Until the Night by Giles Blunt Read Free Book Online Page A

Lacroix?”
    “Sorry.” Priest stood up and turned to the bartender. “If she tries to pay, smack her.”

    “Tell me something,” Ronnie Babstock said, pouring more wine into Cardinal’s glass. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
    “No. I don’t believe Elvis is alive, either.”
    Babstock turned his glass, as if considering all the colours in the burgundy spectrum. “But don’t you ever think about it? I never did until Evelyn died, but I do now. I sometimes wonder if she’s … I don’t know. Don’t you wonder about your wife?”
    Cardinal and Babstock had been friends in high school—always on good terms, although never close. They had lost touch for many years. Cardinal became a cop in Toronto and later in Algonquin Bay, and Babstock had gone on to a glorious career in industry, eventually founding a robotics company that had been a prime contributor to the space shuttle programme and the exploration of Mars. It was one of the few companies in Ontario that still actually employed people to make things.
    Cardinal was once again struck by the variegated nature of those people who chose to come back to Algonquin Bay. In fact, Cardinal’s own decision to return, after ten years with the Toronto police, had surprised him. And who would have expected the likes of Leonard Priest or Ronnie Babstock?
    Babstock had stunned the high-tech world by moving his company to this pocket of the near north, more than ten years ago now. He hadn’t got in touch with Cardinal at the time, and Cardinal didn’t even consider contacting him’ his old schoolmate had moved into a different class.
    But then they both became widowers within months of each other, and Cardinal had been surprised—and touched—to receive a sympathy card signed your old friend, Ronnie Babstock . A couple of months later, Babstock had called him at work and they went out for a beer and a burger.
    Cardinal didn’t expect much’ they’d led such different lives. But they were both newly widowed, both with grown daughters, both in their late fifties—and they discovered they enjoyed one another’s company. They found they could even talk politics, something Cardinal avoided with pretty much everyone.
    “You know, you’re amazingly liberal for a cop,” Babstock had said.
    “And you’re amazingly liberal for a businessman.”
    “That’s Evelyn’s influence. And Hayley’s—my overeducated daughter. I’d probably be a lot richer if I never listened to them, but I’d’ve been a lot more miserable too.”
    Babstock had become known as a philanthropist and had put his money behind major international initiatives as well as local improvements to the main street and the waterfront. Cardinal had come to have tremendous respect for him.
    “I’m glad you called me, Ronnie,” Cardinal had said when they were parting that first time. “Why did you?”
    “Hell, I don’t know. Suddenly you’re fifty-eight and you haven’t paid any attention to friendships for thirty, forty years and you wake up in the bloody Yukon—psychologically, I mean. That’s probably why I called you, to be honest. Gets fucking lonely.”
    It sent a chill through Cardinal to hear a man admit to loneliness. He never used the word about himself. But he knew what Ronnie meant. Friendships suddenly matter a lot more when you live alone. He didn’t know what he would have done if Delorme hadn’t somehow managed to become his buddy over the past two years.
    “You’re ignoring the question,” Ronnie was saying now. “If I tell you I sometimes think Evelyn’s trying to contact me, you just think that’s nuts, right? You never wonder that way about …?”
    “I miss Catherine. I miss her every day. I don’t suppose that’ll ever stop. But we had our life together and now it’s over and …”
    “And what?”
    A pretty young woman came into the dining room and asked if they would like more dessert.
    “No thanks, Esmé. That was delicious. Just clear everything away and