‘You’re looking pretty good, Catherine. I don’t think you’ll be in here too long this time.’
Her right hand never stopped moving, her index finger drawing tiny circles over and over again on the arm of the couch. ‘I know I’m a witch to live with. I would have killed me by now, but –’ She broke off, still staring out the window. ‘But that doesn’t mean my ideas are insane. It’s not as if I’m … Fuck. I’ve lost my train of thought.’
The swear word, like the obsessive circling movement of her hand, was a bad sign; Catherine didn’t swear when she was well.
‘So pathetic,’ she said bitterly. ‘Can’t even finish a sentence.’ The medication did that to her, broke her thoughts into small pieces. Perhaps that was why it worked, eventually: it short-circuited the chains of association, the obsessive ideas. Nevertheless, Cardinal could feel the hot jet of anger gushing inside his wife, blotting everything out like an artery opened in water. Both of her hands were making the obsessive circles now.
‘Kelly’s doing well,’ he said brightly. ‘Sounds practically in love with her painting teacher. She enjoyed her visit.’
Catherine looked at the floor, shaking her head slowly. Not accepting any positive remarks, thank you.
‘You’ll feel better soon,’ Cardinal said gently. ‘I just wanted to see you. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I thought we could have a chat. I don’t want to upset you.’
He could see Catherine’s thoughts growing heavier. Her head sank lower. One hand now covered her eyes like a visor.
‘Cath, honey, listen. You will feel better. I know it feels like you won’t just now. It feels like nothing will ever be right again, but we’ve got through this before and we’ll get through it again.’
People think of depression as sadness, and in its milder manifestations perhaps it is, but there could be little comparison between a tearful parting, say, or a sense of loss and these massive, devastating attacks Catherine suffered. ‘It’s as if I am invaded,’ she had told him. ‘It rolls into me like black clouds of gas. All hope is annihilated. All joy is slaughtered.’ All joy is slaughtered. He would never forget her saying that.
‘Take it easy,’ he said now. ‘Catherine? Please, hon. Take it slow, now.’ He put a hand on her knee and received not the slightest flicker of response. Her thoughts, he knew, were a turmoil of self-loathing. She had told him as much: ‘Suddenly,’ she said, ‘I can’t breathe. All the air is sucked out of the room, and I’m being crushed. And the worst thing is knowing what a misery I am to live with. I’m fastened to you like a stone, dragging you down and down and down. You must hate me. I hate me.’
But she said nothing now, just remained motionless, with her neck bent forward at a painful angle.
Three months ago Catherine had been bright and cheerful, her normal self. But gradually, as it often did in winter, her cheerfulness had ballooned into mania. She began to speak of travelling to Ottawa. It became her sole topic of conversation. Suddenly, it was vital she see the prime minister, she must talk sense into Parliament, she must tell the politicians what had to be done to save the country, save Quebec. Nothing could jog her from this obsession. It would start every morning at breakfast; it was the last thing she said at night. Cardinal thought he would go mad himself. Then Catherine’s ideas had taken on an interplanetary cast. She began to talk of NASA, of the early explorers, the colonization of space. She stayed awake for three nights running, writing obsessively in a journal. When the phone bill arrived, it listed three hundred dollars’ worth of calls to Ottawa and Houston.
Finally, on the fourth day, she had spiralled to earth like a plane with a dead engine. She remained in bed for a week with the blinds pulled down. At three o’clock one morning, Cardinal awoke when she called his name. He found her in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub. The cabinet was open, the rows of pills (none of them in themselves particularly lethal) waiting. ‘I think I’d better go to the hospital,’ was all she had said. At the time, Cardinal had thought it a good sign; she had never before asked for help.
Now, Cardinal sat next to his wife in the overheated sunroom, humbled by the magnitude of her desolation. He tried for a while longer to get her to speak, but she stayed silent. He hugged her, and it was like hugging wood. Her hair gave off a slight animal odour.
A nurse came, bearing a single pill and a paper cup of juice. When Catherine would not respond to her coaxing, the nurse left and returned with a syringe. Five minutes later Catherine was asleep in her husband’s arms.
The early days are always bad, Cardinal told himself in the elevator. In a few days the drugs will soothe her nerves enough that the relentless self-loathing will lose its power. When that happens, she will be – what? – sad and ashamed, he supposed. She’ll feel exhausted and drained and sad and ashamed, but at least she’ll be living in this world. Catherine was his California – she was his sunlight and wine and blue ocean – but a strain of madness ran through her like a fault line, and Cardinal lived in fear that one day it would topple their life beyond all hope of recovery.
It wasn’t until Sunday that Cardinal got the opportunity to review background material. He spent the entire afternoon at home with a stack of files labelled Pine, LaBelle and Fogle.
In a city of fifty-eight thousand, one missing child is a major event, two is an out-and-out sensation. Never mind Chief R.J. or the board of commissioners, never mind The Algonquin Lode or the TV news, it was the entire town that wouldn’t let you rest. Back in the fall, Cardinal could not so much as shop for groceries without being peppered with questions and advice about Katie Pine and Billy LaBelle. Everyone had an idea, everyone had a suggestion.
Of course this had its bright side: there was no lack of volunteers. In the LaBelle case the local Boy Scouts had spent an entire week treading step by step through the woods beyond the airport. But there were drawbacks too. The station phones never stopped ringing, and the small force had been overwhelmed with false leads – all of which had to be followed up sooner or later. The files filled up with stacks of supplementary reports – sups, as they were not very affectionately called – follow-ups on tips that led like a thousand false maps to dead ends.
Now, Cardinal sat with his feet to the fireplace and a fresh pot of decaf on the stove, weeding through the files, trying to winnow the stack of data into facts. From these solid facts, newly regarded, he hoped to extract one solid idea, one fragment of a theory – because so far he had none.
Armed Forces had graciously lent them a tent big enough to cover Windigo Island and two heaters formerly used to heat hangars for the local squadron of F-18s. Down on their knees like archaeologists, Cardinal and the others had culled the snow foot by square foot. That took most of the day, and then, turning up the heaters bit by bit, they had slowly melted the snow and examined the sodden carpet of pine needles and sand and rock that lay beneath. Beer cans, cigarette butts, fishing tackle, bits of plastic – they were buried in trash, none of it tied to the crime.
The lock had yielded no fingerprint.
This, then, was Cardinal’s first sad fact: their painstaking search had rendered not a single lead.
Katie Pine had disappeared on September 12. She had attended school that day, leaving just after the final bell with two friends. There was the initial report – a phone call from Dorothy Pine – and then there were the sups: Cardinal’s interview with Sue Couchie, McLeod’s interview with the other girl. The three girls had gone to the travelling fair that was set up