LITMIR.BIZ

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numerous calls to the carpenter.

      Green glanced out into the hall long enough to glimpse Sharon’s expression as she wrestled Tony into some clothes. Bob would be the last straw.

      “Look, Bob, when the cabinets are all ready, we’ll work out a time. But we need a few days’ notice.”

      “Hard to do. Depends on the weather, eh? We should at least get the cabinets out.”

      Green sighed. Five years ago, he’d been a bachelor living in a tiny downtown apartment and accountable only to himself. His only obligations had been weekly visits to his father and monthly child support payments to an estranged daughter on the other side of the country. Now he had a wife, a toddler in full terrible twos, a traumatized mutt, an instant teenage daughter with a disposition as black as her nails and a decayed monstrosity of a house that was consuming every penny he earned.

      He glanced at his watch. “How long will that take?”

      Bob assured him at the most two hours. Green said he would wait if they could get there in the next fifteen minutes.

      Bob’s van, trailed by a dusty pick-up and an elderly Cavalier, pulled into the drive an hour later, and Green ensconced himself in his study on his computer while Bob’s hammers banged beneath his feet. The noise was so loud, he didn’t hear the doorbell and vaguely became aware of someone shouting his name over the din. A minute later, Sergeant Brian Sullivan clumped up the stairs and shoved his head in the doorway.

      “Fuck, I told you you should have let me help you, Mike! Those guys are massacring the place.”

      Sullivan’s massive bulk filled the doorway, and it took Green a minute to register the grin on his ruddy, farm-boy face. Green was surprised to see him. Although the two men had been friends since their rookie days on the streets together twenty years earlier, their friendship rarely spilled over into their homes. Green knew there had to be a reason for the call. He glanced at his watch, which said eleven o’clock. Had he forgotten some crucial meeting?

      “What’s up?” Sullivan shrugged.

      “Nothing much. I’m on my way to Ashford Landing.”

      “Ash-what?”

      “Nice little village down on the Rideau River about thirty kilometres south of here. Now part of our megacity.”

      “What’s in Ashford Landing?”

      “A body. Probably nothing, but Ray Belowsky, one of the NCOs out there, is a hockey buddy of mine, and he wants Major Crimes to take a look at it.”

      Green perked up. Anything to escape Bob and his hammering. “What’s so special about it?”

      “Well, the guy seems to have fallen out of a church tower in the middle of town. Has folks a bit upset.”

      Green’s hopes deflated. People did fall off things on a fairly regular basis, even in the country, so it seemed hardly a reason to call in Major Crimes. “They’re sure he fell? Didn’t jump off to escape the minister’s sermon?”

      Sullivan chuckled. “Could have. But they said it looked like a chunk of the stone wall at the top gave way. They found a piece of his jacket caught on the edge.”

      “That doesn’t mean much. How old is the church?”

      “I don’t know yet. My buddy didn’t feel comfortable just leaving it to the General Assignment investigators. Besides, they’ve been trying really hard to make sure the folks out there have confidence in our policing.”

      The alienation of the rural wards was the popular crise du jour not only in Ottawa City Hall but also in the senior offices of the Ottawa Police, which had tried to address the problem by creating rural community police centres and fostering links with local leaders. However, specialized services like Criminal Investigations remained under the thumb of downtown headquarters on Elgin Street, with much of their efforts geared towards the inner city crime wars. But Sullivan was an experienced investigator used to running his own cases, no matter where they took him. It was quite unlike him to come to Green for permission on such a routine matter, but when Green said as much, Sullivan gave an easy shrug.

      “I thought you might like a drive in the country. See the fall colours, smell the cows. Get to know the rural side of our new amalgamated police force.”

      Green chuckled. Sullivan knew damn well that he was a confirmed inner-city boy with a passion for exhaust fumes, noise and decaying corner stores. But just as he was about to beg off, he heard a renewed burst of hammering downstairs. If he could trust Bob not to destroy the house in his absence, perhaps even cows might be a welcome alternative. As he logged off his computer and prepared to go downstairs to check with Bob, he felt that old quiver of excitement that always accompanied the hunt.

      * * *

      The forty-five minute drive to Ashford Landing took them alongside the Rideau River, past the bedroom village of Manotick and out across farm fields strewn with stubble and straw. Halloween scarecrows decorated the homesteads, and clusters of pumpkins dotted the yards. Sullivan drove with one hand on the wheel and the other drumming an imaginary beat on the console beside him. Behind his mirrored sunglasses, he looked relaxed and cheerful, although Green suspected he was probably fending off his share of memories. Farm life was an alien world to Green, who rarely ventured beyond the city lights and bustle, but it was only too familiar to Sullivan, who had grown up in a family as harsh and unforgiving as the Ottawa Valley land on which they had settled.

      But to Green’s surprise, a mischievous smile played across Sullivan’s face.

      “What?” Green asked, wondering what secret surprise Sullivan had in store for him.

      “I was just thinking about you. Jesus, if anybody would have told me... And you’re still smiling! Living in a dump that’s falling down around your ears, sharing a roof with a dog and two offspring as pig-headed and impossible as you are, but you’re smiling!”

      Green laughed. “I kind of like the dog, actually.”

      “Yeah, dogs don’t give you grief at the end of a hard day.” Sullivan sobered and cast Green a quick look.

      “How is our blue-haired girl, by the way? Still wanting to stay with you?”

      “I don’t know about ‘wanting’. More like I’m the lesser of two evils, parents being evil by definition. I also think she loves driving her mother crazy. Ashley thought she’d be back on a plane to Vancouver before the month was out, and it’s been almost four months.”

      “Is she still in school?”

      “That’s part of the deal. Thank God for Sharon, and for alternate school. Hannah picks her own credits, does her own course work at her own speed, puts in only half a day—”

      “Half a day! What does she do with the other?”

      “Cooperative education placement. She gets credits for it plus valuable job experience, that’s the theory. Hannah is working in a school, of all places, and enjoying it, so there may be method to their madness.” He sighed and rested his back against the seat. Hannah still evoked a strange mix of emotions whenever his thoughts ventured near. “I don’t want to fuck this up. Nothing Ashley’s tried has worked for Hannah, and I just want to...connect. But damn, when you’ve got nothing to build on but resentment, it’s tough.”

      “It’s tough even if you have raised them all along. Especially girls. There are times Lizzie doesn’t talk to me for days on end. Boy, you got to learn patience, and that was never your strong suit anyway.” Sullivan steered around a tractor hauling a wagon of baled hay. “But believe in yourself, Mike. If you love the kid, that’s going to show.”

      “If you love the kid...” Green thought. Not the pig-tailed imp of his imagination, but this sullen, spiky reality. He fell silent and stared out the window in search of distraction. Human habitation had begun to increase sporadically as they neared the village of Ashford Landing. An automotive garage here, a warehouse there and a sprinkling

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