A Door in the River by Inger Ash Wolfe Page A

generation never had time to pity itself: we had work to do.”
    She drove her mother, more or less in silence, to Gary Pass’s office, although Hazel turned the radio on halfway there to cut through her mother’s fuming. Emily reached over and turned it off. Gary had recently moved his office farther down Pearl Street, to take advantage of the extension of “Mall Row,” due to happen some time in 2006. It seemed that developers were taking a gamble on the growth rate in Westmuir, and they were placing a lot of their bets on Port Dundas. In 1995, you couldn’t find a grocery store north of Mayfair larger than two hundred square metres, now you shopped in football fields. Down on Pearl there was a giant Canadian Tire that had replaced the little one on Main Street in 2001, a big discount clothing chain, and a bunch of big chain eateries. The seventy-seat That’s a Spicy Meatball! was giving Fraternelli’s Osteria a run for its money. Everyone called this progress, but no one could say whose progress it was.
    Gary Pass’s new office was still half in boxes, and his receptionist apologized to them and took them directly into the doctor’s private office, where they waited for him to appear. Emily sat stone-faced, looking at pictures of Gary’s kids on the walls. Finally, he entered and tried togive both of them hugs, but he had to accept a handshake from Hazel’s mother. “So,” he said, taking his seat behind his desk, “what’s going on?”
    “My daughter thinks I’m an old woman,” Emily said. “She thinks you have a pill for that.”
    “We just might,” said Pass, smiling a little too warmly. It made Emily sit far back in her chair, like a truculent teenager.
    “She’s lethargic,” said Hazel. “She has no appetite, she falls asleep in the middle of the day in front of the television, and her colour is bad. She thinks it’s normal.”
    “Do you think it’s normal, Your Honour?”
    “Don’t be sarcastic with me, Gary, unless you want to hear some stories about how much your mother worried about your toileting when you were a boy.”
    The smile faltered, just a little. “I got over that. What can I help you with?”
    “I eat, I sleep, I celebrate the million little things that make old age such a joy. I’m a little more tired than I used to be. I don’t sleep as well at night.”
    “She’s fried all day long,” Hazel said.
    Pass held a hand up. “Listen, it’s time for a checkup anyway . Let’s do our normal bloodwork, listen to your heart, take your pressure, check your eyes, and so on. If there’s anything amiss, it’ll turn up. Okay?”
    Hazel looked at her mother, who was still staring at Pass, or perhaps through him. “Is that okay, Mum?”
    “When I was elected mayor of this town for the first time, you were drinking from a sippy cup,” Emily said quietly. “Now you want to listen to my heart.”
    Hazel and Pass waited for where this thought was going to lead her, but that was it. Pass stood up and squared a couple of file folders with a clack on his desk. “Well, then, why don’t we move into one of the exam rooms, and we can get started.”
    It was eleven in the morning when Roland Forbes arrived back on Queesik Bay Road. Hazel had wanted him to go back right away the afternoon before, but he convinced her he’d been sufficiently noticed by Earl/Tate to warrant just a bit of discretion on their parts. Good instincts, Gumshoe . Needing to be around for an extended period of time in broad daylight was going to take a light touch, though. For one thing, he couldn’t go back down in the unmarked, in case someone had really taken notice of him. He borrowed Hazel’s personal car, instead, a Mazda 3 with eighty thousand kilometres on it. It was a 2003: she’d put all that mileage on her car driving the ten kilometres back and forth from Pember Lake to Port Dundas. It looked like a woman’s car, too, a category he thought included all Datsuns and Mazdas.
    The main road on the