419

  Do you know who we are?we are Mafia. We will FIND you and we will kill you

  CHAPTER 10

  Wet forests crowded the roadside. Broad leaves, heavy with rain, slapped against rooftops as the vehicles jockeyed for position. The tanker truck was bucking under its own weight, straining against its own momentum; the driver and his mechanic could feel its cargo of fuel pushing them forward as they drove across washboard surfaces and crumbling asphalt, windows down, grinning wide.

  Joseph was gripping the wheel as though it were a life preserver and he was at sea. He had to yell to be heard over the noise of the engine. "Dreams Abound!" he shouted. "We are on our way!"

  What could stop them? Nothing.

  Nothing except—He geared down. "Roadblock ahead."

  "Police?"

  "Army."

  CHAPTER 11

  You, I love. This is what Laura remembered: chuckwagons reeling around a corner, men in rippling silk shirts yelling hard, Stetsons flying, outriders in full gallop, hooves flinging up clods of dirt, the tinny cries of the announcer lost in the melee.

  And then—one of the animals stumbled and the wagons took flight, wheels in the air, men tumbling upward, horses piling on top of each other. Laura's father, covering her eyes.

  Had she seen that accident? Or dreamed it?

  Memories of the midway. A Tilt-A-Whirl world of spinning lights and helium balloons escaping into the night sky. Laura, wearing a cowboy hat with a plastic whistle attached, and her father in full Western gear, meaning, in this case, a too-tight vest, a too-big hat, new cowboy boots, and no whistle. Wandering the midway was like wandering through a slow-motion pinball machine. Chimes rang and ricocheted. Ferris wheels turned and Gravitrons spun.

  Ring-a-bell tests of strength and guess-your-weight booths. Frozen bananas and deep-fried cheesecake. Light bulb lanes and tumbling milk cans. "Throw a ball, win a prize! It's just that easy."

  With Warren off with his friends and a mother who didn't like crowds, it fell to Laura's father to entertain her.

  But she was too small for the big rides and he was too big for the little rides, so the evening consisted mainly of her dad waving to her as she passed by on the Lady Bug Bugaloo or the Inch-Worm Express

  (a roller coaster that consisted of a single circle with a single bump).

  While waiting in line for mini-doughnuts—moist and warm and dusted with cinnamon, the highlight of any Stampede midway visit—Laura had walked ahead, down the line, while her dad held their spot. She'd peered seriously at the menu-board options, decided after great deliberation to get the Big Bag, and was hurrying back when she kicked something underfoot. A twenty-dollar bill.

  She ran, breathless, back to her dad. "Look what I found!"

  Her elation didn't last, though. "Sweetie," he said. "It's not ours to keep."

  So they went down the mini-doughnut line, asking everyone in turn if they'd dropped a twenty-dollar bill. One by one, everyone said no, till they got to a gaggle of smirking teenage boys. "Yeah," one of them said. "That's mine."

  As she walked away, she heard them laughing.

  "That wasn't theirs," she'd said, face in full pout.

  "Probably not," said her dad. "But it definitely wasn't ours."

  And somewhere in the gap between probably and definitely, her father had lost her, and the rest of the evening was ruined. As she walked, hand-in-begrudging-hand with her father through the fairway, with its toss-a-coin stands and dartboard prizes, she silently tallied the items she might have purchased with that lost twenty:

  —a snow globe with a Mountie inside

  —a bandana bedazzled with a rhinestone greeting of

  "Howdy, pardner!"

  —an accordion-drop of postcards for Nana

  —a pink cloud of cotton candy

  —a glow-in-the-dark doodle pad poster proclaiming the Stampede the "Greatest Show on Earth"

  —a small bear with Rumpelstiltskin-style granny glasses

  —a plastic cowboy piggy bank

  —a ticket to the All-Seeing Oracle

  —an array of sparkly headbands and glitter lip gloss

  The possibilities floated past on either side, as all the while she kept an eye out for the smirking boys who'd plucked that twenty from her fathers hand. She never saw them, which was just as well. What would she have done? Trailed them like Nancy Drew?

  Confronted the leader with an accusatory stab of her finger?

  Laura wasn't sure she'd ever really forgiven her father, though.

  Not inside, not where it counts.

  CHAPTER 12

  A vein of lightning on the far side of the sky.

  Storms without rain.

  Winds without water.

  She woke, and when she sat up, the dust fountained off her and the voice that had accompanied her once again stirred, once again whispered, "Get up. Keep walking. Don't stop."

  CHAPTER 13

  There were three sets of tire treads from the Ogden Road accident to be sorted out: those on the upside-down vehicle at the bottom of the embankment; those of a car being steered forcibly off the road, through packed snow and over the edge—clearly belonging to the Oldsmobile below, but still needing to be confirmed; and the tire treads from the car that had braked hard and come to a stop, tires rolling through a dusting of their own debris as the vehicle turned to go back up the hill. The car that had been aiming for the guardrail, but had stopped.

  Sergeant Brisebois was at his desk with the accident scene photographs laid out before him, studying the stained sweater on the victims body—"Did it say what kind of sweater?"—when the folder landed on his desk. "They match," said the young constable who had delivered it, a quick-talking woman from Collision Reconstruction.

  "Which ones?" he asked.

  "All of 'em."

  "All?"

  She nodded. "They're all from the same car, the one the victim was driving, the Oldsmobile."

  Brisebois leaned back. "But the tracks didn't line up. The ones higher up and the other ones lower down—the ones that left the road and went over the side—they're at different angles."

  "Be that as it may, the treads are the same. One car, one set of wheels."

  She left him with this quiet revelation. The victim wasn't forced off the road, and he wasn't being pursued. At least, not by anything external.

  Brisebois remembered something one of the other officers at the scene had said, Colin maybe, as they examined the route the vehicle had taken over the edge of the embankment: "He missed the guardrail by inches."

  "Bad luck," said Brisebois.

  "Bad luck," said the other officer. "Or good aim."

  CHAPTER 14

  Laura's father was wearing the same sweater he always did, the one with the geometric deer on it, now looking a bit ratty, as though the deer were afflicted with some sort of woodland mange. He'd had that sweater for years; she remembered it from when she was little.

  It was the last time she would see her father, though Laura didn't know that at the time.

  "What happened to the green cardigan?" she asked. "The one I gave you last Christmas?"

  "Oh, that?" he said. "I still have it."

  "You never wear it."

  "I do. I just—" He wore his deer sweater when he went to see her because he remembered how much she'd liked it as a kid, how she'd given each deer its own name even though the animals were identical. "I thought you liked this sweater," he said.

  "I do, but it's getting a bit worn, don't you think?"

  And—this is the awful part. He took it off.

  "Dad, c'mon..."

  "Oh no, it's okay." And he'd stood there in shirtsleeves, sweater balled in one hand. "So what are we having for lunch?"

  They were at Northill Plaza. Laura had taken the elevator down, met him in front of the chocolate shoppe.

  "My namesake," she'd said with a laugh. "Remember?"

  "Sorry?" He seemed distracted.

  "Laura Secord. The heroine on the ch
ocolate box. You told me I was named after her. You said you'd won Mom over when you were courting with a box of Laura Secord's Assorted."

  "Hmm? No. Not for Secord. Your great-aunt Ida, on your mother's side. Laura Ida. Not the chocolates, that was just a story."

  "Yes, Dad, I know. I was only—So what do you feel like?

  Chinese? Greek?"

  They had arrived at the food court.

  "Italian?" she said. "Or Thai? Maybe Mexican?"

  "Oh, I don't know. What do you recommend?"

  "I had Opa yesterday," she said. "And I'm not wild about Edo of Japan. Let's see. There's Taco Bell. Manchu Wok. Seoul Express.

  How about that? It's Korean."

  "Isn't that spicy? I don't really care for spicy food."

  "I know, but this'll be fine. The kimchee they have is mild."

  So they found a table and dined on mixed vegetables and mild kimchee. But their conversation seemed strange and disjointed. Her father's attention would drift away, then suddenly snap back into focus—though not always on the topic at hand. "You'll be fine," he said at one point, apropos of nothing. "Your mother worries about you, but you'll be fine."

  "Mom worries about me? Why?"

  "She thinks you should get out more, meet people."

  Laura laughed. "That's what mothers do. They worry."

  "But I don't," he said. "There's a strength running through you, Laura. Something Warren never had. A resilience. You get it from your mother, you certainly don't get it from me."

  Dad, fishing for a compliment. "C'mon," she said. "You've got all kinds of strength."

  "No," he said. "I don't. I thought I did, but I don't. You, though.

  That's a different story. I've always been so very proud of you."

  Her father had helped her move the year she went away to university, driving across the prairies in a rented van: Laura immersed in earplug music, her dad aiming for the vanishing point ahead. Sunsets across open fields. A city glowing in the middle of it. "The Peg," he said as they circled in. "That's what they call it."

  She'd stayed in residence the first year, and her dad had come back out to see her over Thanksgiving. "Your mom sends her best wishes—and this pumpkin pie," he said. Store bought, but still. Her mom was substitute teaching that week and couldn't come, let alone bake. But her dad had made the trip, and they had Thanksgiving together. He slept on the couch in the common room and headed back the next day, driving across the prairies toward that other vanishing point.

  Laura had been struggling with an Introduction to Philosophy essay at the time, trying to somehow tie the absolutist moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant to both the emotive prose of the Late Romantics and Plato's Allegory of the Cave. The paper was a mess. After her father had left, though, she'd found something: in her open notebook, where she'd written out that ancient imperative, underlined forcibly for added emphasis as a reminder—Let justice be done though the heavens fall!—her father had written below it, in smaller letters, "Let Heaven be done, though justice falls."

  She'd puzzled over this, her father's inversion of heaven and justice, of love and retribution, of forgiveness and reprisal. Was he just playing with words? He never played with words. Let Heaven be done, though justice falls. It was one of the few moments she remembered her dad ever being philosophical—if that's what that was—and it had stayed with her all these years precisely because it was so unusual. It seemed to offer a glimpse of something that lay below what she called his "dad demeanour."

  Laura never did finish that essay; she was marked "incomplete," a verdict harsher than failure, in her mind. Even now, she carried the memory of that grade like a burden. Incomplete.

  Laura had called home from the dorm every Sunday, sometimes with a forced joviality in her voice, other times sniffling with sadness. She spoke to her mom at great length about the minutiae of university life, the profs she disliked and those she could stand, the workload, the daily defeats, the small victories. With her father, though, it was mainly mundane: pleasantries accompanied by assurances from Laura that she was doing well, was knuckling down, studying hard. But if Laura's mother got to hear the detailed ins and outs of Laura's life, it was always her dad who got to say goodbye.

  "Here's your father."

  He would end the calls with "I love you." That way, he explained, "The last thing you hear before you go to sleep will be

  love."She'd teased him about this. "Not love. You," she said.

  "Me?"

  "You. The last thing I hear is you. If you wanted to end it on love, you'd have to reword it."

  And so it became a running joke between them. Whenever she phoned, the call would end with her father telling her: "You, I love."It was something they shared throughout her Away Years, something she hadn't heard for a long, long while. Somewhere along the way, it had been forgotten. But when they'd said goodbye that day in the food court, he'd called back to her as she was leaving.

  "Laura?"

  "Yes, Dad?"

  "You, I love."

  Why would he have done that?

  CHAPTER 15

  There had been a boy at university. Not a boy. A grad student who taught one of her introductory English courses. There had been a baby as well. No. Not a baby. A shadow, a smudge on an ultrasound followed by protestations. "I can't be somebody's father. I can't. I'm not ready. I'll never be ready." Not that it mattered; Laura wasn't able to carry the child, and the entire incident had long been pushed down into the footnotes of her life. She hadn't told anyone about it. Not even her dad.

  After university she'd been hired by Harlequin, proofreading romances. She'd later moved on to pocketbook police procedurals and then into the lucrative world of freelance copy editing. Memoirs, biographies, manuals. It was her job to impose a consistency of grammar, spelling, punctuation, to compile a style sheet of preferred spellings and usages for each particular project. It was decidedly unsexy, but it paid the rent (barely), even if it did come with certain challenges, mainly in the form of intransigent authors.

  One particularly troublesome author had insisted on ending many of his sentences with... nothing. No period, no question mark, no exclamation, not even an ellipsis. Laura had dutifully gone through and fixed these, adding a semicolon here, a period there, only to receive a barrage of incensed emails after the author had reviewed the pages. "How dare you!" the emails typically began.

  Laura had tried to explain to him that every seritence needed an ending, but the author had refused to accept this and had fought back with a passion worthy of a better cause. "Not everything has an ending! Open your eyes!" he wrote—using exclamation marks, ironically enough. After several testy back-and-forths, it became clear that it would be easier for the publisher to simply acquiesce. The reviewers then complained (inevitably) about the sloppy editing. "Riddled with typos," they said.

  Did everything have an ending?

  Poetry could end on emptiness, a disregard for proper punctuation being somewhat de rigueur among the poetry set. But prose?

  Biography? Her father's biography, uneventful till the very end—had it ended on the raised eyebrows of an exclamation point? The curlicue of a question left unanswered? The final summation of a period, or the stutter-marks of an ellipsis trailing off into blank paper...

  Laura prepared indexes as well and was currently juggling several biographies, all public figures, all women—an athlete, a soldier

  (posthumous), a country singing star. Highlighting surnames and proper nouns, tallying Key Events and Honours, Earned. It was for a series titled Lives Lived. Indexes were tricky things. What mattered? Surnames, certainly. And cities. Specific locations (New York), but not general (kitchen). Do you group the subject's early jobs in advertising and marketing together? Or under subheadings labelled "Employment, Early"? Do you need a separate entry for

  "Advertising"? Or could you get away with using an artful "see:

  Marketing"? (Answer: No.)

  It was not a particularly enjoyable task
, indexing other people's lives. "Seems to me," she'd said with a sigh to her father on the phone one day, "that the most important aspects of someone's life are the very things not listed in an index." There were never entries for "memory," or "regrets," or even "love," in the lowercase.

  It was always "Education (post-secondary)" or "Awards (see also: