An Excerpt from Noonday Dark
My new mystery novel goes on sale tomorrow, June 4!
The second installment of my mystery series featuring amateur sleuth Dr. Annick Boudreau, cognitive behavioural therapist, goes on sale in North America wherever books are sold tomorrow, June 4th! (UK readers will have to wait until Fall!) Please grab a paper copy or an ebook — and buy it wherever you normally would, but of course I’m partial to independent bookstores <3
The first book in the series, Primary Obsessions, touched on obsessive-compulsive disorder; the sequel, Noonday Dark, explores depression — as well as being a deep dive into Vancouver life and seamy backroom politics. Readers who want to start the series with Book 2 before reading Book 1 will have no trouble following. Now please enjoy Chapter 6 of Noonday Dark!
Chapter 6
i’m sorry i got weird last night mon coeur. trouble on the dark side of the moon. forgive me?
The dark side of the moon had become Philip and Annick’s shorthand, over recent months, for the parts of their lives cut off to the other. If Annick were troubled by something she couldn’t keep hermetically sealed inside her work life, but likewise couldn’t explain to Philip without violating patient confidentiality, it would explain her irritability, or curtness, or absent-mindedness. Philip would know to cut her some slack. He, likewise, could make use of the system if he had to protect a source for one of his stories, though perhaps unsurprisingly the issue didn’t come up so much in the field of science reporting, where Philip was just as likely to be filing a story on the literal dark side of the actual moon.
When Annick had noticed, at the beginning of the week, that this particular day of appointments wouldn’t get properly underway until 11 a.m., she’d allowed herself the girlish fantasy of a slow, lazy morning, forestalling her entry into the cold, grey damp until the last possible moments. Instead, she’d arrived early, just a few minutes after Cedric, and begun poring over her notes from past sessions with Danielle, to see if it were possible—of course it was possible; it was always possible—that she’d missed something.
Her phone vibrated.
It’s fine. We can talk about it later if you want. I don’t like having stuff from the past that I have *never* hidden thrown in my face. Have always been straight up with you.
Annick sighed; she didn’t know what she’d expected to accomplish with the text, but this certainly hadn’t been it. They had sat through the previous evening’s movie with chilly indifference, towards it and each other, going to bed at different times. She let out a deep and dispirited exhalation, and set to writing what she hoped was a contrite but dignified response. But she was interrupted by the shrill double-ring of the phone on her desk.
“Hi, Marcel.”
“Hello, Dr. Boudreau,” answered Marcel, with the unflagging professionalism he brought to all of the clinic’s incoming and outgoing communication. “There is a Mr. MacFadden here at the front who would like to see you? He says that he does not have an appointment.”
“No,” Annick said, her heart picking up, “no, he doesn’t. It’s fine, send him down. Thanks Marcel.”
Annick imagined that she could hear Marcel beginning to direct the visitor down the corridor towards her office as she was hanging up the phone, and that she was picking up the tail end of the directions viva voce as she stood and opened her door to welcome him. At the end of the short hallway, turning the corner a few yards from her office, came a white man in his late sixties, wearing mismatched denim shirt and jeans and a Gore-Tex jacket from the days of their pure and hideous utility, before they were created as design objects.
Still walking towards her from the hallway, the man croaked a question at her, somehow with a heavy valence of confidence despite its being a question: “You’re the shrink? Boudreau?”
“I’m Dr. Boudreau.”
“Ivor MacFadden,” he said, then gave a wet cough that could have been a smoker’s cough or could have been a man trying not to cry. Then, with the same perfectly gruff modulation, he added: “I’m trying to find my daughter.”
“Why don’t you come into my office, Mr. MacFadden?”
“Ivor.”
“Annick.”
Ivor nodded stiffly, and followed Annick into the office, taking in the details of the room with a journalist’s reflexive curiosity as he sat down in the chair where Danielle had sat the previous week.
MacFadden gave a vague, all-purpose nod, but Annick wasn’t sure how she was meant to interpret it because his face seemed to be drawn into something like a permanent squint.
“Can I get you anything, Ivor? A glass of water or a cup of coffee, tea?”
“Too early in the day to drink anything useful.”
“Okay,” Annick said, smiling softly.
Ivor wiped his face with both of his large hands and stared at Annick. It was always an interesting thing when very beautiful women looked a great deal like their fathers. If one knew the father first, it was usually considered at least a little funny, if not slightly unfortunate for the poor girl. But when Annick and Philip had watched 12 Angry Men, their first sustained exposure to Henry Fonda, neither could get over how pretty he looked, owing to his strong resemblance to Jane. Annick brought the same daughter-first sensibility to Ivor’s features, and saw the girl’s loveliness cast back a generation underneath the silver beard and wild eyebrows of the father, in his cheekbones and on the bridge of his nose, the large and intelligent eyes. Ivor MacFadden had been a Vancouver legend—not a founding member of Greenpeace, but a fellow-traveller and its bard; an editorialist but always, also, a shoe-leather reporter. He had exposed governments municipal and provincial, brought low federal cabinet ministers, and the deep moral assurance of those years was still written into the lines of his face.
“They said my daughter killed herself.”
“I got a phone call from the VPD yesterday telling me that that was their assumption. It was an awful call to get—I can’t imagine how much worse it was for you. I’m so sorry.”
“They found a suicide note.”
Annick gave the kind of nod that could have been a confirmation, or just empathetic listening. Ivor wasn’t put off by the tactic.
“I say they found a suicide note.”
“Yes, I heard you.”
“What do you make of that?”
“I can’t imagine how difficult this must be. But I—it would be inappropriate for me, and I really have no grounds, for speculating on an open police investigation.”
“Open! Open and shut. Girl’s reported missing by the old lady on the main floor who brings up the mail, they find old empty bottles of antidepressants in the suite, they find a suicide note, how much sniffing around do you think they keep doing after that?”
“I don’t know,” Annick answered, entirely honestly.
“Sure. I’ll bet there’s a lot you don’t know. Otherwise, how else does a young woman end up coming in here, giving you however many months of her time, however many hundreds of her dollars, and still somehow, she’s in a state of popping pills and leaving suicide notes?”
“Mr. MacFadden, I can’t imagine the pain you must be feeling at the moment. I would ask you, though, to address yourself to that pain, rather than coming into my office and impugning not only my work, but also your daughter, from a position of spectacularly splendid ignorance. Is that clear?”
Annick had seen that look before: the look that appears when two people, meeting in a professional context, bite down on the hard kernel of shared blue-collar mettle. Far from angering or alienating MacFadden, Annick’s response had clearly passed some sort of smell test for him.
“But you don’t think she killed herself.”
“Listen, I’m not—”
“Don’t worry about the confidentiality song and dance, I’m still the goddamn next of kin, for Chrissakes. So we don’t talk, well—okay. That’s not my choice. I’m still her goddamn father and the institutions of Western liberal democracy haven’t entirely eroded into the soup of postmodern relativist whims just yet, and so as the father of a missing young woman, presumed dead by suicide, I’m still entitled to some information, from the police department if not from the inviolable spiral-ring notebook of some psychiatrist. Alright?”
“Actually, I’m a psychologist.”
“Same thing.”
“Not really, no.”
Ivor sighed loudly. “The cops told me that you said you didn’t think she’d killed herself.” After pronouncing what he knew, and how he knew it, a neediness shifted into MacFadden’s body language. The heel of his left foot began bouncing, and his chin dropped slightly, and Annick realized now that this was the closest Ivor MacFadden could bring himself to pleading. “Is that true? You don’t think my daughter’s dead?”
Annick shook her head in a way that could have been a no, or could have been more empathetic listening, as she calculated the ethical parameters of the situation. Whether or not they were estranged, MacFadden was right: he was Danielle’s next of kin. Danielle had even listed him as such with the clinic. Given the context, Annick saw no reason why she couldn’t confirm what the police had already told him.
“In my opinion, as I told the police—I had no reason to believe, from my most recent interactions with Danielle, that there was any imminent threat of self-harm.” Annick looked at his pleading eyes, so much like his daughter’s only filled with fear and dread and searching hope, and spoke again before she realized she was adding anything: “In fact, quite the opposite.”
Ivor’s facial expression didn’t change, but he sat nodding for several seconds, then shot up out of the chair and stepped towards the door.
“Thank you,” he said without turning. “I’ll let you know if I need any help finding my daughter.”
Can't wait to get a copy...!