Counted Among the Dead by Anne Emery

Author:Anne Emery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2024-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter XI

Monty

Stratton Sommers always scheduled a staff party in mid-November, to avoid conflicts with the many Christmas parties in December. This year’s event was on Saturday, November thirteenth, at the Lord Nelson Hotel. Monty knew he should have laid off the booze much earlier that night but, as Brennan would say, the craic was mighty, and Monty hadn’t wanted the fun to end. Well, the fun was over now. Every time he drifted off to sleep, he woke up and had to use the toilet. Rather than disturb Maura’s sleep, after the second trip to the bathroom, he retired to the guest room and got in between the sheets there. When he finally passed out, his sleep was disturbed by dreams, violent and unrecognizable images.

Then something came unbidden to his mind at three o’clock, that most dread hour, the soul’s midnight. He remembered one of the names in the laudatory article about Lorne MacCombie and his company, about some of the disadvantaged people MacCombie had hired to work on his building sites. One of those people was Cole Barstead, a lifelong criminal with a history of violent offences. There was an extremely violent robbery of a young drug dealer committed many years ago, and the two men accused of the crime had turned on each other. Each claimed to be innocent; each claimed that the other had laid the horrendous beating on the victim, which left the young man with a red ragged scar across the left side of his face and a no doubt larger scar on his abdomen after his spleen had to be surgically removed. Barstead was initially represented by Nova Scotia Legal Aid, by one of the best trial lawyers in the province. But the client flew into a snit when the lawyer, speaking from long experience, outlined the situation for him, told him how slim was his chance of acquittal based on the story he insisted on telling. So Barstead fired his Legal Aid lawyer, went and hired a newbie with virtually no courtroom experience. Monty was representing the co-accused, and he was able to get his own client off, while Barstead was convicted. It was a righteous conviction — Monty had uncovered enough information to know that it was Barstead who had administered the beating — and he was sentenced to eight years in federal prison. Lying in bed at three in the morning, Monty found his mind assailed by lurid images of what Barstead had done to his victim.

And then it was Normie. As Monty tossed and turned and writhed about in bed, he formed the image of his little girl being followed and then battered and bloodied by a vengeful Cole Barstead who was, in this late-night horror show, working for Lorne MacCombie. When the sun was up, and Monty with it, he tried to shake off those fears and images. He blamed it on the hour and on the drinking. He had no reason to think that Cole Barstead would be aware of the theatrical offerings of a choir school.

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