Overexposed. Michael Blair

      We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program.

      Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

       J. Kirk Howard, President

      Printed and bound in Canada

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       for Pamela

      Author’s Note

      Many of the locations in this book — Granville Island, Sea Village, Bridges Pub, Harbour Ferries Marina, the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club — are real, although not necessarily exactly as portrayed. All events and characters, however, are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

       chapter one

      I found the dead man on a bright Sunday morning in September, the week after Labour Day. He was slumped in a plastic lawn chair on the roof deck of my house, chin on his chest, fingers linked in his lap, ankles comfortably crossed, looking for all the world as though he had just dozed off. I didn’t know he was dead, of course, when I found him, although I suppose he knew. The first thing that occurred to me, standing there in my socks, hung over from the previous night’s celebration of the close of the fourth decade of my life, was that some local homeless person, of which there are a few in Vancouver, even on Granville Island, had somehow managed to get onto the roof deck and had fallen asleep there. On closer examination, however, I realized that he was too well dressed to be homeless, in a blue blazer, yellow polo shirt, grey trousers, and polished black loafers. A friend, then, I thought, left over from the night before, too drunk to drive home — some of my friends are that sensible. I didn’t recognize him, though. A friend of a friend, perhaps.

      I wasn’t in the best of shape myself. The slightest exertion caused me to break into an icy sweat. My mouth seemed to be lined with ferret fur, my head felt as though someone had jabbed sharpened sticks behind my eyeballs, and the coffee, which I’d made far too strong, was making me twitchy and nauseous.

      “Hello?” I said to the man in the chair. My voice, roughened from too much drink and talk the night before, was gravelly and unfamiliar in my own ears.

      He didn’t answer, of course. I stepped closer. He was in his late fifties or early sixties, I guessed, with a full head of iron grey hair, which appeared to have been recently cut. He was clean-shaven, and his complexion was fine and pale, but with a slightly waxy appearance.

      “Hello,” I said again, louder. I grasped his shoulder, shook him gently. “Hey, wake up. Go home. The party’s over.”

      Unsurprising in retrospect, he felt stiff and unresponsive, curiously cool to the touch, even through the material of his jacket, a condition I attributed at the time to spending the night under the stars. I shook him a little harder, whereupon he toppled out of the chair, landing on the deck with an ugly thud. Startled, I jumped back, spilling coffee on myself and almost tripping over a potted plant. The man lay stiffly on his side, in more or less a sitting position, as though he were made of plaster. Slowly, though, his arms and legs settled into a more comfortable-looking attitude.

      He wasn’t dead drunk, I realized then. He was just dead.

      I stumbled downstairs — or below, if you insist; I live in a floating home. Kevin Ferguson, my friend and former boss, was sprawled on the sofa in the living room. Kevin may have looked like death warmed over, but he wasn’t dead. Dead men don’t make the kind of noise he was making. I shook him awake. He snorted and snuffled and sat up with a startled jerk that made my head hurt.

      “What? What is it?” he said, looking around with a panicky expression on his horsy, freckled face.

      “There’s a dead man on the roof,” I said.

      “Eh? What?”

      “There’s a dead man on the roof,” I said again.

      “So why tell me, for crissake?” he growled. “Call 911.” He flopped back down onto the sofa.

      I went into the kitchen to use the phone. There were empty wine, beer, and liquor bottles everywhere, and glasses and dirty dishes and every piece of cutlery I owned piled in the sink and stacked in the dishwasher. A pair of green plastic garbage bags overflowed with pizza boxes, paper plates, and Chinese takeout containers. A fat fly buzzed around the remnants of a Costco chocolate cake on the kitchen table. Ignoring the mess, I took the phone off the wall, focused as best I could, and managed to dial 911 on the very first try.

      “Fiepolisamblans,” a female voice said.