Does Your Mother Know? by Maureen Jennings Read Free Book Online Page A

there.
    As well as what I’ve already said about chaos and order, which was a private reason, I’d joined the police force because Paula’s father was a cop and she wanted to be one too. We went to the academy at the same time. Until a few months ago, I’d had no regrets.
    Sunrise DeLuca had been lying in her crib for two days. The room was freezing, because the windows were wide open and it was January. She was emaciated, wearing only a filthy diaper. She was blue with cold and exhaustion and so weak that I didn’t know initially if she was alive or not. Her mother, Sondra, with an O, age about nineteen, was a crack addict and part-time prostitute, and had supposedly left her child with the next-door neighbour, another crack addict, who denied he knew anything about this assumed responsibility. They had both been there when I arrived on the scene, and it was he who said I had handled Sondra so roughly that she had a heart attack and died. The coroner said it was the crack that killed her. The DeLuca family, one sister and a demented mother, said I did it because I hated Native people.
    I turned my attention to the scenery. The cloud-filled sky seemed vast, and the moor rolled away to gathering hills on my left and slate-grey strips of ocean on my right. The low-growing brush was a sombre taupe colour, with here and there slashes of coal-black soil where the peat had been cut out. Pockets of white wildflowers reminded me of snow patches, but the only flash of colour was the yellow of the wild gorse bushes that were scattered along the edge of the road.
    “What happened to all the trees?” I asked Gillies, anxious to get away from my own thoughts. He seemed to enjoy the role of teacher.
    “According to legend, an early Viking raider named Magnus Barelegs burned most of them down, and they wouldn’t grow again no matter what. Some folks claim the fairies who dwell here underground refused to forgive Magnus. A less romantic interpretation is that the wind is salt-laden and the peat soil too acidic.”
    “Why was he called ‘barelegs’?” I asked. “Were all the others ‘trouser shanks’?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe he was vain about his muscular calves and wanted them to be visible.”
    “Hence the kilt?”
    He just laughed. I had the feeling Gillies was one such possessor of shapely lower legs. He had removed his windbreaker, underneath which he was wearing the official short-sleeved white shirt with shoulder tabs, indicating his rank and number. His forearms could certainly be called muscular. All that knocking around with hockey sticks, I suppose.
    Back to the scenery, which was beautiful but nowhere near as wild as I expected. A two-hour-plus drive from the megalopolis of Toronto and you could be having close encounters of the wild kindwith bears, wolves, and moose. Not to sound superior, but this island was cultivated from stem to stern. However, I also sensed that I was looking at essentially the same landscape that had been there for hundreds of years. We drove on in silence for a while, and I continued to take in gulps of that fresh sea-tinted air. A sign in the two languages — English and Gaelic — thanked us for driving carefully through their village and we passed a gas station which seemed anachronistic at the edge of these moors. Gillies made a turn to the left. I remembered the map I had looked at.
    “Aren’t the Callanish Stones in this direction?”
    He nodded. “They’re further along.”
    So Joan was going to the monolith.
    We continued on, not talking much except for my occasional exclamations about the cute black-faced sheep. I can’t help it if sheep rarely appear in my life. Finally I settled back in my seat. Time to address the issue.
    “I had only the briefest of conversations with Inspector Harris about the accident. Do you have any theories about what happened?”
    “The road can be treacherous at night and it was raining heavily on Friday. It would have been easy to lose