Boundary

by Andrée A. Michaud

  As for Michaud, he performed the same ritual as not long before. He knelt next to Sissy and asked her who, how, why? suddenly ashamed to be presenting himself before her in a coffee-stained shirt. On the young girl’s face some tears had flowed, whose sinuous path you could see in the thin film of dust covering her cheeks. As according to the medical examiner the trap’s bite had resulted in an immediate loss of consciousness, the tears must have preceded the wound, and the dust as well. And so they were caused by the aggressor, by the fear he’d provoked, along with, perhaps, useless supplications, useless imprecations, “son of a bitch!” He could well imagine Sissy Morgan calling the murderer everything under the sun, flinging her fury in his face, a meagre consolation because murderers listen to nothing, not insults and not prayers. Their will is impervious, their intentions firm. Who? he repeated, looking for marks on her skin, scratches, a stone heart in a closed hand, then he saw a letter, an M or a W traced in the dirt covering the blood on her elbow. He called Cusack immediately to ask him if he saw the same thing. A bird, like children draw, replied Cusack, unable to detect an initial in the blurred mark. But Michaud held to his guns, it was a letter scrawled by Sissy, that would perhaps reveal the identity of the murderer, William, Walter, Mark or Michael. Cusack didn’t dare contradict him, the chief needed clues, messages to grab onto. He knew the story of young Esther Conrad’s stone heart, which some had used to mock Michaud. He’ll end up seeing the Virgin Mary appear beside a corpse, one of his colleagues joked one day. Cusack defended Michaud, whose fervent desire to see some sign on the skin of the dead was not at all laughable. The chief inspector was looking for monsters, and thought he could find traces of them in his victims’ final silence. In the present instance, Cusack distinguished neither an M or a W on Sissy Morgan’s arm. He thought of a crooked line left by a branch or a stone, but who could say whether Michaud might be right, whether the murderer’s name wasn’t Warren or Mitch? Take a few photos, Michaud told him, and the Polaroid’s flash sizzled once more in the night, after which Michaud thanked Sissy, thanks for the letter, Sissy, and signalled to the stretcher-bearers that they could do their work.

  One could already see a glow rising up behind the trees, a yellow glow confirming that summer was not over, when the black-wrapped body left the clearing, followed by Ed McBain and Victor Morgan, who was not only blind but deaf, deaf and mute. Shortly afterwards the reinforcements arrived, the ground was divided into four sectors, the birds awoke, the sun rose, but neither Michaud nor Cusack felt the warmth. They were thinking of the severed leg sitting in a black sheet near to Sissy, they were thinking of shorn hair, they were thinking of Morgan and the killer, who was perhaps even now stalking a third prey.

  On the dark veranda, my mother stared at the lake while toying nervously with the belt of her dressing gown. Five minutes earlier, my father had passed by to exchange his sandals for his hiking boots, had filled his flask with cold water, and had left with Bob to join the men gathered at the foot of Côte Croche. After Zaza Mulligan’s death, my brother declared that he was a man, and no one could stop him from doing what men do. So he got himself a flashlight and joined the first group, which you could see from my bedroom window, five or six nervous men to whom more would soon be added, because there was a new drama now, Sissy Morgan had disappeared. Her father had arrived at suppertime, his hair as wet as if he’d been running under a fine rain, it was all stuck to his temples. He talked with my father, then he said to me, look, Aundrey, look everywhere, his hoarse voice all shaky. He also asked Bob, my mother, the neighbours, and all of Bondrée, look, please, look for Sissy.

  My mother let me skip dessert and go searching with Sandra Miller, who’d burst into our yard at the same time as her father and Scott, her giant of a brother. I rushed outside pursued by the insistent tick-tock of Sissy’s watch, and her voice, troubling as that of her father’s when faced with the mysterious designs of God, begging me to find her friend. Look, Aundrey, look everywhere. Sandra might well have been older and wiser than me, don’t stray an inch from Sandra, my mother said, in a fit of heartfelt, crazy love, but she was still a hundred times more of a pain in the neck, maybe because she was almost as old as Sissy and Zaza, the age when you disappear on a dark night. Whatever the case may be, I had to jostle her a bit to drag her towards the hypothetical nowhere of Sissy, come on, Sandra, we haven’t all night. Once away, we looked everywhere we could, everywhere we were allowed to go. All I found though was Bobine, the doll my sister had lost at the beginning of summer, which had crawled, it seemed, under the pile of boards stacked up behind the Ménards’ cottage. It was pretty messed up, but still in a state where it could live the life of a doll.

  At nightfall, after the clattering of dishes, after the bathing suits had been taken down from the lines stretched between two trees and replaced by wet dishtowels, no one had yet found anything, not Sissy nor any trace of Sissy. The sun had just set behind Moose Trap when the men decided to head into the woods, when my father came by to change his shoes, when the women started to watch the lake while playing with their belts.

  Had Sissy Morgan gone to join Zaza Mulligan? Everyone was wondering the same thing without saying it out loud, the women especially, who feared seeing her appear on the shore, washed up by the foamy waves. No one thought she could have been dragged against her will into the darkness of the forest, because they didn’t yet know that Pete Landry’s traps were heaving up out of the earth to move about stealthily at ground level. They imagined the worst, a young girl throwing herself off the end of a dock, but not another trap, not another Zaza. It was only when the men began emerging from the woods, Ed McBain out of breath, Ben Mulligan rubbing at his puffed eyes, and Gary Miller looking scary, that they saw that it was pointless keeping their eyes on the lake. Sissy Morgan would not be coming back out of the waves.

  Seeing Ed McBain running, my mother let out one of her mouse squeaks and pulled the sides of her dressing gown over her chest, over her mother’s belly, repeating, no, my God, no, no, no… three useless words, because they’d never been any use, because they came always after the fact, when God could no longer intervene. An utterly worthless negation, which cancelled itself out, but persisted in calling on God. No, no, my God, no… Hearing my mother utter those words, I knew that something irrevocable had happened. Sissy Morgan had disappeared. Sissy Morgan was dead or gravely ill.

  On the pale wood chest of drawers where I’d put it down when I came in, Sissy’s watch was still tick-tocking, a sign that the earth was still turning in time with the second hand and that of the hours and the pace of days they counted out, but I had the feeling that everything had stopped dead, that my mother in her old dressing gown would never leave the veranda, that Millie would not wake up, that my father would not come back, talking man to man with Bob. No, I murmured in my turn, seizing hold of the watch, then Millie stirred in her sleep, setting our universe in motion again at the heart of a world my mother was trying to deny. Risking a rebuff, I went to join her on the veranda, but contrary to what I feared she held me tight against her and, together, we went out to see the light beams slashing through the darkness, more and more numerous as the rumour spread that it was too late now to search for young Sissy Morgan.

  Instead of going home the men came together, walking towards each other with their heads bowed, but without talking, shaken, unable to express what they felt, with a kind of incredulity that numbed their limbs, the same that drove the women to call on God. Sometimes you saw one who was in a hurry, who didn’t yet know and was rushing to join the group. Someone drew him aside to give him the news, as if he didn’t want to subject the others to the ugliness of certain words again, and shoulders slumped once more as the man’s head went no, one word, one only, that was of no use, either, to him.

  Mama and I looked for Bob and my father among all the men. But they were with those who hadn’t come out of the woods, those still searching or who had to stay behind at the site of th
e tragedy that was keeping the others from going home. Seeing that I was shivering, Mama went in to look for a wool blanket to put over my shoulders, and we moved down and sat on the swing, one facing the other, in the light breeze sweeping across the road, waiting there for my father and my brother. Mama could have gone to question the men shuffling through the low-lying mist. Suzanne Lamar, Frenchie’s mother, had run to meet them a bit earlier only to leave in tears, her pink slippers clacking on their heels, but my mother wasn’t yet ready to cry. She preferred not to know right away the details of Sissy Morgan’s disappearance. As long as she’d not yet heard the words making the rounds from one group to another, hope, however unreasonable, was still possible.

  Are you cold, my mite? she asked me after Ted Jamison, one of those who didn’t yet know, went by on the road at a run. We can go in if you like, but she didn’t really want to leave the swing, and neither did I. It was the first time she’d let me stay up with her beyond my usual bedtime, the first time she hadn’t treated me entirely like a child. I wanted to make the most of this privilege, even if I understood nothing about what was going on, and felt undeserving of this confidence that made me want to cry. The end-of-the-world sentiment running through Bondrée involved me too, and my mother didn’t try to protect me from it, something for which I was grateful, despite my fear. She wanted me near her, a mother and daughter waiting anxiously for the return of a husband and son, a father and brother, who would come back exhausted from one of those expeditions that are the lot of men.

  It was three forty-seven by Sissy Morgan’s watch when a police car, followed by an ambulance, passed behind the cottage, dispersing the fine mist through which everyone was trudging. Shortly afterwards, an expensive car parked in the McBains’ driveway. After a few long moments, Charlotte Morgan got down, wearing a kind of floating pyjama that made her look like a ghost. Stella McBain came right out to throw herself into her arms, but Charlotte Morgan’s arms stayed hanging by her side, limp, the arms of a ghost, as Stella wept and moaned poor girl, poor little thing. But next to her, Charlotte Morgan’s ghost didn’t weep. It looked at the night, it looked at the lake, transfixed by a reality slipping away beneath her feet, all wreathed in mist, then Stella McBain led Mrs Morgan inside, the door closed, and the moans drifted out through the open windows, poor girl, so young.

  My mother was ill at ease, aware that we had just witnessed a scene whose intimacy was not meant for our eyes. In the middle of her forehead the little red circle grew bigger, and she began to twist her belt out of embarrassment, but above all because of Stella McBain’s words, poor girl, poor little thing, that said more than she wanted to hear. Come my mite, it’s time to go in, she said, taking me by the hand, and we walked through the dew, a mother and her daughter in the middle of the night. Back inside, no longer able to play with her cursed belt and with nothing to do, she brought out bread, paté, Cracker Barrel cheese and mustard, they’re going to be hungry. Then she spread Cheez Whiz for me onto a pile of soda biscuits and we went to sit at the table, she in front of a cup of tea drowned in milk, me in front of my pile of crackers, which I swallowed while keeping my eyes on the window over the sink, hoping to see my father’s head or Bob’s, while my mother gathered into little piles the crumbs fallen on the table, crushed them with her thumb, and started all over again, creating little mounds of fine powder where the crumbs had turned back to flour. That procedure got on my nerves, but at least it made me think about the fact that we belonged to the small number of privileged people who could play casually with their leftover food, as if fields of corn, alfalfa, wheat, and I don’t know what, grew on trees, and the trees grew right into the desert. In front of those little piles of flour I told myself that if you could gather together all the crumbs fallen from my mouth in a year – fifty-two boxes, times about a hundred biscuits, times more or less twelve crumbs per biscuit – you could harvest a good bag of soda biscuit flour. Result: two Chinese babies would be less hungry. That made for a super good reason for rich people to learn to multiply rather than add.

  The pile of flour was starting to collapse, and yellow light was profiling the top of Moose Trap, when the screen door to the veranda slammed. My mother and I leaped from our chairs as if they’d been hooked to the door’s hinges by a rubber band, our hearts leaped as well, our two hearts together, and my mother spontaneously took me in her arms on seeing Bob’s face, the face of a boy who wanted to be a man. It was day, but the night was not about to end.

  When he saw Sissy Morgan on top of Snake Hill, the man saw Jim Latimer all over again, the best poker player in the 1st Division Infantry of Uncle Sam’s army, reeling on his rubbery legs, looking for his torn-off arm, then he thought of Pete Landry, hanging at the end of a rope. With her shorts that were too big for her, and her air of not knowing if she should turn left or right, or if it would be best to stop and languish where she was, Sissy Morgan resembled Landry, Sissy resembled Jimmy, a puppet brutally robbed of one of its limbs, a doll whose fatuous pain made you want to beat it to death to make it shut up. It was clear to him at that moment that Sissy Morgan was soon going to die, like Latimer and like Landry, like the puppet and the doll, like Zaza and Sugar Baby. Such was life. Such was fucking life. He brought together his thumb and index finger to form a circle through which he targeted Sissy. Pow! And the girl’s body, with its disarticulated limbs, collapsed in a red, sun-doused flash.

  DAY 2

  Knowing he wouldn’t sleep, with all the caffeine he’d absorbed during the night, Mordecai Steiner, after making a detour to pick up his car, followed the ambulance to the morgue where he asked the stretcher-bearers to lift the body onto a metal table, then he closed the door and pulled on his gloves. He wanted to finish with this business as quickly as possible, to make the young girl talk before the alterations in her body muddied what it had to say, and to head home as soon as he’d shut everything up in one of those mental compartments he only unsealed for professional purposes, to utter words like “asphyxia,” “rupture of the aorta,” “serous drainage,” chill words that enabled him to do his job without being entrapped by beauty, youth, or some sentiment that would transform his scalpels, in his eyes, into instruments of butchery. Because Steiner was not a butcher, no more than any other medical examiner he knew. His work was one of inquiry, a vocation he exercised according to the rules of the métier, conscious that he was exploring a terrain where there was perhaps buried a quantum of truth that might shed some light on the nature of man.

  Before proceeding with the autopsy he closed his eyes, as he always did, calling up some lines from Macbeth that consigned all spectres to the realm of non-being. “Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold…” That was his ritual, his way of reminding himself that a cadaver was nothing but residue, matter, only matter, from which he could at times derive clues that would explain a death, if not its meaning. He found a grandeur in Macbeth’s dread, which helped him to maintain a distance between himself and the body before cutting into its flesh. “Thy blood is cold,” then he opened his eyes and relieved Sissy Morgan of her blood-soaked clothes.

  The intact leg was covered in blood, the thighs as well, contrasting with the milky whiteness of her chest. Mordecai Steiner was used to those horrific tableaux with clashing colours that reminded him of Francis Bacon’s grisly canvases, depicting the susceptibility of flesh to the mind’s savagery and the imminent decay of every living thing. What he did fear, however, was that the bodies of young girls would disclose to him wounds pointing to the violation of an entire being through the defilement of intimate parts nature should have made fiercely impregnable, as was the vagina dentata that once haunted the minds of men.

  With delicate gestures, he first washed the stained limbs, “thy blood is cold,” indifferent to Sissy Morgan’s past beauty, since cold flesh cannot be an object of desire. He then examined those hollows where he could judge whether an erect penis had tried to turn Sissy Morgan into a disposable object, or wh
ether the young girl, by some marvel of the death throes, had caused damage to her aggressor. He gave a long sigh of relief, close to the joy of one who has found his or her child unhurt after a fall, when he found that no man, ever, had penetrated Sissy Morgan’s body. Thank God, he murmured, just like all those unbelievers raised in a faith, then he cut into the young girl’s chest.

  Two hours later he was ready to write a preliminary report in which the words “mutilation,” “laceration,” “splinter” figured, cold words that sealed up the wall he’d erected between the man in the autopsy room and the one he’d again become when he removed his gloves and his white coat spattered with organic matter. His report would also contain words like “fetishism,” “knife,” “hunt,” because he’d been able to determine that Sissy Morgan’s hair had been sliced off with a hunting knife, like those with which you carve up carcasses. Along with the trap, the knife indicated that Boundary’s murderer was a hunter, someone whose power resided in capture, and then in the spoils he stripped from his prey: meat, antlers, fur, and in this case, hair, the perfect emblem for femininity, trophy for a sick soul.

  He sent a copy of the report to Stan Michaud, whom he’d so often seen murmuring into the ears of the dead that he wondered if there weren’t a channel through which Michaud communicated with the departing spirit via the cooling blood. Michaud performed no miracles, but Steiner hoped deep inside that Elisabeth Mulligan and Sissy Morgan had in secret whispered to him some despairing words, some accusatory utterance that would enable him to seize by the collar the scumbag who’d butchered them, to then serve him up to their devastated fathers. He imagined the tortures appropriate to such a monster, then he calmed himself, conscious that most monsters had not chosen what they’d become, and he finished his report, in which he mentioned the dural haematoma he’d detected in the anterior part of the parietal lobe, an ante mortem wound caused by a blunt object: a stone, a piece of wood, or a length of pipe.