More Than Sorrow

by Vicki Delany

  “There’s been some talk about tourists leaving and reservations being cancelled. But it’ll all blow over soon enough, I suspect. I hope,” Rebecca said.

  “Unless…” Joanne began. She didn’t finish the sentence because the doorbell rang once again.

  “Busy night,” she said, getting up to answer it.

  Rebecca Mansour sipped at her tea, and we watched the children play.

  Joanne led Maude Harrison out to the deck. She was twisting her hands in front of her and her eyes were wide with fright and her face was bloodless.

  Rebecca leapt to her feet. “Maude, what’s happened?”

  “I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do. I saw your car go by earlier, Doctor, and guessed you’d be here.”

  Joanne gestured toward a chair. “You need to sit down.”

  Maude shook her head. “It’s Grant.”

  Rebecca headed for the door.

  “No,” Maude said. “He’s okay. I mean he’s not hurt. I mean…he’s been arrested. The police have arrested him for Hila’s murder.” She burst into tears.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  It was after midnight when Grant Harrison came to collect his wife. Rebecca Mansour drove him.

  Joanne had insisted Maude couldn’t go home by herself and ordered Lily to vacate her room for the night. She’d made up the bed with fresh sheets and put a sleeping bag on the floor of my room for her daughter. Rebecca had gone to the police station to find out what was happening, having ordered Maude to remain here. Jake went to bed, but Joanne and I waited with Maude who insisted she couldn’t sleep. We sat in the living room, drinking tea. The forecast had been wrong and it had started to rain. High winds lashed the trees and water streamed down the windows. Small branches swayed and large ones groaned and debris scratched against the glass. The chimney of the propane fireplace in the living room squeaked as it moved.

  The house lights flickered, but before we could react, they came back on. I thought for a moment of the people who’d lived in this house when it was first built. A storm at night would be a terrifying thing, with nothing but tallow candles and burning wood to keep creatures of the dark at bay.

  When a curve of headlights swept up the road, we were at the side door before the car engine was even switched off.

  Two people got out, and Maude slumped in relief. Grant glanced toward us. He would have seen three women bathed in the light that burned over the door, but he headed straight for Maude’s car. He climbed inside, taking the driver’s seat, and sat there, staring straight ahead. Presumably he did not have the keys.

  “Thank you for your kindness,” Maude said. “Just a misunderstanding.” She dashed for the Toyota, holding her hand over her head as feeble protection from the storm. The engine roared to life and they backed up the driveway and sped off into the night in a spray of water from under the wheels.

  Rebecca Mansour joined my sister and me. She was drenched right though.

  “They aren’t holding him?” Joanne asked. “I’m glad.”

  “He wasn’t arrested. Just questioned.”

  “Well, I’m going to bed, morning comes early.”

  “Would you like a cup of tea before you leave?” I said. “You need to dry off a bit.”

  “Tea would be welcome, but I don’t want to keep you up.”

  “As my sister will tell you, I don’t sleep all that well most nights.”

  “I’m not surprised to hear it.” Rebecca kicked off her wet, muddy running shoes. Joanne thanked her for her help and made her way to bed. Her footsteps were slow and heavy on the stairs.

  I plugged in the kettle. “Would you like something a touch stronger? There’s a bottle of Drambuie in the cupboard, and I think there’s some Jameson’s as well.”

  “Jameson’s did you say? Faith and begorrah.” She put on a hideous Irish accent. “The answer to a lady’s prayers. Just a splash mind as it’s an ugly night to be out.”

  I found the bottle in the back of the cupboard. “Ice?”

  “Heresy. A drop of water will do.”

  I poured her drink and made tea for myself. I sat across from her at the big kitchen table.

  “Cheers,” she said.

  “Cheers.”

  “Do you know what the police wanted to talk to Grant about? He was gone for a long time.”

  “They wouldn’t tell me anything. Left me cooling my heels in an interview room. I had a couple of medical journals in the car, so at least I had something to read. Grant was pretty tight-lipped on the way home.”

  “Do you know them well?”

  “The Harrisons? Him, I don’t know at all, but Maude’s a dynamo with the hospital volunteer committee. I met him once at a fundraising dinner. The word taciturn was invented for Grant Harrison, I’d say.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “I guess he felt he had to tell me something, as I’d come to fetch him. The police are interested, he said, in anyone who might have come to visit Hila while she’s been staying with them. No one, apparently, had. She had no visitors. Grant seemed surprised that the police didn’t believe him. When he insisted, they asked about letters. None, he replied. She didn’t even get junk mail. They confiscated her computer and are searching to see who she’s been in touch with.”

  “She was taking university courses on line. Probably had lots of e-mails to do with that. Police. You said he was questioned by the police. Was anyone else present?”

  “Like who?”

  “CSIS is poking around. If the cops are looking into Hila’s friends and contacts, then they don’t suspect it’s a random attack sort of thing.”

  “I’m sure they’re looking into everything, Hannah.”

  “I guess. I don’t actually know anything about how the cops operate. I’ve never been on the,” I wiggled my fingers in the air, “crime beat.”

  “As for who was questioning Grant, he just said they and them.”

  “I may not know anything about the crime beat, but I do know a thing or two about intelligence operatives. Normally, they would have as much interest in the death of a Prince Edward County woman as in a farmer’s cow. So what’s brought them here?”

  I didn’t answer my own question. I wasn’t a journalist these days. I was a woman trying to get her head on straight and her life back. “No matter. It won’t do Grant any good if the townsfolk hear he’s been brought to the station and questioned. Rumor doesn’t need much to get it started.”

  “From what I know of Grant, he won’t give a rat’s ass, pardon the expression. But Maude, yes, it will upset Maude a great deal.”

  She finished her whiskey. When she put the glass onto the table a smile touched the edges of her mouth. I found myself smiling back; I liked this woman very much. In another life, another place, we could have been friends.

  We both jumped at the sound of a clatter and glanced toward the deck. I got up and peeked outside. The wind had knocked over a decorative metal flamingo and thrown it against the wall. The yellow light over the deck shone on sheets of rain, and the glass table top rattled. The wooden planks were littered with leaves and small branches. We’d forgotten to bring the cushions in. They’d be soaked in the morning.

  A chair scraped the linoleum behind me and I turned.

  “I’d better be going. Morning comes early at the hospital.” Rebecca studied my face. “Take care of yourself, Hannah. And if you can’t do that, will you at least let your sister take care of you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why don’t I believe you? Come and see me tomorrow morning at the hospital.”

  I stood in the doorway for a long time, watching the red lights of her car disappear into the storm. Then I came back inside and switched off the kitchen lights. I walked through the dark house listening to the sounds all aro
und me. Outside the storm continued, unabated. The old house groaned, but it had withstood far worse weather than this, and it would for a long time still to come. Inside we were all warm and snug. Well-fed, well-loved children tucked up safely in their beds. Farmers sleeping soundly before heading out to another day’s work. The horses and chickens and barn cats would be restless, but even they would know they were safe.

  I was restless and knew sleep would not come. I climbed the second set of stairs and went into the attic. I switched on the lamp and settled myself into the ratty old chair.

  ***

  “Finding anything?”

  I jumped. Weak morning light spilled through the un-curtained windows.

  “You frightened me,” I said to Jake.

  He leaned against the door frame. He was barefoot and dressed only in his pajama bottoms, riding low on thin hips. His arms bulged with muscle earned over days spent at a physical job. His chest was white, covered with sprinkles of black hair, but his neck and arms were as brown as the wood of the kitchen table. My sister was a lucky woman, to have that to keep her warm at night.

  “I’m enjoying the old letters,” I said. And I was. I’d taken the bunch off the top, put them to one side, and burrowed back in time. I stopped around 1820 and began reading a stack of letters between a woman by the name of Emily and her friend Sarah, both of them highly excited about the construction of Sarah’s new house and the purchasing of furniture and hiring of servants. The letters were out of order, with many gaps indicating where letters had either not been written or had been lost. Emily had beautiful handwriting, and I could understand every word. Sarah’s hand was small and cramped and difficult to decipher, but I knew that the trouble reading them was due to her penmanship, not to my brain injury, and that made me very happy indeed.

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Day-to-day life. Lives so different from our own. What are you doing up here, anyway?”

  “It’s my house. I can go where I like.”

  “I know that, Jake. I’m just asking.”

  “I saw the light and thought one of the kids might have left it on. You’re dressed. Haven’t you been to bed?”

  “You know Grant was released, right?”

  “Joanne told me when she got into bed.”

  “I couldn’t sleep, so came in here.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “What?”

  “Sit up all night. Sleep all day. While people work all around you.”

  I felt as if I’d been struck across the face. “What’s your problem, Jake? I’m paying my way, aren’t I? If you want me to leave, tell me to my face, and I will.”

  His eyes slid to one side. “Sorry, Hannah. Joanne loves you, I know that. She won’t hear of you leaving.”

  “And I love her. And Lily and Charlie. And you, Jake.”

  “Be sure and turn off that light when you’re done here, will you.” He left.

  I let out a long breath before bending my head once again over the papers.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “You think she went off her rocker?”

  “I think it’s a possibility,” Rick Brecken said.

  “Can’t say I’d be sorry to see the bitch get what’s coming to her.”

  “You’ve met?”

  “Once or twice. Tell me what you have on her.”

  “She doesn’t have an alibi for two important time frames. Thursday afternoon, when Hila disappeared. She won’t say where she was, and no one seems to be able to place her, try as they might. Again on Saturday after she found the remnants of the scarf and called the cops. Another couple of hours without an alibi.”

  “Manning’s not stupid,” McNeil sipped at her beer. “She’s a journalist, of all things, a successful one. If she killed Hila, or knew what had happened to her, she’d at least have come up with some story for where she was at the time in question.”

  The newcomer’s name was Gary Wolfe. He was with military intelligence. Not the sort of role that should have him looking into a small-town murder. But as soon as the name Manning crossed his computer screen, he was on the phone, calling for details. Two hours later he was on the road out of Ottawa, heading to Picton. He thrust his hand into the tin of nuts and sorted through them, looking for cashews and brazils, throwing the peanuts aside. They were in his motel room, gathered around a six-pack of beer and bags of nuts and potato chips. “Rick?”

  “Precisely the point, I’d say. There’s nothing rational about Manning killing Hila Popalzai. If she wasn’t acting rationally, she wouldn’t have thought rationally enough to be able to cover it up. I’ve seen her medical records…”

  “Wow. How’d you ever get those?” McNeil said, impressed.

  He didn’t bother to answer. “TBI they call it. Traumatic brain injury. Severe trauma to the occipital lobe, among other injuries, resulting in a massive concussion, all of which can lead to seeing things that aren’t there as well as vision and perception problems. Did her mush of a brain think Hila was coming after her? And lash out?”

  “I don’t see it,” McNeil said. “Remember the autopsy? Hila was beaten. Pretty severely. Almost certainly tied up while they were having a go at her. If Manning was having some sort of delusion, she might lash out, sure. But carry the woman away, conceal her, rip off her underclothes, and tie her up?”

  “She wasn’t raped, or even molested, so no need to think it wasn’t a woman. And who knows what Manning might have been thinking.” Brecken took a long drink.

  “Well, I don’t buy it,” she said. “Hannah Manning couldn’t…. wouldn’t…have done all of that on her own.”

  “That sister of hers is mighty protective. Suppose the sister came across Manning with Hila, realized what had happened and helped get rid of the body. Hila might not even have been dead yet, and the sister knocked her around to make it look like a beating and then whacked her over the head to get it over with.”

  “Now you’re really stretching. If the sister had had anything to do with it she would’ve folded the first time an officer questioned her. She’s just a farm wife, for god’s sake. You’ve spent too long in the netherworld.”

  “The netherworld, as you call it, is why Hila was here. In Canada. Don’t forget, her family was murdered in Afghanistan. She’s the only one who survived. And then she ends up murdered? You think that’s a coincidence?”

  “You can’t possibly suspect Hannah Manning is an Islamist sympathizer? She’s an educated Western woman for god’s sake.”

  “That means nothing when these religious fanatics get hold of them. But no, Manning isn’t a friend of the Taliban, I’ll give her that. If nothing else. But she’s a reporter, and they have their own agenda, always after ‘the story.’” Wolfe made quotation marks in the air with his fingers. “No matter what harm that story might do to their country’s interests. Scum of the earth, most of them.”

  McNeil put down her beer, unfinished. “You’re saying Manning killed her in a fit of insanity, then you’re saying it was politically motivated. Can’t you get your story straight?”

  “At first I figured it was political, yes,” Brecken said. “Someone finishing what the Talib failed to do to Waheed Popalazi’s family. That’s why I’m here. But now, yeah I’m considering Manning. And her sister. And a passing serial killer. But hey, you’re the cops. Aren’t you the ones supposed to be looking at all the angles?”

  “We’re doing our jobs, thank you. And we’d be better off without any unofficial help. She got to her feet. “Be seeing you.”

  “Take the sister to the station tomorrow,” Wolfe said. “Put the pressure on. If she knows something, she’ll crack soon enough. If she doesn’t know anything, it’ll up the pressure on Manning. And, if it is Islamic extremists, maybe’ll they’ll think the heat’s off and relax. When people relax they
make mistakes.”

  “I don’t take orders from you.”

  He tossed another handful of nuts into his mouth. “The orders will be on your desk before you get home.”

  She slammed the motel room door on the way out.

  Rick Brecken leaned back in his chair. His feet were on the bed and he lifted his bottle of beer. “You don’t need to antagonize the locals, Gary. We need them.”

  “We don’t need anyone. Let them run around in circles with their little investigation. Manning did it, pure and simple.”

  “If Manning killed Hila, and I concede that’s a possibility, but only one of several, you must know she’ll get off for diminished responsibility. Her doctor, her medical records, her media friends will make sure of that.”

  “So then it’s up to me to make sure this is handled as a national security matter. I don’t intend to see it go to court.” Wolfe threw a peanut onto the floor.

  Rick Brecken grinned. “What the hell’d she ever do to you?”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  When I came downstairs, having not gone to bed, Jake’s mother was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a mug of coffee.

  Joanne stood at the counter, making the children’s sandwiches. She looked tired. Dark bags had formed beneath her eyes, and the skin around her mouth had fine lines that hadn’t been there a few weeks ago.

  “Bad business,” Marlene said. Her mouth twisted as if she were sucking on a lemon. “No good comes from letting them into our county. They bring their fights with them.”

  “Yes, yes,” Joanne said. “You told us that already.”

  Marlene turned her attention to me. “Jake says you’ve been poking around in our family letters.”

  “Not poking. Reading them. I find them interesting.”

  “I suppose that’s all right then. Mind you take care of them. They’re very important to us.”

  So important they’d been sold along with the house and left to the attentions of mice and mold.