City of Ice (7 page)

The process was accepted until history intervened. Famine besieged the Lake District in England, prompting massive emigration to Montreal. Under pressure to provide for the arriving and starving English, the Church offered land in Quebec it didn’t want, or where it had not as yet created a parish. Granting the English farmland created a problem for the Church, for it had no means of distributing property among
les autres
—the others, the Protestants, the English. So the bishops contracted with the Sun Life Assurance Company to do the job. English farmers, then, had to approach Sun Life on bended knee to beg land, just as the French bowed at mass on Sundays.

“For the early homesteaders,” Cinq-Mars explained to Sandra, “Sun Life became the equivalent of the Catholic Church. The French put their faith in redemption after a life of devotion, the English in redeeming policies after a life of premiums. It’s one of the ways the French and the English remained culturally separated, even though our history in this place is merely different sides of the same coin.”

Both the Church and Sun Life would be left behind by the times. Politics became the new religion of the
province, politicians its new saints and bishops. Parish churches emptied, the power of the priests was stripped away. The new political might of the French proved too much for the scions of Sun Life, who chose to flee, packing their head office into trucks in the middle of the night and scurrying three hundred and fifty miles down the highway to Toronto.

“It leaves you out of the loop,” Sandra suggested to her husband.

“How do you mean?”

“You’re a religious man, but your church is becoming a shell. You love your city, but it’s not as prosperous as it used to be. Politically, Montreal’s ripping apart at the seams. How do you feel about all that?”

Cinq-Mars swallowed the last of his coffee and mashed his styrofoam cup in his hand. “Like everyone else, I wait, watch, and worry,” he said gravely. “I study the situation. Change is always difficult. Political uncertainty chases away industry. So many people out of work, so much lost opportunity. Which makes my business more hectic than it should be.” Getting cold, Cinq-Mars turned his face away from the wind and exhaled a giant billow of air. “Trouble is, change becomes a religion to some. Was it really necessary to categorically ban English on signs? Shops, okay, that’s only natural, but tourists die on the highways because they can’t comprehend our signs. The people who believe in that should clean up the blood and guts. They should be the ones to tell the victims’ families.” Cinq-Mars sighed and banged his boots together to chase off a chill.

“But for me, there’s something else.” He glanced at a homeless woman lugging her bag of belongings across the park like a weary Santa Claus with his sack of toys. Where was she going in such a determined fashion? Out of the cold, perhaps, or to a free Christmas meal? The image of her reminded Cinq-Mars
that Santa Claus had been murdered, and that he was pursuing his killers. “What scares me most around here, what worries me about political upheaval, is those seams you were mentioning, the ones that are being ripped apart. When the political, the economic,
and
the social structures of a city crack, criminals take up residence along the fault lines. They entrench. They dig their way into the dirt, they become part of the new foundation. That’s an aspect of political instability nobody talks about. We can’t contain the biker gangs now. Imagine if our resources were depleted or distracted by secession, and suddenly you have thousands of people leaving, and others arguing to divide Quebec land among the English and the French. If more business leaves and people go hungry, if the currency fails, if we have riots—scary in itself, but nobody, nobody is thinking about what that will do for organized crime. Except, maybe, the bikers.”

They were waiting for a taxi to pass so they could cross the street back to their car. “Do you really think that bikers talk politics, Émile?”

Cinq-Mars regarded her in a thoughtful manner. When they’d first met they had enjoyed discussing American politics. The situation in Quebec was another subject, so embedded was it for Cinq-Mars with fret. Perhaps, though, now that she was living here, discussion of the local situation ought to become part of their daily lives, as it was with most families. “I know they do,” he told her.

He spoke in a particularly gentle voice. Sandra nodded. She understood. Like the buildings at her back, the Sun Life and Mary Queen of the World, the import of his words lay beyond their apparent architecture.

Julia Murdick went home for Christmas.

As she had explained to Selwyn Norris, she was not going
home
home but to the farm her family used as a
retreat. They were gathering for the holidays—her mother, her father, her father’s new wife, and her mother’s latest boyfriend—and she was expecting the usual wretched quagmire.

Buses took her beyond Ottawa, a two-and-a-half-hour trip, where she disembarked on a barren highway surrounded by open fields. Frigid winds stung her cheeks and, going right through her wool coat, made her shiver. She waited for her dad, getting madder by the second. If her father ever showed up she’d brain him. Just then, Julia spotted his car descending a hill on the secondary road and waved as he passed to access the highway ramp. Given that the bus had arrived early, he was not terribly late. Never mind. She would impress upon him that unless he planned to buy her a very expensive, much warmer coat he’d better never be late for a wintertime pickup again. He ought to show up at least an hour ahead of schedule.
If
he loved her,
he
should have been waiting for
her.
And yet, when his car sidled up to her and he smiled broadly, Julia was simply glad to see him. She’d been away from home for so long and away from her father for longer still.

Inside they kissed cheeks and she slammed the door shut. “Good thing I’m a student,” she barked.

Her father ceded to the trap. “Why’s that?” His name was Ron Murdick, and he owned several restaurants in the Ottawa area. A good-looking man of forty-five, rotund, with a carefree disposition, he’d gained a shock of white hair when he’d been in his twenties. Ron Murdick was always a sucker for her gibes.

“I’m financially dependent on my parents. Otherwise”—she made a twisting motion with one hand—“a shiv through the heart.”

“I’m not late.”

“You’re not early.”

“You’re hard to please,” he lamented.

“I’m frozen stiff! Another minute, I’d be a goner.”

“I came as soon as I could get away.”

Julia laughed. “Like I’m going to believe that!”

Enjoying being ribbed by her again, her father laughed lightly also. “It’s the truth,” he said. “You don’t have to believe me.”

“I know better.”

They drove into the broad and rolling countryside, past snowbound fields and copses, through small villages that served the agricultural communities around them, the old stone homes of the early settlers still prominent, and they carried on toward what they referred to as the family farm, although no plow had tilled the soil in twenty years and title had never wholly resided in family hands.

Through most of her childhood and adolescence, Julia had journeyed to the farm from Toronto for her summer and winter holidays. Along with eight others, including her father, her mother had bought the property in the early seventies, before Julia was born. The group had scraped cash together and made the purchase for a pittance, inspired by talk of forming a commune to live off the land.

“Now that’s a scary thought,” Julia had scoffed one time. “You guys living off the land. Yeah, right. Like maybe for a weekend.”

She had reason to be cynical. Rather than being a retreat for an alternative lifestyle, the hippie commune had become a mark of affluence. Swank summer cottages replaced the pottery and weaving studios, and the original barn had been bulldozed to make room for a four-season house. Fields had gone to seed. Beehives envisioned next to a wildflower meadow had given way to a three-car garage. Space for the stables had been appropriated for a pool.

The henhouse, the pig sty, the milking barn, the lambs’ pens and rabbit warrens had slowly collapsed
over time, never knowing a welcomed tenant. The vegetable garden—worked for a few years—had been paved for parking, and the original farmhouse where Julia and her family stayed now offered, after three additions, ten bedrooms and four bathrooms to accommodate the expanding and multiplying families.

Where four couples had originally been involved, now there were nine, divorce having been the catalyst for growth.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Margaret commented as Julia entered the house through the kitchen door. “Nice of you to drop by for a visit.”

Julia beamed at her stepmother. Luckily, she could give as well as receive. “Is Mummy here?” she asked, promptly putting her father’s wife in her place.

Margaret Murdick smiled back. “There’s another one who thinks Christmas is just another inconvenient smudge in her appointment book. No, Julia, your mother is not here yet. Who knows if she’ll make it? She might be throwing a Christmas brunch for diplomats. Maybe she’s doing her nails. Perhaps she was on her way but met a new man in some roadside diner.”

“She’s busy,” Julia reminded her. “Doing well, I hear.”

Her stepmother—annoyingly thin to Julia’s mind, but at least she had mousy hair that never set properly—hung tough. “Being an indentured slave to the government, dear, is not working. Think of it as an extended vacation with pay.”

“What about you?” Julia shot back. “Found a job yet? Or are you still looking?”

Her stepmom grinned so brightly that Julia worried she might be defeated in her foray, but the smile proved to be another ruse. “There’s a good job out there with my name on it, sweetheart. My spirits are high, my disposition sunny. I’m thinking positively. Someone will snap me up.”

“I hope it’s an orgasmic experience for you,” Julia muttered as she moved through to the large living room before Margaret could respond. She slipped her backpack off her shoulders.

“I heard that, young lady!” The piercing voice from the kitchen trailed after her. “That’s not the sort of language we tolerate in this house. Carting yourself off to a university does not give you the right to be vulgar.”

“Orgasmic is a word, Margaret. It’s look-up-able.”

“A word like that you can find in places other than a dictionary—and I know what sorts of places!”

“Oh, lay off.” She ascended the stairs. “It’s Christmas Day. I don’t want to kill you on Christmas Day. Somebody already butchered that poor sod Santa Claus last night, did you hear? That’s enough violence for a while.”

Margaret stood at the foot of the stairs, gazing upward, where Julia had vanished. “I told you this would happen,” she said to no one in particular.

Julia lay down for a few minutes in the quiet of her room.
This is going to be nuts. Wait’ll the gang’s all here. This’ll be hell.
She had deliberately delayed arriving until the last possible moment, and she didn’t intend to stay long. She felt weary and utterly alone, less resilient, less formidable than expected. Funnily, she was missing Selwyn Norris, missing his attentions, she even missed battling his intellect.
This’ll be the worst visit ever.
Somehow she had to suppress her anger, make it through until her real mother arrived. After that, with any luck, she might scrape by.

Julia had to hope that her mother showed up soon. Hope as well that she wasn’t in one of her crankier moods.

Merry Christmas
, she told herself.
Welcome home, Julia kitten.

Sandra Lowndes hung back as she and her husband entered the small apartment where Santa Claus had swung from a coatrack. Émile Cinq-Mars moved about the rooms in stages, observing, concentrating. She wondered if he detected the cries of the victim, or picked up an echo of the killer’s words. Could he identify criminals through intuitive revelation? Émile was eighteen years her senior, and at times she felt his age, the gap apparent in his weariness at the end of the day when an evening’s whiskey caused him to slur his words. Often he fell asleep in his armchair after dinner. They had met around horses, where his concentration in the midst of a negotiation was fearsome. He could detail an animal’s attributes and short-comings in rapid-fire succession and take command of any deal by virtue of his superior knowledge. She had been impressed. Here, in the room where the frightful crime had occurred, she saw again the knitted brow, the eyes moving over the objects of their interest while the head remained perfectly still, the occasional gentle tapping of a middle finger upon the hard bone behind his ear to indicate that notions were alight, in the air.

She watched him crouch before a blank wall, stand on tiptoe and peer at the dust on top of the refrigerator. He seemed scarcely to be breathing. He spent considerable time in the common living and sleeping room, less time in the kitchen, no time at all in the bathroom. He seemed more interested in blank spaces than in the cabinet where the boy had hung, or in the plain dark pine table centered in the apartment. He did stand upon the table once, observing both the top of the cabinet and the room’s central light fixture.

“All right,” he said finally. “Let’s go.”

“Émile?” She leaned a shoulder against the wall next to the entry door, where she had remained throughout. “Tell me what you see,” she requested quietly. “Please.” Her husband was a reserved, reticent
man. In the heady days of romance spontaneity had never been a problem, but marriage had proven the less successful sojourn. Daily she felt him becoming more removed from her, his secretive nature taking up residence between them as a third and somewhat hostile entity.

Cinq-Mars gazed back into the room. He considered his thoughts, as though uttering them aloud might diminish their import, or tarnish his ideas in such a way that they’d lose their impetus.

“The furniture was removed from this room,” he pointed out, “and only the fridge and stove are left in the kitchen. You can see by the shadows where light faded the floor in some places and not others. The bed was here. Over there, a dresser. The way this small rectangular shape turns toward the large one suggests a television aimed at a sofa. No cable. Here, these small shapes? Bricks, placed in a row to support bookshelves. Someone removed every stick of furniture, except the closet and the table, which they probably needed to remain behind.”