And towns like Port Dundas couldn’t say no. Not to all that commerce, all that foot traffic. People got rich off it. But the gargantuan houses that were built on the new lots lasted a lot longer than the money did. Westmuirians had been squeezed out of their own countryside. It made her angry, but she’d accepted it by now.

What was left of the town of her childhood she felt fiercely protective of. Main Street was the map of her life. She was eleven before her parents decided she was old enough to walk to town on her own, but the moment she was allowed to go, she was there all the time, running in and out of her father’s store, “helping customers,” going to the bank for change, looking at the river under Kilmartin Bridge, following the leaves skirling in rainwater in the gutters, buying sodas at Ladyman’s. (She looked at the venerable old restaurant now, through the window of the Station House. It was badly in need of three coats of paint both inside and out. The great old sign that poked out over the sidewalk, and famously had 109 lightbulbs in it, had been gone now for twenty-five years.) When she was eleven, the heart of the main drag had been O’Connor’s Stationery, the S. Baker Pharmacy, L’il Folks Shoes (and beside it, the more solemn, leathery-smelling Famous Footware), Micallef’s, The Station House, Ladyman’s, the Riverside Café, Porelli’s Grocery, Porelli’s Meats, the Red Door Bakery, a Stedman’s, and the cinema – The Beverly – which had been her favourite place in town.

By the time she was thirteen, she felt like she owned the town. She knew every inch of it, was a repository for its dailiness, its history. People used to joke that the mother was in City Hall and the kid was directing traffic out on Main Street. There wasn’t a soul who didn’t know her on sight.

Now her mother was coming to the end of her life, and her own personal Port Dundas was vanishing. Charles O’Connor had died in 1965, the Porellis closed up both their shops and moved to Kitchener in the 1970s. Stores came and went, although the ornately carved keystones above their doors, and the beautiful lintels and soffits were still there if you traced your gaze up the rain-softened stone. She had truly kept watch over this place her whole life, and now she felt the first moment of the final act beginning. Ray Greene was in charge. Willan had anointed him. And they were going to straighten the 41 so it ran east of the townsite, that was surely going to happen. They’d connect Mayfair in a straight shot to Port Dundas and Fort Leonard without actually running the highway through the middle of town. It was going to miss Dublin entirely. She wondered if the investors in Tournament Acres knew anything about that. She suspected not. Then again, maybe that town would be saved. Maybe only Port Dundas would die.

After lunch, Greene gave her permission to do what she’d asked to do, and Hazel filled out the rest of the paperwork. She waited for Wilton while he was in the evidence locker in the basement, and then she drove down to Kehoe Glenn with the knife they’d found in Travers’s chest.

There was a little cool sting in the air now. Summer was not officially over until September 21, but this always happened in the second half of August, this sudden encroachment into the heat. It never stopped shocking her when the summer began to end. You wait so long for it and then, like a switch being thrown, the cold makes its appearance.

Cathy looked at Hazel through the screen door and then opened it, and Hazel walked in past her, touching the widow softly on the upper arm. She went into the kitchen and sat down, placing a paper bag on the table. Cathy came in hesitantly, seeing the bag and not liking it. But she took a seat.

“I hope those are french fries,” she said.

“No.”

“Then I’m going to have a drink. Do you want one?”

“Whatever you’re having.”

Cathy went to make the drinks and dropped an ice cube in each glass. “This is going to be an unpleasant experience, isn’t it? I can feel it.” She was weaving a little, side to side, against the counter.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have another,” Hazel said.

“This is my first, Officer. But I am stoned. I presume I am not arrested.”

“No.”

She brought the drinks to the table. “So, why are you here?”

“The girl’s name, the one you saw, her name was Larysa Kirilenko.”

“Is she dead?”

“No. And we haven’t captured her. Yet,” she added and reached for her drink.

“So I have to leave my home again?”

“No,” said Hazel. “I promise you, she’s gone. You’ll never see her again.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I know what happened to her now.”

Cathy didn’t want to know, though. Hazel could see the fear in her eyes. Now was the moment she would learn how her husband had earned his death.

“What’s in the bag, Hazel?”

“I told you Henry might have been trying to help her. She was in a place … a place there was no way out of. I saw it. I do think that Henry was trying to help her. I think he found out somehow through Jordie Dunn and that’s why he went there. Somehow Larysa was able to stab a guard with a knife and she took the guard’s stun gun. That’s how she got out. But she was six kilometres from where Henry’s truck was found. So either she tracked him, with an intent to kill him, or he told her where to go, to meet him.”

“And what was he going to do with her when she showed up?”

“Bring her to the police? Get help? But she killed him instead. She used the stun gun, which she had probably seen used down there. They’re not supposed to kill, not even this type. It was an early kind of stun gun, called a Lea Stinger. Russian. She must have known it wasn’t lethal. And she had the knife, which she did use to kill with. Twice.”

“So she didn’t want to kill him? They were friends? She did kill him!”

“I want to show you the knife, Cathy. It came out of evidence, so it’s pretty awful. We can’t clean it yet. Do you think you can look at it?”

Cathy was shaking her head no but looking anxiously at the bag. “Why?”

The question was enough. She had to see it. Hazel removed a ziplock evidence bag from within and lay it on the table. The hunting knife they’d removed from Lee Travers’s chest was inside, still in its open position, and encrusted with dried blood from its tip to the end of the handle. “This is what killed that guard and also Terry Brennan and Lee Travers, who ran the whole thing. It’s a brand-new Buck knife. Your husband’s was the only store north of Mayfair and south of Sudbury to sell this brand of knife. This particular one is a Buck/Simonich Raven Legacy, a top-of-the-line knife that costs almost four hundred dollars. Someone at the store confirmed for me yesterday that the one they had in the case is missing. He hadn’t noticed it until I asked him. Henry gave Larysa this knife, Cathy. Because he wanted to help her escape.”

“You said she was looking for something.”

“We still don’t what it was.”

Cathy picked up the clear plastic bag. It had a date and a code scrawled on a white patch in permanent black marker.

“And you think he gave her this.”

“I believe he did.”

“And is this supposed to make me feel better?” She fell silent and dropped the gruesome object to the tabletop. “This isn’t proof my husband was a good man.”

“No, you’re right,” Hazel said. “It isn’t. But if you can believe he was, then proof is nothing.”

Epilogue

Late August

The man at the customs desk at Kiev Borispol stamped her passport and handed it back to her. Her visa had been for a full year. He asked her why she came back so soon. “I didn’t like it in Canada,” she said. “I got homesick.”

She’d paid cash for the cheapest flight: a one-hopper from Toronto on Delta and Aerosvit. When she stepped out of the airport at noontime on a Friday at the end of August, it was hotter than she ever remembered the summer being. She hadn’t eaten real food in three months, her own food, and she stopped in the first decent place she could find and ordered smoked whitefish, potatoes, and a Heineken. Afterwards, she purchased a package of Yava Golds and had the first cigarette she’d smoked in ten years.