Road Ends (28 page)

Eventually Luke stirred himself. “Cartwright, did you say?”

“That’s right.”

“Your dad manager of the bank?”

“Yeah.”

“He helped me a lot when I was starting up my furniture business,” Luke said. “Ten, fifteen years ago. I was just a kid, really, knew nothin’ about nothin’. I went to him for a loan. He showed me how to draw up a business plan, work out what I needed to borrow—all that sort of stuff. He took a lot of time over it. Really helpful.”

“No kidding,” Tom said, trying not to sound as sour as he felt.

Luke nodded. “Nice guy.”

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Tom thought bitterly. Maybe he should make an appointment to see his father at the bank. That way, he might get ten minutes of his time.

More miles went by. A couple of inches of new snow covered the road, easy for the plough to deal with. What it couldn’t deal with was the treacherous layer of compressed snow underneath, hard as ice and just as lethal. Chains were the only answer to that and most cars had them, but even so people ended up in the ditch on a regular basis.

“Speaking of families,” Luke said. “The … ah … waitress at Harper’s the other day? Sorry about her, she’s a pain in the ass. Best thing is to ignore her.”

“You’re related?” It seemed polite to pretend he hadn’t worked that out.

“She’s my sister.”

Tom tried to think of an appropriate response. “Sorry to hear that,” might be a little impolite. “She seems to have a thing about vegetables,” he said at last.

“Been going on about them for years.”

“That must be kind of …” he searched for a word … “wearing.”

“You cannot imagine,” Luke said.

Tom laughed. He hadn’t laughed for a long time and it felt good, felt as if it loosened things that had been clenched up inside him.

“What do your parents think?” he asked.

“They’re dead, so they don’t have to deal with it.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Luke lifted a hand dismissively. “Years ago.”

Ahead of them a moose stepped out of the bush, ambled into the middle of the road and stopped. Tom touched the brakes carefully, then stepped on them harder, and the snowplough slewed sideways, straightened up again and came to a stop. The moose paid no attention. He was gazing into the woods on the far side of the road, lost in thought.

“Sometimes they don’t seem any too swift,” Luke said.

“That’s for sure.” Tom honked the horn. The moose swung his head around, gave them a baleful look and sauntered on.

After that they sat and watched the snow-laden trees go by until they got to Struan, where Tom realized he’d not only managed to carry on a whole conversation without breaking into a sweat but had passed the turnoff to the ravine without even noticing.

Luke Morrison was meeting the boss-guy at Harper’s, so Tom dropped him off there and went and parked the snowplough.
When he got to Harper’s himself, Luke and a bald guy in a suit were ensconced in one of the bigger booths. Along with their lunches there was furniture—dollhouse size—all over the table. The bald guy was forking fries into his mouth with one hand and picking up pieces of furniture with the other, turning them this way and that. “… As many as you need,” Luke was saying as Tom walked by. “The numbers wouldn’t be a problem.”

Tom stole a quick look at the models as he went past. They looked good. There were three or four different designs, some of them fancy, some of them plain, all of them sturdy and graceful-looking. He’d have liked a closer look at them himself.

He’d picked up a copy of
The Globe and Mail
on his way to Harper’s but before he could spread it out the Amazon sped by carrying two plates of hamburgers and fries. She delivered them to a table near the front, then headed back towards the kitchen, pausing, as if purely in the pursuit of duty, at Luke’s table.

“How’s your dinner, sir?” she asked the bald man solicitously, inclining her head to show her genuine interest and concern. “Are you enjoying the hot turkey sandwich? How about the coleslaw—isn’t it just the best?”

From where he sat Tom could see the man’s face and Luke’s back. Luke was running his fingers through his hair—a gesture of stress, Tom guessed. You could bet this wouldn’t have been his choice of meeting place. But the bald guy smiled widely. “It’s real good,” he said. “All of it, coleslaw included. What’s your name, miss, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Bo,” the Amazon said. “Good, that’s what I like to hear, a rave review. And you, sir,” she turned graciously to Luke, tipping her head to the other side. “Are you enjoying your meal?”

Tom looked away—it seemed cruel to watch. Luke must have forbidden her to let on they so much as knew each other and she was having so much fun with the situation she hardly knew what to do with herself.

“Well, there we go!” Tom heard her say. “Two rave reviews. The chef will be so pleased. Now how about dessert? There’s blueberry pie, apple pie, lemon meringue pie, black cherry pie, pecan pie and Mrs. Harper’s world-famous brownies, all with cream or ice cream. My own personal recommendation would be the blueberry pie because our blueberries up here are the best in the country, but they’re all delicious.”

“Well, I for one am going to have exactly what you recommend,” the bald man said. “And some more of your excellent coffee.”

Luke’s hair was starting to resemble a well-ploughed field. He muttered something and the Amazon said, “Excellent choice, sir! Coming right up!” and bounced off to the kitchen. The bald man followed her with his eyes.

“Now she is something else,” he said admiringly. “Didn’t know you grew them like that up here!” He was all but licking his lips.

You dirty bastard, Tom thought, with disgust. You’ve got to be pushing fifty!

On the way home he took a detour down to the lake to have a look at the plane. It was sitting on its skis out on the ice, a Beaver, as Tom had guessed it would be, a single-engine, propeller-driven little workhorse designed by de Havilland Canada and purpose-built for the rigours of the Canadian bush. Back when he was four or five he’d been playing on the beach one day when an unimaginably wonderful machine had swooped down out of the sky, skidded along the top of the water, settled down on its floats and taxied right up to the shore. The door opened and a man leapt out and splashed barefoot to the beach, pausing just long enough to tousle Tom’s hair as he went by. Tom had been so astonished he couldn’t speak.

He’d been hooked then and there. The miracle of flight—the
glamour of it, the romance, the nonchalant ease with which man defied the law of gravity—everything about it enthralled him. Two decades later, still enthralled and studying aerodynamics in Toronto, he’d come to realize that the truly astonishing thing was that it
wasn’t
a miracle: man had worked out that it could be done and therefore he had done it; it was as simple as that. Now man had taken on space itself; he had broken free of Earth’s gravity and orbited the moon. Soon he would land on it. No miracles required, just a little imagination and a lot of math.

Tom’s own particular passion wasn’t outer space, it was supersonic flight, and it seemed to him that if there were a miracle involved it was that he happened to be born when he was, because in the whole history of flight there had never been a better time to be an aeronautical engineer. Over in Europe, Concorde was under development; out in Seattle, Boeing was working on the supersonic transport program; down at the Institute for Aerospace Studies in Toronto, having completed his final exams, Tom was called into his professor’s office and told that his name had been put forward to both Boeing and de Havilland and he would probably be receiving letters inviting him for interviews shortly. If that wasn’t a miracle for a boy from the bush, what was?

Three weeks later, back at home for the summer, he had rounded the corner of a sheer rock face and seen the crumpled heap of his friend’s body at the foot of it, and twenty years of passion had vanished in a heartbeat.

Now Tom walked around the little plane trying to work out what he was feeling. Nothing much. But he didn’t think he’d have been able to come and look at it a couple of months ago, so maybe that was progress.

He walked along the shore, keeping close to the edge, where the wind had left enough snow to provide some traction. The sun
had gone and a few large soft flakes were drifting down—the plane would have to leave soon or not at all. Once he rounded the point that sheltered Low Down Bay from the wind, the snow was thigh deep and within yards he was breathless and sweating. As soon as Lower Beach Road came into view he stopped. No need to go farther.

The bay looked entirely different in winter, barren and hostile, the point where land and water met erased by ice and snow, the curve of the rocks obscured by drifts. The trees were so burdened with snow they looked like figures hunched against the wind.

The cottages were deserted—they had no insulation, so were only for summer use. The one the little girl and her parents had been staying in was at the far end of the road, with the beach on its doorstep and its back to the woods. It was the one they always stayed in. They came for a month every summer to enjoy the beach and the lake and the wide curving beauty of the bay. They loved the peace and quiet, the child’s mother had said that day in court, her mouth so distorted with grief and rage that the words had to be squeezed out one by one. The peace and the quiet and, in particular, the lack of traffic.

Robert was convicted of manslaughter, which surprised no one. What surprised them all was the sentence passed down by the Crown attorney: three months of service in the community. Robert had looked stunned by it. He’d expected a prison sentence.

Tom had been standing beside Robert when the child’s mother came up after the trial—Robert’s parents were on the other side—so he heard what she said. She was shaking so hard with anger that the words came out in fractured syllables, but they were still comprehensible. She said that justice had not been done and that Robert knew it. She said she hoped that the image of her child’s dead body would be at the forefront of Robert’s mind every minute of every day from now until the day he died.
She said that Robert had destroyed her child’s past for her as well as her present and her future; she could no longer see her daughter in her mind’s eye as a baby or a toddler or a little girl learning to ride a bike—her memory no longer held those pictures. The only picture it held, the only thing left to her, was the image of her child’s dead body, head lolling back, mouth gaping open, as they had lifted her into the doctor’s car. And therefore her prayer now, her constant prayer, was that it would be all Robert would ever see either, now and forever.

Tom had known he should stop her; he’d known he should step between her and Robert and say, “Ma’am, excuse me, but you don’t want to say those things, you really mustn’t say those things, please come away now.” He should have put an arm around her and steered her away, forcibly if necessary, given her into the safekeeping of someone, anyone, so that she could not let loose into the world words that should never, ever, have been spoken. He knew he should do that but he was unable to move. He felt rather than saw Robert stagger back, though the woman hadn’t struck him with anything but words. Later he saw that Robert’s mother had collapsed and that people were gathered around her. He also saw Robert’s father, Reverend Thomas, standing as if carved from stone, one hand partially raised as though to stop the appalling words before they reached his son, his mouth half open as if he’d tried to say something but at this, the most critical moment of his life, had lost the power of speech.

By a stroke of luck Shelley the Slut wasn’t there when he got home. Adam was in the living room playing with his cars. Tom sat down in his chair, leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Apart from the sound of Adam’s cars there was silence, a rare and beautiful thing in this house. He thought he might even fall asleep, and then thought he was asleep, and then he woke up
because the sound of cars had stopped and he smelled an odorous presence. He opened his eyes a slit. Adam was standing by his knee looking at him with serious eyes.

“Hello,” Tom said, not bothering to lift his head.

“Are you sad?” Adam asked.

“I guess a bit,” Tom said.

“Why?”

Tom sighed and straightened up. “A friend of mine died. It was a while ago, but it’s still sad.”

The by now familiar crease appeared between Adam’s eyebrows. “What
is
died?” he said.

Tom opened his mouth to say, “Like that mouse we found” but stopped himself. The concept was difficult enough without the kid thinking that everybody ended their days upside down in a jar of honey.

“It’s like … you just aren’t there anymore. It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“Where do you go?”

“Nobody knows. Nowhere bad, though.”

Adam thought about it long and hard. Finally he held out a car he’d been clutching. “This is my new car,” he said.

“That’s called a change of subject,” Tom said, taking the car. “This is new, is it? It’s very shiny. Do you know what kind it is?”

A shake of the head.

“It’s a Mercedes sports car. They can go really fast.”

A vigorous nod. “Is that colour called silver?”

“It is. Where did you get it?”

“It was on the table.”

“What do you mean, on the table? In a box or something?”

Adam shot off and returned with a little Matchbox box and handed it over.

“I see,” Tom said, examining the box. It had been considerably squashed. “That’s very neat. Where did it come from?”

“It came with the letters.”

“Someone sent it to you? That’s nice of them. Do you know who it was?”

A shake of the head.

“Do you have the paper it was wrapped in?”

Adam shot off again and returned with a jumble of brown paper.

“Right,” Tom said, smoothing out the paper on his knee and fitting pieces together. “Somewhere here there should be a return address … look at the stamps, they’re different—well hey! Whaddya know—it’s from Meg. Do you remember Meg? I guess you wouldn’t; she left a long time ago. She’s your big sister. She lives in England.”