Children in the Morning (6 page)

“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, 23

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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.

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“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.”

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“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 26

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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 partici-pate 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 coach-ing 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 27

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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!”

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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.