As Fortin neared his body to take Lyle’s gun away he was puzzled by the heap of colors and shapes under and near him, trying to determine what it could be then – Oh God! Oh no! He saw a tiny hand, a face, another face, and the awful truth shrieked with such velocity he vomited.

Billy Dolan, aged [PI1]six, his sister, Daisy, aged five, were also killed by Fortin’s rounds.

He never saw them standing behind their father, blocked by the porch wall. Never saw them until now. Tiny eyes, frozen open, stared at the stars in the vast prairie sky. Their little bodies shook slightly, from the tugging by their three-year-old sister, Lori.

“Billy, wake up! Daisy, wake up!”

Fortin fell to his knees over the children, his body shaking as he reached for his radio, his trembling hand slipping in the rain.

-Chapter 7-

Southern Alberta

The moments after the shooting were like a dark dream for Will Fortin.

For an instant he hurled through an out-of-body rush, blood hammering in his ears, his scalp tingling.

Lyle Dolan was dead. Six-year-old Billy Dolan was dead. His five-year-old sister, Daisy Dolan, was dead.

I shot them all. I killed them all.

Fortin remembered static-filled voices shouting over his portable radio, calls for ambulances, calls for backup and status reports. Blood from his glass cuts webbed down his face, onto his shirt and vest, but he felt no pain as adrenaline coursed through him.

Suddenly his thoughts became crystalline. His training took over when he considered three-year-old Lori Dolan, grasping at the bodies of her brother and sister.

“Billy, wake up! Daisy, wake up!”

He hoisted her from the dead, put her in his car, wrapped his jacket around her and turned down his car radio so she wouldn’t hear the dispatches as the rain pelted the car.

“You have to stay here, honey, okay?”

Her eyes were huge, frozen wide, as she nodded.

Then he returned to the house to look for her mother.

Where’s Trudy?

Gun drawn, Fortin searched room after room.

Maybe she was hiding? Maybe Lyle had locked her up?

He’d found her in the bedroom on the bed.

At first he wondered why someone had thrown paint against the wall because the splatter was so intense. Trudy was in a half-sitting position, the back of her head had vanished into brain matter pasted to the wall as she stared back at him in wide-eyed, questioning horror and her words from his earlier calls echoed in his brain.

We’ll talk to the bank. We’ll work it out. We’ll be fine.

In the kitchen, on the table, Fortin saw that Lyle had been midway through his suicide note on the back of the formal, cold foreclosure notice. In dark block letters that punctured the page in spots, Lyle had stated that he wouldn’t harm Billy, Daisy, and Lori, whom he wanted his sister to raise.