Punishment (42 page)

I gave it about five seconds reflection. “I’m thinking,” I said. Then five more seconds.

“You know what you should do?” I said at last. “There’s a lovely old bed and breakfast a few miles down the road. Beautiful spot, overlooks the sea. The Seaside B and B. There’s a big sign on the highway just before you get to it. Check in there for the weekend. Very comfortable. And I’ll bet they
can help you with anything you need to know about the place.”

The driver looked over at the passenger and they nodded at each other briefly. Then he turned back to me. “Sounds like a plan,” he said.

As he powered the window up, he said softly, “Y’all have a wonderful day.”

I realized that Mary was standing in the doorway of the store, leaning, one arm across her middle. The other arm was raised, hand before her face holding a cigarette, concealing her expression. She puffed once on the cigarette, then dropped it and crushed it with her heel, nodded, smiled slightly, turned and walked inside.

I’m grateful to many readers who took the trouble to review early versions of my manuscript—especially Carol Off, Anne Collins and Shaun Bradley, who responded generously in the most primitive stages of the project. Particularly Anne, who struggled with me as the narrative evolved into its final form. I owe particular thanks to Lorne MacDowell, Jill Arthur and my colleague and friend Gillian Findlay for important advice on courtroom scenes. To the extent the courtroom drama rings authentic, those three deserve the credit—where it fails, the fault is mine.

LINDEN MACINTYRE
’
S
bestselling first novel,
The Long Stretch
, was nominated for a CBA Libris Award and his boyhood memoir,
Causeway: A Passage from Innocence
, won both the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction and the Evelyn Richardson Prize. His second novel,
The Bishop’s Man
, was a number-one national bestseller, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award and the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year Award, among other honours. The third book in the loose-knit trilogy,
Why Men Lie
, was also a number-one national bestseller as well as a
Globe and Mail
“Can’t Miss” Book for 2012. MacIntyre, who spent twenty-four years as the co-host of
the fifth estate
, is a distinguished broadcast journalist who has won ten Gemini awards for his work.