proportion of his clients were adolescents, and his office was fitted out with posters of cool-for-the-moment bands and magazines that covered the range of adolescent dreams from Seventeen to Modern Drummer. When I’d needed advice about a drum kit for Angus, I’d known exactly where to turn. Dan knew everything there was to know about drummers and their art. The space next to his waiting room housed his personal passion: a Red Yamaha Stage Customs drum kit and a dazzling array of Sabian and Zildjian cymbals. He had soundproofed his garage himself.
He had also replaced the hard-packed cinder of the yard with good soil in which he planted wildflowers and indigenous grasses that murmured in the wind. In warm weather, Dan’s young patients sat beside him on a bench, listening to the grasses, smelling the wildflowers, and watching koi swimming placidly in a pool hand-dug in an area that had once between a cemetery for abandoned car parts. The metaphor was ready-made, and Dan used it when he talked to kids who said they could never turn their lives around.
As Tracy rushed towards the garage office that chilly day, she didn’t spare a glance for the half-dozen bird feeders placed with such care around the garden, nor did she notice the pains Dan had taken to ensure that each stone in the garden wall complemented its neighbours. She was a woman on a simple and well-defined mission. She wanted to get a prescription and she wanted to get the hell out. Venturing into this weird place was simply the price she had to pay.
We heard Dan before we saw him. He had been drumming, and when he opened the door of the converted garage, he was glistening with perspiration and life. It was twenty-five below zero, but he was wearing cut-offs and a sweatshirt. I made the introductions. He shook hands with Tracy and Claudia, and drew Tracy inside. “Come talk awhile,” he said. He looked at me. “Kitchen’s unlocked,” he said. “You know where the tea is.”
“All I want is to get out of the cold,” Claudia said. She was warmly dressed, but she was hugging herself and her teeth were chattering. “It’s bitter out here.”
We sat down at Dan’s kitchen table, slid off our coats, and stared silently at the snowy garden. Finally, I said, “So do we talk about the elephant in the living room or not?”
“I don’t want to talk about anything,” she said. “In the last twenty-four hours, my brother was murdered; a man I liked died under questionable circumstances; a man I don’t like humiliated me in public; and the child I cared for from the day she came home from the hospital told me to bite her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I hadn’t added up all you’ve had to deal with.” I leaned forward. “Claudia, I never knew you’d taken care of Bryn.”
“Who else would have?” she said.
“I just assumed her parents…”
“They were building their careers. Focused. I was twenty-three years old with a shiny new diploma and no idea at all about what I was going to do with the rest of my life.”
“And you took over the care of an infant. That’s a pretty selfless decision for a twenty-three-year-old.”
“Not for a twenty-three-year-old who’d had the kind of parenting I’d had.”
“That bad?” I asked.
Claudia’s mouth curved in an ironic smile. “No point talking about it,” she said. “It was no worse than what happened to Evan – no worse than what happened to the other kids we knew. The unwanted children of the rich live in their own particular hell. It’s just so difficult to spot under their picture-perfect lives of private schools, ski holidays, and idyllic camps in the Muskokas.”
“Where were your parents?”
Claudia tented her fingertips and regarded them thoughtfully. “Well, my father had the good sense to be dead by that point. That left Caroline, and the only reason she had children was because contraception was an imperfect science, and my father had scruples about abortion.”
“Your mother told you that?”
“No, our housekeeper. Mrs. Carruthers made that particular contribution to our education. Caroline pressed her into service to care for Evan and me until we were old enough to be packed off to school. When Bryn was born, I saw that history was about to repeat itself, so I stepped in.”
“And Annie didn’t mind?”
“She never noticed. Annie and Tracy were living the high life. They’d ignore Bryn for days, then they’d wake her up in the middle of the night so Evan could film them playing with her. I don’t have a maternal bone in my body, but I knew that was wrong.”
“And you came to love Bryn,” I said.
Claudia shook her head. “She wasn’t an easy child to love, but I did come to feel responsible for her – for both of them. After Annie died, I was all Bryn and Tracy had.”
“Caroline was there,” I said.
“In body if not in spirit,” Claudia said. “And to give Caroline her due she has allowed us to share her beautiful home on Walmer Road for lo these many years. Our family may be dysfunctional, but we have nice digs.”
Tracy didn’t bother coming inside when she and Dan emerged from his office. She spotted us through the window, waved the prescription in her hand, and gestured for us to join her. Neither Claudia nor I had to be asked twice. When the two women headed for my car, I turned to thank Dan. He was a man with a ready smile, but in that moment he looked deeply troubled. “Keep an eye on her, Jo. I’m faxing her psychiatrist’s office. I know he’s out of the country, but someone must be covering for him. I’d rest easier if I knew someone familiar with her case was handling Tracy Lowell. Until then…” Dan waved his hands in apology. “I’ve said too much already.”
“Not too much,” I said. “Dan, I put you in a tight spot. I shouldn’t have presumed on our friendship.”
Dan shook his head. “You saw someone who needed help, and you got help. That’s not presuming on friendship; that’s being a responsible human being.”
“One more question, and this is hypothetical. Could an overdose of beta blockers be fatal?”
“Jo – an overdose of Aspirin can be fatal. But if I can read your subtext here, Tracy’s prescription is short term.”
“But if someone – not Tracy – we’re still talking hypothetical here – were to be given a larger dose?”
“It would depend on the dose and on the person. It always does. You know how beta blockers work. They slow the heart rate and reduce the force of heart muscle contractions. An overdose could cause hypotension and bradycardia.”
“In lay terms?”
“Severe low blood pressure. Severe low heart rate. Heart failure.”
“Death.”
“It could happen.”
Claudia insisted that she and Tracy take a cab back to the hotel. She said I had already done enough, and I didn’t argue the point. I had done enough. That didn’t change the fact that there was still more to do, and I welcomed the chance to be alone to ponder Dan’s information before I made the next stop on my rounds. Kevin Hynd’s Day-Glo painted patisserie, Further, was in the Cathedral Area, so-called because its citizens lived their lives beneath the shadows cast by the twin spires of Holy Rosary. As I drove past newly gentrified houses and specialty shops, the dark possibilities of pharmacological dirty work seemed a world away.
Kevin’s business on 13th Avenue was flanked by shops called The Little Red Meat Wagon and Pinky’s Nail Salon – steak, cake, and fake – one-stop shopping for the unreconstructed hedonist. If we can judge a human being by the kitchen he keeps, Kevin Hynd was stellar. The walls of his shop were painted the rosy gold of peach butter. Like me he had a pegboard wall, hung with pots, pans, sieves, and strainers. Unlike me, his kitchen had gleaming industrial-sized ovens, three Kitchen Aid mixers, a stainless-steel Sub-Zero refrigerator, and a wooden worktable smoothed by use and so beautiful that I would have traded my signed copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking for it. Julia Child would have approved, and she would have approved of Kevin, a chef who might have been a dead ringer for Jerry Garcia but who was approaching the mound of pink-tinted marzipan in front of him with the reverence of the serious cook.
“Greetings,” he said. “Wash your hands, put on some gloves, and be bold. We’re all novices.”
“Okay,” I said, “but we need to talk first. The preliminary findings of the autopsy on Gabe Leventhal suggest he didn’t die of natural causes.”
“Whoa!” Kevin flopped the marzipan onto a marble pastry slab. “So what happened?”
“His blood sample was suspicious; he had bruises that didn’t come from the truck driving over him; and
