The Bay of Love and Sorrows (22 page)

The night they finally took Tom in to be interrogated, Vincent ran away from Constable Matchett and, holding on to Maxwell, he escaped into the woods. The little dog had one eye swollen shut because someone had come into the yard and booted it, and then that someone had run back along the fence so that Matchett couldn’t get a look at who it was.

Vincent had fed his gerbil, Snowflake, its supper and put on his jacket with the four big buttons. He had attempted to leave a note about going to visit his Aunt Libby. His main intention may have been to hide the dog from people.

As soon as Vincent began to cross the brook he lost his balance and Maxwell fell over the falls, scampering here and there in a circle, its swollen eye unable to open, its two big front paws splashing the water in front of it.

Vincent jumped over the falls after the dog.

For two days men searched everywhere for him and found his dog, drowned, at the mouth of Derrick’s stream at nine o’clock the next Wednesday night.

Tom, thin and haggard-looking, was then taken to the Sheppardville Road to join in the search along Arron Brook.

Behind a windblow they found a boot. But for two more days there was no other sign.

And then Bobby and Joyce Taylor discovered the body lying half-hidden in the swirling water only thirty yards from where the dog had been found.

He had been dead four days. His jacket was still buttoned up. His pipe was gone.

Bobby remembered teasing Vincent once when he said he was sweet on Gail Hutch.

“I could protect her,” Vincent had said finally. “From Mr. Hutch.”

Bobby sat in the wet dirt on his knees, turning around at everyone: “No one will have to send him home now at ten o’clock” he said.

Arron Brook rushed on. And it rained all night.

The police, Constable Delano included, felt they had a weak case against Tom Donnerel. He went to Laura McNair at the prosecutor’s office with interviews and documents, and some pictures of Madonna Brassaurd found in Michael’s farmhouse. He said he did not know why these pictures were significant, but he had some faint “ongoing objection” to the direction they were taking in the case they were on. The interviews with both Michael and Silver made him feel this way as well.

“Why?” Laura said, glancing at the pictures and looking up at him, completely mystified.

“Perhaps it is this picture here” he said, shuffling through them and handing one to her. It showed Michael Skid on the verandah, leaning against the post, smiling, his long hair braided, a bandanna on his leg. In the corner, on a deck chair beyond the blue wooden table, was a small chocolate-coloured block of hash in tinfoil, and beyond that was Hutch’s Harley Sportster.

“Perhaps it’s because they believe they are the ones fashionable enough to be crucified,” Delano said, finally “And Karrie wasn’t included,” he said, fumbling for another picture, this one of Karrie standing on the bow of
The Renegade,
in a dress and carrying a purse.

“Well, Michael was with me — the night of the murder,” Laura snapped, noticing neither the hash nor the Sportster, “and he did everything to protect her. More than the police ever do in these matters,” she said, “Two hundred women a year are battered to death by their husbands or boyfriends — “

John Delano was taken aback. Not by what was said, but
how
it was said. It was as if Laura felt that
he
was trying to please her or prove himself to her by discrediting her friend. He had been infatuated by her, he had asked her out a half-dozen times — found out when her birthday was and sent her a card. All of this was known, by everyone, and it had made him look and feel ridiculous. But he was not ridiculous enough to be able to promote himself by this.

“Anyway, John, there is no case to solve,” she said, more kindly, turning away and taking down her coat to put on.

She added that it was clear that Vincent killed the woman, and certainly Tom put him up to it. Michael Skid had tried to protect the young woman from them. This was becoming more and more evident now.

“I think you are on an entirely different case than we are, John,” Laura said, laughing suddenly.

“I think so,” John said. Their eyes met in the mild, stuffy air of the back room of the courthouse. Suddenly a dark wave came over the sky, just for a second. And Delano knew by this that everything was over between them, every faint hope he had entertained about being with her.

“All this mystery,” Laura said, buttoning her coat and giving an acrimonious smile. “My, my”

Over the next five workdays, the police took statements from Dora and Emmett Smith, and from Madonna Brassaurd, who admitted that since Michael and Karrie had become friends, Tom turned jealous. They were able to verify that Daryll and Everette Hutch were in Chatham the night of the murder, and could find no evidence linking Silver Brassaurd.

The prosecution’s office was adamant that they had to charge Tom Donnerel. Laura said that they should enter two charges against him. One for criminal negligence, the other for conspiracy to commit murder, by using his brother. The entire community, and by now the province, wanted Tom, with some justification, to pay. By these charges, the prosecution felt it would throw light upon the whole messy circumstance.

“outrage on a violent river,” read the headline in the largest provincial paper.

“Certain cases in our province unite people in outrage and remorse,” it stated. “And never has this been more evident than the murder of young Karrie Smith.”

“best friends’ rivalry turns deadly,” read the headline in the other provincial paper.

The reaction to the case caused a certain pressure. And Laura was in fact pleased by this pressure. She had interviewed a bartender and three or four patrons of the bar in Neguac who had seen Tom just after midnight that night, telling people that Karrie would no longer be around to bother him. It was also known that, a month before, he left Vincent and went on a five-day drunk, where it was reported he had turned violent.

The idea now, quite apart from everything else, was that he was like his father — an obstinate, mean, unpredictable, and domineering drunk. And this more than anything inspired antipathy for him by Laura McNair, whose own father was kindly, helpless, and sad.

“He spent the money at the bar,” she said, “That’s where the money went!”

With small, inquisitive eyes which gave a cute and impish puffiness to her cheeks, she looked up at her mentor, Mr. Tait, who stood by the window overlooking the main street running back through this part of town. She was impish when
not
in court, and liked to tease.

The loss of her heroic brother, Lyle, still evoked a silence in her, which could be seen in the knee-length skirts and heavy brown shoes she wore, which had become her trademark — as much as the sou’wester she wore in the rain.

But the tragedy also gave her a more outgoing posture, for her family’s sake. And someone had finally come her way. Michael Skid. They had met as children and had dated as teenagers.

She had always been attracted to him. And John Delano knew this, and she felt that this was the reason he was trying to ruin this case,

“Even on criminal negligence we can press for eight to ten,” she said to her boss now, emphasizing
ten
the way people do when it will mean the undoing of others and not of themselves, and to show that she was savvy and knew about ten, as opposed to five or fifteen. She stared at the prosecutor and her eyes glowed, and the cuteness of her face didn’t match what she had just said.

The prosecutor, a heavyset man of thirty-eight, who was new to the community, and had the feeling that he was in an area of intangible remoteness because he himself had grown up twenty miles outside Fredericton, said emphatically, while reaching over to tie his shoe: “He’s a son of a bitch. I’m sure he was there — I mean, at the scene. He probably told Vincent to run away, hoping he’d get killed. But we’ll never get him for conspiracy or anything if he has any kind of lawyer. He’s smart enough to get away with it.”

The further outraged Laura McNair phoned Tom’s defence lawyer on her own initiative.

“Lookit,” she said, as she played with the telephone cord without taking her eyes off the notes she had written, “we can take this all the way — let me tell you, we know the son of a bitch was
there.
We’ll sit down on this one and prove it. The hundred dollars was found — it was part of the money Tom wanted. What would Vincent know about money?”

It was very strange that she had said, “Sit down on this one,” because it was her first murder case, and she had never used that expression before.

There was a long pause, and it seemed longer in the heat of mid-morning. Then Tom’s lawyer spoke. His voice came as a whisper, like a distress call from a wounded animal: “I’m getting death threats over this damn thing — what am I s’posed to do if that son of a bitch came to me? My wife is angry — phone calls. I haven’t slept in a week. The best thing to do is to get this case behind us — “

“Oh, I know — he’s a bugger,” she said, and she wrote in her notes: “big scaredy-cat!”

Yet Laura came into the office the next morning and found she had a phone call waiting. It was Tom Donnerel’s lawyer. He said there was no way to stop his client. Tom had resolved to plead guilty, saying that he had planned everything and had forced his brother to murder.

So, on his own initiative and to the relief of his lawyer, Tom pleaded guilty to the charge of criminal negligence and the further charge of conspiring to commit murder,

“Do you wish to do this?” his lawyer asked, pretending to be concerned, when his only concern, Tom knew, was if Tom said no. So he looked into his lawyer’s eyes, with fear and regret, remembering how Vincent had bothered Karrie all summer long, and understood his lawyer’s plight.

“It makes no difference now,” he said.

“Conspiracy to commit murder — we should fight that all the way, at least — we’ll go for the first charge — it’ll make a great difference in your life — it might have been criminal negligence, I’ll say — but conspiracy?”

Tom said no. He had, he said, led Vincent astray. And saying this, he remembered his brother’s huge lumbering hands. “If it weren’t for me, Vincent wouldn’t have done what he did.”

“Well — a terrible thing — a terrible thing,” his lawyer said.

Three weeks later Tom stood in the dock, in that brown suit he was going to wear to his parents’ funeral. There were many derisive cries: “Hang him!”

There was an audible grumble of disbelief from Mr. Jessop. And then there was nervous laughter.

Judge Skid, his face flushed and clean-shaven, with white, dried-out, lifeless hair and small red lines on his white cheeks, which indicated his drinking bouts, looked about as if counting the people in the room.

“The whole community has been outraged over this affair,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Tommie Donnerel whispered. He kept looking around, as if he wanted to be certain that it
was
the entire community or even if it was he they were outraged by. He began to shake uncontrollably, which caused Judge Skid to frown in disgust.

He then spoke with great affection for Karrie Smith, a young woman whom the community downriver loved and whom he wished he had met. Then he looked over at the parents and nodded, and both of them seemed pleased,

Then he looked at Laura McNair.

Ms. McNair gave her summation. She did not speak of the murder for more than a few moments.

She spoke of Karrie and her dreams washed away in her blood. And then she spoke of Vincent. She spoke of his childhood. She spoke of his dog, Maxwell And she introduced the report, from a day in the early 1950s, when Vincent, in stopping his baby brother, Tom, from falling off Burnt Church wharf, fell himself, causing the massive head wound that left him mentally like a child of four. This was something that Tom hadn’t known until that moment. Something that his parents had always hidden from him, something that now made him clutch the dock so he wouldn’t fall.

“
FAMILY OUTING TURNS TRAGIC
,” read the headline in the old and distant yellowed paper. It was one of the provincial papers and the story appeared on page six. Ms. McNair lifted it up triumphantly. Then, putting the paper down, she went around to the front of the prosecution’s table and suddenly turned and glared at Tommie Donnerel, her nostrils flaring out.