I found Claudel’s habit of depersonalizing annoying. A white female. The victim. The body. The wrists. Not even a personal pronoun.
“And the victim may have been burned,” he continued.
“Burned?”
“LaManche will know more later. He is going to do the post today.”
“Jesus.” Though one pathologist from the lab is on call at all times, rarely is an autopsy carried out on a weekend. I knew the murder had to be extraordinary. “How long has she been dead?”
“The body wasn’t fully frozen, so it was probably outside less than twelve hours. LaManche will try to narrow the time of death.”
I didn’t want to ask the next question.
“Why do you think it could be Anna Goyette?”
“The age and description fit.”
I felt a little weak.
“What physical characteristic were you referring to?”
“The victim has no lower molars.”
“Were they extracted?” I felt stupid as soon as the question was out.
“Dr. Brennan, I am not a dentist. There is also a small tattoo on the right hip. Two figures holding a heart between them.”
“I’ll call Anna’s aunt and get back to you.”
“I can—”
“No. I’ll do it. I have something else to discuss with her.”
He gave me his beeper number and hung up.
My hand trembled as I punched the digits for the convent. I saw frightened eyes gazing from below blonde bangs.
Before I could think of how to frame my questions, Sister Julienne was on the line. I spent several minutes thanking her for sending me to Daisy Jeannotte, and telling her about the journals. I was evading what I had to do, and she saw right through me.
“I know something bad has happened.” Her voice was soft, but I could hear tension just below the surface.
I asked if Anna had turned up. She had not.
“Sister, a young woman has been found—”
I heard the swish of fabric and knew she was crossing herself.
“I need to ask a few personal questions about your niece.”
“Yes.” Barely audible.
I asked about the molars and tattoo.
The line was quiet only a second, then I was surprised to hear her laugh.
“Oh my, no, no, that isn’t Anna. Oh heavens, no, she’d never allow herself to be tattooed. And I’m certain Anna has all of her teeth. In fact she often mentions her teeth. That’s how I know. She has a lot of trouble with them, complains about pain when she eats something cold. Or hot.”
The words flew in such a torrent I could almost feel her relief rush across the line.
“But, Sister, it’s possible—”
“No. I know my niece. She has all of her teeth. She isn’t happy with them, but she has them.” Again the nervous laugh. “And no tattoos, thank the Lord.”
“I’m glad to hear that. This young woman is probably not Anna, but perhaps it would be best to have your niece’s dental records sent over, just to be sure.”
“I am sure.”
“Yes. Well, perhaps to assure Detective Claudel. It can’t hurt.”
“I suppose. And I will pray for that poor girl’s family.”
She gave me the name of Anna’s dentist and I called Claudel back.
“She’s sure Anna didn’t have a tattoo.”
“Hi, Auntie nun! Guess what? I had my ass tattooed last week!”
“I agree. Not likely.”
He snorted.
“But she’s absolutely certain Anna has all of her teeth. She remembers her niece complaining about toothaches.”
“Who has extractions?”
My thought precisely.
“It’s usually not people with happy teeth.”
“Yes.”
“And this aunt also believes Anna never went off without telling her mother, right?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Anna Goyette has a better act than David Copperfield. She disappeared seven times in the last eighteen months. At least that’s how many reports the mother filed.”
“Oh.” The hollowness spread from my breastbone to the pit of my stomach.
I asked Claudel to keep me informed, and hung up. I doubted he would.
I was showered, dressed, and in my office by nine-thirty. I finished my report on Élisabeth Nicolet, describing and explaining my observations, just as I would with any forensic case. I wished I could have included information from the Bélanger journals, but there just hadn’t been time to go through them.
After printing the report, I spent three hours photographing. I was tense and clumsy, and had trouble positioning the bones. At two I grabbed a sandwich from the cafeteria, and ate it as I proofed my findings on Mathias and Malachy. But my mind was focused on the phone and wouldn’t concentrate on the work at hand.
I was at the copy machine with the Bélanger journals when I looked up to see Claudel.
“It is not your young lady.”
I stared into his eyes. “Really?”
He nodded.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“Her name was Carole Comptois. When the dentals excluded Goyette we ran the prints and got a hit. There were a couple of arrests for soliciting.”
“Age?”
“Eighteen.”
“How did she die?”
“LaManche is finishing the post now.”
“Any suspects?”
“Many.” He stared at my face a moment, said nothing, and left.
I continued photocopying, a robot with emotions swirling inside. The relief I’d felt at learning it wasn’t Anna had immediately turned to guilt. There was still a girl on a table downstairs. A family to be told.
Lift the cover. Turn the page. Lower the cover. Push the button.
Eighteen.
I had no desire to see the autopsy.
* * *
At four-thirty I finished with the journals and returned to my office. I dropped the babies’ reports in the secretarial office then left a note on LaManche’s desk explaining about the photocopies. When I reentered the corridor LaManche and Bergeron stood talking outside the dentist’s office. Both men looked tired and grim. As I approached they took in my face, but didn’t inquire.
“Bad one?” I asked.
LaManche nodded.
“What happened to her?”
“What didn’t,” said Bergeron.
I shifted my gaze from one to the other. Even stooped the dentist was over six feet tall, and I had to look up to meet his eyes. His white frizz was backlit by a fluorescent ceiling light. I remembered Claudel’s comment about an animal attack and suspected why Bergeron’s Saturday had also been spoiled.
“It looks like she was hung by her wrists and beaten, then attacked by dogs,” said LaManche. “Marc thinks there were at least two.”
Bergeron nodded. “One of the larger breeds. Maybe shepherds or Dobermans. There are over sixty bite wounds.”
“Jesus.”
“A boiling liquid, probably water, was poured on her while she was naked. Her skin is badly scalded, but I couldn’t find traces of anything identifiable,” LaManche continued.
“She was still alive?” My gut recoiled at the thought of her pain.
“Yes. She finally died as a result of multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen. Do you want to see the Polaroids?”
I shook my head.
“Were there defense wounds?” I recalled my own ordeal with the mugger.
“No.”
“When did she die?”
“Probably late yesterday.”
I didn’t want to know the details.
“One other thing.” LaManche’s eyes were full of sadness. “She was four months pregnant.”
I moved past them quickly and slipped into my office. I don’t know how long I sat there, my eyes moving over the familiar objects of my trade, not seeing them. Though I had some emotional immunity, inoculated
by years of exposure to cruelty and violence, some deaths still broke through. The recent onslaught of horrors seemed uglier than most I could remember. Or were my circuits simply overloaded to the point that I could not absorb more heinousness?
Carole Comptois was not my case, and I’d never laid eyes on her, but I couldn’t control the visions surfacing from the darkest depths of my mind. I saw her in her last moments, her face contorted in pain and terror. Did she beg for her life? For her unborn baby? What kind of monsters were afoot in the world?
“Damn it to hell!” I said to the empty office.
I shoved my papers into my briefcase, grabbed my gear, and slammed the door behind me. Bergeron said something as I passed his office, but I didn’t stop.
The six o’clock news began as I drove under the Jacques Cartier Bridge, the Comptois murder the lead story. I jammed the button, repeating my last thought.
“Damn it to hell!”
By the time I got home my anger had cooled. Some emotions are too intense to persist without ebbing. I phoned Sister Julienne and assured her about Anna. Claudel had already called, but I wanted to make personal contact. She will turn up, I said. Yes, she agreed. Neither of us fully believed it anymore.
I told her Élisabeth’s skeleton was packed and ready, and that the report was being typed. She said the bones would be picked up first thing Monday morning.
“Thank you so much, Dr. Brennan. We await your report with great anticipation.”
I did not avail myself of the opening. I had no idea how they’d react to what I’d written.
I changed to jeans, then prepared dinner, refusing to allow myself to think about what had been done to Carole Comptois. Harry arrived at half past seven and we ate, commenting on little but the pasta and zucchini. She seemed tired and distracted, and willing to accept my explanation of having fallen face forward on the ice. I was completely drained by the day’s events. I didn’t ask about the night before, or about the seminar, and she didn’t offer. I think we both were glad to neither listen nor respond.
After dinner Harry read her workshop material and I started with the diaries again. My report to the sisters was complete, but I wanted to know more. The photocopying had not improved the technical quality, and I found it just as discouraging as I had on Friday. Besides, Louis-Philippe was not the most exciting chronicler. A young medical doctor, he wrote long accounts of his days at the Hôtel Dieu Hospital. In forty pages I came across only a few references to his sister. It seemed he was concerned about Eugénie continuing to sing in public after her marriage to Alain Nicolet. He also disliked her hairdresser. Louis-Philippe sounded like a real prig.
Sunday Harry was gone again before I got up. I did laundry, worked out at the gym, and updated a lecture I planned to give in my human evolution class on Tuesday. By late afternoon I felt reasonably caught up. I lit a fire, made myself a cup of Earl Grey, and curled up on the couch with my books and papers.
I started where I’d left off in the Bélanger diary, but after about twenty pages I shifted to the smallpox book. It was as fascinating as Louis-Philippe was dull.
I read about the streets I walk every day. Montreal and its surrounding villages had over two hundred thousand inhabitants in the eighteen-eighties. The city stretched from Sherbrooke Street on the north to the port along the river on the south. To the east it was bounded by the industrial town of Hochelaga, and to the west by the working-class villages of Ste-Cunégonde and St-Henri, which lay just above the Lachine Canal. Last summer I’d pedaled the length of the canal bike path.
Then, as now, there was tension. Though most of Montreal west of rue St-Laurent was English-speaking, by the eighteen-eighties the French had become a clear majority in the city as a whole. They dominated municipal politics, but the English ruled in commerce and in the press.
The French and Irish were Catholic, the English, Protestant. The groups remained largely separate, both in life and in death. Each had its own cemetery high on the mountain.
I closed my eyes and thought about that. Even today language and religion determined so much in Montreal. The Catholic schools. The Protestant schools. The Nationalists. The Federalists. I wondered where Élisabeth Nicolet’s loyalties would lie.
The room dimmed and the lamps clicked to life. I read on.
In the late nineteenth century Montreal was a major commercial hub, boasting a magnificent harbor, huge stone warehouses, tanneries, soapworks, factories. McGill was already a leading university. But, like other Victorian cities, it was a place of contrasts, with the huge mansions of the merchant princes overshadowing the hovels of the working poor. Just off the wide, paved avenues, beyond Sherbrooke and Dorchester, lay hundreds of dirt lanes and unpaved alleys.
The city then was poorly drained, with garbage and animal carcasses rotting in vacant lots, and excrement everywhere. The river was used as an open sewer. Though frozen in winter, the offal and refuse rotted and reeked in the warmer months. Everyone complained of the foul odors.
My tea had grown cold so I uncurled, stretched, and made a fresh cup. When I reopened the book, I skipped ahead to a section on sanitation. It had been one of Louis-Philippe’s recurring gripes about the Hôtel Dieu Hospital. Sure enough, there was a reference to the old boy. He’d gone on to become a member of the Health Committee of the City Council.
I read an engrossing account of the council discussing human waste. Disposal was chaotic at the time. Some Montrealers flushed excrement into city sewers that led into the river. Some used earth closets, sprinkling dirt over their deposits then putting them out for garbage collectors. Others defecated into outdoor privy pits.
The city’s medical officer reported that inhabitants produced approximately 170 tons of excrement each day, or over 215,000 tons per year. He warned that the 10,000 privy pits and cesspools in the city were the primary source of zymotic diseases, including typhoid, scarlet fever, and diphtheria. The council decided in favor of a system of collection and incineration. Louis-Philippe voted yea. It was January 28, 1885.
The day after the vote, Grand Trunk Railway’s western train pulled into Bonaventure Station. A conductor was ill and the railroad’s doctor was called. The man was examined and diagnosed as having smallpox. Being Protestant, he was taken to the Montreal General Hospital, but was refused admission. The patient was allowed to wait in an isolated room in the contagious diseases wing. Finally, at the railroad doctor’s pleading, he was grudgingly admitted to the Catholic Hôtel Dieu Hospital.
I got up to stoke the fire. As I rearranged the logs I pictured the rambling, gray-stone building that stood at avenue des Pins and rue St-Urbain. The Hôtel Dieu was still a functioning hospital. I’d driven past it many times.
I went back to the book. My stomach was growling, but I wanted to read until Harry arrived.
The doctors at the Montreal General thought those at the Hôtel Dieu had reported the smallpox to public health authorities. Those at the Hôtel Dieu thought the converse. No one told the authorities, and no one told the medical staff at either hospital. By the time the epidemic ended, over three thousand people were dead, most of them children.
I closed the book. My eyes were burning and my temples throbbed. The clock said seven-fifteen. Where was Harry?
I went to the kitchen, took out and rinsed the salmon steaks. As I mixed dill sauce I tried to picture my neighborhood a century earlier. How did one face smallpox in those days? To what home remedies did one turn? Over two thirds of the dead were children. What was it like to see your neighbors’ children die? How did one deal with the helplessness of caring for a doomed child?
I scrubbed two potatoes and put them in the toaster oven, then washed lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Still no Harry.
Though the reading had taken my mind off Mathias and Malachy and Carole Comptois, I was still tense and my head hurt. I ran a hot bath and added aromatherapy ocean mineral salts. Then I put on a Leonard Cohen CD and slipped in for a long soak.
I used Élisabeth
to keep my mind off my recent homicide cases. The trip through history had been fascinating, but I hadn’t learned what I needed to know. I was already familiar with Élisabeth’s work during the epidemic through the volumes of information Sister Julienne had sent before the exhumation.
Élisabeth had been a recluse for years, but when the epidemic raged out of control she became an advocate for medical moderni-zation. She wrote letters to the Provincial Board of Health, to the Health Committee of the City Council, and to Honoré Beaugrand, mayor of Montreal, begging for improved sanitation. She bombarded the French- and English-language papers, demanding the reopening of the city smallpox hospital and arguing for public vaccination.
She wrote to her bishop, pointing out that the fever was spread in places where crowds gathered, and begging him to temporarily close the churches. Bishop Fabre refused, stating that to close the churches would be to laugh at God. The bishop urged his flock to church, telling them that united prayer was more powerful than prayer in isolation.
Good thinking, Bishop. That’s why French Catholics were dying and English Protestants were not. The heathens got inoculated and stayed home.
I added hot water, imagining Élisabeth’s frustration and how much tact I would have used.
O.K. I knew about her work, and I knew aboust her death. The nuns had gone to town on that. I’d read reams on her final illness and the public funeral that followed.
But I needed to know about her birth.
I took the soap and worked up a lather.
There was no avoiding the journals.
I ran the bar over my shoulders.
But I had the photocopies, so that could wait until I got to Charlotte.
I washed my feet.
Newspapers. That had been Jeannotte’s suggestion. Yes. I’d use the time I had on Monday to view old newspapers. I had to go to McGill anyway to return the diaries.
I slid back into the hot water and thought about my sister. Poor Harry. I’d pretty much ignored her yesterday. I’d been tired, but was that it? Or was it Ryan? She had every right to sleep with him if she wanted. So why had I been so cold? I resolved to be more friendly tonight.
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