Still confident they’d be able to find Heather before it was necessary to call in the dogs, Thorne and Morissette marched around La Languette calling “Heather” and “Heather Waverley” until it was dark and the wind, blowing through the trees with a sinister creaking, carried their cries away. At 6 p.m. Morissette, who was now as worried as Thorne, begged him to stay where he was and went to the village for reinforcements. One missing person was plenty.
At 4 a.m. Thorne was forcefully taken back to his house before he died of cold or gave himself a heart attack, but the search continued until the dogs arrived, the northeasterly wind still blowing through the trees with a sinister creaking.
* * *
I’m looking at one of the sections of the fence P. and I repaired last summer and that we’ll need to strengthen some more, because nature moves, because the ground we rely on for stability is in constant motion, our own balance nothing but an illusion. On one of the posts partly hidden by the lower branches of our single solitary oak, stands an angel. I saw it the day before yesterday, and again yesterday — and it’s still there, a white oblong shape that could well be the silhouette of a plaster Virgin Mary.
I bend down for a better view, unable to work out whether it’s an angel or a Virgin. At first, I tell myself it’s a Virgin angel, and then I correct myself because I’ve been told that angels don’t have a sex. A Virgin turned angel, then, watching over the birds, the undergrowth, the oak, and who’ll watch over Beauboule, the second cat, when we spread his ashes at the foot of it.
I point out the pure white shape perching on the fence to P. “It’s a bit of stripped wood,” he says, staring at the amber light coming through the glass of bourbon he’s holding in front of him. “No,” I say, “it’s an angel, a Virgin covering herself with her wings.”
* * *
Lying on the back seat of her Buick with the gun at her feet, Heather Thorne moves in her sleep. Through the blinding gusts of her nightmare, she can hear men calling her name, getting louder and closer, “Heather,” “Heather Waverley.” Here, she tries to answer, I’m here, but no sound escapes her mouth. On the verge of panicking, she realizes that the “here” she’s talking about is somewhere in the sky beyond the gusts. A sharp feeling of nausea immediately takes hold of her, because only the souls of the dead fly higher than the wind like this, only spirits fading into the black sky, unable to do anything but scream the memory they still have of words.
I’m here, she murmurs, and then she falls, falls, falls, and wakes up, soaked in sweat, to the morning song of buntings and jays.
* * *
I’ve just filled up the bird feeders and am sitting for a moment on the stone steps that descend through the arch between rock gardens, where wildflowers and cultivated plants are intertwined, contesting the few metres bordered by the two piles of rocks and going beyond them to colonize the ground around: hostas, phlox, mugwort, buttercups, hawkweed, and so on. Fifteen or more varieties, some seeded or planted by me, others by our predecessors, others still by the wind and animals.
Sometimes I wish this was all I had to do — sow, plant, weed, sow again — for the simple pleasure of watching shoots burst through the ground, the buds appearing, then flowers emerging from them; not having to worry about Heather, or Vince Morissette, who has been on my mind ever since H. W. Thorne described to me how he set off with him to look for Heather on December 7, 1980.
I wonder why, when I was looking for the man with the gun, V. never mentioned H. W. Thorne; why he steered my attention toward the two men from the neighbouring village, one of whom might have been Heather’s assailant — or his double, his carbon copy, what do I know? It was as if he wanted to set me off in a different direction, for me to discover for myself which pawns I’d placed on the chessboard, and how the game had been played without my knowledge.
The day had barely begun, but I’d go visit him as soon as the sun was high enough for him to offer me a beer and for the two of us to continue our conversation like two old friends: Bev, short for Beverley, and V., short for Vince or Vincent Morissette.
* * *
“Vincent’s not well,” his brother said to me as he opened the door. “He doesn’t want any visitors.” For a moment I was speechless. As I was getting out of my car I’d seen Vince on the patio out back, eating peanuts and tossing the shells to the ground. I ignored R., who seemed to be inventing a pretext to stop me from seeing Vince every time I visited. Instead, I walked around the house and sat down next to Vince. “We need to talk,” I said with no preamble, and Vince signalled to his brother to leave us alone, even though R. was ready to grab me by the scruff of the neck and send me back to where I’d come from like some ne’er-do-well.
Reluctantly, R. went inside the house, though not before shooting me a killer look that I ignored. Vince picked up the pitcher of sangria sitting among the peanut shells by his feet and poured me a glass. After he clinked his glass against mine, pointing at the bowl of peanuts and telling me to help myself, he asked, politely, since he already knew perfectly well, what it was I wanted to discuss. When I mentioned Heather’s name, he murmured, “Why wake the dead, Bev?” unaware that sometimes the dead wake themselves up and that we have no choice but to reintegrate them into the world of the living. So I paid no heed to his objection and brought up the subject of the storm, the northeasterly wind and its sinister whistlings, so that Vince would understand I didn’t intend to give up.
We talked over one glass of sangria after another until R. came to ask Vince if he was hungry. There were a couple of steaks in the fridge waiting for someone to do them justice, he said, and R. was so hungry he could eat a horse. “Just wait a few more minutes,” Vince said, and offered to share a steak with me. I said thank you and then reminded him I didn’t eat any meat — no flesh other than my characters’, but he didn’t get it because he still thought I was Bev. I didn’t think it was a good idea to disabuse him of the notion, as I barely knew myself quite who I was anymore.
I told Vince to eat and rest, because I’d noticed that he seemed to be suffering as we talked, though he was trying to hide it and brushed away any questions of mine about the state of his health. “Take care, amigo,” I added, before leaving without saying goodbye to R., who was watching me from the window over the sink as if he wanted to cast a spell on me, turn me to stone just by looking.
I gave him the finger so we were equal, and then drove off at full throttle, only to slow down after the first turn once I was out of his sight. Then I forced myself not to go faster than fifty, because those few glasses of sangria I’d knocked back were blurring the road my shining eyes were struggling to follow, the colours of the countryside too luminous to be real. At the intersection with Route 263, I accelerated slightly. I took the Cordon bend as though it were a long skating rink, at the end of which I’d end up at my house trying to process, in the quiet of my study, the information — disturbing to say the least — that Vince had provided.
* * *
When I got back, P. was watching an old Star Trek episode, and I took advantage of his eyes being glued to the television screen to avoid him. “I need to pee, it’s urgent,” I pretended, rushing into the bathroom. In actual fact I wanted to examine myself in a mirror bigger than the one in the car to see if my bloodshot eyes were less disconcerting from further away. This was not the case. I splashed my face with cold water, put a few drops of Visine into my eyes, and swallowed a quarter-bottle of mouthwash. I didn’t want P. to conclude that every time I came back from seeing Vince or H. W. Thorne or any of my characters, as he thought of them, my breath stank of alcohol. I might as well not have bothered: the alcohol in the mouthwash amplified the alcohol in the sangria, and made it seem as though I’d been drinking aftershave.
I composed my face and left the bathroom to head to the fridge. “I’m going to peel some potatoes,” I called out to P. “I had a couple glasses of sangria with Vince and I’m starving,” but
then on the counter I saw the ingredients P. had prepared for dinner, all lined up in a series of bowls arranged in order of height: garlic, not yet crushed, in the smallest; the next one for the olives; the third one for cheese, and so on. We were going to eat pasta that night and I was the one who’d asked for it, which I’d forgotten in the rush to conceal my drunkenness.
“Is something wrong?” P. asked, as I was putting the potatoes back in the fridge. “Everything’s great,” I lied. “I’m hungry. When are we eating?” I said, like a teenager who thinks food makes itself and wants nothing else — wants to eat, not talk, and especially not to talk about the guy who’s just informed her that fictional characters aren’t brought by the stork.
* * *
Eventually I fed the cats, set the table, and helped P. make the pasta. I even chose the music to listen to during dinner — the soundtrack to Apocalypse Now. I wanted to hear “The End” by The Doors, playing through the helicopter noises and the soldiers whistling to the tune of “Suzie Q.” As the brass was starting up “The Ride of the Valkyries,” I announced to P. that from now on V. would be called Vince, short for Vincent, because H. W. Thorne had revealed his name and I was fed up with the accumulation of so many initials perforating my sentences with a whole bunch of little dots. If I was in possession of three or four names, it was only fair that V. should be allowed at least one.
P. coyly avoided asking me when, finally, I would call him Pierre. Instead, he talked about the Philip K. Dick novel he’d started reading the day before yesterday, a story about a planet that people thought initially was some kind of work camp or penal colony, but which didn’t actually exist. “In fact,” P. continued, taking a sip of his wine, “the people supposedly sent to this planet were propelled into another temporal dimension, one of the twelve Dick imagined and —”
And that’s where I lost him. I was thinking about what Vince had told me that afternoon, about the drama I’d perhaps put in play thirty-five years after it occurred, and I thought to myself that Dick and I probably had a few things in common, the difference being that he could legitimately call himself a science-fiction or futurist writer, while I was swimming in cold, hard reality.
* * *
The hour of the bombyx was dragging on and I was starting to worry about the cat, who hadn’t come when I called out to him from the darkened porch, where I’d heard two of the little Alberts or Albertes munching up the scraps that had fallen from the bird feeder. I’d become obsessed. I was picturing the cat confronting a lynx, as he has done before, or trying to run from a pack of coyotes. Anxiously, I was looking forward to the moment when I could sit at my desk and think over the implications of Vince’s revelations, but the images of the cat I was entertaining, a combination of horror movie and wildlife documentary, were preventing me from thinking clearly about what he had told me.
According to Vince, the storm had lasted for nearly four days, every passing hour reducing the chances of finding Heather Waverley alive. The police had joined the search, dogs had sniffed the red tuque and the other clothes that H. W. Thorne, whom nobody had been able to keep at home, was carrying in a large white plastic bag decorated with yellow flowers strangely contrasting with the wintry scenery. Snowmobilers who’d heard about the crisis arrived from surrounding villages and even further away, in such numbers that La Languette became a screaming forest in which the rumbling of the machines mingled with the whistling of the wind, but nobody had found any trace of Heather.
It was only on December 12, two days after the storm ended, that the body was found, leaning against a tree on the edge of a clearing through which so many snowmobilers had travelled that not a single square metre of its ground had been spared the chewing of their vehicles’ caterpillar tracks.
At the time, it was concluded that Heather had not died on December 7, as her father claimed, but had wandered for another five days, battling hunger, cold, and the violent winds, finally dying just a few hours before she was found, which only made her death more shocking and the notion of H. W. Thorne’s suffering more intense. Further examination of the body and clothes would reveal, however, that Heather Waverley’s journey to the clearing had been much more complicated.
* * *
The lynx that had confronted the cat was actually a young female called Sylvette who used to wander around our house two years ago, likely on the hunt for a male with whom she could mate and deciding that the cat would do. The wildlife agents didn’t believe what we told them, because as a rule lynx don’t approach houses, and as a rule cats don’t attack lynx, but we have the photos, so there.
I’m sitting cross-legged under a spruce tree whittling a stick with a penknife P. gave me, a Smith & Wesson Special Tactical, its black blade featuring several serrations whose purpose I don’t understand. P. claims that people who live surrounded by forest should always have a penknife to defend themselves and ensure their survival, but also for the thousand little tasks that require a sharp blade.
The risks of getting lost in the forest before I hit the 1st or the 6th Line were basically nil, and the chances of my attacking a bear with a three-inch blade non-existent; I use the knife to cut branches, clean my nails, open bottles, or simply pass the time, as I’m doing this morning, sitting under a spruce and sculpting an angel head that resembles, or at least I hope it does, the Virgin angel perched behind the oak. The angel’s head, like my own face, is paler by the day even though I’m exposing myself to the July sun every time I work in the garden, cut the grass, put up a fence panel, or simply sip a cup of tea on the porch behind the house, daylight bearing down on it from the middle of the morning until 5 or 6 pm.
I’m dematerializing, you might say, for the benefit of Heather and H. W. Thorne, whose initials, for all I know, could denote a Henry Walter, Hank William, Harold Wayne, or even Henry William, Hank Walter, and so on. Among all the possible combinations, none seem right. So I decide, until further notice, to call him Howard — Howard Wayne Thorne — Howard W. for short.
I raise my eyes to the tops of the pines and cry, “My name is Howard, Howard Wayne!” At the same instant, the knife in my grip slips on the piece of wood and wrecks the head of the angel I’m clumsily trying to make. A few drops of blood pearl at the tip of my index finger and are quickly absorbed by the angel’s damaged head as it turns slowly into a red Virgin. I let the blood flow and nail the piece of wood next to the white Virgin, who, with eyes closed and lips sealed, calmly looks over the ashes of a cat named Beauboule.
* * *
As I examined my pale face in the mirror, an old dream came back to me. I rifled through my notebooks to find the few words I’d written about the disturbing dream, and could only find this: “When the lakes start to dry up, memory is covered with rocks, and abandoned quays drift on the sand, then time itself is drying up, along with the thirsty bones.”
According to the coroner’s report, Heather Waverley Thorne had in fact been dead for some time when her body was discovered in the clearing, which meant that someone had carried her there to sit her up against a tree facing the rising sun. Examination of the body also revealed that Heather was no longer a virgin and had been subjected to attacks that led to fears that she had been raped. Yet strangely, neither her skin nor her clothes had any traces of blood or sperm. By all evidence, her attacker had scrupulously washed her body, underwear, and pants, suggesting that her assailant might have shut the corpse up in a cabin before bringing it back out into the cold.
The extremes of temperature, and the moving of Heather Waverley Thorne’s body that had covered the tracks, explained why the coroner was unable to provide definitive information to the young girl’s father, who swore he’d find the shit who’d murdered his child. Nobody doubted what he would do to the man, but nobody dared to try to make him see reason. Howard W. Thorne was ready to kill, and you can’t stop an armed man set on revenge unless you want to become his first victim.
* * *
&
nbsp; Vince and the coroner talked about the assailant. Howard W. Thorne swore the man responsible for Heather Waverley Thorne’s death would pay for his crime. Vince, the coroner, and Thorne believed a single individual had attacked Heather. Heather wrote, “The first is called Ferland and the second McMillan.” Only Heather and I know the truth of it.
* * *
Once again, I’m sitting with Howard W. Thorne, and now I understand the mixture of rage and sadness that hardens his features. A bottle of scotch he was swigging from directly had replaced the forty-ouncer of cheap gin. He held the bottle out to me, but I refused it with a wave, even though I was extremely thirsty. I wanted to keep my ideas straight and, specifically, not to blurt out Ferland and McMillan’s names in a moment of drunkenness for fear of setting off a bloodbath that would stain me as well, and make me a pariah in the whole county. If Howard W. Thorne, along with Vince and everyone else who’d witnessed the events in 1980, believed that Heather was the victim of a single attacker, then I needed to leave him with his erroneous belief until I was able to shed light on Ferland and McMillan’s part in her death — and until I understood exactly how the pair had managed to evade the police investigation and Thorne’s dogged searches.
Back Roads Page 12
