Seven Days

by Patrick Senécal

  PRAISE FOR

  PATRICK SENÉCAL

  ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD!

  “Unstoppably addictive.”

  Quill and Quire

  “A master at unsettling our emotions and taking us very far into the pit of madness.”

  Le Soleil

  “An author that no other equals in his ability not only to keep the readers riveted, but also to plunge them into an unsettled state.”

  L’Oeil Régional

  To Nathan and Romy,

  my loves,

  my hope,

  my life

  I must be cruel, only to be kind.

  William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4

  PART 1

  WHEN HE SAW THE MONSTER get out of the car, Bruno Hamel heard the growling of the dog for the first time.

  Thirty meters ahead of him, the police car had been stopped at the back entrance of the courthouse for a good minute already, and its occupants still had not made an appearance. Bruno had even been wondering whether they had noticed his presence, when the two police officers finally got out and opened the rear door and the monster appeared, wearing handcuffs.

  Bruno saw him in the flesh for the first time. With the exception of his combed hair and freshly cut beard, he looked just like the images on television.

  That was when Bruno heard the dog growling in the distance. He hardly paid attention to it. His eyes were riveted on the monster’s face. He had always been wary of stereotypes: he felt that the most twisted people often looked the most innocuous. But for once, the monster really did look like a louse, like a stereotypical Hollywood “bad guy,” and that bothered Bruno, though he couldn’t have said why.

  The police officers led the monster to the door, where some twenty people were expressing their hatred and disgust by shouting insults at the prisoner. The monster curled his lip in an arrogant smile, but his fear was perceptible behind the tough exterior. Soon the smile would be replaced by a terrified expression. At that thought, Bruno had to make an effort not to get out of the car and shoot the monster point-blank with the pistol tucked in his belt. He forced himself to stay calm and not to move. It would be a waste to express his hatred now. He had to save it for later. A bit later.

  Accompanied by the two police officers, the monster disappeared into the building, and the little group of demonstrators quieted down.

  Bruno heard the dog growling again. He looked around, expecting to see it approaching, but he didn’t see any animal.

  One of the two police officers came back out, walked through the now quiet group of demonstrators, and got into his car. The vehicle backed up and disappeared around the side of the courthouse, into the parking lot. Bruno, whose car was still running, followed it at a distance. The police car parked near a door, beside two other patrol cars. Ten seconds later, the officer entered the building.

  Bruno parked some twenty meters away and turned off his engine.

  “You didn’t tell me it was a cop car.”

  Bruno turned to the teenager sitting beside him. The kid shook his head with annoyance and repeated, “If I’d known, I’m not sure I would have said yes.”

  Bruno took out his wallet and counted out ten hundred-dollar bills. The boy, who hadn’t been expecting such a big bonus, stared greedily at the money. He must have been sixteen or seventeen years old; he had a shaven head and a pin in his lower lip and he was quite good-looking. He went to take the money, but Bruno stuffed it in his coat pocket.

  “When it’s done,” he said.

  The skinhead nodded and opened his door.

  “Not right away!”

  The kid closed the door nervously. Bruno looked at his watch: ten to ten.

  He lowered his sun visor, leaned his head back, and for the first time since the beginning of the nightmare, thought about the past ten days.

  THE DARKNESS HAD CHOSEN AN especially sunny afternoon to make its appearance. October 7 was like a summer day, and Bruno was in his yard raking the leaves, which had fallen early this year. He had no surgeries after noon and wasn’t needed at the hospital: it was a half-day holiday. He had started by spending an hour at his computer, organizing photos. It was a passion for him, and as soon as he had a minute free from his work and family, he’d be in front of his monitor, inaccessible to one and all. But it was such a beautiful day that he had finally gone outside to do a little leisurely yard work. While finishing his third beer of the afternoon (might as well take advantage of the fact that Sylvie wasn’t there to preach at him!), he raked the leaves into a huge pile to surprise Jasmine. She would be ecstatic. She’d throw herself into the leaves, insisting that her father do the same. And Bruno would gladly obey.

  Because he was crazy about his daughter.

  It was twenty after three, kids were walking along the street, and the pile of leaves was just about done. Bruno saw Louise Bédard pass and wave to him. She’d gone to pick up her son Frédéric at school as she did every day; the little boy was afraid to come home alone. The nine-year-old waved timidly to the doctor, and Bruno responded with a smile, touched, as always, by the sight of the disfiguring scars the child had had for three years now and which Bruno could not get used to. As he watched him and his mother disappear toward their house on the corner, he thought for the thousandth time how lucky he was. Very lucky.

  An hour before the darkness descended on him, Bruno Hamel thanked providence for giving him a life with no real hardship.

  After all the children in the neighborhood had passed, he started to wonder. But when he went to the school, he still wasn’t worried. She might have stayed behind for extra help or some activity. But they told him Jasmine had left at least forty minutes ago. He still wasn’t really worried when he got back home, expecting to find his daughter playing in the leaves with her mother. Sylvie was there, but not Jasmine. Sylvie made a few phone calls, but the little girl wasn’t at any of her friends’ houses.

  After that, he finally started to become worried. Enough to call the police.

  When they came, the police officers tried to be reassuring: seven-year-olds often made a little detour on their way home from school. “Disappearances of children are rarer than lottery winners in Drummondville!” one joked. Bruno knew that wasn’t exactly true: at least once a year, he’d see an article in the local paper about the disappearance of a child. The police officers agreed to do a search although they weren’t really alarmed.

  They first went back to the school with Bruno, while Sylvie stayed at the house to welcome her daughter, who, of course, would return home in the meantime.

  At the school, while one officer questioned the yard monitor, Bruno saw the other one walking back and forth in the field next to the school. He kept telling himself that in an hour the three of them would be home laughing about this, but he kept his eyes on the policeman, who was making a thorough search of some bushes.

  Suddenly the officer stopped short, staring down at the ground. He took off his hat and slowly ran his hand through his hair . . . and Bruno’s legs instantly went numb.

  Walking over to the policeman, he kept telling himself it wasn’t anything, that the cop had discovered a book, a cap, something unrelated to his daughter. He came closer, and despite the distressed expression on the officer’s face, he was still denying it. Even when he was close enough to see a bare leg sticking out of the bushes, he kept telling himself that it was another child, another little girl, not his, not Jasmine, because it was simply impossible—this was something that happened to other children and other parents, in the papers and on television, but not to them.

  He recognized her right away, and yet it wasn’t her. It was no longer her. The first thing that broke his heart w
as her nakedness. She was still wearing her blue dress, but it was too tattered to cover the little body he had washed a thousand times in the bathtub . . . but that was now so . . . defiled! Every time Jasmine hurt herself and came into the house crying, Bruno felt the pain in his soul. But this time, there were so many bruises, so much blood . . . and yet she wasn’t crying! Why wasn’t she crying, she must hurt so much!

  When he saw the blue hair ribbon around her neck, the ribbon Sylvie had put in her hair in the morning, warning her not to lose it, he knew she was dead.

  Jasmine, his only daughter, with whom he should have been playing and laughing right now, was dead.

  Then he saw her face. He had never seen it like that. And the expression . . . empty, but there was a look of horror deep in her eyes. How could there be such an emotion in the eyes of a child? Whoever had done that hadn’t just killed his daughter, he had destroyed her soul.

  Bruno fell to his knees. He reached out and gently picked Jasmine up, as he had done when she was sick or had fallen asleep in front of the television. He held her to him, laid her face in the hollow of his shoulder, and hugged her tight without a word or a cry, with only a long, wheezing expiration. He didn’t notice if her body was stiff or limp, warm or cold. He noticed only that for the first time, his daughter did not respond to his caresses, did not hug him back, did not giggle with joy against his neck. For the first time, she had no reaction. And of all the hurts, that was the worst.

  Still holding her to him, he closed his eyes and saw a series of familiar scenes: Jasmine running toward him when he got home; Jasmine, all serious, helping him arrange his CDs; Jasmine shouting with joy on the elephant’s back at the zoo; Jasmine tracing eyes and a mouth in her shepherd’s pie; Jasmine parading around in Sylvie’s dresses, pretending she was grown-up; Jasmine chasing the squirrels in the park; and above all, Jasmine laughing, laughing, laughing . . .

  That was when the darkness blotted out the sun.

  BRUNO OPENED HIS EYES. TEN fifteen. The hearing in front of the judge must have started. He looked around: there was no one in the parking lot and they weren’t visible from the back entrance of the courthouse. So he told the teenager he could go.

  The kid got out and quickly went over to the police car. He took a couple of instruments Bruno didn’t recognize out of his coat pocket and started working on the door. On the lock, to be precise.

  Bruno surveyed the surroundings again. The nearest people were a hundred meters away on the sidewalk. And there was no reason for the demonstrators at the back entrance to come here. It was a bit risky (Bruno hadn’t expected the little group of people to be there), but he didn’t have much choice.

  He noticed how drab the other cars in the parking lot were, how gray and cracked the asphalt was, how dull the sky. But he knew things weren’t really like that, that it was just the way he was seeing them.

  Because he saw everything differently now; his vision had been altered.

  He turned his attention back toward the boy, but he was lost in thought and didn’t really see him. This new way of looking he had was a reaction, an effect of the darkness.

  THE CHANGE IN HIS VISION had occurred abruptly, without warning. Before he picked Jasmine’s body up and closed his eyes, Bruno saw things one way. When he opened his eyes a few minutes later, he saw everything differently.

  He had only a vague, almost unreal memory of the hours following the discovery of the body. Only a few moments stood out clearly in the fog: Sylvie’s hysteria, the phone call to his mother. He also remembered how one-dimensional Sylvie had seemed. Like the walls, the furniture, the things in the house that he looked at, distraught.

  There was a filter in front of his eyes now.

  All that evening, they had sat hugging on the living room couch, not moving, barely speaking. Sylvie couldn’t stop crying. Bruno, broken with grief and despair, held her as tight as he could but didn’t shed a single tear. The darkness within him stifled even his sobs.

  Two days later, at the funeral home, there were a lot of visitors: relatives (even Bruno’s mother, who was almost completely incapacitated, had moved heaven and earth to be there), friends, colleagues, and all the board members of Hatching, the battered women’s shelter where Sylvie worked part-time and Bruno volunteered one night a week. Bruno, deeply moved, had hugged each one of them.

  “This shouldn’t happen to people like you and Sylvie,” Gisèle, the director of the women’s shelter, had said, her face bathed in tears. “God is so cruel sometimes.”

  Bruno had touched her cheek, his throat too tight to say anything.

  He managed to talk to some friends, making a superhuman effort to suppress his pain for a few seconds. But it was no use—it was everywhere, like a wave that formed and re-formed again and again. And beneath the despair there was the darkness, the strange blackness in his soul that prevented tears and that seemed to hide something he didn’t want to face yet.

  Several times that evening, particularly when he was standing in front of the closed casket, he stuck his hand in the pocket where he had put the blue ribbon Jasmine had been wearing on the last day of her short life. Bruno had kept it without telling anyone, not even Sylvie. Since then, he’d always had it with him, and he felt he wanted to keep it with him forever.

  In that closed wooden box was his daughter. Lying there peacefully, as if she were asleep. Every night when she went to bed, she would say the same thing to Bruno when he left her bedroom: “Daddy, don’t forget your bag, don’t forget your hat, don’t forget anything!” It didn’t really mean anything, but she had been saying it since she was three and it had become a ritual, a private joke only the two of them understood.

  Looking at the casket, Bruno thought that it was the first time Jasmine had gone to sleep without their little ritual.

  Cry! Cry already, you want to so much!

  Why wasn’t he able to? Why did this strange darkness in him prevent him from pouring out his grief?

  During the burial the next day, under a splendid sunny sky, Bruno felt such intense panic that he came close to throwing himself on the casket screaming. The idea that his little Jasmine would be in that hole for all eternity, rotting until she completely disintegrated, was so repugnant, so unthinkable, that he wanted to run away, but Sylvie’s arm around his waist gave him the strength to stay. He put his hand in his pocket and held the blue ribbon tight.

  That evening, Bruno would normally have done his volunteer shift at the women’s shelter. Obviously, he didn’t go, which was very unusual. For three years, he had been going to the shelter one night a week to counsel the residents and sometimes treat those who had just arrived, in tears, their bodies still swollen from beatings by their partners. Sylvie worked there three days a week. She and Bruno were well liked at Hatching and had received a large card signed by all the residents. Most of the messages were addressed to the couple (“You’ve helped me so much, I wish I could help you”), but some of them were more for Bruno (“I’ll always remember the night I arrived at the shelter in crisis and you were so kind, so gentle to me”), and others more for Sylvie (“The three best days of the week are the ones you work here”). They had read the card standing at home cheek to cheek.

  All of a sudden, Sylvie turned to Bruno. “I want you to make love to me.”

  There was no desire or sensuality in her words, but rather an almost pleading desperation. Bruno looked at her for a long time. How long had it been since they’d had sex? Two months? Maybe three? Things hadn’t been very good in their relationship for a while; they both knew it but hadn’t spoken about it. There weren’t a lot of arguments or specific reproaches, just dull habit and stagnation, and fewer and fewer sparks.

  Bruno understood Sylvie’s request. Jasmine’s death should bring them together. They had to go back to being the couple they once had been—it was now or never. And it was the only way to get through this ordeal. Yes, he understood. And he hugged her and walked slowly with her up to their bedroom on the second f
loor.

  Despite the tenderness of their intimacy, there was no real pleasure, no passion, and they stopped after a while. Sylvie cried softly in Bruno’s arms, while he reflected. It wasn’t that surprising it hadn’t worked, but was Jasmine’s death the only reason? Silently, he pressed his body to Sylvie’s with such a need for fusion and solace that he fell asleep in that position.

  The next day, in the late afternoon, Bruno went to Jasmine’s school. He watched the children leaving the school, and some of them recognized him and looked sad. Bruno had the impression that they were all faded and washed out, but he knew that wasn’t the case. It was the filter over his eyes.

  When there were no more children coming out of the school, Bruno stayed there, unmoving, staring at the door, wishing with all his might that it would open and Jasmine would come out. But it remained closed. He took the blue ribbon out of his pocket. The blood on it had dried. He rubbed it against his cheek, closed his eyes for a moment, and returned to his car with his head down.

  THE KID WAS STILL WORKING on the car lock, but Bruno was lost in his memories and hardly saw him.

  THE FIVE DAYS AFTER THE darkness came had been the saddest and most despairing. But they had also been filled with determination: determination to get through this, determination to regain the closeness with Sylvie, determination to be stronger than fate. Of course, Bruno was still too weakened by grief to put up a real fight, but he believed in doing so. Despite the darkness within him, he really believed in it. He and Sylvie had to climb out of this abyss, and as long and painful as it was, they would have to do it one day at a time.

  But on the night of the fifth day, the telephone rang.

  At the other end of the line, Bruno heard a voice that was hoarse yet soft. Everyone who had called until then had asked in an embarrassed tone how he was doing, which seemed to him an insult. This man was the first one to say something different.