Children in the Morning Read online

  “I do not care what your papers say or do not say. Anybody would know, looking at the boy, whose son he is,” Giacomo said. Then he caught sight of Father Burke, and glared at him, then looked back at the baby. Father Burke stood up, because it’s polite to do that if somebody comes in the room, but he was giving Giacomo a dirty look.

  Then Giacomo finally saw me. “Oh! Mi dispiace, Normie, buonasera!”

  “Buonasera, Giacomo,” I answered, because he had taught us a few words of Italian.

  “Giacomo Fornino, this is Brennan Burke. Brennan, Giacomo.”

  The two of them shook hands, but they did not look happy to be meeting one another.

  “Sit down and have something to eat, Giacomo. We’ll talk later.” He didn’t want to eat. He wanted to argue. But he sat down.

  Father Burke pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered them to Giacomo. He took one, and Mum went over and opened up the buffet table, and brought out two old ashtrays. She usually growls if anyone tries to smoke in the house, but that night she didn’t bother. Father Burke leaned way over and lit Giacomo’s cigarette, glaring through the flame at him the whole time.

  Giacomo sucked back on the cigarette and spoke up. “A pleasure to meet you,” he said to Father Burke, but he didn’t mean it.

  “Where are you from, Giacomo?” Father Burke sounded friendly.

  “I am from Rome.” He talked a bit about Rome, and Father Burke asked him a couple of questions in Italian, which he really speaks, unlike me and Tommy who only know a few words. Giacomo answered sometimes in English and sometimes in Italian.

  When he wound down, Father Burke said: “But seriously, now, where are you from?”

  “Roma.”

  “No, you can’t be from Rome.” Father Burke took a deep drag of his cigarette and blew the smoke away from the table. “I know you’re just having us on. So? Di dov’è?”

  Mummy looked at Father, wondering what was going on.

  Giacomo finally said: “I am from a small village originally, of course, but I came to Rome to study and I stayed there until I came to Canada to work for three years.”

  He was mad and got up and left the room. Went to the bathroom.

  Mum gave Father Burke kind of a dirty look. “All right. Give. How the hell did you know he wasn’t from Rome?”

  “He just said he paid cinquecentomila lire for something. Chinkweh-chento, not shinkweh-shento the way the Romans say it. So, a bit of a dissembler you have there, darlin’.”

  “Hearing the gospel truth was not my main motivation for seeing Giacomo. If I want gospel, I’ll get up early on a Sunday morning and go hear you.”

  “Sounds as if you’re more in need of a lawyer right now than a priest.”

  “I’ll send him packing. He’s got no proof —”

  “But a child’s father certainly can claim a right —”

  Mum used a big word, and I came up with a sneaky question the next day to find out what it was: “hypothetically.” I did that a lot while this was going on. It wasn’t really a lie when I told her I was trying to “build up my vocabulary,” because that’s something they want us to do at school.

  Anyway, what Mum said this time was: “If, hypothetically, a child has a father who lives here in the city of Halifax, or even in the province of Nova Scotia, a mother might be more inclined to see those hypothetical rights exercised. But if a child has someone claiming to be the father, and that individual wants to take the child four thousand miles across the ocean, then that individual is never going to succeed in establishing his claim.”

  Giacomo came back then and said he wanted to get to know his son. Our baby! Then he started going on about his parents in Italy.

  That’s when Mum interrupted him and said: “Normie, you have lessons to do for tomorrow. Time to go up to your room.”

  But going to your room in our house is not the end of it, because there’s a secret listening post upstairs in the hallway. It’s an old thing called a register in the floor, where the heat comes up. It’s made of squiggles of black iron. And when the heat’s not on, you can hear what people are saying in the kitchen. So I clomped up the stairs and into my bedroom, then tiptoed out to the listening post and sat down.

  “My family expect to see their grandson. They expect him to be part of their lives. Which is only right.”

  Mum said: “You are making an assumption that you are not entitled to make, that you are the father of the child. That’s all I am going to say on the matter for now.”

  Giacomo scraped his chair back. On his way out of the kitchen, he said: “You will be hearing from me, or from my lawyer!”

  “Who’s your lawyer?”

  “You don’t know him. He is from home.”

  “Well, make sure he doesn’t reverse the charges when he calls!”

  “There will be no need for long-distance telephone charges. He will be here.”

  “You’re bringing a lawyer all the way over here from Italy?!”

  “Yes. So you know I am serious. Goodbye. For now.”

  I heard the front door close. Then Mummy burst out into tears! She kept saying: “This can’t be happening. Only over my dead body will that child leave the country!”

  I ran downstairs and Father Burke was hugging Mum while she cried. He looked over the top of her head at me and said: “Don’t you worry, Normie. Everything will be fine.”

  “Don’t let him take Dominic away!” I didn’t mean to yell but I did anyway.

  He said: “That’s not going to happen, little one. Don’t even think about it. Maura, macushla, settle yourself down and call the best lawyer you know.”

  “Ha! I don’t think Monty would want to take this on, given that my pregnancy put the kibosh on us getting back together!”

  “Well, you have to admit, it did come as a surprise to him!”

  “It came as a surprise to me too! I just thought I’d gained a bit of weight! I had no idea . . .”

  “All right, let’s not get into that again. The point is, you won’t be hiring Monty to take the case. Too close to home for him.”

  “The best family lawyer in town is one of Beau Delaney’s partners. Val Tanner. Oh God, I hope Giacomo doesn’t twig to the fact that he’s going to need someone local here, a member of the Nova Scotia bar, and get to her first! He’s probably heard me talk about her. She’s relentless. If he gets her, I won’t have a hope!”

  “Get to her first. Give her a call. Go!” And he kind of pushed her to the phone.

  I think he had forgotten that I was there because he looked surprised when his eyes fell on me. “Normie, wouldn’t it be better if you went upstairs and did your school work? Your mum will work all this out, never you fear.” So up I went again. In a way, I wanted to try to listen some more, but in another way I didn’t; I just wanted to remember Father Burke saying Mummy would work it out. So I did my school work.

  I didn’t find out what they did about Dominic because I went to Daddy’s house to spend a few days with him. I do that a lot, and so does Tommy, unless he’s with his band, which is called Dads In Suits, or with his girlfriend, Lexie. Daddy’s house is right on the water. It’s a part of the water that comes in from the ocean and they call it the Northwest Arm. We have a boathouse, but no boat. Yet. But going to Daddy’s place always gives me the chance to nag for one. All I wanted was a little rowboat, and I would paint it bright yellow. Daddy used to have a sailboat but then he spent so much time with us and with his blues band, Functus, that he never had time to go sailing, so he sold it. Which was kind of dumb, really. You never know when you’re going to want a boat again, so why not keep it? But I would continue to work on him.

  I didn’t get a chance to nag about the boat on my first night with Daddy because I fell asleep before I could bring it up. Then I had other things on my mind. I had horrible dreams and I woke up in the mid
dle of the night with Daddy standing over me. It took a few minutes to figure out that I was staying at his house and to understand what he was saying: “Normie, sweetheart, wake up. You’re having a nightmare. Let yourself wake up, and you’ll be fine.”

  My heart was beating really fast, my head hurt, and I was a sweat ball. My jammies were stuck to me. But Daddy hugged me anyway. Then he sat with me in the bed, and put my head against his chest; he kept smoothing my hair back.

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “It was just a dream, dolly. You’re safe here in the house with me. Tell me about the dream; that will make it go away.”

  “There was a baby. And they were being really mean!”

  “Who was?”

  “Those guys that were there.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “I don’t know. I just know the baby was crying and screaming, and was scared or hungry, and it was those guys’ fault!”

  “Was the baby a boy or a girl?”

  “I don’t know that! I don’t have dreams about people being bare naked!”

  “All right, I understand, sweetheart.”

  “But I’m pretty sure it was a boy. It just seemed to be a boy.”

  I wished I could explain it, how scared and sad it made me feel for that baby, but I couldn’t. Daddy rocked me and sang to me till I fell back asleep.

  (Monty)

  The first thing I wanted to arrange with Delaney was a viewing of the scene of the accident, known to police and the Crown as the scene of the crime. I wanted to see where Peggy died, but I did not want to do this in the presence of their children. I left it with him to find a convenient time. It didn’t take long. Delaney called me on a mild, sunny day in late February to tell me the children were with an aunt, so I drove to Brunswick Street and picked him up. We left the Twelve Apostles and pulled up a few minutes later in front of the Delaneys’ colonial revival house in the city’s tony south end. Designed in the 1930s by Halifax architect Andrew Cobb, the white clapboard house had a steeply pitched black roof with dormers on either side of a classical-style entrance. The left side of the residence, which I assumed was the living room side, had a set of three double-hung windows; the right side had a set of two.

  We went inside. The entranceway was clogged with kids’ boots, skates, hockey sticks, and other debris of family life. There was a sunken living room on the left, and a kitchen and dining room on the right. But it was the basement that interested me. We headed there without comment. The stairs were wooden and surprisingly steep, but I could imagine slipping and sliding down the staircase without suffering much more than a bruising. If you somehow flew or were thrown from top to bottom, that would be another story. And if you fell from that height and landed on a jagged rock, that would be the story we were faced with.

  I saw a little memorial the family had set up near the death scene, flowers and cards on a table.

  “Where was the pile of rocks, Beau?”

  He walked down the steps ahead of me. “They were here.” He pointed to an area to the right of the bottom step. “The kids were building their castle over here. They had planned to put up three walls and use the basement wall and window as part of the structure. We couldn’t afford to have that much of the basement out of commission so we told them they’d have to revert to their first plan, and build it outdoors. Most of the stones had been carted back outside when this happened. There was just the one pile left. And Peggy landed on it. Along with everything else the kids have to deal with, they are feeling guilty about leaving the rocks there. I told them the result would have been the same if 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.

  “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.”

  “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 that anybody who could walk upright would probably make the team. He met this other Irish guy, who’s a teacher in another school, and they decided to start up Gaelic football teams in that school and ours. So far it’s just the boys, but we’re going to have a girls’ team too. I was watching the first practice with Kim and Jenny and Laurence. It was still winter — February 25, exactly two months after Christmas! — but it was reall
y warm and the snow had melted, so the kids all nagged Father Burke to go outdoors and have a practice. He said it would be too wet, but he must have really been excited about getting out there himself, because he ended up saying yes. We don’t have a football field at the school because we’re downtown and there’s not enough room, so we packed the goalposts and stuff into some parents’ cars and went to the Commons. That’s the huge big grassy park in the middle of Halifax where they play all kinds of games. We had rain the night before so it was muddy. But that only made it more fun. I wished I was out there.

  “Richard! What are you doing?” Oh, no. It was Richard Robertson’s mum. She was marching towards the field, and she looked mad. “You’re filthy!” she yelled at Richard.

  Richard had a big grin on his face. He’s in grade six. He has reddish-brown hair and his eyes are almost the same colour; he has freckles across his nose, and people tease him about them, but not in a mean way. “We’re playing Gaelic football!” he told his mum. “Father Burke’s teaching it to us, and we’re even starting a league, and —”

  “I don’t want to hear it, Richard. Have you forgotten what day it is?”

  “Uh . . .” He looked at Father Burke, who saw Mrs. Robertson and came over. You should have seen the face on her when she saw him. Even though he’s a priest, he was in shorts and a T-shirt, and had mud on his knees.

  “Well! I hardly recognized you, Reverend. This must be casual day.”

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Robertson.”

  “I don’t recall signing a consent form to allow my son to participate in games that might be dangerous and that will obviously get him dirty, and give him a chill, and make him late for his other activities.” She turned to Richard and said: “You are going to be late for your personal coach.”

  “His what?” Father Burke asked.

  “His personal coach.” Father just stared at her. He had no idea what she was talking about.