“Everyone but you and Ked,” Dan said, his voice too far gone for a joking tone. He pressed his thumb and forefinger against his eyes, making the darkness sparkle under the lids.
“The kid’s got balls the size of grenades. He’d have to, with a father like you.”
“Okay, enough!” Any farther and he’d say things he might never be able to take back. “I have to go,” Dan said, but kept the phone to his ear.
“Will I hear from you again?” Donny asked quietly. “Or is this the big flush?”
Dan felt the ice running in his veins, a dead cold that made him want to strike back. He wanted to put distance between them. There were things even friends shouldn’t say.
“Do you hate me now?” Donny asked.
“Why would I hate you?”
“Just answer the question.”
Dan opened his eyes, the sparkles slipping into a lacy-edged nothingness. “Maybe.” He waited. “And maybe I’d be justified if I did.”
“Justified.” Donny sighed. “I think you do hate me right now, even though you won’t admit it. You hate me for telling you the truth about yourself. I can hear that detached tone you WASP-y folk get in your voices when you talk about the people you don’t talk about any more.”
“I’m pretty angry about some of the things you said just now.”
“Good — anger’s fine. It’s okay. You can toss it right back at me. You’ve pissed me off plenty too. But I don’t want to lose your friendship, Dan. I respect you and, yes, I love you too. I really love you. And that’s the bottom line for me.” Donny took a drag and exhaled. Dan heard the sound of a cigarette being stabbed out with finality. “I just hope you know that.”
Silence stretched between them. Donny was right. How could you not hate someone who exposed your lies and contradictions, and left you defenceless against your carefully constructed fictions? “Thanks,” Dan said, politeness being the makeshift best he could do.
“For what? For pissing you off?”
“For challenging me. Maybe I needed someone to say those things.”
The haughty tone came back into Donny’s voice. “I guarantee you needed it. But if I have to,” the tone shifted again, “I’ll take back everything and we can just pretend I never said a word of it. So we can still be friends.”
“No. Don’t do that. Just give me time to think it over.”
“Okay.” Donny waited. “Talk to you soon?”
“Sure.”
“You call me or I’ll call you?”
“I’ll call you.”
Dan put the receiver down and stared at the wall. The room had shrunk over the last few minutes. He tried to ignore the nameless sorrow under his skin, the gnawing doubts that mocked his hope that life could be a fine thing or that happiness was possible. An acid loneliness came pouring in — the same loneliness that enticed him to drink and told him he had no friends except the one on the table in front of him.
He wished he knew someone he could talk to about the ache that never went away. Not just for the things Donny had said, but for all the times he’d given his best and life had short-changed him. All the times he’d wished for things to be different. And while he was wishing, why not wish for a partner who cared about him the way he, Dan, cared about others? He wished he could phone Bill and pour his heart out and make things right between them, but Bill was only interested in repairing hearts, not soothing or reassuring them.
Fifteen
Services Rendered
Saylor called again the following week. Given his increasing involvement in the case, Dan wasn’t surprised to hear from the Picton cop a second time. He listened patiently while Saylor updated him. He was exhibiting all the symptoms of over-zealous determination, including tracking the girl’s whereabouts before her death. The long arm of the law reaching out beyond the grave.
“By the way, are you still talking to those people?” Saylor asked.
“The Killingworths?”
“Those would be the ones.”
“No — I’ve left off with that.”
“Very interesting, what I’ve come up with.” This apparently was Dan’s cue to ask him to elaborate. When Dan said nothing, Saylor continued. “The girl had actually been in the country almost a month before the wedding, which is curious when you consider that she was here with her husband and not her brother. It gets more interesting though. That pregnancy?” Dan’s ears picked up. “She was booked into an abortion clinic in Montreal.”
“What?” Suddenly Dan was very interested.
“She went in for a consultation two weeks ago. She was supposed to have gone in for the full procedure last week, but she never showed up.”
Dan whistled. “I wonder who was behind it?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Saylor said. “The operation was arranged and paid for by Lucille Killingworth.”
A surprise piece of the puzzle slipping into a very unexpected space. “Oh, man!” Dan said.
“I’d give a million bucks to know what was going on there,” Saylor said. “How did they react when you told them about the pregnancy?”
Dan flashed on the scene in the drawing room at the Killingworth home. He recalled the tense looks on both faces, but it had only been Thom who’d disavowed any knowledge of it.
“And she never said anything to the contrary?” Saylor asked.
“No, but she looked pretty shocked too.”
“I guess she would be if she thought she’d taken care of it.” There was a silence on the line then Saylor said, “Do you think the son was telling the truth when he said he didn’t know about it?”
“I’m inclined to believe it,” Dan said, sketching in Thom’s revelation about provisions for a first grandchild in his grandfather’s will.
“So legally speaking, because of the marriage any inheritance money would have belonged to the baby, whether it was Thom Killingworth’s DNA or not?”
“I guess. I can’t say for sure. I’m sure a lawyer would happily argue that.”
“Well, well — that’s interesting news,” Saylor said.
“When you put it that way, yes.”
“I’m all over it, buddy. You keep in touch now.”
The date was circled on his calendar. He’d scheduled a meeting with the family of the missing fifteen-year-old. He was too rushed to eat so he ordered coffee in and tried to concentrate on the file. Telling parents their teenage son was involved in prostitution was always a delicate matter. Dan thought about his own boyhood. If he’d disappeared without telling anyone, would his father have found himself sitting through an interview like this, explaining how Dan had run away because he felt unloved and unwanted? If asked about identifying markings, would he have mentioned the scar running down the right side of Dan’s face from the time he’d thrown him against a doorframe? Probably not. Dan had let his father off easy by announcing his departure.
Just before one o’clock, Sally knocked and opened the door, giving Dan an odd look. The Philips entered, introduced themselves as Gloria and Paul, and sat before Dan could offer. Everything about them was loud. The only thing standing between the father and a caveman, in Dan’s estimation, was about three grunts. He could have been a mail-order hitman — muscles constricted in his shirtsleeves, his neck a bulbous pillar wider than