She sensed it and took his hand. ‘Come on in and say hi to everyone. They won’t bite.’ She opened the door and led him up a dark hallway and into a much brighter family room with large windows opening on to the garden. He felt the atmosphere as soon as he entered it. His niece and nephew were playing a computer game on the television. His brother-in-law was sitting in a leather sofa pretending to read the newspaper. They all looked over as he came in. ‘Luc, come and say hello to your uncle.’
Luc was around fifteen, with a shock of blonde hair gelled back from his forehead. He crossed the room obediently and gave Sime a solemn handshake. There was just the faintest curiosity in eyes that were reluctant to meet his. ‘You were just about so high last time I saw you,’ Sime said, without any real idea of what else to say.
His sister had trotted along behind him. A gawky girl with braces who gazed at him with unglazed interest.
Annie said, ‘Magali couldn’t have been much more than a baby.’
Magali presented each cheek and Sime stooped to kiss her awkwardly. Then both teenagers headed back to their game while their father put his paper aside and stood up. He approached Sime with his hand outstretched, but his smile was cold.
‘Gilles.’ Sime nodded and shook his hand.
Gilles said, ‘Nice to see you after all this time. Not sure I’d have recognised you if I passed you in the street.’
Sime felt the sting of the rebuke, and Annie said quickly, ‘He’s not been well, Gilles.’ And the warning in her tone was clear.
It was dark by the time they all sat around the table for their evening meal. The first time Sime had sat down for a family dinner since the death of his parents.
Annie prattled on to fill the awkward silences, bringing Sime up to date on everyone and everything. Luc excelled at sports and was a budding star of the school basketball team. The boy blushed. While Magali, on the other hand, was top of her class at school and wanted to be a doctor. Magali continued to gaze at him with her unselfconscious curiosity. Gilles was now principal of the Bury secondary school, and was even flirting with the idea of standing for political office.
Sime was surprised. ‘What party?’ he asked.
‘Parti Québécois,’ Gilles said. Which was the Quebec nationalist party. Sime nodded. He had never been convinced by the idea of an independent state outwith the Canadian federation. But he didn’t say so.
Suddenly Magali said, ‘How come you never visit?’
An uncomfortable silence fell around the table. It had clearly been a topic of conversation among the family before his arrival, and he felt eyes turning towards him.
He laid down his knife and fork and wanted to be honest. ‘Because I’ve been pretty selfish and self-obsessed, Magali. And I’d forgotten what a wonderful person your mother really is.’ He couldn’t bring himself to look at his sister. ‘But I hope to be a regular visitor from now on, and maybe we can all get to know one another a bit better.’ He caught Magali’s eye. ‘And if you’re really interested in medicine, I can take you on a tour of the pathology labs at the Sûreté in Montreal sometime.’
Her eyes opened wide. ‘Really?’
He smiled. ‘No problem.’
Her mouth fell open now. ‘I’d love that.’
‘Do you carry a gun?’ It was the first time that Luc had spoken since his arrival.
‘Usually, yes,’ Sime said. ‘Not right now, though. ’Cos I’m sort of on sick leave.’
‘What kind of gun?’
‘Well a patrolman would carry a Glock 17. But detectives like me carry the Glock 26.’
‘How many rounds?’
‘Thirteen. You interested in guns, Luc?’
‘You bet.’
He shrugged. ‘Then maybe I can take you to the police shooting range one day and you can have a shot at firing one yourself.’
‘No shit?’
‘Luc!’ his father reprimanded him.
‘Sorry,’ the boy said. But he wasn’t. ‘That would be brilliant.’
Sime glanced at Annie and saw the pleasure in her smile. He knew she didn’t approve of guns, but anything that made connections and brought the family together had to be good.
He spent the rest of the meal fielding questions about cases he had worked on, murders that they had read about in the papers or seen on TV. From the family pariah he had suddenly become exotic and interesting, at least as far as the kids were concerned. Gilles was more reserved. But just before Annie took him upstairs to show him his room, Gilles solemnly shook his hand and said, ‘It’s good to have you here, Sime.’
IV
Sime’s room was up in the roof, with a dormer window looking out over the garden below. Annie switched on a bedside light and laid out the diaries on the bed in chronological order. He watched her with both apprehension and anticipation. He couldn’t wait to read them, but at the same time feared that perhaps they would not provide the illumination he sought. About the ring that had first sparked his dreams, and its possible connections to a woman charged with murder on Entry Island.
Annie lifted the final diary and turned towards him. ‘After you phoned,’ she said, ‘I dug these out and spent most of the next two days reading them. I can’t tell you what memories they brought back. I could almost smell Granny’s house as I read. And I could hear that distinctive little creak she used to have in her voice when she was reading.’ She paused. ‘You know she didn’t read us everything?’
He nodded. ‘I knew there was stuff our folks didn’t want us to hear. I can’t imagine what, though.’
‘You’ll figure it out when you read for yourself,’ Annie said. ‘But you mentioned the ring when you phoned, and that’s what I focused on.’ She searched his face with dark green, puzzled eyes, then opened up the diary that she held in her hands and searched through it for a page she had marked with a Post-it. ‘His entries became more and more infrequent before he stopped altogether. But you should read first from here, Sime. Granny never read us any of this. If she had I’m sure you’d have remembered the significance of the ring.’ She handed him the diary. ‘When you’ve read to the end, you can go back and follow the trail from the beginning. I think you’ll know where to look.’
She reached up and kissed him softly on the cheek.
‘I hope you’ll find resolution here.’
When she had gone, Sime stood for a while listening to the silence of the room around him. Somewhere outside he heard the hoot of a distant owl. The diary seemed to grow heavier as he stood there with it in his hands, before eventually he pulled up the chair at a small writing desk below the dormer.
He sat down and turned on the reading light. Then carefully opened the diary at the page she had marked and began to read.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I have floored the beams now in the pitch of my cabin roof to make an attic. I have built a spare room and indoor toilet at the back, and a covered porch with fly screens at the front. I often sit on the porch at the end of the day and watch the sun set over the trees, and I dream about how things might have been had I not been separated from Ciorstaidh on the quay at Glasgow that fateful day.
I have cleared and ploughed most of my land, and grow enough to feed myself with some left over to sell. At certain times of the year, myself and a few of the other men from Gould walk across the border to earn a bit of cash on the bigger farms at Vermont in the United States. At others I am busy enough on my own land. Especially at harvest time when I have to rush to bring in the crops before the first frosts, which can come as early as September.