Deep in thought? he heard as he was pondering Emma’s next visit in just a few days, and he saw Michaud on his feet next to the table, waiting for him to pull out of his reverie. He’d just sacrificed a few moments of the real world to its dark side, there where unknowns, disowned by chance, have gone to ground. He would have liked to have remained in that world for a few moments more, thinking of those many lives that had slipped through his fingers, but the worried look on Michaud’s face brought him back to the here and now. Very deep, he answered, then all three left for the cottage of Marcel Dumas, the old bachelor who’d been woken by the laughter of Zaza, Sissy, Frenchie, when the young girls had left the campground on Friday night.
Dumas was a dry, nervous little man whose hands trembled when he reached for his Zippo to light one of the hand-rolled cigarettes he’d prepared that morning, to last him until night. Fifteen a day, no more, as his lungs were weak. Still, he smoked four in just half an hour, restless, tense, smoothing his grey hair with a shaky hand, repeating that he’d heard nothing of what the adolescents were saying. The words of drunken young girls, incomprehensible. He also hadn’t noticed if anyone was following them. He’d only glanced out his window long enough to see who was responsible for the noise, long enough to glimpse the bottle Frenchie Lamar was holding out, seeing it passing from one hand to another as she swayed along. Michaud insisted, nevertheless, that he repeat his story, ask him what time it was, Larue, because Dumas’s nervousness was not a good sign. Either he was made uneasy by the situation, like all those people who lose their composure at the very sight of a police badge, or he was hiding something. Michaud thought the latter, but Dumas stuck to his version of the facts. He’d neither seen nor heard any more than he’d told them.
We’ll be back, grumbled Michaud, leaving Dumas’s cottage, a remark Larue didn’t bother translating, then they went to knock at another door, then another, and another still, where they were greeted by solemn faces, aware already that the police were doing the rounds of Bondrée, with a cadaver on their hands. The afternoon was drawing to a close when Samuel Duchamp welcomed them onto his veranda. He wasn’t the one who’d found the body, but it was he who, along with Gilles Ménard, had asked his neighbour to call the police, and led Cusack to the scene of the crime. And so he’d seen the dried blood, the torn skin, the lifeless face. No surprise that he seemed so beaten down. When the three men arrived he rose to shake Cusack’s hand, as one shakes the hand of a brother-in-arms. Horror creates bonds, and a bond had been forged between Duchamp and Cusack when they knelt near Zaza Mulligan. Michaud remembered having seen this fellow the night before, keeping his distance while his team scoured the site, but he’d paid him no heed. All his attention was then focused on Zaza Mulligan, on Esther Conrad. He barely saw the restless shadows moving about under the floodlights.
Duchamp also shook the hands of Michaud and Larue, but more formally, without a meeting of eyes to acknowledge a shared ordeal, and without the suggestion of a mutual understanding, since there was as yet no connection between them. He invited them to sit down while his wife brought lemonade in a large, misted pitcher. Michaud’s wife owned the same pitcher, which she’d acquired by saving up packages of Kool-Aid, and he regretted not being home, preparing the barbecue for Monday night hamburgers. As for Dorothy, Dottie, his wife, she was no doubt wondering whether she should light the charcoal briquettes or wait a while, in case Stan only arrived at nightfall. She was used to this. Since Stan had been named chief inspector at Skowhegan, fifteen years earlier, she practically lived alone. Her evenings dragged on while she waited, then a car door slammed and Stan appeared, most of the time exhausted, his face haggard from a violence whose effects he might just be able to manage. He was not made for this job, he was too sensitive, too vulnerable, and yet no one better than he knew how to ferret out villainy. When he could still stand on his own two feet she served him a whisky, a Bulleit or a Wild Turkey, raw whiskys the way he liked them, and they sat in the living room, where he buried himself in a book about nature or slumped down in front of the TV, while Dorothy devoured the new Patricia Highsmith or gave herself over to her latest pastime, drawing, yoga, puzzles, or word games. Some nights he told her about his day, how he’d had to testify at the trial of an adolescent who’d tried to strangle the bastard who was beating his mother, how he’d helped out his colleagues, surrounding a mare frightened by a brush fire. Other nights he said nothing, or almost nothing, and Dorothy understood that he’d seen what no one wanted to see, that he was wading through mire that would bury him in the end, mire on the move, the kind men are so good at manufacturing.
Unlike other police wives, Dorothy didn’t complain about her situation. She worked three afternoons a week at the local library, had a few good friends, including Laura Cusack, the wife of Stan’s deputy, and she was not the type to get bored. When she was not re-potting a plant or re-covering a cushion, she sank down into an armchair with a book or magazine, and didn’t see the time pass. In any case, she and Stan had lived together too long for them to fill whole evenings with words. An hour or two was now ample for non-essentials, for the voicing of thoughts insistent enough that you had to express them aloud, or for when you had to face again things that went deep, fear, anxiety, and had to reframe words that refused to be daunted by the passing of time. Never mind, Stan still felt guilty, knowing she was there in the garden or the kitchen, wondering if she should peel the potatoes or if she could step into a warm bath. He’d phone her soon, when he’d finished with Duchamp.
Florence Duchamp, visibly intimidated by the presence of all these men, was on the verge of leaving them alone with her husband, but Michaud insisted she stay. He wanted to question her as well, because anything he learned about Zaza Mulligan might be useful, a detail, a word overheard by chance. Neither Florence nor Sam Duchamp could recall, however, a single incident that ought to have put them on their guard, any strangeness, any bizarre behaviour. They didn’t really know Zaza, and had always observed her from a distance. She belonged to another world, one that didn’t mix with theirs. For years they’d seen her go by with Sissy Morgan, singing with Sissy Morgan, the Andrews Sisters, Florence Duchamp murmured, lowering her head, saddened at the thought that one of the sisters would sing no more, thereby silencing her shadow, unless the shadow were to cloak Bondrée in mournful melodies. Only Andrée, their daughter, had been able to get close to the adolescents. She’d even gone looking for Zaza, two days earlier, along with Sissy.
Tell her to come here, Michaud said. Two minutes later the child was showing them the matchbook and the bag of chips she’d picked up along a path, Sissy’s watch, and the mother-of-pearl button she held in the palm of her hand, edged in gold and gleaming in the July sun. An object she hesitated to add to her treasure chest, fearing it would compromise the magic of her coloured feathers, would subdue the brilliance of her dusty jewels.
After closing her hand over the button, she described the earring she’d given to Sissy, a tear, a pink raindrop, then the route she’d taken, crying Zaza, Zaza Mulligan, from the McBain cottage to that of Brian Larue, the book man who was there before her now, translating each of her words in an assured voice, at ease with words, a tear, a drop of pink rain. She’d only ever seen him from afar, a tiny silhouette moving about in the shadow of the mountain on the other side of the lake, and she imagined him to be as grey as books. But he was blonde, fair as wheat and sand together. She was also astonished that his skin was so brown and his eyes so pale. The books, contrary to what she’d supposed, had not leached out Larue’s colours. Perhaps his luminosity came from them, from the word “sun” and the word “light” rising off the pages, brightness flaring in the forests where the characters roam.
But a cloud darkened his gaze today, a cloud that was not usually there. Zaza Mulligan, who’d forced him out of his books to face the odour of real blood. Books never hurt you, that’s why he’d chosen them. Every time he drifted away from them, it was only to
come face to face with the clear-cut pain in what was real, stretching all the way to this veranda, even into the eyes of this child, Andrée, who replied eagerly to the questions being asked as if she thought it still possible to save Zaza Mulligan, because children believe in resurrection, in the reversibility of death. They can’t accept the finality of certain silences, and speak to the dead while hoping one day to be able to take them by the hand.
Seeing that she was watching him, he placed a hand on the child’s scraped knee, just like Emma’s, just like that of all the little girls still running free, to ask her why she’d picked up the bag of chips. Because those were Zaza’s favourites, she replied, with “vinaigre.” Vinégueure, she added proudly, then immediately regretted it when Larue burst out laughing. He at once felt guilty for his dumb reaction, out of place under the circumstances. He’d just not been able to hold it back, what with the sincerity of this vinégueure with its Beauce accent. Sorry, he murmured to the little one, but she’d clammed up. He’d wounded her pride, and he’d have to be more diplomatic if he wanted to beguile her again, which he hoped to do, because he’d thought right away, on seeing her, that this little girl might be a friend to Emma, who was too solitary and too closed in on herself, that she might be a summer friend of the kind that leaves behind the fondest of memories. But Andrée didn’t blame Larue. She blamed herself, and was furious for being so stupid. The hell with you, Andrée Duchamp, keep your mouth shut, don’t translate anything any more, you look like a real idiot.
Seeing the uneasiness that had crept in, Michaud brought his interpreter back to the point, to the Humpty Dumpty bag, asked her to say again where exactly she’d picked it up, if it was empty or full, wet, stepped on, never mind what. Michaud also wanted to know whether the matchbook was near the bag, if she’d already seen one in Zaza’s hands, and if one could presume that the two objects had hit the ground at the same time, one from the hands of Zaza, the other from those of someone unknown. If the matchbook had at least borne the address of a bar, a restaurant, or a motel, he could have perhaps traced it back to its owner, but it was an anonymous matchbook like you saw everywhere, bearing only the Canadian maple leaf.
He could probably learn nothing from them, but this cursed matchbook and the bag of chips were all Michaud had to go on for the time being. He thought to himself that without his knowing how, those objects might yet lead him somewhere, give him some sense of the route Zaza had taken Friday night after saying goodnight to her friends, what paths she went down when she wanted to be alone, where she took shelter, places, to be exact, where you might follow her, wait to lure her farther on into a snare-filled forest, for that’s how he saw the place where Zaza Mulligan’s life ended, a zone where traps converged, and from which you did not emerge unscathed. The proof was that not he, nor Ménard, nor Duchamp, nor Cusack, had emerged intact from that night where Zaza Mulligan lay dead. They’d all left a part of themselves behind, a vestige of innocence that had survived into adulthood, a vision, a dream in which the forest did not turn into a realm beyond the grave, but a world that was still liveable. There were places that were under a curse and this was one, its traps hidden away for decades.
One of his men, the day before, had talked to him about a certain Peter Laundry, a trapper who’d hanged himself deep in the bush, and whose traps could still be found today, buried under vegetation, under fallen branches, under rot, like engines of death strewn over the landscape of countries once ravaged by war. The forest had plunged Landry into a space where he was no longer thinking like a human, and years later his amnesia, and the woods’ malevolence, were still doing their work. Was Zaza Mulligan the first victim since Landry and the dog called Sugar Baby, or had there been other deaths along the way, other vanishings no one had found suspicious, not conceiving of what nature could do?
He had a bad feeling on hearing Landry’s story, remembering that some men never entirely leave the places they’ve haunted. Their sadness outlives the beating of their hearts, and makes of them terrible spectres bent on destroying the tranquillity of peaceable kingdoms. The power of these phantoms eluded him, but he had the disturbing suspicion that Zaza Mulligan’s death foretold others still to come. That was why he’d insisted that the child be precise in every detail, describe every nuance, golden or lemon yellow, because he feared the onset of a new cycle of violence. And she had responded well. If her parents agreed, he’d perhaps come back to question her some more, as she seemed to know Boundary better than anyone. Not only its residents, but also its trees, its paths, its cul-de-sacs. For the moment he was exhausted, his shirt stuck to his back, and he wanted to go home, take a shower, and touch Dorothy’s cheek, to feel that softness he’d have liked to see on the surface of his own skin.
Enough for today, he murmured, and he asked if he could use the phone. The Duchamps had no phone, but he could go to the McBains’, the first neighbours on the right. But the prospect of having to shake other damp hands made him give up on the idea. Dorothy would understand. Dorothy always understood. But he did shake the hands of Duchamp and his wife, then that of Larue, arranging to meet him the next day. They’d work out the details of his hiring later. He then got back into his official car along with Cusack, who wanted to make conversation, unable to bear the silence despite the wind whistling past the open windows. Cusack was young, one of these days he’d learn to be quiet, once he realised that words only calm one’s anxiety for a very short time. Meanwhile, Michaud pretended to listen. He grunted, knitting his brows, he nodded his head, tossed out an occasional yes for the sake of appearances, all the time trying to elude the boomerangs which, along the road, were threatening to hurl themselves out of the woods.
The policemen came back the next day with Brian Larue, all three exhausted, all three mopping their foreheads under the big spruce tree where my father had dragged the chairs. Jim Cusack, the youngest, was killing horseflies, half of which didn’t exist, with his handkerchief. He scratched at his neck, anticipating the bite, then gave a slap to his shoulder or his knee, swearing under his breath. After a few minutes my father began to scratch too, out of empathy or a kind of infectious uneasiness I suppose, seeing the imaginary flies missed by Cusack heading his way. He suggested they go in the house, but Michaud wanted to stay outside for the breeze, if you could call that semblance of wind a breeze, since it barely stirred the trees’ limp leaves.
My mother must have been watching their little game from inside the cottage, because she turned up with a bottle of lemon oil my father and Cusack used to anoint all their body parts not covered by clothing, except the top of the head, which Cusack rubbed compulsively, victim to one of those uncontrollable itches resulting from irritation, heat, fatigue, and for which there was no remedy. You have to lie down, forget you exist, and start anew the next day.
As for Michaud and Larue, they seemed immune to flies and mosquitoes. With the backs of their hands they intercepted the drops of sweat trying to slip into their eyes, dried their knuckles on their pants, and squinted at the sun filtering through the branches. The air was still and Brian Larue lit cigarette after cigarette, probably to combat the smells of lemon, spruce, and sweat all mixed together, because it didn’t seem likely that someone could smoke away like that just for the pleasure of it. Every time Michaud asked me a question, he exhaled the smoke from his last puff, then translated, while knocking off the ash with a tap of his thumb from under the filter. Michaud wanted to know if I was familiar with the paths that split off from the east side of Turtle Road, Otter Trail, Weasel Trail, that of Loutre, that of Belette, and if I’d seen Zaza with a boy or a man. I’d seen Zaza kiss Mark Meyer, the campground attendant, at the start of Otter Trail, but I couldn’t say anything about that in front of my father. I was afraid that if I uttered the word “kiss,” he’d imagine me frenching with Réjean Lacroix or Jacques Maheux, two idiots who organised spitting contests and thought they were geniuses because they peed farther than Michael Jamison. So I said m
aybe, a stupid answer that was the same as an admission. Michaud, not so stupid, kept at me until I confessed that I’d seen Mark Meyer put his mouth against that of Zaza, which was the only way I could think of to say it.
The questions then came fast and furious, and I realised that they’d found Zaza not far from Otter Trail, a well-lit path where nothing bad, it seemed to me, could ever happen. I’d picked up Gertrude, my first frog, in the middle of that path, where I hid her under a nest of leaves. I went back to see her every day, and Gertrude was never in the same place, she got bigger and smaller all the time, but for me the frog I made jump along my forearm was always the same one, and her name was Gertrude, the Otter Trail Frog, even if she was a francophone frog, a real frog after all. I also went up Otter Trail when I wanted to plot a nasty trick, undisturbed, and to hide myself away behind a tree trunk where the ferns shielded me from people’s eyes. I even remembered for a long time looking for otters, though they’d abandoned the lakeshore and the river as soon as humans moved in, just like Pete Landry, who fled into the bush on Otter Trail or Weasel Trail. Maybe Zaza had taken flight also, following Landry and the otters, for a reason that had something to do with the presence of men. We’d probably never know, Zaza no longer being there to tell us why she’d run off into the night on Otter Trail. Only the man or boy who’d urged her there, as Stan Michaud seemed to think, could tell us why Zaza never came back, but that man wouldn’t talk. If he’d wanted to talk, he’d have done so already. If he stayed silent, it’s because he knew that a single word on his part would bring down a barrage of blows on his head.
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