Boundary

by Andrée A. Michaud

  While she prepared a soup that looked more like a mishmash of massacred vegetables, I borrowed one of the Bob Morane books from my brother, and settled into the La-Z-Boy. Outside the rain was still pouring down, and that’s all you heard, the wind, the rain, the dry, methodical clacking of the vegetable knife on the cutting board, and the barely audible collapse of Millie’s castles. I tried to concentrate on the Yellow Shadow’s progress through the London night, but the tension in the house rivalled Morane’s zeal in confronting the enemy. The rain obliterated Mister Ming’s silhouette, and filled the room with a nameless darkness that imposed its own silence.

  Huddled in his corner, my brother stared into space, while chewing at his cheeks. His right foot tapped the floor with a steady rhythm that sometimes matched the cadence of the vegetable knife, whose chunk-chunk sped and slowed according to the resistance offered by celery or turnip. Even Millie was holding her breath, darting rapid glances at my mother, and not daring to demand her glass of milk. In a vain attempt to lower the tension, I declared that I was going to read on the veranda, and tried to attract my brother’s attention, but he just buried himself deeper into his armchair. Mama told me to put on a sweater, and silence fell again at the same time as Millie’s castle, whose Queen of Hearts, monarch of the kingdom, flew right up to my feet. Zaza Mulligan’s just fallen down! exclaimed my sister. My mother turned in a flash, brandishing her knife, her forehead crimson. What did you say? Millie recoiled in her chair, pointing to the card I’d picked up, not too sure if she should answer or chew on one or two of her fingers. The Queen of Hearts is Zaza Mulligan, I explained, while Millie gnawed her right thumb, a habit of hers whenever she was afraid of being punished, guilty or not. My mother forced herself to smile, of course Millie of course, then she planted her knife in a potato and went to shut herself up in the toilet, whose confined space, it seemed, had the miraculous power of easing her anxieties.

  My intuition was not wrong. Zaza Mulligan was the source of the storm that had descended on Bondrée. I put the Queen of Hearts down on the table, and went to take refuge on the veranda. Visions of wounds and gashes rolled round in my head and I prayed that Zaza had just scraped herself on branches in an alder grove, let it be so, God, let it be so, but I knew perfectly well that you don’t let rip a hurricane for a few scratches.

  The smell of soup was just penetrating the odour of wet earth that pervaded the veranda when beams from headlights swept across the yard from the row of birches on the left to the swing creaking in the wind. Papa was back, with or without Gilles Ménard. Ordinarily, one or two slamming doors would have followed immediately after the engine was turned off, but my father stayed in the car, perhaps with Gilles Ménard, looking out on the dark depths from which they could not detach themselves. Finally a door shut and my father came into view at the corner of the cottage, not running, not any more, but bearing on his shoulders the very future mother had dreaded. The horror in Ménard’s nerve-wracked body had caught up with him now on this rainy night, just two or three miles from a world where light still shone. No point in running when you’re caught. No point in crying out when no one can hear.

  Hello, my mite, he murmured, coming onto the veranda, then he picked me up in his arms and held me to his wet raincoat, smelling of fir and mould. He held me like that for a long time, and left me there, shaken by this excess of tenderness, which signified that the worst had happened in the woods. Someone was dead. Zaza Mulligan was dead.

  The drama had taken place about a mile from the Mulligan cottage on the night of Friday the 21st to Saturday the 22nd of July, according to the estimate of the medical examiner, who couldn’t be more precise as to the hour of death. An investigation was launched immediately, in order to establish the exact causes of death, as well as the reason Zaza was walking in the woods at such an hour. As Boundary straddled a vague border lost in the lake’s deep waters, it was hard to decide whether the investigation was the responsibility of Canada or the United States. Finally, the Maine police were put in charge of the case, the victim being American. The incident site was searched first, but the rain that had come down on Boundary Sunday night had erased all signs that might offer clues. All that remained, half dried in the mud, were the footprints left by the police and the men who had led them to the body, Gilles Ménard and Samuel Duchamp, both still pale, both still in shock. Without any tracks or other indications, it could not be confirmed whether someone had brought Zaza, willingly or by force, deep into the woods.

  The investigators had nothing solid on which to rely. There was no witness, and no call for help had been heard, unless Zaza’s cries had been confused with those of the animals that crossed Boundary from north to south every night. Unless people had preferred to blame the wind and to stay warm in their beds. Hope Jamison reproached herself, saying she should have woken Ted after hearing a hoarse sound she’d too quickly taken for the yapping of a coyote. I should have seen if it was the wind, Barry Miller said to himself, or the shed door, repeated Madeleine Maheux. Guilt was already circulating its poison, the fear of having let sleep render you oblivious to Zaza’s calls because it was Zaza, that kind of girl, who had always, as long as you could remember, been heard singing with Sissy Morgan, crying with Sissy Morgan, run, Sissy, run! to the point where you’d come to pay no attention to the two girls, who had become three over the summer, Sissy, Zaza, Frenchie.

  Everyone was questioned, everyone who knew how to talk, from the smallest to the biggest, but the investigation focused on the relatives and friends, the last people to have seen Zaza alive, Sissy Morgan, Frenchie Lamar, then Gilles Ménard, the man who’d discovered the body. What was Ménard doing in the woods? That was the first thing the police wanted to know, and Ménard had no answer to this question other than the most banal. He was walking, that’s all, because he liked to walk, to walk beneath the trees and to see the play of light on the tangled, mossy roots. But he couldn’t explain why he’d taken this direction rather than another. It was a matter of chance, a moment’s whim. A detail catches your eye, an animal track, a familiar clearing, and you decide to head into the woods at that spot.

  Ménard didn’t know what path he would have taken had he known what he’d find that day, and the thought tormented him. Would he have raced towards Zaza, driven by the vain hope of outrunning death, or would he have left it to others to shut the young girl’s uprolled eyes? Do you throw yourself towards a nightmare, towards the blade that’s going to rip into your breast? Back home, the night before, while the police dealt with Zaza Mulligan, he’d only been able to doze off at dawn, haunted by the adolescent’s indescribable gaze, part resignation and part stark terror, then by the long leg that slid under the sheets, the gluey sweetness of the fresh blood, jolting him awake. The blade had already seared his skin, forcing him to lie to Jocelyne, his wife, to clumsily comfort her, unable to admit that henceforth they’d be sleeping with the dead.

  The investigators also questioned her, Jocelyne, a great beauty according to one of the policemen, seeing the pale freckles which attested to the harsh sun beneath which she must have run and played as a child. She confirmed that her husband often went off for hours at a time, returning, his breath rich with the odour of spruce gum, his eyes agleam with the glint of stream water or the gaze of beasts lurking in the green shade of the underbrush. She didn’t know the true source of this gleaming, didn’t understand how cold water could be transmuted into light in the corner of an eye, but she could describe the bitter taste of the forest, lingering in her mouth long after her husband, with luminous strokes of his tongue, had tried to impart to her this essence containing the beauty of the trees. But she could tell them nothing about Zaza Mulligan, other than that her ghostly body, since the previous night, walked by her husband’s side, and that he’d talked to her about Zaza’s torn leg, but above all about her hair, that streak of light subdued in green shadow. That’s what Ménard had noticed first on leaving the path, the long red hair, no
t immediately grasping what the silky tangle was. He’d felt a violent blow to his chest on seeing it, like the one that hit him every time his little Marie broke away from him to cross the street. Time stopped, became just a heart beating in the void, until Marie reached the opposite sidewalk and he was able to join her, his legs wobbly, his ears buzzing: if you die, Marie, I’ll go mad.

  And so at the heart of the forest he thought of Marie while holding his breath, then he burst out laughing, finding himself ridiculous, stupid, fumbling in his pocket for a handkerchief to wipe away his tears, squatting down with a cramp in his stomach now, a good laughing-out-loud cramp. What he’d taken for hair was just the long red tail of a fox, dead from hunger, sickness, or old age. Fucking Ménard, he murmured, fucking Ménard, you give me a pain sometimes. When he raised his head a flash of white skin dazzled him, a few inches of white reaching out from the hair. His laughter came up short, a gunshot went to his heart, and he approached the tree at the foot of which something uncertain was lying. It’s a fox, Ménard, take it easy, it’s just a poor fox. But the thing was almost naked, longer than a fox, whiter as well. It had legs and polished fingernails.

  Like all men his age, Ménard had seen death, but he had to lean against a tree so as not to fall. Troubled by the partial nudity of the body, dressed in a simple pair of shorts and a sweater hiked up to the breasts, it took him a while to recognise Elisabeth Mulligan, even if she was the only girl in Bondrée with such a head of hair. Drained of its blood, the face now was no more than a mask, a cold porcelain object with what might have been long threads of red silk wound around it. Ménard had already seen death, yes, but he’d only seen it dressed up and powdered, stripped of any sharp memory of warm flesh and masking the body’s nearness to the earth, where humus feeds on putrescence.

  An airborne bird made him jump, stay calm Ménard, and he took off his shirt to cover Zaza Mulligan. He then placed a nervous finger on her jugular, for appearance’s sake, because it was clear that the adolescent was no longer breathing. The jaws of a bear trap had closed over her right leg, baring the bone, the long white tibia of a young girl with long legs, then the blood had spilled out, all of Zaza’s blood. Ménard thought of the blood of Sugar Baby, so much a part of Maggie Harrison and Pierre Landry’s legend, but whose death was only referred to obliquely, and never spoken of to children for fear that a little white dog might come in turn to haunt the beach, a real little dog, with real blood to mingle with the scarlet nectar of Tanager’s crushed flowers. Dead as a dog, he murmured. The young girl must have fainted first, then awakened a little later, between darkness and light, and tried to clutch at the rotten leaves, her hands limp, her eyelids heavy, her breath tuned to the wind’s slow drift.

  At first Ménard didn’t know how to react. He didn’t want to abandon the remains, leave them alone in this forest where he’d suddenly learned what fear really meant, but he couldn’t stay there and shout himself hoarse until his cries were lost in those of Zaza. He had to alert someone, a friend, the police, the parents. Before leaving he at least closed Zaza’s eyelids. He could not bear the idea of their being wide open to light sifting through branches and entering her eyes only to find utter darkness. Perhaps he was wrong, perhaps it was better not to touch the body, but he wanted that gaze to rest in peace, wanted to expunge those clouded visions, blighted with red, which had accompanied the dying. Then he ran, breathless, to the cottage of Sam Duchamp, an honest man who’d keep him from breaking down.

  Jocelyne Ménard knew nothing more but that was enough, with their cottage held hostage by a mutilated body that followed her husband everywhere, its sickening smell smothering the pungent perfume of the trees inside his mouth.

  Stan Michaud, the chief inspector in charge of the investigation, had also spent the night with Zaza Mulligan, in the midst of those odours exhaled by the inhuman whiteness of cold flesh. He was watching an episode of Bonanza when Jim Cusack, his deputy, called to the crime site to replace a sick officer, phoned him. Cusack had been an inspector on his team for three years, and he’d never seen him flinch before any horror, letting the pain roll off his cop’s back without gaining a hold. But Michaud knew that Cusack’s equanimity had its limits, and that one day he would crack. That day had come. As Cusack described the scene to him, Michaud saw that the façade behind which the policeman was hiding was slowly breaking down, and that this affair would become one of those that haunt you long after the dust has settled, one of the boomerang cases, as he called them, that come back at you full force just as you’re having a quiet beer in your garden, and that pursue you until the first snows, if not until Christmas. In general those cases involve children or young girls, vulnerable bodies found under the crumpled metal of an automobile, or on the edge of a wheat field where a few hairs, torn away, undulate along with the yellow spikes. When he heard Cusack’s faltering voice, a picture came instantly to his mind, or rather a face, that of Esther Conrad, sixteen years old, one of the boomerangs that hit him straight on every time a new one was flung his way.

  The case went back ten years or so, but Esther’s hand, closed around a stone shaped much like a heart, still haunted him. The hand grazed the back of his neck after the boomerangs came down, then it let the grey stone drop at his feet. For a long time Michaud thought the heart might lead him to the killer, that Esther had tightened her fist around the one object that could identify her attacker. In the pale light of the morgue, surrounded by its cold metal surfaces, he’d asked the young girl, who, Esther, who? But it was in Salem that he’d had to question her, in the dump where a junk dealer had found her, and he’d gone back there, ten, twenty times, with the rats scrabbling in the refuse, who, Esther, who? in a futile search for the initials that ought to have been carved into the heart, for the signature of the poisoned arrow that had robbed her of all she had, her life, her breath.

  As Cusack was giving him the young girl’s name, Elisabeth Mulligan, one that would haunt him forever after, Michaud thought about Esther’s heart, now gathering dust in a box on the nondescript shelves of the State Police archives. Elisabeth Mulligan, he repeated, to commit the name to memory, then he told Cusack that he’d be in Boundary within the hour. He told his wife not to wait up for him, that he had to go to the scene of a crime, a crime or an accident, he didn’t yet know. All he knew was that he was on his way to the site of a death that would put down roots inside him.

  He wasn’t wrong. As soon as he set foot on the spot, lit by a few improvised flood lamps with their surreal light shining down onto Zaza Mulligan’s sodden body, he received a sudden sharp blow to the throat, that of the boomerang. He stayed put until the middle of the night, talking with the pathologist, with his colleagues, with the dead, who, Elisabeth, who? After the body was taken away he kept wandering about the site, kneeling in the mud, studying the rusted trap, wiping the back of his neck, constantly, compulsively, there where the drops falling from the trees met Esther Conrad’s hand. Back home he hesitated to join his wife, knowing there was not much chance of his getting to sleep, then he slid under the cotton sheet at last, only to find there, long and tanned, Zaza Mulligan’s lopped leg. That’s how sleep found him, his leg wrapped around that of a dead young girl. The nightmares came on then, the screeching of tyres, the clanking of metal, the usual repertoire. He woke two hours later, as weary as if he’d slept on a pile of boards, and he went looking for Cusack, with whom he began the round of questioning.

  He started with the parents, Sarah and George Mulligan, whom Cusack had tried in vain to talk to during the night. Again they were almost mute, repeating that they knew nothing, they didn’t understand, blaming themselves for not having spent enough time with their daughter, then retreating again into silence, their eyes red, their hands trembling. Michaud and Cusack had no more success with Sissy Morgan, too filled with rage to be of any help in the short term. You would have told me, bitch! You would have told me, she kept on saying, striking the fluffy orange cushion she clutc
hed to her stomach, her long hair flung over her face, while imploring her father to confess the truth, it’s not true, Dad, she’s not gone, tell me the truth, tell me, tell me! When he could see her eyes, Michaud said to himself that those of Zaza must have projected the same fury, that her voice must have assumed the same cadence when she was angry. The resemblance between the dead and living girls was not striking, but it must have been when the dead one was still alive. She who was weeping before him was another Zaza, a sister, a twin. Abruptly, he wanted to lift her in his arms and bear her off like a princess to a place where no trap could ever close over her long legs. He stretched out his hand in her direction, and the young girl recoiled. Don’t touch me! A bit shamefaced, he sought support in the eyes of his colleague, then the two of them took their leave. They’d come back when Sissy Morgan had regained her calm.

  Outside, the sun was already beating down. It would be a hot, stifling day. A day without end. Heat waves, like cold spells, always made the work harder. During the one you dragged your feet, hoping for wind, rain, thinking of the rotten smells aggravated by the humidity. And you were unbelieving, you stupidly told yourself that nothing so awful could happen in the bright sunlight. Summer didn’t seem right for tragic endings, and you looked to the heavens for the corpse to stir a finger, to half lift an eyelid, since it was only the muggy weather that kept it lying there. You tried to persuade yourself, despite the flies buzzing about the wound. In the second instance, it seemed that devastation was everywhere to be seen or soon would be, that the drama you were probing was just a prelude to the one to follow. A prophetic death, embracing an icy gloom, lapping up the cold and spewing it back at you in glacial exhalations.