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

you can be off.”
    Cardinal had been having dinner at Babstock’s place once a month for going on a year, and he still wasn’t sure if Esmé was a maid or a caterer or a niece. Babstock always treated her with respect but betrayed no interest beyond that. Caterer, Cardinal decided. The meals were always perfect, and he enjoyed their quiet conversations before the others—one the architect who had designed Babstock’s house, the other a major at the local radar installation—arrived after dinner and proceeded to beat both of them at stud poker.
    “Fabulous meal,” Cardinal said. He tapped his wineglass with a fingernail. “Wine too.”
    “You never thought Catherine might be trying to get in touch with you?”
    “No, Ron. Why, has Evelyn been phoning you?”
    “Phoning, no. But I hear her voice sometimes. I think I do. I mean, it’s bad enough I even saw a doctor about it.”
    “What did he say?”
    “Stress, of course. Overwork.”
    “Well?”
    “Okay, I’ll stop. I’m being silly. Let’s move.”
    Cardinal followed him into the game room. Babstock’s house was a series of rectangles, mostly glass, overlooking Lake Nipissing. The lights of Algonquin Bay glittered across the frozen lake, making it look a much larger city than it was. Babstock had another house in town, but Cardinal had never visited him there.
    They sat at the poker table and Babstock patted his pockets for his reading glasses. “Oh, listen—before I forget—I want you to come to my party.”
    “It’s nice of you to ask, but I’m really not a party person.”
    “I don’t want party people. I want real people. Feel free to bring someone, of course. Are you seeing anyone?”
    “Not just at the moment.”
    “What about that detective colleague you told me about? Why not bring her? You said you like her.”
    “Lise is even less of a party person than I am.”
    “All the better. Be good for both of you. Listen, what did you make of that case in California? That little girl missing for eight years.”
    Babstock made a charming effort to be up on crimes Cardinal might be interested in—no matter how far afield they had occurred. This was a California case in which a child had been abducted at age two. Her mother recognized her eight years later, now age ten, at a playground in a different city. DNA tests confirmed her identity, and the couple who had stolen her were now in federal prison. Cardinal hadn’t paid much attention.
    “Of course, what I really want to ask you about is this motel murder. But I know you can’t talk about it.”
    “ ‘Fraid not. Ongoing investigation.”
    “I know, I know. There’s the doorbell. Come to my party, John. Meanwhile, get ready to part with a serious amount of cash.”

From the Blue Notebook
    Back in the winter, when the plane deposited Wyndham and me and the construction crew on T-6, we had somehow contrived in that polar darkness to assemble the prefabricated structure of the mess hall in such a way that it ended up with an extra stub of a room, a kind of alcove. I had dragged one of the more comfortable chairs into it and stacked some of my books around it. I liked to sit there at night and read.
    Rebecca (this was weeks later) was doing a crossword in the mess. Of all of us, Rebecca was the one most able to keep to a regular schedule despite the unending twilight. When she was finished recording and sorting her data for the day, she devoted her evenings to crosswords, board games or reading. I was in my alcove, from where I could see Wyndham but not Rebecca. He was tinkering with his laptop, trying to improve the insulation pack around his jerry-rigged car battery. We weren’t supposed to do such things in the mess, but Wyndham always did.
    I don’t know which of them started it—probably Wyndham, who was always good for a philosophical ramble—but they were talking about different kinds of cold. For some reason their easy conversation put me in a sneering mood and I couldn’t