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And towns like Port Dundas couldn’t say no. Not to all that commerce, all that foot traffic. People got rich off it. But the gargantuan houses that were built on the new lots lasted a lot longer than the money did. Westmuirians had been squeezed out of their own countryside. It made her angry, but she’d accepted it by now.
What was left of the town of her childhood she felt fiercely protective of. Main Street was the map of her life. She was eleven before her parents decided she was old enough to walk to town on her own, but the moment she was allowed to go, she was there all the time, ru
By the time she was thirteen, she felt like she owned the town. She knew every inch of it, was a repository for its dailiness, its history. People used to joke that the mother was in City Hall and the kid was directing traffic out on Main Street. There wasn’t a soul who didn’t know her on sight.
Now her mother was coming to the end of her life, and her own personal Port Dundas was vanishing. Charles O’Co
After lunch, Greene gave her permission to do what she’d asked to do, and Hazel filled out the rest of the paperwork. She waited for Wilton while he was in the evidence locker in the basement, and then she drove down to Kehoe Gle
There was a little cool sting in the air now. Summer was not officially over until September 21, but this always happened in the second half of August, this sudden encroachment into the heat. It never stopped shocking her when the summer began to end. You wait so long for it and then, like a switch being thrown, the cold makes its appearance.
Cathy looked at Hazel through the screen door and then opened it, and Hazel walked in past her, touching the widow softly on the upper arm. She went into the kitchen and sat down, placing a paper bag on the table. Cathy came in hesitantly, seeing the bag and not liking it. But she took a seat.
“I hope those are french fries,” she said.
“No.”
“Then I’m going to have a drink. Do you want one?”
“Whatever you’re having.”
Cathy went to make the drinks and dropped an ice cube in each glass. “This is going to be an unpleasant experience, isn’t it? I can feel it.” She was weaving a little, side to side, against the counter.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have another,” Hazel said.
“This is my first, Officer. But I am stoned. I presume I am not arrested.”
“No.”
She brought the drinks to the table. “So, why are you here?”
“The girl’s name, the one you saw, her name was Larysa Kirilenko.”
“Is she dead?”
“No. And we haven’t captured her. Yet,” she added and reached for her drink.
“So I have to leave my home again?”
“No,” said Hazel. “I promise you, she’s gone. You’ll never see her again.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I know what happened to her now.”
Cathy didn’t want to know, though. Hazel could see the fear in her eyes. Now was the moment she would learn how her husband had earned his death.
“What’s in the bag, Hazel?”
“I told you Henry might have been trying to help her. She was in a place … a place there was no way out of. I saw it. I do think that Henry was trying to help her. I think he found out somehow through Jordie Du
“And what was he going to do with her when she showed up?”
“Bring her to the police? Get help? But she killed him instead. She used the stun gun, which she had probably seen used down there. They’re not supposed to kill, not even this type. It was an early kind of stun gun, called a Lea Stinger. Russian. She must have known it wasn’t lethal. And she had the knife, which she did use to kill with. Twice.”
“So she didn’t want to kill him? They were friends? She did kill him!”
“I want to show you the knife, Cathy. It came out of evidence, so it’s pretty awful. We can’t clean it yet. Do you think you can look at it?”
Cathy was shaking her head no but looking anxiously at the bag. “Why?”
The question was enough. She had to see it. Hazel removed a ziplock evidence bag from within and lay it on the table. The hunting knife they’d removed from Lee Travers’s chest was inside, still in its open position, and encrusted with dried blood from its tip to the end of the handle. “This is what killed that guard and also Terry Bre
“You said she was looking for something.”
“We still don’t what it was.”
Cathy picked up the clear plastic bag. It had a date and a code scrawled on a white patch in permanent black marker.
“And you think he gave her this.”
“I believe he did.”
“And is this supposed to make me feel better?” She fell silent and dropped the gruesome object to the tabletop. “This isn’t proof my husband was a good man.”
“No, you’re right,” Hazel said. “It isn’t. But if you can believe he was, then proof is nothing.”
Epilogue
Late August
The man at the customs desk at Kiev Borispol stamped her passport and handed it back to her. Her visa had been for a full year. He asked her why she came back so soon. “I didn’t like it in Canada,” she said. “I got homesick.”
She’d paid cash for the cheapest flight: a one-hopper from Toronto on Delta and Aerosvit. When she stepped out of the airport at noontime on a Friday at the end of August, it was hotter than she ever remembered the summer being. She hadn’t eaten real food in three months, her own food, and she stopped in the first decent place she could find and ordered smoked whitefish, potatoes, and a Heineken. Afterwards, she purchased a package of Yava Golds and had the first cigarette she’d smoked in ten years.