Pumpkin Eater. Jeffrey Round
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the sort of furniture people bought when they had no idea what they wanted other than to have something to sit on or to invite guests in for a drink and offer them a footstool and a surface to put their glasses on. Dan glanced over a shelf crammed with knick-knacks and framed portraits. He caught a laughing face with a ready smile, limbs over- and under-twined in a row of teenage boys. This was a much younger Darryl Hillary. Not long out of high school, Dan imagined. Exuberant, even hopeful, as he and his pals faced the future and all it might bring. He hadn’t always been friendless, then.
Darlene brought him his third cup of coffee that morning. He poured cream, stirred it into turbulent clouds and sat back in a worn brown armchair. It was comfortable, at least.
“Please, go ahead and ask me anything you like,” Darlene said, her gaze fixed on his face.
“I asked earlier if your brother owed someone a substantial sum of money,” Dan said, thinking of Darryl’s drug habit. He recalled the cop’s comment that Darryl Hillary’s fingerprints had been on file.
It would have been for some past offence. “I was wondering if anything came to mind since then.”
“No. I’m pretty sure of that.”
“Apart from occasional marijuana usage, did he ever indulge in drugs of the harder sort?”
She shook her head. “If he did, he didn’t tell me. I’d find it hard to believe, in any case. He wasn’t really an extremist in that way.”
Dan nodded. What he found hard to believe was that her brother had received death threats because he smoked marijuana. Thousands of ordinary Canadians had been busted for possession of cannabis and worse. Dan doubted any of them had been threatened with death because of it. In any case, the crime was long overdue for a scrubbing off the books, and probably would have been but for the righteous heave-ho of so-called moralists to the south, whose policies overarched and affected Canada’s own far more than most Canadians liked to acknowledge. But other than his predilection for an adolescent indulgence, Darryl Hillary seemed to have had little contact with the outside world.
Dan recalled Darlene’s voice on the phone the first time they spoke. She’d sounded frantic. Instinct told him there had to be something else.
“The threatening calls you mentioned — did you overhear any of them? Do you have any idea what your brother was being threatened over? What he might have been running from?”
She looked resigned. “I didn’t overhear anything directly. He said it was about his past. About … about the time he’d spent in prison.”
Dan’s eyebrows shot up. She’d lied to him. This was the first he’d heard anything about prison. Too late, he thought of the ardent courier and the file he’d left unread on the shelf in the hallway.
“For marijuana possession?”
“No.” It was a whisper.
Dan waited.
She looked up. A sigh escaped her. “The charge was ‘corruption of a minor.’”
Bells were clanging as Dan flashed back to one of the cop’s referring to Darryl as a “perv.”
“Your brother was convicted of having sex with an underage partner?”
She nodded. “That was a long time ago.”
Dan looked over at the younger Darryl’s photo-
graph again. His ready smile now seemed to be a warning against over-optimism about everything life held in store for you.
“Please don’t judge us,” Darlene said.
“I won’t. Can you tell me about it?”
Her fingers played with the nubbly fabric on the arm of the chair while she filled in the gaps in her story. She and Darryl were ten years apart in age, so she often felt more like a mother than an older sister. They’d grown up together in Northern Ontario. A poor existence, but not an unbearable one, she told him, like so much stage dressing for the story to come. The parents had been religious but the kids maintained their sanity despite their father’s constant preaching and his dire warnings of an impending apocalypse that he seemed to welcome and felt his children should as well. It hadn’t kept his son away from temptation, however. After his conviction, Darryl spent two years in prison. Following his release, he and Darlene moved to Toronto, hoping he’d be more anonymous in a larger urban centre. He’d stayed within the bounds of his parole and hadn’t strayed from the court order forbidding contact with his former victim. The girl, fourteen at the time, would now be twenty-five. Darryl had been thirty when he died.
Sometime over the last year, Darlene said, her brother had been targeted by hate mail and death threats. When pressed, he’d admitted that it was in connection with “the old business.”
“He hid it from me for some time,” Darlene said. “But eventually he had to tell me. I’m just not sure how long it was going on.”
“How did you find out about it?” Dan asked.
“Darryl’s behaviour changed drastically. He was afraid of going outside. He even stopped sitting out back in the garden. Until the letters and calls came, he spent most of his time out there, even in the winter. He loved the garden. It was his place of refuge. Then suddenly he just stopped. He used to peer through the curtains when he had to go out for anything. I could tell something was up.”
“And he believed the threats were real?”
She nodded. “How did these people even find him?” she asked, wiping away a stray tear. “The property was in my name. The address shouldn’t have been listed in connection with him.”
“They have their ways,” Dan said. “Your brother would likely have been listed on the Sex Offenders Registry.”
Darlene shook her head at the suggestion. “He shouldn’t have been on it any more.”
Under the new rules, Darryl’s lawyers had applied to have his name and record removed, citing his case as an unlikely repeat offender. As far as anyone knew he had been taken off the list, but sometime over the last year her brother had been targeted by hate mail and death threats referring to his conviction.
“You said the girl was fourteen at the time?”
She nodded.
“Making your brother nineteen.”
Brown eyes turned to him. “Not a very mature nineteen, not that it makes much difference.” She looked away. “I’m not making excuses for him.”
Dan nodded. “Their ages weren’t that far apart. Am I right in thinking she was Darryl’s girlfriend?”
Darlene nodded. “They were quite serious about each other. It wasn’t just a casual thing for them. He once told me they planned to be married when she turned sixteen.” She looked off wistfully. “You never saw two
people so in love. He was devoted to her and she to him.”
“The problem is they were more than four years apart in age,” Dan said. “So what is called a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ clause would not have helped out here. Even if they declared themselves in a serious relationship, he would still be perceived by the court as an older aggressor.”
She shrugged. “That’s more or less what happened. Just before his trial, another young girl was raped and murdered by her older boyfriend. It was in all the papers. It didn’t help Darryl one bit either.”
“No, I’m sure it didn’t.” Dan thought for a moment. “If you don’t mind, can you tell me how your brother ended up being charged?”
A spasm of anger crossed Darlene’s face. “Our father turned him in. He caught them together one afternoon.”
Leaving a trail of broken hearts and broken lives, Dan thought. He put down his cup and waited a moment. “Do you want me to come with you to the morgue?”
She