A Trial of One, the third in The Osgoode Trilogy.

Chapter 3

When I write about Norma Dinnick, I can just see either Maggie Smith [Downtown Abbey fame] or Judi Dench [too many performances to count] playing the role of Norma Dinnick. EIther of them could capture the conniving nature of the woman perfectly. But is she lucid or mad? Read on! 

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 Be very careful, Harry! They’re always watching and working together! Was it Norma’s paranoid prattle or a warning of utmost seriousness? Whichever, it haunted Harry. With his dress shirt matted to his back, he drove out of the Mercer parking lot and down the steep gravel road.        

A vision of George Pappas loomed before him. That vicious hoodlum had an organization of unknown proportions behind him. His death did not erase the sense of menace now engulfing Harry.

          Arthur’s hiding the shares had exposed Norma and himself to great danger. Peter Saunderson, Harry’s roommate from law school, was George Pappas’ lawyer. On the payroll, Peter had spent his career unsuccessfully hunting down the shares. Harry would always be haunted by the specter of Peter’s dead white face as he saluted him, and then jumped from a bridge to his death.  Poor Peter knew his chances—I’m a dead man anyway. Pappas will execute me in an excruciatingly gruesome fashion. Probably castrate me first. So you see, this really is the easiest.

The afternoon sun dropped behind the hills, and shadows raced across the sunlit farmland below. As Harry wound down the road and through the darkened woods, he suddenly felt chilled.

Back into the light, he could see across the shrinking expanse of farmland in the valley to the industrial complexes near the airport. In the hazy distance, the towers of the downtown core clogged the skyline. Sprawling along Lake Ontario, Toronto no longer had any real beginning or end, he thought.

Suddenly, he smiled. Off to London in a few days! Maybe Natasha would come with him, even on short notice. Both of them needed time away together—she from her real estate brokerage and he from his law practice. Surely, she’d appreciate such romantic spontaneity. Longing swept over him as he visualized the curve of her shoulder and imagined the touch of her hand. When Laura, his ex-wife had left him, he had felt like a patient fresh from the surgical knife. But then Natasha had appeared like a soft summer breeze, soothing yet tantalizing him, at the ragged edges of his life. Although she wanted time for love to grow, Harry could not entirely extinguish his craving for certainty.

Of course, other people were far more expeditious when it came to love and sex. His deceased partner, Richard Crawford, the unrepentant womanizer, was never troubled by the niceties of emotional entanglements with women. In an apoplectic fit of lust for his client, Marjorie Deighton, the old man had dropped dead at his feet little more than a year ago. Harry never forgot his last few words. If you have not experienced the passion, the thrall, you have not lived! By nature, Harry sought order, not chaos, in his life.

Several days ago, Natasha and he had gone through Norma’s six-plex to list it for sale. Starting in the basement, which was crowded with shovels, garden hoses, and stacks of newspapers, they had progressed upward in the gray light to the third floor. As the heat pressed in, summer storms rumbled in the distance.

Despite his yearning, moments of intimacy seemed fragmented and distant. On the stairs, he reached out to steal a kiss. But at every turn, she seemed to float away, more fantasy than reality. In the third floor apartment, under the steep eaves, her cell phone rang, and she moved away to answer. He stared out the window as he heard her low intimate laugh. Who the hell is it? he wondered.