He found Annie’s number in the contacts list of his cellphone and with a great effort of will tapped autodial. He raised the phone to his ear with trepidation. After several rings it was answered by a boy whose voice sounded as if it might be breaking. ‘Yeah?’
‘Hi. Is your mother there?’
‘Who’s calling?’ He seemed bored. Or disappointed. Perhaps he’d been waiting for a call himself.
Sime hesitated. ‘It’s your Uncle Simon.’
There was a long silence at the other end of the line that was difficult to interpret. Then the boy said, ‘I’ll get her.’
He could hear voices distantly in the background. Then more silence. And Sime could actually feel his heart pulsing in his throat. Suddenly his sister’s voice. ‘Sime?’
‘Hey, sis.’ He dreaded her response.
But he should have known better. She had never been one to bear grudges. Beyond her surprise, he heard the delight in her voice. ‘Oh, my God, little brother! How the hell are you?’
And he told her. Without preamble. The plain, unvarnished truth. His break-up with Marie-Ange, his insomnia. And while he could feel the shock in her silence as she listened, the simple act of sharing everything he had bottled up for so long came as an enormous release.
‘Poor Sime,’ she said, and meant it, echoing his own thought of poor Annie, just a few minutes earlier. ‘Why don’t you come home. Stay with us for a while.’
Home seemed like an odd word for her to use. The little military town of Bury, in the Eastern Townships south-east of Montreal, was where she still lived. It hadn’t been home to Sime in years. But home had a good sound to it, full of comfort.
‘I can’t right now. I’m on the Madeleine Islands, a murder investigation.’ He hesitated. The moment he asked, she’d know there had been an ulterior motive for him calling. ‘Annie, remember those diaries? The ones that Granny used to read from when we were kids.’
If she was disappointed there was no hint of it in her voice. Just surprise. ‘Well, yes, of course. Why?’
‘Do you still have them?’
‘Somewhere, yes. I’ve still got everything here that we took from Mum and Dad’s. And from Granny’s. I keep meaning to sort through it all some day, but we put everything in the attic above the garage. And, you know, out of sight …’
‘I’d like to read them again, sis.’ He could tell that she was containing her curiosity with difficulty.
‘Of course. Any time you like.’
‘I’ll come down as soon as we’re finished here on the Madeleines.’
‘That would be great, Sime. It’ll be lovely to see you.’ And then she couldn’t help herself. ‘What’s the sudden interest in the diaries?’
‘It’s complicated,’ he said. ‘I’ll explain when I get there.’ Then, ‘Annie … you know the signet ring I inherited from Dad?’
‘Yes. Some kind of red, semi-precious stone, wasn’t it? Engraved with a family crest. Not ours, though. It was an arm and sword or something.’
‘That’s right. Do you know anything about its history?’
She laughed. ‘Am I really going to have to wait till you get here to find out what this is all about?’
‘Sorry, sis, there just isn’t time for me to go into it right now.’
‘Well, it got passed down through the male line,’ she said. ‘Came originally from our great-great-great-grandfather, I think. The one who wrote the diaries. The one you were named after. In fact, I’m sure there’s something about the ring in the diaries themselves. Can’t remember what, though.’
‘Do you remember how or where he got it?’
‘I think it was given to him by his wife.’
Sime was deflated. If that was true he couldn’t imagine what possible connection it could have with Kirsty Cowell. ‘He met his wife here in Canada, didn’t he?’
‘That’s right. She was a serving girl or something in Quebec City.’
A dead end.
When he didn’t speak for a long time, Annie said, ‘Sime? Are you still there?’
‘Yes, I’m still here.’
He heard her hesitation. ‘It was the tenth anniversary last week, Sime.’
He was momentarily confused. ‘Of what?’
‘Mum and Dad’s accident.’
His guilt returned. He had barely even thought about his parents in all the years since the accident. Of course, he remembered, it had been at this time of year. An autumn deluge which had swollen the River Salmon, washing away the bridge and the cars that were on it at the time. Ironically, it was only their parents who had lost their lives in the accident.
Annie said, ‘Someone put flowers on their grave. I visit them often. And I thought it was lovely that someone else had remembered. No idea who, though.’
Sime said, ‘Annie, I have to go. I’ll call you when I get home, okay?’
He hung up and closed his eyes. There was so much in his life he had simply learned to shut out. Like the death of his parents. He’d always thought there would be time to tell them that he loved them, even if he’d never been quite sure that he did. And then death had stepped in and left him feeling all alone in the world for the very first time.
His ancestor’s pain at the loss of his father came flooding back in a surge of childhood memories. It had been a cold winter’s night, sometime just after New Year, that their granny had read the account of it to them. Right after dinner, and he and Annie had sat by her feet at the fire while she read. The story had given him nightmares later that night. And he couldn’t imagine then what it would feel like to lose a parent. Never mind both of them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Even although there was still plenty of light in the sky, it was as dark as a winter’s night in the blackhouse. And there was conspiracy in all the faces huddled around the flicker of the peat fire.
I sat among the men listening, but saying nothing.
I still have a clear recollection of the potato crop first failing the previous year. Green, healthy leaves on the lazy beds that turned black and slimy almost overnight. And I remember being sent to the potato store in our barn, pulling aside the tarpaulin to be greeted by a smell like death that rose from the rotting tubers we had so carefully nurtured and harvested twelve months before.
Disaster!
Without the potato there was no way to survive. It was the ever-present at every meal. Our meagre harvest of oats and barley served only to supplement a diet that was totally dependent upon the humble spud. And yet some invisible malady had robbed us of the gift of life that it gave us. A disease visited on us by God. For our sins, as the minister would have it.
There must have been a dozen men or more sitting around the embers of the peat, almost lost in the fug of smoke that hung heavy in the air of the fire room. But I could see the hunger in their sunken cheeks. I had watched strong men grow weak, as I had, and stout men grow thin. I had seen my mother and my sisters wasting away, reduced to scouring the shore for shellfish. Limpets and clams. Food for old women without teeth. They collected nettles for soup, and silver leaf from among the grasses. The roots, when dried and ground, made a kind of flour. But it was a poor substitute for proper grain and we could barely gather enough to sustain us.
The fishermen no longer dried their white fish on the rocks in case we stole them, and we had no boats of our own to take fish from the sea for ourselves.
As always my father led the discussion, old blind Calum squatting at his side, listening intently from within his world of darkness, his head so shrunken now that his Glengarry seemed almost to drown him.
I heard the fettered fury in my father’s voice. ‘Guthrie hands out grain rations from the Poor Board then charges it against our rents. Earns a name for himself as a man of generosity, while creating the excuse for throwing us off our land. Rents beyond our means, debts we can never repay. And while we’re starving, he and his cronies hunt deer and take salmon from the river and eat like kings.’