Had anyone pointed it out to her, it wouldn’t have occurred to Adeline Parr to find anything unusual in the fact that she had been able to monitor the entire evening’s comings and goings from the leather chair behind the desk without ever leaving her study. Like a bejewelled, lacquered, well-tailored spider, Adeline Parr felt every tug on every strand of her web, which included not only Parr House, but the town of Parr’s Landing itself. Nothing and no one arrived or departed without her knowing about it.
Except this time. Except for the arrival of Phenius’s adopted Indian boy, Billy Lightning. News of his arrival in Parr’s Landing had eluded her, as had news of Phenius’s death. She felt the impact of this the way she might have felt the impact of an explosion on the other side of town- the ground had shaken, the air had shimmered and eddied for a moment, and while there was an intellectual awareness of devastation, the damage itself had not yet been internalized or quantified.
Phenius. Phenius.
When she closed her eyes against the haze of smoke in her bedroom, it wasn’t the entirety of him she remembered-she didn’t see him completely, not from head to toe-but rather a pastiche of memories that somehow added up to Phenius: the back of his tanned neck, his legs protruding from the rumpled khaki shorts he’d worn every day on the dig in 1952. The pattern of his chest hair, the way the blond blended with the silver almost imperceptibly. The surprising hardness of his arms- surprising in a man of his age, entirely unlike the soft, plump arms of her husband, who had been the same age when he’d married her as Phenius Osborne had been when he’d taken her in his arms for the first time. The wiriness of his body, the feeling of his cock brushing up against the inside of her thighs. The feeling of his calloused hands warming her body, the secret thrill of being touched in places she’d never been touched in her life, certainly not by her husband, and by no one since he’d died.
Phenius had taught her what it felt like to be a woman instead of the inviolate queen of Parr’s Landing.
As to her guilt-not only her guilt over her own adultery, but also over making an adulterer out of Phenius Osborne-she could barely access a memory of her feelings of guilt over what they’d shared that summer. But she knew it was there, hovering like the twinge of a broken bone that still occasionally aches when the weather is damp. She’d never spoken of it to anyone, of course. Nor, to the best of her knowledge, had Phenius, who had still been married when they last saw each other.
Adeline stood up and walked over to her dressing table. There was a small mother-of-pearl box sitting between the cloudy amber bottles of Joy and Arpege perfumes and her monogrammed silver vanity brushes and mirror. Adeline opened the box and withdrew the bronze key that lay against the faded green velvet lining.
As she did so, she turned her husband’s photograph face down on the lace runner. Then, almost as an afterthought, she opened the middle drawer of the dressing and tossed the picture inside, slamming the drawer shut with the back of her hand. She didn’t want to think about Augustus Parr at all right now, or even look at his face.
She held the key to her lips for a moment, deep in thought.
Then she crossed the floor and opened the door to her bedroom. Hearing no one on the landing, or downstairs, she stepped out into the hallway and took the staircase downstairs to the foyer. In a hallway off the main rooms, she opened the door to a flight of stone stairs that led into one of the basement wings of Parr House where there was no electricity. Adjacent to the basement door, a flashlight hung on a chain.
Adeline removed the flashlight and switched it on. She played the beam of light across the walls, but it was an instinctive response. She could walk through Parr House blindfolded at midnight and never miss a step. Adeline knew the house the way another woman might know a lover’s body. Leisurely, as though savouring the pressing darkness, she walked to the end of the hallway. She reached for the doorknob, opened the door, and stepped into the room.
Against the far wall were grouped a collection of boxes and storage trunks in various sizes. She shone the light through the curtains of dust that seemed to sway as she stepped towards them.
When she found the box she was looking for, she knelt down and unlocked it. Inside were a packet of letters, some photographs, and a bound sheaf of papers in an envelope with a Toronto postmark. These she tucked under her arm.
Adeline retraced her way down the stone corridor to the stairway leading up to the main floor and the privacy of her study, again locking the door behind her, even though she had encountered no one on her way there, nor heard any sounds coming from anywhere in Parr House.
Sitting at her vast mahogany desk, she perused the contents of the package thoughtfully for a time. Then she reached for the telephone and dialled the number of the Golden Nugget Motel.
When Darcy Marin, whose family had owned the motel for fifty years or more, picked up the telephone, Adeline identified herself, then asked to be connected to Billy Lightning’s room. As always, she was obeyed immediately, and the phone on Billy’s desk in the motel room rang, startling him from the notes he was writing about the discovery of the bloody hockey bag, and the ones he’d been reading about the history of murder and madness associated with the land Adeline Parr considered sanctified by the martyrdom of the priests of St. Barthelemy three hundred years before.
To say that he was surprised to receive a telephone call from Adeline Parr inviting him to lunch would have been an understatement of some magnitude. Billy had a dim memory of having met Adeline in 1952. He had a clearer memory of Phenius Osborne’s frustration at the hoops she’d made him jump through in order to secure the permits that Phenius needed for his archaeological dig.
Adeline had cited the “holiness” of the land around Spirit Rock, as though the fact that the Jesuits had been martyred there three hundred years before, while trying to convert the Ojibwa of the area to Christianity before being wiped off the face of the earth by an angry rival tribe, had somehow rendered holy the land that used to be her family’s gold mine.
Even as a teenager, Billy had found the hypocrisy galling, as had his father-the fact that Adeline Parr claimed to be concerned about the sacrilege of an archaeological dig to locate the ruins of the St. Barthelemy settlement, but had not had any such qualms about her husband’s family raping and exploiting that very same land for profit in the nineteenth century, and amassing the very fortune that allowed her to put roadblocks in his father’s way. It was as though the notion that the land might be sovereign unto itself had never occurred to any of the people who had occupied it-not the French who came to Christianize Billy’s ancestors, not the English who’d taken it from the French, and not the oligarchs and land barons who had purchased it and made it their own.
And now Adeline Parr wanted to have lunch with
“May I ask what this is about, Mrs. Parr?” he’d asked politely. “It’s not ‘about’ anything, Dr. Lightning,” had come the reply, metallic-sounding in the telephone receiver. “I knew your father slightly when he was here twenty years ago. While I was surprised to hear that you had returned to Parr’s Landing, it occurred to me that you might not know anyone in town. I understand you’re now a professor in your own right, like your father. I’d be delighted to entertain so distinguished a visitor in my home. We rarely have the benefit of such company in Parr’s Landing. And I think your father would have approved.”
“
“Only that he had passed away, Dr. Lightning. My daughter-in-law mentioned it at dinner last night. I understand you met her in town. She told me nothing of the circumstances. I’m so very sorry.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Parr.”
“Shall I expect you at noon, Dr. Lightning? I can assure you that Beatrice, my cook, has a skill in the kitchen that you’ll find unparalleled anywhere else in town, let alone the available dining establishments.” There was silence on the other end of the line as Adeline Parr waited. When Billy hesitated, she snapped, “Well? Are you coming or not?”
His own curiosity overrode his qualms-qualms whose source he couldn’t identify, but which he chalked up to residual distaste for the high-handed way the Parrs had treated his father in 1952. Besides, he’d never been inside a robber baron’s house before. And Christina might be there. He would dearly love to see her face again.
“Yes, Mrs. Parr,” Billy said. “I’d be delighted. I’ll see you at twelve noon.”
“Splendid.” Adeline’s voice was crisp, once again the voice of a woman used to being obeyed. “Do you know the address?”
Billy smiled into the telephone receiver. “I do indeed, Mrs. Parr. I know the house. It’s the only one in this broken-down Ontario mining town that looks like a Norman chateau.”
Two hours before Adeline Parr called Billy Lightning, Jeremy Parr drove his niece to school.
