Chapter 2

(Monty)

The news media were out in force on the Wednesday morning Delaney appeared in the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia for his bail hearing. And they weren’t disappointed. Or perhaps they were; it was good news, at least for us. Delaney was released, with a number of strict conditions, including a curfew, no unsupervised contact with his children, no alcohol or drugs or firearms. I had never pictured Beau as a gun-totin’ boozer or a crackhead, so I didn’t think he’d have any trouble on that score. His law firm put up the $100,000 bail money. We had a bit of a public relations coup in that Beau’s brother-in-law invited him to stay at his place for the duration. This was not quite as good as it might have been; this was not Peggy’s own brother, but the husband of her sister, and the couple had separated. Still, we had a relative on Peggy’s side of the family who obviously believed in Beau’s innocence and was not afraid to have him in the house.

The release gave Beau the opportunity to grandstand in the plaza in front of the courthouse. He declared his innocence, expressed his faith in our criminal justice system, which he had observed close-up for twenty-five years, and said he was confident that he would be acquitted of the charge of murdering his beloved wife, Peggy.

I drove my client to his new residence in central Halifax. On Brunswick Street there is a row of brick townhouses known locally as the Twelve Apostles. They were built as barracks for British soldiers in the year 1900. Each house has a little gabled roof and front porch with a side-facing door. Delaney’s brother-in-law, Angus MacPherson, met us out front. Angus was a piper who played in a local pipe band and also performed at one of the hotels downtown, greeting guests and piping them in. He was in full Scottish regalia, white-and-black Dress-MacPherson tartan kilt, with his sporran or purse on the front and the knife called a sgian dhu stuck in his right sock. The bagpipes were slung over his shoulder. None of this turned any heads among the locals here in Halifax. Men in kilts were a regular feature in New Scotland.

“If I’d known you were coming right now, I’d have piped you in. Next time!”

“Thanks anyway, Angus, but I’m keeping a low profile. I’ll expect a massed pipe band in front of my own house the day I get acquitted.”

“You’ll have it. I’m off. Make yourself at home. Here’s your key. See you later.”

“Thanks, Angus.”

“Ciad mile failte!”

(Normie)

I wasn’t scared when I knew Mr. Delaney was coming to the school to see Jenny and Laurence. They really did join Four-Four Time, our after-school music program, when I invited them, and they asked their aunt, who was taking care of them, if they could come. She said okay. The program is for all kids, from any school, and it’s free. I planned right from the beginning to go to it myself most days after school and help out. Jenny and Laurence were shy at first, but they were nice. The reason I wasn’t scared of Mr. Delaney was that I knew he didn’t really kill their mum. He was an innocent man arrested by mistake. Even though that was true, Daddy said there were some rules Mr. Delaney had to follow. One of them was that he was not allowed to see his own kids unless another grown-up was there. They made a plan that, since the kids were coming to Four-Four Time and Father Burke nearly always came in to hear the music, that was the place where Jenny and Laurence could see their dad. I guess their sisters and brothers saw him someplace else. Anyway, when he walked in, the other kids in the music program were whispering and pointing. “Is that him?” they all asked.

“That’s him,” I told them, because I recognized him from the newspaper and, besides, I had seen him before somewhere. He is really, really big and has a lot of brown and white wavy hair. He has old-fashioned glasses with thick black frames. My own glasses you can hardly see because the frames are thin and metal. Some people don’t even notice them. But you noticed his.

Jenny and Laurence ran up to him as soon as he walked in. “Daddy!” they both yelled, and they buried their faces in his jacket. He put one arm around Jenny and one around Laurence, and kissed the tops of their heads.

“I’ve missed you guys! Don’t worry. I’ll get this whole mess straightened out, and we’ll all be home again. And you guys will be able to play me a song on, what?” He looked around the room and saw the instruments the other kids were playing. “Jenny plays the tuba, and Laurence plays the triangle. Right?”

They laughed and said no, that Jenny was learning to play the piano and Laurence the guitar.

Mr. Delaney noticed there was a priest watching him, and nodded his head at Father Burke. Father came over and said: “Mr. Delaney.” It would have been rude if Father did not shake his hand, so he put his hand out and they shook. “I’m Father Burke. Your children have a great deal of musical ability; we’re very pleased to have them here.”

“Thank you, Father. I appreciate their being here. And I appreciate being here myself.”

“You’re welcome. Make yourself at home. Is there anything we can get you? Tea? A soft drink? A sweet?”

“No, no, I’m fine.”

“Ah, sure you’ll have something.”

“Well, a cup of tea then.”

“Ian!” Father Burke turned to the kid closest to the table, Ian McAllister. “Pour Mr. Delaney a cup of tea, and bring him over that plate of sweets, after you wash . . .” Ian made a grab for a teacup and put his finger right inside it when he picked it up. “. . . after you wash your hands, I was about to say. Then get a fresh cup. Keep your fingers out of it.”

“Yes, Father.”

Jenny saw me looking at her dad, so she said: “Daddy! This is Normie. She’s the one that told us about Four-Four Time.”

He looked down at me and smiled, but his eyes behind the big glasses looked sad. “That means you’re Miss Collins,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Your father is a wonderful man and a great lawyer. You know he is helping me.”

“I know.”

“Well, I think the world of him. And he must have a very fine daughter.”

“Thank you.”

Then I went over to a little kid I was supposed to be helping with sight-reading. He had dropped his book on the floor and was standing on it and making faces at another boy instead of reading. You have to have a lot of patience with little kids.

I looked back at Jenny and saw that she was clinging to her dad and trying not to cry.

You wouldn’t believe what happened at our house the night after that. Daddy was out at his place getting a guy to fix his furnace, and Tommy was playing with his band. So Mummy and I decided to order a pizza, just for ourselves. Without pepperoni. Dominic is only a baby and he’s too young to eat pizza. Obviously. When the Tomaso’s guy came to the door, there were two pizzas; it was a special deal, which Mummy had forgotten about or not paid attention to. So we decided to call Father Burke to share them with us, since he lives only a few blocks away. He said yes and went to the Clyde Street Liquor Store to get a bottle of wine. He didn’t look like a priest when he arrived; he was wearing a regular shirt with a sweater over it. The baby was fussing and crying but when Father Burke arrived, a big grin came on Dominic’s face, and he kicked his little fat legs in the air and moved his arms up and down to get Father to pick him up. Dominic was always doing that whenever Father Burke came over. It was really cute, especially because he looks like Father, with black hair and really dark eyes. We put him in his high chair to eat, but he fell asleep.

“Sit your blessed arse down, Father,” Mum said. “How may I serve you?”

“Sure I have an awful thirst on me, Mrs. MacNeil, and I’m a bit peckish as well.”

So we all sat down. Dinner was really fun. They let me have a tiny bit of wine in a little wee glass. It was a dark red and tasted kind of sharp at first; then, I really liked it.

“This is damn good wine, Father,” Mum said. “I hope it didn’t cost you a month’s pay.”

“Well, they took up a special collection for me at the church, Mrs. MacNeil, knowing as they do that I live in the spirit of poverty. Just following in the footsteps of our Lord and His disciples.”

“Oh, you’re a saint, Father.”

“Ah, now, all this talk from yourself and so many others about me being a saint, it embarrasses me. If Holy Mother Church deems it appropriate to canonize me after my passing, so be it. In the meanwhile, I’m here to serve as best I can.”

“And serve you do, so generously. Taking your last coin and spending it on a little treat for us.”

“And a drop for meself, too, now. I’m not as selfless as I’m portrayed in the local . . .” He said a word like “geography” but with something like “hag” instead of “geo.” So I asked what that was.

He said: “Hagiography. A book about the life of a saint.”

“Okay.”

He looked at me and my wineglass then. “Whoa! Take it easy, little one. Don’t be getting too fond of the drink there, Normie!”

“I won’t!” If you get too fond of drinking, you become an alcoholic. Which is bad. But I don’t have that problem. I can drink or not drink; either way is fine with me. I didn’t ask for seconds when I was done.

“Future sainthood aside, Father, do they ever take you to task over at the rectory for all the high living you do? The worldly pleasures you enjoy? Wine, whiskey, cigars, rich food . . .”

“They do, darlin’. I’m on my knees every night, in contrition. But the bishop usually lets me off the hook when he knows I’ve eaten here. ‘No sumptuous dining tonight, eh, Brennan? Gnawed on a few tough scraps at the MacNeil house again? Offer it up to God, my son.’ But you’ve outdone yourself tonight. By far the best meal I’ve ever enjoyed here.”

“Father?”

“Mmm?”

“Pòg mo thòn.”

I didn’t get what they were talking about, but I wrote it all down in my personal diary anyway, and looked up the spelling of some words. I think it was just a joke about Mum’s cooking. She’s not a great cook, even though she’s a great mother. But I do know what she said to him at the end: it’s Scottish Gaelic for — and it’s not me saying this, it’s Mum — kiss my arse!

So it was funny to listen to them talking, even if some of it didn’t make sense to me. A couple of times I saw Father Burke staring at the baby, then he looked away, as if it’s rude to stare at someone’s baby. But it isn’t. Everyone likes people to look at their baby because everybody thinks their own baby is cute. Even if it isn’t. But ours is.

Then there was a loud knock on the door.

“Who could that be?” Mum said. It always drives Dad crazy when the phone or the doorbell rings and Mummy asks who it might be. The whole family is like that, Mum’s side anyway. Daddy just says: “Answer it. Mystery solved.”

Anyway she got up and went to the door.

“Oh!” I heard her say. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see my son!”

“I don’t believe there is a piece of paper filed anywhere in this province that names you as the father of my child!”

“Don’t make jokes. I want to see him!”

Anybody would know who that was, because of his Italian accent. He had long curly brown hair and dark eyes, and looked like somebody in a movie. It was Mum’s old boyfriend, Giacomo. We had not seen him for ages. Me and Tommy thought they broke up. Now he was at the door. And then he was in the dining room. Gawking at Dominic in his high chair.

“I do not care what your papers say or do not say. Anybody would know, looking at the boy, whose son he is,” Giacomo said. Then he caught sight of Father Burke, and glared at him, then looked back at the baby. Father Burke stood up, because it’s polite to do that if somebody comes in the room, but he was giving Giacomo a dirty look.

Then Giacomo finally saw me. “Oh! Mi dispiace, Normie, buonasera!”

“Buonasera, Giacomo,” I answered, because he had taught us a few words of Italian.

“Giacomo Fornino, this is Brennan Burke. Brennan, Giacomo.”

The two of them shook hands, but they did not look happy to be meeting one another.

“Sit down and have something to eat, Giacomo. We’ll talk later.” He didn’t want to eat. He wanted to argue. But he sat down.

Father Burke pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered them to Giacomo. He took one, and Mum went over and opened up the buffet table, and brought out two old ashtrays. She usually growls if anyone tries to smoke in the house, but that night she didn’t bother. Father Burke leaned way over and lit Giacomo’s cigarette, glaring through the flame at him the whole time.

Giacomo sucked back on the cigarette and spoke up. “A pleasure to meet you,” he said to Father Burke, but he didn’t mean it.

“Where are you from, Giacomo?” Father Burke sounded friendly.

“I am from Rome.” He talked a bit about Rome, and Father Burke asked him a couple of questions in Italian, which he really speaks, unlike me and Tommy who only know a few words. Giacomo answered sometimes in English and sometimes in Italian.

When he wound down, Father Burke said: “But seriously, now, where are you from?”

“Roma.”

“No, you can’t be from Rome.” Father Burke took a deep drag of his cigarette and blew the smoke away from the table. “I know you’re just having us on. So? Di dov’è?”

Mummy looked at Father, wondering what was going on.

Giacomo finally said: “I am from a small village originally, of course, but I came to Rome to study and I stayed there until I came to Canada to work for three years.”

He was mad and got up and left the room. Went to the bathroom.

Mum gave Father Burke kind of a dirty look. “All right. Give. How the hell did you know he wasn’t from Rome?”

“He just said he paid cinquecentomila lire for something. Chinkweh-chento, not shinkweh-shento the way the Romans say it. So, a bit of a dissembler you have there, darlin’.”

“Hearing the gospel truth was not my main motivation for seeing Giacomo. If I want gospel, I’ll get up early on a Sunday morning and go hear you.”

“Sounds as if you’re more in need of a lawyer right now than a priest.”

“I’ll send him packing. He’s got no proof —”

“But a child’s father certainly can claim a right —”

Mum used a big word, and I came up with a sneaky question the next day to find out what it was: “hypothetically.” I did that a lot while this was going on. It wasn’t really a lie when I told her I was trying to “build up my vocabulary,” because that’s something they want us to do at school.

Anyway, what Mum said this time was: “If, hypothetically, a child has a father who lives here in the city of Halifax, or even in the province of Nova Scotia, a mother might be more inclined to see those hypothetical rights exercised. But if a child has someone claiming to be the father, and that individual wants to take the child four thousand miles across the ocean, then that individual is never going to succeed in establishing his claim.”

Giacomo came back then and said he wanted to get to know his son. Our baby! Then he started going on about his parents in Italy.

That’s when Mum interrupted him and said: “Normie, you have lessons to do for tomorrow. Time to go up to your room.”

But going to your room in our house is not the end of it, because there’s a secret listening post upstairs in the hallway. It’s an old thing called a register in the floor, where the heat comes up. It’s made of squiggles of black iron. And when the heat’s not on, you can hear what people are saying in the kitchen. So I clomped up the stairs and into my bedroom, then tiptoed out to the listening post and sat down.

“My family expect to see their grandson. They expect him to be part of their lives. Which is only right.”

Mum said: “You are making an assumption that you are not entitled to make, that you are the father of the child. That’s all I am going to say on the matter for now.”

Giacomo scraped his chair back. On his way out of the kitchen, he said: “You will be hearing from me, or from my lawyer!”

“Who’s your lawyer?”

“You don’t know him. He is from home.”

“Well, make sure he doesn’t reverse the charges when he calls!”

“There will be no need for long-distance telephone charges. He will be here.”

“You’re bringing a lawyer all the way over here from Italy?!”

“Yes. So you know I am serious. Goodbye. For now.”

I heard the front door close. Then Mummy burst out into tears! She kept saying: “This can’t be happening. Only over my dead body will that child leave the country!”

I ran downstairs and Father Burke was hugging Mum while she cried. He looked over the top of her head at me and said: “Don’t you worry, Normie. Everything will be fine.”

“Don’t let him take Dominic away!” I didn’t mean to yell but I did anyway.

He said: “That’s not going to happen, little one. Don’t even think about it. Maura, macushla, settle yourself down and call the best lawyer you know.”

“Ha! I don’t think Monty would want to take this on, given that my pregnancy put the kibosh on us getting back together!”

“Well, you have to admit, it did come as a surprise to him!”

“It came as a surprise to me too! I just thought I’d gained a bit of weight! I had no idea . . .”

“All right, let’s not get into that again. The point is, you won’t be hiring Monty to take the case. Too close to home for him.”

“The best family lawyer in town is one of Beau Delaney’s partners. Val Tanner. Oh God, I hope Giacomo doesn’t twig to the fact that he’s going to need someone local here, a member of the Nova Scotia bar, and get to her first! He’s probably heard me talk about her. She’s relentless. If he gets her, I won’t have a hope!”

“Get to her first. Give her a call. Go!” And he kind of pushed her to the phone.

I think he had forgotten that I was there because he looked surprised when his eyes fell on me. “Normie, wouldn’t it be better if you went upstairs and did your school work? Your mum will work all this out, never you fear.” So up I went again. In a way, I wanted to try to listen some more, but in another way I didn’t; I just wanted to remember Father Burke saying Mummy would work it out. So I did my school work.

I didn’t find out what they did about Dominic because I went to Daddy’s house to spend a few days with him. I do that a lot, and so does Tommy, unless he’s with his band, which is called Dads In Suits, or with his girlfriend, Lexie. Daddy’s house is right on the water. It’s a part of the water that comes in from the ocean and they call it the Northwest Arm. We have a boathouse, but no boat. Yet. But going to Daddy’s place always gives me the chance to nag for one. All I wanted was a little rowboat, and I would paint it bright yellow. Daddy used to have a sailboat but then he spent so much time with us and with his blues band, Functus, that he never had time to go sailing, so he sold it. Which was kind of dumb, really. You never know when you’re going to want a boat again, so why not keep it? But I would continue to work on him.

I didn’t get a chance to nag about the boat on my first night with Daddy because I fell asleep before I could bring it up. Then I had other things on my mind. I had horrible dreams and I woke up in the middle of the night with Daddy standing over me. It took a few minutes to figure out that I was staying at his house and to understand what he was saying: “Normie, sweetheart, wake up. You’re having a nightmare. Let yourself wake up, and you’ll be fine.”

My heart was beating really fast, my head hurt, and I was a sweat ball. My jammies were stuck to me. But Daddy hugged me anyway. Then he sat with me in the bed, and put my head against his chest; he kept smoothing my hair back.

“Tell me.”

“I’m scared.”

“It was just a dream, dolly. You’re safe here in the house with me. Tell me about the dream; that will make it go away.”

“There was a baby. And they were being really mean!”

“Who was?”

“Those guys that were there.”

“What were they doing?”

“I don’t know. I just know the baby was crying and screaming, and was scared or hungry, and it was those guys’ fault!”

“Was the baby a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t know that! I don’t have dreams about people being bare naked!”

“All right, I understand, sweetheart.”

“But I’m pretty sure it was a boy. It just seemed to be a boy.”

I wished I could explain it, how scared and sad it made me feel for that baby, but I couldn’t. Daddy rocked me and sang to me till I fell back asleep.

(Monty)

The first thing I wanted to arrange with Delaney was a viewing of the scene of the accident, known to police and the Crown as the scene of the crime. I wanted to see where Peggy died, but I did not want to do this in the presence of their children. I left it with him to find a convenient time. It didn’t take long. Delaney called me on a mild, sunny day in late February to tell me the children were with an aunt, so I drove to Brunswick Street and picked him up. We left the Twelve Apostles and pulled up a few minutes later in front of the Delaneys’ colonial revival house in the city’s tony south end. Designed in the 1930s by Halifax architect Andrew Cobb, the white clapboard house had a steeply pitched black roof with dormers on either side of a classical-style entrance. The left side of the residence, which I assumed was the living room side, had a set of three double-hung windows; the right side had a set of two.

We went inside. The entranceway was clogged with kids’ boots, skates, hockey sticks, and other debris of family life. There was a sunken living room on the left, and a kitchen and dining room on the right. But it was the basement that interested me. We headed there without comment. The stairs were wooden and surprisingly steep, but I could imagine slipping and sliding down the staircase without suffering much more than a bruising. If you somehow flew or were thrown from top to bottom, that would be another story. And if you fell from that height and landed on a jagged rock, that would be the story we were faced with.

I saw a little memorial the family had set up near the death scene, flowers and cards on a table.

“Where was the pile of rocks, Beau?”

He walked down the steps ahead of me. “They were here.” He pointed to an area to the right of the bottom step. “The kids were building their castle over here. They had planned to put up three walls and use the basement wall and window as part of the structure. We couldn’t afford to have that much of the basement out of commission so we told them they’d have to revert to their first plan, and build it outdoors. Most of the stones had been carted back outside when this happened. There was just the one pile left. And Peggy landed on it. Along with everything else the kids have to deal with, they are feeling guilty about leaving the rocks there. I told them the result would have been the same if their mother had hit her head on the bare concrete floor. I have no idea of course whether that is the case or not.”

“So when you found her, she was lying on her back and her head was on the top rock in the pile.”

Beau stared at the place on the floor where his wife had died. “That’s right.”

I knew the indentation, the fracture, in her skull matched the edge of the rock.

“I haven’t seen the rock yet. Can you show me another one of the same type?”

He walked to a corner of the room and pointed to a pile of half a dozen building stones, each of which was about ten by six by four inches in size. I wouldn’t have wanted to land on one with the back of my head. I turned back to Beau.

“Did you move her when you found her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He looked at me and didn’t answer. He was not about to say he wanted to preserve the crime scene because, from his point of view, it was not a crime scene. Peggy Delaney had suffered an accidental fall.

“Did you know she was dead?”

“Yes.”

I wondered about his story. What would I do, instinctively, if I found someone I loved lying at the foot of the stairs? Would I be calm and collected enough not to touch the person? Or would I shake her to see if I could wake her? Would I cradle her in my arms? Would I be concerned about contaminating a crime scene, if I had no reason to think a crime had been committed?

I didn’t pursue that line of questioning, but I knew the Crown prosecutor would. Instead, I asked Beau to tell me what happened next.

“I called for an ambulance. When they saw that she was dead, they called the police and the medical examiner. The police arrived within minutes.”

“What was their reaction?”

“If they thought foul play was involved, they didn’t let on to me. The medical examiner didn’t come down one way or the other on the question, as you know. Then Sergeant Chuck Morash muscled his way into the case. And the rest is history.”

“Speaking of history, what’s yours with Sergeant Morash?”

“Apparently, Chuck has trouble separating the professional from the personal.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning if I give him a rough time on the stand when he appears as a Crown witness in one or another of my cases, he takes it personally. If I discredit the evidence of a police witness, I’m just doing my job. As you are yourself, when you’re defending a case. As Morash is when he’s testifying on behalf of the Crown. I have a good rapport with most of the cops here, or many of them anyway, outside the courtroom. Morash can’t leave his sensitivities behind when he gets down from the stand. That coloured his approach to the investigation of Peggy’s death. Obviously.”

“But the Crown accepted his version of events. As did Dr. MacLeod.”

“Right. They had to go pathologist-shopping in order to find someone who would declare it a murder.”

“We don’t know that. MacLeod might have been the first they asked after the medical examiner.”

“Well, we’re going to find out, aren’t we? How many experts they shopped this to, before they found one whose opinion accorded with their own. And we’re going to find our own expert, who will take a common-sense view of things and conclude that this was an accident, pure and simple.”

(Normie)

We don’t just do music at our school. We also have sports, and a new game started up this year. Father Burke used to play a special kind of football when he was little, over in Ireland. It’s called Gaelic football. Kind of like soccer, except you’re allowed to pick up the ball, and the rules are different. They say it’s like rugby, too, but I don’t know what that is. Anyway, there are a lot of people on the team. Fifteen players, so your chances of getting picked must be good. I guess that’s what Father Burke meant when he said that anybody who could walk upright would probably make the team. He met this other Irish guy, who’s a teacher in another school, and they decided to start up Gaelic football teams in that school and ours. So far it’s just the boys, but we’re going to have a girls’ team too. I was watching the first practice with Kim and Jenny and Laurence. It was still winter — February 25, exactly two months after Christmas! — but it was really warm and the snow had melted, so the kids all nagged Father Burke to go outdoors and have a practice. He said it would be too wet, but he must have really been excited about getting out there himself, because he ended up saying yes. We don’t have a football field at the school because we’re downtown and there’s not enough room, so we packed the goalposts and stuff into some parents’ cars and went to the Commons. That’s the huge big grassy park in the middle of Halifax where they play all kinds of games. We had rain the night before so it was muddy. But that only made it more fun. I wished I was out there.

“Richard! What are you doing?” Oh, no. It was Richard Robertson’s mum. She was marching towards the field, and she looked mad. “You’re filthy!” she yelled at Richard.

Richard had a big grin on his face. He’s in grade six. He has reddish-brown hair and his eyes are almost the same colour; he has freckles across his nose, and people tease him about them, but not in a mean way. “We’re playing Gaelic football!” he told his mum. “Father Burke’s teaching it to us, and we’re even starting a league, and —”

“I don’t want to hear it, Richard. Have you forgotten what day it is?”

“Uh . . .” He looked at Father Burke, who saw Mrs. Robertson and came over. You should have seen the face on her when she saw him. Even though he’s a priest, he was in shorts and a T-shirt, and had mud on his knees.

“Well! I hardly recognized you, Reverend. This must be casual day.”

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Robertson.”

“I don’t recall signing a consent form to allow my son to participate in games that might be dangerous and that will obviously get him dirty, and give him a chill, and make him late for his other activities.” She turned to Richard and said: “You are going to be late for your personal coach.”

“His what?” Father Burke asked.

“His personal coach.” Father just stared at her. He had no idea what she was talking about.

“A coach who will assist Richard in becoming more goal-oriented, more focused, more successful all round. This is a case in point. The fact that Richard has forgotten and made himself late for his coaching session underscores the need for it. Richard! Get your things and get into the car. This minute.”

Me and Jenny and Kim looked at each other. Kim said: “Richard’s mum is kind of mean. She makes him do all this extra stuff and gets mad when he doesn’t do it. I heard him telling Ian that he wishes he could go to Four-Four Time or Gaelic football every day, so he wouldn’t have to see that coach guy, or his French tutor, which his mum says he needs or he’ll never be able to get a good job.”

“Yeah, that’s not like my mum. I mean, before she died,” Jenny said. “She used to say kids have to have time for fun, and not always be dragged around to activities their parents put them in.”

“I feel really bad about your mum,” I told Jenny.

“Yeah.”

“Why do you think she died?”

“I think she had a heart attack. Or what’s that other thing? They call it a strike. And it made her fall down the stairs.”

“They call it a stroke, I think,” Kim said. “My grandfather got all upset and then had one, a stroke, and he can’t do anything now.”

Laurence said: “Maybe she died because she was sad.”

“Sad about what?” I asked him.

“Our brother ran away.”

“No! Really?”

“Well, he wasn’t really our brother, but he lived with us sometimes. Years ago, and again last year. Then he left.”

“Where did he go?”

“Nobody knows.”

“That’s awful!”

“He was mean!” Jenny said.

“Well, yeah, he was sometimes,” Laurence said. “But maybe she didn’t know that. He always acted good around Mum. She might have been sad about him being gone.”

“When did he go?”

“A few months ago,” Laurence said.

“Was it a long time before she died?”

“Not very long.”

“How old is he?” I asked.

“Fifteen.”

“What’s his name?”

“Corbett.”

“I never heard that name before.”

“I suppose. I never thought about it.”

“We’ll have a family meeting on this, Richard. In the meantime there is no point in arguing.” That was Richard’s mum again. Richard was walking away from the field, and he didn’t seem very happy about it. He didn’t look at us or any of the other kids. “Good day, Reverend!”

I don’t think Father Burke likes being called Reverend. That’s not his proper title. But Mrs. Robertson isn’t a Catholic and she doesn’t know any better. Father stuck up for Richard, though. “You’ll be pleased to hear that Richard is singing so well he’s going to be the section leader for the trebles.”

“It’s about time. Richard? Keep moving. And you’d better not get any mud in that new car. Your father won’t be pleased.”

They left, and Father Burke made a cross behind her back. I don’t mean a sign of the cross that you do when you pray; I mean he crossed his hands in front of himself the way they do in a horror movie when they want to “ward off evil.” It was funny. He probably forgot the rest of us kids could see it.

But I think I got him in trouble, even though I didn’t mean to. I told Daddy when he picked me up after school. He laughed, but then he said: “No consent form, eh? I’ll have to have a word with the good Father about that.” Lawyers don’t always see the fun in things.

Daddy has to work later than school kids do, so he took me to his office. I like going there except he always tells me to do homework while I wait for him. He had to go to some kind of meeting with the other lawyers so I had his office all to myself. I was good and started doing my lessons, but then I got tired of school work. I could finish it all in twenty minutes at home, so why bother with it now? More fun to go through the stuff in Daddy’s office, like the stamp that says “Montague M. Collins, A Barrister of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia.” I made some designs on paper with that. I tried to erase Montague and put Normie, but I made a mess. Then I snuck my Nancy Drew book out of my schoolbag and put it on my lap behind the desk, so nobody could see me reading instead of studying. But it was almost like studying anyway, because this book has all kinds of big words in it, like “creditably” and “supercilious,” and I can look them up and sneak them into my school work and get better marks. The book is The Clue of the Whistling Bagpipes, where Nancy goes to Scotland and meets all kinds of people like my own ancestors, and solves a mystery. And it made me want to solve a mystery myself. I could call it The Mystery of the Missing Brother. Not my brother, but Laurence and Jenny’s. Where was Corbett?

Most people go to the police when a person is missing. But the Delaneys would have done that already. So I couldn’t start there. Any time I read a book or see a movie about somebody missing, the first thing they ask is “Where was he last seen?” I would ask Jenny and Laurence who saw Corbett before he went away. Other questions would be: Was he happy or sad, or mad at somebody? And: Did he have stuff with him, as if he was going to run away for a long time?

I made up my mind to ask my first question when I saw Jenny the next day at Four-Four Time. Laurence wasn’t there, so I used that as an excuse, and said: “Where’s your brother? I just mean Laurence, not the other guy. What is his name? I forget.”

She looked at me, trying to figure out who I meant, because she has a whole bunch of brothers.

“I wasn’t talking about the guy who is missing,” I said.

“Oh. Corbett. Yeah, nobody knows where he is.”

“Where was he last seen?” There, I got it in.

“The last time anybody saw him was at our house.”

“Oh. When was that?”

“I’m not supposed to say.”

“Really? How come?”

“Because it was the day Mummy died.”

“No! How come you’re not supposed to tell?”

Jenny looked around to make sure nobody was listening in. “He wasn’t allowed in the house. Daddy said so.”

“Did he sneak in?”

“Yeah. Daddy was away for a couple of days on a big case. The trial was in the newspapers. That’s when Corbett showed up at the house. Mummy felt sorry for him because he said he didn’t have a place to stay ever since he left us.”

“So, what happened? Your mum let him in?”

“She said he could sleep there, down in Connor and Derek’s room because they were away on their school trip. Corbett could sleep there but he had to go out during the daytime because we would all be at school, and the little kids would be at Aunt Sheila’s. And Corbett couldn’t stay in the house by himself.”

I tried to remember the other questions I should ask to solve the mystery of her missing brother. Was he sad? No, that probably wasn’t it.

“Was he mad because he had to leave in the mornings?”

“Probably. He was mean. But I don’t know. I didn’t talk to him. I just heard him on the back porch with Mum. Then he went to sleep down in the basement room. Derek and Connor’s. And he was gone when I got up the next day.”

“That was the day your mum died?”

“No, well, the day before that, I guess. Then I think he slept there again the night she died, because I remember hearing somebody moving stuff around in the boys’ room. Then it was quiet. The door was closed. But I just went to bed.”

“Was he around when your mum fell down the stairs?”

Jenny shrugged her shoulders up. “I don’t think so. He would have been asleep. I didn’t know about Mum dying until Daddy woke us up that morning. And Corbett wasn’t there.”