explanation ever came.
When – finally – I managed to reach Alex the next day, he was distant, and his apology was hollow. We quarrelled – or rather I quarrelled, and he listened. Clearly, his mind was elsewhere. Two weeks later I discovered what had captured his attention. There was another woman, and I found out about her existence through the oldest of B-movie cliches. Alex stopped by the house, and the perfume I smelled on his jacket was not my brand. When I asked him about the scent, he didn’t bother to lie – in fact, he embraced my accusation that he had been with someone else. Seemingly grateful that I had lifted a burden from his shoulders, he said goodbye. It was the evening of November 30. Earlier that day, he had advised Anne Millar that sometimes in life it was best just to walk away. Apparently he had been so impressed with his counsel that he’d decided to follow it himself.
It had been eight months since Alex severed our relationship, but remembering the breakup still made my face burn and my skin crawl. That morning I was relieved when my bedroom began to fill with pre-dawn birdsong and the knowledge that it was time to get up. Riding out to the middle of the lake to scatter a man’s ashes wasn’t at the top of my list of cottage pleasures, but anything was better than lying in the dark, lashing myself with memory. I swung my legs out of bed, and as my feet hit the floor I came as close to an epiphany as a woman can before she’s had her first cup of coffee. I didn’t have to lie in the dark, passively accepting every jolt and bombshell the fates sent my way. On my seventh birthday, my grandmother had given me an autograph book. She had handed along her own wisdom on the first page. “Don’t be a doormat all your life,” she had written. “Learn to give and to take and you’ll be happy.” Almost fifty years later, I knew it was time to listen to Nana.
I took my laptop into the kitchen, made coffee, sat down at the kitchen table, and sent a note to Anne Millar, giving her a precis of my conversation with Delia Wainberg and telling her that alarm bells were going off for me, too. I asked if she had the names of anyone Clare Mackey had been close to; then, proving that epiphanies beget epiphanies, I asked where Clare had gone to law school. If she practised in Saskatchewan, chances were that she’d gone to the university in Saskatoon. Clever students often keep in touch with their mentors, and I had friends on the law faculty there. It was a long shot, but there was a decided shortage of sure things.
After I’d sent the message to Anne, I glanced at the phone. Alex had told me to call if anything came up. The past twenty-four hours had brought plenty of revelations, but if I was going to confront him with questions about his relationship with Lily Falconer and his refusal to become involved in Clare Mackey’s disappearance, I needed more information. I looked at my watch: it was four-thirty. I let Willie out briefly with a promise of more to come later, showered, dressed, checked on Taylor, whispered to Leah that I’d be back in an hour, then feeling less like a doormat than I had in a long time, I walked down to the dock.
The others were there already, waiting. They could have been mistaken for the most carefree of vacationers: the sun was just rising over the horizon, bringing enough breeze to give the waves a chop. Zack Shreve’s Chris-Craft was beside the dock and he was already in the cockpit behind the steering wheel. Lily and Blake Falconer were sitting aft – as far away from one another as it was possible to be. The Wainbergs were standing at the end of the dock, Delia with her inevitable cigarette, and Noah behind her, kneading her shoulders with his big, gentle hands.
When he saw me, Zack waved and pointed to the seat next to his. Relieved I didn’t have to sit next to Lily, I took my place. Delia and Noah came aboard, sliding into the space between Lily and Blake.
Zack did a shoulder check. “Looks like we’re all here.”
“Where’s Chris?” Delia said. The question was blackly humorous, and everyone smiled.
“Exactly where he’s supposed to be,” Zack said, “in a box in the storage area.” Then he gunned the motor and backed the boat smoothly away from the dock into the open water. No one spoke as we headed for the lake’s centre. When we’d reached the middle, Zack cut the motor. Except for the screech of the gulls and the slap of the waves against the launch’s hull, the world was silent. I cast my eyes around the shoreline, getting my bearings. Until that moment, the cottages on the far shore had been dabs on a pointillist’s canvas, strokes in a vista created for our pleasure. Now they leaped into dimensional life with boathouses, rafts, floats, and docks of their own. When I looked back at Lawyers’ Bay, the handsome summer homes seemed to have no more substance than a stage designer’s balsa-wood mock-up of a set, too fragile by far to support the weight of Chris Altieri’s tragic death.
Zack interrupted my musings by tapping me on the arm and gesturing towards the storage area under the bow. “Why don’t you do the honours?” he asked.
I leaned forward, opened the latch, and pulled out a cardboard box. Zack took it from me and without ceremony threw a handful of ashes into the water, then passed the box back to Blake. The sequence was so devoid of emotion that it seemed brutal, but when I looked over at Zack, his eyes were moist. In turn, each of the partners and their spouses threw ashes into the water. Lily was the last, and as she took the open box a breeze came up and blew some of the ashes against her. Her reaction was swift: she hurled the cardboard box into the lake, then scooped water and began scrubbing furiously at the ashes on her shirt. I remembered a doctor I knew advising against scattering ceremonies, explaining that human ashes are so dense they stick to skin and embed themselves under nails.
Zack chortled. “Chris seems to be finding it hard to leave you, Lily,” he said. I was no fan of Lily’s, but I didn’t believe in kicking someone when they were down, and at that moment, Lily Falconer was definitely down. She looked ill: her skin had a greenish tinge, and her eyes were as blank as those of the woman in the wood carving at the base of the gazebo.
Her husband leaned forward and put his mouth next to Zack’s ear. “Shut up and get us out of here,” he said.
Zack gave him a mock salute and gunned the motor. The surge of power lifted the boat out of the water and within seconds we were kicking up spray, pounding towards the shore that lay across from Lawyers’ Bay. The rafts and water-ski ramps seemed to jump at us, but Zack didn’t change course.
I grabbed his arm. “Are you trying to kill us all?”
His lustrous green eyes danced with malice. “Would that be such a loss?” he asked.
I tightened my grip. “For me, yes, it would be,” I said.
He gave me a small smile. “In that case…”
He turned the wheel sharply and the landscape changed – the shore that had loomed so ominously vanished, replaced by open water. We were safe. For the next fifteen minutes we sped around the circumference of the lake. When finally we came to Lawyers’ Bay, Zack’s fury seemed to have spent itself. He cut the engine and the launch drifted in. We climbed out and waited as Zack slid onto the lift that moved him from the launch to the dock.
After the boat was safely moored, Blake ran a hand through his scrub-brush hair. “So what’s the preferred activity after you scatter a friend’s ashes?”
Zack shrugged. “Linking hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’?”
“How about getting back to work?” Lily said. “The firm still has bills to pay.” Her colour had come back and she seemed in command of herself. “I’m going into the city. Chris has files that need attention. We don’t have anybody in family law with enough experience. We need to find someone fast.”
Delia frowned. “Do you think we have to hire someone this soon?”
“Chris’s clients will think so,” Lily said dryly. “And we’ve already had letters of inquiry and resumes from lawyers who are anxious to join the Falconer Shreve team.”
“Scavengers circling the fresh carcass,” Zack said. “Clearly Falconer Shreve material.”
Blake shook his head. “Well, now that we’ve established the criteria -”
Delia cut him off angrily. “Those aren’t our criteria. We’re better than that.”
Zack’s smile was almost pitying. “With all due respect, Delia, that was then and this is now.”
“We can be good again,” Delia said. “We only have to find someone with that lust for justice we used to have.”
“We don’t want any young hotshots who think they have to right every wrong,” Blake said wearily. “We just need someone to replace Chris.”
“Chris is irreplaceable,” Delia said.
Her husband took her hand. “No one’s irreplaceable,” Noah said softly. “Let’s go back to the house. You had a bad night. You could use a little sleep.”
Blake was thoughtful as he watched the Wainbergs walk towards their cottage. “Maybe with Chris gone, they’ll have a chance,” he said.
“Maybe we’ll all have a chance,” Lily said. She reached out and touched her husband’s cheek. It was a small gesture, but the effect was electric. He turned and looked in her eyes.
