Fifth Son. Barbara Fradkin
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stepped in to head off the sales pitch. “What can you tell us about the Pettigrews?”
Sandy looked startled at the sudden change, then his face took on a regretful air. “What can I say? Sad, sad situation. The great-great-grandfather hacked the farm out of the wilderness himself back in the early eighteen hundreds, and his grandson built that brick house in the 1890s. Raised dairy cattle, owned the creamery here in town, had the best stud bulls in the county. Now they’re all gone, and the farm’s been bought by a civil servant from Ottawa, who’s not going to raise a single head.”
“What can you tell us about the more recent Pettigrews?” Sullivan asked. “Did you know them?”
“Oh yeah, everybody knew them. I went to school with the Pettigrew boys, and the adjacent farm is still in my family, thank God. What do you want to know for?” His jaw dropped. “Oh my God, was the dead man a Pettigrew?”
“Who’s been living there recently?”
“Just—just the old man. And Robbie off and on. He’s the youngest. There were five boys, so it gets confusing. But all the others...well...”
“Do you know where the others are?”
Sandy stared across the table at them in silence, his hearty façade quite gone. “If you think one of them is the body in the churchyard, I want to know, because they used to be friends of mine.”
Sullivan laid the photo on the desk without a word. Sandy stared at it fixedly, his colour slowly draining from his face.
“Holy crap,” he muttered. “What a mess.”
“Can you recognize him?”
Sandy wagged his head back and forth helplessly. “It might be one of the boys. It’s hard to tell from this, and I haven’t seen them in a long time.”
“Have you got their current addresses? Or any idea where they are?”
Sandy’s eyes strayed to the photo again, and he stared at it in bewilderment. “When I was growing up, they were a happy family. Religious and strict, but happy. I used to love to play over there. But they’ve had more tragedies than any family was ever meant to bear—one by one they left home, until in the end all that remained was Robbie and his father.”
“Could this be Robbie?”
Sandy shook his head firmly. “Robbie’s much younger than the others. In his late twenties, I’d say. But I haven’t seen any of the others since they were in their teens or early twenties, so it’s impossible to know. I mean, that’s twenty years ago.” Sandy eyed the photo again with a shiver of distaste. “Poor Robbie. Now he’ll have one more thing to contend with. Some guys never get an even break.”
When Green and Sullivan emerged from Sandy’s office, it was past five o’clock and the autumn sun was sinking fast. Green realized a quick check with both home and office was in order, to ensure that no major crises had occurred in either place while they’d been vacationing in the country. Sullivan, meanwhile, wanted to check on the progress his team had made in the village.
The massive white truck that served as a mobile command post had arrived and sat on the grassy verge opposite the church. On the outside, it looked like an oversized chip wagon, but inside it was stocked with the latest in surveillance and communications devices. The two detectives logged in with the scribe before settling down at the work stations. The harvest from phone calls and email checks was meagre, however. On Green’s end, he was happy that Bob had not knocked the house down and that no murders or grievous crimes had cropped up in his absence. Sullivan was less delighted to learn that virtually nothing useful had turned up, either in the canvass of the town nor in the intensive search of the church grounds. Although the name Pettigrew had surfaced a few times, no one could be certain who the dead man was.
But no one would be surprised if it was a Pettigrew at the bottom of the tower. It was a cursed family, they said.
Sullivan logged off, stifled a yawn and headed to the door. “Time to get back to the city, Mike. We’ve got the current address on this Robbie, so I’ll take the photo to him after I drop you off. Hopefully, he’ll be able to ID his own brother and we can wrap this up, pending MacPhail’s autopsy report and the tox results. We’ve found no one who saw an altercation or another individual near the church, and the victim had no defensive wounds on his body, so it’s looking like a self-inflicted. There’s no evidence to suggest foul play was involved.”
“Except the broken wall and the torn piece of jacket,” Green countered. “That could suggest a struggle.”
Sullivan shrugged. “Not much of one, according to Ident. More consistent with him trying to climb over the wall.”
Maybe, Green thought, but there were a few more questions that needed answering before he would be willing to sign off on it. Such as why had the man returned, what was he searching for at his parents’ farm, why had he chosen that particular church?
And perhaps most importantly, how did he get in? Ident reported no evidence of forced entry, the huge padlock hadn’t been touched in years, and the back door had been locked when the police arrived. It was the self-locking kind that the victim might have pulled shut after his entry, but unless he had the skill to crack a combination lock, how had he unlocked the door in the first place?
All in all, it had been an intriguing day, Green thought as they drove back into the city. Manure aside, the air had been crisp and fresh, the fall colours spectacular. The pace out here was slower and the sense of history more vivid than the life he was accustomed to, yet it was important for the Major Crimes Squad to be sensitive to the difference. He felt less hurried and discouraged than he usually felt at the end of a typical office day, and he was quite looking forward to an evening with his family. Even the prospect of the dismantled kitchen did not bother him. Maybe they’d all go out to dinner and spend a bit of real time together.
But when he opened his front door, he found himself just in time to overhear the full blast of adolescent wrath.
“Forget it! You had no fucking business going through my things, and I’m not giving it back! Even if you ground me for a hundred years!”
Four
Sharon Green had staggered through the front door an hour earlier, her head pounding and her feet on fire. Hospital budget cuts were going to do her in. Psychiatric nursing had always been emotionally draining, but as the patients got sicker and their inpatient stays briefer, it was the physical exhaustion she noticed most. She had spent much of her shift trying to wrestle a three hundred pound depressive out of bed into a bath, and she felt rancid from head to toe.
Hannah’s bedroom door was closed, but the pulse of rock music shook the entire house. Something the girl had in common with her father, Sharon observed, surprised yet again by how similar they were, despite having been apart all Hannah’s life.
Sharon knocked on Hannah’s door and waited for an invitation, well aware of her tenuous status as stepmother. A grunt answered her, but in her frazzled state, that was enough. She peeked in.
“I’m ducking into the shower,” she said. “Would you please watch Tony for a few minutes?”
Hannah was sitting cross-legged on her bed, writing something which she snapped shut at the sight of Sharon. She smiled, not at Sharon but at Tony, who was squirming in her arms.
“I’ll take him out,” she said unexpectedly. “I want to mail a letter anyway.”
Sharon knew better than to question the motive for this minor miracle. It was enough that Hannah was volunteering to do something helpful.
Two minutes later, Sharon peeled off her clothes, then stopped at the entrance to the bathroom with dismay. It looked as if a hurricane had hit. The walls dripped moisture, the window and mirror were steamed up, three soggy towels lay scattered on the floor, and Hannah’s school clothes were in a lump outside the shower where she had stepped out of them. Sharon gritted her teeth. Resolutely, she opened