I was racking my brain when Stan Michaud turned up on the veranda. Seeing Jocelyne Ménard and her mountain of Kleenex, he bowed his head, that was the best thing he could do since he was too big to get under the carpet, then he apologised for arriving unannounced, but he had to talk to my father about a shirt that had disappeared as if by magic, or that went wandering off all by itself in the bush, as I understood it from his mutterings, which were not very enlightening. Seeing him, Jocelyne Ménard jumped up, imploring him to give her back her husband, but Michaud, glumly, just managed one of those shoulder shrugs that are as painful for the person who’s trying to justify himself as for the one who’s wailing in front of him, and that was the end of it. My mother coldly informed Michaud that my father had gone to work in town and that he wouldn’t be back until Friday night. Michaud turned around and left under the carpet this time, a proof that shame really does make you smaller, after which Jocelyne Ménard threw herself into my mother’s arms, which were wide enough to embrace half of Bondrée’s population, and the two women went back to sit down with their bottle of gin.
I’d never seen my mother drunk, but at the rate she was emptying her glass this would soon be a first, proving that mothers are human. A lousy day. A damned lousy day. For a while, all we heard was the noise of the rain on the roof, then Marie, in the next room, commanded dodo, baby, dodo. That was all it took for my mother to burst into tears, tears copious enough to drown half of Bondrée’s population.
Jocelyne Ménard stayed at the Duchamps’ until nightfall, then she took Marie home and was able to put her to sleep by telling her for the hundredth time the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in a version where the prince was replaced by the king of the dwarfs. She then went down to sit by the lake, where she lit herself a cigarette she’d scrounged from her neighbour, Martha Irving, who smoked like a chimney and didn’t care, since no one any more was interested in her mouth. But who, in any case, would have wanted a mouth attached to a body that was falling to pieces? Jocelyne Ménard saw her smoking on her patio when she got back, and took the opportunity to bum a Player’s. It was her first cigarette in months, and that, combined with the gin she’d drunk with Florence Duchamp, made her woozy. That was what she wanted, to drown her sorrows, to lose herself in the cloudy sky so as to stop thinking about Gilles, his eyes, his helpless arms the length of his body, gone suddenly limp. A pointless effort, as the picture of her husband descending the stairs surrounded by policemen kept coming back to her. It was a nightmare, she thought, but a very real nightmare, the roughness of the sand on her bare thighs was not at all like the feelings she associated with bad dreams, no more than the nausea coiling around her throat along with the smoke.
At least she wasn’t crying any more. Her eyes had gone dry after her second glass of gin, and she no longer saw the world through a hot veil of tears, but with the sharpness that comes in the wake of panic, the exaggerated clarity that makes everything seem unreal. She even managed to make out the mountain’s peak, black on black, silhouetted on her left. If she’d been able, she’d have gone to stretch out on the mountain’s slope the way you lie full length alongside a lover, and she’d have wrapped her arms around it. She was so tired that she felt as if her body were as heavy as that mass of rock pointing to the sky. She knew she wouldn’t sleep that night, and to imagine her head in repose leaning against the Moose Trap summit gave her a deep feeling of peace.
That was what she’d planned to do over the next two weeks, to lie in Gilles’s arms with their odour of spruce when he wasn’t busy rebuilding his shed, to lie next to him, here, while Marie built sandcastles or buried their feet in the sand with her plastic shovel. She’d been waiting for her husband’s two weeks of annual vacation since the beginning of summer, and here a blood-stained shirt had dropped onto their outstretched bodies before they could even savour the sweet sigh of weariness that comes with too much heat and sun.
How could the police have got it so wrong? How did they come to believe that a man who gathered water from streams with his grass-stained hands could attack young girls? There was such ardour in the act of gathering water, a silent ardour, full of respect for the millions of tiny units of life slaking our thirst. A man infused with such faith could not be bad. The police would soon see the error of their ways, nothing else was possible, and life would carry on as before between green leaves and the sand.
But Jocelyne Ménard knew that wouldn’t be, that a normal life was from now on out of the question. Even absolved of all suspicion, her husband would bear to the end of his days the mark that comes with doubt, the mark of the pariah. Martha Irving, who was not, however, a gossipmonger, had just looked at her as if she were a poor soul, the wife of a condemned man reduced to asking for one last cigarette before the axe came down. She regretted now not having pressed her for two or three more, to dizzy herself again and feel alive thanks to her nausea.
She doused her cigarette butt in the sand and removed her shoes, then she advanced down the lake’s gentle incline, wetting the bottom of her skirt, the top of her skirt, wetting her white cotton blouse, which billowed out from her torso like a liquid flower. The water was just reaching her hair when a cry rang out, echoing from the bay to the mountain to the Millers’ and the Lamars’, the Morgans’ and the Mulligans’.
The killer’s wife, they all said to themselves, trembling, she’s expiating the sins of the monster she’d wed before God.
Once in the clearing, he set the girl down on the ground and threw water from his flask into her face. The cold water woke her, and she wondered for a moment who she was, where she was. He’d already seen that in the trenches, soldiers who only came to themselves to realise that they were going to die. Fear flashed through their eyes, and it was all but over. Some cried out, others struggled, still others took their guns into their mouths, but the result was the same. The trenches were red and death carried them off.
He didn’t have to wait long for the flare to ignite in Sissy Morgan’s eyes, followed by cries and insults. After that, he had only to push the girl into the centre of the clearing, and the trap snapped down. He was about to leave the carnal remains for any interested party, when he noticed the hair, which, spread out on the grass, looked like a young fox coiled around the girl’s head and shoulders. Without thinking, he took out the knife he used for stripping off fur, not unlike the pelts Landry lovingly groomed on the table in his shack, while offering a prayer to the earth god.
Smoothing the hair, he regretted not having taken that of the other girl, fox red, but he’d been afraid of the open eyes, of the frightened hand convulsively beating at the air amid machine gun bursts. Today, however, he was so calm that nothing would be able to trouble him. The shooting was over. The world was at peace once more. He left the clearing holding Sissy Morgan’s mane at arm’s length, a long, strangely blonde animal tail, saturated with dew.
DAY 4
Up at dawn, Mordecai Steiner was preparing a full pot of strong Arabica before going to pick up his newspapers, which a paperboy insisted on throwing onto the wet grass. Michaud was on the front page of the Bangor Daily News, offering to the camera his profile of an angry cop. Steiner skimmed the article, certain that Michaud had only told the reporters what they knew already. Two girls were dead, the police were investigating. However, on page 4, two long articles quoted a number of people interviewed at Boundary Pond. They’d spared no details, no matter how lurid, and the press was quick off the mark to rehash Pete Landry’s legend, which it had already been onto for years.
Words, words, words, Steiner exclaimed, closing his paper, words and blood, the perfect combination to sell copy, then he poured sugared water into the hummingbird feeder hanging in front of his kitchen window, where at breakfast he could watch the little creatures, whose brightly coloured thrumming relieved his morning torpor. He drank his first coffee amid this buzz, thinking about the dead bodies waiting for him that would not all make
the front pages, then he turned on the radio in case there was fresh information concerning what the reporters had called the Boundary Pond affair.
After the weather report he was treated to one of the summer’s hits, a song in which a certain Lucy flew away surrounded by diamonds, or at least that was what he was able to deduce from the lyrics whose meaning he couldn’t really grasp, being too old, probably, to share in youth’s boundless enthusiasm. Zaza Mulligan and Sissy Morgan must have hummed this hit before themselves becoming Lucys in the sky, but he doubted if today they were crowned with diamonds. Elisabeth’s and Sissy’s diamonds had the consistency rather of stone, the richness of black earth, Zaza in the soil with stones, Sissy under the ground with sand.
He was pouring himself a second coffee when the radio show’s host passed the microphone to the newsreader, who informed the listeners that there was a new development in the Boundary Pond affair. A suspect had in fact been arrested, a certain Gilles Ménard, he who had apparently discovered the first victim’s body. No accusation had yet been brought, but the police finally had a trail to follow.
Djill Menarde, murmured Steiner, Djill Menarde… then he remembered the man pacing up and down on the path the night he’d been called to confirm the death of Elisabeth Mulligan. A man who had practically no more face, so sunken were his features, a man hunched in on himself, who must have been six inches taller under normal circumstances. Absurd, he thought, totally absurd. If this Djille Menarde was the murderer they were looking for, then he, Mordecai Steiner, was Jack the Ripper’s illegitimate son. Absurd, totally ridiculous! How could a cop like Michaud be so blinded by his investigation, and what reason did he have for arresting that man?
He had to get this off his chest right away, at the risk of being put in his place, because this Ménard was a victim, that was obvious, just like Landry, about whom people were still obsessed years after his death. He quickly dialled the number of the police station and asked to speak personally with Michaud. He claimed it was urgent.
The inspector was in a foul mood, as he expected. The telephone had not stopped ringing since dawn, the state governor wanted a complete report on the investigation within the hour, and Michaud was going to have to organise a press conference for the next day, though there was nothing he hated more than playing the fool in front of a pack of hyenas ridiculing his idiocies. Steiner let him shoot his wad, then said you’re wrong, Menarde is not your guy. A silence followed, during which Steiner heard the inspector sigh. Michaud knew the goddam examiner was right. He knew well that Ménard was not his man, but how to let a guy go whose guilt everything pointed to, without getting himself lynched and sending the poor innocent to the scaffold? I know, Steiner, but I have no choice. Before hanging up, he advised Steiner to barricade himself inside as if the Third World War were going to break out, and to keep his mouth shut: you say nothing! This was not Steiner’s affair, he was taking care of Ménard, who for the time being was better off under lock and key.
His hand on the receiver, the examiner thought to himself that his adopted country was still living in the age of the Far West. He felt sorry for Michaud’s having to draw his gun every time a dog barked and to always be pitted against the dead who continued to show signs of life, demanding justice and compensation through the medium of their survivors. His own dead were at peace in the whiteness of the morgue. The horror of their last moments, to the extent that they were horrifying, now faded away behind them, and their faces expressed only the affectless wisdom of letting go.
Michaud, for his part, didn’t envy Steiner. He could never have borne sawing into skulls and manipulating organs all day long amid the odours of formalin and disinfectant. That morning, however, he would have liked nothing better than to have changed places with the man, who seemed always just as composed as his cadavers. Since he’d awoken he’d tried to breathe deeply, closing his eyes over neutral or restful images, as Dottie had advised him, upset at seeing him struggle like a marionette being strangled by its strings, but he couldn’t do it. No image was neutral enough to loosen the knots in his stomach. He’d been able to put the reporters off by promising them a press conference, but he didn’t know how to broach the affair. The budding genius to whom he’d granted an interview the day before had taken Peter Landry and the traps he’d left behind as the focus for his first article, as if Landry, before passing the rope around his neck, had orchestrated a Machiavellian plan whereby some sicko would come along and dig up his traps fifteen years after his death, all in order to poison the lives of those who’d survived him, why not, and to sow chaos among the Boundary intruders, allowing Landry to treat himself to a bracing laugh from out of the depths of his rotting coffin. Nonsense! Today, however, it would all be about Gilles Ménard, who’d be pilloried, even though no formal accusation had been made against him.
He almost regretted having arrested the fellow, just as he regretted not having listened to his mother, who’d dreamed that he’d become a lawyer and defend great causes, but he didn’t have it in him to be a John Adams or a Perry Mason. He dispensed justice far from the courts, in the field, where he stoically endured the insults that came with the territory, along with the clichés associated with the police. This job never promised him a great future, but glory and success meant nothing to him. His causes were called Esther, Zaza, Sissy, and he gave himself to them body and soul, receiving in return, for the most part, only anguish and reproach. Whatever happened, in the eyes of the public, the police always did its work badly, and never acted fast enough.
He foresaw the questions that would be put to him during the press conference. They’d start by asking him, typically, what his men thought they were doing, how it was possible to allow a murderer to strike a second time, and whether they were waiting for all of Boundary’s young girls to be killed before collaring the perpetrator. These classic attacks were articulated by people who didn’t know what it means to stalk a man who seems to be a familiar of the wind and the rain, and whose tracks vanish as he goes, as if he could fly or materialise only long enough to bring out his instruments of murder. He wouldn’t be surprised if he were accused of not having arrested Landry while there was still time, the depths of idiocy being limitless, while Landry’s only sin consisted in his having forgotten who he was. That trapper was but an instrument in the hands of the killer, who could have used him as a perfect alibi had he stopped at his first murder, or had not used the same weapon to kill Sissy Morgan, faking instead a suicide or a second accident everyone would believe in, young Morgan being only a shadow of herself since the death of her friend. The man was following a plan that eluded Michaud, a logic that only madness could fathom.
Michaud was rapping on his desk with his pencil, what did I miss? when Anton Westlake informed him that the governor was on the line. Michaud planted his pencil in his eraser, which tipped over onto its side, took a deep breath, and picked up the receiver. The real shit was hitting the fan.
The rumour had spread like wildfire. Gilles Ménard had not yet been led off by the police when already it was on its way, rounding the bay at high speed to head up Turtle Road and sweep along in its path everything that could feed into it: Ménard’s face, deathly pale, his too frequent sorties into the forest, the likely frigidity of his wife, who at the age of twenty-nine had brought into the world only one little girl, and then his hands, big and heavy, which one could easily imagine crushing the head of a cat. After having circled the lake, the gossip left Boundary by the main road, arriving at the office of the state governor, who declared on the radio that a suspect had been arrested in the Boundary Pond affair.
Emma translated for me the broad lines of the governor’s statement, then, too depressed by the speed with which you could transform an innocent harvester of blueberries into a killer, we changed the station for one that broadcast rock’n’roll. Eric Burdon and the Animals were singing Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, a song that would make me swoon the following year as I
became aware of Burdon’s frankly animal sensuality, when Emma’s father, just like that, came to see whether we might not be plotting another coup. Since my mother, unable to hold her tongue, had told him about our expedition to the Chauves-Souris Falls, he hadn’t left us alone for ten seconds. He’d sworn that that wouldn’t happen again, and that we’d best keep our noses clean, because if we got out of line we’d find ourselves inside a ring of poles held together with boat rope and three hundred and sixty knots.
Brian Larue had nothing to fear, we’d been bored stiff since morning, and people who are bored don’t have enough imagination to plan actionable stunts. They’re as boring and inoffensive as pious images, where you won’t catch little Jesus or one of the angels scurrying about, conspiring behind the Holy Virgin’s back. Even Brownie found the day interminable. She remained slumped at Emma’s feet, sighing constantly, like someone who looks at his watch every two minutes and is stunned by time’s relativity.
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