Mary Cyr

by David Adams Richards

  But on her twenty-fifth birthday a deal was struck. She pleaded guilty to negligence. She received one year of house arrest.

  Garnet and Nan spoke for the many when they said:

  “She has been a burden on us, but we still love her.”

  But after a time (and this was published in Mexico as well), the entire country of Canada became sick to death of her. Radio talk shows said that anyone mentioning the name Mary Fatima Cyr ever again would be fired.

  The defence attorney was paid some $220,000.

  Mary Cyr never spoke a word, for over a year. She collected all of Bobby’s toys, all his clothes and gave them to charity.

  She got involved with someone. She married someone in Halifax—some older gentleman, who liked to feed pigeons and was allergic to eggs. (This is how he was described in her diary.) He was eighty-six when they met. She told her diary:

  “We were both on the rebound—he had met his first wife in 1918—in the trenches. Sadly she died of a queer little cough sometime in 1979.”

  She stayed with him until he died. She was terrified of AIDS and so perhaps married him because of that, looking as she said:

  “For respectability.”

  That did not come.

  By that time John had presented the results of his investigation into Bobby’s death to the family. And this is what he said privately to Garnet, speaking about the inboard motor. It was damaged and she had never managed to fix it properly, but she had not planned to harm her child.

  Besides, John said, she had packed everything to take for a child, to the beach. She had then unpacked everything and opened the cottage. She had started a fire in the fireplace in the boy’s bedroom, to warm him up when he came in.

  So in fact she had no idea the child was dead. Besides that there was one other thing: she had ordered the boy a dog—a little chocolate lab, which he never got to claim.

  * * *

  —

  Almost three months after she came home from Halifax, Bobby’s body was found. It was picked up by a herring net off Escuminac.

  His tiny little body, frail and elderly, had not changed; the toy he had been holding was, amazingly, still clenched in his hand, green from the seaweed and kelp that kept in their grasp the body of a child and the secrets of their world.

  She had recognized her flaw too late—the flaw that certain wilful women had, to show the world they could do things just the same as men—when in fact only certain men (or women) did those things and there was no shame in not doing so or in asking for guidance if you did do them. That was rebuilding an inboard motor.

  But she was too stubborn to ask for help. She was going to show the world—and people like John Delano—but John did not need to have her do those things—he did not need her, or himself for that matter, to prove anything now. Her wilfulness to be a championship woman is what in the end caused her little boy’s death. That one affectation she hated in other people, she exhibited on the dry teakwood boat.

  All her life she would remember Packet Terri saying:

  “Let me set that up for you, or at least show you.”

  And she, turning and smiling and saying:

  “Never—I don’t need anyone. This is for Bobby and me. So I will do this just by myself.”

  To her, no matter how brave she had been, she would be guilty until she died. So what did it matter when that death occurred?

  PART TWELVE

  1.

  ANOTHER FOUR DAYS PASSED. THE MEN CAME, BY ORDER OF Mexico City, the department of mines, the department of justice, to excavate the cave-in at the Amigo mine.

  No one had predicted this. But people in Oathoa felt it had to be because they wanted to charge Mary with these deaths too. That seemed the only logical reason.

  Of course it was for an entirely different reason. That is, for almost two years there was a microphone in Mr. DeRolfo’s office—and just on the off chance, the man who carried the engine to the garage and worked on Mr. DeRolfo’s Mercedes was asked to bury a wire inside the back seat a month ago—just about the time poor Mary Cyr arrived.

  Mr. DeRolfo, his wife, Gidgit, and Hulk Hernández had been taped for a long time. So even if Victor did not have a tape to give—Bara had one.

  Few knew about this operation by the police in Mexico City, but it was related to the CHUG A CHUG of the drills going into the earth, the sad whir from the machine; the men watering the drill down, to keep it from overheating—flying in new expensive drill parts out of Canada and the US.

  The dig had started slowly, with backhoes and dozers, and then more men came. And then someone came and asked DeRolfo for printouts of the levels—and at what level were the men most likely trapped. Then they asked him how difficult it would be to get down into this mine—where the safeguards had been put, and what walls and drifts had been reinforced. They asked how large the safety rooms were, and where were they exactly? And where was the money spent—perhaps it would be better to go down another way; if the levels were re-enforced like Amigo declared, it might be better to tunnel somewhere else into a safe room. And the more they spoke to him, the more they became certain that something was not quite right. (Of course the head of the recovery team knew this because he was a member of Mexican Special Forces, which had been after Mr. Hernández a long time.)

  And then Mrs. DeRolfo had to go to the hospital because of stress—saying the accident and the deaths were terribly discomfiting to her. There was a picture of Mr. DeRolfo holding her hand, tears in her eyes, and a big bouquet of flowers, and a box of Kleenex near her sickbed.

  2.

  STILL TALLAGONGA CONTINUED ON, NOT KNOWING OF THE tapes, or the transcripts, and thinking that in order to indict someone, there only had to be partial truth. So now if the case against Lady Mary was partially true, with Mary Cyr now in jail it was not a long stretch to make it completely true.

  “Para la ciudad de Oathoa. ¡La Ciudad de Oathoa!” Mr. DeRolfo would say, and he would raise his fist as he left his wife’s hospital bed.

  For the town of Oathoa.

  When he came through the crowd, people would now clap.

  “Compensación por el sufrimiento—” compensation for the suffering—he would say.

  Then one day he said something that caught a nerve:

  “Forty million. Or Mary Cyr stays where she is.”

  * * *

  —

  On the nightly news it played very well back in Canada. People, they say, only need an excuse to be outraged; they need it to satisfy the famine in their lives. A privileged woman, Mary Cyr, murders and tries to adopt. She comes to Mexico to steal a child. The man who tries to retrieve her is a corrupt cop who, let’s remember, was suspected in his own adopted son’s disappearance. Certain Greenpeace activists, Nigel Cruise’s protege Ned being one, planned a major demonstration, yes, and acts of civil disobedience too.

  Signs were printed.

  “Forty million or keep her in Mexico.”

  They marched on Parliament Hill.

  Yes, she saw it on Mexican TV.

  Mary was exhausted, hot and tired. “It’s snowing there—look we’re having a late-winter storm. ¡Nieve!” she exclaimed.

  Then the op-ed piece in the Toronto Star spoke for many when it addressed her past, her relationship with Denise Albert, her flights of fancy—and, as the piece stated, no, they were not pointing fingers. The tide of opinion had long ago turned against her, it said. That is, the initial feeling over her right to do what she did with a horribly deformed and sick child some years before, and the sympathy this writer and her husband had always entertained for young women in general, who were the easiest ones victimized, had given way little by little to a sense of disgust, at her wealth and privilege and the sexual liaisons she must have had with her grandfather. This writer and her husband, the article did state, had a chance some years before to help this woman, but the help was unfortunately refused and Mary Cyr’s decline started at that time.

  The piece was writte
n by the famed advocate for women, Ms. Rory Cruise.

  And as many said, her name spoke volumes.

  3.

  FOR JOHN, THOSE SAME THREE DAYS OVER EASTER WERE eventful; visiting privileges had been taken away. He did not know why this happened. For a time the guards told him to come back in an hour—or come back tomorrow morning. But then on the fourth day—that is, the Tuesday after Easter—he was told he was not welcome.

  “No visit,” the man at the desk told him, waving his hand abruptly, as if they had caught on to something deceptive that John was up to. “No visit no more—no más visit,” he declared, his tie immaculate but sweat under both arms, one eye drooping.

  Then as he was walking back to the resort a police car picked him up and drove him back to the station. There, sitting in what was, he determined, interrogation room four, he was asked questions for over an hour. Did he see the body of Florin, did he know where Florin was. Did he think he could outsmart the police of Oathoa, did he have relations with Mary Cyr. When he said no to that, Erappo Pole smiled and said:

  “Why not—everyone else has.”

  Then they questioned him about Señor Xavier—who was paying him? And the Cyr family—were they a family of criminals like so many people thought? Every time he answered a question they looked more disturbed and positive he was lying. Then suddenly Constable Fey came in and spoke to the two policemen in the room. He spoke quite harshly and was quite impassioned.

  They all went into the hall for a few moments. Then Fey came in, and without looking at him said:

  “You can go.”

  And so he did. But he knew by the way they obeyed Fey that he had more clout than an ordinary policeman—so he must know something more as well. And if he knew something more as well, then he must know something about her innocence. And John began to remember everything that went on since he arrived.

  Certainly someone else is working on this, he thought. Certainly Fey knows something very important he is not saying.

  John went back to his room. He did not know what to do. He sent his findings off to the Canadian embassy and waited for a reply. A standard “Thank you for visiting Canada’s website in Mexico” came back.

  * * *

  —

  They came from the tierra caliente—the hot land—and now it was hot. It was too hot for John, who could not seem to function in it—the heat blazed down upon him, even when he wore the hat he had bought from a rack at the supermercado. It was too hot for Mary, who lay on the floor of her cell, silently as the hours seemed to drip away—remembering how she had in her rooms at the cottage all kinds of things she collected. Moosehead quart bottles that she spent her time shining, old CYR COMPANY OIL cans that she kept in immaculate condition—a porcelain British flag—a picture of Beaverbrook with Jean Norton at a spa. The picture of her dog, Muggy Muffs. The picture of Denise Albert that had by now become famous. The picture of her mother shaking hands with John F. Kennedy. The little jar Debby Dormey collected blueberries in; the autograph from Neil Young, which she cherished until his attack on her family’s pipeline some years later. The knowledge that half or more of the people whose careers she applauded and championed, men she first helped get published or promoted and sometimes did benefits with, did not think her more than a frivolous rich girl. None of them came to her defence. Now, in silence, with the heat seeming to draw away the air, she realized this. She realized she treasured people, and gave money to their causes while they secretly scorned who she was.

  She thought of Bobby and called his name softly and said:

  “You are loved.”

  It was what some anonymous person had written her from Canada, after so much hate and glee. Someone had simply written and said:

  “You are loved.”

  It was, as we later discovered, Beeswax.

  4.

  STILL SHE COULD SEE THE DONKEY, WITH ITS SAD BLACK EYES, and she could see a girl—she did not know it was Gabriella—go to it with a big carrot, only to back up—terrified—when the donkey hobbled toward her; throwing down the carrot and running back beyond the fence, and then looking at it.

  The old donkey was blind, and little Gabriella would try to help it locate the carrot without getting close to it. This kept Mary busy also. For she would haul her crate up to the window, stand upon it, and she and Gabriella would communicate.

  “He perdido mi reloj,” Mary would say, pointing to an old, dusty stick on the ground.

  (She thought she was saying, “Pick up the stick”—what she was actually saying was “I have lost my watch”—but Gabriella caught on, and using the stick, and stretching it as far as she could, she was able to push the carrot toward her enemy, the blind old donkey.)

  And finally the old donkey put its snout to the dirt and fumbled with its mouth in the old tuffs of grass until it found the carrot.

  “He got it,” Mary shouted. “You did it—bravo, señorita!”

  A week or more passed, and every day Gabriella came to the donkey, and some days Mary would give her money and she would go to the market and buy apples or carrots for it. Mary would wait for her to come back, longing to see her skinny little body.

  Gabriella would talk to her. She would wait until no one was around. This was generally during the hottest moments of the day. Then Mary gave her some more money and said:

  “Buy a bucket for water—for our donkey.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Comprar un balde de agua.”

  And so little Gabriella came back with the bucket.

  Then Gabriella would stand by the cell, and speak slowly in Spanish and English, trying to get Mary Cyr to understand.

  Everything would be all right—but Gabriella said Mary Cyr must swear and bless herself and spit if she had not done anything.

  So Mary Cyr swore that she had not, and blessed herself that she hadn’t and spit out the cell window.

  Then one day she asked to make a phone call, for her cell phone, which they said she could keep charged, was dead. And Gabriella gave her, her own phone to call.

  She phoned Xavier, and told him to phone her family.

  “What do you want them to do?”

  “I want you to tell them, ‘Do not send anyone else down here—especially from the family or they will be arrested.’”

  And Gabriella, with her hair as black and shiny as coal, told her that she had a tape.

  “Give it to the right person—for my sake. ¡Por favor si usted puede por mí!”

  “Sí, sí, Mary Cyr,” Gabriella said. “Sí, sí—Constable Fey.”

  5.

  FEY HAD KNOWN SHE WAS INNOCENT FOR WEEKS. IF HE TOOK what he had learned and added it to what John had learned, he had a scenario that was fairly solid and simple. And it had nothing to do with the crystal cave. It had more to do with crystal meth, and the trafficking in stolen goods from the coast; and even the cartel. And this is what it had to do with and Constable Fey knew this.

  You draw the curtain back enough and you found meth and cocaine, and a stable of innocent young girls transported to America. That is what you discovered—and no one in his office wanted to discover this.

  Especially any scenario that implicated the DeRolfos. But it is what Ángel’s father had discovered on his way to Los Angeles and why he was shot in the back of the head.

  This was the trail that John without knowing found and Fey had known about. It concerned a man nicknamed Hulk, who used the coal mine to launder money, and who orchestrated the stealing of millions in funds sent down by Tarsco.

  Did Isabella Tallagonga wish to discover this? Sure she wanted to. However, she knew she would be dead or at least ruined once she discovered it. Mary Cyr then had to pay, the price of cartels. But you see, knowing this the Mexican police and judicial system involved wanted it to happen quietly—they had wanted Tarsco to pay a great penalty; wanted Mary Cyr to be hustled out of the country after some months in jail. The tragedy for them is Tarsco refused to pay.

  It was amazing th
at John had realized this. But really in another way it was completely obvious, and Fey knew it was.

  As for John Delano, he was given his passport back. He was told to make arrangements to leave the country or he would be arrested.

  He would be arrested of all things on the suspicion of murder.

  “Whose murder?” John asked calmly.

  Constable Fey did not answer. But really in a way, by not answering he had. And then John said this:

  “I want to warn you—the DeRolfos are going to leave—but they are going to create a diversion so they can go—they know with the mine being excavated it is only a matter of days—so something will happen.”

  Fey said he would decide about the DeRolfos in his own time.

  Then John handed him the Dutch doctor’s report.

  The Dutch doctor’s report read in part:

  Arseen worden niet ingesteld als de oorzaak van de dood. de oorzaak van de dood was een ernstige pak slaag door één of meer personen Ik onderzocht het lichaam post mortum. Ik ben ervan overtuigd en dus zal de wereld dat het hier een miskraam van Justitie.

  Translated roughly, it said that arsenic was out of the question and that to charge Mary Cyr would be a miscarriage of justice.

  The world would know this sooner or later.

  And though Fey shrugged at this as an imposition, he knew this too.

  6.

  FEY, ALONG WITH MOST OF THE TOWN, ALONG WITH DELANO, and all the women who kept vigil along with tourists and the press, went to the funeral of Victor. The body had been held an inordinate amount of time because of the concern of Alfonso Bara. Alfonso Bara and his wife also paid for the funeral.

  They had dressed Victor in new clothes—a decent shirt and pants with a small bow tie. What was his full name again, a newspaper reporter asked.