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  “Good day, dear,” she said as if Catherine were an old friend, which she wasn’t. She sat next to Catherine on another antique chair, and Sue reappeared with a silver tray and a gold-trimmed teapot from which she poured Nora and Catherine their cups of mint tea each.

  “I’m very pleased to see you again,” said Nora with sincerity.

  “Thank you for seeing me in your lovely home,” said Catherine.

  “It’s my pleasure.”

  “Your art collection is amazing.”

  Her eyes lit up. “It’s my husband’s art collection, dear. I know only a little about art, and I enjoy the tackiest things, actually. But Saul’s father was an artist. Saul began bringing things, incredible things, home to me. I slowly learned about the periods and styles. I still really don’t know much about it, but I love having it around me. Some of the paintings especially become great friends when you live with them. They don’t talk back or anything, and I’m not affected by dementia, at least not yet, paintings do tell stories. Oh, listen to me! You didn’t come here for that I’m sure,” said Nora, laughing at herself and reaching for her cup.

  “It’s very interesting though,” Catherine said. “But you’re right, I came here for a very specific purpose and I’m grateful you made time for me.” She paused there, also reaching for her tea.

  “What’s troubling you, Catherine?” Nora asked.

  “I’m here to talk with you about the Larivée Technology Park project and some of the variables that you and your husband may want to think about, well, before investing any large sums.”

  “How so, dear?”

  Catherine began by explaining the evolution of the project, going into some of the details that had prompted this visit to the Vineberg home. Her audience was receptive and empathetic, and Catherine held nothing back, sharing more about her own experience at Mulroy Arsenault than she had thought she might. At the same time, she did not want to take up more of this wonderful woman’s time than necessary. She told her about what lay ahead if improprieties came to light. There were risks, both financial risks and risks to the reputations of all involved. She could not live with herself, Catherine explained, if she had not come forward to let the Vinebergs know about these dark possibilities.

  “Thank you, Catherine, for coming here today. I won’t forget it. You are brave for doing so and your sense of what’s right is healthy. I’ll speak with Saul and I’m certain he will be grateful for what you dared to say this morning. Thank you,” she said, laying her hand on Catherine’s just long enough to signify respect and care. “Sometimes, in life, I’ve learned, we like to make things so complicated. More people like you around would help make things simpler. At least, that’s what I think.”

  “What will you do?” asked Catherine.

  “Oh, I’m sure Saul is running his own review of the project to determine whether it suits us or not. He always does that. He didn’t get this far without being very tough, the toughest, even though he looks like a little cuddly bear.”

  Catherine smiled.

  “More importantly,” Nora asked. “What will you do, dear?”

  On those words, an image of her boys flashed across Catherine’s mind. Nothing about work was important. Mulroy Arsenault was meaningless. Those two young faces, two loving pairs of eyes, looked at her from deep in her soul, jarring every doubt and anxiety of the world around her. Everything in her life paled in importance next to her sons and the attention they needed, especially with the death of their father. The morning was now clear, liberating, sharp, sun-filled, transcendent.

  Catherine left the Vineberg home, relieved and proud of herself.

  Back at her car, Catherine dialled the Valhalla number and waited to hear her boys’ voices.

  But the phone rang and rang. No answer.

  What time was it anyway? Not so early that they wouldn’t be up already. Maybe they were blasting music and didn’t notice the phone? Maybe they went outside for air. They both loved the outdoors, the woods, the fields. This had been a great result of spending so much time in Beaufort. Their connection with nature was deep and firm within them.

  Her phone rang. She put it to her ear without checking the call display.

  “Noah! Jack!” she called out happily.

  “Catherine, it’s me, Kevin! Where’ve you been? We’re waiting for you!”

  “Kevin?”

  “Yeah, are you on your way? Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, realizing just how true that was. She was supposed to be at the office first thing in the morning for a team meeting. She had completely blocked it out of her mind. “Tell everybody I’m sorry, I’m going to be a half-hour, maybe forty-five minutes late, but I’m on my way.”

  “Forty-five minutes! What the hell, Catherine?”

  “Get it started, Kevin. Just get it started.”

  “What’s going on, Catherine?”

  “Nothing. Nothing’s going on. I’m fine. I’ll see you as soon as I can get there.”

  “Would you tell me if things weren’t fine?”

  “I’ve got to go!” She said with finality and hung up.

  She suddenly felt nauseous. The mint tea sat uncomfortably in her empty stomach. She had forgotten to eat before leaving the house. She made a mental note to not do that again.

  She snapped open the door of her Audi and slowly, hesitantly, grudgingly headed back to the office, taking the longest route.

  The boys had put Lennox with his back against the stone wall, tied to a wrought-iron chair, with nothing near him he could possibly reach. Other ropes tied him to the structure of the wall.

  Millet had had to pee, and Zeph had loosened his ropes just enough to get him to the toilet of the guest bathroom next to the living room. Jack helped to support Millet but looked the other way. It was a delicate operation, but Millet was able to pee, and the boys then trussed him up again beside Lennox. There was no way either of them could shift his position.

  Jack had brought Noah’s telescope stand down to the kitchen, too, taping Millet’s loaded rifle on top of it, and the result—all the more intimidating for being improvised—was a sort of gun turret rotating in front of the two men. They looked very worried as they watched the boys set this up. What if it the tape slipped or the rifle moved while one of the boys had his finger on the trigger? Their eyebrows went up, and stayed up, when Jack swivelled the telescope-rifle in their direction, and at first they were speechless.

  Then Lennox began shouting. “Let me the fuck out of here, you sons of bitches! Let me the fuck out of here!” Then, directly at Jack, the obvious leader of this crazy pack of kids, “Let me the fuck out of here, you son of a bitch, or you’ll regret the day you were born.”

  “First of all, don’t bad-mouth my mother. She’s anything but a bitch. Or you’ll regret today, the day you were wiped off the planet. You got me, Jeffrey M. Lennox?” said Jack, reading off Lennox’s driver’s license, then handing it back to Noah. He was sitting at the kitchen table with a laptop, looking through all the documents that had been in the men’s wallets.

  “Give me that, you little fuckers!”

  Zeph was busy digging for something in the fridge. “Hey,” he now said to Lennox, “haven’t you seen the movie? ‘In space, no one can hear you scream!’” Then he went back to his search for the ultimate snack.

  “What are you doing with our wallets?” asked Lennox.

  “Anything we want,” said Noah. “Really.”

  “You look like a nice kid. Tell your brother, this is crazy and he should let us go,” Lennox pleaded. Noah was untouched. He looked at his brother, then brought his attention back to his work at the laptop. Lennox was livid, but he could do nothing about it.

  Jack was about three metres from Lennox and Millet. “My brother Noah is small and fourteen years old, but don’t underestimate him. I neve
r do. You know what he can do, what we can do, with your dates of birth, credit cards, medical insurance cards, social security numbers, and everything else we have right here at our fingertips? We can do anything we want. Anything.”

  “I don’t give a shit, you little fuck! You’re only digging your own hole. What are you going to do, buy yourself a new iPod with my credit card? Fuck you! Go ahead, see if I care! You want my frequent flyer points, too? Take ‘em!”

  “We can do better than that. See, I told you not to underestimate us. No, what we can do is erase you from this goddam world. That’s what we can do. Just wipe you off, like a piece of dirt that should never have been there in the first place. Gone!”

  “Okay, kid, I’ll play along, what do you want from me?”

  “Finally, a good question.”

  Millet stirred within his bindings. “They think we had something to do with the shooting of their father, Paul Carignan!”

  “What the fuck?” said Lennox.

  Jack walked over to Millet and stretched duct tape across his mouth.

  Lennox raged. “I didn’t shoot your father! Stupid kid. What the fuck are you thinking.”

  “Ease up on the swearing, you’re in my home.”

  “Yeah, guests, right? Are you going to serve us brunch soon? Some waffles and coffee?”

  Zeph reacted to Lennox’s sarcastic suggestion. “Waffles?” he considered, then reached into the freezer to look for some, finding a box and rattling its contents.

  “There’re more in the cold room,” said Noah to Zeph. Then he gestured to his brother over to the laptop, showing him an Internet banking interface.

  Jack studied the screen for a few minutes. “You are amazing,” he said to Noah.

  “This one was too easy,” said Noah. “Got lucky.”

  Jack turned back Lennox.

  “You’re in quite a bit of debt there, Mr. Jeffrey M. Lennox.”

  “You’re not allowed to look at my banking information!”

  “No, we’re not allowed,” confirmed Jack. “But you are.”

  Lennox started to protest. “How the hell—?”

  “You’d be amazed what you can do if you cross-reference a person’s Internet information. And with your cards, of course, that’s not too difficult,” said Jack.

  “You really should have used a password more complicated than your home address. That’s never a good idea,” said Noah, fourteen-year-old master hacker. “And you used the same password everywhere. I’m on your Facebook account!”

  Jack glanced back at the laptop. “Twelve friends, that’s really pathetic.”

  Lennox glared at them.

  “What do we want from you? It’s very simple. We want the truth.”

  “The truth about what?”

  “Come on, Mr. Lennox, you know.”

  “The break-in? Is that what you’re talking about?”

  Jack stared at him, realizing the other avenue he could be exploring. “Okay, tell me about that.”

  “So, we broke in here. So what, your insurance fixed it up nice. Big deal! Is that a big deal to a rich family like you guys?”

  “No, not really. But why you did it might be interesting?”

  “Because I goddam felt like it. That’s why.”

  “He said ‘we’,” said Noah to Jack, who nodded back.

  “Who’s we?”

  “Me and Keith Davis! You think I’m afraid to name names. There’s a whole bunch of us here in Beaufort who don’t—didn’t—give a crap about a rich piece-of-shit shark like Paul Carignan.”

  These were hard words for Jack and Noah to hear.

  “What do you mean?” asked Jack.

  “What do I mean? Have you talked to people here in Beaufort about what kind of man your father really was? Did you, kid? No, I’m not surprised, you’re just like him, I guess.”

  “Like what? Tell me.”

  “It’s simple, kid. Beaufort was a cool place, until he showed up with all his friends and their big money. But he had to fight everybody, take land, this land, for himself or for them, Indians, Jews, Blacks, Muslims, you name it, he had all those sorts of friends. Fuck! This was a good place. A good, quiet place. French, English, we got along, mostly anyway. Right? Now it’s all fucked up, and half the land is in the hands of outsiders who don’t give a shit about Beaufort.”

  “That’s it? Really?”

  “That’s not enough? Immigrant after fucking immigrant buying up Beaufort County, like it was toilet paper to wipe their ass with. And what do they do with it? They don’t contribute to the town, they sit on their hands until the value of the land rises sky-high and then they sell it off to another arriving immigrant, someone in their family maybe. A cousin. And costs go up for all of us, that’s what happens!”

  “You shot my dad because of the friends he had?” Jack was stunned.

  “I didn’t shoot anybody!”

  Noah was frozen, staring at Lennox. “You’re an immigrant too, Mr. Lennox, indirectly, we all are,” said Noah, the wisest in the room. “Have you ever even read up about it? That’s how the world works.”

  “Fuck you, smart-ass punks, what do you know?”

  “We know the difference between right and wrong!” said Jack.

  “Really?” shouted Lennox. “You’re holding me against my will! I’m tied up!”

  Jack reached for a water bottle and had a gulp. He threw the bottle at Lennox. The bottle careened off the top of his head, pulling up strands of his messy hair, and bounced onto the floor, leaking out on the concrete. Jack didn’t care. Lennox didn’t care either, smiling back smugly.

  “There’s a line,” Jack said. “A line!”

  “What do you know? Naïve kid.”

  “I know where that line is. My brother and I know where that line is. And it’s clear, unmistakable. People choose, Mr. Lennox, to be on one side of it or the other.”

  “As simple as that, hey kid?”

  “Yeah, it is really. Noah and I didn’t have any choice—we had to learn where and when that line was drawn. What your buddy said was right. What we want is to know everything about the night of September 23rd, 2012. Mr. Millet gave us his version. What’s yours?”

  “I had nothing to do with what happened to your dad. Did I like him or even agree with him? Not a bit, no. But, that night, I was at a party with him,” he said, motioning to Millet with his head and eyes.”

  “We already know that. What happened after the party?”

  “Nothing happened after the party! What do you mean?”

  “Walk us through it. Come on. Say what you remember of that night.”

  “Your dad was shot here outside, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, whoever shot him was within a hundred metres of here. Why are you talking to me?”

  “Because you were out hunting with all the guys from the party. We know how that went down, from Millet here.”

  “So, you know what happened!”

  “We know you went hunting in groups between Brian Henley’s farm and our place. Millet told us you won the challenge.”

  “Of course, I’m the best shot of them all. I’m better even than Rob Morrison. I don’t miss unless there’s some damn good reason. Keith Davis, on the other hand, is a lousy shot, doesn’t know the first thing about shooting at night, and took a whole bunch of shots in the dark before he caught up with me. He almost shot me, the fuckhead! Why don’t you go catch him and tie him up!”

  “Maybe we will.”

  “Good luck with that. He’s a triathlete. Strong as a bull.”

  “Okay, but how smart is he?” said Jack defiantly. “We got you, didn’t we? And we’re not letting you go. Not until we have the full picture.”

  “I gave you the full picture!”

  “Maybe,” said Ja
ck, pacing. He gave Noah and Zeph a look, as if he was a young leader of a rebel army wondering what his next move should be.

  “Keith Davis, he owns Beaufort Hunting and Fishing in town,” said Noah to Jack.

  “Where everything is so overpriced,” contributed Zeph.

  “Fuck you kids,” said Lennox.

  “Hey, you’re the one who suggested it,” said Zeph.

  “What, are you going to get us all in the room? Everyone who was there that night?” asked Lennox.

  Jack, Noah and Zeph looked at each other in silence. Zeph threw Jack and Noah chocolate chip cookies. The other boys caught them and chewed in silence. Lennox stared at them, moving his head from side to side. Millet did the same. Jack walked over to him and pulled the duct tape off his mouth. He screeched with pain. Jack put cookies in his bound hands. Millet threw them off. The cookies smashed on the ground.

  Jack sat next to Noah.

  “Send the text,” he instructed him.

  Noah nodded, chewing.

  Keith Davis had built the Beaufort Hunting and Fishing store into a resource for the region when it came to game hunting, rifles, fishing rods and all the accessories you would ever need for outdoor sports in any season. A big part of his business was ski equipment, but that was something that had grown over time. Davis’s true love was deer hunting, and though he himself was not a particularly good rifleman, his equipment was top notch. Customers walked into his store looking for advice as a man’s man and industry expert.

  So, when Deputy Chief Tom Doran walked into his store, Davis’s first thought was that he must be planning a hunting trip. He would never have guessed that it was because one of his closest friends, perhaps two of them, had gone missing. Davis was looking over a new supply of hunting vests as Tom walked up to him to let him know his concerns. Davis was shorter than Tom and powerfully built from years of sports training.

  “Just thought maybe to check with you if either of them was going hunting, looking for ammo or something?” said Tom.

  “Nah, I can’t remember either of them buying anything for a week or two. Let’s see. It was Jeffrey that dropped in last week. Pretty usual order. You’re right, though, Jeff and Claude both shop here, and only here. I talked to Jeff yesterday”—Davis pulled out his phone and swiped at it with his thumb and keyed in to his call log—“No, it was the day before yesterday when I spoke with him. Just shooting the shit. Shit, time flies, doesn’t it?” said Davis, sliding a batch of vests over on his counter and reaching for an inventory list.