2.

I DID NOT WANT TO drive back up River Road. I drove with the hope that the car would be gone. Or that it would not have the plate number Tim had given me over the phone. Or that if Lucy was missing, her car would be found somewhere else. That I wasn’t going to be the one to find it. Most of all I wanted to believe that Lucy had gone for an extended walk and was now driving the Suzuki, and herself, safely home.

But I knew before I arrived on River Road that it was a hopeless wish.

Lucy, Tim had told me on the phone, had had a recurring dream. I was startled. Lucy had often talked about her dreams, but she’d never mentioned a recurring one.

“She dreams she’s being choked.”

He seemed not to hear my sharp intake of breath. He was already embarking on his story. “It was Friday night she had this dream. She screamed so loud she woke our tenant, and she’s two floors above us. It took a long time to calm her down. We were both a little shell-shocked, but she was better by morning. Saturday she was in good spirits. She told me she loved me. She said she was going to see friends in the Gatineaus. I expected her back last night—this morning at the latest. She’s got work she’s gotta do. I been phoning her friends all day. I just saw your name on the calendar for one o’clock yesterday.”

I started again. He was referring to the Sunday afternoon ice-breaking-up party. I felt a sudden pang of guilt. I had never given Lucy a thought. Which was ironic, given how my invitation to her had precipitated my break-up.

“She didn’t show up,” I told Tim.

“Maybe I got it wrong where she was going. Maybe it wasn’t the Gatineaus. I left a message for another friend of hers. There’s some retreat she knows about. I haven’t heard back.”

“Do you know Lucy’s licence plate number?”

“No, but I can find out. It should be here somewhere.” I heard the sound of rustling paper.

“I’ve never been in her papers before,” he said.

Yes, you have. It was an irrational thought. I dismissed it.

There was more shuffling. “Here it is.”

I wrote down the number, even as I was wondering what papers would have Lucy’s licence plate number written on them. I didn’t think mine was recorded anywhere in the house.

“I’ll call you back in twenty minutes,” I told Tim. We hung up.

The invitation to my party had been extended during a phone conversation. I had called because I’d forgotten if I’d faxed a fact sheet that Lucy had requested. We were working on another exhibit for the National Gallery. When she answered she sounded terrible—weak and hoarse. She apologized and said she couldn’t talk, she’d call me back.

The next day I found the fax transmittal sheet and called to tell her, and to see how she was doing. She came on the line, the first part of her “hello” cut off. Could she call me back? She was on the other line with her bank manager, and it had taken her ages to get through.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I solved the problem; I don’t need you.” I let her go back to the other call.

She returned my call anyway, sounding surprisingly cheerful. “You may not need me,” she said, “but I need you.”

She needed me to look in the local paper for a cottage rental. I felt a twinge of guilt; it wasn’t the first time she had asked. While I hunted through the Low Down to Hull and Back News, she chattered on. She felt much better for the massage she’d just received. She wanted a cottage for the whole season, and it had to have electricity; she wanted to bring her computer. She sounded refreshingly upbeat. She also spoke in the singular. It sounded like she and Tim were still apart—that maybe they’d broken up for good. I found a notice for a cottage just down the river and gave her the number.

The invitation to the party came out naturally, when she mentioned she was going to be in the Gatineaus on the weekend. “Well, if you’re in the area, drop in. Any time after three.”

I was hanging up the phone when a voice startled me from behind. “What are you doing?”

I swivelled my chair around, knocking into Belle, lying at my feet. I put an apologetic hand on her back as she got up and moved out of the way.

Marc was standing in the entrance to my office, arms crossed, legs apart. He was still dressed in his work coveralls. His shaggy hair, already streaked light and dark blond, had additional streaks of cream paint in it. There had been no noticeable anger in his voice, but I could see it in his stance, usually so relaxed. And in the chiselled angles of his face, usually softened by his easy smile and boundless enthusiasm. The anger, the dirt on his face, made him look older than thirty. He had obviously been listening.

His tone brought out my sarcasm before I could censor it. “I’ve been arranging to go for a nice paddle with Lucy on Sunday afternoon while you entertain the other guests.”

“I will not have a murderer in my house.”

“I wasn’t aware Lucy had murdered anyone.”

He levelled his gaze at me and said nothing.

“She didn’t say anything about bringing him.”

“But you do not know for sure that she will not.” His francophone accent was more pronounced than usual. And he wasn’t using contractions. Signs of his increasing agitation.

“So? What if she does?”

“I told you before, I do not want you to have anything to do with this murderer. I do not want you to bring him here. I do not want him to know where we live.”

It always got my back up when he dictated to me this way. I crossed my own arms. “Get it right: he’s a manslaughterer, not a murderer. Read: accident. Read: give the man a second chance. Read: open your mind.” Like I’m trying to do.

Marc was silent.

I relented. “Marc, I really don’t think she’s going to bring him, but I can call back and check if you like.”

“Comme tu veux.” His voice was a hard monotone.

For a moment I looked at him. Then I took a breath. “I do comme je veux but somehow it’s never good enough for you.”

Marc was staring at me as if he had lost all comprehension of English. I rushed on. “You claim it’s okay that I don’t paddle with you, but there’s this—I don’t know, this underlying reproach or something. It’s always there, in my head. Even when you’re gone for a month at a time, I feel it. I did try you know. It’s not as if I didn’t try.”

“You misled me.”

“Misled you? What are you talking about?”

“I thought you were a different person. I thought we had more in common.”

“We have lots in common. You knew I wasn’t a paddler.”

“You led me on. I thought you were into it.”

“I was. I tried. You know I tried. It’s not my fault.”

“It’s not good enough. It’s my life,” he added flatly. “And you never come with me. Anywhere.”

I crossed my arms. “So you’re just looking for a paddling partner? Is that it?”

“I want to be with you.”

“So stop running off every summer and weekend and be with me. You always expect me to come with you.” We were far into the tape of an old argument by now.

There was a small humourless smile from Marc. He made a circle in the air with his forefinger: “And around we go.” He hesitated. “Maybe it’s time to admit it.”

Something clamped around my heart. “Admit what?”

Marc avoided my eyes. He crossed over to the window and spoke to the river. “That it is over between us.”

“Over? You want to break up?”

Marc half turned, made a gesture with his hand. “What is holding us together?”

My frustration came bursting to the surface again. “I thought it was love holding us together.” God, I was sounding like a clichéd pop song. “Are you saying you don’t love me anymore?” What had happened to us? The short winter days seemed to have shortened our tempers and erased all the acceptance and understanding we had worked so hard at in the fall.

Marc made that futile gesture with his hand again. He didn’t speak.

I watched the back of his head. The head I knew so well. I memorized the patterns of streaking in his hair. The white paint, the shades of blond. My own head felt numb. As if someone had whacked me on the ear with a two-by-four.

Marc’s voice came as if at a great distance. “It will be better this way. I will be away anyway. It will not be so….”

I was shocked. This wasn’t the way people broke up, in one fell swoop. I pulled myself together. Tried for a joking tone. “Not before a party. Maybe after. If we don’t have a good time.”

Marc kept his back to me. My feet wanted to walk over to him, my arms wanted to turn him back to me. Neither were working. My voice could only come up with a lame response. “Marc, you can’t go. We have a party to host.”

Marc turned around then. His face was full of emotion. Exasperation. Defeat. “You have a party to host,” he said and his voice cracked.

I couldn’t meet his eyes. I fought my own tears. “And where are you going to be?”

Marc seemed to straighten up, to pull his emotions back inside himself. “By Sunday afternoon? Thunder Bay.”

I stared at him. “But you’re not starting that job for another two weeks.”

“Am I not?” he asked and walked out of the room.

I watched him pack. He was trying to scare me. He was packing to be ready to leave on May sixth, as planned. He was going to stay for the party. For me. Of course.

But early Friday morning, he loaded up the truck. And I retreated to my office and looked out to the grey April sky and porous ice on the river. Unable to say, “Stay.”

The construction site was deserted. Except for the yellow Suzuki Sidekick parked on the side of the road. It was facing toward the city, as before. I did a U-turn and pulled in behind it. I didn’t need to read the licence number in front of me to know it was Lucy’s.

The shoulder was bordered by a scruffy row of bushes, and beyond the bushes was a cottage, and a man in the yard.

I got out of the car, cut through the bushes and crossed the lawn. “Excuse me,” I said to the man. “I’m wondering if you know anything about that car parked over there.”

He turned slowly, with the help of a cane. He was slightly built, with thick greying hair and a topographical map of a face.

“It belongs to a friend of mine,” I said. “I’m wondering if you’ve seen her.”

“No, I ’ave not seen her.” He spoke each word slowly, with a strong Québecois accent. “That car ’as been parked ’ere since Saturday afternoon. My wife and I, we ’ave just come back from town tonight—we live in Hull. This is our cottage. We are renovating. We were going to call the police. We thought it might be stolen and abandoned.”

“Do you have a phone I could use?” I seemed to be speaking from a script, knowing both my lines and his.

“Yes, in the house. Ma femme, she is there. Go ahead,” he added. He waved his cane.

This was in the script too—that I should go ahead and let him make his way behind me. That I should feel I was being rude, but know that under the circumstances it was necessary.

I stepped around the construction materials on the porch. The woman who answered the door spoke little English, but she understood the word “phone” and my agitation. She guided me through a half-finished hall to the living room.

I sat in a chair and dialled Lucy’s number on an old black rotary-dial phone. My hand shook. Tim answered on the first ring.

“It’s her car,” I said.

“Should we call the police?” His voice was as shaky as mine. This was also part of the script—the line and the delivery.

“Yes, but I don’t know if it should be Ottawa or Quebec.” I leaned my head in my hand, trying to think. “Quebec, I think, since it was found in Quebec.”

I wanted to hang up and leave it to Tim. But he would have no idea how to call the Sûreté du Québec, or how to communicate, if necessary, in French. I could feel his helplessness. I couldn’t block it out. I couldn’t change the script.

“I’ll call them,” I said.

His relief came across so strongly the feeling of scripted roles faded. The melodrama of the evening stayed.

“Where are you?” he asked. “How do I get up there? I’m no good with directions or finding my way at night.”

I remembered Lucy telling me the same thing the previous summer, explaining an idiosyncrasy I couldn’t have cared less about at the time.

She had been ecstatic to have finally gotten him out. The battle was over. But it had been an adjustment. Tim had been completely dependent. He had little idea how to live in the outside world. She’d had to drive him everywhere, show him how to do the simplest things, the grocery shopping, getting a library card. She’d bought him a mountain bike. Shown him the bike paths along the canal. Finally, he got his driver’s licence. That had made a huge difference. Except, I now remembered her telling me, he had a lousy sense of direction. He kept getting lost and calling her from phone booths to come and get him. “He doesn’t go by street signs,” she explained. “He goes by landmarks, which you can’t see at night, so he doesn’t drive at night.”

It was one of those useless things you retain in your head that suddenly become relevant. How was I going to explain where I was? It was getting darker by the minute.

“Do you know where Tulip Valley is?” I asked him.

“No, I never been up there before. Is it near Kingsmere? I’ve been to Kingsmere.”

“No, that won’t help.” Kingsmere was at the other end of Gatineau Park, closer to the city.

I couldn’t deal with him right now. I had to get the police here. “I’ll call the police, and call you back when they get here.”

I sat opposite the couple in their living room—the Rivests. I sipped water from a glass. Each tick of the clock pushed the sun farther behind the hills. Each sound of a passing car brought me to the window.

Every time I sat down I smiled an apology to the Rivests. They had better things to do than wait in their living room with a strange woman for the police to come and investigate the disappearance of another strange woman. It wasn’t their fault she’d parked her car in front of their house. They hadn’t asked to be in this drama. Neither had I.

Sitting intensified the pain in my leg. I stood up. “I’m just going to go outside.” I gestured out the window. Mr. Rivest nodded. From behind me, I heard him speaking in French to his wife.

The temperature had dropped with the sun. I pulled my jacket tight around me and walked with crossed arms over to Lucy’s car. Walking relaxed the sciatic nerve a little.

I cupped my face against the passenger window. I was expecting the car to be empty.

It wasn’t. A pair of sunglasses lay on the dashboard. There was a dark bag on the passenger-side floor, and another, bigger bag in the back. Would she have gone for a walk without her sunglasses? Would she have left her purse in full view on the floor? Both seemed unlikely.

I avoided touching the door handles, but I could see the locks were pushed down.

I looked up and down the road. No cars. No police.

Back in the house, the Rivests were still sitting in the living room. As if frozen there until their part in the next scene began.

I dialled Lucy’s number again on the old rotary phone. “The police still haven’t got here,” I told Tim. “I looked in the car. Her purse is there and her sunglasses. The car’s locked. Do you have a spare set of keys?”

“Yes, there should be one here.”

“Could you bring them? I’m going to try to give you instructions to get you up here. The police are taking so long.”

“Okay,” he said. He sounded as if he were bracing himself.

I braced myself too. Lucy had said he didn’t go by street names. I tried to think of obvious landmarks. “Do you know the bridge from Ottawa that takes you onto the big highway that cuts right through Hull?”

“Is that the one from King Ed-ward?” He said the name hesitantly, as though pronouncing a word in an unfamiliar language.

Relief. It was like trying to ask someone a question in their language and having the response come back, haltingly, in your own. “Stay in the left lane,” I continued. “There will be a sign pointing to Hull.”

“Is that the sign that says Hull left, Sussex right?”

“Yes, that’s the one.” More relief. It was so much easier than I had expected. He would be here soon.

I had met Tim only twice. The first time had been just a few weeks after his release, almost a year before. The same day Lucy had explained his idiosyncrasies with directions. I had ridden my bike down from Chelsea for an early supper. I was nervous about meeting him, though Lucy hadn’t mentioned whether he would be joining us. And she hadn’t made it a foursome. Which was just as well, given Marc’s reaction when I’d told him where I was going. He didn’t want me socializing with Lucy at all, now that Tim was out of prison. But he hadn’t been home when I’d left for Lucy’s. He was conducting a paddling workshop on the Ottawa River.

Wheeling my bike around behind the house, I spotted Lucy working in the garden at the bottom of the yard. She came over to greet me. She was wearing an oversized shirt thrown over a white tank top and black cotton leggings. I was shocked at how tightly her skin was stretched across her collarbones. I saw fragility and aging, toughness and sensuality.

She tugged off her gardening gloves and invited me inside. There were steps from the backyard to a small porch, presumably leading to the kitchen, but she took me in through a sliding door on the same level as the yard.

Walking through this door was like a small revelation. Technically it was the basement. In reality it was the rest of her living space—her bedroom. Now hers and Tim’s.

It was a large room with partial walls separating off other rooms. Her office. A laundry room. Even though it was above ground at the back, my impression was one of darkness, of partial walls leading into dark corners.

We climbed a set of stairs and we were in the bright kitchen. Then Lucy revealed another room I hadn’t noticed on my previous visits: a sitting room off the kitchen. It was a tiny cozy space, with a window overlooking the yard. Just big enough to hold a love seat, a bookshelf and a TV in a corner cabinet.

Ensconced on the small couch with a glass of wine, I relaxed. There was no sign of Tim. There was no sign of his presence, either, though he’d been living there for a few weeks already. He would have had few belongings. Still, there was nothing to indicate someone else was living in the house.

“How’s the new tenant working out?” I asked. I was referring to the woman renting the top floor. The previous tenant had apparently been a disaster.

“Which one?” Lucy grinned.

I made an apologetic gesture. I should, of course, have been asking about Tim. But Lucy didn’t seem concerned.

“So far, so good,” she said. “Her name is Lakshmi. Goddess of prosperity. How can I go wrong?”

She went on to talk about her other new “tenant.” They’d started a handyman business—Brockman Repairs—a combination of their last names. Tim was out at the moment, she said, seeing a woman about a painting job. He was good at carpentry too. “Maybe Marc could hire him.”

I made excuses. I didn’t do them very well, and she wasn’t fooled.

“Well, just ask him. He must need an extra worker sometimes.”

I lied and said I would.

We were in the kitchen eating a delicious homemade vegetable stew when we heard sounds from down below. There was a steady thud on the stairs. The door opened and the man from the photos on the refrigerator stepped into the room.

Lucy introduced us, and Tim shook my hand. He looked almost solemn, as if he understood how I might be feeling. I was touched by his sensitivity.

He turned to Lucy, and his face transformed into smiles. He’d got the painting contract.

Lucy beamed back at him.

The Sûreté had only just arrived when a green pick-up pulled into the driveway. The man I hadn’t seen in over half a year got out of the truck. He looked different from what I remembered. Not the attractive confident man from the photos who had been working out. Not the solemn sensitive man shaking my hand in Lucy’s kitchen. Just an ordinary guy in a loose-fitting windbreaker, jeans, and a baseball cap. No one I would have partnered Lucy with.

Tim looked me in the eye. “I was okay until I got to River Road. Then I stopped at that restaurant there, to make sure this was the right road.”

I felt mildly irritated. He had to be pretty dense to stop there. It was the one place I had given him an obvious landmark—the restaurant itself.

I explained the situation to the two Sûreté officers. At least I assumed I did. My dealings with the Sûreté stayed in my mind afterward as a series of blocked scenes. A tableau followed by a plunge into darkness before the next is illuminated.

In the first tableau, Tim and one of the Sûreté officers and I were rushing to the car. The spare key was in Tim’s hand. Tim was unlocking the driver-side door, opening it, reaching over to unlock the passenger door for the officer.

I stood behind Tim. I watched him reach up to the dome light on the ceiling. I watched him lean in and put his hands on the steering wheel. I watched him insert the key in the ignition and heard him say, “Maybe this is how you turn on the interior light.”

You don’t need the key in the ignition to turn on an interior light.

In the second tableau, the Sûreté officer was reaching across the inside of the car, handing Lucy’s handbag to Tim and me. Our hands were inside it. Two books were suddenly in my hand. The titles didn’t register. Lucy’s wallet was open in Tim’s hand. Licence, money, credit cards: everything was there. I didn’t want everything to be there. I wanted signs of theft. Ordinary theft.

Tim pulled out a white plastic bag. Her lunch, he said, feeling it. We didn’t look inside.

Why are we touching everything? We shouldn’t be touching anything.

In the third tableau, Tim was reaching into the back seat, pointing out Lucy’s overnight bag. He lifted up the bag. “See,” he said, “it’s heavy. I carried it to the car for her because it was so heavy. She packed her pyjamas, a bottle of wine, hot water bottle.”

Why are you lifting her bag? How come you know what’s in it?

We were sitting in the back seat of the cruiser. The officer in the driver’s seat was asking questions. What did Lucy look like? How old was she? What was she wearing when she left the house Saturday morning? He was checking things off on a clipboard, as if he were doing a consumer survey.

Beside me, Tim was describing what Lucy was wearing. “She had on a navy blue coat. I don’t know what you call it—it comes down to the knees.” He looked at me, as if I might know.

I did. I could see it in my mind’s eye, from our very first meeting at the National Gallery. “A pea coat,” I said. I spelled the word for the francophone officer.

“A pea coat,” repeated Tim, nodding, “with a thin red stripe down the sleeves. And dark blue or black leggings.” I was impressed by his powers of observation.

“What kind of shoe was she wearing?” the officer asked in accented English.

“I know she was taking three pairs of shoes,” Tim said. He counted them off on his fingers: “Her runners, her loafers, and her slippers.”

“’Er loafer were in ’er overnight bag,” said the second officer. At some point he had got into the car and now sat in the passenger seat. “And ’er slipper were on the front seat floor on the passenger side.”

“Then she must have been wearing her runners,” said Tim. “Nikes, I think. Yes, she was wearing her Nikes.”

“How would you describe ’er mental state?”

Tim and I looked at each other. “Nervous,” he said. “High strung.”

I was surprised to hear him admitting this about his loved one.

“Was she on any medication?” the officer asked.

I expected Tim to say no. Instead he said, “She had a prescription for Valium. She would get eight from her doctor and they’d last her a couple of months.”

“Would you describe her as suicidal?”

“No. Definitely not.” Tim was adamant. I thought about the Lucy I knew. I’m hell-bent on healing the traumas of my past. Those were not the words of someone who is suicidal. I echoed Tim’s answer.

The light from a set of headlights suddenly swung through the inside of the car from the rear. A vehicle passed us. Red tail lights intensified. A tow truck. I watched it back up into place in front of Lucy’s car. The second officer got out of the cruiser.

I wanted to jump out of the car after him and stop them. You can’t take the car away. It’s our only link to Lucy. It has to stay here until she’s found. I didn’t speak these irrational thoughts.

The officers and Tim and I were standing beside the cruiser. The interview was over. There was nothing more they could do tonight.

“They will send ’elicopter, dog, in the morning,” said the first officer. “We will now search the track before we go.”

“We should go and thank the Rivests,” I told Tim.

We walked up the drive to the house.

Tim was holding a tissue offered by Mrs. Rivest.

“I know she knew how to swim,” he said, through tears. “But the water is so cold.”

He wiped his eyes. Mrs. Rivest offered him another tissue.

“She was—is—just a tiny person; I’ve got a hundred pounds on her. I know how easily she can be hurt—when we play-wrestle on the living room floor.”

I didn’t want him to have play-wrestled with Lucy on the living room floor. I didn’t want him to be speaking about her in the past tense.

We were back outside. The police were gone. Their search had been too short. Tim agreed that we should do a search ourselves. He fished a flashlight out from his truck.

Lucy was at the end of the beam of Tim’s flashlight. Everywhere. She was lying on the tracks just ahead of us, disguised as one of the dark railway ties. She was lying in the black ponds between the tracks and the rock face, among the rocks and stumps. She was lying in the river, her hair waving gracefully in the water beside a dock….

I nearly stumbled on the steps down to the rickety dock beside the floating hair.

Tim was right behind me.

He shone his light into the water. Under the prolonged beam, what I had thought was Lucy’s hair revealed itself to be the fraying end of a rope floating on the surface. I breathed again. And then realized where I was, close to water on a rotting dock. I stood stock still, terrified the dock was going to give way under my weight. Terrified I would fall in the water. Had Lucy fallen through from here?

Tim shifted the beam to the dock to illuminate the broken boards. I stepped back to the relative safety of the stairs.

Out of the light, the unravelled rope ends in the water beside us transformed themselves back into Lucy’s hair.

Tim stood before me, a black shadow on the rotting dock. I couldn’t stop staring at the dark mass in the water. “She could have come down here to write in her journal,” he was saying. “Do you remember seeing her journal in her bag? She took it everywhere with her.”

I tried to remember what books I had held in my hand. I was sure I would have noticed if one of them had been her journal.

Tim shone his flashlight into the water again, beyond the rope. “It’s so shallow here.”

Could she have fallen in and not got out? I shuddered. It was my own worst nightmare. She could swim, Tim had said in the house. But how long would she last in the frigid water?

We climbed back up the steps to the tracks.

On the way back to the car, Tim swept the beam of light over the brush beside the shore and at the water’s edge.

“It’s so shallow,” he said again.

Beside his truck, he began to cry. I held him.

Then I invited him to my house for tea.

It hit me on the highway heading home, with his headlights blinding me in my rearview mirror. Who this man was. Where he had spent the last ten years of his life. Why.

*

SHE WAS IMMERSED IN HER thoughts and missed the arrival of the first witness of the day. Vaguely, she heard the clerk reciting her usual litany: “Do you swear to tell the truth….” But the answer came with the clarity of someone speaking directly in her ear: “I do.”

She started and opened her eyes. She sat forward in her seat and tried to peer around the heads in front. She could barely see the back of the man sitting in the chair before the judges. But she could hear him, clearly, even before the lawyer asked him to speak up. It was the voice of someone she knew, someone she was, or had once been, intimately familiar with. She hadn’t caught his name. She knew she wouldn’t recognize it anyway.

She sat back as if she were the court stenographer, recording the conversations the witness related to the court that he had had with the inmate Archie Crowe while he had been appealing his own sentence.

“What prompted you to come forward?” Colin Fajber’s lawyer asked when the witness had finished. “Obviously it’s against the code to come forward. What prompted you?”

“I was sitting in my cell one day just after supper,” the witness responded. “I had watched the local news, and I saw Mrs. Fajber speaking with the Prime Minister. The way she was talking to him—she was begging him to help her son and help her.

“I thought to myself, well, inside it just made me feel a lot of empathy toward her. And sympathy. I thought to myself: if this lady has been hanging in there … that is what struck me. I thought to myself: If what I know is relevant to the situation, I would like to offer it up to help her.”

Her pen stopped mid-page. She sat open-mouthed. Out of this stranger’s mouth had just come an exact echo of her own heart’s reasons for being here.

The witness continued. “I thought about it for two or three months before I ever made a decision to do anything after that. But definitely the reason I got into it was because of how I felt about what she had been doing with it.”

“Mr. Brennan, have you ever in your life met Colin Fajber?” the lawyer asked.

“No, I don’t know the man. I never met him.”

“Have you been offered anything whatsoever for coming forward? Is there anything in this for you?”

“No. In fact, by doing this my life is about to change as of tonight. I’ve got two years left, and my life is going to seriously change from what it was yesterday by being here. I have given up a lot by being here. I am not asking for anything.”

Again, his words hit home. It had taken courage for her to come here, too. But overcoming her own fears was nothing, she knew, compared with this man’s courage to sit where he was sitting and say the things he was saying, and as a result put his safety, maybe his very life, in jeopardy. Would she have been able to do what he was doing? The answer was painful, but not difficult. Sometimes, she could barely drive or walk down her own street without having to race back home, scurrying like a squirrel back to some illusory notion of safety. Yet, here was this man, who had spent most of his adult life in cloistered walls, who had had, it seemed, little access to the outside world all those years, and he had set aside his fears of the world and the people in it and, even more, his fears of those inside the prison walls who might threaten his life.

The lawyer for Colin Fajber finished his friendly questioning, and then the inquisition began—first from the lawyer for Archie Crowe and then from the Counsel for the Manitoba Attorney General. Through it all—the insinuations, the attempts to discredit him—the witness kept his cool. Answering difficult questions about his past with devastating forthrightness and calm. She would never have been able to do that.

She didn’t care what he had done in his past. What came through—shining through—was that his intentions for being here today were good. “In the life of the Spirit,” she quoted in her head, “you are always at the beginning.” One of her favourite lines from The Book of Runes.

The Counsel for the Manitoba Attorney General finished his questions. There was a brief re-examination by the lawyer for Colin Fajber, and then the Chief Justice addressed Mr. Brennan: “You may go.”

He made it sound so simple. As if the witness could just stand up and leave the room.

Instead, the witness waited for a police guard to come and escort him down the main aisle. She craned her neck as he passed by her row. He looked straight ahead. He wasn’t handcuffed, but he was wearing prison greens. He wasn’t a tall man but there was a breadth to him. He walked with his shoulders set back. He walked with the presence of a man who knew he had done the right thing, the act of his doing it made greater by the risk to his safety that he had taken to come here, and the fact that few were going to thank him for it.

She didn’t stop to think. She found herself on her feet, pushing past the bony knees and blank faces in her row, walking as fast as decorum would allow, down the aisle, through the anteroom, and out into the cold marble hall.

She ran down a corridor she was not supposed to go down, away from the main staircase. No one stopped her. There, at a set of elevator doors, stood Mr. Brennan with his police guard, and Mrs. Fajber.

She waited until Mrs. Fajber had finished thanking him and then she approached, out of breath. “Excuse me.”

He was holding out his hands to be cuffed. He didn’t immediately turn around.

“Excuse me,” she said again.

The guard gave her a stern look. “What are you doing down here?”

“I wanted to speak to Mr. Brennan.”

At her words, the prisoner started and turned. He looked younger than his voice had sounded, and his mouth turned down naturally at the corners, giving him an even younger look. But it was the eyes that held hers. They were the eyes of an ancient friend and lover, in the face of a stranger.

His eyes gave her courage.

But then he glanced at the notebook in her hand, and his receptivity changed to a stranger’s hostile stare.

She almost lost her nerve. And then she realized: he thought she was a journalist, here to expose him.

She spoke quickly, still out of breath. “I think what you did today was very brave.”

His mouth turned up at the corners. “Thank you.”

“I was wondering….” She started again. “My name is Lucy Stockman. I’d like to write to you. To thank you for what you’ve done for Colin Fajber.” She barely knew what she was saying. She only knew she couldn’t let him disappear without making a connection. She could only look at him, willing him to look in her eyes and see her. She wanted him to recognize her, the way she recognized him.

The guards were leading Brennan through the elevator doors. She was an annoying fly they were trying to brush away.

Inside the elevator, Brennan turned and faced her. “I’m at Collins Bay,” he said. He punctuated his words with a smile that reached into his eyes.

The doors closed between them. Brennan went back to prison. And, with a new lightness of heart, she went back to hers.