“He gave us permission before we left,” I claimed, straight-faced, not actually knowing even vaguely if it was true. “He was glad we came, that we’d managed t
o find him in time to get him on tape. Been waiting years to tell his side of the story, so he wanted to do it as quickly as possible, someplace other than there.”
“Yeah, all right—but permission from the home, that’s what I meant. Quite a risk to the health getting yourself all twisted up like that, ’specially at a hundred-plus.”
“Mr. Sidlo’s an adult, detective. He knew what he was doing.”
“Not most of the time, according to his caregivers—including Nurse Amy Bedard, the girl who showed you to his room. She says he was barely lucid, tired easily. Says she didn’t know you were going to take him off-site, either, or she’d never have let you see him in the first place.”
“That was Sidlo’s idea, like I said,” I claimed, digging myself deeper. “Why don’t you ask him why he suggested it?”
“We’d like to, certainly,” Correa said. “But we can’t. Because he’s dead.”
“Why else would we be here?” Valens threw out, from yet another direction, making my neck twist so fast it actually hurt.
Dead. Jesus, no wonder they were pressing so hard.
“How?” I asked, finally.
“Natural causes, according to the paramedics,” Correa replied. “But then again, at that age, any sort of death is bound to look natural. . . .”
“Are you implying it wasn’t?”
“Was it?”
“I don’t know,” I bit off, teeth grinding slightly. “Not anything that happened, not after a certain point, just like the last time. Dr. Harrison would’ve told you how long it’s been for me, right—a week ago, basically? When I fell down in a Quarry Argent glass house, almost cut my own throat?” No reply. “Paramedics, though . . . who called them? Was it Simon, Safie?”
“The paramedics came with the fire department, Ms. Cairns, responding to an alarm from inside your unit.”
I half-rose, wobbling, only to find somebody—Harrison, it turned out—there to take my arm, pressing me back down while I struggled, panicked. “A fire alarm . . . something caught on fire? Is everything okay? Our place, all our stuff . . .”
“All that’s fine, no casualties,” Valens told me. “Except Sidlo.”
“You need to tell me what happened, RIGHT the fuck now. Or we are done here.”
“Calm down, ma’am—”
“Don’t you tell me to calm down! Holy shit, what is wrong with you people? I wake up and I can’t see, you tell me the guy I was talking to what seems like ten minutes ago is dead, my home might’ve burnt down, my son’s still in a fucking coma—”
“I have to agree,” Harrison said, from beside me. “I’m not sure just what you’re trying to get my patient to confess to, but you’re going about it very childishly, and I won’t stand for it. Cease and desist, or I’ll have you removed.”
“Listen, doc—”
“Eric,” Correa said, “he’s right; that’s enough. Drop it.”
Ms. Cairns, you have our sincerest apologies. It’s been a very long day.
The facts, as they told them to me, were these:
The Toronto Fire Department station that took the alarm at our building was #333, located on Front Street, less than a block from Sherbourne. The truck dispatched was probably the same one that seemed to turn up at our building every other week during the summer, when the change of weather plus the always-late switch to air conditioning meant stoves and grills started randomly overloading some apartments’ capacity to process trapped heat. After checking in with security at the front desk, the firefighters ran upstairs, where they surprised Simon at his station, “on guard”—sure, the loss of light and the fans turning on had been a bit of a shock, but there was no way he thought we had anything to do with it. In a way, though, it’s lucky he was there: they were all set to kick the door open till he reached in and demonstrated it was already unlocked.
Inside they found three things. Those were, in quick succession:
—Safie down on her knees, hands cupped under my head, desperately trying to keep me from knocking it on the floor as I trembled through another seizure; her camera, knocked over in the corner, was still recording.
—Sidlo slumped in his wheelchair in front of the drawn blinds, dead but not relaxed—taut all over, limbs slightly contracted as though electrocuted. The silver nitrate reel, clutched in both frail hands, seal intact and unbroken.
—Behind him, a scorch-mark spreading upwards across both blinds, like some giant, yellow-ashy pair of wings.