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because I fell asleep before I could bring it up. Then I had other things on my mind. I had horrible dreams and I woke up in the middle of the night with Daddy standing over me. It took a few minutes to figure out that I was staying at his house and to understand what he was saying: “Normie, sweetheart, wake up. You’re having a nightmare. Let yourself wake up, and you’ll be fine.”
    My heart was beating really fast, my head hurt, and I was a sweat ball. My jammies were stuck to me. But Daddy hugged me anyway.
    Then he sat with me in the bed, and put my head against his chest; 22

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    he kept smoothing my hair back.
    “Tell me.”
    “I’m scared.”
    “It was just a dream, dolly. You’re safe here in the house with me.
    Tell me about the dream; that will make it go away.”
    “There was a baby. And they were being really mean!”
    “Who was?”
    “Those guys that were there.”
    “What were they doing?”
    “I don’t know. I just know the baby was crying and screaming, and was scared or hungry, and it was those guys’ fault!”
    “Was the baby a boy or a girl?”
    “I don’t know that! I don’t have dreams about people being bare naked!”
    “All right, I understand, sweetheart.”
    “But I’m pretty sure it was a boy. It just seemed to be a boy.”
    I wished I could explain it, how scared and sad it made me feel for that baby, but I couldn’t. Daddy rocked me and sang to me till I fell back asleep.
    (Monty)
    The first thing I wanted to arrange with Delaney was a viewing of the scene of the accident, known to police and the Crown as the scene of the crime. I wanted to see where Peggy died, but I did not want to do this in the presence of their children. I left it with him to find a convenient time. It didn’t take long. Delaney called me on a mild, sunny day in late February to tell me the children were with an aunt, so I drove to Brunswick Street and picked him up. We left the Twelve Apostles and pulled up a few minutes later in front of the Delaneys’ colonial revival house in the city’s tony south end.
    Designed in the 1930s by Halifax architect Andrew Cobb, the white clapboard house had a steeply pitched black roof with dormers on either side of a classical-style entrance. The left side of the residence, which I assumed was the living room side, had a set of three double-hung windows; the right side had a set of two.
    We went inside. The entranceway was clogged with kids’ boots, 23

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    skates, hockey sticks, and other debris of family life. There was a sunken living room on the left, and a kitchen and dining room on the right. But it was the basement that interested me. We headed there without comment. The stairs were wooden and surprisingly steep, but I could imagine slipping and sliding down the staircase without suffering much more than a bruising. If you somehow flew or were thrown from top to bottom, that would be another story.
    And if you fell from that height and landed on a jagged rock, that would be the story we were faced with.
    I saw a little memorial the family had set up near the death scene, flowers and cards on a table.
    “Where was the pile of rocks, Beau?”
    He walked down the steps ahead of me. “They were here.” He pointed to an area to the right of the bottom step. “The kids were building their castle over here. They had planned to put up three walls and use the basement wall and window as part of the structure.
    We couldn’t afford to have that much of the basement out of commission so we told them they’d have to revert to their first plan, and build it outdoors. Most of the stones had been carted back outside when this happened. There was just the one pile left. And Peggy landed on it. Along with everything else the kids have to deal with, they are feeling guilty about leaving the rocks there. I told them the result would have been the same if