born. She looked at her smiling grandmother and saw only sweetness and an implied offer of safety and security. In that moment, her heart overflowed with relief, and with gratitude towards Adeline.
Morgan put down the two suitcases she was carrying and walked over to where the two women stood and took her mother’s hand. She squeezed it gently, wordlessly assuring her that she was all right, that everything was going to be all right, that she loved her.
For his part, Jeremy merely stared, his mouth open. The tension in the air may have been beyond Morgan’s experience to understand, but Jeremy recognized it immediately and it carried the whiff of sulphur. Unlike his niece, he had an excellent idea of what had transpired while they had been fetching the suitcases and wondered, not for the first time, what had possessed them to return to this awful place and willingly put themselves at the mercy of this horrendous woman. He was suddenly wracked with the guilt of not having been enough of a man, enough of a brother to Jack, to find some way to support his niece and his sister-in-law. He’d been an idiot to think Adeline might have changed in the ten years he’d been away, let alone the fifteen Christina had. And now they were trapped in this monstrous house, in this town that had always seemed to him to be a blight on the edge of nowhere.
Adeline stepped in between Christina and Morgan, edging Christina almost imperceptibly to the side with her elbow. She put her arms around Morgan’s shoulders and hugged her tight.
“My family is restored to me,” Adeline said. “Especially my long-lost granddaughter. How very, very wonderful.”
Jeremy shuddered. “Come on, ladies,” he said. “I’ll show you where your rooms are. I think I still know my way around this dump.”
Jeremy took them upstairs, then excused himself and continued up the staircase to his own room after bidding them goodnight.
“I’ll be on the next floor up, second door to the left of the corridor,” he said. He and Christina exchanged a long, meaningful look. “Wake me up if you need anything at all.
She smiled gratefully and squeezed his hand. “We’re fine. I’m just going to get Morgan to bed, and then hit the sack myself. I’m worn out. Are you going to be all right up there?”
“Right as rain,” Jeremy said wryly. “I’ll see you in the morning. Unless something has changed in the last ten years, breakfast is at seven in the dining room. Sleep well.”
Once Christina had settled Morgan in the opulent “yellow room” and put her to bed (with Morgan gushing all the while about how
Her room was a fraction of the size of Morgan’s and very simply furnished by comparison. She knew that Adeline was making yet another point about Christina’s dubious standing in the family, but she didn’t care. She hadn’t come back to Parr’s Landing in search of any status Adeline Parr might extend or withhold. She’d come back for exactly what she’d been given downstairs, however cruelly Adeline had presented the goods-some security for Morgan and a roof over their heads while she figured out what to do next. She hadn’t sold her soul to Adeline, though she may have put it in escrow for the short term.
She looked out the window and saw that the moon was going down. Her watch read three a.m. Christina suddenly felt more tired than she could ever remember feeling.
She undressed quickly, not even bothering to wash her face or brush her teeth, and pulled on the red flannel nightgown she’d brought with her. She climbed into bed and pulled the covers up around her neck. The room may have been spare, but the mattress was welcoming. As she closed her eyes, she thought briefly of Jack and wondered if she’d dream of him tonight, here in the house in which he’d grown up, and what shape the dreams would take, if and when they came. She hoped they would.
Christina was fast asleep within minutes of laying her head against the pillow, and for the first time in months, her dreams were entirely uneventful.
At the exact moment Christina was falling asleep and the moon was completing its descent, Richard Weal was butchering a sixty-year-old widower named Alan Carstairs in his bed, in a remote fishing cabin just outside the town of Gyles Point, twenty-five miles south of Parr’s Landing, on the shore of Lake Superior.
Weal had broken in soundlessly-the door had been unlocked, of course-and surprised Carstairs, who was dreaming of his late wife, Edith.
He hadn’t been able to bring himself to come up to the cabin at all during the three years since her lingering death from cancer. Today, finally, he had. He’d driven to the cabin, arriving just as the sun was setting over Lake Superior and the waves were high and wild. Inside, he’d lit the kerosene lamps and eaten supper by lamplight.
Carstairs felt the vast emptiness of the cabin all around him and he knew he’d made a terrible mistake coming back up here today.
Edith had been a real Canadian girl. She’d loved the cabin when she was alive and he’d felt her presence
Her watercolours of the hard granite shoreline were hanging throughout the cabin. Carstairs knew that if he brought one of the kerosene lamps over to the pine walls outside the ring of yellow light, he’d see them there, under three year’s worth of dust. But he realized he didn’t want to see them. She was gone, and no alchemy between his own loss and memory and the wild forest magic of this rocky coastline was going to render vivid something that had forever left his life.
Carstairs wept at that realization which, to him, was like watching her die all over again. His sobs made his shoulders ache. Around him, the silence and the darkness seemed to swell and expand till it was vast and huge, and he filled it with a loud keening that came from a deep and terrible empty place inside. He had never felt older or weaker-or more alone-in his life.
When Carstairs felt he had no more tears to shed, he splashed water on his face and pressed a cold washcloth to his eyes. He briefly thought of leaving the cabin that night, but he was a practical man-it was late and he was too tired to drive. It would be dangerous. Before he went to bed, he set his alarm clock for five a.m. He intended to get an early start back to the city, then telephone a realtor from home and put the place on the market. He mounted the stairs to the upper floor, holding the kerosene lantern in front of him, looking straight ahead. Then he undressed and climbed into the cold double bed.
Asleep, his Edith had come to him like an angel of mercy and comfort.
In the dream, Edith was a still just a girl from Trout Creek he’d fallen head over heels for as a student at Wesley College in Winnipeg in 1929. She was young like she had been on their wedding day. In the dream, there was no cancer-and in fact, never would be any cancer. Edith opened her plump, tanned arms to him and said,
When he woke in the darkness, it was a grinning Richard Weal he was holding in his arms and the foetor of spoiled meat, body waste, and decay was everywhere.
Carstairs didn’t see the knives at first, but he felt them immediately.
In the end, his death had come much more quickly than Edith’s had-though, like hers, it was not without pain. Weal had been leisurely with his tools this time, and he’d enjoyed himself very much.
After he was finished, Weal re-lit the kerosene lamp on the dining room table and washed his knives and hammers in the kitchen sink, enjoying the cozy
Upstairs, he wrapped the various segments of Carstairs’s body in bloodied sheets and tied them with baling
