Free Children in the Morning by Anne Emery Page A

left with us that day all the kids, with the exception of the two oldest boys who strove to put brave faces on, were in tears. Not just in tears, but weeping inconsolably. The little ones clung to him. All I could do was wave to Sheila, turn away and head for the car.
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    Chapter 4
    (Monty)
    Delaney waived his right to a preliminary hearing because he wanted a speedy trial, and we did very well, getting a date in early May of that year. This gave me a little over two months to pull together the evidence and case law I would need to defend my client. I was particularly pleased with the report of our pathologist, Dr. Andrea Mertens. I had consulted her and Dr. Ralph Godwin. I wasn’t confident in Godwin because he didn’t seem confident in his tentative opinion that Peggy’s death was more likely than not an accident. The force of the fatal blow to the back of her head, well, it certainly could have resulted from a fall and it probably did, but he could not rule out a violent shove or a blow to the head administered at the top of the staircase before she ended up below. I could write the Crown prosecutor’s script when faced with that kind of dithering in court.
    Dr. Mertens was much more solid, and she had a very helpful piece of advice for me, which I followed. She recommended an engineer and accident reconstruction expert named Wes Kaulbeck, who, if we were correct in our theory of the incident, would support us with cal-44

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    culations of the magnitude of the forces that would have been required to fracture Peggy Delaney’s skull, and the mechanics of a fall that could have produced the fracture. I commissioned him to do an investigation and write a report. If the report didn’t help us, it would never see the light of day. As it turned out, it was exactly what we needed, so we added Kaulbeck and Mertens to our line-up of witnesses. I was enormously relieved to have some science in our corner as we looked ahead to the trial.
    I had my kids at home on Leap Year Day. Tommy told Normie this would be her only chance in four years to propose marriage to Richard Robertson, given the leap-year tradition of women proposing marriage. She informed him that Richard was just a friend, and she got back at her brother by saying: “I don’t hear the phone ringing, I guess Lexie must be proposing to somebody else!” We enjoyed our usual activities: jamming with my guitars, harmonicas, and key-boards; watching old movies on the vcr; walking around Dingle Park and climbing to the top of the Dingle Tower; and not-so-successful fishing expeditions off the edge of my backyard. Normie often went out there with an old fishing rod she had found years before. To my knowledge — and I would know — she had never caught a fish. But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, from her point of view, because it led in to one of her pet subjects: if I got her a boat, she could go
    “deep-sea” fishing thirty feet away from the house and provide a trout, a salmon, or a tuna fish for our supper. Tommy had a bee in his bonnet as well. He wanted a car of his own, nothing fancy, just a secondhand vehicle to get him around the city. That wasn’t a bad idea, but the rust buckets he saw in the newspaper for a couple of thousand dollars looked to me like nothing but trouble. Nobody in our family was mechanically inclined, so I could picture a car spending a lot of time up on blocks in somebody’s shop, and a lot of repair bills coming in. My take on it was that I should just buy him a good used car. But to his mother, Maura, coming from a family of seven kids in the Cape Breton coal town of Glace Bay, giving your child a car of his own was a little too much like spoiling him and making him full of himself. And she worried about him running the roads with a carload of other high-spirited young males. But I figured she would come around