Lindstrom Alone Read online

  Harry stepped off the elevator at Miranda Quin’s floor and made his way through groups of detectives and forensic specialists huddled in separate conspiracies over coffee and maps and broadsheets and photos. When they made eye contact through the glass wall of her office, Miranda got up and walked to her door to wave him through. Harry glanced around, fascinated by how quiet it was.

  “Miranda,” he said, sidling by her and sitting on the worn black leather sofa.

  “You here alone, Harry?”

  “As far as I know.”

  But you’re not, Harry. I’m here.

  Miranda’s eyes were hazel, the same colour as Karen’s. Her hair was auburn, but the grey made it lighter than Karen’s. She was a very attractive woman and so was his wife, but they did not look at all alike. Miranda’s features were gentle and rounded, changing with her mood from girlish to urbane, resolute to serene, while Karen’s were sculptural, like stone brought to life. Miranda was handsome, Karen was beautiful.

  He looked up at Miranda with a rare expression of warmth, as if what he was about to tell her was a secret. “I’m thinking of taking the case. I told her we’d look into it.”

  “I was afraid you might be put off.”

  “By the sad possibility that it’s true?”

  “By the deaths of her children.”

  Harry gazed at her, feeling rising resentment. She met his gaze without pity.

  “I like your scarf,” she said. “Did Karen make it?”

  “She sewed the ends together.”

  “And a beautiful job she did.”

  “It has wonderfully anomalous mathematical properties. Topologically, it’s a square with circular properties and a circle with rectangular properties.”

  “That particular one, or all of them?”

  “It’s a Möbius loop.”

  “Is it warm?”

  He smiled. She had a way of subverting his pomposity by making him feel like he was in on the joke.

  “So,” he said. “I’m intrigued. All she’s got is a Googled collection of deaths by exposure, a tea box of expendable body parts, and a mother’s conviction that her son is a monster who murdered his sisters when he was a kid and may decide to kill us next. Not much to go on.”

  “Has he threatened you?”

  “Not directly.”

  “I’ve been in touch with the National Criminal Police in Sweden about the cases she’s dug up and they don’t see a connection. They don’t even see murder. Girls and women being careless in a cold climate. Assault doesn’t seem to be an issue, but they do have things in common.”

  “They’re dead,” said Harry.

  “They’re female, young, blonde.”

  “Not surprising.”

  “None raped or beaten.”

  “Freezing to death is supposed to be gentle.”

  “It’s horrific, Harry, no matter how gentle. I’m glad you think what she’s got is worth pursuing.”

  “At her expense.”

  “Or yours if you don’t find anything. I’ve dug up our old file on the sisters. She asked me to let you read it.”

  “Sounds like it’s not even a cold case. There’s no case at all.”

  “She was grieving, she still is. But it might help you understand what you’re getting into.”

  “I’m the last person in the world to be a grief counsellor.”

  “You care, Harry. And it’s a good read.”

  “I need encouragement, here.”

  “You’re already involved.”

  “I need motivation.”

  “You want to stop people dying.”

  “Only God can stop people dying. That’s why I’m an atheist.”

  “Still? You think God has forsaken you?”

  “No, Miranda, I have forsaken God.”

  “Harry?”

  “You can’t understand, Miranda. You were never a believer, anyway. You were an Anglican.”

  Miranda winced

  “Harry, you need to read her story. The woman was coping with the deaths of her children. God knows, you know, we cope with death in different ways, especially when children are involved. I think Birgitta Ghiberti was distraught. I think her mind was poisoned. She had lost three daughters in three separate incidents. She was trying to make sense of their deaths.”

  “So she blamed her son.”

  “There’s a certain logic to her version of events.”

  “But not enough to lay charges.”

  “Her son was a kid, he’d lost his sisters, he was a bit weird, but he was suffering too.

  Morgan felt sorry for him.”

  “Morgan did the report?”

  “In his inimitable way.”

  “And he concluded Bernd didn’t kill anyone.”

  “I’m not saying that, Harry. The kid was a kid. His mother was grief stricken. Morgan left it open-ended.”

  “Police equivocation is not a pretty sight.”

  “It’s quite possible the kid was the innocent victim of his mother’s outrage.”

  “Or that she’s outraged because he’s a killer and got away with it.”

  She slid the file across her desk.

  “Is Morgan still around?” he asked.

  “Yeah, we make a good team. He’s a lovely free spirit.”

  “Me too,” said Harry and smiled.

  As she gazed at him, sadness weighed down the corners of her eyes.

  “Read it over, see what you think. It’s quite eloquent.”

  “I’d expect nothing less.”

  “And Harry, be careful.”

  “Of course,” he said. Since she wanted him to take on the case, he wondered whether she meant to be careful of the mother, the son, or himself.

  Harry picked up the file and made his way through the organized chaos of the homicide department to an interrogation room. The door didn’t lock from the inside but he knew he wouldn’t be disturbed. He had a couple of hours, allowing for time to walk over to Birgitta Ghiberti’s house in Rosedale by noon.

  The room smelled of stale sweat and disinfectant.

  He sat upright in the straight-backed chair and tried to read but Miranda’s motivations distracted him. She was a cop but she was reaching outside the force, encouraging Harry to fan cold embers into flames.

  No action is ever taken without an ulterior motive.

  Yes, but whose?

  Don’t be obtuse, Harry.

  It was Miranda Quin who had urged him to open a detective agency. She recognized that after what he had been through with the loss of his family, continuing to teach philosophy, expounding on being and non-being, life and afterlife, meaning and ultimate ends, all might seem futile, especially when he was lecturing to students who took being, life, and meaning as given, and death as a dreary abstraction. She had signed as guarantor when he applied for his P.I. registration. She knew his past, more of it than anyone still alive.

  When he thought about Miranda, Karen usually stayed in the shadows.

  Three decades previous, Miranda had been Harry’s counsellor at a canoe tripping camp in Algonquin Park, the same camp Karen had gone to after they’d both moved on. Miranda was older than him and worlds apart. He was skinny with a massive shock of straight blond hair, and smart in a disarming way, a wry observer. And Miranda Quin could roll a canoe onto her shoulders by herself, make cinnamon rolls over an open fire, and had real breasts. With her shimmering auburn hair and hazel eyes, for the entire season she was a living version of magnetic north; every male in the camp knew precisely where she was at any given moment.

  When they had met briefly on Bloor Street some years later, he was on a break from his studies in England to attend a funeral. They went for drinks. Miranda had just dropped out of the RCMP; they were on a more equal footing. She was as striking to look at, as vivacious and clever, and he was no longer a boy but a handsome young man with a furrowed brow, an aquiline nose and bold eyes, his strong features softened to a knowing scowl by his Nordic complexion. And sti
ll a wry observer, but now, as a philosopher, the wisdom of the ages weighed on his shoulders, or so he imagined. He hadn’t finished his studies.

  They became lovers for a few weeks. He had been happy to evade relatives clustered around the death of his beloved Aunt Beth, whom most of them resented for her having achieved so little in her life with such great élan, and Miranda was recovering from a bad affair in Ottawa. After a brief period of seclusion among familiar particulars around the family home in Waldron, not far from where Harry’s own family had made and lost their modest fortune, she was in Toronto to join the police service, eventually to become Superintendent of the Homicide Division. Harry was on his way back to complete his doctoral studies at Cambridge.

  For a while they stayed in touch with the occasional call or email. After he returned from Cambridge and both he and his bride began teaching at Huron College in London, Ontario, their communications were reduced to sporadic notes catching up on milestone events. After the accident, their lives again converged.

  She was Harry’s only living friend.

  He focused on the file in front of him and began to read. A few paragraphs in, he sat back; he realized Miranda’s motivation was curiosity, not forensic curiosity but intellectual curiosity. She wanted to know. Harry was her surrogate; she wanted him to find out the truth. Birgitta Ghiberti had rekindled her interest. She wanted Harry to fan the flames or put out the fire. Either way, to resolve the mystery—an abstract incentive appropriate to a philosopher, even if his own desire to know meant putting his life in jeopardy.

  Morgan’s version of Birgitta’s account was compelling. He read the accompanying documents. There was a coroner’s account of accidental death by drowning, a fire marshal’s explanation for a fatal explosion from leaking gas, a medical examiner’s autopsy report of death by suffocation. An hour later, he dropped the folder off on Miranda’s desk.

  He turned to leave, then stopped and faced her, trying to fine-tune his facial expression. She waited but he seemed stuck between taciturn and congenial.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Interesting. Gotta think about it. Thanks.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  “Could you call and tell her I’ll be late.”

  “I’m not your secretary.”

  “Fine, keep an old lady waiting.”

  “She’s not that old and she’s rather gorgeous.”

  “It’s all relative, isn’t it.”

  He needed time to think. He was no more convinced of Bernd Ghiberti’s guilt than his innocence, but he was enthralled by what he could only call evil that characterized the mother’s story. He planned to walk up to Rosedale despite the cold.

  Miranda reached into a drawer of her desk and pulled out a black woollen toque. Harry took it from her gingerly, as if he were too fastidious or too proud to countenance a used piece of clothing.

  “It was my Dad’s, Harry. He would have liked you to wear it.”

  Harry pulled the toque on and rolled up the edge. His short prematurely grey hair merged with the black wool in a jaunty corona.

  “Looks good,” she said.

  Harry stopped in at Starbucks on the corner of College and Yonge, then headed north, shoulders hunched against the cold, with his fleece collar pulled up and the toque pulled down over his ears. Leaning into the Arctic wind that surged down Yonge Street, he walked slowly. He was wholly in the moment of his own creation. A moment at once horrifying and exhilarating. He savoured the reasons he had become a private detective.

  3 BIRGITTA’S STORY

  THIS IS WHAT HARRY PIECED TOGETHER FROM A BRIEF conversation with a woman who was certain her son was a killer, from an eloquent police write-up, and from speculation based on a coroner’s report, a fire marshal’s investigation, and a forensic autopsy. Harry’s imagination was fired by the intuitive insight of his dead wife, Karen, and the confidence of Miranda Quin, an old friend who recognized that coping with sorrow gave him special insight into the sordid complexities of Birgitta Ghiberti’s account. This was Birgitta’s story, translated through Harry Lindstrom’s mind to accommodate his fascination for ambiguity and his penchant for narrative coherence.

  ON MARCH 25, 1991, Birgitta Ghiberti entered the old police headquarters on Jarvis Street just months before its postmodern granite and blue glass replacement opened on College Street. She requested an interview with someone in homicide, and with unnerving composure intensified by her blonde colouring and Nordic reserve, she informed Detective David Morgan that her thirteen-year-old son, Bernd, was responsible for the deaths of his three sisters. She had just buried the last of them on the previous Saturday. She had no proof, beyond a mother’s conviction, and she had no doubts. Her son had done terrible things.

  IN THE EARLY summer of 1985, when Bernd was seven, the family settled into their cottage along the Muskoka River, only twenty minutes from Port Carling. The children had been taken out of school two weeks early for the dubious pleasure of enjoying the solitude before the hordes arrived with their speedboats and jet skis. The father, Vittorio Ghiberti, generally commuted from Toronto to spend the weekends with his family, although he anticipated being tied up in the city this year with business commitments. Birgitta was happy enough with the arrangement and the four children were unabashedly relieved by his absence.

  The river in front of the Muskoka cottage was broad and meandering, so that its flow seemed determined by the summer breeze. Early most mornings, because the nights were still cool, a fine mist hovered over the tiny beach in an alcove beside the Ghiberti boathouse. Sometimes the two older girls would skinny dip with the mist shielding them from the eyes of early rising cottagers nearby. Giovanna and Isabella spent most of their summers close to the water, only going up to the cottage for meals and, when their father was visiting, for compulsory board games in the evening.

  The boathouse had two slips, one for the old-fashioned Muskoka launch, with its massive engine and low-profile mahogany hull, and one for the rowboat. The canoe was hauled up on the dock outside, covered by the overhang of the loft where the older girls slept while the younger children, Bernd and Sigrid, slept upstairs in the rambling white cottage with the au pair and their mother.

  When the girls went skinny dipping, of course, everyone knew what they were doing. Giggles and splashing penetrated the grey haze that was spun to gossamer by the morning sun before fading away. The sounds reverberating along the riverbanks, echoing in boathouse slips, and rising to cottage verandahs made the old feel young and put the lascivious on edge.

  Giovanna was fifteen, two years older than her sister. They were beautiful girls, both fully developed, and often taken as twins. This flattered Isabella tremendously and pleased Giovanna. On June 21, 1985, the mist was burning off from the sun by the time they woke up but they decided to swim anyway. When they went down to the sandy alcove, Giovanna dropped her towel, despite the fading mist, and waded in to her knees. Isabella hesitated, then stepped back, feeling her toes squish in the damp sand, and, grasping her towel more securely around herself, she gazed at her sister’s naked body with unrestrained admiration. She was not used to her own body yet and Giovanna so casually inhabited hers, she wanted to reach out and embrace her, to absorb some of her womanliness without knowing quite what that meant.

  “You are beautiful, Giovanna,” she said.

  “And you are beautiful, too,” said her older sister.

  Behind them, standing by the red canoe in the shadows of the boathouse, seven-year-old Bernd, still dressed in his Christopher Robin pyjamas, stared solemnly at Giovanna. She was just a girl when she had her clothes on but a woman with pointy breasts and golden pubic hair and strange exciting curves without them. He touched himself between the legs to be assured that he was like his father, whom he feared and admired.

  Isabella whirled around at the quiet whimpering sounds and saw her little brother clutching his penis through his pyjamas. She squealed and, dropping her towel, she raced through the shallows into d
eep water, laughing hysterically. Giovanna sank to her knees and smiled serenely, the shallow water splashing against her rib cage, her exposed breasts, her smile, taunting him.

  Bernd’s eyes narrowed to a squint as he released his grip on his penis and cupped his hands in front of his stomach, rocking back and forth on his heels like an animated garden gnome. He knew he had to behave like a man but being laughed at and taunted made him angry, as it always did, so he stopped rocking and stood very still, scowling at Giovanna and ignoring Isabella, who was splashing about and giggling as she swam close enough to the boathouse dock to give him a good soaking, but she didn’t, he looked so solemn.

  Giovanna began to feel uncomfortable under the weight of her little brother’s squint-eyed scowl. She stood up in the knee-deep water, defying him to keep looking. When he moistened his lips, then slowly drew his face into a smile, she turned away in disgust and plunged sideways toward the deeper water. The little bugger had somehow turned his humiliation into her own. Normally a graceful swimmer, she swam with a thrashing sweep of her arms, kicking a furious wake behind her, until she was almost to mid-river.

  She took in a mouthful, choked and gasped for air. It was still too early for boat traffic that would build during the day to a crescendo about four in the afternoon, then taper off toward evening. But she was instinctively wary and she was beginning to feel sorry for her strange little brother. She turned and, swimming the breaststroke as she tried to catch her breath, she made her way back toward the boathouse.

  Isabella was treading water close to the side of the dock, unsure of how to extricate herself from Bernd’s diminutive but malignant presence, and Bernd remained motionless, enthralled by his newfound power. She was beginning to shiver and kicked her feet more vigorously, at the same time grabbing the worn cedar plank edging the dock. Giovanna was getting closer; she would chase the little bugger away, and they would emerge from the water, dignity restored.

  Never had Bernd deserved more than now the nickname the girls had given him, the little bugger. Not, of course, in front of their father and only with caustic endearment when their mother could hear them. Sometimes they used an English accent they had picked up from reruns of Fawlty Towers. Then it was: dirty rotten little bugger. They loved him in the same way he used to love his decrepit Pooh bear, which he hauled around by a torn ear until he forgot it somewhere and it was retrieved and quietly buried.