I turned all that over in my mind while Jim Cusack pulled at his scalp, while Brian Larue spat his life away, while my father tried to balance his chair on the spruce roots snaking over the ground, forming knots with other roots before returning to earth, and Otter Trail suddenly seemed dangerous to me, because you could die there, because you could meet there men who harboured a lethal secret. I didn’t know how Zaza had died, my parents refused to tell us. Waiting to learn about it some other way, I could only use my imagination, could only reproduce scenes of horror I’d seen on television, where hands holding a shiny knife blade advanced through the darkness. Otter Trail, from now on, would be haunted by Zaza Mulligan’s shadow, then by that of a faceless figure who could leap out of the dew-drenched ferns at any time, ready to rip out your eyes to protect his secret. Because Zaza had strayed, nothing would ever be the same.
My chair was sinking into the ground among the twisted roots, when my father placed his hand on my shoulder. You all right, my bug? He called me that when things were serious, bug. I could have taken offence, but I knew that the bug he saw in me had nothing to do with an insect. It was a bug that wasn’t really a bug, that didn’t smell bad and that knew how to climb trees. Bug was just another word for mite, not really more flattering if you think about it, but it was a word full of affection, and nothing gave me more pleasure than to hear him call me that. As long as he called me bug, I knew he loved me. I told him yes, I’m all right, why tell the truth when it’s got a dirty face? Michaud asked me one last question, then everyone got up, Brian Larue coughing, Michaud cracking his knuckles, Cusack starting in again to kill non-existent horseflies, and me looking at the roots over which everyone made their way without asking themselves if it hurt.
Before leaving, Brian Larue invited me to visit his daughter, Emma, who’d be arriving in Bondrée the next day. She looks like you, I’m sure she’d like to know you, then he tempted me with Emma’s dog, a short-legged dachshund called Brownie that no doubt picked up all kinds of dirt in its fur and scared off other animals, squirrels and field mice. His strategy worked all the same, because if Emma Larue turned out to be the same kind of nuisance as Jane Mary Brown, I could at least fall back on the dog, given that my parents refused to adopt one, claiming that it hurt too much when they left us, and they didn’t want to see us going around red-eyed for weeks. All they saw in the animal was its death, forgetting the big paws on your knees, the furry behinds that warmed your feet, the smiles from ear to ear. That’s why you wanted a dog, because a dog, it’s lovable. If it were as dumb as a cabbageworm, there’d be no problem. For that matter, I asked myself why they’d bothered to make us, Bob, Millie, and me, because we were going to die too, maybe before them, like Zaza Mulligan, whose parents had shut themselves up behind closed curtains, refusing the summer, refusing the sun. Even Zaza’s brothers, Jack and Ben, back from Florida the day after the body was found, were unable to tempt them out or to take them back to Portland. They wanted to stay near Zaza, near her last words, her last steps, and would only go to Portland for the burial, which had to be delayed because of the autopsy.
That’s what Brian Larue told my parents when he thought I was out of earshot, that they were going to cut up Zaza’s body and go right under her skin to look at her, in case the state of her heart might explain why it had stopped beating. Michaud, standing beside Larue, mumbled something about a young girl who had a kind of stone heart or crippled heart, and I didn’t understand anything he said. I thought about Zaza’s heart, her gaping belly, like the plastic model at the front of my classroom in school, with its yellow liver and its orange spleen, run through with diagonal grooves. I also thought of Sissy Morgan cloistered in her room. Since Zaza’s death, Sissy had been invisible. No one had seen her coming down Snake Hill humming Lucy in the Sky, no one had seen her dive off the end of the Mulligan dock, shouting whatever, Sam! an expression with meaning only for Sissy and Zaza and belonging only to them, whatever, Sam! their red and white bathing suits describing perfect arcs against the blue sky. I thought of Sissy’s sadness as Laval Maheux passed by on his new bike, a sign that the quarantine was coming to an end. Children began to come outside, mothers to shout after them, Michael, Norman, don’t cross the lifeline, and Michael and Norman cried out in their turn from this side of the buoys you weren’t supposed to go past, the lifeline beyond which the swimmer lost his footing and risked being swallowed up by the calm water. Life returned. The wind carried the sounds made by the living, but Sissy’s sounds were missing, and the sounds of Zaza. There were holes in the echo sent back to us by Moose Trap, in the colours of the landscape, holes that would never be filled, even if another duo were to appear, an Emma-Andrée duo, for example.
I was wary of meeting this girl, and at the same time couldn’t stop myself from dreaming. I saw myself wrapped in a cloud of smoke, a Pall Mall in my hand, and a bunch of “foc Emmas” on the tip of my tongue, ready to materialise along with the smoke, but there was only one duo like that of Sissy Morgan and Zaza Mulligan. Zaza gone, such an entity was no longer imaginable. Franky-Frenchie Lamar was still around, but she didn’t have what it took to aspire to the title of Queen Zaza. In any case, I would have bet a million dollars that her friendship with Sissy Morgan was over, Zaza not being there to hold the three of them together. Besides, Frenchie was just an appendage, a more or less viable add-on, a kind of extension that only held true because the others tolerated it. Without Zaza, no balance was possible. There would never be another duo, only a truncated Sissy, weakened by the loss, a lame half-girl who could not be made whole.
I kicked at a rock without wondering if that caused it pain, then I went back into the cottage, where my mother made me swear never again to set foot on Otter Trail. For now, she didn’t have to worry. I had no intention of going for a stroll there where Zaza’s voice would rise from the ground with the dew, but one day I would return, when curiosity got the better of my fear, and I’d had enough of behaving like a coward. I’d wait for the rain to wash the blood away, all of Zaza’s blood, for the wind and the birds to carry off the last of her hair, and I’d go there, to the end of Otter Trail, because that’s what children do who can’t stop themselves from diving from high on the rocks, eyes shut hard but skin all aquiver. And there, bent over the flattened ferns with their dim impress of a body as fanciful as Jim Cusack’s flies, I’d murmur Zaza, Zaz, as I once whispered the name of Pete Landry near what was left of his shack. And perhaps Zaza would answer me, who knows, and would tell me softly what closed eyes see, before I’d take off, asking no more, happy to be alive, happy to be a child.
Stan Michaud and Jim Cusack spent four days in Boundary, knocking and again knocking at the same doors, questioning the same people, pulling from their tents those staying at the campground, or going to seek them out near the lake. These strangers were perfect suspects, but they all also had perfect alibis, a girlfriend who hadn’t left them alone all night, a neighbour in the camp with whom they’d partied until dawn, a child who’d received a fishhook in the behind and had to be taken to see a doctor, but Michaud persevered, going over the same detail twenty times, dragging Cusack into Otter Trail and asking him to wait at the edge of the woods while he walked alone in the footsteps of Elisabeth Mulligan. At those times he kneeled where the young girl had fallen, near the hole left when the trap was removed, and he dug around the hole in case Zaza had buried there a gold heart or one of stone. The trap was now at the local police station, inside a box Michaud opened when he felt himself at a dead end, up against a wall behind which there was perhaps a light or a truth that would solve the mystery. He studied the trap as he had examined Esther Conrad’s stone heart, hoping the object would speak to him, that a sudden insight would come to him while the rain drummed on the dirty windows, then he folded the box’s flaps back down, leaving only the narrow gaps giving onto a deep darkness.
It was dark as well at the end of Otter Trail, but at times a ray of sun entered into the open
ing where the trap had been wedged. It then seemed to Michaud that Zaza was smiling, that in this light the young girl’s last rush of happiness was declaring itself, defying her pain on a summer’s day as flawless as youth. How, Elisabeth? Why? But the day remained silent. The silence was easy to explain. Elisabeth Mulligan had died for nothing, for no reason, because most young people die that way, to no proper purpose, with nothing to explain the speed with which events unfold. This death, like almost all premature deaths, was devoid of meaning. Unless you were to see death justified by the privilege granted to the living of breathing the air on earth. Those who breathed more rapidly, perhaps, or more intensely, would be condemned to an earlier death. Faced with the frequent dramas where blood was shed, Michaud found himself thinking along those lines as a matter of course, always asking questions that had no answers. Why so young? Why so beautiful? Why this one and not that one?
In the days following Esther Conrad’s disappearance, he’d also pondered those senseless questions: why, why, why? He remembered that Dorothy, just as he was reflecting on the transience of beauty, had talked to him of jonquils and roses, of lilacs that you gathered most always before they were ready to die. Such was the fate of a certain kind of beauty. He didn’t know what the answer was, he thought of horses you put down when their gaze goes dim behind the froth on their breath, but that act of mercy had nothing to do with flowers picked in the middle of gardens, then he went back to his first idea, that death had meaning only if the heart stopped from exhaustion, if it was the result of a conscious act, of an inadequate adaptation to life.
Zaza Mulligan, he knew, was not one of those who had lost faith in the need to survive. Her hair was too long for her not to have loved life. Besides, you didn’t choose torture to put an end to your days. Barring proof to the contrary, she did not belong either to that handful of unfortunates whose fate was determined by an assassin. Despite his lingering doubts, he couldn’t help concluding that Zaza had died accidentally because of the errant ways of a man called Landry, who didn’t know he was becoming unhinged. That’s what he’d said to her parents, and that’s what he’d write in his report, accidental death, senseless death, for nothing, in the prime of life, since no concrete evidence contradicted that thesis, and the medical examiner had detected no anomaly during his autopsy other than a slight heart murmur, which perhaps explained the young girl’s red cheeks when she insisted that her heart beat more strongly. Still, he’d hold on to the trap in case the object were to break its silence, and he’d keep his eyes open, you never knew where killers might resurface, or where a chance occurrence might offer a glimpse of a premeditated act, the hand decanting poison or propelling an innocent victim to the bottom of a ravine.
After telling George and Sarah Mulligan that his investigation was over and that they’d see him no more, he went to pay one more visit to Brian Larue, whom he regretted not being able to add to his team, not only because Larue made it possible for him to negotiate the ins and outs of a language he felt too old to go back to, but because he had the impression that he was one of those men with whom you could discuss anything without their doing an instant pirouette to bury their heads in the sand. If he’d known Larue better, he’d have talked to him about the solitude of those who consent to lay hands on the skin of the dead, cold and increasingly viscous, with the odour of decay they trail behind them, an odour whose origin they can’t communicate to those close to them without obliging them to touch the viscid skin in their turn. Larue would have understood, since his hand, over recent days, had brushed against Zaza Mulligan’s body several times. What was the point, however, of reminding a man that he too shared a contagion? Once at Larue’s, he pretended he’d just come to thank him one last time, but Larue saw his bowed shoulders, his eyes ringed in shadow, and he invited Michaud for a drink. You don’t refuse one’s house to a man in need of rest.
Michaud wasn’t used to drinking so early in the day, but he accepted a cold beer, which he savoured in the shade of the porch, slumped in an armchair where he would have soon fallen asleep had he been alone. Beside him Larue also drank, turning his bottle around in his hands, its label, wet with condensation, shredding into thin strips that stuck to his fingers. From time to time one of them made a remark about the heat or the stubbornness of old Pat Tanguay, who must have decided to fry himself in his boat with his fish, but neither seemed ready to broach the subject that connected them, Zaza Mulligan. They were both lost in thought, in the contemplation of clouds or the observation of the young girls below them, playing on the beach. Even if Michaud didn’t know Larue’s daughter, he soon guessed, seeing little Andrée Duchamp jumping off the end of the dock, that the child running behind her was Emma. As for the dog pacing the dock and barking, that was surely Brownie, the dachshund Larue had mentioned.
For about twenty minutes the girls took turns diving, splashing Brownie and creating little rainbows over the lake’s calm surface, then they sat down on the dock, their beach towels over their heads to protect themselves from the sun and to contain in the damp cloth’s shadow the secrets children invent. They talked heatedly, agitating their thin arms outside the shelter of their towels, and Michaud thought to himself that you could already see, in the refinement of the muscles, that those would soon be women’s arms. Their wrists would be adorned with gold or showy bracelets whose jingling would create that music proper to women who talk with their hands and who with broad gestures trace out words they want to be heard more than others. Michaud had always been fascinated by those noisy creatures, not afraid to laugh out loud in the middle of the street, clacking their heels on the sidewalks. But they frightened him too. He preferred discreet women, like Dorothy, whose femininity was less strident. He was just wondering what category Emma and Andrée would fall into when Larue offered him another beer, which he willingly accepted even if he shouldn’t have, even if the heat amplified the effect of the alcohol. He felt good on this porch. Larue’s empathetic silence was calming, after a week during which everyone wanted to be heard on the subject of Zaza Mulligan’s death, weighing him down with absurd opinions and gossip so petty that it verged on the obscene.
Coming back with the beer, ice cold O’Keefes bought on the Canadian side of the border, Larue pointed to the clouds gathering in the south, foretelling a storm. Michaud voiced his concern about forest fires, talking about the one that had razed part of Maine in October 1947, the worst fire the state had ever known, destroying almost half of Mount Desert Island, burning houses on Millionaires’ Row in Bar Harbour, and consuming in all more than seventeen thousand acres of land. “The year Maine burned.” Michaud sighed, citing one of the big headlines of the time, then he went silent again. The girls, still wearing their towels, were now sitting in the boat pulled up on shore, facing the lake. If the light had been lower you could have taken them for frail ghosts, but it was too bright, the colours too vivid for one to associate those silhouettes with any kind of spectre.
Michaud would have liked to include that tableau in an album dedicated to immortality, two little girls and a dog in the summer light, he would have liked to photograph the scene so as to keep it on hand for trying times, to be able to oppose it to the pictures faded to grey that burdened his mind, but he knew that was hopeless. His head was full of scenes imbued with innocence, schoolgirls playing marbles, a moose swimming across a lake at dusk, a child petting a cat, all of which melted away, faced with the vulgarity of other images. In any case, those pictures only described a passing moment of what was real. They omitted the schoolgirls’ boredom, the death of the cat, and that of the moose that reached shore only to be greeted by a detonation it would hardly have a chance to hear, and to be thrown onto its back, wondering why it had fallen. The girls sitting near the lake would vanish too at the end of the summer. Jewels would encircle their wrists, and the dog would be forgotten on the doorstep.
In normal times alcohol prevented him from lapsing into those spiralling trains of thought where
the dark side of things, at each bend in the road, encroached on the light, but today his thoughts were spinning right down to the heart of the spiral, a progress that seemed to gather speed as the alcohol took effect. It must have been his fatigue, and the memory, still fresh, of Zaza Mulligan. Still, he burst out laughing when old Tanguay, in the middle of the lake, started cursing the flies, proof that the ridiculous has an immediate impact, whatever the circumstances, and he shifted his attention to the children, in case they’d be able to level out his spiral.
As for Larue, he was watching them too, congratulating himself on his good judgement in inviting Andrée Duchamp to visit Emma. Emma had baulked when he’d told her the news, arguing that it was up to her to choose her friends. But it took no more than ten minutes for the two girls to forge what would become a friendship. Inseparable, that’s how he saw them already, two little girls in each other’s image, like Sissy Morgan and Zaza Mulligan, two children who would suffer equally from their loss, but nothing would make him want to spare them that unhappiness. It was the price of childhood friendships, and that price was never too high. Michaud must have guessed what he was thinking, because he suddenly started talking about the sweetness of certain ages, with little silhouettes slowly unthreading in the half-light, then he rose, telling Larue to keep a close eye on the children. Don’t let them grow old too fast, he added, shaking Larue’s hand, and Larue wanted just then to ask him if he too had a daughter, as he had supposed, but he held back. He and Michaud would probably never see each other again, other than on a commercial street in Portland or Bangor where they would greet each other in passing. Why, then, trivialise the existence of his daughter, if there was one, with a perfunctory question? They stood in silence until Michaud pointed to the dark mass advancing on Bondrée, composed and threatening. It was time for him to leave.
Boundary Page 8
