law, and her early interest in law mostly because Grandmother had instilled in her the old-world belief that law was about justice and as a result it was the noblest of professions.
Fresh out of law school in Toronto, she’d applied for an articling position at two different law firms, and was told there were no openings. Eventually she landed a job with a firm on Danforth Avenue. They paid her next to nothing and used her mostly as a filing clerk and to make coffee and fetch lunch at the corner. The lawyers, all men, winked at her and invited her for drinks.
She stuck it out until the bar exam, hoping the firm would give her real work then, and pay more. They did not, and so she found other jobs. One of them she walked out of when, after hours, a junior lawyer cornered her against the telex machine. She struggled, and it helped greatly that the machine suddenly began to chatter and type.
She found another job in an office on Bathurst Street, and this one lasted long enough for her to meet her articling requirements. Two months before Andrew was born, they let her go because they were worried about the demands of motherhood.
She loved her time with baby Andrew—the nursing, the sweetness of it all, the closeness. But at the same time, if she was honest, she often also wearied of it. In those moods she wanted her body back. All this nursing on demand, for hours. She missed getting out, missed the challenge of work, missed her independence, and at the same time felt guilty feeling that way. She admitted it only to Aileen on the phone. With Aileen she could talk about it, and because of little Danny, who was only a year and a half older, Aileen understood exactly.
Meanwhile Jack was brilliantly successful, and it had become clear to her that Canada with its resource-based economy had a far greater need for keen new exploration geologists than it had for keen new women lawyers. It seemed Jack could spot good properties by knowing almost intuitively what the geological ages and the ice ages had done in certain geographies, how strata in others had risen up and broken apart to mirror certain events at depth, and how to run the geophysics and plan his core samples. With skill and youthful enthusiasm he quickly became a sought-after mine-finder, and often he was gone three, four weeks at a time, travelling all over the world. He was gone more than he was home.
By the time she was ready to go back to work, she had a gap in her resumé, still no courtroom experience, and the responsibility of a child at home. She did find new jobs, usually short-term replacement jobs, and to be able to leave the house she had a series of live-in and day nannies. Because she’d read up on the benefits of breast milk over formula, she pumped milk and put it in small jars with the date and hour on them. She kept a second pump in a locked desk drawer at the office for emergencies, and often when she had to work late, or when the nanny called in a panic, she’d pump in the washroom at the office and send the jars wrapped in wet papers and plastic home in a taxi.
It was true what she’d told Michael about the teasing and insults from her colleagues in those early days. What she’d never talked about to anyone except Aileen, never to Michael or Jack, was the shame of it. The shame for herself, and even more so
her shame and contempt for the men, who always only grinned at her and winked, as though the cracks about full-fat milk and milkmaids in her condition were some sort of clever mating call.
After a while she learned to smile and stare them down until their grins froze on their faces. The decision she made, and confirmed over and over in the private stillness of some taxi going home late at night, was that this was all just part of the price of admission. It was something unpleasant to be endured, and surely before long to be left behind.
As it happened, it was in corporate work where eventually she found her niche. The firm she worked for at the time took on a complicated tax case, and the lawyer told her to learn the file by heart and then to find whatever supportive material she could and brief him.
She spent days and nights at it and built a file for him of similar cases and their rulings, each case with an outline of fact, principle, and procedure, and in the end it all worked out exceptionally well. She did more cases for that same lawyer, all white-collar crime and tax issues, and after a while he took her with him to court and introduced her as his associate counsel.
Soon other lawyers noticed her, and after all the rejection and condescension early on she eventually received good offers from other law firms. From then on, she was on her way. She made tax loopholes, tax deferral, and tax jurisdictions her first specialty, and after a while added investment law and offshore ownership. In time she became very good at it all, and she was proud of that fact. It gave her confidence. She told herself that this was her gift, the gift to organize her life around, and she treated it with great respect. A solid career, and now, after many difficult years, nothing less than the promise of a partnership at a top law firm with international clients and multi-million-dollar cases.
