He couldn’t be certain, but all indications were that Sissy Morgan had been knocked out before being dragged to the trap that would be fatal to her. So much violence disturbed him, and he hoped that the young girl wasn’t conscious when the trap closed on her leg, though the dried tears on her grey cheeks seemed to indicate that she was. He tried to reconstitute the sequence of aggressions in his notebook, the cutting of the hair, the blow that was struck, the trap, then he turned off the fluorescent light buzzing overhead, and rolled the body into the cold room. He couldn’t do any more for the moment, other than advise Michaud that his murderer was also a dangerous maniac, which Michaud surely already knew, but Steiner wanted to tell him so in his own words, clinical words that would bear no contradiction. And so he phoned the Skowhegan police station, where a certain Anton Westlake promised to pass the message on to Michaud, still back at the scene of the crime. And he made his way home.
It was around noon when Michaud called him back from Boundary. He was exhausted, you could hear that in his raspy voice, but he seemed for the most part anxious, uneasy at the thought of not being able to act quickly enough to forestall the discovery of a third victim. He’s going to do it again, he murmured, when Steiner spoke to him about the murder’s brutality, and he thought immediately of Françoise Lamar, who was the next logical victim. He’d sent one of his agents to the Lamars’ that very morning to keep an eye on the young girl and the cottage, but he was no less worried. He knew from experience that those lunatics were not content with a single attack once they’d savoured the power a body’s violation accorded them, and along with it the defilement of a person’s wholeness. That was what he feared, that the violence would go on. At first he’d entertained the possibility that the killer’s hatred was directed only at Zaza Mulligan and Sissy Morgan, teasers, schemers who, as had been intimated to him, disturbed Boundary’s moral order, but the humiliation and pain inflicted on Sissy Morgan changed the equation. The hatred was growing, and the killer was still hungry.
Knocked out, he told Cusack, as he put down the telephone at the McBains’, whose luxurious cottage would in some sense become their headquarters, the control room for information going in and out of Boundary. Knocked out, he repeated, explaining that the young girl had been struck on the head, probably while she was trying to get away. Struck from behind, by a coward, a loser. They had to look for the object he’d used, but since the wound hadn’t bled, you might as well try to find a Bedouin at the North Pole. Shaken by the examiner’s voice describing the killer’s apparent modus operandi, Michaud sank into a chair and contemplated the reflections making the McBains’ dining room table gleam, an oak table that was surely worth a fortune, and that he and his colleagues were going to soil with their fingerprints and coffee stains.
When the McBains suggested he set up headquarters in their home rather than stay in the cramped space of his car, cursing a radio that only worked part of the time, Michaud accepted at once. Along with Cusack he followed Ed McBain inside, and the two of them sat at the oak table, around which they were able to work out their action plan while emptying the coffee pot Stella McBain had brought them. Let’s start over, he grumbled, pushing to the side a few sheets of paper blackened with hasty writing, which were sitting next to the coffee pot and a plate of buns that neither he nor Cusack had touched.
Yet they’d eaten nothing since their meals the night before, shepherd’s pie for Cusack, pork chops for Michaud, served with a sauce of seasonal berries that he’d pushed around the edge of his plate, trying to avoid the disapproving gaze of Dorothy, who’d run to the grocery store a bit earlier after having cut the recipe out of some magazine vaunting the salutary effects of colour on one’s mood and digestion. No matter how often he insisted that it was neutral tones that made him both more regular and easier to live with, Dottie was determined to refine his tastes. He should have been famished, but the very sight of pastries set out in a circle on a tray ornamented with wildflowers made him queasy. It was the same for Cusack. His shepherd’s pie still weighed on his stomach, and inklings of corn rose into his throat, a residue he repressed with coffee well laced with sugar and cream. That’s the way the two men functioned, they ran on caffeine and adrenaline, and they’d probably not be able to swallow anything solid until the day was done.
They were dealing with a hunter, Steiner had claimed, and Michaud agreed. But he had to use this information with caution, because if he mentioned a hunter, Pete Landry’s story would be resurrected, hysteria would run rampant, and he’d lose all control of the situation. What counted now was to forestall the death of a third girl. He could count on Steiner not to let anything get out. Michaud had known the medical examiner for years, ever since the Esther Conrad affair and even before. He knew he wouldn’t be betrayed by the man who recited Shakespeare to the dead, who went down with them to that realm of shadows where their soft voices could be heard. Michaud, for his part, begged them to come forth just for a moment so he could understand the steadiness of those dry eyes that refused their supplications, to speak a while about the why of an existence where there was no point running or dreaming, when the humblest dream could be snuffed out in the midday sun.
Stella McBain, a bit let down that they hadn’t tried her buns, first prize winners at the Farmington fair the year before, had just brought them a second pot of coffee when they decided to go over to the Morgans’. They had to start there, with the parents, those closest to the girl, even if it was doubtful that they’d be able get anything from them other than cries, insults, exhortations, as if they had the power to go back in time and resurrect their daughter.
It was Vic Morgan who came to the door, his beard long, his hair dirty, and with a gesture ushered them into the living room, where Ed McBain was serving a scotch, certainly not her first, to Charlotte, the mother, dressed in white satin pyjamas whose top was stained. Alcohol, thought Michaud, observing that Charlotte Morgan could barely sit straight in her chair. Instinctively, he pulled the tail of his jacket over his coffee-stained shirt, embarrassed by the image Charlotte Morgan was projecting, and not wanting to be associated with it. In future he would bring along a change of shirt and would not wander around in his jacket when the temperature was over eighty degrees. McBain offered him and Cusack a glass as well, but both refused, then he left them with Morgan. I’ll wait outside, he said from the door, and he left.
The faithful friend, Michaud thought to himself, who’ll never fail you, remembering that his sole true friend had gone to meet his maker a few years earlier: Nick Perry, the greatest consumer of French fries in all of Maine, dead of a heart attack at the age of fifty. Since Nick’s death, he had only Dorothy. No old comrade to confide in. It sometimes happened that he’d have a drink with his colleagues, take part in a baseball tournament or a fishing excursion, but he didn’t feel close to any of the partyers who filled his glass or yelled at him to move his ass so he’d get to second base before the ball was heaved in by the opposite team’s outfielder. Run, Stan! Move your fucking fat ass! Nick Perry was the only man in whose company he could sob, to whom he could confess that he sometimes felt like cutting his own throat or emptying his gun’s magazine into the gut of the travelling salesman who’d just run over a young boy with his outsized car, the only man in whose presence he could burp, fart, or vomit, without the other moving away and holding his nose. From now on, there’d be no more Nick. Only colleagues called Jim, Anton, or Dave, honest cops, guys he respected, but with whom he’d never take off for two or three days into the woods, as he’d done several times with Perry, toting their gear in backpacks and sleeping under the stars while telling sexist jokes and then, abruptly, talking about their lives, their dreams. Vic Morgan was lucky to be able to count on an Ed McBain.
Although they were sitting opposite each other, Vic and Charlotte Morgan’s eyes didn’t meet. Morgan seemed to have passed his blindness on to his wife, who hadn’t noticed the stain on her blouse, unusual for a woman
whose appearance constituted her identity, and her vacant gaze remained fixed on a cut-glass candy dish whose green and orange veins were intertwined. Uncomfortable, the two policemen sat down on the love seat, each squeezed into a corner so their knees wouldn’t touch, then Michaud pulled out his notebook so that he would seem to be in control, before expressing his sympathies and starting the interrogation.
That little bitch, the mother blurted out when Michaud asked her if she knew where Sissy was going when she left the cottage the day before, that little bitch, never told me anything, then she went silent again, her eyes on the candy dish. Michaud was shocked by the mother’s words. You don’t call your daughter a little bitch, living or dead. Facing the pursed lips of Charlotte Morgan, who was fighting off a rush of tears, he saw all the same that she could love from a distance only, one that would shield her from being overwhelmed by any tenderness. There was a softness beneath the apparent bitterness, just as there had been in Sissy’s words to Zaza Mulligan, you would have told me, bitch! The mother and daughter had only their anger with which to face death, and they took refuge in a hatred with no true object, so as to avoid falling into that pit where tears will take you. If they couldn’t talk to each other, it was because they were too much alike. Michaud wouldn’t bank on Charlotte Morgan’s chances of eluding a life-threatening bitterness. Without that double who was her daughter, that mirror in which she could recognise herself without hating herself too much, she’d become more desiccated than ever and would nurse that aridity by dousing it with alcohol. He didn’t envy the woman’s fate.
As for Victor Morgan, he didn’t react any more to his wife’s little bitch than to the questions put to him by Michaud, who calmly rephrased them, trying to penetrate the fog surrounding the man. Morgan remained lost in his thoughts, his brow furrowed as though he were searching for a word, a misplaced idea, sometimes venturing a sad smile, doubtless linked to a memory, then he uttered a few words for himself alone, evoking a little pink dress, a few birthday candles, looking at the policemen as if they were strange characters who had just turned up in his living room. They were about to leave when he at last mumbled the trap, shouldn’t have been there. The trap shouldn’t have been there, he repeated, but Michaud, it appeared, didn’t know what he was trying to say. Morgan then talked about the search organised on the two preceding weekends, the combing of the woods, men thrashing the ground with their sticks, the flies sucking their blood, the traps thrown into the back of Valère Grégoire’s truck. The trap shouldn’t have been there. As Morgan went on with his story, Michaud felt his face going red, flushed with the heat that comes from exasperation and that brings fire to your eyes. Why, dammit, hadn’t the men clustered together the night before mentioned that they’d already gone through that bloody clearing with a fine-tooth comb?
This information was crucial, and not one of the idiots staring at him with their mouths hanging open had thought it would be a good idea to provide him with it. As if the police were too dumb to add two and two. He let loose with a “Jesus Christ” while looking for a handkerchief to mop his brow, then he asked Morgan who, for God’s sake, had searched the clearing. Morgan didn’t remember, didn’t remember anything any more, repeating every ten seconds that the trap shouldn’t have been there. Seeing that it was hopeless to persist, Michaud put away his notebook, but not his handkerchief, which he clutched in his fist, thinking that he was going to have to turn himself inside out to question people who would only give him half the truth, convinced as they were that some details were none of the police’s business and ought to be passed over for the good of one and all.
As he was leading Cusack outside, Charlotte Morgan headed, reeling, towards the bar, and offered him a drink, one for the road, detective, but he didn’t hear her, he was thinking about the trap, deliberately buried in the high grass covering the clearing. He thought of the man who’d brought it there. He thought of the anxious faces that had hidden the truth from him. Come on, we’re going to Valère Grégoire’s, he told Cusack, to see what he did with those damned traps, and he left the Morgans in the good hands of Ed McBain, the faithful friend who would never betray them.
Seeing the police car park in front of his house, Brian Larue shut his book and went to greet Cusack, who was walking, head lowered, towards the cottage. Like almost all of Boundary’s able-bodied men, he’d taken part in the search for Vic Morgan’s daughter the day before, but he’d gone home before the police arrived, not wanting to stand around in the humid night along with twenty or so devastated men who would soon be glaring at each other, wondering if their neighbour, the one with a strange tic who spent his time scratching his left ear, might be the bastard who was setting traps for their children.
He was waiting for someone to come and ask him to take on the role of interpreter again, and he was ready, ready to transpose the fear and the lies into words which differed in their sounds, yet shared the same sense of incredulity. He wanted to contribute to the arrest of whoever it was who, in a few days, had transformed Boundary into an accursed place where no one could scan the landscape without thinking of the violence stored in the memory of those streams that flowed out of the forest. Thanks to that man the lakeshore would soon be abandoned, like every paradise after the encroachment of evil, and would go back to being wild, reasserting its natural state as Pierre Landry had known it, Landry the trapper who was said to be the source of this sickness infecting Boundary, whereas Boundary had lost its idyllic status as soon as men, in Landry’s wake, began putting down roots there. Evil couldn’t spring from one individual alone. It always arrived in numbers and then more numbers, in the accretion of hatreds that came with numbers, with too many destinies cheek by jowl jockeying fiercely for fulfilment.
He shook Cusack’s hand, a tired hand, and joined him in the police car. It’ll be a long day, murmured Cusack, then they drove in silence from Larue’s to the Grégoire cottage, behind which Michaud awaited them, sitting on a stump and staring at his feet, you would have thought, though in fact he was observing ants, a colony that had built its nest next to the stump. Dozens of insects were busying themselves around the small sandy hill, following trajectories whose logic escaped him, some transporting minuscule bits of debris, food, or material that would contribute to the community’s survival, others going he knew not where. There were those who compared the bustling of those creatures to that of humans, but this did not hold water. The ants’ agitation had a meaning, while the frenetic activity of men had no goal other than to limit their awareness of their own mortality. When Cusack’s car came near, Michaud stood, taking care not to crush any ants, there was too much death in the air for him to remain indifferent to the life of any creature, any innocent and inoffensive beastie, and he went to greet his partner.
Seeing Larue get out of the car, he felt a weight being lifted off his shoulders. With Cusack, he was locked into a cop’s way of seeing things, whereas Larue came from another world, that of books, which reflect reality with a different sort of acuity, taking a small sample of the real and weighing it against a whole that existed only in the sum of its parts. That was what he ought to be doing too, looking on Boundary as the microcosm of a humanity that never changed. In theory, he should have followed the rules and hired an interpreter, but he wanted only Larue for this investigation, whatever the consequences if the higher-ups objected.
Sorry to take more of your time, Michaud apologised, but Larue knew it wasn’t the chief inspector’s fault that time had come to a stop for everyone, given the twin dramas. In fact, the prospect of working with him somewhat lightened his burden. He’d learned that with Michaud, no interrogation was going to turn into a farce or a power game where billy clubs were brought out. Ignoring the apology, he followed Michaud and Cusack into the Grégoires’ cottage. It was filled with the aroma of cabbage soup, which reminded him of his mother’s, which he’d forced himself to eat despite its smell. As for Michaud, he thought of Dorothy’s cabbage rolls, an
other recipe from a magazine, and wondered if she was at the cemetery at that moment, as on most every Sunday. Dottie only went to Mass from time to time, but she continued to visit her parents, Mary Forbes, 1889-1962, and Franklin Attenborough, 1887-1957, whose gravestone she adorned with flowers from her garden as soon as the crocuses and daffodils came up. In winter she brushed off the stone with her naked hands, so their names would be legible facing the wind, and she talked to them of her life, on her knees in the fallen and falling snow. He’d phoned her at about six o’clock, when she usually got up, to tell her that he didn’t know when he’d be home, or if he’d be early enough for Sunday night’s blood-red steaks, though to refer to them as such struck him as being in bad taste under the circumstances. He’d call her later, after he’d questioned some of the witnesses, and had some idea of what lay before him.
Valère Grégoire apologised for the smell of soup. Berthe, his wife, didn’t want to lose the cabbage they’d bought at the Farmington market the week before. Then he suggested they talk in the yard, but Michaud preferred to stay inside, where he could find out a lot more about the occupants of a place than on a square of lawn. The cottage was clean, modestly furnished, and it gave off an obvious warmth, that of simple people who enjoyed life. On a small table there was a collection of rocks picked up by their children, Denise, Gilles, and Estelle, said Berthe Grégoire, while putting away a pile of comics where Superman adventures were mixed in with a magazine called Spirou, which Michaud in his head pronounced Spyrow, probably spy stories.
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