He wondered how well that skillset was developed here. With these people, who rarely brought in a person they didn’t know, it had to be hard to create and maintain the atmosphere you needed to fish out something hidden. The interview room was a place where the law traded safety for the truth. But there was no motivation to trade the truth if you didn’t feel you could be endangered, and Wingate had to admit, this place felt like everything was between friends.

Still, he marvelled at the amount of activity here. The jail cells seemed permanently empty, and yet the phones rang off the hook. The waiting area in front of Staff Sergeant Wilton’s desk was always busy. There were desks in the pen, rather than cubicles, and it created the aura of a squad room chock-a-block with humanity. Even the unoccupied desks, piled with papers, coffee cups, family photos, desk calendars, Rolodexes, and pens, seemed poised to burst into action. All this with a staff of sixteen, only eight or nine of whom were in during daytime hours. The station house was a tenth the size of Twenty-one, but it was its own thing, in its own scale, and it was alive.

He’d been through difficult adjustments before. His life had felt like a chain of difficult adjustments – this one didn’t really rate – but he was hoping the day would come when he wouldn’t have to question anymore where he fit in. He’d just be. Back at Twenty-one, he’d been respected, but he wasn’t sure he’d actually been liked. Naturally, a gay cop wasn’t going to end up being “one of the guys,” but he wondered if his sexual orientation actually had anything to do with it. He suspected they’d looked on him as the one who’d report an internal irregularity, the narc in their midst. They’d never had a reason to suspect him on this level, and in fact he’d turned a blind eye as often as the next guy. But there was a wall between him and his fellows and he would never know now what it had been made of. Or how to avoid the same thing here. Certainly being who he was in a small town wasn’t going to be any easier than it had been in Toronto. He’d already decided no one would know that side of him here. There was no reason to think he’d have cause to advertise it; he wasn’t interested in meeting anyone and even if he were, he doubted there’d be an opportunity. After David’s death, that part of him had gone to sleep, and he didn’t care if it ever came back.

He’d kept busy for part of the afternoon, and then gone home for a two-hour nap. Three days a week now, with Hazel gone, he was working doubles. In at six, break from three to five, and then back in until eleven. When he returned to the station house, the evening shift change was starting. Half the cars were out on the roads already, dealing with the developing mess that was long-weekend traffic. He went to his desk to check his messages and get ready to go through the day’s reports. That was part of his job now, too. Cartwright appeared behind him. “There you are,” she said.

“Where am I supposed to be?”

“You missed all the excitement. We got a call from a hysterical lady up in Caplin. We sent three cars up there.”

“What’s going on?”

“Says she found a body.”

He immediately stood and put on his cap. “A body? Where?”

“She said she found it in Gannon Lake. The body of a woman.”

She was still sitting on the couch, lost in thought, when Glynnis unlocked the basement door and came in. She hated it when Glynnis used her key; she felt she deserved at the very least a courteous knock. Glynnis looked to the bed and then her eyes tacked across the room and found Hazel. “There you are,” she said.

“World explorer.”

“You want to eat lunch there or will you be more comfortable at home base?”

“I’ll lie down.”

Glynnis put a paper bag on the bedspread and came over to offer an arm. Glynnis was the one who lifted her, who carried her. Twice a week, she bathed her and that was the sine qua non of Hazel’s humiliation, an unthinkable abasement, to be bathed by the woman for whom her husband had left her. But she had come to accept that there was no other way. She wrapped an arm around Glynnis’s shoulders and the two of them hobbled to the bed. “You need a pill?” Glynnis asked.

“I’m fine for now.”

“I brought us tuna today. Okay if I eat with you?” She asked this even as she dragged one of the chairs to the side of the bed. “I know I’m not your preferred company, but it’s silly for me to eat alone upstairs and you alone down here.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“You should be careful,” said Hazel. “People might start to think you really care.”

“Well, if they do, I can just smack you around a little and clear up any confusion.”

Hazel took a long slug of her coffee. “Do you want to smack me around, Glynnis?”

“I can wait until you’re done your lunch.”

“See, I knew you cared.”

Glynnis smiled. “Keep up that positive thinking, Hazel.”

After lunch, Hazel reset the bed into afternoon sleep-mode, but when she lay down, she wasn’t as tired as she thought she’d be. Visits from Glynnis always rattled her. The woman’s kindness was the hardest thing: it would have been for anyone. Surely Glynnis deserved to be punished for her kindness? Everything else, Hazel had earned: Andrew’s cheating on her, the divorce, her life alone with her smart-mouthed mother. But did she merit this? This awful tenderness?

She reached across to the bedside table to choose something to read. The gardening magazines were too much for a shut-in, and she chose instead Monday’s Westmuir Record. Her mother had mentioned it was publishing the summer story. She silently prayed it wouldn’t be a romance this year. She opened to the story. It was a little mystery called “The Secret of Bass Lake.” A man and his son fishing. A cooler full of beer. The sun peeking up over the horizon. Christ, she thought, it is a romance. The writer’s photograph was printed beside his name, a cheesy image of the man standing with his legs set widely apart and his hands in his pockets in a parking lot somewhere. She closed the paper and tossed it onto the floor.

An hour passed. Slowly. She sat up and put her legs over the side of the bed. Dr. Pass hadn’t actually told her she was “coming along.” He’d gone down her left leg with a pin he’d taken out of his bulletin board – a nod to country doctoring – pricking her leg with it every few inches. She knew about these nerve paths because they’d gone dead on her so many times. He wasn’t dissatisfied with the neurological signs, but he told her off for the atrophy he found in the muscle. “You know what this tells me?” he said. She waited him out and he lowered her legs. “This is the sign of a woman feeling sorry for herself.”

“Don’t you have to feel my head for that?”

“These are legs shrivelling from bedrest, Hazel. You can’t heal in bed. You have to move.”

“It hurts to move, Gary.”

“It should. Your back is a mess. But movement and pain are the only way through to as full a healing as you’re going to get.”

Now, after Wingate’s visit and lunch with Glynnis, she was so bored even exercise seemed an escape. She decided to try the stairs. She crossed the basement to the door that led to upstairs and opened it. The stairs looked like a job for a professional climber. She grabbed the banister and started up. She felt like she was emerging from a cave.

The upper part of the house was full of light. The upstairs clocks her mother had told her about she now saw for the first time; their incessant ticking gave the house a fugitive presence, like there were people whispering in its rooms. What kind of person needed to know the time wherever they stood? Perhaps a woman who was counting her luck, and had to mark every blessed second of it.

She strolled slowly through the living room, with its leather couch and chairs, the widescreen television sentinel in a corner, the fireplace with its pristine unburnt logs waiting for another winter to lend their hearthy romantic glow to the house. She saw Glynnis and Andrew cuddling on the couch, murmuring things to each other, indulging whatever conversational shorthand they’d developed with each other, only a word of which would be enough to make her crazy. She touched nothing, but looked closely. A line of old, heavy books lined the mantelpiece on either side of a rococo silver clock. Decorator books, never read. Probably cost them a pretty penny, too. There was another set of stairs off the living room that led to the bedrooms, although she knew her mother slept on the main floor, in what was Andrew’s office. She went there next, passing the dining room. She glanced in and saw the exact centrepiece she imagined would be there: a tangle of twigs with dried berries and little silver objects in it, stars and planets, and a big, thick red candle sticking up out of the middle of it. The wick was white; Glynnis had never lit it. Perhaps they argued about it. Why did I buy you this nice thing if you never use it? But then Glynnis’s answer presented itself right away: Because if I use it, it won’t be the lovely, thoughtful thing you bought me one day for no reason but that you loved me. Goddamnit.