The Noon God Read Online Free PDF

a new woman? I would feel terrible for dragging you home and worrying you if he came rolling in like a naughty schoolboy.”
    “ But he never disappears like that. Even when he stays out, he always checks his messages.”
    “ When he didn’t return my calls on Monday and Wednesday I got worried. I checked the house. His mail hadn’t been picked up and the dishes from our dinner Sunday night were still in the dishwasher. The neighbours hadn’t seen him since the weekend. So I called the police.”
    “ You should have called me,” Lucy sniffed.
    “ I know.”
    “ Where did they find him?”
    “ In a storage room at the faculty. It looks like he was killed outside the entrance from the parking lot and dragged to the room where he was left.”
    “ Where was his car?”
    “ It was in the garage at home,” I said. “He probably walked to the office. That’s what he usually did in the summer.”
    Lucy nodded. I could see her working it out mentally. If Daddy had walked to the office he would have cut across the parking lot and gone into the building through the back entrance, just as if he’d been driving. His beat up Volvo was well known to his colleagues. The police might have found him sooner if it had been left in the lot.
    “ Was he robbed?” Trust Lucy to cut to the chase. Because of her weight problem and because her eyes often appeared dull, Daddy thought Lucy was not very bright. It was true her movements were usually slow. Just the same I believed Lucy had inherited both my father’s quick mind and my mother’s sensitivity and intuition. She seemed to have a knack for sliding right to the heart of logical matters.
    I thought if she could get a handle on her self-esteem Lucy would be a sharp young lady. She might be able to overcome her chronic over-eating and she would almost certainly perform better at school.
    “ They don’t think it was robbery,” I answered. “His credit cards and cash were still in his wallet.”
    “ Did he suffer?” Lucy’s lip began to tremble.
    “ No. The Medical Examiner said Daddy didn’t feel anything. There was only one shot, straight through the centre of the forehead. He probably wasn’t even aware of what was happening.”
    “ But why, Mona? Why Daddy?” Lucy had a blind spot when it came to Daddy. In her eyes he could do no wrong. It was always that way with Lucy when she loved someone. I think it was because she lost Mom when she was an infant. Since then she’d spent her life transferring her need for love from one surrogate to the next: first to Helen, then to Gail and finally to Daddy.
    And now he was gone.
    There was nothing to be gained by pointing out his obvious flaws to Lucy. He was a proud, arrogant man who must have fostered a number of enemies throughout his illustrious career. Jealousy runs amok in the artistic world. Other fine Canadian writers had been overlooked time and again in favour of Daddy’s grand style and masterful prose. I had escorted him to literary gatherings in cities across North America. It was always the same. As soon as we arrived on the scene the established cloisters would dissipate and all attention would be diverted towards the great J. Caesar Fortune, Man of Words, Lord of Ideas.
    Of course Daddy deserved his measure of success. He had earned it through a great deal of effort and a refusal to settle for “less than”. But that didn’t make the green pill any easier for his contemporaries to swallow.
    And then there were the women. In addition to being professionally superior to his peers, Daddy was also a known womaniser. Since Mommy’s death I had long ago lost count of the number of women in his life. Some were fleeting, tiring of his inattention and disappearing as quickly as they had appeared. Others stayed with him for years, tolerating his lack of availability with good humour. Often we would see more than one of his ladies at a gathering. Rather than becoming awkward the situation was usually cause for gentle