happy to take your kids away from you. It happened all the time.”
Dan felt shot through with emotion. What would have become of him and Kedrick twenty years ago? Impossible to say. He considered the question before he spoke. “Did you ever suspect that Craig was murdered?”
Magnus’s face exploded with anger. “Oh, he was murdered all right.” Dan was startled by the vehemence in his voice. “But you’ll never be able to pin it on the bitch!”
“Lucille?”
Magnus nodded. “Oh, no — she was too smart. And she had help in high places.”
Dan wondered if Magnus was referring to Burgess, the OPP commissioner with the barracuda eyes. “But why do you still hope he’ll turn up alive if you know he’s dead?”
“I’m getting ahead of myself.” Magnus nodded toward the creased piles on the shelf. “The letter. I got it two, maybe three weeks later. It took me a while to get out here, but it was waiting for me when I did.” He held up the piece of paper he’d been scratching through the debris for and offered it to Dan. “You can read it for yourself.”
November 1st
My dearest, darling Magnus,
Forgive me. I should be with you instead of sending you this sorry letter. I know how hard this is going to be for you. I am a weak man. I can’t spend the rest of my life with you.
An hour ago I told you I was leaving with you tonight. I lied. I know now I can never do that. She’s won. I cannot live without my sons. It’s all in the diary. Do what you see fit with it.
Please forgive me. I’m going to give her what she’s always wanted. By the time you get this, I will be a dead man.
Love always, Craig
Dan looked up. “Suicide?”
Magnus nodded. “It’s what she wanted. Craig talked about it often enough. Even said how he’d do it, if it came to that. He said if he ever disappeared, he’d be under the ice in the bay. In the winter the reach freezes over. Only the ferry passing through every half hour keeps the channel open. The ice is thick. Thick enough to keep you under till it thawed. It would keep you down all right. Your bones would stay covered over till spring.”
“You think he’s at the bottom of the Bay of Quinte?”
“He told me he’d kill himself if she managed to keep him from his sons. And she did.” Magnus nodded to the picture in his hands. “And she did.”
Dan was prepared for a long wait, but Magnus started in again, the telling easier now. “Twenty-three years ago we met at Lake on the Mountain. I was the gardener up at the lodge. Have you been there?”
Dan nodded.
“He’d just separated from his wife, but he hadn’t told her he was gay — just said he had things he needed to work out. We had an affair. It was going along fine until he decided to tell her about it. He thought she’d understand. So he told her — and she threatened him. She said she’d never let him see his sons again. And she had ways to make sure that happened. He was terrified. He broke things off with me and went back to her. It hurt, but I understood how he felt. I didn’t hear from him for a year. She got him into some kind of therapy, one of those programs where they try to change you. But you can’t change these things. I know it’s hard for your sort to understand, but that’s just how it is….”
“I’m gay, Magnus.”
Magnus gave him an appraising stare. He nodded. “All right. Then you know.”
“And I also have a son who means more to me than anything in the world. So I know what that would mean to a man like Craig Killingworth.”
Magnus nodded. “Anyway, he wasn’t cured. He just buried it inside. One day he snapped. He drove his car over the side of the road trying to kill himself. For four days they couldn’t find him. He lay in that car, pinned against the steering wheel, hidden by the brush around it. Some kids picking blueberries spotted it and called the police to get him out.”
“But he survived?”
“That time, yes. Anyway, he went back to her again. Crazy — just plain crazy. She’d been happy thinking he was dead. Now she had to worry about him all over again. That’s when I came to work for them. He thought it might help him get better if he had me around, at least part-time, puttering around the grounds, though he was still pretending to be what she wanted him to be. I think it made things worse for him, though. It was harder for him to have me there and not be with me.”
“And she didn’t suspect you?”
“I think she knew something was up. That’s why she concocted that story about him attacking her and claiming he was mentally unstable.”
“It wasn’t true?”
“Nah, it’s a lie. They were arguing and she started to beat him with her fists. He put up his hand to stop her from hitting him. She called it assault.”
“He told you that?”
“I was there. I saw it! Right after that, she fired me.”
Dan flashed on the OPP report stating Magnus had been fired by Craig Killingworth. “Did you tell this to the police?”
“I tried. They didn’t care. I think that was when she decided to kill him. She vowed that if she couldn’t have him, no one would. ‘If I can’t have you, nobody will!’ She actually said those words to his face. That’s when Craig got suspicious and started taping her phone conversations. He got her on tape asking a friend how she could drive him to suicide. He’d tried it once — she knew it wouldn’t take much to make him try again.”
“Why didn’t he go to his family for help?”
“Oh, she was right tricky. When he was in the hospital recovering from the car crash, Lucille told Craig his family had turned against him because he was gay. And then she phoned his family and said Craig didn’t want to hear from them any more because they’d caused the trauma he was going through. Anyway, they all believed her stories.” He clucked his tongue. “She was a monster!”
Dan thought of Trevor’s story about how his mother had stopped talking to her brother when he first left home.
“This was back in the eighties. It was all AIDS-this and AIDS-that. They were pointing fingers, blaming us for the epidemic. ‘God’s wrath on queers’ and all that rot. Nothing but ignorance and superstition.”
“The old man — Nathaniel Macaulay. Did he know what was going on?”
“He surely did. He hated the fact that his son-in-law was a hell-bound faggot. Worried himself sick one of the grandsons might catch it. Never stopped nagging his daughter about it.”
Which explained the will, Dan realized. “What happened the last time you saw Craig?”
“We spoke on the phone that morning. He sounded moody and went on for a long time about not wanting to leave his sons. It was killing him, I could tell. Craig was living in Bloomfield by then. Because of the assault charges, he wasn’t allowed to see his
