None So Blind (28 page)

Marilyn pressed her eyes shut. “Julia thought I was out. She used the butcher knife, and if I hadn’t walked in …”

“You saved Laura’s life, at great risk to your own.”

She shrugged off the comment. “I had to. I had smelled the gasoline on her clothes the day before too. When the fire chief told me it was arson, I realized Julia had set the fire. She knows no limits when she wants something, but I thought she just wanted the money.” She broke off, trembling and overcome.

Outside in the hall, soft-shoed staff bustled to and fro amid the chatter of the hospital PA system, but inside the room a hush descended. Green waited her out. He reached over to squeeze her hand but she jerked it away.

“I knew she’d burned my house down, and still I made excuses for her.”

“You took the blame for her.”

She nodded. “I’d already lost one daughter. So I protected the only one I had left — my damaged, frightened, hurting child. Until the body was discovered. I knew right away it was Gordon, because he was still in the house when I left to meet Laura. But I thought, maybe Julia didn’t know he was there. Maybe it was an accident. Still making excuses! But when I rushed back to Laura’s house, I found Laura with her throat slit …”

She rocked herself, cradling her bandaged side as if to keep the pain contained. Gradually her breathing slowed and her eyes grew bleak. “I suppose you need to know what happened.”

“Not me. In due course Detective Gibbs will take your statement, when you’re stronger and have a chance to consult a lawyer.”

“None of that matters. There is nothing left for me but to tell the story, for all those victims who no longer have a voice. For Lucas, whom I doubted when I shouldn’t have.” Her voice thickened. “Julia took those photos, not Luke. She’d been taking nude photos of Gordon and Jackie for years, a sick little hobby she kept secret from us all. She told me all about it when she found me up at the old stone ruins. She said she had lots of hiding places in the basement and she burned the house down when Gordon found some of the evidence and she had to kill him. I … I think Gordon knew something. Or suspected. I heard him asking her where she was staying the night Rosten died. But even he could hardly believe … until it was too late.”

Earlier, MacPhail had confirmed what Marilyn already knew — that it was Gordon whose body was in the basement, dead before the fire even started. Green’s thoughts raced ahead, past her endless loop of self-recrimination, past Gordon’s death. Dreading the answer, he asked the question nonetheless. “Did Julia have the gun, Marilyn?”

At first, it was as if she hadn’t heard him. “She had to brag, Julia always had to brag, even when it got her into trouble. She didn’t know I’d taken the gun before I ran from the house. She had the butcher knife and I was bleeding and older and smaller. I told her Gordon had died in the fire and asked her if she knew he was there. I was still hoping it was an accident — I guess it was my last little bit of blindness. She said, ‘Oh damn, didn’t he burn to a crisp?’ That’s when the last bit of veil fell away. Her tone, her contempt — it was like the monster had finally dropped her act. I realized —”

Her voice broke. She gasped for air. “I realized, oh dear God, it was Julia all along! I asked how could she let that poor professor take the blame? And she turned all soft. ‘It all just got away from me, Mummy. You know me and my temper. Jackie and I were out at Morris Island, working on her project, and she started talking about how this professor had offered to tutor her and how his cottage was right near here. I don’t know what happened, I just saw red. Everyone always loves Jackie. Erik, this professor, Luke, you. I just flipped out, and next thing I knew, Jackie was dead. I got scared and I tried to cover it up, but I just got myself in deeper and deeper.’”

Green listened without interruption, but he was checking off the inconsistencies in Julia’s account. The note Rosten’s wife had found, purportedly from Jackie, arranging to meet him at the cottage, which ensured he would be near the scene. The exam paper with its damning invitation, which had been found in her backpack. Lucas’s belt. And most of all, Julia’s triumphant admission to Rosten, which clearly showed how she planned it all.

“Did you believe her?”

“Not a word. Julia lies as easily and convincingly as she breathes. I do believe she was jealous of Jackie, especially over Erik, but even over Luke and me. Everyone did love Jackie. She was lovable. Julia was not. It made me feel so guilty. What mother doesn’t love her own child? But as for the rest of her tale — the blackout, being scared, the plea for my understanding — that’s all self-serving fabrication.”

Green nodded. Waited.

Marilyn sucked in more air. “I’m sure she thought her act would work as it always had, but I’d reached the end. I had created a monster, and it had cost me everything I love in this world. My children, my husband, my house. My whole reason for being! I got to my feet and I started walking toward her. “‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. I pointed the gun at her and said, ‘We’re going to the police.’ She laughed, ‘You won’t pull the trigger. I’m your daughter.’ ‘You killed my daughter,’ I said, ‘and my son.’ ‘What are you going to do,’ she asked, ‘take me to your pet inspector?’ “‘No,’ I said.

“And I pulled the trigger.”

The sentence hung in the silence, deafening. With it hung two unspoken questions.
Did she come at you? Did you fear for your life?
This time he did not dare ask either.

Green returned home from the hospital to find Sullivan waiting, full of purpose and armed with a wheelchair, grab bars, and commode from the Canada Care Medical supply store, as well as a gallon of bright yellow paint. By dinnertime, the little add-on sunroom had been transformed from home-office-cum-junk-room into a cheery bedroom, just in time for his father’s arrival.

He knew he was running out of time, because his father was still refusing to eat, but he was hoping the noisy affection of his family and the cheerful view of the garden would give him renewed hope. Unlike Marilyn, a reason to go on.

The struggle to get his father into the house and settled into bed took every spark of Green’s depleted energy. Sid had turned down dinner, but Sharon tried to assuage Green’s fears with murmured reassurance about the disruption to his routine and his need for time to adjust.

What routine? Green wanted to shout. The routine where he’s on his way to dying? But he nodded emptily and clung to the one bright moment of the evening. Sid, after snapping at everyone who came near enough, smiled when the dog came into the room and stole a piece of cheese off his plate. Like many Holocaust survivors, his father was afraid of dogs, but here, in his son’s house, surrounded by the love of family, would it be Modo who lured him back from the brink?

Throughout the evening, Hannah was uncharacteristically subdued. She had phoned in sick to work, ostensibly to help settle her grandfather into the house, but afterwards, she had retreated to her room and the cocoon of her music. At midnight, long after the rest of the household had gone to bed and Green was sitting alone in the living room nursing a Scotch and trying to unwind, she appeared in the doorway.

She hovered there, as if uncertain whether she wanted to commit.

He forced a smile. “Going to bed, honey?”

“I don’t understand how she could do it.”

Green shut his eyes. He was exhausted, in no mood to discuss the psychology of evil. “We’re not meant to understand, honey.”

“How do you do it, Dad? How do you deal with these awful, twisted people and investigate all the terrible things they do to each other, and keep your sanity? How do you not slit your own throat?”

He opened his eyes again, recognizing the doubt and fear in her question. Hannah was studying criminology with the hopes of becoming a police officer herself, but she was now questioning the emotional cost.

“Come here,” he said, patting the sofa beside him. She entered the room but perched on the armchair nearest the door. “You build walls,” he said. “Between your job and your home. Between your eight-hour shift and the rest of your life. You surround yourself with things that make you healthy and happy. A family, good friends, a proper home you can feel good in, and a hobby that frees your mind and lets you blow off steam.”

“You don’t have a hobby.”

He gave her a wan smile. “I don’t always follow my own advice. But watching Tony play soccer, taking Aviva down a slide, sharing music with you …”

She shot him a glance. “Even Avenged Sevenfold?”

A lump formed in his throat. He paused, unsure how much sentiment they could both handle. “Even Avenged Sevenfold.”

She fell silent but he could see her thinking. Wrestling with something more.

“Most people, even the ones we deal with, have heart,” he said. “They’re just desperate or angry or foolish. Hurt, lonely, bitter, screwed over by life … you can usually see a reason. That’s another way I cope. Never lose sight of their humanity.”

“But how could she kill her own sister? Her own brother? I get the jealousy and the temper; I know what that’s like. But I was looking at Aviva and Tony tonight and no matter how mad I might get … how does she just snuff them out? Deliberately?”

“Because she’s not like us, honey. She doesn’t feel. She doesn’t love.”

“My head gets that. But my heart … how could she feel nothing? Even a dog gets upset when someone is in pain.”

“Most of us, even dogs, are hard-wired to mirror feelings. We laugh when others do; we feel fear and sadness when we see it in others. Psychopaths seem to be missing that hard-wiring. They only learn to play-act.”

“You think she was a psychopath?”

It was the question he’d been pondering all evening. “I knew she was manipulative and often deceitful. I knew she played people to get what she wanted. But I looked into her eyes a hundred times during the past twenty years and never saw the fundamental sham. The fake neediness that wormed through my defences, the play-acting at grief and sympathy. I never saw the emptiness. It’s scary to think there is nothing inside there that we can touch or understand. No common human bond. Nothing that stops them from using us. Some people call that evil, but pure psychopathy is actually a tragedy.”

“Yeah. For everyone else!”

He nodded. “That too. But the flaw is probably mostly in their genes, a missing humanity if you like, that keeps them from feeling and linking with others. Reminding myself of that, even when I feel like ripping their head off, helps me to cope as well.”

She scowled. “But we still have to hold them accountable. We can’t use this so-called missing humanity to excuse them.”

“That’s the difference between law and psychology. Between my job and Sharon’s. We don’t need to take sides. Both are important, both play their part in making society fair.” He rose to pull her to her feet and hugged her close. “If it’s what you decide, you’ll make a great cop. But you’ve got years to think about it.”

He watched her climb the stairs to bed, her steps lighter now, and then he went to pour himself a rare second Scotch. The truth was, the walls were often breached, and he’d never known a cop who didn’t struggle now and then with the depravity they encountered. Many people, even the ostensibly law-abiding, had a touch of the psychopath in them. They conned and swindled and lied for their own gain. They shrugged off the suffering of others, even beat their loved ones without a qualm.

But pure psychopathy was a rare and elusive beast: master of deception and illusion, terrifying in its absence of soul.

It was those shape-shifters living among us as innocent school children, sons and daughters, who are the hardest to recognize. The hardest to trap. Marilyn Carmichael and James Rosten had both paid a terrible price in their attempt to take on the monster. For Marilyn, it meant facing her own guilt and cutting out the poison that was part of her. Rosten had paid with his very life, but that choice had been a deliberate one. He had known he might not survive, but he had already lost his dreams, his health, and his freedom to her. His life was all he had left to barter.

Green sipped his Scotch and thought about his meeting with Neufeld on Monday. Wondered what price he would pay, beyond sleepless nights and haunting self-doubts, for his own part in the destruction the monster had wrought.

T
here
are many stages in the journey of a book from ethereal concept to final product. Along the way, authors are indebted to many who voluntarily contribute expertise, creative input, or critiquing to make it better. At the earliest stage of my research into
None So Blind
, Dan Haley, Executive Director of the Peterborough Community Chaplaincy, shared his invaluable insight, compassion, and experience with prisoners and parolees, and later Don Wadel, Executive Director of the John Howard Society of Ottawa, provided information about procedures in half-way houses. Thank you as well to Ursula Lebana of Spy Tech in Toronto for her expertise in security cameras.

The police have always willingly shared their expertise. I’d like to thank Constable Eric Booth of the Ontario Provincial Police for his knowledge of historical policing, Inspector Don Sweet of the Ottawa Police Service for his expertise in forensics and police pursuits, and especially, as always, my friend Mark Cartwright of the Ottawa Police Service for his ongoing advice, feedback, and support. And thanks to Sheila Minogue-Carver and the Navan Streetwalkers for giving me the perfect location. Any factual inaccuracies in the representation of official procedure or geography, whether accidental or intentional for dramatic purposes, are mine alone.

I am privileged to have a wonderful critiquing group, The Ladies Killing Circle —
five talented writers and lifelong friends who provide not just insightful feedback but also wine, hugs, and laughter as needed. Huge thanks to Joan Boswell, Vicki Cameron, Mary Jane Maffini, Sue Pike, and Linda Wiken.

I am indebted to my publisher, Dundurn Press, for its staunch commitment to Canadian writers and stories and for its continued belief in my work. I’d like to thank Kirk Howard, Beth Bruder, Margaret Bryant, and the whole team from editing to marketing, for their enthusiastic assistance and support. In particular, a special thanks to my editor, Dominic Farrell, and my publicist, Jim Hatch.

A writer’s life is solitary, and without friends and family, it’s possible to go days without human contact beyond the characters in our head. Thanks to my sister, my children, my mother, and my friends, for everything!