Excerpted: Saints Rest

I left and walked along the harbourfront, leaned on the railing and looked out to the water. The clouds were low. Ice was piling up along the edge of the murky water. The curve of shadow from the clouds was nearly blue.

I thought about the details of life that would slip in and out of perception so briefly, only to be noticed later, things forgotten then reinvented. I was thinking about Madison and the way she’d meet my eyes. The city wasn’t the same after she left me. I found myself, now and then, going to the places we used to go. Sometimes, I went to her apartment to keep an eye on her and the cars that came and went.

I pulled out my phone and made a call. It rang twice.

“Hello?”

“Malory?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Frank. From the Cormier Agency,” I said.

“Hey, Frank,” she said.

I looked down at the grey water beneath.

“I’ve got some more questions for you,” I said.

“If you’ve got time.”

“When?”

“Whenever.”

“How’s now?”

I looked at my watch. “I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

When she agreed, I walked back up to Princess. I was still a little drunk but it wasn’t far to go. I started the engine on the second attempt and pulled out onto the street, following the one-way streets back around to Union and then over to the North End, looking down at the grid of rail lines leading to the dockyards.

Saint John wasn’t a company town but it may as well have been. In Saint John, there was a company and it owned the town. It owned oil and lumber, railways, shipping, and trucking. It owned gas stations and hardware stores. It owned shipbuilding and construction. It owned the only newspaper and most of the radio stations. More importantly, it owned the land.

When I moved here, I thought it was unlike any place I’d known before. A billion-dollar Empire of oil, gas, and lumber while children lived in squalor of mold, mice, and methamphetamine. Malnourishment and impoverishment fed the appetites of the wealthy. No grocery stores in the heart but uptown galleries hawked cheap art at high prices, pandering to parasites.

I’ve since learned that every city is the same. Some just hide it better than others.