Forty Words for Sorrow by Giles Blunt Read Free Book Online

chart—was the hardest thing Cardinal had ever had to do. Dorothy Pine’s face, the heavy features scarred by a ferocious, burnt-out case of acne, had expressed no trace of grief. He was white, he was the law, why should she?
    Until then, her only experience of the police had been their sporadic arrests of her husband, a gentle soul who used to beat her without mercy when drunk. He had gone to Toronto to find work shortly after Katie’s tenth birthday and had found instead the business end of a switchblade in a Spadina Road flophouse.
    Cardinal’s finger shook a little as he rang the doorbell.
    Dorothy Pine, a tiny woman who barely cleared his waist, opened the door and looked up at him and knew instantly why he had come. She had no other children; there could be only one reason.
    “Okay,” she said, when he told her Katie’s body had been found. Just the one word, “Okay,” and she started to shut the door. Case closed. Her only child was dead. Cops—let alone white cops—could be of no assistance here.
    “Mrs. Pine, I wonder if you’d let me in for a few minutes. I’ve been off the case for a couple of months and I need to refresh my memory.”
    “What for? You found her now.”
    “Well, yes, but now we want to catch whoever killed her.”
    He had the feeling that, had he not mentioned it, the thought of tracking down the man who had killed her daughter would never have entered Dorothy Pine’s head. All that mattered was the fact of her death. She gave a slight shrug, humouring him, and he stepped past her into the house.
    The smell of bacon clung to the hallway. Although it was nearly noon, the living-room curtains were still drawn. Electric heaters had dried the air and killed the plants that hung withered on a shelf. The place was dark as a mausoleum. Death had entered this house four months ago; it had never left.
    Dorothy Pine sat down on a circular footstool in front of the television, where Wile E. Coyote was noisily chasing the Road Runner. Her arms hung down between her knees, and tears plopped in miniature splashes onto the linoleum floor.
    All those weeks Cardinal had tried to find the little girl—through the hundreds of interviews of classmates, friends and teachers, through the thousands of phone calls, the thousands of flyers—he had hoped that Dorothy Pine would come to trust him. She never did. For the first two weeks she telephoned daily, not only identifying herself every time but explaining why she was calling. “I was just wondering if you found my daughter, Katharine Pine,” as if Cardinal might have forgotten to look. Then she’d stopped calling altogether.
    Cardinal took Katie’s high-school photograph out of his pocket, the photograph they’d used to print all those flyers that had asked of bus stations and emergency wards, of shopping malls and gas stations, Have You Seen This Girl? Now the killer had answered, oh yes, he had seen this girl all right, and Cardinal slipped the photograph on top of the television.
    “Do you mind if I look at her room again?”
    A shake of the dark head, a shudder in the shoulders. Another tiny splash on the linoleum floor. Husband murdered, and now her daughter too. The Inuit, it is said, have forty different words for snow. Never mind about snow, Cardinal mused, what people really need is forty words for sorrow. Grief. Heartbreak. Desolation . There were not enough, not for this childless mother in her empty house.
    Cardinal went down a short hallway to a bedroom. The door was open, and a yellow bear with one glass eye frowned at him from the windowsill. Under the bear’s threadbare paws lay a woven rug with a horse pattern. Dorothy Pine sold these rugs at the Hudson Bay store on Lakeshore. The store charged a hundred and twenty bucks, but he doubted if Dorothy Pine saw much of it. Outside, a chainsaw was ripping into wood, and somewhere a crow was cawing.
    There was a toy bench under the windowsill. Cardinal opened it with his foot and saw