Judging by the contents, it had served as a sort of catch-all. Phone numbers and names were scrawled at odd angles alongside recipes for mushroom bisque and some kind of sauce, reminders to pick up dry cleaning or pay bills, and ideas for photographic projects: Telephone series – all shots of people on phones: pay phones, cell phones, two-way radios, kids on tin cans, everything. And another: New homeless series: portraits of homeless people, but all fixed up and dressed in good suits, point being to remove as much of their ‘otherness’ as possible. Some other way? Less contrived? On the next page she had simply written: John’s birthday.
Delorme had the pen as well. It had been in Catherine’s shoulder bag along with the notebook. A simple Paper Mate, with very pale blue ink. Delorme wrote the words personal effects on a sheet of paper and compared it with the notes. It was the same ink – as far as one could tell without a lab test.
And then there was the note itself. The handwriting appeared to be the same as that in the notebook. The minimalist J in John, the t in other crossed and looped over the h in both the notebook and the suicide note. That terrible note, and yet the handwriting did not appear to be any more emphatic or wobbly than the rest of the jottings. In fact, the note was a good deal neater, as if the decision to die had brought with it an untouchable calm. But you had a good man, a loving, loyal husband. Why did you do this terrible thing? Delorme wanted to ask her. No matter how much pain you were in. How could you?
She placed all three items in a padded envelope and sealed it.
A few hours later that envelope was open on the kitchen table of John Cardinal’s house on Madonna Road. Kelly Cardinal was watching her father carefully flip through the spiral notebook. The sight of her mother’s handwriting made Kelly’s heart liquefy in her chest. Every now and again, her father made a note in his own notebook.
‘How can you stand to look at that stuff, Dad?’
‘Why don’t you go in the other room, sweetheart? This is something I have to do.’
‘I don’t know how you can bear it.’
‘I can’t. It’s just something I have to do.’
‘But why? It’s just going to make you crazy.’
‘Actually, it’s making me feel better in a weird way. I have something to focus on other than the simple fact that Catherine’s …’
Kelly reached out and touched his sleeve. ‘Maybe that’s exactly what you should be focusing on, rather than going over her notebook. It’s not healthy, Dad. Maybe you should just lie down and cry. Scream, if you have to.’
Her father was holding the notebook under the light that hung low over the kitchen table. He tilted it this way and that, first examining a blank page, and then a page with writing on it. His concentration was irritating.
‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘I mean, not if you don’t want to. But this is interesting.’
‘What, for God’s sake? I can’t believe you’re messing with that stuff.’ Thinking, I sound like a teenager. I must be reverting under the stress.
‘As far as I can tell, this is Catherine’s handwriting.’
‘Of course it is. I can tell that, even upside down. She makes those funny loops on her t’s.’
‘And it’s written with this pen – or one just like it – on a page torn from this notebook.’
‘Surely your colleagues already determined that, Dad. Why? Do you think somebody else wrote Mom’s note for her?’
‘No, I don’t – not yet, anyway. But look. Come round this side.’
Kelly debated whether to just go into the other room and turn on the TV. She didn’t want to encourage her father, but on the other hand, she didn’t want to do anything that would make things worse. She got up and stood behind him.
‘See, what strikes me funny about this,’ Cardinal said, ‘is that the suicide note is not the last thing Catherine wrote in this notebook.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You can see the impressions back here, earlier on. They’re very faint, but you can just make them out when you hold the notebook at the right angle. Can you see?’
‘Frankly, no.’
‘You’re not at the right angle. You have to sit down.’
Cardinal pulled out the chair beside him and Kelly sat down. He tilted the notebook slowly back and forth.
‘Wait!’ Kelly said. ‘I can see it now.’
Cardinal held the notebook steady in the light. There at the top of a page of random notes was a faint impression of the words Dear John. Cardinal tilted it slightly. Lower on the page, Kelly could just make out any other way … Catherine. The middle was obscured by other notes, including a reminder for Cardinal’s birthday.
‘My birthday’s in July,’ he said. ‘Over three months ago.’
‘You think she wrote her note three months ago? I suppose it’s possible. Pretty weird to carry around a suicide note for three months, though.’
Cardinal dropped the notebook on to the table and sat back. ‘On the other hand, there could be some perfectly simple explanation: she wrote it out one day, intending to … but then she changed her mind. For a while, at least. Or maybe she accidentally skipped a page in her notebook three months ago, and then, the other day, she just happened to use the first blank page in the book.’
‘Out of a concern for neatness? Seems a pretty odd time to be worried about using every page in your ninety-five-cent notebook.’
‘It does, doesn’t it?’
‘But it’s her writing. Her pen. In the long run, what difference does it make what page she wrote it on?’
‘I don’t know,’ Cardinal said. ‘I truly don’t know.’
Cardinal had learned long ago that a detective thrives on contacts. In the overworked and underfunded endeavours of forensic science, the slightest personal connection can help nudge a case along quicker than the average, and an actual friendship can work magic.
Tommy Hunn had never been a friend. Tommy Hunn had been a colleague of Cardinal’s back in the early days of his career in Toronto, when he was still working Vice. In many ways, Hunn had been a police force’s nightmare: excessively muscled, casually violent, cheerfully racist. He had also been a pretty good detective right up until he got caught in a bawdy house by his own squad. He could have faced charges much more serious than conduct unbecoming had not Cardinal gone to bat for him at his disciplinary hearing. He wrote letters of support for him, and later, when Hunn was looking for a new line of work, a letter of reference. Hunn had gone back to school, and eventually managed to get himself into the documents section of the Ontario Centre of Forensic Sciences, where he had been leading an apparently honourable life ever since.
‘Hoo, boy, it’s Cardinal the friendly ghost,’ Hunn said when he answered the phone. ‘Got
