Usually being sensible was easier than this. Their lips parted. He kissed her again on her unbearably sweet lips, but lightly.
“See you Monday,” he said again.
After Karin left, Ted drove to the Clarkson GO Train station. Plainly, many regular commuters were starting their September holiday weekend early: there were dozens more parking spaces available in the south parking lot than was usual for a weekday, and more seats on the upper level of the second last coach. He’d found this railcar tended to be the least crowded. The trip took just under half an hour, barring mishaps, and this morning he spent the time reading the paper. He usually did—although he had had occasion to correct colleagues who supposed there would be nothing but industrial wasteland to see out the windows anyway. While Mississauga might still fall a blossom or two short of Arcadia, this rail corridor was for the most part a leafy green, interrupted only by the very occasional school or commercial enterprise. The factories, rail yards and graffiti-spattered abutments didn’t begin till you were into Toronto proper.
He spent the morning at his desk in the University of Toronto’s Department of Criminology. He was late with his peer review of an article a lecturer at Simon Fraser had submitted to one of the learned journals, but he had time to give it only a passing glance at present. It dealt with the Mafia and had been sent to Ted because someone had reported he was interested in gangs. The report had some foundation, but Ted didn’t consider it safe to be known as a mob expert. Besides, the subject of this paper wasn’t one of the criminal organizations he was collecting data on. More urgent this morning was the tweaking of an unpublished article of his own on young offenders into something he could deliver at one of the conference’s workshop sessions on Sunday. And his first duty was getting ready to moderate a panel discussion on sentencing at seven o’clock that evening.
The conference proper, a symposium on punishment, was open to registrants only, mostly academics with positions at universities as far flung as Hong Kong, Cape Town and Helsinki. Proceedings would be launched with a keynote address tonight at eight thirty by a big cheese from the Australian Institute of Criminology. His subject, according to the program that Ted now retrieved from a drawer in his desk, was to be “Life Sentences as Overkill: the Need for Evidence-based Penalties.” A good, progressive topic without being really provocative to the criminological community.
The panel discussion, open to all comers and featuring politicians and social activists as participants, had been publicized as a gesture of goodwill and inclusiveness towards the larger community. It had been organized also—Ted suspected, although this goal had been less explicit—as an opportunity for the academics to see how unenlightened the masses really were on the subject of sentencing and hence how vital it was that there be criminologists to straighten them out.
Shortly before noon, the man he was substituting for at the conference dropped by. Ted heard the rackety approach of the hard plastic wheels on the rolling suitcase before Graham Hart’s tall frame filled the doorway.
“Lend me a blank DVD, Ted?” The suitcase was quite small for all the noise it made. Graham parked it in a corner and leaned on the back of a chair. He wore a buckskin jacket with fringe.
“Sure.” Ted opened his top desk drawer and groped around.
“Some soc prof at Lakehead is going to let me copy his whole dossier on the Ojibway.”
Ted’s hand came out empty. “I could have sworn I had one.” A quick check showed it wasn’t in any of the other drawers either. “Sorry. Say, shouldn’t you be on your way to Thunder Bay by now?”
“The airport limo’s waiting as we speak. So just a quick heads-up on what to expect tonight. There’s a victim of violent crime—suggested by our department chair, who knows her somehow. There’s old Kerr, the happy warrior from U. of Calgary. He was your idea, wasn’t he? And I dug up a fire-and-brimstone Toronto city councillor and a Brampton-based Crown counsel to round out the bear pit.” Graham dropped an annotated list of names on Ted’s desk. “As for topics, be prepared for concurrent versus consecutive sentences, conditional sentences, the faint hope clause. Capital punishment probably won’t come up.”
“The hang-’em-high crowd has had to do without since ’62,” Ted observed. “I guess folks get discouraged.”
“More than that, there’ve been too many wrongfully convicted. It’s one of the universe’s little jokes that obtuse juries have done more for progressive penology than acute criminologists.”
“Do the Ojibway do a better job selecting members of their sentencing circles?”
“Ask me Tuesday,” said Graham and clattered off. He’d been trying to get a first-hand look at how aboriginal communities dealt with crime for more than two years, and yesterday without warning an accused and his chief had agreed to let the white scholar attend. An opportunity not to be missed.
Ted looked over Graham’s notes. He thought the tone he should strike as moderator would be imperturbable good humour, evinced by a tolerant smile and a willingness to interrupt when panellists and questioners weren’t letting each other be heard. The main work remaining was to make sure he could pronounce the participants’ names. A couple of phone calls established that both Cesario and Szabo started with an S sound.
Karin didn’t get back to the house until seven thirty. She would have left the rehearsal early without scruple, but the music had absorbed her, and she had lost track of time. It still shouldn’t be a problem. Unlike Ted, Markus was a night owl. She’d just have to warn him not to keep supper for her. In the shower, she remembered she had meant to pack her bag Thursday night. Hearing the results of the pregnancy test had driven all such thoughts from her head. Well, she needn’t pack much: she was sure she had some cottage clothes up there. The worst of it was she was bone tired, in no condition to thread her way through hours of snarled traffic and to make allowances for other drivers’ weary irritability. On her way to the basement to pick up her knapsack, she stopped by the range to put on water for a quick cup of tea.
The basement was full height, which—as the real estate agent had delighted in pointing out—they’d appreciate if they ever decided to finish it, or to sell the house. In the meantime, the correspondingly numerous basement stairs were one of Karin’s pet hates. She imagined builders overdue at their next job slapping together scraps of wood and tacking on a thin railing with sparse supports. Never had she seen stairs so cheap, steep and flimsy. And the low basement floor, far from being a plus in her eyes, only increased the odds that someone ascending or descending with less than full concentration would someday come to grief.
Hand on rail down. Knapsack. Hand on rail up. Kettle boiling. Tea bag in mug. Water in mug. Tea bag out. Carry mug of tea and knapsack back to bedroom. Pack. Dress. Slurp down tea. Phone Markus.
He wanted to know where she was calling from and chuckled when he heard.
“Still at home? My goodness, Ted’s timetables have slipped for once.”
“Ted’s conferencing, remember? It’ll just be me and you this weekend.”
“Maybe I’ll ask that movie star on the next lake to come over and keep you company.”
Her answer came a beat late. “I’m bringing my cello. There may not be room for