Children in the Morning by Anne Emery Read Free Book Online

their mother had hit her head on the bare concrete floor. I have no idea of course whether that is the case or not.”
    “So when you found her, she was lying on her back and her head was on the top rock in the pile.”
    Beau stared at the place on the floor where his wife had died.
    “That’s right.”
    I knew the indentation, the fracture, in her skull matched the edge of the rock.
    “I haven’t seen the rock yet. Can you show me another one of the same type?”
    He walked to a corner of the room and pointed to a pile of half a dozen building stones, each of which was about ten by six by four inches in size. I wouldn’t have wanted to land on one with the back of my head. I turned back to Beau.
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    “Did you move her when you found her?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    He looked at me and didn’t answer. He was not about to say he wanted to preserve the crime scene because, from his point of view, it was not a crime scene. Peggy Delaney had suffered an accidental fall.
    “Did you know she was dead?”
    “Yes.”
    I wondered about his story. What would I do, instinctively, if I found someone I loved lying at the foot of the stairs? Would I be calm and collected enough not to touch the person? Or would I shake her to see if I could wake her? Would I cradle her in my arms?
    Would I be concerned about contaminating a crime scene, if I had no reason to think a crime had been committed?
    I didn’t pursue that line of questioning, but I knew the Crown prosecutor would. Instead, I asked Beau to tell me what happened next.
    “I called for an ambulance. When they saw that she was dead, they called the police and the medical examiner. The police arrived within minutes.”
    “What was their reaction?”
    “If they thought foul play was involved, they didn’t let on to me.
    The medical examiner didn’t come down one way or the other on the question, as you know. Then Sergeant Chuck Morash muscled his way into the case. And the rest is history.”
    “Speaking of history, what’s yours with Sergeant Morash?”
    “Apparently, Chuck has trouble separating the professional from the personal.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning if I give him a rough time on the stand when he appears as a Crown witness in one or another of my cases, he takes it personally. If I discredit the evidence of a police witness, I’m just doing my job. As you are yourself, when you’re defending a case. As Morash is when he’s testifying on behalf of the Crown. I have a good rapport with most of the cops here, or many of them anyway, outside the courtroom. Morash can’t leave his sensitivities behind when he gets down from the stand. That coloured his approach to the investigation of Peggy’s death. Obviously.”
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    “But the Crown accepted his version of events. As did Dr.
    MacLeod.”
    “Right. They had to go pathologist-shopping in order to find someone who would declare it a murder.”
    “We don’t know that. MacLeod might have been the first they asked after the medical examiner.”
    “Well, we’re going to find out, aren’t we? How many experts they shopped this to, before they found one whose opinion accorded with their own. And we’re going to find our own expert, who will take a common-sense view of things and conclude that this was an accident, pure and simple.”
    (Normie)
    We don’t just do music at our school. We also have sports, and a new game started up this year. Father Burke used to play a special kind of football when he was little, over in Ireland. It’s called Gaelic football.
    Kind of like soccer, except you’re allowed to pick up the ball, and the rules are different. They say it’s like rugby, too, but I don’t know what that is. Anyway, there are a lot of people on the team. Fifteen players, so your chances of getting picked must be good. I guess that’s what Father Burke meant when he said