“I know,” I said. “Apparently it attracts perverts.”

Walter paused halfway through the door into the garden and pointed his finger at me again. This time it appeared to be loaded. “I’m not finished with you,” he said. “You keep poking your nose into things and getting in the way of our investigations, you’ll hear from me again. And stay away from Mel Holiday.”

I watched him walk through the garden, climb the stairs to the level of the laneway along the beach, and glance toward the caragana bushes where Gabe had died. Then he ambled off in the direction of the war memorial.

I closed the door and sat at the kitchen table, remembering, regretting, and trying to forgive.

BEFORE I MET GABE, I had a fling with a psychiatrist. I had gone to see him because I was feeling depressed over the kind of men I had been dating. When the psychiatrist convinced me after a couple of sessions that I was no crazier than the average divorcee, which did not make me feel as good as he intended, he suggested we have coffee sometime, since I was no longer his patient. He was a nice fellow, slightly British, with both the accent and the tweeds, and divorced like me. We had a few dinners and a couple of dirty weekends. We might still be dating if I hadn’t acquired the sensation that he was always practising psychiatry, even when he was on top of me in a waterbed. It destroyed my fantasy life. No matter what I was thinking at the time, I always suspected that he either knew what I was thinking or was trying to learn what I was thinking. Either way, he would be evaluating me, and you can understand what that would do to my visions of sandy lagoons in the Caribbean—or whips and midgets, for that matter.

“Do you know what your trouble is?” he said during our last session in bed. We had been talking about my feelings and his sex drive, and vice versa. “Your trouble is that you’re a very moral woman trying to live an immoral life.”

Which may be the most profound thing any man has ever said to me. If I meet him again, I’ll tell him that. But I probably won’t thank him.

Sitting alone in the kitchen after Walter Freeman left, I thought about his words and I thought about what I had most recently done to prove they were true.

I LOVE TO DANCE. Waltz, jive, samba, quickstep, you name it and I’m out there shaking my hips with two right feet. I can dance anywhere with anybody. I am especially good at dancing around my own guilt.

A year ago, the idea of cheating on Gabe would have been as unthinkable to me as following the cormorants into deep water and chasing fish. Or maybe I was just fooling myself.

Something about Gabe had begun to bother me. He was quiet, he was wise, and he was thoughtful when he wasn’t aloof. He was physically strong and comfortably predictable, and one day it began to dawn on me: he was my father. Not literally, of course, and not even emotionally. In all the characteristics that made him a man, however, he was my father or my father’s son. Whenever the idea entered my mind, I gave myself a mental slap across the face. I would be fine for a day or two, then I would go back to playing mind games. Did young girls who love their fathers grow into women who look for the same kind of man to be their lover? It made sense. The way I see it, the odds are so high against finding a guy who is loyal, gentle, strong, and doesn’t look as though he was a model for a gargoyle, that you might as well go for the tried and true, the comfortable and familiar. For most of us, those of us lucky enough to have good parents, this was their father. Or more accurately, a surrogate, a clone, a substitute. I think a lot of women do that. I worried that I was one of them. Maybe I was just bored.

In April, Gabe had to travel to Montreal to appear at the trial of a major gangster. The guy had been arrested here, and Gabe had interrogated him before releasing him to the Montreal cops. Gabe was needed to give evidence about the gangster’s dirty work in Quebec, which would take him away from home for almost a week. I wanted to go with him, but he refused, saying it was business and he would take me some other time for a vacation, but not when he was travelling on public money. I threw a tantrum, a stupid spitting and hissing fit, when he left.

I had planned to keep busy working and visiting Mother, plus reading and painting the kitchen, but the night after Gabe left, Mel showed up in a V-neck sweater, tight jeans, and deck shoes, which I thought was just about the sexiest thing I had seen since Elvis died. Do I have to paint a picture? If I did, it would be with a bottle of Teacher’s whisky before and tears after. In bed, Mel talked about leaving policing, about taking me to a B & B he knew in New England, about buying a place on a lake up north, where we could live together and listen to the loons at night, he and I in bed, naked under a duvet. “What would we live on?” I asked, and he said there would be enough money, but I didn’t think much of loons and I didn’t want to live anywhere except on the beach strip, and I had no plans to leave Gabe. I had just wanted—what? Maybe to prove I could love a man who did not remind me of my father. Maybe to help me get over becoming forty-one years old.

I said never again, and never lasted about a month, until I decided I might as well be hanged for being a whore as for being an adulteress, and I met Mel at his apartment in the middle of the afternoon, and once more at a motel down the highway to Toronto. And that was it.

I handled it the way most people handle things they are ashamed of doing. It’s not them who did it, and it wasn’t me who went to bed with Mel. It was some crazy person with totally different values. Okay, it was me, but I had become mentally unbalanced on three different occasions and was not totally responsible for my actions. The first time, I was drunk and lonely and angry and frightened, which sounded like enough excuses. The second time I figured, what the hell, the worst had already happened. The third time was closure. Two naked bodies humping on a sway-backed bed, thinking, We’ll always have Paris, except it wasn’t Paris, it was a Motel 6.

There is a line between knowing and suspecting, and Gabe straddled that line in the days before he died. Things were different in ways that I cannot identify or describe. Maybe it was how Gabe seemed to be watching me whenever Mel was around, or the way I would hand the telephone to Gabe when Mel called, without saying anything beyond hello. Maybe I talk in my sleep. It was the unknowing, the wondering if Gabe knew, that I couldn’t stand. I would be selfish again. I would confess to Gabe. That’s why I wanted to reveal everything to him the night he died.

The thing I couldn’t figure out was, how could Mel and Gabe work together like they did? I wondered about that until I read a magazine article titled “Why Women Will Never Run the Boys’ Club.” The subject was the failure of women to become top business executives, and I expected the usual claptrap on female hormones and nest-building instincts. Instead, it talked about playing team sports, which interests me about as much as Bulgarian politics, but I read enough to understand the point of it. Boys tend to play team sports more than girls, and they are more intense and aggressive. The article explained that playing intense team sports teaches boys to co-operate with other boys they dislike. “He may be a jerk,” the guy who wrote the article said, “but if he’s a great linebacker,” whatever that is, “and I need him to cover my flat, I can work with him.” His flat what? I didn’t know, but I understood the point: men can find a way of working together on something even when they’re competitive with each other on something else.

Gabe enjoyed working with Mel, at the beginning at least. Cops, Gabe believed, needed a special way of thinking and acting. You couldn’t think first and act later, because you could get shot or run over while pondering things. And you couldn’t act first and do the thinking later—that’s how innocent people get shot by cops who mistake a pocket comb for a gun when it’s in somebody’s hand and the light is poor. Gabe said Mel had the ability to think and act simultaneously. “Like an athlete,” Gabe said. “Like a pro athlete. The only thing he’s gotta control is his temper. Flies off the handle too fast.”