I smiled back, raising his blush level higher, just as Maude Blair rose from behind a large plastic garbage pail into which she had been dropping cuttings from a dogwood bush. She waved and began tottering toward me on hockey stick legs that ended in canvas sneakers, holding one arm up and calling, “Josephine! Josephine!” in a burr that always brought me visions of wool tartans.

Brushing her husband aside, she reached to grip my sleeve and pull me away from the boardwalk, looking around as though searching for something lost. “There’s a man been in your garden,” she hissed. “Jock saw him, didn’t he?”

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“He’d a bushy beard, dressed like a poor soul come outta the gutter, Jock tells me. And wild-eyed. Frightened the jeepers out of Jock, he did. He’s gone now. Jock said he watched him leave, tottering like a Glasgow drunk toward the canal. You didn’t see him, did you?”

I told her no, I had not seen anyone like that. I knew who she meant, of course.

She leaned closer to my ear. “Jock, he’s worried about you, lass. I can tell. All the tragedy you’ve been through, and Jock and me, we don’t want anything bad happening to you now.”

I wanted to wrap her in a hug for her concern, but I didn’t. I simply thanked her and smiled over her shoulder at Jock, who remained at the fence, his face glowing in deeper shades of crimson like a setting sun.

“Will you be needing more marmalade?” Maude called out as I began walking along the boardwalk again. “I’ll send some over with Jock.”

I didn’t need the marmalade, and I didn’t want to enter the house yet. I thanked her and joined the other people in the sun, hearing Maude’s voice, her nagging softened by the highland burr, telling Jock he should put the cover back on the rose spray, asking, “An’ were ye born in a barn? Because ye never close anythin’, never.” I smiled at the things that both bond and destroy marriages, the imperfectness that challenges romantic illusions. It reminded me of Gabe and me. It reminded me that neither of us achieved the perfection in reality that dominated our image of each other. If I was imperfect enough to cheat on Gabe, could he be imperfect enough to kill me for it? And himself as well? Did the alcohol in his blood confuse him so much that he decided to do himself first when I was late arriving?

I had been having these thoughts, and variations on them, since Gabe’s death. They invaded my mind like musical ear-worms, those old songs you don’t even like that keep playing in an endless loop within your mind. Thoughts about what might have happened that night had become my own personal earworm. I would have preferred something by Captain & Tennille.

THE BOARDWALK WAS FILLED WITH JUST ENOUGH PEOPLE to make me feel secure, and the sun’s last rays actually appeared to grow warmer as the day began dying. I walked toward Tuffy’s, past the house with the helicopter on the front porch and past Hans and Trudy’s castle.

The bodies moving ahead of me were a chaos of speed and rhythm, earthbound gliders on in-line skates and stuttering strollers with canes, and amid them I saw the bird’s-nest hair of the silently screaming woman. She crossed the boardwalk on a path leading from the lake back to Beach Boulevard, vanishing between stands of high grass on the shore. I stepped toward the beach through the nearest break in the grass onto a section of the shoreline that had rocky outcroppings, a thin strand unattractive to bathers. A man ahead of me was tossing a stick into the water for his Labrador to retrieve, over and over. Three stubborn pines, their limbs twisted like the arms of spastic dancers, marked the edge of the grass line. I stood among them, waiting for her.

She emerged from the grass, head down, arms folded within a pink cotton cardigan over straight and bony shoulders that appeared like the last rung of a short ladder, legs clad in plaid slacks. She walked with her eyes fastened three steps ahead of her, measuring her world that way, and approached the pines. When she was a step away, I spoke aloud to her. “Hello.”

She stopped in front of me, startled but not prepared to flee, as I had expected she might. Instead, she stood frowning as though I had delivered a mild insult, and I realized she was trying to place me, trying to identify me.

“Are you Mrs. Dalgetty?” I asked.

She nodded dumbly. I saw ancient beauty amid the lines of her face and around a mouth shaped like an inverted crescent. She could not have been more than a few years older than me, but the currency of those years had been spent differently. In that moment, I thought of my own concerns about aging, of how reluctant I was to let go of those parts of myself that I had treasured when I was young, to leave them for the passage of time to raze and finally level. First we ripen, then we rot. Mrs. Dalgetty was outpacing me in the rotting stage.

“You live over the upholstery shop.”

She nodded again, and her mouth actually formed a semblance of a smile. Someone knew who she was. Someone could confirm she existed. “That’s me,” she said.

I offered a hand. “My name is Josie Marshall,” I said.

She pulled away as though ducking a blow, and I reached to grab her arm.

“Why do you stand behind my house and stare at it?” I asked.

She shook her head, and I realized she was unafraid of me, but she continued to look around, confirming that no one was eavesdropping.

“Talk to me, please. My husband is dead, and …” My mouth tasted like sand and I had to start over. “I’m sure someone killed him. I just wondered if you could help me. Can you help me? Because the police say he committed suicide, and I don’t believe that. I can’t believe that.”

Her head kept moving as she spoke, twisting from side to side, looking up and across the strand in a motion that I thought at first was spastic, then realized was driven by fear. “He killed Dougal,” she said. “He killed him, Dougal, my husband.”

“No,” I said. “Gabe did not kill anyone. Not your husband, not himself. Gabe would never do that.”

“That’s what I heard,” she said. “That’s what they told me.”

“Who? Who told you that?”

She pulled away, dismissing me with a wave of her hand.

“Tell me about this man they call Grizz.”

She looked back at me, then at the sand near her feet. “Who?”

“Grizz. Your husband worked for him. Is he one of Mike Pilato’s men? Where is he? Where can I find him?”

She looked directly at me for the first time. “I never heard of no Grizz,” she said. “Don’t go sayin’ that I know anybody named Grizz, ‘cause I don’t, you hear me?”

“Someone keeps looking for him, at my house,” I said. “The police can’t find him. Have they asked you? Have they talked to you about this person?”

She shook her head, turned, and walked quickly away, with her arms folded across her chest and her head down.

19.

The lane along the beach extends five miles beyond the canal. I have walked its length. I walked it after Dougal Dalgetty’s widow left with her arms folded and her head down. I had walked it with Gabe on autumn days very much like this one when we talked about books and music and people we passed on the way. And I had walked it when Gabe was away for a few days testifying in Montreal and something happened.

Gabe and I had argued before he left. I love Montreal and wanted to go with him. He would be gone almost a week. I could go shopping or just stroll through Côte-des-Neiges while he waited to testify. Gabe said no. He was being paid to be there and it was work. He would take me at our expense some other time. I accused him of wanting to chase women while he was there. Wasn’t that what men did, alone in Montreal? Wasn’t it that kind of city?