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Dismay.
     
One of the first things Laura did when she took over a manuscript was to start a timeline of events, to ferret out any internal contradictions and make sure everything lined up properly. But the events that followed her father's death defied Laura's best copy-editing skills. They were tangled and jumbled. They overlapped.
     
They bled into each other: reds and blues, forming new hues and strange mixtures.
     
Try as she might, Laura couldn't sort these events into anything resembling a straight line. The devil wasn't in the details, it was the details. A memorial service to arrange. Relatives to contact. An obituary to write. And a mother too numb to help.
     
Somewhere along the line, Laura's father was turned into ash.
     
As for the obituary: "You're the copywriter," said Warren, doggedly erroneous. (No matter how many times she'd explained what she did for a living, he never got it.)
     
"I don't write copy, I edit it."
     
"Whatever. Just write an obituary, okay?"
     
It was an odd undertaking, the penning of obituaries. A life tallied up and charged by the word. What to leave out? What to leave in?
     
The deceased's full name, certainly, with educational abbreviations, strung like semaphores behind it. B.A. Spec. Honours. Teaching Certificate (Industrial Arts), Athabasca University. A checklist of children and a spouse survived by (if applicable). Address and time of service. Donations in lieu of flowers. Flowers in lieu of attendance. A quote from someone wiser, more sentimental. "To every thing there is a season..." Obituaries weren't written so much as assembled.
     
"What does that even mean?" said Warren, baffled at the notice his sister had run in the paper. "Let Heaven be done, though justice falls."
     
     
"It's just something Dad said—something he wrote, a long time ago." Maybe he hadn't written that at all; maybe she had imagined it. But it was still a message. From their father.
     
Sergeant Brisebois had delivered the autopsy results in person, cap tucked under his arm as a sign of respect. He'd gone over the results as soon as they arrived from the Medical Examiner's Office.
     
Cause of death: "Blunt force trauma." No shit. He didn't mention the fact that the tracks on Ogden Road had all come from the Olds, or that the investigation had expanded.
     
"There wasn't any alcohol in the bloodstream," Brisebois told the family. "No narcotics, and no sign of cardiac arrest, either. His heart was fine."
     
Laura heard this as: "He had a good heart." Laura heard this as:
     
"He was a good man."
     
When Laura's grandmother had died, it had barely caused a ripple in the family; it was more as if their Nana had evaporated than expired. But with her father's death, everything clattered together, yelling for attention at the same time like Warren's twin daughters. Laura had handled the funeral and Warren handled the money, calling the insurance company, refusing to be put on hold, berating a series of administrators over payments due and procedures Warren deemed "unacceptable."
     
That was the first inkling that something was wrong. "The added coverage on your father's policy was too recent. It doesn't apply." This is what the insurance company told her brother. Read the fine print, bozo. As it turned out, their father had increased his life insurance in the week before the accident, more than doubling his premium. But a six-month waiting period was required before any added payouts could be claimed.
     
Their mother was now staying at Warren's house in Springbank, having finally accepted that their father was (a) never going to call to say it had all been a terrible mix-up, and (b) never coming home.
     
(Even after his body had been incinerated, she'd expected him at any moment; it was only over the triangular-cut egg-salad sandwiches at the reception after the memorial service that she realized she was, indeed, a widow.) Warren's home was in a cul-de-sac amid other cul-de-sacs, and their mother,