the rain falls, it falls in droplets of grief, and when the light shines, it is in waves and particles of grief. From whatever direction the wind blows – south, east, north, or west – it blows cinders of grief before it. Grief stings your eyes and sucks the breath from your lungs. No oxygen on this planet, no nitrogen; the atmosphere is composed entirely of grief.
Grief came at Cardinal not just from the myriad objects that had been Catherine’s: photographs, CDs, books, clothes, refrigerator magnets, the furniture she had chosen, the walls she had painted, the plants she had tended. Grief squeezed its way through the seams of the house, under the doors and around the windows.
He couldn’t sleep. The note repeated itself over and over in his head. He got up from his bed and studied it under the bright lights of the kitchen. Kelly had thrown out the envelope, but he retrieved it from the trash. The type was clearly the work of a computer printer, but there was nothing distinctive about it – at least, nothing he could detect with the naked eye.
Nor was there anything remarkable about the card itself. A Hallmark sympathy card and envelope was available at any drug or stationery store across the country.
The postmark showed the date and time – that would be the date and time it was processed, of course, not the date and time of mailing – and the postal code. That code, Cardinal knew, did not indicate the exact location of mailing, but the location of the processing plant where the card was handled. Cardinal recognized the postmark as Mattawa’s. He knew a few people who lived in Mattawa, acquaintances who could have no possible reason to hurt him. Of course, Mattawa was prime cottage country, lots of people went there from all over Ontario for weekends by the river. But it was well into October, and most people had closed their cottages for the winter.
Of course, if you wanted to disguise your true whereabouts, there was nothing to stop you driving to Mattawa and mailing a card from there; it was right on Highway 17, little more than half an hour from Algonquin Bay.
Lise Delorme was surprised to see him. It was Sunday, and he had caught her in the middle of washing her windows. She was wearing jeans with huge rips at the knees and a paint-stained gingham shirt that looked at least twenty years old. Her house, a bungalow at the top of Rayne Street, smelled of vinegar and newsprint.
‘I’ve been meaning to wash them since August,’ she said, as if he had asked, ‘and only just got around to it.’
She made coffee. ‘Decaf for you,’ she said. ‘Obviously you haven’t been sleeping.’
‘That’s true, but there’s a reason. I mean another reason.’
Delorme brought the coffee and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies into the living room.
‘Why don’t you ask your doctor for some Valium?’ she said. ‘There’s no point making things worse with lack of sleep.’
‘Tell me what you think of this.’ He pulled the card and envelope out of a manila folder and placed them on the coffee table. They were in a clear plastic sleeve, now, the card open, the envelope address-side up.
Delorme raised an eyebrow. ‘Work? How can you be bringing me work? I thought you were off for a week or two. Hell, if I were you, I’d be gone for months.’
‘Just take a look.’
Delorme leaned over the coffee table. ‘Somebody sent you this?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh, John. I’m so sorry. It’s so sick.’
‘I’d like to know who sent it. I thought you could give me your first impressions.’
Delorme looked at the card. ‘Well, whoever it is went to the trouble of printing out this two-line message instead of writing it by hand. That tells me it’s someone who thinks you might recognize their handwriting – or at least be able to match it up.’
‘Any candidates spring to mind?’
‘Well, anyone you’ve put in jail, of course.’
‘Anyone? I’m not so sure. You know, I put Tony Capozzi away for assault a couple of months ago and, sure, he’s pissed off, but I don’t see him doing something like this.’
‘I meant guys who are doing serious time. Five years or more, maybe. There’s not so many of those.’
‘And of those, it’s got to be someone who’s sophisticated enough – and persistent enough – to find out my home address. It’s not like I’m listed in the phone book. I’m thinking maybe someone connected with Rick Bouchard’s gang.’
Rick Bouchard had been one of the world’s natural-born creeps – even by the low standards of drug dealers – until he had been killed in prison a couple of years previously. Cardinal had helped put him there for a fifteen-year stretch and Bouchard, who, unlike most criminals, had many resources and a good deal of natural intelligence, had pursued him until the day he died.
‘Possible,’ Delorme said. ‘But how likely is that? With Bouchard dead and all.’
‘They know my address, and it’s their style. Kiki B. showed up at my door with a threatening letter a couple of years ago.’
‘But Bouchard was still alive, then, and Kiki has since retired, you told me.’
‘Do guys like Kiki ever really retire?’
‘Lots of bad guys are going to know your address. There’s the Internet, for one thing. And remember that idiot reporter a few years ago did a stand-up right outside your house? That was a huge case. Who knows how many people saw that?’
‘They didn’t use that clip nationally. I checked. It was just local.’
‘Local covers a lot of territory. John …’ Delorme took his hand between her warm palms, one of the few times she had ever touched him. Her face was soft, and even through the blur of pain – perhaps because of his pain – Cardinal thought her at that moment extraordinarily beautiful. He realized she must put on an entirely different face for work, armoured for the daily sarcasm festival of the squad room. Of course, so did he, so did everyone, but he had a sudden sense of Delorme, the only woman of the group, as a dolphin in a tank full of sharks.
‘It could just as easily be some sick neighbour,’ she said. ‘Somebody with a grudge against the police. It isn’t necessarily personal.’
Cardinal picked up the plastic folder. ‘The postmark indicates Mattawa.’
‘Yeah, well … Why don’t you let this go? It isn’t going to help you. It’s not going to make you feel any better. And you’d have to go to one hell of a lot of trouble. I’m not even sure you could.’
‘I was going to ask you to do it.’
‘Me.’ She regarded him, her eyes a little less soft.
‘I can’t do it, Lise. I’m involved.’
‘I can’t investigate this. It’s not a crime to send a nasty card through the mail.’
‘“Just no telling how things will turn out,”’ Cardinal read. ‘You don’t see that as a threat? Given
