“I think so.”

“He threw up.”

“Why’d you call him in?”

“I didn’t. He came in of his own accord,” she said. “He wanted to know if Henry had been murdered.”

Forbes made a face. “Did he know Henry was murdered?”

“No. He thought what he’d read in the paper was far-fetched. He seemed to know something about bees.”

“Maybe you should put him on the investigation.”

Hazel laughed. Yes, she was probably going to need all the help she could get.

Wingate drove to the cabin on Gannon Lake and unpacked his things. The cabin was one of five that faced the water and trees on a quiet little patch of land. He’d been told two of the other cabins hadn’t been filled for the week, so he had the place almost to himself.

He’d bought some groceries on the way up, and he put them in the fridge, aware of his footsteps padding around on the wood floor. Smoked trout, milk, pasta, pecorino, roasted red peppers, plum tomatoes, oranges, butter, a loaf of wholegrain bread, carrots and cucumber, a bottle of red wine, and a head of iceberg lettuce. Enough for the weekend. His plans were to do the minimum amount of physical movement. Beds and chairs only, plus books. He’d brought a couple of detective novels as well as some crummy American celebrity magazines. He also had some sample detective sergeant exams in his bag. (How varied my inner life is, he thought.) It was early to be living in hope, but he’d been a detective constable for almost three years. He was thirty-one years old. If all this change he’d gone through since David’s death was to be for something, he had to keep moving. He hadn’t arrived at a mental space where he was ready to love again, but he sure as hell felt like working.

It had been a little awkward leaving in the midst of an investigation, but if anything happened – and he dreaded and anticipated something happening in about equal measure – he knew he’d hear from Hazel. Maybe, if he was lucky, there wouldn’t be a break in the case until next Wednesday. Five days of R&R would be enough, if he could get that.

He hadn’t had a break since he arrived in Port Dundas in November of last year. It had been a busy year since, perhaps busier than any he’d experienced in Toronto. It was as if the whole county was undergoing a sea change. You could smell it: the first hints of cold threaded in the fall air, that told you summer was really over, that winter was on its way. It was in the impending changes at the station, with Ray Greene coming back, with whispers of what amalgamation was going to bring. He’d heard rumours that the station was going to be moved to another location. He had to presume it would still be in Port Dundas, but who knew what this commissioner was capable of? The way Hazel talked about Chip Willan, he sounded like a bull in a china shop. Who knew what the future held anymore?

He chopped a bit of lettuce into a bowl, added tomato, cucumber, and some of the smoked trout, and headed out to the lakeshore with one of the magazines. It promised to tell of the tribulations of a Hollywood couple who were having trouble conceiving. The husband was widely understood to be gay, so the story was just part of the ongoing folderol about his viability as a leading man and international sex symbol. Probably the wife was gay too. It had long ago stopped galling him, this masquerade in which the truth was known by everyone who had considered it. He imagined most of the people who were the subjects of this kind of attention were already half insane from believing their own stories.

He took his cell down to the lake.

] 12 [

Friday, August 12, morning

The following morning, Hazel made tea for herself and her mother. Cathy remained asleep in the guestroom, but Hazel had opened the door a crack to ensure the woman was actually there, and she was. Emily had already forgotten that she had her appointment with Dr. Pass in an hour. When Hazel reminded her of it, she made a sour face.

“I used to pinch that man’s cheek. Grace Pass says he wet his bed until he was ten – she thought I’d know what to do about it.”

“Well, you were the mayor.”

“I told her to wait until January and put him on an ice floe. And you trust him to prod me with his tools?”

“He’s your doctor, Mother. You’re supposed to be in his office at nine. So none of your games.”

“I’ll play whatever games I want to.”

“I think you’re depressed.”

“I get disgusted, distracted, and dead-tired; I do not get depressed. That’s you, my dear. My generation never had time to pity itself: we had work to do.”

She drove her mother, more or less in silence, to Gary Pass’s office, although Hazel turned the radio on halfway there to cut through her mother’s fuming. Emily reached over and turned it off. Gary had recently moved his office farther down Pearl Street, to take advantage of the extension of “Mall Row,” due to happen some time in 2006. It seemed that developers were taking a gamble on the growth rate in Westmuir, and they were placing a lot of their bets on Port Dundas. In 1995, you couldn’t find a grocery store north of Mayfair larger than two hundred square metres, now you shopped in football fields. Down on Pearl there was a giant Canadian Tire that had replaced the little one on Main Street in 2001, a big discount clothing chain, and a bunch of big chain eateries. The seventy-seat That’s a Spicy Meatball! was giving Fraternelli’s Osteria a run for its money. Everyone called this progress, but no one could say whose progress it was.

Gary Pass’s new office was still half in boxes, and his receptionist apologized to them and took them directly into the doctor’s private office, where they waited for him to appear. Emily sat stone-faced, looking at pictures of Gary’s kids on the walls. Finally, he entered and tried to give both of them hugs, but he had to accept a handshake from Hazel’s mother. “So,” he said, taking his seat behind his desk, “what’s going on?”

“My daughter thinks I’m an old woman,” Emily said. “She thinks you have a pill for that.”

“We just might,” said Pass, smiling a little too warmly. It made Emily sit far back in her chair, like a truculent teenager.

“She’s lethargic,” said Hazel. “She has no appetite, she falls asleep in the middle of the day in front of the television, and her colour is bad. She thinks it’s normal.”

“Do you think it’s normal, Your Honour?”

“Don’t be sarcastic with me, Gary, unless you want to hear some stories about how much your mother worried about your toileting when you were a boy.”

The smile faltered, just a little. “I got over that. What can I help you with?”

“I eat, I sleep, I celebrate the million little things that make old age such a joy. I’m a little more tired than I used to be. I don’t sleep as well at night.”

“She’s fried all day long,” Hazel said.

Pass held a hand up. “Listen, it’s time for a checkup anyway. Let’s do our normal bloodwork, listen to your heart, take your pressure, check your eyes, and so on. If there’s anything amiss, it’ll turn up. Okay?”

Hazel looked at her mother, who was still staring at Pass, or perhaps through him. “Is that okay, Mum?”

“When I was elected mayor of this town for the first time, you were drinking from a sippy cup,” Emily said quietly. “Now you want to listen to my heart.”

Hazel and Pass waited for where this thought was going to lead her, but that was it. Pass stood up and squared a couple of file folders with a clack on his desk. “Well, then, why don’t we move into one of the exam rooms, and we can get started.”

It was eleven in the morning when Roland Forbes arrived back on Queesik Bay Road. Hazel had wanted him to go back right away the afternoon before, but he convinced her he’d been sufficiently noticed by Earl/Tate to warrant just a bit of discretion on their parts. Good instincts, Gumshoe. Needing to be around for an extended period of time in broad daylight was going to take a light touch, though. For one thing, he couldn’t go back down in the unmarked, in case someone had really taken notice of him. He borrowed Hazel’s personal car, instead, a Mazda 3 with eighty thousand kilometres on it. It was a 2003: she’d put all that mileage on her car driving the ten kilometres back and forth from Pember Lake to Port Dundas. It looked like a woman’s car, too, a category he thought included all Datsuns and Mazdas.