(Monty)
That evening, Brennan and Pat Burke joined me and Normie in my backyard. The property is bounded by the waters of the Northwest Arm, the long, narrow body of water separating the western side of the Halifax peninsula from the mainland. We sat in my Adirondack chairs with our drinks, and enjoyed the mild April weather.
“What a grand spot this is, Monty,” said Patrick. “It’s therapeutic just sitting here and gazing at the water. I may decide to miss my flight to New York tonight.”
“Thanks, Pat. Feel free to send your patients up for a spot of relaxation.”
“I may do that. Is it always this balmy in April?”
“Ha!” I responded. “It could be like this, it could be raining or snowing, or both. Or — look out to the ocean — what do you see?”
“A line of clouds, it looks like.”
“Fog. A fog bank just sitting out there. If it moves in, that will be the end of all this happy talk about the weather. Even downtown, on the other side of the peninsula, they can probably feel the chill breeze coming off it.”
“We’ll enjoy the good times while they last, then,” he said.
“More seriously, though, Pat, I don’t know how to begin to thank you for coming up here and helping us out with Normie. We’ll sort things out in terms of compensation, your flight and all that.”
He waved me off. “No worries. I was due for a visit anyway. And Bren was overdue for his physical.”
“You’re his family doctor, are you, in both senses of the word? Quite a distance between doctor and patient.”
“Doesn’t make much sense, does it? But if I don’t insist, he’ll never go for a checkup. Have you ever heard of him going to see a doctor here?”
“No, but then he strikes me as the type who wouldn’t mention it. Or anything else to do with health or sickness.”
“No, of course not. He wouldn’t mention it if he had a double lung transplant. ‘Brennan, would you like to go over to the Midtown for a pint and a smoke?’ ‘Ah, no, not today.’ That would be all you’d hear on transplant day.”
Typically, Brennan ignored the exchange.
“Do you know how to do that stuff?” Normie asked. “Listening to hearts and fixing broken arms and all that? I thought you just knew how to deal with people’s heads.” She stopped abruptly, and her face reddened. She must have thought she was out of line, but of course she wasn’t, and Pat smiled at her.
“Well, now, you wouldn’t want me operating on Brennan if he needed that lung transplant — necessitated by his refusal to give up smoking — for instance. Nor would you want me to give you a triple bypass operation. You’d best go to a heart specialist for that! But in fact psychiatrists are medical doctors first. That’s how we start out. Then we go on to study psychiatry. So I know the medical stuff, too.”
“That makes sense. I get it now. Daddy, what time is it? I said I’d phone Kim after her dance lesson.”
“It’s just after seven o’clock.”
“Okay, I’m going to see if she’s home now.”
When she left us, I asked Patrick: “So, Pat, where do you come down on the question of psychic phenomena, clairvoyance and all that?”
“I guess I would describe my position as ‘cautiously open-minded.’ Ask most of my colleagues what accounts for a person hearing voices or having visions, and I think you know what they’ll say: psychosis. Quite rightly, most of the time. So they wouldn’t welcome me making an address to the American Psychiatric Association on the subject of clairvoyance! There are a lot of charlatans out there, and a lot of wackiness around the whole subject, as is evident from the tabloid press. So we have to tread carefully. I’ve never had a psychic moment in my life. But it strikes me that some people have insights that can’t be explained by coincidence. Sometimes the theories put forward to debunk these stories are just as fanciful and lacking in proof as the wildest of psychic claims. And there is nothing I’ve ever seen in Normie that would suggest she is lying or psychotic! Even this fellow” — Pat inclined his head towards his brother — “falls short of a finding of psychosis.”
“Give it to me straight, Doc.”
“And I know he is, shall we say, ‘sensitive’ to otherworldly phenomena, as left-brained as he otherwise appears to be. I suspect he finds Normie’s claims quite credible.”
“I do,” Brennan replied. “There’s a whole lot of codology — foolishness — associated with this stuff, but I believe it’s the real thing with Normie. She has the sight, just like the old spook in Cape Breton, her great-grandmother.”
“She comes by it naturally, then! I saw something of it myself, when you were all in New York for the wedding. There we were at the table, and she was able to intuit a great deal about our brother, Francis, including the Irish-language pet name our mother used for him when he was a child. I checked with Mam afterwards, and she was adamant that she had never used the phrase in Normie’s hearing. She hadn’t said it in years. What was it, Bren? It meant ‘child of my heart.’”
“Leanbh mo chroí.”
“Right. Could she have heard that bit of Irish around the Collins household?”
“Not much chance of that. Monty hasn’t had our advantages, Padraig. Never mind that he bears the name Montague Michael Collins. His da obviously banjaxed the job of passing on our ancestral history to his poor, benighted son. Or maybe he did, but the lad wasn’t listening.”
“There you go. She’d never heard it before, and she came out with it, and she spooked the hell out of Francis when she did it. So I’ll talk to Normie again, and see what she has to say. Who knows, we may find out she’s seeing events that really happened, or that will happen, and I’ll be able to present a paper to the American Psychiatric crowd after all!”
(Normie)
I was in my bedroom at Daddy’s house. There’s a whole wall that he lets me draw and paint on, which was really fun. Except now I had the wall full of pictures, and I wanted to put more on there and didn’t know where. I was trying to figure it out when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and I knew they weren’t Dad’s. There was a knock at the door even though it was open. It’s nice to know some people are really polite.
“Hi, Dr. Burke.”
“Hi, Normie. Would it be all right if I talked with you for a few minutes?”
“Okay.”
He sat in my chair. “I’d like to help you, Normie. I know the things you see are upsetting you.”
“They think I’m crazy! Like the people in the movies who say they’re hearing voices, and everybody looks at each other and makes a face like ‘woooo, this guy’s loony!’”
“Your mum and dad have talked to me, and so has my brother, and they don’t think there’s anything crazy about you at all! They believe what you’re saying, and so do I.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yep. And you know something?”
“What?”
“I work with the kind of people who are sometimes called crazy. Not a very nice way to talk about them, is it? Especially since it’s not their fault. They are people who have problems, sometimes mental illnesses. And I can tell that you’re not like them in any way.”
“Honest?”
“Honest.”
“That’s good.”
“So, Normie, how are you enjoying the choir school? This is your first year, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and it’s great! I love it! We learn a whole lot of regular stuff like math and history, but then we get to sing, in Latin and Italian and French and German. Me and Kim both switched to the choir school this year.”
“So you have your best friend with you?”
“Yeah. She’s kinda scared of Father Burke — well, your brother.”
“You tell him to stop scaring Kim, or I’ll tell our mother on him! She’ll get him sorted.”
I laughed because he was joking.
“So things are going well at school for you.”
“Yep.”
“And you have Kim for a friend. Other friends, too?”
“Yeah, some from my old school and some at the new school. And some more at Four-Four Time, the music program we do after school with kids from all over the city.”
“Lovely. And you have a big brother who takes good care of you . . .”
“Yeah, Tommy’s a really good brother. He teases me sometimes, but in a funny way, not in a mean way. And he has a really nice girlfriend, Lexie.”
“Good, good. And you have a baby brother. That must be fun. Are you enjoying being a big sister?”
“Oh, yes! Dominic is so cute. I really love him. I couldn’t stand it if . . .”
No! I stopped myself before I started to blurt out anything about Dominic. I figured I’d better not say anything else about him, or all that stuff about Giacomo. Mum didn’t want Daddy to know, so I knew it was supposed to be a secret between Mum and Father Burke, because he was trying to help her save the baby. I probably wasn’t even supposed to know it myself, but I was there when Giacomo came to the house, so I found out about it that way, and by listening in. And I wasn’t supposed to listen in on people, so I really, really didn’t think I should mention it to Dr. Burke, even though he would be a good person to talk to about it.
Oh no! I could feel myself starting to cry.
“Are you all right, Normie?” he asked.
“Yes, I was just thinking of . . . a sad song. Talking about the baby, but not just him . . . about Tommy and Lexie, too, and Kim . . . made me think of it.”
“Music can certainly bring our feelings out into the open, can’t it? Especially if we have something at the back of our minds already. What song were you thinking of, sweetheart?”
Oh, no, now I had to make up something. “It’s an old song, about, um, somebody going away for the whole summer and being lonesome for their girlfriend and brother and friends. But it’s okay because they all get together again at the end of the summer. So, even though it’s a sad song, it has a happy ending!”
“That’s nice. Because that’s one of the most painful things in life, isn’t it? Maybe even the most painful — being separated from the people we love.”
“But nobody’s going away here! So it’s just a song.”
He nodded his head and didn’t say anything. I wondered if he already knew about Giacomo and the baby. But I couldn’t take the chance of being the one to let out the secret if he didn’t know.
But he talked about something else. “You’ve been pretty lucky with your health, I’ll bet, Normie. You’ve never spent a lot of time in the hospital, I’m guessing.”
“No, never! Except for that big machine. That was scary.”
“I’m sure it was. It’s great how it turned out, though, good results right down the line. But I think everybody expected that. Sometimes you have to have tests just so the doctors can check things off and move on.”
“Yeah, it turned out good at the end.”
“Did you ever have the measles, chicken pox, things like that?”
“I had both of those. Back when I was little.”
“Have you ever been troubled by headaches?”
“Sometimes when I’m seeing all those bad things.”
“Anything else?”
“No, except for having a cold and being sick to my stomach with the flu. I hate being sick.”
“I don’t blame you. I do too! Can you tell me this, Normie? We all feel sad sometimes. How about you? Are there many times when you feel sad?”
“Only when I worry about . . . well, the baby was sick, and I was sad and worried about him. And I feel sad when I hear of people getting killed or beat up, especially when it happens to little kids. I don’t mean it’s okay when it happens to grown-ups!”
“No, I understand. If you were writing a book titled Normie Collins: A True Life Story, would you describe yourself as a happy person?”
“Oh, yeah! Almost always! Except when things happen to upset me. Like these bad dreams. The things I see.”
“Now, about those dreams or visions. We don’t have to wonder whether you’re seeing or feeling these things, because we know you are. Are these kind of like movie scenes that appear in your mind, as if you’re seeing them with your eyes?”
“Yes, I can see what’s going on. Or at least I can see part of it.”
“What about sounds? Do you hear things? Voices, or noise of any kind that you think maybe other people can’t hear?”
“I can hear voices, but I don’t like telling people that. You know why.”
“Oh, I know. But, really, if you’re seeing something happening, it’s probably quite natural that you would hear something too. Would you say so?”
“That’s right. I can hear people yelling and sounding mean.”
“What about this? Do you ever find that things don’t taste the way they should? Or do you notice strange smells? Anything of that nature?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Why don’t you describe the things you see and hear, so I can try to picture them.”
“But Daddy’s going to be mad at me!”
“Why would you think that, sweetheart?”
“Because . . .”
He didn’t ask me “because what?” He didn’t make a face that said “I wish she would hurry up.” He just sat there, as if he didn’t have anything else to do for the whole night. It was quiet, and then I felt like talking again. I figured he wasn’t going to get me in trouble.
“Because . . . sometimes I think Mr. Delaney is bad!” There, I said it! I hadn’t even said it to myself before.
“Maybe he is,” Dr. Burke said.
What? I couldn’t believe it! He said it as if it was normal! Maybe it was okay to think it: Mr. Delaney could be bad.
“But he can’t be! Daddy says he didn’t do it. Didn’t kill Mrs. Delaney. And besides, he’s Jenny and Laurence’s dad! They are really good kids and they’re my friends. None of my friends’ dads are bad!”
“Well, you and I know some people are bad. Just a few of course, in any large group. And some of those bad people have kids. So it could be that you’re right, even if you don’t want to be right.”
“But I must be wrong. Mr. Delaney is always really nice to his kids, and he’s nice to me, too. If he was bad, I’d know!”
“Maybe you do know. Maybe that’s what your feelings are telling you.”
“Do you think he’s bad?” I asked Dr. Burke.
“I’m kind of stuck for an answer because I don’t know him. I’ve never met him. But I’ll bet you can help me figure him out. When is the last time you saw him?”
“I think it was a couple of weeks ago, at our other house. Our house with Mum.”
“How did you feel that day?”
“I was okay when I was with Mum and Father Burke, but after I went up to my room and fell asleep and then woke up again, I had pictures in my head. Like a dream but it seemed more real.”
“Was Mr. Delaney in those images?”
“I don’t know! I never know. There was a baby. Sometimes it’s a baby and sometimes a little kid. And he’s scared and sad and sometimes he’s hurt really bad. He screams and cries. That night when Mr. Delaney was there I saw a spooky old building that had words on it. One was ‘Vincent,’ and . . .”
“And?”
“Uh . . .”
“Something else?”
“I forget.”
Dr. Burke didn’t say anything for a long time, so I thought I’d better tell him more about it, without saying the word asylum. “And there’s other people in the room. The people in robes.”
“Oh, I see, and what kind of robes are they, Normie?”
“Long black ones.”
“Many people?”
“A few anyway. Sometimes it seems like more.”
“Can you tell if they are women, or men? Or are both men and women there?”
“I always think they’re men. But I really can’t tell, so maybe there’s both.”
“Are they doing anything?”
“I can’t see it that clearly. I just know it’s awful, it’s horrible, and . . . and it seems to me as if somebody I know is one of them! And I keep thinking maybe it’s Mr. Delaney. I don’t see him exactly, but the dreams only started happening after I met him and his kids. Sometimes it’s the people in robes in that building, and sometimes it’s people in another place, a room, and I hear them talking or yelling in a mean way. But, no matter where it happens, there’s always a little kid.”
“So let’s see if I have it straight. There are two different kinds of dreams, or pictures. One involves the old building and the long robes. The other does not.”
“Right.”
“When these things are happening, how do you feel yourself?”
“I get upset, as if I’m right there and I’m not doing anything to help!”
“When you reflect on these experiences, Normie, what do you think they mean?”
“I think some grown-ups did something bad to a little kid, and maybe to a baby. Or it might be something that’s going to happen later. Way in the future! And that may be even worse because I already know, but I don’t know how to stop it!”
“And when you see Mr. Delaney, you feel . . . what? How would you describe it?”
I didn’t think I’d better blame Mr. Delaney any more, in case it wasn’t really him, so I didn’t answer.
Then Dr. Burke said: “Does he make you feel uneasy? As if something’s wrong? Or nervous maybe?”
“Yeah, kind of like that.”
“Normie, if there’s ever anything you want to talk about, you just get hold of me, okay? If you want to do that, I’ll be happy to help you. And of course happy just to hear from you any time!”
“Okay.”
“This is my card, with my phone numbers at work and home. I’m going to tell your parents that I’ve given you my card and that I may be speaking to you, but you can call me on your own. Call any time, day or night.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re more than welcome. I’ll leave you alone now. You’ll be needing your sleep if you’re going to sing well at choir school tomorrow and put Father Burke in a good mood!”
I laughed again. He knows what his brother can be like, that some people might find him a little scary, but that’s mostly shy people; he doesn’t bother me.
So he gave me his card. I decided I would ask for a new wallet just for people’s cards. This was the only one I had so far but I would collect others.
(Monty)
“Get your diving gear on.”
“What?”
“Strip yourself of your priestly vestments, put on jeans and an old T-shirt, and meet me in your parking lot. We’re going to a dive.”
“What dive would that be now?”
“The Miller’s Tale in Dartmouth. Stand by.”
The fog bank had moved in and it was chilly. Burke was in his church parking lot in jeans and a battered leather jacket when I arrived. He raised his left eyebrow at me when he got in the car. I responded: “A client of mine was an associate of the Hells Angels in the not-so-
distant past, and he may be able to help us with our inquiries. He recently started work at the Tale as a bartender after being out of the workforce for an extended period of time. He owes me.”
“Would he have been a guest of Her Majesty for a couple of years perhaps?”
“Two years less a day in one of her institutions, yes.”
“Sounds to me as if he doesn’t owe you a thing.”
“He should have gone away for ten years, and he’s enough of a pro to know it. I worked out a deal for him, he did his time like a man, he’s out, and he appreciates it. So I’m going to call in a marker. Try for some information.”
“Is he a member of the motoring club?”
“He was an associate. There was a falling out years ago. Somehow he managed to make reparations for whatever offence he committed against them, and there are no hard feelings. I’m sure he’s careful not to tread on their turf. As far as I know he’s just a regular working stiff now. Like you and me.”
The stench of greasy fried chicken assailed our nostrils when we got out of the car at the Miller’s Tale. The chicken emporium was two doors down; the club’s immediate neighbours were an X-rated video shop and a tattoo parlour. We went into the bar and stood still for a few seconds, letting our eyes get used to the dark. I didn’t recognize the bartender. A wasted trip, or the chance for a beer and a game of pool?
“Let’s get a drink and I’ll see if I can find out when my old friend comes on shift.”
We claimed two bar stools and we each ordered a draft. Seeing Burke with a beer glass in his hand reminded me that I hadn’t seen him take a drink in weeks.
“Did you fall off the wagon? Were you on it?”
“I took a little break from the stuff for a while.”
“How long a while?”
“Would I be counting?”
“How long?”
“Just over three weeks, I believe it is.”
“Why’d you do that?”
He shrugged, then said: “Maybe I just wanted to see whether I missed it.”
“Did you?”
“I didn’t go through the DTs or anything, so . . .”
“Well, did you crave it? Did you have to fight the temptation to get into it?”
“No. I’d reach for a drink out of habit, but I didn’t suffer unduly when I reminded myself I was on the wagon.”
“So? What did that tell you?”
“That there’s no harm in taking it up again!”
“I see. That worked out well for you, then.”
“I don’t need to drink; therefore, I drink.”
“Your Cartesian logic puts me in mind of the Monty Python sketch about the drunken philosophers.”
“I love that. It’s brilliant. We’ll have the choir perform it some day.”
Burke was obviously one of those guys who have a considerable capacity for alcohol, but never became an alcoholic. A lot of people thought they were in that category, but were sadly mistaken. He, however, seemed to have it under control.
He drank down a third of his beer, put his glass on the table, said “Ah,” and lit up a smoke.
I was just about to make a casual inquiry about Bradley Dwyer when he appeared carrying two large trays of fresh glasses. He was well able to handle the load. Over six feet in height, he was two hundred fifty pounds of pumped-up muscle. Prison tats covered his arms, and his dull brown hair was buzzed on the top, straggly in the back. He saw me right away and looked a bit leery, but recovered quickly and offered me a friendly greeting.
“Monty!” He turned to the other man behind the bar. “Don’t take this guy’s money, Al. He and his buddy drink free.”
“Thanks, Bradley. We won’t drink the place dry. This is Brennan Burke. Bradley Dwyer.” They nodded to each other.
“How are you doing, Brad?”
“Not too bad.”
Two hard-looking women came in, and Bradley served them. They took their drinks to a table, then picked up pool cues and got into a game. When the other barman went out back, I took the opportunity to question my old client.
“Brad, do you remember a guy named Bullard, got killed last spring?”
Warily, he answered: “Yeah, I remember hearing about that.” He looked at my companion. “What do you do, Brennan?”
I laughed. “He’s not a cop. We’re not involved in an investigation of Bullard’s death. It may have a connection with something else, or it may not. I heard it was a Hells Angels hit.”
“That’s bullshit!”
“Bullard was taken to a remote location and shot. And he was known to associate with guys with leather wings.”
“He was a hanger-on, a loser! The HAs didn’t want to have anything to do with him.”
“Why not?”
“He was a fuckin’ psycho, that’s why.”
“How do you know he was a psycho?”
“Because the HAs sent him to do a little intimidation job on a guy who owed them four thousand bucks in a drug deal. All Bullard was supposed to do was scare the guy, threaten to break his legs, just to motivate him, you know? Guy wasn’t home, so Bullard goes nuts on the guy’s woman. Rapes her, cuts her up. Unfuckinbelievable. And he did it in front of her son. Kid was seven years old. He freaked out, screaming and crying and trying to get Bullard off his mother. Bullard turns on the kid, beats him up.”
I looked at Brennan. He was staring at Brad, horrified.
“So,” I said, “from the bikers’ point of view, eliminating this guy would be damage control.”
“No fucking way. Angels didn’t go within a mile of this clown after that. Damage control was ‘never heard of the guy.’ But somebody took him out.”
“How about the man whose wife and child were attacked?”
Brad shook his head. “Airtight alibi. Cops had picked him up for selling coke the night before.”
We reverted to small talk after that, then finished our drinks, thanked Brad, and left.
“So, where does that leave us?” Brennan asked in the car on the way back to Halifax.
“The Hells Angels apparently weren’t after Beau’s client. And they wouldn’t have been after Beau. That wouldn’t make any sense.”
“Sounds as if the most dangerous element in this whole thing was Beau’s client.”
“And he’d already been eliminated before Peggy died, so if she was concerned about the Hells Angels at some point, this guy wasn’t the problem.”