Forty Words for Sorrow Read Online Free PDF

night—that’s how it had started. She had thought at first it was Paul, a former boyfriend who got drunk every six months and called her at two in the morning, weepy and sentimental. It was Dyson. “Conference at the chief’s house in half an hour. His house, not his office. Get dressed and wait. Horseman’ll pick you up. Don’t want certain parties seeing your car outside his place.”
    “What’s going on?” Her words were slurry with sleep.
    “You’ll know soon enough. I’ve got a ticket waiting for you.”
    “Tell me it’s for Florida. Someplace warm.”
    “It’s your ticket out of Special.”
    Delorme got dressed in three minutes flat, then sat on the edge of the sofa, nerves singing. She’d spent six years working Special, and in all that time she had never once had a midnight summons, nor ever seen the inside of the chief’s house. Ticket out of Special?
    “No point asking me anything,” the young Mountie told her before she’d even opened her mouth. “I’m just the delivery girl.” A nice touch, Delorme thought, to send a woman.
    Delorme had grown up revering the Mounties. The scarlet uniform, those horses —well, they went straight to a little girl’s heart. She had a vivid memory of the first time she saw them perform the Musical Ride in Ottawa, the sheer beauty of such equestrian precision. And then in high school, the glorious history, the great trek west. The North West Mounted Police, as they were then known, had ridden thousands of miles to ward off the kind of violence that was plaguing the westward expansion of the United States. They had negotiated treaties with the aboriginals, sent American raiders hightailing it back to Montana or whatever barbaric pit they had crawled out of, and established the rule of law before settlers had even had a chance to think about breaking it. The RCMP had become an icon of upstanding law enforcement around the world, a travel agent’s dream.
    Delorme had bought the image wholesale; that’s what images are for, after all. When, sometime in her late teens, she had seen a photograph of a woman in that red serge uniform, Delorme had seriously considered sending away for an application.
    But reality kept breaking through the image, and reality was not nearly as pretty. One officer sells secrets to Moscow, another is arrested for smuggling drugs, still another for tossing his wife off the balcony of a high-rise. And then there was the whole Security Service fiasco. The RCMP Security Service, before it had been dismantled in disgrace, had made the CIA look like geniuses.
    She glanced at the fresh-faced creature in the car beside her, wearing a shapeless down coat, blond hair pulled back in a neat French braid. She had stopped for the traffic light at Edgewater and Trout Lake Road, and the street lights silvered the down on her cheek. Even in that pale wash, Delorme could see herself ten years ago. This girl too had bought the straight-arrow image and was determined to make it stick. Well, good for her, Delorme figured. Cowboys armed with brutality and incompetence may have betrayed those true-North ideals, but that didn’t make a young recruit dumb for clinging to them.
    They pulled up in front of an impressive A-frame on Edgewater. It looked like something out of the Swiss Alps.
    “Don’t ring the buzzer, just walk right in. Doesn’t want to wake the kids.”
    Delorme showed her ID to a Mountie at the side door. “Downstairs,” he said.
    Delorme walked through the basement, amid smells of Tide and Downy, then past a huge furnace into a large room of red brick and dark pine that had the leathery, smoky look of a men’s club. Fake Tudor beams criss-crossed stucco walls that were hung with hunting prints and marine art. A feeble flame flickered in the fireplace. Above this, a moose head contemplated the head of R.J. Kendall, chief of the Algonquin Bay police department.
    Kendall had an open, congenial manner, perhaps partly to compensate for his