Enter, Night

ledge somewhere up near Spirit Rock. “How will you find her?”

“Shouldn’t be hard to find her,” Hank said, his throat suddenly full. “I’ll find her. I’ll bring her back home. You’re right. It’ll be good for Finn to see that she… that he didn’t… well, that something else didn’t happen to her.”

When Hank left for work, and Finn was finally asleep in his room, Anne did two things in quick succession. First, she telephoned the Mrs. Brocklehurst at the school and told her that Finnegan was running a high fever and wouldn’t be at school for at least the next day or two. She was keeping him home, for everyone’s sake. Yes, it was a pity. Yes, these sudden changes in temperature were indeed the dickens. Yes, she’d make sure his bedroom window stayed closed. Of course. Yes, thank you Mrs. B. When Anne hung up the phone, she locked herself in the bathroom and turned the cold water tap full-blast in the sink so Finn wouldn’t hear anything. Then she sat down on the edge of the bathtub and wept her own tears, the ones she’d kept from Finn and Hank because if she fell apart, they would, too. And now Finn had fallen apart, and there was no more reason to keep the tears inside. At least not in private. She cried for Sadie, whom she loved as though Sadie were her dog, not Finn’s. She cried harder than she had since she was a little girl, so hard that her shoulders and her abdominal muscles throbbed with it.

But mostly, she cried for Finn, because whatever had happened this morning out there on the cliffs-whatever it was-it had destroyed something in her son she feared he’d never get back. Whatever other tragedy had happened here, something had been shattered beyond any possibility of repair.

Later, around lunchtime, through an upstairs window, she’d seen the Parr girl come up the driveway. Anne had heard the knock on the door, but hadn’t answered it. She’d prayed Finn hadn’t heard it. He was finally asleep. For her part, Anne didn’t have the faintest clue how to tell the Parr girl about Sadie, even if she’d had the heart to try.

She looked out the window again and saw the girl walking back in the direction of Matthew Browning. A nice girl, Anne thought, relieved that she’d left so quickly. She reminds me of Jack. I’ll tell Finn she was by when he wakes up. He’ll appreciate that she stopped by. So sweet of her to do that.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Jeremy double-checked the address on Martina Street as he manoeuvred the Chevelle to a parking spot next to the curb. He found he’d forgotten that even towns like Parr’s Landing had streets like this one- rows of narrow, rectangular prewar shotgun houses with peeling paint and small chain-link fenced front yards where nothing beautiful ever grew, with fenced back yards that housed dogs who were never allowed to experience the warmth of the indoors. Houses that were smaller and meaner than even the other small, mean houses in a town full of them.

Christina grew up on one of these streets, Jeremy thought. Her father died alone in one of these houses while she was in Toronto with Jack, and no one told her until six months after he was in the ground, probably because they were too afraid of my mother to find out where she lived. God, what must we look like to Christina, really, up there in that house, throwing eighteen-karat gold dishes at each other and stomping across marble floors and slamming mahogany doors. Good fucking Christ.

To Jeremy, even the light seemed dirtier on Martina Street. It was as though the generations of men and women who’d offered their youth, their hopes, their dreams-indeed the entirety of their lives-to the Parr family gold mines as a sort of terrible, ultimate rent had only their own despair left to plant in the patchy, ugly side gardens between the houses. If that was the case, it was a crop that had thrived both in the heyday of his family’s violent use of the land and its people and later, when the mines closed, throwing a town full of miners on the mercy of government welfare, and their own hardscrabble ability to survive. His own family’s fortune had been long ago secured, of course, which had allowed his mother to continue to live like royalty, albeit lonely royalty, in her house on the hill on the other side of Bradley Lake.

Visible even here, from Elliot McKitrick’s front steps, the jagged line of cliffs loomed in the distance, gathering the town in its brutal fold of wings. Though not usually given to flights of philosophy, Jeremy suddenly wondered whether the hills and the honeycomb of mines beneath them had been consuming the bodies and lives of the townspeople for more than a hundred years, or whether the townspeople themselves had been the predators and the once-pristine boreal forest and the earth beneath it had been the prey.

There were two mansions in Parr’s Landing: Parr’s House, and the Roman Catholic Church of St. Barthelemy and the Martyrs on MacPherson Street, arrayed in the self-referential sanctity of its own history as a shrine to the French priests who had died here attempting to colonize the people to whom the land actually belonged.

Everywhere else, it seemed, there were variations on the houses on Martina Street. In one way or another, both Parr House and the church had consumed the lives and the lifeblood of the townspeople and had been nourished by it.

This is my inheritance, Jeremy thought. This is my legacy. This land and the people my family has been feeding on for over a hundred years. Whatever seed was planted in those hills and under that earth, it’s been held for me in trust all these years. It’s been waiting for me to claim it. Or for its chance to claim me.

And right now it has me exactly where it wants me.

Jeremy shuddered. He shook his head, then reached out and knocked on Elliot’s door. When there was no answer, he knocked again. He tried the doorknob, finding that it turned easily and swung open.

“Elliot?” he called. “Are you there? Elliot? Hello?”

At first there was silence, then out of the silence came a thump, like someone swinging their legs over the side of a bed and planting both feet firmly on the floor. In the air was a not-unpleasant scent of sweat and cigarette smoke, and something else-Jeremy recognized it immediately. It was Elliot’s own musk, the unique, personal signature of his skin and hair. And his sex. Jeremy closed his eyes and breathed it in, suddenly flooded by a rich flush of memories that excited and shamed him in spite of himself.

“Elliot? Are you in there? It’s me, Jeremy.”

The bedroom door opened, and Elliot stood framed in the doorway. Behind him the bedroom was dark, the windows closed. In the half-light of what Jeremy assumed was a bedside lamp, Elliot’s body was etched carved in shadow. At first, Jeremy thought Elliot was nude, but he was wearing a pair of white cotton boxer shorts that clung to his legs as though dried sweat had plastered them to the sinewy curves of his thigh muscles. Elliot was half- erect. The wiry scrub of black pubic hair crested the waistband of the white boxers, hanging off his lean hips, and the tip of his cock was visible through the fly.

Elliot squinted in the dimness. “Jem? Is that you?”

Jeremy’s breath caught in his chest. “Yeah, it’s me. Are you OK?”

His voice was rough with sleep. “What time is it? What are you doing here?”

“I called the station, they said you weren’t in till later. I… I knocked. I thought we could maybe talk or something.”

“Talk. OK, we’ll talk, sure.” Elliot went to rub his eyes and flinched. Gingerly he felt the area under his jawline. He explored it with his fingertips, feeling for something Jeremy couldn’t see. “Where am I? Wait, what are you doing here?”

“You asked me that already, Elliot. You’re in your house. This is where you live.” Jeremy took a step towards him. “Is everything OK?”

“Bad dreams. Fuck, my head hurts. I feel like shit.”

“Do you want me to get you a glass of water?”

“Yeah, please.” Elliot indicated the kitchen with a general sweep of his arm. “In the kitchen.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “Thanks.”

Jeremy found a clean glass in the midst of the unwashed crockery in the sink and poured Elliot a glass of water. When he returned to the living room, Elliot was no longer standing there, though Jeremy saw his legs over the side of the bed through the doorway of his bedroom. Elliot was sitting on the bed with his face in his hands. As Jeremy drew closer, he saw that Elliot was pale-no, more than pale, actually waxen. The thatch of dark chest hair stood out against the whiteness of his skin. His thick black crew cut was askew with jagged spikes.