There was also the mangled bit of thumb, a good chunk that had been hacked all the way back to the wrist. It lay near one of the knives which looked like its blade had been bent. They sat like a purposeful place setting, maybe a modern art piece in these troubled times, among the pieces of plastic and the sticky wet mess in gaudy contrast with the white of the linoleum floor and the appliances. It was a gristly mess that Malin was sure would still be warm if she dared to touch it.
Four officers had come, two each in two cruisers and one of them had stayed with her in the front yard, instructed to do so while the other three went to check out the inside of the house. She told that officer of her credentials and the situation in its entirety and was finally let inside the house again. It was then that she realized Fairweather’s calls for help, his screams and his swearing, had ended. It was silent inside.
The last officer and Malin had entered the back door. He had called out to his fellow officers to confirm their safety. In that tiny second Malin was convinced the three of them were dead. Perhaps their skulls had been crushed by the swing of something heavy. Or maybe they had been thrown against a wall and lay unconscious. She knew that to be irrational, but couldn’t catch a breath anyway. The officers, though, all three of them, called back to the one standing at her side in the kitchen doorway. Then they each appeared, confirming that her mind was exhausted and perhaps still in shock from the harrowing episode inside the BMW.
But the one officer, the big one with the tightly cropped blonde hair, he said that the house was empty. Malin protested. Fairweather was cuffed to the stove in the kitchen. No, he wasn’t. And then she discovered the partial footprint on the linoleum towards the back door where she stood. There was a smeared red thumb print on the door handle and she pushed her way into the kitchen to see for herself. The Druid was gone.
Her panicked mind spun through scenarios as the three officers moved out into the cold of the back yard. It appears as if the suspect has left through an opening in the back fence, one of them said into the radio handset as he tore it from the Velcro patch at his jacket’s lapel. Malin stood staring at those ringlets hanging from the stove. She tried to convince herself that they weren’t still coming to rest from a gentle swing after their captive had fled.
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Her father would have said, had he still been alive, “Malin Magdalena, du behöver bara en paus. Andas, gumman. Och ta en paus.” Malin Magdalena, you just need a time-out. Breathe, baby daughter. And take a time-out.
And that’s exactly what Malin Holmsund needed to do. She needed to step out of this for a second and just...think.
Her hands were freezing—again. They, as had the rest of her, warmed up during the brief struggle with the Druid before those cuffs had snapped into place. Now her fingers were shaking and white. All their color was gone and it felt like that color had drained away from her head as well. She needed a time-out.
Through packed and drifted mounds of uneven snow, she made her way around the front of the house, insisting to the last officer that she was fine, but that she needed to warm up in the car. He stood back near the garage door and she traipsed through the snow of the front lawn to where her rental car still sat idling in front of the house. The Druid had done an unimaginable thing. And now he was out there somewhere.
Malin could barely get her mind wrapped around that distorted detail. She could still see the fleshy stub, covered in blood and laying on the floor of the kitchen. What would it take to make someone do that?
Her final thought, as she eased into the warm seat and felt the flow of hot engine air on her face and hands, was that she needed to take some officers and drive to Charlemagne Lake. Immediately. Tonight. Now.
A groping, pawing hand wrapped in a blood-sodden tea towel—assuredly missing its thumb all the way back to the wrist—came from behind her neck and fastened itself at her mouth, stifling her with sloppy wetness. She could hear nothing but the car’s fan and engine, could feel no sensations except for the circulation of hot air threatening to dry out her eyes like two olives left in the sun.
The second hand, this one with the edge of white plaster at its wrist came into view, also from somewhere behind her head. It held a plastic syringe, and the point of its needle let fly a solitary drop of clear liquid.
Its metal point thrust deeply into her left breast.
Breathe, baby daughter, it said. You need a time-out.
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Just a few short minutes after the sun fell from the sky on that Sunday afternoon, the officers found Malin inside the running car. She had not been breathing and none of them could venture to guess how long she had been without breath.
Behind her in the vehicle where she sat limp, was, they surmised, the suspect who had attacked her inside the house. He was dead. She was not. An attempt at cardiopulmonary resuscitation ensued.
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What she left behind on the snow-covered stone and dirt ground above the ocean waves were two things. She had an all-encompassing final comprehension of Sebastion and what the Druid actually was. She had a respect for that man, the one with the delirious grin who could sing a song more badly than anyone she had ever met, but could mean it more than anyone she had ever met too. She had approached him first with prudence, then with candor, but knew she would miss him now. She liked his painting and, despite wanting to see how he tackled something as ominous and imposing as a blank sheet of canvas, she knew she would never see that magic trick performed.
More personally, deeper, at the root of her own tree, there was also a melancholy longing. There was a feeling that her stressful and demanding career, while it had been what she always strove to achieve, did not compare to certain other things in her memory. Nor could it compare to certain things in her hopes and dreams. Among them was a wish that she could again lay in her father’s big arms, ears against his warm chest, and listen to him reading.
She became the Druid’s. And in the blackness that came after, the Druid gathered her up and looked back towards what was still left to do.
The pain and buzz in his ears had left again. They always did and this time was no exception. But the blackness remained longer than it ever had before. Contained in it, like a ghastly smudge of semi-lucid whiteness, was the image he had been running towards, running from, for too long. It was the shiny chrome bumper of a ’77 Thunderbird. And its gaping mouth-grille screamed at him to do something. Anything.
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Driving west from Canmore, with his two daughters in the back seat and a tank nearing empty, David Langtree took a swig of his fizzless Orange Crush and glanced over his shoulder to see both little girls fast asleep. They rested homily against each other, just two pink faces and mittens peeking from a comfy pile of hoods and snow suits. And they jittered a little with the movement of the car on the ridges of packed highway snow.
The dark enclosed them back there; the rear window was still covered in white, dark gray really, in this light. The powder had come down gently but quickly at Canmore while he and the girls stopped to get a bite and he was trying to make time so the window had gone without being scraped or brushed. Getting them to finish their dinners, then taking them both to the bathroom, taking off their coats, then putting their coats and mittens back on, then getting them back into the car had burned too many minutes. The orange soda was warm. That stop had been hours before.
Laying down in front of him was the winding roadway. He had slowed, was now only at what felt like a maddening crawl. But every few minutes, on a straight stretch when there were obviously no other cars coming, his foot pressed a little harder and the speedometer crept up a tiny bit. He needed to be in Richmond by morning. The interview was at nine. And the idea of an hour’s sleep followed by a cigarette was utopian.
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David’s wife had been Leighton Ashbury Langtree, formerly Leighton Ashbury Fitzsimmons after an unfortunate first marriage when she was still too young to know better. At the start she had bee
n Leighton Ashbury Pye, and had grown into a beautiful and giving English Lit student at Memorial University in St. John’s. She went back to school and wrote her final undergraduate paper on T.S. Elliot’s “The Wasteland.” It felt like a triumph of will to finally get her degree after the divorce, but she was unable to find steady work as a teacher, so she found employment as a legal secretary instead. Later, working at an estate firm in Etobicoke, Ontario to pay the bills and her student loans, she would plug through her days and imagine at night that one day she might be able to make a living with her true passion, teaching, and to have her children before she was beyond middle age, the point of no return, her sisters kept telling her.
Still beautiful, but no longer young, she met David Galbraith Robertson Langtree, III, who, in search of professional and personal success, had sufficiently wandered from position to position, city to city on the North American continent after leaving London, Ontario where his family’s estate still lay on the outskirts, hovering at the edge of the water like an apparition. He had outgrown his pompous linear designation and had left behind the haughty middle names by then. He was just David Langtree now, even though the surname still bothered him when he signed it to a piece of paper.
He met his future wife late in life, nearly convinced he would be alone for the duration. Both of them were in mid-beat, early middle-life, striving for the career their educations had promised them. They tried not to hearken back on their family’s heritages and David tried to avoid a square look behind at his father’s money.
His father first had interests in Canada’s news world and entertainment industry and then later his involvement spread to include the burgeoning pharmaceutical market. David had left that wealth and those standards behind, had left London entirely, and had sought to make a life with Leighton Ashbury where she grew up in Etobicoke, independent from his empty upbringing, his parents’ dinner parties and stylish suits, and the childhood of strained distances from his mother and father. It was not so much his father’s boozing that had caused the problems—though that had surely not eased matters. It was instead, he believed, his father’s incapacity to say anything to him that ever mattered. As far as he was concerned, his father did not even have eyes with which to see him.
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Wrote a book
Called it Love;
Dedicated it
To The Man above.
So read the opening inscription inside the pages of an incomplete memoir to be published by Sorenson and Sons of Toronto for a handsome advance. The memoir was of David Galbraith Robertson Langtree, II, head of the news magazine dynasty Langtree Wire, started by his father after World War I. The company’s success had waned considerably over the last twenty-five years of Langtree Jnr’s life and most of his moneys were tied into pharmaceuticals at the time of his death.
Mingled in the words of his storybook—a fanciful tale mostly made up, his son would decide—were other curious and fastidious pieces of nonsense disguised as wisdom.
“Forget the past. Know the self.”
“It is not up and down that has mattered in a world of righteous rules. It is instead right and wrong that has made all the difference.”
David Jnr. seemed not to care that his words echoed, or even stole, from his favourite poet, Robert Frost. What was the worry now? Like his relationship with his oldest son, his memoir pages were left like a dangling conversation. David Galbraith Robertson Langtree’s “Lines Drawn in the Sand: A Way of Life” would never see the ink of a printing press. He was dead of a stroke at the age of seventy-three.
From Canada, David had returned to England after years of estrangement with his dad, with his entire family, for the reading of the estate plan. The memoir script’s only copy, and youngest David’s only legitimate claim in his father’s list of good intent, garnered absolute disdain from him. For it only recounted his worst misgivings. There were altogether sparse mentions in those pages of the old man’s family and what phrases there were sketched loosely a caring and supportive unit, bent on holding the Langtree crown aloft while dad, also caring and supportive, did his business—and brought home the family’s bread.
Similar to the amount of press the family received in the stillborn memoir, in the will, there came no mention for his eldest son to receive any of the kindling wealth. Near the end of the reading, there was only a snippet of text directed at the boy he had not seen since before the tongue of manhood had long ago begun to lick the hair from his scalp and the sparkle from his eyes:
“You have turned your back on your upbringing, your name and all that you are. I have been grieving for you longer than you will be for me.”
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Still unmarried, both David and Leighton brought their work to bed with them every night for too many years and lived in separate cities for too many more, putting off their wedding out of perceived necessity. When asked why the marriage was being delayed, the answers ranged from Our careers are just getting started to We’ll just get our student loans taken care of first and then concentrate on a family. They were so focused on doing the right thing and told themselves and each other that to bring children in to such a work-focused marriage would be horrendous and unfair. So they waited.
Have your kids before thirty-five, everyone had told her and David. The chances of problematic birth increase by a full quarter after thirty-five. And she started to. Or at least she and David had tried to do that. They went to expensive fertility specialists and racked up an even greater financial gravesite. The process was long and difficult and, on many occasions, both of them would wail at one another over dinner or in the living room. They would get so frustrated and angry. At themselves, at each other. They wanted to quit, to just stop trying. But they didn’t. And, like a gift from God, Ashleigh was born when Leighton had just turned thirty-seven. Davina came two years later.
But last year, when Ashleigh was nearly five and Davina was just past two, Leighton died in childbirth. She was forty-two and her third daughter was stillborn.
David was left with the unenviable duty of burying both his third princess-girl and his bride of seven years. The baby girl’s birth certificate and death certificate had to be filled out with the same date, on the same date. Ink from the same pen, even.
He put the name Leighton on both, because it felt like her death, and her mother’s, had killed him twice.
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David fell away from the world then. For nearly a year he changed diapers and warmed food for his two daughters in a cloudy haze that he would one day barely remember. In a frozen landscape of noise and filth, he had fallen against the headboard
of his bed, unconscious, and he woke up with silence inside him. Noise came back like a slowed-down rush of water over an embankment. There was a smoldering cigarette on the rug near the foot of his bed which would burst and pop at any moment. He saw Ashleigh standing nude with her bare feet dangerously close to its orange-yellow glow and the vines of gray wafting and threatening. And he heard Davina howling with sobs at the top of her lungs from somewhere else. Beyond the fog and his naked little girl, the front door of the Langtree house banged and banged. And finally, out from its casement it was pushed—the pounding had not been in his head. Men from the bank and officers of the law rushed forward with more sheets of paper in hand, notices of foreclosure, notices to vacate. They were identical to the yellowing notes already tacked to the little house’s wooden door.
It was the end and it was also the beginning. Like the perceptible snap of a twig in silence, David came back to life. Consciousness flooded his vision. Awareness, unfelt in months and months, had burst back full-fledged. He lost the house that had been under his and his wife’s name. But he still had those two little dark-haired princess-girls. How could he have been so stupid? It was remarkable to him now, as he drove through upending darkness, that any of them had survived.
But this job, the one in Richmond at the boys’ school, would set things right. After the house had b
een taken, David found himself and the girls a small two bedroom place for a couple of months. Because of his dwindling performance and a lack of attendance, he had lost his job at the high school where he taught mathematics, drafting and auto mechanics. He was living on credit now. The money was in short supply and all he had to his name was this old car, a heap of junk now that had been pristine when he bought it. It would be a miracle if it brought them all the way to Richmond without incident, and it would also be a miracle if the next gas station would accept one of his overdrawn credit cards.
His plan seemed impossible. He pushed his heavy black-framed glasses back up his nose and leaned a little further over the wheel to see the ever-shortening expanse of road in front of his head lights. He started to panic about how difficult it might be to sell this clunky lemon once he got to Richmond. That’s all, he thought. Wow ‘em at the interview tomorrow, then sell the car for enough money to cover two months’ rent and the minimum payments on three of the four cards. Then he could use those again for more groceries. No matter how he phrased it in his head it sounded foolish. He forced himself to pull it together as the nose of the gold Thunderbird edged closer to the snow-dusted rock face to the right of the narrow roadway.
He had never driven in the mountains, had never even been to the mountains before, but had heard a million stories about the dangers of logging trucks and roads that could vanish into thin air before your eyes. The voices of the friends he still had echoed in his head and his wariness was multiplied because he wasn’t sure if his old white-wall tires had enough tread left to get the car out of a tight spot if one should arise. Leighton and he couldn’t yet afford a new car with the house, the loan payments, and then the fertility clinic bills, so they had priced out a set of new tires for the T-bird, planning on making it last as long as they could. But they hadn’t got the tires before—
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