Free The Carpenter by Matt Lennox Page B

fine. He could watch me all the way to my car.
    Dick bent down and picked up a stick from the grass. He held it for Cassius to sniff and then he hurled it across the yard. Cassius trotted after it but stopped halfway and just looked. Dick shook his head and looked back up at Stan and said: I told you I owed you a visit. Them things you asked me about on the telephone a few days ago.
    Stan came down. He got some beers from the fridge and carried two lawn chairs to the dock. They agreed there were not going to be many more days this year that they’d be able to sit by the lake and take in the sun.
    —How’s town? said Stan.
    —Same as ever. Say, do you remember that business with Simon and Charles Grady?
    —Christ, that’s a lot of years ago. King, wasn’t that his name?
    —Leland King, said Dick. Anyhow, he’s been paroled. He’s back in town.
    —I remember driving Leland King down to the provincial jail when his trial started. I thought he looked just like a kid. Remember how his dad—I think his name was George—dropped stone dead in that store of his one morning?
    —Only from hearing about it later, said Dick. I think I was still overseas when he died.
    —That’s right. It would have been ‘44 or so. Anyway, it was better for him, I guess, to die long before he’d see what his son would make of himself.
    —I expect Frank will pay a visit to Leland before long, said Dick. Tell him how things are.
    —It was Frank who was first on the scene with the Gradys, if I remember right. Frank was new to town. Him and Mary hadn’t even had Emily yet.
    —I see Arthur Grady sometimes, driving around, said Dick. He still looks after the living boy. Hell of a thing.
    —Yes, said Stan. When it happened, it was the biggest goddamn news in the county for a whole year. As big as the Lacroixes were … And Charles Grady, he was one hell of a hockey player, but I always wondered if maybe there wasn’t a little more to the story than what came out at the trial. There were a whole lot of people not saying anything at all.
    —Oh well, said Dick. I don’t think it matters much any more.
    They drank their beers and watched a boat cut across the lake two hundred yards out. The change in the colours had reached the point where there was an equal distribution of green and yellow and red around the shore. Edna had liked spring best because that was when she planted her garden, but she’d always said fall was the prettiest time. She came into Stan’s head abruptly now, as she sometimes did, and just as abruptly he tried to push the thought of her away.
    —So, do you still think you’ll retire next summer? said Stan.
    —You better believe it. They won’t have any trouble getting me out the door.
    —I was a few years past the thirty-five when I went. I lost money on my pension but I just didn’t know what I would do with myself. I still don’t.
    —Is that what this is about? said Dick.
    —What?
    —We’ve known each other a long time, Stanley. I don’t know anything else that’s dogged your heels like the Lacroixes, and that was, Christ, I was a kid when that happened. Now this with Aurel’s daughter, you being the one to find her.
    Stan rubbed at a knot in the dock planking with the heel of his boot and said: It wasn’t you on the investigation, was it.
    —No, said Dick. It was Lenny Gleber.
    —Look. I don’t know what I’m thinking, Dick. Maybe I just don’t have anything better to do.
    —I don’t think you owe that family anything. I don’t think you ever did. Judy Lacroix was a pretty poor-off girl with her illness and all, anyhow.
    —Did you get a look at the toxicology?
    Dick took a folded paper out of his breast pocket. He held it out to Stan.
    —You know what Frank would do, don’t you.
    Stan took the paper and unfolded it. He was looking at a photocopy. The reporting toxicologist’s name was blotted out. Stan read the date of the test and the details. He looked at the drug notes, and he said: Look