She heard him answer from the bathroom in the hall behind her. “Just a minute.”
“Sorry,” she called. She heard bubbling coming from the counter and turned to see the coffee finishing. The sight of a pot of coffee filling would, for some time now, link itself in her memory to the early morning encounter with Claire Eldwin in her kitchen, living the last few moments of her freedom. She’d wept in the car back to Mayfair, but neither Hazel nor Constable Childress had inquired whether she wept for herself, her husband, or Brenda Cameron. When they got to Mayfair, Eldwin was in surgery. They kept her cuffed in a curtained-off part of the ER for two hours, and when they had word he’d come out, they let her into the ICU to see him. He was still unconscious, but his pulse had risen and his colour had improved. The surgeon had had to amputate his right arm at the elbow: the cut wrist had become infected and gangrene was setting in – they’d had no choice. The sides of Eldwin’s head were bandaged as well – they told her if he recovered he’d have to find a plastic surgeon to reconstruct his ears, but for now, all they could do was clean up the wounds and graft skin over the gaping holes to protect the structures within. She stood at his bedside, her hands behind her back, and called to him, but he’d given her no response. “He’ll be asleep awhile yet,” the nurse told her. She wanted to wait for him to wake, but the brief visit was all Constable Childress would allow her: they had a date to keep with Superintendent Ilunga.
Hazel had sent Wingate back to Port Dundas to start on the paperwork, but she lingered behind, hoping Eldwin would open his eyes. She had yet to actually meet this man, whose fecklessness had set in motion the destruction of so many lives. She didn’t know how she would tell him the news of what had changed in his world. She didn’t even know how she felt about it. Would he grieve the knowledge that his wife had killed to preserve an illusion? Would he welcome the new freedom it gave him? She realized she didn’t know the bounds of the man’s depravity. The longer she sat with him – and he continued to sleep – the more she wished there was something she could charge him with. But there was nothing. For once in his life, Colin Eldwin was the victim.
Joanne Cameron was under observation. There would have to be charges – she was not innocent, she had chosen to accept Dana Goodman’s methods – but Hazel thought an understanding judge would take the mitigating circumstances under consideration. Grief was not the same as insanity, but in some cases, it was close.
As for Goodman, the teams that had gone out to Pickamore to bring him in had found his body in the tall grass six metres back from the shoreline. She’d shot him cleanly through the throat: the autopsy showed he’d drowned in his own blood. It was the first time she’d discharged her gun in eight years, and it was the first time she’d ever killed a man. She looked into her heart and she saw that she could live with what she’d done.
Hazel poured coffee into four cups, two milks and two sugars for her, regular for Martha, and black for her mother. She was hovering over Andrew’s mug when she heard him come out of the bathroom. “Are you still double-double, or has your wife reduced your sugar intake?”
He made a mocking “O” with his mouth. “My wife? Good god, you’re really coming around, aren’t you?”
“Don’t push me, Andrew. Seeing you coming out of the bathroom with the newspaper in your hands is making me hallucinate.”
“I’ll go double-double for old times’ sake,” he said. She stirred and passed him his cup. He sat at the kitchen table, tossing the morning’s Westmuir Record down in front of him with a faint slap. “Impressive ending to ‘The Mystery of Bass Lake.’”
“You think so?”
“You’re full of surprises.”
“Still,” she said.
He sipped his coffee, grimaced, and asked for more sugar. As he stirred it in, he said, “You and Gord Sunderland working together. I’m going to watch the sky for pigs.”
“It was the only way to convince him not to print all the scurrilous rumours about Ray Greene coming back to town. Among other things.”
Andrew raised an eyebrow at her. “Scurrilous rumours are usually true. Is Greene coming back?”
She hesitated. “Maybe.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
“My feelings are mixed.”
“Your feelings are always mixed.”
“Then I guess it’s business as usual.”
It could have been five or ten years ago, the two of them bantering at the kitchen table. Any time but now. Except it was now, and her mother and daughter were airing out the house and another summer was beginning in which she would be, in all the ways that it mattered, alone. A great shudder of feeling went through her and the thought came into her mind that maybe this was how it would be, always, maybe she would be alone for the rest of her life. She reached over the table and covered Andrew’s hand with hers. He smiled at her, at ease. “What harm would it do if you kissed me one last time over coffee?”
“None,” he said, and he pushed himself out of his chair and leaned over the table. She met him in the middle, and their lips touched, lightly, chastely. He looked around. “The world still here?”
She laughed. “Thank you for everything, Andrew.”
“You’re welcome. Mi casa es… well, mi casa. Don’t hurt your back again.”
“Are you two arm-wrestling?” said Glynnis, entering the kitchen. She held up an alarm clock. “I forgot this. I put it in the glove compartment so I wouldn’t, and I did.”
“You should have kept it for your collection,” Hazel said.
“Oh, no, it’s yours. It’s a different time zone out here anyway, isn’t it?” She put it down on the table and gave Andrew a kiss on the cheek, but as she was leaving again, Hazel called her back.
“Stay for a coffee. You’ve earned at least that.”
“At the very least,” said Glynnis.
She sat and Hazel got another cup and grabbed the little box of sugar-coated donuts they’d bought. She called to her mother and Martha. Emily came into the kitchen with a fistful of wispy dead flies, which she dumped into the garbage can under the sink.
“Is my house arrest over?” asked Martha, sitting and taking her coffee.
“You’re free to go under your own recognizance,” said Hazel, “but you’ll have to check in with your parole officer on a regular basis.”
Martha nodded knowingly. “You think plastic surgery will help me?”
“Not a chance,” said her mother. “I’d know you anywhere.”
After washing her hands, Emily came to the table. Around it sat a collection of people who made up, in Emily’s opinion, a very strange family indeed.
Andrew opened the newspaper to the conclusion of the summer short story and turned it to her. “Your daughter, the author,” he said. Emily lifted her glasses off her chest and put them on and began to read. “Maybe you have another calling,” he said to Hazel.
“I’m having a hard-enough time with this one.”
“Another lifetime, then.”
“Yes,” she said, a little sadly, lifting her coffee cup to shield her eyes. “Another lifetime.”
About Inger Ash Wolfe
Inger Ash Wolfe is a Canadian fiction writer whose real name has not been revealed. The publishers have stated that Ash is "the pseudonym for a well-known and well-regarded North American literary novelist."The pseudonym was originally to be Inger Wolf until it was recognized that a Danish crime writer already uses that name.
