She gave a wide berth to the buffet. How people could eat at a time like this was beyond her. Cathy was sitting at one end of a couch, receiving people. She looked to be in shock a little, but it hadn’t caused her natural warmth to flag. She was a beautiful, capable woman of thirty-six, and it was hard to imagine anyone bearing up with as much grace as she was.

There was a clutch of people standing around Cathy and not talking so much as they were emoting to each other. Professional criers, Hazel recalled, had once been hired by mourners to bring the proper gravity to a sad situation. It seemed the performance came naturally to some. She threaded her way eventually to the couch and took Cathy’s hand in hers. “I don’t know what to say.”

“What is there to say?”

“I thought he was indestructible.”

“Apparently not. It’s unimaginable to me that he could have fallen off as many ladders as he did but be killed by something that tiny.”

“Why was he down there?”

“He told me he was going to Mayfair to pick up some filters. Maybe he got a call on the way back. I don’t know. I didn’t talk to him after he left the store.”

“It’s awful, Cathy. Just awful.”

Hazel hung back for a while after that, and shook hands, and made the appropriate gestures to the family. She overheard quite a few Henry Wiest stories that she already knew. The time he came in the middle of the night and enticed a family of raccoons out of Robert Moss’s attic with nothing more than a net and one of The Frog Pond’s meatballs. His uncle was talking about how Henry had three wild years in his teens when nobody thought he’d ever settle down. He was obviously never going to take over Bill’s store. His father, my brother, said the uncle, pausing. But there was always a lot more to Henry and he wanted to be able to be with that woman, there, he said, pointing at the couch. Hazel watched people coming up to the uncle, smiling and touching him. She’d never heard of a wild version of Henry Wiest, and she’d known him from babyhood. The Wiest family went as far back in Westmuir as the Micallefs. Hazel had been fifteen when Henry was born; maybe his wild years coincided with her child-rearing years. She filed it away, though. She had her own collection of stories. Her ex, Andrew, had once needed a hand to help trim heavy branches hanging over their roof: Henry had insisted Andrew go back inside and watch the football game, it was a two-man job he could do on his own. And once, when Martha was fourteen and alone at home, an attempt at teaching herself to drive had found her backsliding down the hill behind the house in their 1982 Volvo station wagon. Henry had answered her panicked call for help and he came to winch her back uphill and show her how to fill the tire tracks in the snow with cedar switches. (Martha told them the truth, anyway. They debated whether the elder Wiest would have approved of Henry’s abetting. He’d been a Calvinist type, William Wiest.)

Both of them had been fixtures in the town. Cathy had sat on town council. If someone was having a party in Kehoe Glenn, there was a good chance they were at it. Henry had been fun to know. A party they’d had once at the house in Pember Lake had gone so late he’d fallen asleep on the couch with a blanket over his head. They’d left him there until noon the next day, tiptoeing around, and then decided to wake him. But when they pulled the blanket back there was a pile of pillows under it and a note that read, Keep it down, please.

She was going to miss him.

When people began to leave (and when the vittles began to dwindle), Hazel went up to Cathy a second time, to say goodbye. “There were a lot of people here,” she said. “He was well loved.”

“Thank you for coming, Hazel. You know it was your father’s generation that set the example for Hank, once he was ready to come around to it. His dad, yours, all those nice old guys who used to curl together at the bonspiel … they were the template. I wonder what this place is going to be like when their influence is finally gone.”

“Well, it’s up to us to keep it alive. Henry was the best example of it, though.”

Cathy half smiled at Hazel. “Thank you for saying that.”

Hazel gave the mourning woman a huge hug. Then, gently, she said, “Do you mind if I ask you something, Cathy?”

“Like what?” Hazel’s tone had put her on alert.

“I’m just wondering if Henry smoked.”

“Oh, he quit years ago. But he bought the occasional pack. I sometimes found them.”

“Do you think he would have gone down to Queesik Bay to buy a pack of cigarettes?”

“Hazel …”

“I know,” she said, “Sorry. Force of habit.”

She squeezed Hazel’s hand and turned her reddened face to the next well-wisher. Hazel went back to her car. She drove home with the radio off, thinking. Why had Henry Wiest parked far in the back of the smoke shop? There was a drive-through there if he’d wanted to be subtle about it. But he’d parked. So maybe he hadn’t gone for smokes. She sincerely doubted that he’d gone for souvenirs, either.

] 2 [

Late afternoon

Things were changing at the Port Dundas Police Department. Years of talk about amalgamating some of the region’s smaller shops was turning into a reality, and the Port Dundas detachment was about to experience that in the form of Ray Greene returning to his old shop as the new commanding officer. Supposedly this was the beginning of a renaissance for Port Dundas: the detachment was going to grow, become more central to Westmuir operations. She wondered what Ray was going to be called. Probably superintendent. It made her skin itch to think of it. He’d been gone for almost a year, after quitting the force over Hazel’s methods, as his CO, and now he was coming back, not as her deputy but her boss. Ray himself had informed Hazel of Commissioner Willan’s decision in person back in May: he was going to be installed in January. So she had five months, five more months to do things her way.

After the gathering at the Wiest house, she called down to Queesik Bay to get a copy of the band police report on the discovery of the body, and a copy of the autopsy. The report was faxed up from the reserve police department. It was detailed and unprovocative. Under the details of time and place, the reporting officer, a Lydia Bellecourt, had written:

I responded to the location at 12:35 a.m. in regards to a report of a body in the rear of the parking lot behind Eagle Smoke and Souvenir. Upon arrival at the time noted above, a customer of Eagle Smoke and Souvenir, full name LOUIS PETER HARKEMAS, directed me to the location of the body, which he first saw when he was parking his car and his headlights illuminated it. He reassured me that no one had touched or moved the body from when he first saw it. The victim was found lying on his back, on the gravel of the rear parking lot, between a red, 2003 Ford F-150 pickup with the licence plate AAZW 229, and a grey 1997 Volkswagen Jetta with no plates. The victim was dressed in jeans, a blue shirt, and was wearing black Blundstone boots. The victim had vomited.

I ascertained that the victim was not breathing and did not have a pulse, whereupon I radioed QBAS to state that the victim appeared to be deceased and that in addition to life-saving equipment that had already been dispatched, a coroner would be needed. The ambulance arrived on the scene at 12:41 a.m. and pronounced the victim dead. The coroner, CALVIN BRETT, arrived shortly afterwards and did his own exam and wrote his report on the scene (#38174490). He estimated the time of death at between 11 p.m. and midnight. A driver’s licence and an Ontario Health Card confirmed the victim’s identity as HENRY PHILLIP WIEST, of 72 Church Road in Kehoe Glenn, Ontario. DOB June 11, 1959. Contents of the victim’s pockets were a wallet with $45 in cash, a cellphone, and a comb. All items were bagged. There was no damage to the victim’s vehicle, and there was nothing of interest in the truck except for a load of home furnace filters, and a half-drunk Tim Hortons coffee in a cup-holder. There were no personal belongings in the truck except for a folded blanket. Papers confirming victim’s ownership of the truck were found in the glove compartment. The victim’s last name is also painted on the side of the truck and refers to a well-known business in Kehoe Glenn, Wiest’s.