Boundary

by Andrée A. Michaud

  Before beginning his questioning, Michaud asked Berthe Grégoire if he and his colleagues could interview her husband alone for a few minutes, then he regretted his clumsiness, seeing her flush, but she said no, no problem at all, smoothing her cotton dress with her tanned hands. Her dress well flattened, she called the children, Denise, Gilles, Estelle, who were spying on them from behind the curtain dividing their room from the living area, three little “spyrows” who followed her outside.

  Michaud accepted the coffee that Grégoire offered him, the same instant coffee he drank every day, which didn’t have the richness of Stella McBain’s percolator coffee, but allowed him to bond with Grégoire, who also hadn’t shaved, and wore the same soiled clothes as the night before. Another person who’d spent the night pondering, and whose hands trembled from fatigue, from too much caffeine, from the after-effects of the shock, or the fear of being found in the wrong.

  Michaud asked him first about the scouring of the woods over the weekends of 29 July and 5 August, the search, he said, the combing. Grégoire told him about how the men had gathered around Vic Morgan, whose idea it was, to ransack the forest and avoid another tragedy. At that point in his story he shook his head in sympathy with Morgan, whose initiative had not succeeded in saving his daughter. Under other circumstances he would have spoken of the irony of fate, but there was nothing ironic about the death of a child. He couldn’t remember who was in charge of the sector where Sissy Morgan was found, but he would swear, his hand in the fire, that the trap had been brought there after the search. No one, not even an idiot, could have passed it by without seeing it. Unless he did so on purpose, Michaud thought. But he kept silent on that, while taking advantage of Grégoire’s bringing up the subject of the trap that had diabolically appeared in the clearing, to ask him what he’d done with those that been entrusted to him.

  Under his beard Grégoire went red, knowing right away what Michaud was suggesting. He pounded his fist on the table, swearing that he’d dismantled the damned traps piece by piece before taking them to the dump. He could lead them to the vacant lot where he’d thrown them if they wanted proof, and he slammed the table again with the back of his hand. You tie yourself in knots to do the right thing, then you’re being accused, câlisse, he burst out, looking at Larue for him to translate, because he wanted him to translate everything, including his câlisse. Cusack tried to calm things down by explaining that no one was accusing him of anything, but Grégoire was beside himself. It took his wife, alerted by the tone of his voice, for him to pull himself together. Don’t get upset, Valère, they’re just doing their job.

  Standing on the doormat, Berthe Grégoire again smoothed her dress, and again left, excusing herself, like so many women who never feel they’re where they belong and would apologise for existing if they were asked. As for Valère Grégoire, his jaw was still clenched. He’d gone silent, but his anger was there in his noisy breathing, the anger of a man who had to hold back the violence that erupted in him, bitter and resentful, every time someone thwarted him or questioned his integrity. This Grégoire was not easy to figure out. Michaud would have wagered that he was eaten away by a frustration he could only master by seizing an axe to go and split a pile of logs, or by careening his pick-up truck along deserted gravel roads. He’d seen too many crooks get on their high horses to believe that Grégoire’s indignation was proof of his honesty.

  All right, he sighed, Agent Cusack here will go with you to pick up the traps, we’ll need them for the inquest. In fact, he didn’t know what he’d do with the dismantled traps, but he wanted to confirm that they were where they were supposed to be, and to see whether Grégoire would overturn the table before leaving the cottage. One last question, he said, as Grégoire rose without smashing everything to pieces, where were you Saturday afternoon? A long silence followed, and Grégoire muttered, in the woods, I was chopping wood up on the hill.

  Alone?

  Alone, Larue translated, then Grégoire left with Cusack.

  The campground fries were greasy, and Michaud shoved away his cone with a belch. He’d thought that eating something would do him good, but the soggy potatoes were indigestible. He could have gone knocking on the door of the McBains’, and Stella would surely have prepared one of her own dishes that had won a prize at the Schenectady fair in 1963, but he didn’t want to abuse those people’s hospitality. He’d be going there soon with Cusack, to a meeting that had been set up with the men in charge of inspecting the clearing and the road along with their team. For the time being, he needed a rest in the open air. He’d spent all day walking from one cottage that stank of cabbage to another reeking of tobacco, and he felt a wave of nausea mounting in him, identical to those of sleepless nights and empty stomachs. Tomorrow he’d bring his own food, pork or roast beef sandwiches, depending on what was in the refrigerator, and he’d limit his consumption of caffeine. Meanwhile, all he could do for his nausea was quietly to inhale the August air that was saturated with ancient odours.

  Cusack had also pushed away his fries, but he’d swallowed his hot dog as if he were afraid someone was going to take it from him, only to regret it, as along with the reflux of corn, there was now that of mustard and sausage. He’d just returned from the dump where Grégoire had tossed the dismantled traps, and he was starving. He’d tried to make Grégoire talk, but he’d apparently told them all he had to say. The trap pieces were sitting in the trunk of his car, and he was wondering what on earth Michaud could do with them. I don’t know, be sure that no asshole gets to them before we do, he’d answered, when Cusack asked the question, then he’d closed up the trunk and followed his partner to the campground canteen, the front of which was adorned with an enormous potato, proclaiming Bienvenue chez monsieur Patate, Welcome at Mr Potato. Michaud was giving him the rundown on his latest visit with Marcel Dumas, next door to the campground, but, too busy digesting his hot dog, he heard only snatches of it.

  Not realising he was talking to empty air, Michaud said he wasn’t sure about Dumas, he was too nervous, a rodent looking for a way out of a sealed room. He too had no alibi for Saturday afternoon, which he had supposedly spent in his cottage with his stamp collection, for which he had just received a series of twenty-five cent South American specimens from the 1950s. Since he lived alone, no one could back up what he said, because he hadn’t budged from his table until he’d heard voices calling the young Sissy Morgan. He hadn’t joined in the search due to his sciatica, but he’d seen all the coming and going and could say exactly who had passed in front of his house, who had veered off towards the campground, who had taken the ascent towards Juneau Hill. From the moment he’d arrived in Bondrée, he’d made it his business to know everybody. A snoop, Michaud added, one who might give us some information, but a snoop all the same, a loudmouth with no lady friend, and what is more, like most psychopaths, fussing over a collection of stamps or press clippings.

  Like me, Larue quipped, bursting out laughing, and Michaud realised that not for a moment had he thought of asking him what he’d been doing the night before. To his mind, he couldn’t be more of a potential suspect than Cusack or himself. He guffawed too, just not being able to imagine him as a killer. Like you, he put in, then confessed that indeed he had to ask him some questions, to exonerate him before going on with the investigation. Go on, replied Larue, even if he didn’t have a stronger alibi than Dumas or Grégoire. Emma had been in town with her mother, and he’d spent the afternoon at home. Unlike Dumas, on the other hand, he’d worked outside a good part of the day, repainting the walls of his tool shed, his neighbours had certainly seen him, strollers, people in boats passing on the lake. Up on his ladder, he’d heard Vic Morgan shouting. A bit later, he’d seen the men gathering, and he’d joined them. Simple as that. After assembling, those who’d answered to Morgan’s call left in groups of two or three, each taking its own way. He himself had gone with Ted Jamison along a woodcutters’ road, which they’d followed until i
t stopped abruptly in front of a pile of fallen trunks. They kept crying out Sissy Morgan’s name, Jamison louder than himself, with a voice that could make the spruce trees shake, then they retraced their steps, only to learn that Sissy Morgan had been found dead near a bear trap.

  He couldn’t tell them any more, other than to talk about the men’s nervousness, the way some clenched their fists or spat at their feet, the wound that had opened up Jack Mulligan’s knee as he was tumbling down a Moose Trap trail, a deep cut onto which Hope Jamison, who’d been sought out as a nurse, had poured a half-bottle of peroxide before wrapping it in a bandage on which a red circle had instantly appeared. He could describe the Bondrée lights, lit up all night as if for a nocturnal festival, a New Year’s Eve, women standing at their windows, but Michaud had seen all that, Cusack too, an unnerving night whose artificial illumination had carved dark arcs into people’s faces.

  Remembering the night, the three men bowed their heads, then Michaud turned the discussion towards the first combing of the woods, wanting to know if Larue had participated in the trap hunt that had been kept from him either by omission or stupidity. The first weekend, yes, replied Larue, the Sunday, along with Gary Miller, with whom he’d shared a stew prepared by his wife, while talking hunting and small game. Larue had a gun in his cottage, an old Remington 30-06 inherited from his father, which he never used except for shooting at tin cans, but he was a good audience, and he’d listened to Miller talk about the smell of the woods and partridges, the cool rain dripping from the trees, which sharpened his predator’s instinct as well as his love of life, of the ruddy sunlight sparkling in the frozen trees. He’d strode with him through what they’d called Sector 7, between Weasel Trail and the woodcutters’ road he’d taken the day before, finding nothing, after which they’d gone back towards the campground, where the women were waiting behind tables covered with salads and stuffed eggs. For his part, he’d only downed a few morsels of sandwich while watching the children play on the periphery, then he’d left the party, for it really was a party, a gathering of proud men, happy to have pulled together, between whom the women in summer dresses wound their way, giving off their lavender or violet perfume in the midst of bodies stinking with sweat. The following Sunday he’d not joined the Moose Trap search because Emma was with him, Emma and Andrée, Sam Duchamp’s daughter. But he’d seen the men emerge from the tangled trails of Moose Trap, one with a set of moose antlers, a rare find, another limping or cursing the flies, and Sam Duchamp with blood on his hands, the blood of a red fox that had been done in by the slamming shut of a bear trap like the one that had closed on Zaza Mulligan’s long leg.

  What the hell! Michaud cried, hearing Larue mention the trap. He immediately ordered Cusack to send one of their men to the lab in Portland with those damned traps to gather all the damned prints that were on them, even if they had to go back as far as Pete Landry. That’s what those traps are going to do for us, Cusack, they’re going to flush out the bastard who’s hiding in the berry bushes. Priority number one, and get to it!

  Michaud was fuming, because there again, he couldn’t understand why no one had mentioned the dead fox. The answer was clear all the same, because no one knew, a week earlier, that there was a killer abroad among them. They’d only realised it the day before, when they discovered Sissy Morgan. As soon as Michaud had digested the information, he told Cusack, who was already jumping into his car, to join him at the Duchamps’. He skimmed his cone of fries into a half-full garbage can and led Larue along the dirt road circling the lake. He’d check his alibi later. He needed someone there, right away, to help him untangle this crazy story.

  Unlike the night in the course of which we learned of Zaza Mulligan’s death, my parents had not tried to hide the truth from me when Bob and my father returned in the early morning looking like characters out of a horror film. In less than a day, Bob had turned into a man with the world on his shoulders, and I had become a girl keeping watch with her mother, too big now for people to put her off with tales of goblins and talking dormice. Someone had died. Sissy Morgan was dead and her death was not natural. A killer was on the loose in the shadow of our cottages, one who had made a zombie out of Bob, and etched into my father’s face lines that hadn’t been there before, outward signs of a kind of stupor, as if he’d received a blow from a baseball bat on the back of his head. And that’s exactly what had happened in the clearing, where a dozen men, along with him, had been blindsided by a mysterious weapon. Ever since he’d been knocked senseless with no warning, my father had been trying to add up figures that made no sense, Zaza plus Sissy, and he was left dumbstruck before an equation he couldn’t solve, before faulty data afloat in a spongy mass, while he juggled words that might lend some order to what was real. After what they’d seen in the clearing, my father’s eyes, as well as those of my brother, had been stunned into incredulity: those things didn’t happen where we lived. And yet the proof was there, in the lined faces, in the horror that spawned that incredulity, in the body lying on the forest floor. There was a killer among us.

  After having removed their flannel shirts, my father and brother sat at the table, my mother made coffee, and one of them, probably my father, said dead, murdered. My mother brought her hands to her mouth, I felt my body go numb as if I were passing out without passing out, and my brother grimaced like a man whose acne hadn’t had a chance to dry. All had been said: dead, murdered.

  A few minutes later, Millie got up, trailing Bobine behind her by one of her dirty little arms. Ever since I’d found her again Millie had not let her go, refusing to surrender her to my mother so she could sew back the buttons that had once been her eyes but that were now hanging down beside her nose. The doll was in pretty bad shape, and I found it hard to believe it was due just to its exposure to the weather. Some kids must have found it, Yvon Tanguay or Michael Jamison, and pulled it apart before tossing it under a pile of boards. As soon as I had a minute I’d go and worm the truth out of those little snot-nosed morons, too chicken to take on anyone their own size, and I’d smash up their faces just like they did to Bobine. In the meantime I forced myself back among the living, for Millie, and for Bobine, back home at last.

  The rest of the day men came knocking at our door, women who couldn’t bear to stay silent, Jocelyne Ménard, worried about Gilles, her husband, I’ve never seen him so pale, sipping her tea while darting glances around her, hoping perhaps to find a cure for her husband’s despondency in the rays of sun beaming into the kitchen. He found two bodies, Florence, three if you count the fox. Berthe Grégoire, for her part, was afraid her Valère would just explode. The police had come early in the morning for the traps, those that Valère had taken apart, and Valère had lost his cool. He’s not himself, with everything that’s going on. He’s keeping his eyes on everybody all the time.

  For their part, the men were talking low in the yard, like at a funeral parlour out of respect for the dead, wondering what they could do, and when the police would let them take their families far away from Bondrée. As for Millie, she wandered from one group to another with her doll blinded in both eyes, saying to her don’t cry my pretty Bobine, everything will be all right, too little to know what was happening, but big enough to see that things weren’t going well.

  At four o’clock, while my mother washed the cups, Stan Michaud arrived with Monsieur Larue, who had a postcard for me from Emma showing King Kong at the top of the Empire State Building. Emma wrote me that she’d be in Bondrée the next day at noon. And that she had a surprise for me. I can’t tell you any more, there are spies. See you tomorrow. Em. I put the card into the top drawer of my chest of drawers, out of Millie’s reach, under my pyjamas. I’d never in my life received a postcard, and I was as excited as if someone had offered me a three-speed bicycle with a banana seat. I was suddenly important. A bilingual girl who lived all year long in the United States, who spoke French from France without taking herself for the centre of the universe,
and who tripped on King Kong, had a surprise for me that had nothing to do with my parents, nor hers, nor my brother, nor my sister, nor Jane Mary Brown, nor the police.

  My enthusiasm went down a few notches when I heard my father talking about the dead fox Jocelyne Ménard had mentioned earlier, and I came back to earth. A girl had lost her life the night before, Sissy Morgan, and now they were talking about an animal covered in the red mud of the Moose Trap trails. In the middle of the mountain, my father went on, recently dead, its blood almost warm. So that’s where the blood came from that made Gilles Ménard stuff his hands in his pockets after the Moose Trap search. That’s where the clay came from, invented by Brian Larue to shut our mouths, Emma’s and mine, from hundreds of foxes whose blood had soaked into the mountain’s earth ever since it first existed. Then there was the question of a hole dug with bare hands, perhaps a prayer, the resurrection, near the lake, of a name Ménard kept repeating, Sugar, Sugar Baby, and I heard the scraping of chairs, the knocking together of cups my mother was putting back in the cupboard, the door creaking. Stan Michaud and Brian Larue went off to the McBains’. From my bedroom window I saw Michaud and Larue shake my father’s hand and cross the cedar hedge, behind which other policemen were waiting. Stella McBain opened the door to them, and silence fell again over the cottage, while in my turn I addressed a prayer to the god of foxes.

  It was four thirty, and the sky was cloudless, the lake transparent and slick, making you want to dive in head first, but no one, not even Pat Tanguay, was disturbing the calm water. Bondrée had just entered a new ice age.