The Bay of Love and Sorrows (33 page)

After twenty years the events were brought into focus again, by the custodian at the amalgamated school, Bobby Taylor. Sitting in his small closeted office on a cool June afternoon, he thought back to that time.

He could see Silver, after all these years, in his mind’s eye.

He took a drag on the cigarette and held it in his lungs, then blew it out the open window into the sunlight, the smell of fresh paint on the window sill, and the warm scent of tilled earth for the flower bed that grew along the brick wall

On December 19, 1974, at 8:52 in the evening, he and Joyce had been decorating the tree and had drunk a full pitcher of eggnog and white rum. The air was sweet, the fire going with lovely sticks of birch, and outside, above their back porch, the stars illuminated the heavens and seemed to toss off sparkles on the snow, which blanketed their property to the trees.

It was their first wedding anniversary and they were reminiscing about what had gone on over the year. Karrie had been Joyce Taylor’s bridesmaid, Tom had been one of the ushers,

“It was as if that was Karrie’s wedding too,” Joyce said, hesitantly, as good people who sometimes mix deep thought and sentimentality are hesitant to expose this mismatch,

A gloom descended upon their private party and Bobby looked at the nutmeg in his eggnog and was silent. For in truth he had been more than mildly fond of Karrie.

“You know,” Joyce said, “it’s Brian Hutch’s birthday today,

He was like Karrie’s little boy. She brought him presents last year, remember? I wish we could do something for them - something to help them start all over. Karrie would have wanted that,”

“Of course,” he said, “but I don’t know what we’d ever be able to do — with Everette Hutch as her brother and his uncle. He would either steal it, break it, or threaten them.” Then he added, “I pray that someone shoots him soon — but it won’t be until Everette kills someone first,”

So Bobby said what people always say when someone dangerous is about,

Joyce nodded at him. “Well, something good will happen sooner or later,” she said.

Just then the door opened and little Brian Hutch came in, followed by his mother.

To Bobby it seemed the strangest coincidence.

He drove them to the police station, where they handed the money over. Gail felt great fear in going to the police, for she had been conditioned from childhood to hate and fear them. Every one of her relatives had hated and feared them. By now even Brian did. But she hoped that this fear would pass, and knew that her life and the life of her son must change forever.

“I’m going to make them supper — so bring them back if you can,” Joyce said.

“Be home by ten o’clock” Bobby said, wondering why in the world that statement sounded familiar.

John Delano took over the case that night of December 19, at ten o’clock, as instructed by Sergeant Fine, who now accepted the notion of spots of blood and a darker, more sinister summer, and made no more derisive comments about Delano’s personal motivation of infatuation, or about Tom Donnerel getting what he deserved when he was stabbed.

Delano had no sooner gotten back from downriver when Gail and Brian arrived, with Bobby Taylor. The bills were placed in front of him.

“Whose money is this?” Delano asked.

Gail told him it had to be Dora Smith’s — part of the money that had been stolen. And it was hidden in her house.

“And who stole it and hid it at your house — Vincent and Tom?” John asked.

Little Gail Hutch laughed and laughed, and then squirted her inhaler.

“Vincent and Tom never entered our door — it was Everette —” she said.

“You sure?” John asked.

There was silence. And then Brian spoke, his voice clear and calm.

“He hammered the nail,” he said, “where the money was hidden — he told me he had to hammer the nail.”

John Delano handed the little boy a cup of hot chocolate and patted his head. The little boy gave a crinkly smile.

“It’s his birthday,” Bobby Taylor whispered.

So John Delano telephoned a person who could find a birthday cake and candles at such an hour. And party hats if she could. A person who made no judgement, who worked for the police with the homeless and bereaved. A person John Delano admired.

This person was Nora Battersoil.

Rumours began. The river was taking on that agonized, dazzling feeling that a crisis was in the cold December air. And the murder of Karrie Smith was being refitted, retraced. Now Vincent and Tom had both resurfaced out of the din of death and speculation as heroic. Tom again thought of as heroic as he once was by that young woman willing to invest her time in him. And now, because of this exoneration, Emmett Smith wanted to confess, saying he’d known of their innocence all along. Dora caught him telephoning the police station and stopped him. Such was the state of affairs at the Smith house at eleven o’clock that night.

John Delano drove about the small town, and waited for morning. Then at seven o’clock, without an ounce of sleep, he phoned Deborah Matchett.

“You think it’s
him
too,” he said cautiously and sorrowfully.

“I don’t know — I hope not, for Laura’s sake.”.

There was a pause.

“Come over — I want to show you something — something I kept pretending did not matter,” Delano said.

He lit a cigarette and lay on the couch in the early-morning dark. Then he once again went over his notes.

The youths who had been treated in hospital in Charlottetown for poisoning had said that the bad mescaline they bought for their beach party had came from a sailboat. (These were the same teenagers Karrie had spoken to from the deck the night of her birthday.) Their statements, each eleven pages long, were given two months ago, the Monday after Thanksgiving.

That was how long John Delano, connecting these events, was certain Karrie had been murdered by someone else.

The pictures of Karrie’s discarded body, bruised and naked with a swollen face, were being looked at by John Delano.

He sat with Deborah Matchett at the table in his trailer, at eight o’clock, with a pot of coffee warming. He sat back while she looked down at these photos. She too was now engaged to be married. And it seemed to him that she, too, for one or two moments the previous fall had believed, as others did, that he was stalking Laura. That he had used this murder as a way to stay involved with her. Delano felt Deborah’s thinking was a way people sometimes had to make others slaves of their own good conscience.

Now that she no longer felt this way, John took no delight in her change of heart. Other questions were predominant. He had no time to reflect on how slightly he had been treated. But there were one or two moments when she looked at him in whimsical apology.

“I have treated women badly,” he mumbled for no apparent reason, as he stared at the picture. He was in a way apologizing to Deborah Matchett, to all women because of this. He looked at her quickly, “I mean in school — and I’m sorry about it now — some of the things I said — did.”

“Oh, John — we’ve all treated people badly — we all have — so —” She stopped short. He nodded pensively and shook his head. Then looked at the picture again.

There was blood on the victim’s left breast and nipple. He showed Deborah the picture of Karrie’s left buttock, where there was a bloodstain in the shape of what could have been a bill. He showed her the picture of the drip of blood on the path thirty yards away from the murder, in the opposite direction of the Donnerels’.

But there was something else. Delano had something to show her on a photograph taken at the barn the morning Karrie was found, something he had disregarded at the time.

“Look”

“I am looking,” Deborah said.

“And what do you see?”

“I see a picture of the victim taken in the barn on September 10,

1974.”

“And what do you see?”

(Pause)

“And what do you see?”

(Pause)

“And what do you see!”

“Goddammit, John Delano, will you fuckin shut up — and let me look?”

“Well, come on, Debby,” John said peevishly, “what do you see?”

“I don’t know,” Deborah said finally

And John pointed. He didn’t point to the clot of blood on the head, the swollen face. He pointed down, to the bottom of the picture, on the right calf. “What’s that?” he asked.

“I don’t know — a birthmark?”

“Let me tell you what that is,” John said. “I will tell you what that is, and then I will make a gambler’s bet about this whole case. That’s a burn from the exhaust of a Harley-Davidson. And it’s Hutch’s Harley-Davidson.”

“Well, why wasn’t it mentioned in the autopsy report?”

“I don’t know — I don’t know why it wasn’t mentioned in the autopsy — okay — but that’s what it is. That’s what the bike tracks on the shore were.”

“Well, so what? She went for a ride on a Harley, big deal Nothing can be proven by that.” She smiled indulgently at him, sat back, and lit a cigarette.

He stood and walked to the window. There was a peevishness about him when he knew he was right, and the room was silent and filled with the deadness of cold air. He had not wanted to go against the grain. But not only the grain, of course. He had tried to convince himself that Laura was right about the case, and he felt that if he had pursued what he knew with more vigour, she would not now be engaged to Michael Skid.

The new polished streetlights at the end of the lane had not yet gone off, the traffic continually ground over flat windswept ice.

Delano turned and lit a cigarette.

“I know. For the last few months I thought the same thing. So what? It’s just a drive on a bike. It was the grey area, but it fits. It fits since I first met Michael Skid in the hospital last summer. Something bothered me about him. About his rebelliousness. The idea of freedom for Karrie Smith, who never had any And Hutch posturing as a good man, and Michael replacing his friend, Tom, with his new friend, Hutch, and finally posturing as a bad man. But you see he was not a bad man. That’s what was behind all this — not Vincent or Tom — it had nothing to do with them.“

Constable Matchett continued to glance through the pictures of the body, and of the barn, now destroyed. Here she lifted her gaze and cleared her throat.

“Oh, I know I’m moralizing about Michael — but moral responsibility in the hands of the frivolous is the real case,” Delano said. “Michael traded upon it — I think he traded Karrie’s life for it, and by now I think he probably knows this. That’s what the pictures at the farmhouse always said to me and I didn’t understand why. But Karrie is the only one in those pictures that never belongs — she
is
always the country girl dressed to go to the city — killed because she knew something. That’s what the burn from the exhaust pipe really says. It says this:
Everette had the whole group of them hook, line, and sinker.”

“Where would Karrie get the money?”

There was silence for a moment, and then John nodded.

“Every cent came from the Smiths. Well take it downriver and set it in front of them. They didn’t admit to losing it, so it had to be stolen money — or a tax ripoff or something.”

Constable Matchett said nothing.

“Every cent came from the Smiths — somehow — and if they had told us this back in September, Tom might not be in jail, or Vincent dead.”

He looked out the grimy window again, smiled slightly, but only for a second or two. He began to ponder why it was they hadn’t reported this money as being stolen.

Dora Smith had Karrie’s upstairs room locked, for she could not stand to go into it. And she would not let Emmett near it. His mourning and his remorse burdened her. Sometimes she would go up to him and clap her hands in front of his face.

“Snap out of it — shape up!”

She had sent Gail Hutch into that room to clean it out just after the funeral. The woman had gone in, scared to meet the ghost of her friend, and did what she could, but left a few things where they were, out of respect.

When Constable Matchett came down with Constable Delano at ten o’clock on the morning of December 20, Dora Smith was sitting in the back porch, alone, staring out at the empty bird feeder (the bird feeder Karrie used to fill in the winter for grosbeaks, as soon as she got home from school, and in the summer for sparrows and chickadees) Emmett took the constables in to see her, and stood a little back from them.