A Woman Scorned Read online

  A WOMAN

  SCORNED

  JAMES HENEGHAN

  Copyright © 2013 James Heneghan

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopying, recording or by any information storage

  and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission

  in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Heneghan, James, 1930-

  A woman scorned [electronic resource] / James Heneghan.

  (Rapid reads)

  Electronic monograph.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-0407-4 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4598-0408-1 (EPUB)

  I. Title. II. Series: Rapid reads (Online)

  PS8565.E581W66 2013 C813’.54 C2013-901928-6

  First published in the United States, 2013

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013904966

  Summary: When a prominent city councilor turns up dead in his posh

  condo, the police are content to call it suicide. But reporter Sebastian Casey

  thinks otherwise and sets out to prove it on his own. (RL 4.5)

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for

  its publishing programs provided by the following agencies:

  the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the

  Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia

  through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Design by Teresa Bubela

  Cover photography by Getty Images

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 5626, Stn. B PO BOX 468

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  16 15 14 13 • 4 3 2 1

  For my family:

  Ann, Robert, John, Leah, Margaux, Lee, Arran,

  Rebecca, Hank, Ruth and Bethiah.

  And for Lucy, as always.

  Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned,

  Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned.

  —WILLIAM CONGREVE, THE MOURNING BRIDE

  1697

  1

  Rain and blustering winds pounded the West End. Muddy pink blossoms littered the streets and clogged the drains. April was always an unpredictable month in Vancouver.

  It was Sunday morning. In the luxury penthouse suite of the Roosevelt Building overlooking Stanley Park, a man and a woman were finishing breakfast. The man had eaten hardly a thing, merely pushing the food around his plate. Finally he put down his knife and fork.

  “I’m moving out, Moira,” he said quietly.

  The woman stared. “What?”

  “I’ve already packed a few things. I’ll be gone by noon.”

  He was forty-four-year-old Vancouver City Councilor George Hamilton Nash. Slim from regular exercise, he had a narrow face, brown eyes and dark hair. He was wearing his black Lacoste bathrobe and tartan slippers.

  His wife, Moira, forty-three, had pale skin and gray eyes. She wore her dark hair short to the jawline. On Friday her hairdresser had taken care of the advancing gray, adding several blond highlights. She seldom wore makeup before breakfast.

  High-school sweethearts, they had been married for twenty-one years.

  There were no children.

  “Moving out? I don’t understand,” she said. She became agitated, pushing back her chair. Her table napkin fell to the floor. “Moving where?”

  “Not far. I bought a condo in the Shangri-La Hotel.”

  “You’re leaving me?”

  “Don’t think of it that way, Moira. I’m not leaving you. I just won’t live here anymore. My new place is less than ten blocks from here. I’ll be very close.”

  “But why? I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t expect you to get it, Moira, but I want to live my own life. I’ve been thinking of this for a long time. I need to be alone. I need to explore new things. New life experiences.”

  “Life experiences? You’ve gone mad!”

  “I knew you wouldn’t understand. Look—I’ve lived with someone all my life. First it was my parents. Then when I went to college I had roommates. Then I met you and we got married. Twenty years we’ve been together—”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “—and I’ve never lived alone. I’m forty-four years old, Moira. My life is half over and I’ve never known what it’s like to live alone. In complete freedom.”

  “So it’s freedom you want, is it? I know what you’re up to, George. It’s all those young women at city hall. Making eyes at handsome City Councilor George Hamilton Nash. They even call you at home. Your slutty city-hall clerks,” she said angrily. “Don’t try to deny it. I can pick up the phone in the bedroom and hear you talking to them from your study. I’m not stupid.”

  “Spying on me. Exactly why I need to move out.”

  “How can you talk of leaving?” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. “I need you here with me, George. My surgery is next week. You know that very well.” She stood and faced him across the table. “Wait. Just wait till I can manage on my own. Until I’m back on my feet and we’ve had a chance to discuss everything. A few weeks at least.”

  He shook his head.

  She started to weep. “George will never leave me, I always tell myself. George is strong. George is good. How wrong I was! Casting me off like an old sweater. How can you do this, George?” Her weeping grew in intensity.

  He threw down his napkin and bounded up from the table.

  “Wait!” she said. “Come back here!” She hurried after him, clawing at his back. He tried to shrug her off, but she clung to him, her nails buried in his bathrobe. “You will regret this, you bastard,” she screamed.

  He shoved her violently, and she fell to the floor.

  “You’ll be sorry,” she said between sobs.

  He marched into his study and locked the door.

  It would be good to be rid of her, he thought. He should have left years ago. Live his own life. Do whatever he wanted. A free agent. No wet blanket of a wife to slow him down. His new luxury condo was on the fortieth floor. Views of the yacht club, ocean and mountains.

  Alone. Sweet word. With occasional guests. He grinned at the thought.

  Moira hammered his door with her fists and then collapsed to her knees. After a while, she got up and made her way to the bathroom. She swallowed several pills and then lay on their unmade bed, eyes closed.

  She didn’t hear him go.

  Some time later, still in her housecoat, she paced furiously about their apartment. Eventually she crumpled into a loveseat near the high windows. She looked out. Wind and rain swept over a deserted Stanley Park. Tall cedars, firs and hemlocks swayed together in a wild spring dance.

  She bent her head and sobbed into her clenched fists.

  2

  Sebastian Casey made his way home Friday evening after a light day’s work. Light work suited him fine. Casey was not an ambitious man, seeking neither fame nor fortune. He lived and worked in the busy West End. He was a journalist, six years now with the West End Clarion, a small-circulation weekly newspaper. The ten years he’d spent with a regular big-city newspaper had been enough. Too busy. Too demanding. For Casey, life came first, work a distant second.

  Casey’s small eighth-floor Barclay Street apartment was only a few blocks from the Clarion office.

  Surrounded on three sides by the sea, the West End district covered an area of roughly one square mile. To the north were the high snowy mountains. Seen from Case
y’s apartment on a fine day they could have been the Swiss Alps.

  He poured himself a Jameson Irish whiskey and soda over ice in a tall glass. Carried it over to the small balcony outside his slider window and looked down at the street. Not many people about. Quiet. Faintly greening horse-chestnut trees. A squirrel was scratching about in Matty Kayle’s front yard over on the other side of the street.

  The whiskey started a warm glow of contentment in his bones.

  He finished his drink and took a leisurely shower. Stood on his bathroom scales. Checked his image in the mirror. Sleepy blue eyes. Hair the color of red sandstone. Since meeting Emma Shaughnessy last November, he had met his goal of dropping twenty pounds. She’d suggested he stop buying his clothes at thrift shops. Patronize a proper menswear shop instead. After she gave him a makeover, he looked smarter, slimmer. Best of all, he felt fit. He owed it all to Emma.

  He missed her. Looked forward to her regular Sunday call from Ireland.

  At the beginning of March, Casey and Emma had taken an Irish holiday together. They’d thought of it as a honeymoon, though there had been no formal marriage. They didn’t mind the Irish rain. It was softer and more forgiving than the Canadian kind. Its molecules had greened over eight hundred years of Irish sorrow and suffering. They stayed a week at the cozy bed-and-breakfast home of Mrs. Bridie Mulligan in Dublin, on the River Liffey. After that they rented a car and drove west to another bed-and-breakfast in Galway, on the River Corrib. This one was the home of Mrs. Annie Gallagher, a cheerful, pink-faced woman of comfortable girth. After a week with Mrs. Gallagher, they drove to Derry, in the north, to Emma’s old home.

  Emma was shocked to find her mother ailing. Over ninety years old, Mrs. Shaughnessy was thin and feeble. She was alone and getting weaker. Though she wrote to Emma regularly, she’d never complained of illness. Emma’s father had passed away years ago, so there was no one else.

  Neighbors had helped by moving the old lady’s bed down to the living room. For months the doctor had been trying to persuade her to move into a nursing home, but she had refused to go.

  Emma had called the Vancouver School Board and arranged a leave of absence so she could stay and take care of her mother.

  Casey had returned to Vancouver alone.

  That was a month ago.

  Now, he wrapped himself in his dressing gown and mixed himself another drink. The whiskey beside him, he settled into his comfortable armchair for an hour of reading. Then he would throw on his raincoat and go out for something to eat. Probably to the new sushi house only two blocks away on Denman.

  Sunday.

  Casey relished his Sundays. In the morning he usually walked or jogged the Stanley Park seawall. In the afternoon he relaxed, reading magazines and newspapers. The evening was for Masterpiece Theatre on PBS or for reading.

  But right now, after his seawall walk, he was looking forward to two o’clock and Emma’s phone call. Ten at night back in Ireland. He poured himself an Irish whiskey and soda over ice in a tall glass. It was almost two. He was ready.

  When the phone rang, he picked up. “Casey,” he said.

  “Hello, Casey.”

  “I miss you, Emma.”

  “I miss you too,” Emma said.

  “How’s your mother?”

  “She won’t get well. Ma knows it. She’s worn out and ready to go. I will stay with her to the end and do what I can to ease it for her.”

  “I want you back,” Casey said. “I’m no good without you.”

  “Casey, I have a confession to make.”

  Casey said nothing.

  “This is hard to tell,” Emma said in a low voice.

  “So tell,” Casey said, his stomach tightening.

  “You remember John Burns?”

  Casey said nothing.

  “You met him when you were here. John and I were at university together. I went out with him for a short time back in those days. He teaches at Queen’s, in Belfast, remember?”

  He remembered John Burns all right.

  An imposter of a man.

  Emma had introduced Casey to him one evening at John Burns’s book-signing event. A bookshop on Fountain Street, in Belfast. Burns had published a book of Irish literary criticism. After the signing, Burns had taken them to his favorite bar for a drink. They found a seat away from the television. Casey bought the drinks. Burns liked the sound of his own voice. He directed his talk mainly at Emma, while Casey sat and listened. Burns dropped names of famous Irish writers, Man Booker prizewinners. They were his friends. There was Colm Tóibín, whom John Burns called “Toby.” Then there was John Banville, or “Johnny.”

  “I was talking to Roddy at the Guinness Peat Awards in Dublin not so long ago,” Burns said, “and he was telling me about a small problem with his WIP.”

  “Roddy Doyle?” Emma said.

  Burns nodded.

  Emma looked impressed.

  “What’s WIP?” Casey said.

  “Work-in-progress,” Burns said to Emma.

  Casey had excused himself. He’d stared at the glossy white toilet tiles in front of his eyes.

  “Johnny Banville, how are ye?” he’d said aloud.

  But the white tiles had made no reply.

  Now, on the phone with Emma, Casey could say nothing. His throat seemed suddenly congested.

  “Casey?” Emma said. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” Casey said with difficulty.

  “Well, John and I started keeping company,” Emma said quietly.

  “Does ‘keeping company’ mean the same as sleeping together?” Casey said.

  Silence.

  “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” Emma said after a while. “But it did. What can I say? I still love you just as much as ever, Casey, I swear. But I had to tell you. I want no secrets between us.”

  Casey couldn’t speak.

  “Are you there, Casey? Say something.”

  “I don’t have anything to say, Emma.”

  “Nothing?” Emma said.

  “Only that I love you and want you back,” Casey said. “I’m waiting for you.”

  He hung up the phone and mixed a second whiskey and soda in a very tall glass. With lots of ice.

  3

  One of Casey’s main jobs at the West End Clarion was covering council meetings at city hall, following up on stories of interest to West End residents. He knew the councilors personally from frequent face-to-face interviews.

  Today he had an appointment with Councilor George Hamilton Nash in his office, just before the council meeting.

  Nash stood up from behind his desk to greet him. They shook hands. “Take a seat, Casey,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  Nash was a successful businessman and councilor. Casey had never warmed to the man. He didn’t know why. All he could say in the councilor’s favor was that he was a sharp dresser. Today he wore an expensive gray suit, white shirt, blue tie, black loafers.

  “Word on the street, councilor, is you’re planning to run for the mayor’s job in November,” Casey said.

  Nash’s eyes glittered. “Sorry to disappoint you, Casey. Man in your profession shouldn’t be paying any attention to rumors.”

  “More than a rumor, George. The smart boys at the Vancouver Club are in your corner. They seem to think you’d be a sure thing.”

  Nash shrugged. “I’ll level with you, Casey, but this is off the record, okay?”

  “Off the record, councilor.”

  “I can tell you nothing till I’ve had a chance to see what kind of support I can count on. If I get the support, then I might have an announcement to make. All I can say, okay?”

  “You think you’d make a good mayor, George?”

  “You know damn right I would, Casey.”

  The city council meeting, on the third floor of city hall, had been in session for an hour. Casey was doing his best to stay awake. Late to bed last night and too much whiskey had drained his energy. Couldn’t think. Except for the
image of Emma having sex with John Burns. He was destroyed with jealousy when he thought of the two of them doing it together.

  Now he was wide awake. Jealousy and lethargy mixed about as well as oil and water.

  He peered over the top of the city-hall media desk at Mayor Bronson. His ten council members sat in an arc across the width of the chamber. There were several women on council. Two more women, City Clerk Barbara Scott and Council Secretary Margaret Mullen, sat at desks one level below the councilors.

  The council chambers were two stories high. Four chandeliers. High windows partially curtained to diminish the light. Walls of dark walnut veneer. The chamber had a gallery built to hold a hundred people. Today it was empty.

  Like Casey.

  He thought again of Emma.

  His Emma.

  Emma and John Burns doing it together.

  Where? Up at the university in Burns’s narrow bed? Or upstairs in her mother’s old house? Or lying together in the heather? Copulating like rabbits behind the fuchsia hedges? That self-satisfied little nobody. With his book of literary criticism. And his Roddys and his Johnnys and his Tobys.

  He vowed to think no more of upstart John Burns.

  The media desk was long enough to accommodate eight reporters. Today, only Casey and a man from The Province were there. It was late. The mayor and his councilors were discussing a thirty-two-page report. The topic was backyard hens. Vancouver residents would be allowed up to four hens in their backyards. Councilors raised questions. Backyard hens would cause smells, noise, disease, rats and who knows what else? And what would be done about hens wandering from backyards and getting lost? Wandering into traffic? Causing accidents?

  There were answers. The culture around urban farming was changing. Sustainable agriculture was the way of the future. As for wandering chickens, or lost chickens, or abandoned chickens, the mayor’s idea was to spend $20,000 on a home for homeless chickens. An obvious solution. This proposal ruffled more than a few feathers as the debate heated up. There were other questions: Would roosters be allowed or would it be just hens? What about ducks, turkeys and geese? Cries of “Fowl!” in the council chamber.