“The forecast for Regina today is thirty-eight below,” I said. “I checked last night. How are you feeling?”
“The same.” Zack raised his arm to see his watch. “Too early to call home and see how everybody’s doing?”
“Better hold off on calling Taylor, but Pete’s a safe bet. He gets up earlier than I do.”
Zack picked up his BlackBerry and called our house. After he’d chatted with Pete and spoken to Pantera, he handed the phone to me. As always, Pete was laconic. “Nothing much going on here,” he said. “Noah brought the baby by last night to play with the dogs.”
“How did that go?” I said.
“Willie herded Jacob for a while, but when he satisfied himself that Jacob was safe, we put Jacob down on the floor and Pantera pushed him along with his nose. Every time Jacob rolled over, he’d laugh, and every time Jacob laughed, Pantera pushed him again.”
“You do realize that when Zack hears about this, he’ll be arranging play dates.”
“Jacob could do worse,” Pete said. “Pantera plays well with others.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Thanks for taking care of everything, Pete.”
“My pleasure. Have a good flight.”
“Impossible,” I said, “but I appreciate the thought.” After I rang off, I called Alwyn, and we arranged to go to the ten-thirty service at St. Mark’s Anglican Church. Zack was in the shower, and I was ironing slacks for church when Noah called.
“Nothing special,” he said. “I just thought I’d let you know that everybody here is fine.”
“That’s always a relief to hear,” I said. “May I talk to Taylor?”
“She and Izzy are still sleeping. Big night – the girls and I took Jacob over to your place; then we ordered in pizza. I had beer and a slice, Jacob had formula and pureed peas, then we gents went to bed and left the ladies to their stack of holiday DVDS.”
“I hear your boy fell under Pantera’s spell,” I said.
Noah chuckled. “You’ve been talking to Peter. I wish Delia could have been here – not just to see Jacob, but to see Izzy having so much fun. She’s always looking for the next mountain to climb. It was great to see her rolling around on the floor with her brother.” Noah caught himself. “I guess ‘nephew’ is more accurate, but the term doesn’t matter. Izzy loves that little boy. So do I.”
“Jacob’s pretty easy to love,” I said. “Thanks for the update, Noah. I’ll give Taylor a call when I’m back from church.”
When Zack came out of the shower, I told him about Pantera and Jacob. His laughter turned into a coughing jag, so I pulled out the jar of Vicks and told him to open his robe so I could rub his chest.
“Does that stuff work?” he said.
“I have no idea,” I said. “But it smells like it means business.”
He extended his arms. “Have at me,” he said, and then he started hacking again.
“That’s quite the bark you’ve got,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to sit next to us in the dining room. Let’s call room service again.”
“Fine with me, but I’d appreciate it if you’d have breakfast with Dee. Do you think you could sit across the table from her without squashing a grapefruit in her face?”
“This is Loyalist country,” I said. “People don’t make scenes. I’ll call her.”
“If it’s any consolation, Dee knows she behaved badly. She said she was going to send Nadine some flowers and a note this morning.”
I slammed the jar of Vicks on the bedside table. “Flowers and a note,” I said tightly. “Falconer Shreve’s signature kiss-off when one of the partners wants to end an inconvenient relationship.”
Zack picked up his pyjama top. “Can we give it a rest? I feel like shit. Delia feels like shit. If she can’t control every detail, she goes up her ass, and from the minute we got here, she hasn’t been able to control anything.”
“What did she hope to accomplish?”
Zack shook his head. “Beats me. I don’t think Dee knew herself. She never makes a move without considering every possible ramification, but she threw herself into this. If she’d been herself, Dee would have realized that Nadine Perrault was not a disinterested party and she would have finessed the situation. Dee works in a tricky field. Insurance litigation is high stakes. She gets paid the big bucks because she never makes a false move.”
“But she’s blowing this,” I said.
“And she knows it,” Zack said. “Yesterday in the car, Delia told me she was afraid. I’ve known her thirty years, and this is the first time I’ve heard her say she was afraid of anything.”
I sat on the bed, so that Zack and I were at eye level. “Is she afraid of losing Jacob?”
“That, and everything else. Delia feels as if her life is unravelling. She thought when she signed the papers giving up her child, she’d closed the chapter.”
“And now the child appears as a grown woman, hands Delia a baby, and is raped and murdered.” I touched one of the lines that bracketed Zack’s mouth like parentheses. “I guess that sequence of events is enough to overwhelm anyone.”
Short of the Fezziwigs’ Christmas party, there was no more festive scene than the Lantern Inn’s dining room on that wet December morning. Instead of a fiddler striking up Sir Roger de Coverley, there was the silvery staccato of Vivaldi’s “Winter,” and the buffet didn’t appear to feature cold boiled beef and mince pie, but the atmosphere of the room was one of Dickensian hopefulness and good cheer.
Delia had found a table for two near the fireplace. She stood to motion me over when I came in. In her black leather-trimmed sweater, white turtleneck, fitted jeans, and black Fluevog lace-up boots, she looked successful, fashionable, and utterly miserable.
“If this table is too close to the fireplace for you, I can ask them to move us,” she said. Her face was pale and strained and her husky voice cracked into the odd little hiccup it made whenever she was on edge.
“It’s good to be warm,” I said.
“Thanks for coming. I know you’re angry.”
“I promised Zack I wouldn’t smash a grapefruit in your face.”
She flashed her three-point cat smile. “That’s a start.”
The server poured us coffee and asked if we needed menus. When we said we were going with the buffet, she nodded gravely and told us we’d made a very wise choice.
“First wise choice I’ve made since I got here,” Delia said.
During breakfast Delia and I made a deliberate attempt to keep the conversation light. She and Noah had talked, so the story of Jacob and Pantera gave us one safe topic. The skating rink Zack and I were putting in at the lake gave us another. Delia was intrigued, and she had enough questions about exactly how a skating rink came into being to get us smoothly through to our second cup of coffee.
As the server cleared our plates, Delia held out her coffee cup in a mock toast. “Well, we made it. No grapefruit smashing. Not even a raised voice. So I’m going to push my luck and ask you whether Nadine won you over when you went back to her cabin.”
“I like her very much,” I said carefully.
“So you’re on her side.”
“No,” I said. “I’m on your side, but I’m hoping you can extend an olive branch to Nadine.”
“She doesn’t want an olive branch,” Delia said. “She wants the whole tree – full custody, and she’s not going to get it. I’m prepared to offer Nadine access. She can visit Jacob in Regina when she has time off from teaching. She can even come out to the lake with us for a couple of weeks every summer. But Jacob will never be left alone with her.”
“You think Nadine poses a threat to Jacob?” I said. “Where did that come from?”
“Abby’s will,” Delia said flatly. “Joanne, most wills have a subtext. A father bequeaths equal parts of his estate to each of his three sons, but he leaves the watch that has been passed down through the family to his youngest son. There’s a message there.”
“The youngest son is the father’s favourite,” I said.
Delia nodded. “In her revised will, Abby left Nadine Perrault money and property but she made certain that Jacob came to me. Clearly there’s something in Nadine’s background that makes it impossible for Jacob to be left in her care.”
“Abby and Nadine were inseparable from the time they were ten,” I said. “It’s difficult to believe there was
