Free Seven Days Dead by John Farrow Page A

copper man.”
    “All right,” the officer says, clearly irritated now.
    “All right what?”
    The Mountie feels that she might be sassing him to make him look bad in front of their visitor.
    “Enough of that.”
    “Of what?”
    “Of that. Will you excuse us, please?” He does a quarter turn to exclude her from further conversation, and as he makes that motion sees Madeleine Orrock come down the stairs. She’s casually sauntering toward him. “Can we help you with something, sir?” he asks the man called Roadcap.
    “ Sir? ” Ora complains at his back. “ Sir? Don’t call him that. Not him.”
    Roadcap ignores her but answers the Mountie. “The other way around maybe. I can help you out, I think.”
    “How so?”
    Ora butts in. “I thought Dark Harbour people got nothing to do with cops.”
    “Maybe for good reason,” Roadcap suggests.
    “No argument there.”
    “Ora,” the cop says, “will you please be quiet?”
    “Dark Harbour guys never date us local girls. Ever notice?”
    The officer sees that Maddy is curious enough to come closer, but she has stopped along the way and stands observing them, listening in. That’s not difficult given the extended range Roadcap has deployed to talk to him, and his voice carries.
    “Sir?” the policeman asks, and he must also raise his voice a trifle to speak across the gulf between them. “How can we help you? Or you help us, as the case may be?”
    “Like I said, I came across the island. Overnight. Through the storm. I met Reverend Lescavage along the way.”
    “Oh I know,” Ora pipes up from behind the officer’s back, “he’s got a thing for you Dark Harbour thugs. His flock gone astray or something like that. Pretty funny when you think about it. I mean, he’s the one astray, right?”
    “Maybe we can talk about this in private?” Roadcap suggests.
    “Is there a problem?” the Mountie inquires, finally alert.
    “You can say that.”
    The Mountie gestures with his chin and the two men stroll farther uphill while remaining in the front yard of the Orrock mansion. They finally come within a conversational distance of each other. Maddy takes advantage of their departure to step forward herself, and comes up alongside Ora Matheson.
    “What are they talking about?” Maddy asks.
    Ora looks her over, exactly as she did when she first arrived, a kind of up-and-down assessment. “Not what,” she says. “Who.”
    “Then who?”
    “Reverend Lescavage. You know him, right?”
    “Family friend, yeah. I’ve known him all my life.”
    “Me, too. All my life. But it’s been a shorter life for me.”
    “So far,” Maddy tacks on.
    Ora agrees with that. “Yeah. Right. So far.”
    They see the Mountie extract his notebook and start to scribble things down.
    “So what are they talking about?” Maddy asks again.
    “That’s for them to know and for us to go find out,” Ora tells her.

 
    EIGHT
    Officer Wade Louwagie of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has made it through a third year on the island of Grand Manan. Coming off a lengthy stint with post-traumatic stress disorder, he’s taken to the place, and credits the island with his salvation. The Mounties have declined to take a page from their sister police organizations across the continent to provide expert counsel for officers with PTSD symptoms, partially believing in the mythic power of their famous tunic to hide what’s going on beneath the skin—and in an officer’s discombobulated head—but mainly convinced that the best therapy, perhaps the only therapy, is to get back to work. Officer Louwagie’s attempts to get back to work failed repeatedly, his anxiety clouded by alcoholism, leading to drug addiction, which wound up in long bouts of tearfulness and inadvertent panics, night sweats, the shakes, violent headaches, two attempted suicides, weeks of mulling over shooting himself, and one admission to a rehab center. Since the Mounties’ hierarchy contends, perhaps as a remnant from