It was a wet spring. The ground didn't get a chance to dry out between rainfalls. Beryl tramped through the bushes in St. Vital Park, away from the well-trodden paths. She slogged through long grass and thistles, poison ivy and mushrooms. Mushrooms in June! That's how wet it was. Her sneakers were soaked through.

Something long, solid and rounded, like a thin baseball bat, caught her hard in the arch of her foot. She lost her balance and toppled to a sitting position in the drenched forest. With one hand sunk in the boggy soil she boosted herself onto a fallen log where it wasn't quite so wet. Beryl removed her shoe and massaged the sore area. I should have stuck to the regular trail, she thought. I should be home drinking coffee.

"What the hell was that?" she muttered. Something stunk; she smelled her hand. And then her gaze drifted to the ground.

Her chest clenched. It squeezed and let go, squeezed again. A female form lay next to Beryl in the woods; she had touched it. It was the shin bone that had caused her to tumble to the ground. Bone on bone. No wonder it hurt so much.

Her breath didn't return for so long she thought she would die. She forced it. Manually -- like turning off the toaster before it popped up the toast on its own -- it could be done.

With her eyes she followed the long length of the girl -- she was tall and very slender. Beryl hoped she was dead. Dealing with a live thing so close to death seemed beyond what she was capable of doing. She needn't have worried. This person was gone. Beryl knew this when she forced her gaze to rest upon the face. She had no experience with long-dead bodies, but no experience was necessary.

The dead girl's mouth was open wide. Mushrooms were growing there. Someone must have filled her mouth with dirt. How else could this be? Beryl closed her eyes for a long minute to give the face a chance to disappear. It didn't. A colony of mushrooms was using the head of a girl as a planter. It rained softly at first, then hard, like a punishment.

She held out her hand and the rain washed it clean.

Pain in her foot. Pain from the shin bone of a dead girl. She could still feel the hard roundness pressing into her.

She wished she hadn't seen the face. The mushroom face. But she had; it was hers to keep. Like a birthmark, like a tattoo. Let me go back, she prayed, so I don't have to carry this forever.

Behind the drywall were layers of mortar and cracked plaster covering wood lath. In some spots the lath had pulled away from the framing behind it. Someone had tried to repair it.

"I like this ripping-down phase," said Frank.

"Not me," said Jane. "It's my least favourite part. I like getting to the stage when we start building new stuff."

"Hey, wait a sec," Frank said. "What's this?"

His arm was out of sight up to his shoulder in a hollow space behind a destroyed sheet of drywall.

"Just a minute. I can't quite get it."

He tore away some more of the outer wall, reached in and brought out what looked to be a photograph. He took off his mask and blew on the item and then wished he hadn't as he coughed away the dust and sneezed four times.

"What are you up to over there?" Jane asked. "Do I need to call an ambulance?"

Frank sneezed one last time.

"I've found something interesting."

He took a clean white handkerchief out of his back pocket and carefully dusted off the picture. It was in faded colour, unframed and curled at the edges. It was bigger than an ordinary snapshot, perhaps five by seven.

"What is it, Frank?"

"It's a photograph."

"Let's see."

Jane took off her gloves and whapped them on the side of her leg.

"Hmm. It looks kind of sixtyish," she said.

There was a man, two women, a boy and a girl. And they did look like their time was the sixties or early seventies, with their tie-dyed T-shirts and long flowing hair, even on the man. The women and girl sat on straight-backed chairs, the man behind them, standing. The boy stood beside the girl with his hand gripping her shoulder.

"Are they wearing costumes, do you think?" asked Jane. "Or..."

"It looks like a pose for an album cover." Frank interrupted. For a group with a girl singer or two."

Jane put her gloves back on.

"I'll leave you to it. I want to get this part over with today."

She went back to her job and Frank continued staring at the photograph.

"Could you please turn the music down, Jane?"

Frank's head was starting to hurt and he no longer liked the songs. There was too much death in the lyrics.

Jane turned it off.

"Are you all right, Frank?"

"I don't know. There's something weird going on in this picture."

"What kind of weird?"

"The little girl might not be alive."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I think she was dead when this was taken."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

Jane set down her crowbar and walked over to where Frank was sitting on a crate with the photograph held gently in his hands. She peered over his shoulder.

"Look at her eyes," Frank said.

"Odd."

"Very."

Jane pulled up another crate and sat down beside him, taking a closer look.

"I think everyone else is alive," she said.

"Yes."

"It's her eyes that give her away, but I'd like to see this in a better light."

"Yes."

They looked at each other for a moment and then back at the picture. Frank turned it over. There was writing on the back, too faded to read. It looked like it had been written in pencil. A capital L for sure, and maybe a capital D, and 19 something, a date perhaps.

"I can probably get someone at work to figure out what this says."

"You're retired, Frank. You don't go to work anymore."

"I still have people there."

His words sounded petulant to his own ears.

Jane stood up.

"Okay. You try to figure out what it says. And I'll go to the library and find out who all has lived here."

Frank suspected that she was humouring him, that she had no intention of going to the library, but he decided to try to take her words at face value and dismiss his mistrustful feelings.

"It's no big deal," he said, as he set the picture down carefully in a safe spot away from their activity. "Featherstone probably already knows who all lived here. We could just ask him before you go trudging off to the library. I wouldn't be surprised if he turned up today while we're still here."

They went back to work.

"Garth has a powerful magnifying glass at home," Frank said, mostly to himself. "Maybe it will do the job of deciphering the words."

"Maybe," said Jane.

With a creaking rip Frank tore down the last of the drywall on the north-facing side of the house.

"Jesus Christ Almighty," he whispered when he saw what was stashed behind it.

As he parked the Taurus on the third floor of the Montreal General parking garage, Max suddenly realized he’d come without even making a plan. He’d driven back to Canada on a whim, abandoning the most elementary caution. Why had he come anyway? David was in a coma and couldn’t speak, and even if, by some miracle, his nephew recognized him and allowed him to stay, what could they possibly talk about?
Your father asked me to keep an eye out for you, but while you were getting blown up on the other side of the world, I was in Manhattan swindling a banker — again! I’m so sorry. Max sighed. His presence seemed increasingly pointless, wrong, in fact. Never mind. He wanted to be with him, and he ought to be with him.
Max slammed the car door, cast a quick look around, and made his way to the hospital. No cops anywhere. Not surprising, really — terrorists never finish off their victims. They leave them to suffer right to the end. Why not do as much damage as you can? No journalists, either. He learned later that they’d been corralled in a smoking room on the ground floor, and there weren’t that many anyway. The operation was over, and the radio was saying that David had survived … just barely. Now he was stable.
Max did spot a security detail, though, but not the usual hospital agency, which struck him as odd. At the entrance, the regular guards’ uniforms were burgundy. These ones wore navy-blue jackets. They were also armed and looked all ready to play commando.
“Can I help you?” An agent had appeared behind him with two more hanging back, and before Max could answer, the man added, “Journalists aren’t allowed here.”
“I’m family.”
The guard looked him up and down. Max realized right away that something was off. Two more agents ambled up in case they were needed as backup. There was no time to lose, and Max tore off down the corridor, looking for stairs to get him out of there fast. Already, he was cursing his carelessness.
He bumped into a nurse, who dropped her tray of meds with a howl of fright. First he tried the door to the stairway, which he opened without looking, but other agents had been called in and were swarming up from below, cutting him off. Max jumped over the handrail, delivering a few punches as he went, but it wasn’t enough. He was being held firmly, his head hurting, against the bars of the railing. He’d stumbled upon some real pros.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to visit my nephew.”
The men looked at one another. One pulled out his cellphone and stepped away to make the call while they took Max back to the corridor. The nurse was crying, and a well-intentioned guard was helping her pick up the things she’d dropped. Max was taken to a windowless room that must have been where the on-duty doctors came for a rest because it had lockers, a wash basin, and a toilet with the door half open. Someone offered him a coffee, which he refused with a grunt. Then they left him alone with one guard. What was this set-up for? Why didn’t they hand him over to the cops? Maybe that was next. A few moments later, he imagined Luc Roberge showing up with an evil grin. After all these years, I finally get my hands on Public Enemy Number One! Luc Roberge. Max had practically forgotten him till now. Of course, it was his turf he’d stepped onto, straight into the cop’s waiting hands. What a screw-up!
When the door opened, it wasn’t Roberge he saw but Béatrice, and the guard had disappeared. Béatrice stood apart from other women her age, thanks to her long years in the diplomatic corps, her manners, and her attitude: lofty, very erect, and impeccably elegant. She was radiant, even in this naked, cold, and impersonal room. Max hadn’t seen her for years, ever since the death of Philippe in 1990, when he’d shown up incognito — thanks to all the “wanted” notices — to be with his brother’s remains. He’d taken a big risk then, too, but he’d trusted Béatrice, who, during the night, had smuggled him into the funeral home on O’Connor Street in Ottawa. While she stood lookout at the back of the hall, he’d gently made his way through the floral arrangements, as though he had the place to himself. Philippe with the discreet and modest red maple leaf pin on his lapel, for which he’d given his life in El Salvador. Max didn’t know how long he’d spent beside the coffin, looking but not crying — he’d already done that. When they were outside in the parking lot, Béatrice announced majestically, “From here on, I never want to hear from you again. Don’t write or speak to me or David. Nothing at all. You no longer exist.”
Then Max had shown her the International Herald-Tribune, the paper Philippe had used to communicate with him once upon a time. Béatrice tossed it in the street. “Never, you hear me? Never.”
So this was to be a double mourning. Her husband was dead, and Max was shoved into the shadows. The idea was to protect David now that Philippe was no longer around. What galled him the most was not this decision; that was hardly unexpected. It was her intransigence … and all with that bedroom voice of hers. Max knew seduction; it was the basis of his craft, and he could only admire the finesse and subtlety of hers. The outcome was the same, but oh, how she said it. Max had gone from being a necessary evil to just plain evil.
A century later, here she was again, standing before him, attractive as ever. She looked disappointed in him, as though his appearance only meant more bad news, just another rock in the avalanche of the past twenty-four hours.
“How is he?” Max asked.
“The doctors are confident; in fact, downright encouraging.”
After long pause, Béatrice said, “I knew you’d come.”
Max smiled sadly. He couldn’t tell if she meant it or if it was just her way of saying it was too late again, that it was time to lay a wreath and choose a picture for the card.
“I want to see him.”
“He’s in a coma. He doesn’t recognize anyone.”
“I want to see him,” Max insisted.
“What’s the point?”
Before she could stop him, Max stepped around her and continued down the corridor. The teary-eyed nurse was gone, and the mercenaries were clogging the coffee machine, leaving only one guard at the door on the other side. He rushed Max to keep him from going in, while others moved in to back him up. Then behind him, Max heard Béatrice: “Okay, it’s okay.” The man hesitated, then stepped aside. Max glanced across the hall at Béatrice and opened the door. The room was in shadow, but his eyes easily spotted the bed in the corner behind a curtain. He approached and pulled aside the curtain. The bed was empty.

Chapter 1: 1954

The words drift over on the wind to the family of three sitting on the beach at Matlock. They don't know where the words come from. Sounds on the beach are tricky. You can hear a laugh or a bark from a mile away. But sometimes the words of the person lying next to you get lost in the waves.

The mother slathers cocoa butter on herself and tells the boy to do the same. When he's done, he smoothes some onto the back of the little girl.

"Don't waste it, Ray," the mother says. "There's not very much left in the jar. Your sister doesn't really need it."

"Yes she does." He keeps on till she is well covered. "There's still lots left."

Ray is seven and he wears two hats. One is a black cap with the name Gophers embroidered in gold thread. Gophers is the name of his peewee ball team. Ray plays first base. He chose the cap when the mother told him to be sure to bring a hat. He didn't know she was talking about sun protection. She has placed one of her big straw hats on top of it. He doesn't seem to mind.

Squinting into the sun, the girl smiles up at her brother. He smiles back and removes his hats to go for a swim.

"Be careful out there!" the mother shouts as Ray dives into the waves. "A little boy drowned here last year, ya know."

Her words vanish before they reach Ray's ears but the girl hears them and shivers.

"Time for some sand cakes," the mother says, and helps her daughter cut out tiny squares from the damp sand near the shore.

"Mmm," the mother says and pretends to eat one. "You now. Take a bite."

The girl sits in the wet sand with the water lapping around her. She is three, going on four.

"I don't want to, Mummy. I don't want to eat sand."

"You know you have to, so just do it," the mother says and smiles up at the people walking by. "And don't forget to chew."

It scrapes against her tiny teeth, grinds in her ears. It's louder than the waves. She gags on sand and tears, feels as though her head is made of sand and she could just lie down and be part of the shoreline.

"Clean yourself up now, before your brother sees you all grubby and dirty."

The little girl leans over the shallows and splashes water onto her face. She peers into the lake, hoping to see a fish or some smooth stones at the bottom, hoping to see anything. But the lake is cloudy and dark. And the darkness settles inside her narrow chest.

Chapter 2: The Present

"Greta Bower found a baby in her rain barrel," Gus said.

Frank Foote turned cold. He stepped out onto his front porch and closed the door behind him. "What?"

"Well, I guess, technically, I found it," Gus said. "She asked me if I could come over and give her a hand with her rain barrel." He gave his head a shake. "It was awful."

"Is it alive?"

"No, Frank. It's dead. Real dead."

"Oh, God." Frank clutched his thinning hair in both fists. "Whose baby is it?" he asked. "Where did it come from?"

"I don't know. It hardly looks like a baby anymore. It's been in the barrel quite a while I guess." Gus sat down on the top step. "I think maybe it wintered there."

"I'm sorry, Gus. Let me get you a glass of water. You're as white as a sheet."

"No sheet of mine, that's for sure. Since Irma died mine just keep gettin' grayer and grayer."

Frank returned with the water. "So Greta doesn't have any ideas on it?"

"She doesn't seem to. She just started to shake and hasn't stopped."

"Where is she?" Frank asked.

"I took her to my place." Gus took a sip of water and spit it out. "She wanted to get away from it."

"I don't blame her." Frank sat down on the step beside his friend. "Are you sure it's a baby?" he asked. "Maybe it's a raccoon or a squirrel or something. Sometimes foxes come into town."

"It's a baby all right," Gus said. "I think I can tell a human being from a fox. Jesus, Frank."

"Sorry, Gus. Just hoping, I guess."

The morning was cool, too cool to be sitting on the porch in shirtsleeves the way Frank was. Chilly sweat slid down his sides and a gust of wind brought goose bumps out on his forearms. "Where is it now?" he asked.

"It's still in the bottom of the barrel. I drained it. Ya see, her water had been cloudy lately and got to smellin' kinda funny. That's why she asked me to come over and have a look at it for her. After the water was emptied out I stood on her ladder to take a peek inside."

"God, I'm sorry you had to see it, Gus. I don't expect it was a very pretty sight."

"I've seen plenty of death in my time, Frank. I grew up on a farm. But yeah, this is the worst I can remember."

Frank put his arm around the thin shoulders of his next-door neighbour, just for a moment. "Who the hell has a rain barrel around here anymore?" he asked.

"Greta Bower. That's who. She's pretty upset, Frank. I should probably get back to my place. I just kind of put her on the couch and left her."

"Yeah, you're right, Gus. We better get moving. I'm just going to have a word with Emma and then I'll come over. I don't want my kids to know about this."

"Thanks, Frank. I'll see ya in a few minutes then."

Frank brushed his teeth and spoke to Emma, who agreed to watch Garth and Sadie.

"It's Sunday," she said. "I thought this was your day off."

"Yeah, it is, but there's a little problem at Greta Bower's place. I'm just going to check it out and then I'll phone the station and get someone else out to clear it up."

"Was that Mr. Olsen at the door?" Emma asked. "What happened? Did someone die?"

"Don't worry about it, Em. I'm sure it's nothing."

Greta was a wreck. Gus had given her a mug of brandy even though it was just mid-morning.

She explained about the rain barrel. "It's just always been there. It was there when I was a kid and well, I like it. I use the water for my plants and my hair and that's about it. The water got kind of yucky looking lately, and it had a bit of a stink to it, so I quit using it. I thought maybe the barrel needed cleaning or something. There's a filter on top to keep out biggish things and I did have it covered with lengths of wood over the winter, but I figured maybe lots of small insects added up, or maybe some kid did something. Oh hell, I don't know what I figured."

Greta gulped down the rest of her brandy and Gus poured her some more.

"The filter is really just resting there," she said. "Anyone could move it if they had something to stand on. Could you please make it go away, Frank? I'd really like to get it cleaned up in a hurry. It's supposed to rain tonight."

"You're surely not going to use it again after this?" Gus said.

"Why not? It's just a little baby. What could be more natural than that?" She laughed. "Maybe it'll give my hair new life."

She's lost her marbles, Frank thought. Maybe it's just temporary, from the shock. Or, maybe she belongs in a loony bin.

"You're thinking I'm crazy, aren't you?" Greta said. "I can tell by the look on your face." She started to cry.

Frank felt terrible, the way he always did when women cried, as though it were his fault and it was up to him to fix things. He touched her shoulder and gave her a handkerchief.

"No, Greta. No one's thinking you're crazy. It just surprised me is all. Most people would probably want to get rid of the rain barrel after something like this. But you're right. A poor dead baby is nothing to run from."

Gus didn't look so sure. He fetched a glass and poured some brandy for himself.

Frank left the room to phone the police station.

"For all of us, being dead would be better than living with him. When Charlie said 'no man is a man until his father dies,' I knew what I had to do."