I ask something…?”
“Shoot.”
“On the last page in the police report, you were quoted as saying your dad was a liar. What did you mean by it?”
Ted gave a bitter laugh. “My father showed up at home right before he disappeared. I hadn’t known he was coming and I was thrilled to see him. It was my birthday and I thought he’d come for that. He came into my bedroom. I remember he was crying. He held me a long time and said he was coming back to us and that everything was going to be the way it had been. But he never came back again, and I couldn’t understand why he didn’t keep his promise.”
Dan nodded. “Not much of a birthday present.”
Ted looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes.”
“Sure you don’t want to rethink this?”
“No — I can’t.”
They finished their coffee and got ready. Ted wanted to stop for cigarettes. He couldn’t give up every addiction, he told Dan with a smile. That would still give him time to get to the ferry and over to the house while Thom did whatever he needed to prepare himself. They stepped out into the whiteness of a flurry. Dan hesitated on the steps of the café before heading for his car. He watched Ted head out, shoulder to the wind, waiting till he drove off.
Dan started up the engine, the wipers taking right off again, picking up the old refrain: Then maybe you are. Supposed to have an epiphany. Then maybe you are. Supposed to have an epiphany. Craig Killingworth’s face bobbed up and down like a sideshow clown at the midway, a moving target in the Shoot-’Em-Up galleries. In the background, Dan imagined Ted’s father-in-law, Nathaniel Macaulay, holding a gun to his shoulder and squeezing the trigger again and again.
Dan slowed the car as he approached Glenora. No line-up. He glanced across the water where the ferry was just reaching the far shore. There was still time. He found himself turning around and heading back up County Road 7 to Lake on the Mountain. He thought of its subterranean aquifers travelling hundreds of miles unseen, only to emerge again somewhere strange, mysterious and unexpected, like a father’s love for his child.
The lake suddenly came into view. Dan pulled into the empty parking lot. The sleet was bashing against the windshield, insistent, like something trying to pound its way into his brain, thousands of little pieces of a giant puzzle flinging themselves at him, getting closer and closer but not quite reaching him.
After all these years, he thought, it was strange how the past still held sway over the present, like hands reaching out from the grave. An old man’s prejudices had stained and perverted his grandson’s lives, and a father’s diary that had lain unread for more than twenty years was about to destroy his family. From this day forward, Dan promised himself, he’d think more about the here-and-now. Donny was right — he’d been caught in a dead man’s world after all.
He sat looking over the Bay of Quinte, with its breathtaking views. If he tried, he could probably pick out the Killingworth mansion on the far side hidden by its copse of pine trees. Were Craig Killingworth’s remains out there, his final resting spot somewhere just offshore from his wife’s cheerless estate? What had gone through his head in those final moments as he stood saying goodbye to all the things he was giving up? How did you say goodbye to your life, letting go of everything that mattered?
What is the one thing that matters most to you? Whatever it is, hold fast to it. Martin’s words again. Thank god for Kedrick. In all those years, his son was the one thing that had kept Dan’s head above water — at times only just above, but still. Dan had promised himself nothing would ever come between him and Ked. Even alcohol hadn’t made him break that promise. So there was hope, he knew. There would always be hope, so long as love remained. Then what had happened to Craig Killingworth, a man who claimed his sons mattered more to him than anything, even life itself? Why hadn’t he chosen to live for them?
Something … something … something was driving at him, ticking at the back of his brain with an insistent rhythm. Whatever it was, he couldn’t ignore it. It held there, waiting for him to find it.
Dan recalled his momentous meeting with Ted a month earlier as he’d unravelled the secrets of the past, unlocking the mysteries of the long-dead. It’s my birthday, Ted had said, just before going out the door. Time to start living.
Dan thought back. It had been the day after Halloween, making it … November First. The date Craig Killingworth had planned to leave town twenty years earlier. The same date on which he’d disappeared forever. If Dan were ever to leave Ked, for any reason on earth, it wouldn’t be on his son’s birthday.
Or any other day.
Because a man who loved his children that much could never abandon them, not even for a pact to begin a new life with another man. Earlier that day Craig Killingworth had said his real goodbyes, to his friend and lover, Magnus Ferguson. Magnus hadn’t known it at the time, but he’d suspected something was wrong when he spoke with Craig on the phone in the morning. So he’d gone to the house and helped him pack. Craig had always been fussy about his clothes, he’d said. A fussy man, who got cranky about packing….
Dan looked down at the cell phone resting on the passenger seat. Yes or no? he asked himself. Yes or no? It had to be … yes! He picked it up, flipped it open with one hand and dialled. Yes! Yes! It screamed at him now. Why? Why hadn’t he seen it in all this time?
Saylor answered. Dan spoke quickly, trying to convince the Picton cop that what he was saying was really true this time. Because he’d just grasped the one thing that was bothering him in all this mess. Despite the apparent suicide letter to Magnus, despite the eyewitness reports and the numerous sightings following Craig Killingworth’s disappearance, leaving just a trace of hope that he might still be alive somewhere, something had been nagging at him. Because despite even what the diary said, he’d felt it in his bones … the one thing out of place in all this sordid sadness.
He’d finally found the unexpected: a suitcase. Standing empty behind a door in a police file, but packed earlier that day according to Magnus. It was the one thing awry in the report. A man had packed his suitcase to go away. Why would he bother to unpack it if he was going to kill himself? Dan’s instincts had been right all along. Ted said his father had come back to see him the day of his birthday. He would never have left on his son’s birthday after promising Ted he was coming back to stay: I’m going to give her what she’s always wanted. By the time you get this, I will be a dead man.
Craig Killingworth hadn’t decided to kill himself. He was a dead man because he knew he couldn’t live without his sons. That meant for the rest of his life he would have to endure whatever his wife had in store for him. He’d unpacked his suitcase — because he’d finally made up his mind to return. Just as he’d promised Ted.
Grief. A powerful word beginning with a soft utterance and ending in a feather’s caress. There’s no way to say it without beginning and ending in a sibilant whisper. Intake of breath or out, it’s still the same — like a verbal palindrome. Craig Killingworth had felt its pull, soft and seductive enough to make him sacrifice himself. He’d given in to its drowning embrace, giving up what he wanted most — his freedom — for what he couldn’t live without: his boys. In doing so, he’d lost both. There wasn’t a prayer or lamentation or elegy in the world that could convey, in words or music, the tragedy that this had brought about. There was nothing that could revoke or undo the senseless horror of what had happened to him: If I can’t have you, nobody will!
Craig Killingworth had unpacked his suitcase that day and then sat down and written his letter to tell Magnus the truth,
