At the moment Billy Lightning and Christina Parr went their separate ways, Elliot McKitrick was parking his cruiser behind the Parr’s Landing police station in his accustomed spot. The distance between the Pear Tree and the police station was less than five minutes, but when he’d left the café, he was too angry to get back to work, so he did what he always did when he was angry—he drove.
He circled the town limits once, twice, three times. As he was about to go around a fourth time, it occurred to him that the visibility of the cruiser was making him conspicuous to anyone who happened to look up as he drove, loop after unvarying loop, along the same route. He turned the cruiser towards the town limits and drove out in the direction of Bradley Lake and the cliffs.
His town was suddenly getting far too small for his comfort. With Jeremy Parr in Toronto all these years, and the past . . . well, in the past, he’d made a good life for himself in Parr’s Landing. He commanded respect. It wasn’t an exciting life, but all Elliot had ever wanted to be was normal. Now, he was normal. And he occupied exactly the echelon he wanted to occupy, and no one challenged it.
Now, in a matter of days, the entire structure of his world seemed under attack from all sides. This mouthy, jumped-up Indian—whom, he’d just realized, he actually hated—was challenging his authority and had actually threatened him—an Indian had threatened him. Jeremy Parr was back in town trying to stir up the past, Elliot’s past. It didn’t occur to Elliot to think of it as Jeremy’s past, too, because Jeremy had gotten away, leaving Elliot to do all the work of self-recreation and the rewriting of his—their—history. Even Jack Parr’s girlfriend, Chris—his wife, or widow, whatever she was—was back in town. It had been obvious from the cold tone she’d taken with him that Jeremy had gone home last night and cried on her shoulder about what had happened between them at O’Toole’s. Typical. So she knew, too.
A sudden thought occurred to Elliot. What if she told the Indian?
He’d seen them talking through the window of the Pear Tree as he drove off. What if she’d inclined her head towards the Indian and said, “Don’t worry about that cop—he’s a fag. He and my brother-in-law had a ‘thing’ ten years ago, and as you may have heard, the cop never married anybody.” What if she’d laughed at the point, laughed with high, shrill insight—and what if the Indian had joined her in her laughter at his expense, promising to himself that the next time Elliot crossed his path, he was going to let Elliot know exactly what he knew and threaten him again, this time with the one thing that truly terrified Elliot—exposure? His knuckles on the wheel of the cruiser were white. Elliot made a sound somewhere between a sharp intake of breath and a soft yelp, startling himself. For a moment, all he heard was the sound of his own heartbeat and the blood thundering in his temples.
Elliot pulled over to the side of the road and waited until his heartbeat slowed down and his breathing returned to normal. He opened the driver’s side door and stepped out into the cold late-morning sunlight and took a deep breath, then another. As he did, his vision cleared and he felt the panic recede.
The sword cut both ways, he realized. Jeremy wasn’t back in town to threaten him. Jeremy was back in town because Chris needed him there. The Parrs didn’t want another scandal. Old lady Parr had sent Jeremy to a lunatic asylum. She’d threatened Elliot’s old man with ruin if he didn’t beat a lesson into Elliot that he’d never forget. The cuts had healed, but the feel of the whip cutting through his clothes into his flesh was one Eliot would never forget.
No, whatever else was going to happen, there would be no concerns about exposure from the Parrs, any of them. They had as much to lose as he did, scandal-wise. No way was Mrs. Parr going to let either Jeremy or Chris make any trouble for him.
The thought comforted him, and slowly Elliot grew calm again. The wind suddenly came up and the trees around him shivered,
releasing clouds of orange and red leaves against the hard blue sky. Elliot shielded his eyes against the sunlight with his fingers and watched the leaves blow away across the treetops towards Bradley Lake.
In fairness to Jeremy, there had been nothing threatening or angry in his demeanour last night at O’Toole’s. On the contrary, Jeremy had shown traces of the very gentleness and vulnerability that had drawn Elliot to him in first place when they were boys, so many years ago. Last night, Elliot had tried to hurt Jeremy, to drive him away. He’d succeeded in hurting him, but Jeremy hadn’t been angry at all. There had been nothing in his eyes but a terrible sadness that Elliot had tried very hard not to see.
But he had seen it, even if last night he told himself he hadn’t. And at that moment, in his privacy by the side of the road, with nothing around but the reddened forest and the cliffs of Spirit Rock in the distance, he could admit it.
Perhaps if Jeremy had been angry, if he’d shown Elliot hatred instead of that terrible gentleness, Elliot would have been able to get it up for Donna Lemieux right away instead of failing, for the first time in his life, to get wood until he did her from behind.
He realized that the thought should disturb him, but he found himself smiling instead. To think of Jeremy and to smile felt good. The muscles of his face relaxed. He hadn’t realized he’d been clenching his jaw until he unclenched it and released all the tension he’d been holding there. He felt the release of that tension spread to every part of his body. He breathed in the cold air easily and deeply. He’d give Jeremy a call this evening, or drive up to Parr House, and talk it out. There was no reason why they shouldn’t be friends, or at least on some sort of conversational terms. They were just a couple of guys who had been good friends once a long time ago—OK, maybe a bit more than friends, maybe, but it was a long time ago. Then was then and now was now.
Elliot climbed back into the car and turned the key in the ignition. He needed to get back to the station and back to work. He was a cop. There would be time for all this personal crap later.
On his way back into town, Elliot passed Donna Lemieux’s plain white house on house on Hobbs Street and felt a stab of guilt. On a whim, he pulled into her driveway. He’d been an asshole to her last night as well as to Jeremy Parr. Fixing the Jeremy situation was going to take some time, but an apology, some charm, and some reassurance of her desirability would go a long way towards making things right with Donna. Elliot prided himself on being a hard-ass, but he’d never thought of himself as an asshole, and didn’t plan to start now. He wished he’d brought flowers, but realized immediately what an idiotic thought that was.
Elliot pulled into her driveway and got out. Instinctively he looked both ways to see if anyone had seen him. A police car parked in someone’s driveway was a universally acknowledged symbol of trouble in the neighbourhood and the last thing he wanted to do was compound last night’s romantic disaster by embarrassing Donna, making her a spectacle to her neighbours. But there was no one in the street, and no one was peering at him from behind the curtains, at least so far as he could tell.
He knocked on her door and waited. Then, receiving no answer, he knocked again, more loudly. He glanced over his shoulder to where her car sat in the driveway. She’d left his place at—what, three-thirty in the morning? Four? She’d obviously driven home in one piece because the car was right there. Had she gone out already? Not likely. Not without the car. He knocked again, and peered in through her front window. The living room beyond the window was dim. There was no movement at all.
She’s sleeping , Elliot thought practically. She came over to my house after a night shift and probably didn’t get back here till four a.m. And she was pissed. She’s probably sleeping, and the last thing I want to do is wake her up and have her answer the door with her hair all messy and her face puffed up and give me shit for waking her up, on top of everything else.
Elliot walked back to the cruiser. He glanced back over his shoulder at the silent white house with the dark windows. A thought came and went so quickly that he barely registered it as a thought before dismissing it: the thought that the house felt empty to him. No, not just empty— absent of life.
It was an irrational thought—emotional, illogical, very unlike Elliot the police officer, therefore, in his mind, very unlike Elliot, period. His rational, logical thought, on the other hand, was that Donna Lemieux was inside, sleeping like the dead, after a rough night for which he was at least partly to blame. That was reality. He would drive out to O’Toole’s tonight and make amends. Maybe even bring flowers. Perhaps flowers would seem like a better idea once the sun had gone down.
Elliot sighed again, thinking in abstract terms that having a conscience was a burden he hadn’t had to consider until very recently, and one he could happily do without.
He got back into the cruiser and drove to the station as quickly as he could, realizing that nearly two hours had passed since his encounter with Christina Parr and Billy Lightning, and he was going to have to think on his feet if he was going to come up with a plausible excuse for Sergeant Thomson as to where the hell he’d been all morning.