Seeing that we were down in the dumps, Monsieur Larue suggested we go for a swim, the weather was too good for us not to take advantage of it, but our hearts weren’t in it, our hearts weren’t in anything, you could even say that we had no hearts at all. What we would have wanted was to launch our own investigation. With an adult hovering over us all the time, we might just as well have tried stripping bare naked and shouting out obscenities, hoping no one would notice. In the morning, we’d started from the premise that we weren’t any dumber than Sherlock Holmes, who was able to solve complex mysteries while smoking who-knows-what between the four walls of his office, but we soon got discouraged. In the first place, we didn’t have an office, and secondly, our three last cigarettes had been confiscated by Emma’s father, who’d probably smoked them behind our backs. Anyway, we were girls who worked in the field, more like Miss Marple minus the girth, and even she wouldn’t have got anywhere with three or four parents underfoot.
As Monsieur Larue was anxious for us to rouse ourselves, we went down to dip our feet into the lukewarm water sliding over the sand. The sun was going down behind the mountain, and a large candy-pink band bobbed up and down on the lake, where a few clouds were reflected, cleaved by the ducks. It had been a long time since I’d been able to savour this beauty without a girl’s panicked cry or a corpse’s leg, hard as wood, coming to hit me full in the face and ruining the landscape. Since Zaza’s death, since Sissy’s, we saw things differently, colours had paled and the loons’ song was but a funereal lament. Beauty wasn’t forbidden us, it had just become as unbearable as the wailing of a child abandoned by its mother by the side of a gravel road, as disturbing as beauty can be when you don’t know how to handle it. I was telling Emma that I was in a hurry to get old so as to remember nothing, when her father called us in for dinner.
Exceptionally, Monsieur Larue had gone to some trouble, and had made us macaroni and Kraft cheese, rather than his usual grilled cheese sandwiches. We also got a few cocktail wieners marinated in oily ketchup sauce. A feast worthy of a special day, to which I did justice, as my mother would never have let me gorge myself on sausages before supper. Even Brownie got hers, which she swallowed whole without chewing it, you’d think dogs had teeth in their stomach.
This brief gastronomic interlude revived us a little, and we washed the dishes without complaining, even doing imitations of Jerry Lewis, one foot in the nose or in an ear. After the dishes, the kitchen floor looked like a pond after a soapy rain, and Brian Larue was missing a “Drink Coca-Cola” glass. Never mind, because we were ourselves once more, two girls ready to unmask the Bondrée murderer. We were almost done mopping the floor when Brian Larue came to tell me he was taking me home. My mother had made rules for the week, while waiting for my father to come and lower the boom on Friday. We could see each other under strict supervision during the day, but there was no question of sleeping over. Talk about trust! If it had occurred to her – but one woman can’t think of everything – my mother would certainly have hired a Pinkerton agent to guard my bedroom door.
I got my stuff together and climbed into Brian Larue’s pickup truck, where I sat beside Emma, who held Brownie on her lap while Monsieur Larue belted out Edelweiss at the top of his voice. After a few moments of excusable hesitation during which I wondered whether Brian Larue had lost his mind, Emma replied in coded language that he did that kind of thing sometimes, and we made the best of it, following his lead in braying life into the song, the better to demolish it. The Trapp Family version, in miniature. When we parked on Turtle Road behind my parents’ cottage, I told Monsieur Larue to stay in the pickup truck, hoping for a few minutes of freedom, but he insisted on accompanying me, as stubborn as my mother and father put together. On the way we ran into Frenchie Lamar, who was pacing up and down on Turtle Road. She’d been crying, that was obvious, since her cheeks were black with running mascara, and she didn’t seem to be doing well. You could understand that, given what had happened to her friends and given the sword of Damocles hanging over her head if the killer was still free. In her place I would have done the same thing, I wouldn’t have wanted to be in my shoes, and I would have been walking all crooked.
Seeing that she didn’t turn and run, Monsieur Larue went up to her and said hello, with Emma, Brownie, and myself in single file behind him, Indian style. The Trapp family among the Iroquois. Below Côte Croche, we’d glimpsed Mark Meyer, who was walking towards the campground, kicking the dirt up in front of him. That probably accounted for Franky-Frenchie Lamar’s black tears. She and Meyer had had a lovers’ quarrel, one of those set-tos that always end up with the girl crying and the boy in a foul mood. Monsieur Larue asked her if she was all right, out of politeness and as a way of breaking the ice, because it was clear that something was wrong, even a blind beaver would have seen that. Frenchie tried to answer yes, but her face turned into a huge grimace, like a balloon that doesn’t quite know if it should explode, then she burst into tears and ran towards her parents’ cottage. We stood there with our arms dangling, Monsieur Larue, Emma, Brownie, and I, the Trapp Family discomfited, until my mother, whose frontal blotch was certainly endowed with a seventh sense, given that mothers already have six senses, appeared on the balcony upstairs.
That night I went to bed early, general’s orders, but I didn’t sleep for all that. My eyes open on the inky black where Millie was breathing serenely, I thought of what I could do so that my little sister would continue to sleep peacefully, so that Gilles Ménard might go back home and spin Marie around under the greenish light of the trees that touched the sky, so that my mother would stop jumping every time a curtain flapped, so that life would go back to normal, that was all, the way it was before death got in the way. But there was nothing to be done, of course. Everyone knows that death stains, that it leaves marks everywhere it goes, big dirty tracks that make us lurch backwards when we’re about to step right into them.
Coming out of the woods, he saw Victor Morgan pounding frantically on the Mulligans’ door and grabbing the shoulder of Jack, the eldest of the two sons, crying in his face Sissy’s gone, my daughter’s gone. Please help me find her, Jack! Please… The man’s distress shocked him, and he went up to him, Sissy’s hair in his bag, to promise him that he’d help find his daughter. It was only the next day, after witnessing the spectacle of Victor Morgan weeping in the clearing, open your eyes, Sissy darling, the same words he’d uttered himself, open your eyes, Pete, open your fucking eyes, Latimer, that he’d brought Sissy’s fur to Landry, there where his first shack used to be, near Ménard Bay. Coming close, he saw Landry, scrawny and half naked, swaying at the end of a rope, skin and bones, hair long and dirty, a body stripped of all fur to ward off the cold to come. He saw the glassy eyes of Boundary Pond’s hanged man imploring Maggie darling to accord him one last look, and he congratulated himself on having settled their account with the two new Maggies of Boundary, while war machines tore Landry to pieces and reduced his world to dust.
Where the old shack had been, there was now only a pile of rotten boards, beneath which he slid the fur so Landry could cover himself up. He then went and sat on a beam, there where the shaky deck once stood, and he looked at the stars with Landry, trying to make the man talk, he who had only a few words left on his lips, Maggie, sweet Marie, Tanager of Bondrée.
DAY 5
Stan Michaud was furious. Anxious to calm public opinion and at the same time to boost his political capital, the state governor was virtually placing a noose around Gilles Ménard’s neck. But Michaud’s face didn’t go red for just that reason. Not satisfied with barging into his investigation, the idiot governor was threatening to set the feds on his tail if it turned out that Ménard was not the murderer they were looking for. Fortunately, Michaud only had the fellow on the telephone, because otherwise he’d have probably scuppered his career with one of those fits of gratifying exasperation when you grab a guy by the tie just to make yourself feel better.
The conference lasted only half an hour, but Michaud was still dizzied by the flash bulbs, the questions coming from all sides, the microphones held out like so many vipers thrusting their way out of a swamp on whose surface there floated white shirts and summer jackets. He tried to focus on that picture, the lightness of summer clothes, but his head was full of the governor’s voice and the pleas of Ménard’s wife, who turned up a bit later with her red eyes, holding her daughter by the hand, a sweet little thing with ice cream on her chin, casting her eyes over the police station’s yellow walls and trying to figure out why her mother always had her nose buried in her handkerchief, and yet was treating her as if it were Sunday.
Michaud tried to reassure Jocelyne Ménard, swearing that he was only keeping her husband locked up in order to prevent him from being torn to pieces by the mob waiting outside. But she didn’t see it that way. There are laws, she insisted. You can no more incarcerate an innocent man than you can hang him in the public square without a trial. Uttering these words, she struck the reception counter with the flat of her hand, setting Westlake’s pencils rolling to the floor, and she left, declaring that she’d be back with a lawyer. Michaud looked at the pencils rolling on the ground, then at little Marie, who had to run to keep hold of her mother’s arm, uncertain if she should cry or look pretty, as one often asked little girls to do who didn’t know how to dance. Still, there was a tear on Marie’s cheek as her parti-coloured dress disappeared through the creaking door that led to the parking lot, leaving behind a whiff of innocence in which Michaud would have liked to lose himself.
He picked up the pencils, put them back where they belonged, gave a blow to the counter himself, then left the reception room to the sound of dry wood clattering onto the floor, and shut himself up in his office. He only had a few hours to deal with this affair to his satisfaction, and he couldn’t let himself be distracted by a child’s dress. He asked Westlake to bring him all the files on the two cases, those of Elisabeth Mulligan and Sissy Morgan, and he buried himself in them, advising Westlake that he was there for no one, not even for that bastard, the governor. The afternoon was drawing to a close when Westlake dared to open the door a crack and tell him there were men waiting for him in the conference room, and that the day, in fact, was far from over.
Millie and Bob were still sleeping when a van bearing the logo of a television station parked beside the cottage. Seeing it, my mother, who spent half her life over the kitchen sink, dropped her dishcloth in a big splash of tiny multi-coloured bubbles, some of which burst in contact with her head, before uttering three or four bad words that mothers, in principle, never pronounced in front of their children, an indication that she’d forgotten about me. Forgetting, however, that a mother never forgets, I tried to slip away, but she ordered me to go and get dressed and she assumed the stance of a dignified woman before going to confront the reporters, whom she didn’t want to see inside her cottage. I quickly pulled on my shorts, not wanting to miss the scene to follow, and I grabbed my dirty T-shirt from the day before, certain that my mother wasn’t going to scold me in front of the television stars. Anyway, she was the one who wanted me dressed, she’d just have to take me as I was.
Super Flo, faster than lightning, was already in the yard when two technicians armed with microphones got down from the vehicle, along with a man who was carrying nothing, just a clean suit he wasn’t going to get dirty toting dusty cables. I caught up with Super Flo just as she was telling them to put their camera aside and explain what they wanted. A short interview with Monsieur Duchamp, replied the man in the suit, as if that wasn’t crystal clear, to which my mother answered that Monsieur Duchamp wasn’t there, and they could pack up their equipment.
Not yet clued in on Florence Duchamp’s determination, the tallest one, I mean the cleanest one, insisted on interviewing her. With the kid beside her that’ll make a good shot, he said in a low voice to the others, indicating that they should get ready. One of the underlings was putting up his tripod, when my mother grabbed the camera and went to deposit it in the truck. We’ve nothing to say to you, she added, smoothing the apron she’d forgotten to take off, which must have infuriated her and at the same time given her the energy to repulse the enemy, then she dragged me with her into the cottage, where her third eye, which she could no longer suppress, was able at last to display its anger.
Since Gilles Ménard had been arrested and she’d brought out the bottle of Dutch gin, my mother had become a real fury, more prickly than ever. She made everyone who approached her understand right away that they’d better not step on her toes, which made me keep my mouth shut, because I might have had something to say to the reporters. Don’t even think of it, Andrée Duchamp, she ordered me, before I’d even had the chance to finish my thought, we’re not gossips, and we’re saying nothing. Okay. I got my things and went to meet Emma, but I had to make it through the general’s office before leaving: no, I wouldn’t talk to reporters, not those and not others who might turn up later, no, I wouldn’t go near them, no, I wouldn’t make her ashamed of me, and I wouldn’t pee in my pants, and yes, I’d pass a lie detector test when I got back.
Fifteen minutes later, I threw my bicycle onto the Larues’ lawn and ran to tell Emma that there were reporters everywhere. She threw the rest of her toast and peanut butter to the crows and promised her father we wouldn’t leave Turtle Road, that we’d be careful, that we’d cry like banshees at the least sign of anything, that we wouldn’t pee in our pants, and we mounted our bicycles, raising a cloud of dust worthy of the best westerns.
All morning we spied on the reporting team from a distance, and you could bet that in every interview broadcast on television you’d see the heads of two dishevelled girls in the background, planted behind a bush or a tree trunk, which wasn’t too serious, as our parents had refused to install a TV set in their cottages. If they learned that we’d made the headlines, it would be from the mouth of a Bill Cochrane, who liked nothing better than to cause trouble, or a Flora Tanguay, who’d by the way put on her loudest dress to greet the reporters. They’d interviewed her beside her cottage, sitting in front of a clump of dahlias that blended in with the flowers on her dress, so much so that on the screen you’d probably see just her head sticking out of a brightly coloured mound, then our two heads, behind, poking up from a clump of rhubarb gone to seed.
We didn’t hear much at the Tanguays’ other than Pete Landry’s name, which popped up over and over with Flora’s gesticulations and the dahlias that received some good whacks from time to time, but other than that it was the name Ménard that we heard, which punctuated the accounts like a dirty word people uttered unwillingly, or spat to the other side of the road, not even wanting to wait for Ménard to be judged. The hypocrisy was one with the stream of coarse murmurings that issued from angry mouths: “I never trusted the guy,” “goddam two-faced,” “we should’ve known,” a pack of lies that dilated their pupils until they almost reached to their foreheads, and filled their eyes with mortal sins. The way some people were having at Ménard, they’d soon be blaming him for World War II.
At the end of the morning, the reporter who’d been sent packing by my mother approached us, figuring by our behaviour that we must be in the know. We hesitated an instant, it’s not every day you can get on television, but the thought of seeing my mother turn up with the flour-covered face on her apron got the better of me. So we took off in a cloud of dust, Calamity Jane and Ma Dalton, but pursued by the name Ménard, which we’d spell out with our peas in my mother’s mashed potatoes, wondering if the real killer was also having hamburger meat for lunch.
Coming out of his office, Stan Michaud saw little Marie’s dress all over again, flying away at the end of the hallway, the lightweight garment floating free of the child’s body, which looked just too sad. Suddenly his immediate future appeared to him with astonishing clarity: this would be his last case, Sissy Morgan his last ghost. There was not enough room in his head to accommodate another. He’d take with him the three girls, Esther, Zaza, Sissy, and would leave them by the side of a road where he could come back to visit them whenever a stray boomerang caught up with him. Who, Esther? Why? He’d made his decision, as soon as the case was over he’d take Dottie to Lake Champlain, far from the road where the girls would be waiting for him. They’d pick up their last vacation where they’d left off, in the late summer light. They could also get themselves a motorhome and embark on an adventure, drive all the way to Arizona or Texas, with no ties and no obligations, like those hippies crisscrossing the country. Dottie would buy herself flowered dresses, and he too, why not, robes in which he would greet the rising sun, intoning a mantra. Rubbish, he said to himself, and he headed for the conference room.
Ten or so men, with whom he’d shared the governor’s demands, were assembled in the room. If they didn’t move their asses, Ménard could say goodbye to his family. A heavy silence descended on the room, along with sighs and the clearing of throats, tired looks that didn’t dare focus on Michaud but took refuge in the tiling on the floor. Jim Cusack, more than the others, seemed overwhelmed by the situation. His elbows on his knees, he held his head in his two hands, he too staring at the floor. But he didn’t see that it had been polished the day before, and that reflected in it was the joyous light of a cloudless sky that harked back to his childhood, floors smelling of wax to herald the weekend’s arrival. All he saw was Laura’s face, the angry beauty of his wife, who’d left the house slamming the door when he came home the night before, rebuking him for not having telephoned, for having left her high and dry in front of a cold oven, staring at a roast that ended up in the garbage along with the tomato pie she’d gorged herself on out of her bare hands, in the process dirtying her white dress, the freshly polished floor, her patent leather shoes. He searched for her part of the night, alerting half the town, including Michaud and Dottie, until the front door creaked open and he saw her reappear, her hair dishevelled, her eyes on fire, her pretty dress covered in dust and blotched with red. He immediately threw himself into her arms, from where Laura shoved him away to go up to their bedroom and lock herself in after banging shut the door. He tried to make her open the damned door, begged her to talk to him, but she didn’t come out of the room until morning, only to tell him that he had to choose between her and those girls, those dead whores, she blurted out. The word “whore” hit him like a slap, incongruous in Laura’s mouth, like a bug running across her tongue that she had to spit out, a cockroach slipping into a corner and defying you to squash it. When he tried to answer, Laura locked herself in the bathroom and stayed there until he left.
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