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  “You never let me do anything,” Morgan said sullenly, staring out the window. “I hate this town.”

  Christina and Jeremy exchanged a knowing look. This time it was Christina who mouthed the word. Hormones.

  “That’s enough, Morgan,” she said automatically. Softening, she added, “I’m sure your friend’s dog is home by now. You can go see him after school. I’m glad you’re making new friends. He sounds like a very nice boy. Why don’t you invite him over?”

  “Are you kidding me, Mom? After that scene with Grandmother about ‘townies’ and ‘sluts’? No way. He asked me if he could come and see the house, but I told him that it wasn’t a great idea, at least not now.”

  “Tell you what,” Jeremy interjected. “I’ll talk to your grandmother about it. I’m sure we can make it OK somehow. Like your mom says, he sounds like a nice boy.”

  “He is,” Morgan said sadly. “And I’m worried about his dog. He really loves her.”

  Christina looked at her watch, but there really wasn’t any way to allow for a stop before school without making Morgan late. And her mother-in-law would hear about that, she had no doubt whatsoever.

  “We’re almost there, sweetheart,” Christina said. “Do you want us to pick you up after school?”

  “No, thanks, Mom. I’ll walk. And I think I will stop by Finn’s house on the way home, unless I see him at lunchtime. He usually meets me. I hope he has good news.”

  “I hope so, too, sweetie.”

  Just before they pulled up to the front of the school, Morgan asked Jeremy to stop and let her out so she could walk the rest of the way. “Just like all the other kids do,” she said, almost apologetically. “Is that OK?”

  “Sure it is, honey,” Jeremy said. He stopped the car and Morgan stepped out. She gave them a little wave, then hurried up the street to Matthew Browning without turning back. When she was out of sight, Jeremy asked Christina where she wanted to go.

  “Why don’t you drop me at the library? It’s decent enough, as I recall. You can go and see Super Cop and I’ll amuse myself in the stacks.”

  “I don’t know how long it’s going to take, though. Will you be all right?”

  “Oh, please,” Christina said. “I’ll read for a bit. If you’re back in an hour or so, we can go have lunch or something, or head back to the house. If you’re not, I’ll walk home. It’s a nice morning. I could use the exercise. Who knows, maybe by the time I get home, Adeline will have taken a fall off the roof of Parr House and she will have left us all her money, and we can get the hell out of here once and for all.”

  “Dreamer,” Jeremy said. “But I admire the scope of your ambition. Tragic death and inheritance. We’ll make a real Parr out of you yet.”

  After Jeremy had dropped Christina off in front of the Parr’s Landing library, he drove along Dagenais Street in search of a pay phone to call the police station.

  Jeremy doubted Elliot would be amenable to anything as normalizing as a cup of coffee, much less lunch at the Pear Tree but—nothing ventured. Who knew? Besides, it wasn’t like Jeremy had anything else on the agenda.

  The man who answered the phone at the police station identified himself as Sergeant Thomson.

  “Good morning,” Jeremy said politely. “May I speak with Constable McKitrick?”

  “May I ask who this is, sir?”

  Jeremy took a deep breath. He leaned back against the wall of the phone booth. “This is Jeremy Parr. I was . . . I am a friend of Constable McKitrick’s. From school. I’ve just come back to town. From Toronto,” he added, feeling like the biggest babbling jackass that ever troubled daylight. At the same time, he noted how artlessly he’d slipped back into the entitlement of his family name. Not My name is Jeremy Parr, but This is Jeremy Parr, conveying the automatic expectation that the person on the other end of the line should recognize his name and be able to identify him. He suddenly missed the anonymity of the city even more.

  There was a pause on the other end. “Of course, Mr. Parr. Welcome home. We’d heard that you were back in town.”

  The policeman’s voice was as polite as ever, and if Jeremy had expected to hear some note of derision or condescension in it, he was relieved not to have heard any such thing. Even though he knew rationally that Elliot would never have willingly talked about what had happened between them—and its terrible consequences—Jeremy’s dominant memory was of the scandal, and he assumed everyone else in town shared the same memory. Paranoia, obviously, but not necessarily unfounded paranoia. To his mother, it was as though it all happened yesterday, as she had reminded Jeremy every minute since his return to the Landing.

  “Thank you, sergeant,” Jeremy said. He waited a beat, then asked again, “Is Constable McKitrick in the office?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Thomson said. “He’s not. He’s not on duty for a few hours yet. I don’t expect him till early afternoon.”

  Jeremy frowned and looked at his watch. It was almost eleven. He didn’t cotton to waiting around town for two or three hours till Elliot came on shift. “Thank you, sergeant,” he said again.

  “Any message?”

  “No, sergeant.” He was suddenly struck by how ridiculous he sounded. Who calls a police station and asks for a particular cop, but doesn’t leave a message? Are you trying to sound weird? “Actually, yes,” Jeremy said firmly. “Would you tell him I called? And that I’ll try him again?”

  “I will indeed, Mr. Parr. And again, welcome back to town.”

  “Thank you, sergeant,” Jeremy said for a third time, then hung up.

  What to do, he pondered. Then he picked up the telephone directory hanging from the ledge next to the phone in the booth and looked up the phone number and address of McKitrick, E. The phone number was there, right beside the address on Martina Street.

  His mouth was suddenly very dry, and his heart sounded like the echo of a trip-hammer in his ears. No guts, no glory, he thought, even though he’d always hated that phrase, associating as he always had, with clubs he would never, ever be part of. But it still rang true.

  The worst case scenario would be that Elliot refused to see him, or threw him out, or decked Jeremy for daring to show up at his house, especially if he was with a woman. On the bright side, maybe in the privacy of his own house, Elliot might be able to talk about his feelings. Christina is right. I am just like a girl.

  Jeremy pushed open the door of the phone booth and walked over to where his car was parked. No guts, no glory, indeed. He slipped behind the wheel and turned the key.

  Anne Miller had decided against taking Finn to the hospital even though when he’d regained consciousness he’d been hysterical. He’d only been out for a few minutes, but to his frantic mother it seemed as though he’d been in a coma for six months. She’d shaken him and patted his face, trying to wake him.

  When he’d woken, in between great arcs of crying, Finn had tried to tell Anne and Hank something about Sadie catching fire. It made no sense to Anne, but the fact that he’d come home distraught and nearly delirious without his beloved Labrador was a fact that asserted itself in the midst of his agitation. Also, he was covered in ash, an incontrovertible fact that chilled Ann Miller to her heart’s core.

  “Finn, slow down,” she begged. “Tell us again. What happened?

  Where’s Sadie?”

  “I threw the buh-buh-ball,” he wept. “And she . . . she burned up. My dog burned up into smoke.”

  “Finn, that’s not possible,” Hank had said, slipping automatically into the reasoned tone of fathers, a tone that usually had the power to right the world’s wrongs and bend reality with the sheer power of its unquestioned authority. “Did someone shoot Sadie? Was it maybe a gun you heard? Did you see smoke?”

  “I threw the ball and she burned up! She burned up! SADIE BURNED UP!” Hank went to slap Finn’s face—not out of anger, but merely a lifetime of watching movies where hysterical people are slapped across the fact to calm them. Before he could, however, Anne stepped b
etween Hank and their son, holding Finn tightly to her breast. Over the top of Finn’s head, Anne shot her husband a look that clearly telegraphed, Oh, for heaven’s sake, Hank. Finn buried his face in her bathrobe and sobbed till his entire body shook, but even Hank could see that his mother’s embrace had a calming effect on him.

  “Shhhhhh,” said Anne. “Shhhhh, Finn. It’s all right. Take your time.

  It’s all right. We’ll figure out what happened to Sadie. Shhhh . . .” And yet Finn was inconsolable. “I told you what happened. I told you.”

  In his bedroom, Finn curled against his pillow as though it were Sadie’s body. She hadn’t seen that posture in her son since he was a baby, and if Finn had suddenly popped his thumb in his mouth and began to suck it, she wouldn’t have found it out of place. As his mother, Ann knew every position of his sleeping body, every curve, every mood-based physical cue. What she saw here terrified her. It was as though Finn was retreating into himself, reverting to a preconscious infantile state. And Sadie was definitely missing—again. There wasn’t any way around it.

  Finn lay on top of the coverlet. Anne took a blanket from the foot of his bed and covered him. As she watched, his shallow breathing deepened and he closed his eyes. If he was not actually sleeping, she thought, he was at least slowly calming himself. Ann ran her fingers through Finn’s hair. Her fingers came away matted with a combination of ash, sweat, tears, and snot. She wiped her hand on her bathrobe. Ash. Sadie? On fire? It’s not possible.

  Back in the living room, Hank was waiting for her, pacing the floor. “Anne, what the blazes . . . ? Where’s Sadie? Did Finn say anything else?”

  “He’s resting,” she said. It was as though she hadn’t heard the question. “Not sleeping, but resting. He’ll sleep.”

  “Anne, where’s Sadie? Where’s the damn dog? Last night she could barely walk. This morning he takes her out for a walk and comes back without her, and with some crazy story like something out of a horror movie. Did he do something to her? Did he hurt her?”

  “Jesus Christ, Hank. What do you mean, ‘did he hurt her’? Are you insane? He loves—loved—that dog like a baby. He’d never hurt her. What the hell are you asking me? Did he hurt her? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Anne,” Hank said, with a patronizing patience that would normally have driven his wife to thoughts of murder, “the dog is missing. You don’t believe she burst into flames all of a sudden, do you?”

  “Hank, Finn is covered with ashes! And Sadie isn’t here! You bet something happened! But what?”

  Hank thought for a moment. “A gunshot? Did a hunter shoot her, maybe? Did he imagine the rest? You know the way he is, especially with those bloody Dracula comic books of his. His imagination can be the very devil.”

  “Hank, if Sadie had been shot, he’d have blood on him. He doesn’t have blood on him. He has ashes on him.”

  “Summer lightning, maybe . . . ? It does happen. It’s rare, but it does happen. I can’t think of any other explanation. Can you?”

  Anne was silent. Then she said, “Hank, can you go out there and see if you can find her . . . her body? Even if she was struck by . . . by summer lightning, she should still be there, shouldn’t she? Can you bring her home? So we can bury her in the yard? I think it would be a good thing for Finn, don’t you?”

  Hank sighed. “I can’t go now, Anne. I have to be at work. But I’ll try to cut out earlier today and head up there before sunset. I just can’t manage it any sooner than that.”

  “How will you know where to look?” Tears filled her eyes at the thought of Sadie lying untended on some rock 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 themse
lves 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. Barthélemy 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.