Anne laughed shortly. “The problem is Inspector Kequahtooway didn’t talk to anyone else about what I told him.”
“He didn’t write up an official report of your conversation?”
“Apparently not. I guess there’s some sort of internal investigation going on about what the inspector did or did not do. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. What matters to me is that the police finally want to get to the bottom of this. Like everyone else involved in this very cold case, it’s finally dawning on them that they failed Clare Mackey.”
When Anne glanced towards the lake, something caught her eye.
“Who’s that with our little group?”
I followed the direction of her gaze. “Let’s see. The smallest of the girls in the navy bathing suits is my daughter, Taylor, the other two are her friends, and the man with them is Blake Falconer.”
“Well, well, well,” Anne said. “They landed a big one.”
Blake and the girls had just come from a swim. The girls clearly had plans other than spending the evening jawing with adults, and it wasn’t long before they hightailed it for the Wainbergs’ cottage. As they darted off, Blake watched them fondly. He was bare-chested and barefoot, and his towel was slung over one shoulder. In the red- gold light, he seemed to glow himself, ruddy and handsome. We strolled over to where he was talking to the rest of the Moot Team.
“Hey,” he said when he saw me. “I was just introducing myself to your company. More lawyers, just what we need around here.” His smile was broad and genuine. Linda and Maggie and Sandra were smiling, too. It was a nice moment, and the part of me that longed for harmony wanted to ignore the ugly questions and ask if he’d had a good swim and if the water was still warm.
But the woman I had never met deserved better. “These aren’t just lawyers, Blake,” I said. “They’re friends of Clare Mackey’s from law school.”
The wattage of his smile didn’t diminish. “So how’s she doing?” he said.
I pressed on. “No one seems to know.”
“We haven’t heard from her in months,” Linda Thauberger said. “We were hoping someone from Falconer Shreve might be able to give us some contact information.”
Blake chewed his lip. “I’m not the best one to talk to about this,” he said. “You should get in touch with my wife, Lily. She and Clare were quite close there for a while. At least, they always seemed to be huddling.”
“Could we talk to Lily now?” Anne asked.
“No,” Blake said. “Lily’s not well tonight.”
“Tomorrow then,” Anne said.
Blake’s eyes met mine. “Maybe Joanne could call you when the time is right.” There was such sadness in his face that my heart went out to him.
“Maybe that would be best,” I agreed.
“Well, goodnight, then,” Blake said. And he walked up the path that took him to whatever awaited him at home. The five of us watched until he disappeared from sight.
“For a guy who’s supposed to have the world by the short hairs, he’s not very happy, is he?” Maggie said.
“No,” I said, “he’s not.”
She gave her curls a toss. “Well,” she said, “you make a deal with the devil…”
The idea of making a deal with the devil might have been a throwaway line for Maggie, but after she left, the words stuck to my consciousness, persistent as a burr. Blake wasn’t the only one who’d made a deal with the devil. Not many hours before he died, Chris Altieri told me he had committed an act that was unforgivable. By all accounts, Chris was a decent and principled human being, but he had also been involved in the rough-and-tumble world of the law for twenty years. He wouldn’t have minimized his culpability about what he had done to win the Patsy Choi case, but somehow I couldn’t imagine him characterizing the act as unforgivable.
The fate of his mizuko was another matter. Haunted by the memory of this child flowing into being, Chris had travelled halfway around the world seeking absolution. Yet the night of the fireworks he had made a point of telling me he had forced his lover to choose an abortion. What he’d said that night had nagged at me. Nothing about Chris Altieri suggested that he was the kind of man who would compel a woman to undergo an abortion she didn’t want. And Clare Mackey certainly did not seem to be a woman who would cede control of her body to anyone. It simply didn’t add up.
But there was another possible scenario, and it had its own cruel logic. Sandra Mikalonis had floated the possibility that Clare Mackey had chosen to abort her unborn child because she had decided Chris Altieri was morally unfit to be a father. If Chris had believed his unborn child had been denied its chance to come into being because of his own moral failure, he might not have been able to forgive himself. His responsibility for the abortion would have been the unforgivable act.
I had always believed the axiom that a burden shared is a burden halved, and the burden of my insight into Chris’s state of mind was heavy. I wanted badly to talk to someone, and that someone was Zack.
He had seemed so tired it was possible he was already sleeping, so when I arrived at his front door I knocked softly. He came to the door almost immediately. He was wearing the white terry-cloth robe he had worn the night before, and there was a stack of folders on his knees. When he motioned me in, I saw the living room was littered with law books and papers.
“Homework?” I said.
“You bet. I don’t like being humiliated, and to use a legal term with which you may not be familiar, I really stepped on my joint in court today.”
“Sounds painful.”
“You should have been there. Speaking of which, you’re ten hours early – not that I’m complaining. I’m just glad you’re here.”
“So am I,” I said.
He took my hand. “So do you want to go to bed or do you want to look at the sunset?”
“I think we need to talk first,” I said.
“Fair enough. Follow me.” Zack led me through his house to the deck. It was large and uncluttered and it faced west onto the spectacular light show of a Canadian sunset in cottage country.
“How did things go with Clare’s friends?”
As I gave my account of the women’s visit, Zack leaned forward in his chair. He didn’t interrupt or comment until I was finished. When he did speak, he was pithy.
“Fuck,” he said. “Why didn’t he come to me? He didn’t have to go through this alone. If he’d let me help with the Patsy Choi case, none of this would have happened. I must have offered to give him a hand a dozen times. I saw how he was throwing the money away. I just assumed we had it to throw.”
“What would have happened to Chris if he’d been caught – I mean, after he’d put the money back?”
Zack rubbed the back of his neck. “Probably not much,” he said. “The Law Society is the Law Society. No matter who’s involved, they have to investigate and decide on appropriate disciplinary action. But this is a small province, and Chris had a boy scout’s reputation. He was loyal, trustworthy, courteous, kind, clean, and obedient.”
“Don’t forget reverent,” I said. “After Chris died, one of the gents at Coffee Row said Chris went to Mass every day.”
“He did,” Zack said. “But the daily attendance started after the Patsy Choi case. Before that, although he never missed Mass, he went only once a week. Guilt, I guess.”
“Why did he feel such guilt?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe something happened when he was a kid that convinced him he had to take on the sins of the world.”
“Who was it who said, ‘Childhood lasts forever’?”
“Probably someone at social services,” Zack said sardonically. “But whoever it was, they were right on the money.” He brightened. “I’ll bet you had a real Norman Rockwell childhood.”
“Don’t bet anything you value,” I said. “Because you couldn’t be more wrong.”
“You’re one of the walking wounded?”
I nodded.
