Children in the Morning (9 page)

“And they have lots of fun with their dad!” Sheila said.

“If worse comes to worse — and I don’t think it will, Sheila — is there anyone who can take in all ten children?”

She shook her head. “Impossible. As much as people would want to, there’s nobody in the family who can take them all in. They’d have to be split up. How would any of us decide which children to take, and which ones would be dumped back into the system, into foster care?”

I didn’t want to picture the scene: children with bundles of belongings being torn from their home and their brothers and sisters.

And their dad. When Beau left with us that day all the kids, with the exception of the two oldest boys who strove to put brave faces on, were in tears. Not just in tears, but weeping inconsolably. The little ones clung to him. All I could do was wave to Sheila, turn away and head for the car.

43

ChildrenintheMorning_final_Layout 1 2/1/10 1:37 PM Page 44

Chapter 4

(Monty)

Delaney waived his right to a preliminary hearing because he wanted a speedy trial, and we did very well, getting a date in early May of that year. This gave me a little over two months to pull together the evidence and case law I would need to defend my client. I was particularly pleased with the report of our pathologist, Dr. Andrea Mertens. I had consulted her and Dr. Ralph Godwin. I wasn’t confident in Godwin because he didn’t seem confident in his tentative opinion that Peggy’s death was more likely than not an accident. The force of the fatal blow to the back of her head, well, it certainly could have resulted from a fall and it probably did, but he could not rule out a violent shove or a blow to the head administered at the top of the staircase before she ended up below. I could write the Crown prosecutor’s script when faced with that kind of dithering in court.

Dr. Mertens was much more solid, and she had a very helpful piece of advice for me, which I followed. She recommended an engineer and accident reconstruction expert named Wes Kaulbeck, who, if we were correct in our theory of the incident, would support us with cal-44

ChildrenintheMorning_final_Layout 1 2/9/10 1:31 PM Page 45

culations of the magnitude of the forces that would have been required to fracture Peggy Delaney’s skull, and the mechanics of a fall that could have produced the fracture. I commissioned him to do an investigation and write a report. If the report didn’t help us, it would never see the light of day. As it turned out, it was exactly what we needed, so we added Kaulbeck and Mertens to our line-up of witnesses. I was enormously relieved to have some science in our corner as we looked ahead to the trial.

I had my kids at home on Leap Year Day. Tommy told Normie this would be her only chance in four years to propose marriage to Richard Robertson, given the leap-year tradition of women proposing marriage. She informed him that Richard was just a friend, and she got back at her brother by saying: “I don’t hear the phone ringing, I guess Lexie must be proposing to somebody else!” We enjoyed our usual activities: jamming with my guitars, harmonicas, and key-boards; watching old movies on the vcr; walking around Dingle Park and climbing to the top of the Dingle Tower; and not-so-successful fishing expeditions off the edge of my backyard. Normie often went out there with an old fishing rod she had found years before. To my knowledge — and I would know — she had never caught a fish. But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, from her point of view, because it led in to one of her pet subjects: if I got her a boat, she could go

“deep-sea” fishing thirty feet away from the house and provide a trout, a salmon, or a tuna fish for our supper. Tommy had a bee in his bonnet as well. He wanted a car of his own, nothing fancy, just a secondhand vehicle to get him around the city. That wasn’t a bad idea, but the rust buckets he saw in the newspaper for a couple of thousand dollars looked to me like nothing but trouble. Nobody in our family was mechanically inclined, so I could picture a car spending a lot of time up on blocks in somebody’s shop, and a lot of repair bills coming in. My take on it was that I should just buy him a good used car. But to his mother, Maura, coming from a family of seven kids in the Cape Breton coal town of Glace Bay, giving your child a car of his own was a little too much like spoiling him and making him full of himself. And she worried about him running the roads with a carload of other high-spirited young males. But I figured she would come around eventually.

45

ChildrenintheMorning_final_Layout 1 2/1/10 1:37 PM Page 46

“Here’s one for two thousand,” Tom said, pointing to an ad in the classified section. “A Honda. It’s ten years old and got rear-ended, but . . .”

“I think we should be looking for something a little newer, Tom.

I’ll help you find one.”

“Yeah, but you know what Mum will say about me getting a car.” In a thick Cape Breton accent, he said: “The arse is out of ’er now, b’ys!”

Normie and I enjoyed a laugh over Tom’s impersonation of his mother.

But all the talk about cars and repair shops put me in mind of something that was still missing from the Delaney file. Beau was supposed to provide me with a receipt for the night of Peggy’s death. He said he had stopped for gas on the way home from Annapolis Royal.

The receipt would show he was still on the highway at the time Peggy went down the stairs. I picked up the phone and gave Beau a call.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Beau. How’s it going?”

“About as you’d expect under the circumstances.”

“Listen, I was just thinking about that gas receipt. Do you have it?”

“No, unfortunately, I can’t find it.”

“You kept your dinner and hotel receipts to be billed against the file you were working on. Why wouldn’t the gas receipt be with the rest of them?”

“I don’t know, Monty, but it’s not there.”

“You paid with a credit card, I assume.”

“Uh, yes, of course.”

“Maybe we can track it down that way.”

“Sure. We’ll give it a try.”

“All right. Talk to you later.”

The one thing we needed, he just didn’t happen to have.

(Normie)

Monday was a really nice day, and Mum came to St. Bernadette’s after school to listen to us singing and playing music at the Four-Four Time program. She walked over with Dominic in his stroller.

46

ChildrenintheMorning_final_Layout 1 2/1/10 1:37 PM Page 47

He looked really cute in a little pair of blue jeans and a bright red sweater and sneakers that had pictures of animals on the bottoms of them, and he gave me a lovely smile and reached up for me to hold him. So I picked him up and gave him a big hug. I was so happy, especially when a bunch of the other kids saw him and came over and gawked at him and went “Awwww!” Then I put him back in the stroller, and sat down at the piano and started to play “The Alley Cat Song,” and Kim and Jenny sang along with me.

Father Burke came in with a bunch of priests and other people from the grown-ups’ choir school, the schola, and he announced to all of us that the grown-ups would love to hear us play and sing a song. Dominic let out a little squeal when he heard Father’s voice and recognized him, and Father turned around and saw Dominic with a big grin on his face, and he came over. Dominic was laughing and all excited. Father picked him up and held him high in the air and jiggled him, and he laughed even more. I saw the other priests looking at each other, and one made his eyebrows go up. He must have been thinking the priests are really good with youngsters here. Then Father put Dominic back in the stroller, and I pushed it around the room so Dominic could see all the toys and instruments, and the treats, but he wasn’t allowed to eat them because he was too little. I had to leave him because I had to help Richard and Ian organize the kids into a group to sing. We did “Panis Angelicus,” and the adults all clapped.

When I brought the baby and the stroller back to Mum, she was in a serious conversation with Father Burke. I didn’t hear what they said, because they stopped talking. All they did was stare at Dominic.

That’s when I looked out the window and saw Jenny, and she had the coolest bike I have ever seen in my whole life. Laurence had his, too, but his was the regular kind. I ran outside. Jenny’s bike looked kind of thick and clunky. The crossbar curved up and then down; it wasn’t just a bar, it was big and heavy, and made the bike look like a motorcycle. It was bright red. There were silver things around the tires. Jenny called them fenders and said they were made of real chrome. There was only one speed! But I loved it.

“Cool bike,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s old-fashioned. It was in my dad’s family for years. My brothers, Connor and Derek, got it up out of the basement and got 47

ChildrenintheMorning_final_Layout 1 2/1/10 1:37 PM Page 48

the rust off it with steel wool, and put air in the tires. Then Corbett said he wanted it, and he took it over. But he’s gone now so I get to drive it sometimes. There are these mean guys that follow us around and they grabbed my bike and said they were going to steal it. Then they said it was an old folks’ bike and threw it on the sidewalk.”

“That was a rotten thing to say. This is a great bike. Who are the guys you’re talking about?”

“Two boys who look like criminals. They hang around watching me and my brothers.”

“Aren’t you scared?”

“Yeah, but they never do anything but follow us and give us dirty looks. And push my bike down.”

“Can I ride it?”

“Sure.”

So I grabbed the handlebars and swung my leg up over the seat and pedalled it a little ways. Then I realized I didn’t know how to stop because it didn’t have any brake lever things on the handles. I didn’t want to ask, because I would feel stupid, so I just waited till I was going really slow, then slid off the seat and onto the crossbar and put my feet down to stop. I wheeled it back to Jenny.

“You better bring it inside the school,” I told her, “or somebody will steal it.”

“No, nobody will. Nobody likes it. But I do.”

“They’re crazy if they don’t steal it! It means they don’t know anything about cool, old-fashioned bikes. I don’t mean it’s right to steal, but if it was, this would be a nice thing to steal. That’s all I meant.”

“I know.”

Anyway, we left it outside and went in to Four-Four Time, and nobody stole it.

†

I dreamed about bikes and strollers that night and so the dreams were good at first, but then I thought I was on the old-fashioned bike and I was going down a hill, faster and faster, and I didn’t know how to use the brakes, and I was going to crash at the bottom of the hill and I started to scream, and that woke me up. I was lying in bed 48

ChildrenintheMorning_final_Layout 1 2/1/10 1:37 PM Page 49

thinking how lucky I was to wake up before I hit the bottom, because I would have felt the pain just as if it was really happening.

And what would happen if I got killed in a dream? Would I really die? So I didn’t want to go back to sleep. But then things came into my mind even though I was awake. I saw a tiny baby lying in a crib and all these people were standing around him wearing long black robes. And I got a really bad feeling that something was going wrong. And I thought there was another little kid in it somewhere, and I felt terrified. Or, I felt the little kid was terrified. Why was I thinking this stuff? I wasn’t asleep, but I knew I was safe in my own bed. I wasn’t with those people in the robes. I lay there and saw more stuff happening, then I called downstairs for Mummy to come up.

She came up right away, and Daddy was with her. I remembered then that he was coming over, but I had fallen asleep before he arrived. They came in and turned on my light. Daddy was closest to the bed, and I described what I saw. And I told him I was not really asleep when I saw it. He looked like he always does when he hears something weird and wants to pretend it’s normal. “What were the people doing, sweetheart?”

I tried to picture it again. “They just stood there. I think they were chanting!”

“Uh-huh. Could you tell whether they were men or women?”

“Both, I think. And then one of them did something to the baby, and the baby cried.”

“The one who did something to the baby, was that a man or a woman? Do you know?”

“A man,” I said. I knew it was.

“What did he do?”

“He reached in and put his hands all over the baby, on his face and then under his blanket.”

“And this happened while the others were around the crib?”

“They just watched while it was going on.”

“Then what happened, Normie?”

“I kept seeing the baby lying there, and then he wasn’t moving anymore. At all. Something was gone from him. I think he was dead!” My voice went up and I didn’t mean it to. But I knew the baby was dead. Maybe they killed him!

49

ChildrenintheMorning_final_Layout 1 2/1/10 1:37 PM Page 50

I felt really sleepy then. Daddy didn’t say anything, just held my hand. Mummy came and kissed and hugged me. I fell asleep, and didn’t dream about anything after that.

(Monty)

The weeks leading up to a murder trial can be quite intense, obviously for the client, but also for the lawyer. And, it seemed, for the lawyer’s family. It was hard to dismiss the notion that there was a connection between the case, or at least the Delaney family, and the disturbing dreams or visions that Normie was having. This was the topic of discussion as Maura and I and Brennan finished up our combination Greek plates at the Athens restaurant. Brennan was getting ready to leave when the subject came up.

“There haven’t been any of those crank news stories about ritual abuse lately, have there?” I asked Maura. To Brennan I said:

“Normie’s latest nightmare — or vision, given that she claimed to be awake when it occurred — was of people in long robes, and possibly the abuse and death of an infant.”