By the Time You Read This by Giles Blunt Read Free Book Online Page B

A N incalculable number of light years from the warmth of the sun. When the rain falls, it falls in droplets of grief, and when the light shines, it is in waves and particles of grief. From whatever direction the wind blows—south, east, north or west—it blows cinders of grief before it. Grief stings your eyes and sucks the breath from your lungs. No oxygen on this planet, no nitrogen; the atmosphere is composed entirely of grief.
    Grief came at Cardinal not just from the myriad objects that had been Catherine’s: photographs, CDs, books, clothes, refrigerator magnets, the furniture she had chosen, the walls she had painted, the plants she had tended. Grief squeezed its way through the seams of the house, under the doors and around the windows.
    He couldn’t sleep. The note repeated itself over and over in his head. He got up from his bed and studied it under the bright lights of the kitchen. Kelly had thrown out the envelope, but he retrieved it from the trash. The type was clearly the work of a computer printer, but there was nothing distinctive about it—at least, nothing he could detect with the naked eye.
    Nor was there anything remarkable about the card itself. A Hallmark sympathy card and envelope were available at any drug or stationery store across the country.
    The postmark showed the date and time—that would be the date and time it was processed, of course, not the date and time of mailing—and the postal code. That code, Cardinal knew, did not indicate the exact location of mailing, but the location of the processing plant where the card was handled. The postal code was followed by a three-digit number for the individual machine. Cardinal recognized the postmark as Mattawa’s. He knew a few people who lived there, acquaintances who could have no possible reason to hurt him. Of course, Mattawa was prime cottage country, lots of people went there from all over Ontario for weekends by the river. But it was well into October, and most people had closed their cottages for the winter.
    Of course, if you wanted to disguise your true whereabouts, there was nothing to stop you driving to Mattawa and mailing a card from there; it was right on Highway 17, little more than half an hour from Algonquin Bay.

    Lise Delorme was surprised to see him. It was Sunday, and he had caught her in the middle of washing her windows. She was wearing jeans with huge rips at the knees and a paint-stained gingham shirt that looked at least twenty years old. Her house, a bungalow at the top of Rayne Street, smelled of vinegar and newsprint.
    “I’ve been meaning to wash them since August,” she said, as if he had asked, “and only just got around to it.”
    She made coffee. “Decaf for you,” she said. “Obviously you haven’t been sleeping.”
    “That’s true, but there’s a reason. I mean another reason.”
    Delorme brought the coffee and a plate of chocolate chip cookies into the living room.
    “Why don’t you ask your doctor for some Valium?” she said. “There’s no point making things worse with lack of sleep.”
    “Tell me what you think of this.” He pulled the card and envelope out of a manila folder and placed them on the coffee table. They were in a clear plastic sleeve now, the card open, the envelope address-side up.
    Delorme raised an eyebrow. “Work? How can you be bringing me work? I thought you were off for a week or two. Hell, if I were you, I’d be gone for months.”
    “Just take a look.”
    Delorme leaned over the coffee table. “Somebody sent you this?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Oh, John. I’m so sorry. It’s so sick.”
    “I’d like to know who sent it. I thought you could give me your first impressions.”
    Delorme looked at the card. “Well, whoever it is went to the trouble of printing out this two-line message instead of writing it by hand. That tells me it’s someone who thinks you might recognize their handwriting—or at least be able to match it up.”
    “Any candidates spring to