The Heart Specialist Read Free

about a day’s drive west of Montreal. It turned out, however, that the girl had actually been living in Montreal, in the attic of our home, for months before her death, although no one besides my parents and me had known this.
    The violent circumstances of her death and the fact that she had been secreted in our attic directly before it were considered sufficient grounds to charge my father with murder.
    Marie Bourret was a cripple and a deaf-mute, alone in the world once her parents died. I have absolutely no recollection of her, although I have since returned to my father’s former house in Montreal and stood in the rooms in which she allegedly spent her last days.
    The prosecutor argued that she would have been a burden to my father, who was her oldest sibling and the most successful of his large family — a doctor teaching at the University of McGill with a young wife and family and prospects shining brightly ahead of him. The prosecutor convinced the public of this motive but had insufficient evidence to prove it. My father was acquitted by the jury but not by general opinion in the City of Montreal.
    He was allowed to keep his practice, an empty gift, for after the trial no patient would come to him. Then McGill gave him notice. The murder was the biggest scandal the city had seen for years and all kinds of people who had not met my father spent hours speculating about his guilt in the affair. We had to take refuge in St. Andrews East with Grandmother White. Throughout that winter and spring rumours flew. Letters were printed in the newspapers. An anonymous poem appeared in the Montreal Gazette .
    Here is the city of Mount Royal
        Built on a river of strife.
        Here is where Dr. Bourret once stood
        Pledging to save human life.
        Was the oath all noise like the rapids,
        As empty and light as the foam?
    And what says the poor murdered inmate
    In the still upper room of his home?
    This was the story of my father, Honoré Bourret. In a way it is also mine. Although my grandmother clearly tried to do her best by me, it was in her mind the minute she saw the squirrel.
    Miss Skerry, who had been at the Priory for only three days, looked on with narrowed eyes. The muscles of her face were pulled down in what appeared to be a permanent scowl, which was why I had dreamed up a nickname for her the day she arrived. The Scary One . So far she had managed only one lesson with me and Laure, which had been an utter bore. We had had to read aloud a random passage from the Bible and scribble out an explication. It was no different from lessons with Grandmother, who believed that the Gospels were the only reading material to reliably produce young women of virtue.
    Grandmother removed her glasses and wiped her eyes. “I must get back to Laure,” she said, straightening her shoulders and looking a bit more like her usual self.
    “What an introduction to our home, Miss Skerry,” she said to the governess. “One girl faints away at the sight of blood and the other delights in skinning squirrels.”
    “I wasn’t skinning it!” I protested. No one looked my way.
    The governess put a hand on Grandmother’s arm. “Please don’t worry, Mrs. White. Just tell me how to help.”
    Grandmother nodded, relieved I think that the governess was practical. “If you can bear it I would like you to stay here, Miss Skerry, and oversee. That would be the greatest service to us all while I tend to Laure.”
    Grandmother then turned to me. “And you, young lady, will clean all of this up, every last bit.” Indignation had brought blood back into her cheeks. For once I was almost glad she was angry. “Miss Skerry will stay here, although I do not expect her to help you. This is your doing, Agnes White, and you must put things right. The carcass is to be buried. And I want every trace of squirrel blood removed. The barn,” she said, looking around for the first time at my specimens, “is to be emptied of all