They were locked in after evening prayers. And that is where the two planned their escape. In the lingering smells of supper and chapel and Lenten monotony.
And to that end Mary deliberated and plotted. For two weeks at night she sewed rags together while little Denise slept, Mary sitting up until three making arms and feet and fashioning heads, and hiding it all under her mattress.
“C’est quoi ça?” Denise asked one evening.
“Dummys.”
“Pour quoi faire? Mettre dans nos lits?”
“Sure,” Mary Cyr answered
“Nos lits?” Denise asked again.
“Sure,” Mary Cyr conceded without knowing what was being asked—for she had not been able to make much headway with the language of love; and Denise looked up at her in a kind of strange, hopeful awe, with her little chest bones visible under her blue nightgown.
“Okay then, two donkeys,” Mary said. And she winked in affection and went back to her sewing.
It was March 26, late, dark in the long hallway, and Mary arose, put her feet on the cold floor and woke her friend. Moonlight came in and she could just sense now how late it had become. The old nun down the end of the hall coughed in her sleep, and the downstairs clock gonged.
The wind blew steadily over the bay, and Mary Cyr had keys in her pocket that she had stolen from Mother Superior’s desk while she was on her knees. These keys would open their bedroom door and the front door as well.
“Maintenant?”
“Sure, buttercup,” Mary said.
The little girl—that is, Denise Albert—had no idea where they were going or what they were exactly running away from. But she sat up, smiled and began to dress. That in fact was what was so sorrowful—her childlike trust.
Under the grey blankets of their beds they put the two dummies Mary had managed to sew—something that would fool no one, especially Sister Alvina, but which Mary Cyr believed was more than pure genius—and left at 1:29 in the morning, Mary carrying a pillowcase filled with crackers and cheese and a lettuce-and-tomato sandwich, and Denise clutching the rosary she had almost forgotten but had remembered just in time.
Now and again moonlight shone through the large back window on their little bodies as they made their way down the three flights of stairs and out the door, Mary taking Denise by the hand.
“There is only one problem,” Mary Cyr whispered. “The river.”
“L’hiver?” Denise asked.
“No—the river—rivière,” she whispered.
And they walked along, both alike in size and disposition, their bodies making shadows on the side of the convent walls.
Then they had to slide down a short, steep, snow-covered hill. And then walk through a field of fire-red alders, picking their way through so the branches would not sting or cut their faces.
They got to the river and walked back and forth. Mary looked it over, walked out three metres and walked back.
“It is as solid as a training bra,” she said. And little Denise stepped out as well, her eyes filled with hope, and fear.
They were trying to cross the river to get to the village of St. Clair. That would save them a five-kilometre walk to the bridge. Mary Cyr was intending to phone her grandfather to take her home; or to some island where, she told Denise, they could smoke cigarettes and live on a sailboat.
The convent was on the west side, surrounded by a brick wall, with the elongated penitentiary sadness of iced-over, naked trees, branches bent in elongated despair.
And the sound of a late-night plow in the village streets. Mary did not know, nor would she have been expected to, that the river mouth was opened halfway across and you must stay to your right to have a chance at living any longer.
Denise, with her white eyelashes and her ears that poked out under her woollen cap, did not make it to the other side.
But how had it happened? It was one of the many tragedies to happen in Mary Cyr’s life. She bravely went first, to mark the way, and made it across the ice; saw little Denise hesitate and start to crawl on her knees. So Mary Cyr yelled:
“Go to your right!”
Or that is what she believed she was yelling.
In actual fact Mary Cyr got two simple French words mixed up: droite and gauche.
“Allez gauche,” is what she actually said.
And the girl simply crawled as quickly as she could into the open water, holding her wooden prayer beads. Mary heard the splash, a kind of small cry and then silence. She bravely ran out onto the ice to help, swishing her arm frantically in the water. But she wasn’t able to touch her.
Then suddenly it became horrifyingly clear, in the soft sudden luxuriant moonlight.
The little girl had slipped under the crystal-clear ice, and was looking straight up at Mary as Mary looked down at her. In the light of the great spring moon little Denise, holding her breath, staring into Mary’s face—and then she simply sank away, with her arms outstretched, as if wanting a hug. The prayer beads sank with her, disappearing into the dark rum-like water.
Denise’s body was not discovered until the following spring, the prayer beads still clutched in her hand. Mary was whisked away—that she was even on the river was mentioned only briefly in the papers. The local priest, because of the connection with the convent, was outraged for a while but then said nothing more about it. People said he had been paid off by the Catholic hypocrite, Blair Cyr. No worse kind in the mind of the secular. But in actual fact Mary Cyr went to confession, and the priest could and would not say anything more. He did feel terrible that he could not. For he learned in that confessional that she and Denise had been bullied and tormented, had run away. And in fact he believed her.
It was the second disaster in her life. So what would all this mean—now? You see, Mary Cyr was made controversial by design—she always became the story rather than the story itself. And her enemies took delight in this. And when she fought back, they could and did say:
“She hit her head, you know, when she was young. Terrible, but it left her bonkers. Do you see she walks with a strange little limp and lisps at times? That’s her head injury acting up.”
This was in fact true; she did lisp over certain words, and she did walk strangely at times. And she did have a head injury, which made her very unpredictable in her anger.
She now told him that she had given Victor twenty dollars and he had bought Florin a toy truck, yellow and orange. She had helped him pick it out. It was called Maxwell the truck.
“Please see if it is at my villa—perhaps Florin was there,” she whispered.
She then sat in her hot cell making a list of names, of people who might say something mean against her. The list got so long, she ran out of paper.
5.
MARY CYR MARRIED TWICE AND WAS DIVORCED ONCE, WIDOWED once before she was twenty-seven. Her first husband was the man who took all he could from her, and beat her twice mercilessly, a man who John went looking for with his service revolver when he found out. Her second husband was a man of eighty-five who reminded her of someone. And with her luck she was able to outlive him. So at twenty-seven she was a widow.
Her third and as yet final husband was a boy named Lucien—a fisherman from Neguac who she forgot somewhere in Spain. In fact he too was dead.
There were terrible fights in the family over whom she married and why she was getting married, and what she was to do with her life. Lawyers alternately hounded and protected her.
John had been hired as her bodyguard. The trouble was—he believed that she had married the first man to get back at him. And he felt that though she had said many times that she didn’t want to act in any way but virtuous and find love—he felt she would do something very dangerous and she would do it to prove to him that she was free. Whatever freedom she had was to come at a terrible price and be used in curious ways against her. She could be violent too, and John knew from experience how violence worked in the human heart.
“I want you to find out who killed Bobby for me—if
you do, I will say nice things about you,” she wrote John once, after not being in contact with him for two years. “I will even mention you to Princess Diana—and as you know, she lives in a castle and has a whole hush of boyfriends—”
But he could not tell her who killed Bobby, her son, because she herself had a hand in it. Of course he knew it was an accident—but what would that matter now? It was as if all her life she was making a mad dash toward the horrid jail cell in the withering Mexican heat. And now she had found it.
He sat on a bench inside the roadway leading to the villa, and looked toward the L-shaped pool and some lounge chairs covered in dead leaves in the blazing afternoon.
There was a faint smell of some Mexican flower and farther away a haze, and the smell of diesel and the thud, thud of a jackhammer on the roadway, which she too must have been able to hear in her cell.
* * *
—
A Russian couple sat by the one functioning pool. A German man and his wife lay on lounge chairs at their little villa, which overlooked the second pool, filled with a foot-round puddle of dirty water and a small tide of dead leaves. He walked over to talk to the Russians for a moment, and asked if they remembered her and Victor, the boy.
“Oh, the American,” the Russian man said.
“Canadian.”
“Ah. The Canadian. She seemed happy—why would she do it?”
“Well, who said she did it?”
“Everyone—even in Cancún, we were there two days ago—they say it too. All the papers say the evidence is incontrovertible,” the Russian advised. “Though he did errands for other people too.” He scratched his stomach and looked about, and yawned. There was the smell of burning leaves somewhere, and a lizard sunned itself on a rock.
The German shaded his eyes when John approached him. He smiled and said to his wife: “Kanadisch.”
John spoke to them a moment. It wasn’t at all as if he had any authority here, and he knew it. But the German man and his Dutch wife were pleasant to him, and aware of this as a special case.
Yes, the German said he remembered Victor. He came to the resort every day with the little boy—his brother. But he had no idea what had happened. There was another boy, named Ángel Gloton, who seemed to protect them. They were good friends.
“Ángel Gloton?” John said.
“Yes.” The German nodded
The woman asked:
“Haben sie dich den korper sehen lassen?”
“Have they let you to see the body?” her husband translated.
That was a very strange question, John thought.
“No, not at all,” John said.
The woman looked cautiously at her husband.
“Meine Frau ist Ärztin,” the man said. “My wife is a doctor—she is interested.”
They explained that she was the first to see the body. The manager of the resort ran to her and asked her to come to Mary Cyr’s villa because he knew she was a doctor. She saw the body for about five minutes, but then the police came and asked her to leave.
“It is all silly,” the German said. He shrugged. “It seems far-fetched, to say the least.”
“What does?”
“Well, they say it was arsenic,” the wife said, shifting into English, which was a little unnerving.
“He was beaten for some money, perhaps. Or something. But no one gave him arsenic—he had bruises just around his neck—but the room was dark and I wasn’t in there long.”
“Still, we think that would be easy to prove—and then once we prove it, she can go home,” the German said.
“He was grabbed and hit?” John asked.
“You would know in a second—yes—by someone larger than that woman. Anyway, I am sure Miss Cyr couldn’t have been able to do that to him.”
John nodded.
They both looked at him with wide, knowing eyes.
“I see,” John said.
“But,” the Dutchwoman said cautiously, “you have to be prepared for what the authorities can do here.” Then she looked at him. “Het is andere wereld.”
“It’s another world,” the German translated.
6.
LATER HE WENT TO FEY AND ASKED IF HE COULD GET INTO Mary’s rooms—that she wanted something from them.
“What does she want,” Fey asked, looking up at him curiously from his desk.
“She wants her childhood comforter,” John said. Perhaps he shouldn’t have told—but he was only a tourist and this was a murder investigation.
Fey shrugged as if he did not comprehend. But John knew he had. Fey spoke to a police officer, and John was led out and down the street toward the resort again.
John was let into her rooms at 3:34 in the afternoon; a two-bedroom townhouse villa shaded by coconut palms, and an old broken lawn chair on the balcony overlooking the empty back pool and the water in the distance. A lizard scurried along the brick tile and hid; another moved and craned its neck toward him.
A disordered apartment. But it was disordered by a search. Both beds had been slept in. There was a bottle of gin on the cupboard—and the bottle was three-quarters gone—and there was police tape around the dresser. There were two books on this dresser. One was Introduction to Conversational French. The second, open and half-read, was The Royal Twenty-Second Regiment in Action—a history of the Quebec regiment, the Van Doos, that fought heroically in both world wars.
The comforter was in fact rolled up near the headboard of Mary’s bed, and she was right—it looked as if it was part of the pillow. Whoever looked at the bed did not look at it as being particular. Besides, this room was not searched like the other bedroom, where the young boy’s body had been found. He took Plu and put it into a plastic bag he had in his pocket. And there was something inside the blanket’s pouch. Her diary.
He put it into the plastic bag as well.
Then he went into the other bedroom.
John looked everywhere in that room, in the closet and behind the balcony door curtains. He went to the balcony door. There was a stain on the door pull. What did that mean? Well, it could very likely mean that the boy was bleeding outside, before he ever got to the townhouse.
John realized something else. The youngster was also spitting—perhaps he was trying to get his breath.
Certainly they should know this by now. So if they knew it, they wanted to deny it. He shrugged, went into Mary’s bedroom and sat on the side of the bed, trying to catch his breath. He felt a lump in his chest, as if he wouldn’t be able to breathe, and then stood and walked unsteadily to the counter and took a drink of bottled water.
He suddenly felt the first cold inkling of the intractableness of the past and how it would play into the charges against her.
“Victor is dead, and little Florin is missing—”
And even though he knew nothing about them, he felt a sudden well of sympathy and despair.
* * *
—
Later that day John went back to the police station and inquired about the toxicology report. That report, no matter in what manner collected or no matter how tepid, did not have to be released until the trial—and the trial might be twelve months away. But the German and his Dutch wife already knew the police were going to say it was arsenic. Now that it was considered arsenic, it would take weeks to say it was not and have anyone believe it.
“Everyone knows it’s preposterous,” the Dutch doctor said. “But now that she is in jail on that charge they will not or cannot change it.” She said she had spent years in Mexico and understood them.
“Zodra dit een nationale verhaal wordt zal ze niet veranderen,” she said, quickly.
“It’s a national story and they won’t change up their minds,” the German translated.
Besides, the worst of it was—John had to get back to the cases he was working on in Canada. A case concerning a woman named Velma Cheval.
And the secret was Constable Fey knew this. Perhaps was waiting him out.
John was a
llowed to see Mary once again. It was now four o’clock.
The sun still burned in the sky over the water as it settled. There was a smell of early supper. He asked her.
“NO. I wasn’t his girlfriend—do they think that?”
“Yes.”
This seemed to catch her unprepared, and in this a kind of revelation overcame her—her features looked amazed at the “thing” now developing against her.
“But he was just a little boy—he was going to help me. He was young enough to be my son—almost grandson.”
“Help you do what?”
“Help people. I came here to help people. What else in my life can go wrong?”
John looked at her frightened, almost hilarious, gaze and said:
“Hopefully nothing else!”
He remembered her as a child. Many times he had to protect her because of the fear the family had that someone would abduct her. Initially that is why he was hired. Although John was never made privy to why this worry had resulted, he was almost sure there must have been a threat. Perhaps it was the idea of her mother coming to claim her? Now he was almost certain of it.
So they made a game of looking out for strangers—though John had thought after meeting Garnet that she had been surrounded by them most of her life. He gave her his number when she was a young girl and told her to phone him whenever she felt uncomfortable about anything.
“Oh—” she now said. “Dear me.”
7.
“I MADE A MISTAKE,” MARY TOLD JOHN THE FIRST NIGHT SHE phoned, which was the first night he had given her his phone number. She may have been eleven or twelve.
“Yes, I made a terrific mistake, Mr. Constable Captain Delano.”
“What mistake is that—it couldn’t have been that bad—”
“I—puked.”
“You did—”
“Yes, at a dinner party—I got nervous when they started talking about the business and how my cousins were in the know, and Nan said, ‘They will steal us blind,’ and I said, ‘I think I am going blind,’ and my eyes got wobbly, and I up and puked on the table in front of the guests.”
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