by Ann Lambert
Marie’s quota of student papers was marked for the day, and she was now lounging guilt-free on the sofa in front of the fireplace in her little house in the woods with Roméo who was opening a second bottle of wine. The vegan meal she’d made for him had been a success; Marie was feeling very pleased that it actually had tasted like something. Roméo filled their glasses again and listened to Marie attentively as she got him caught up on all the local news in her little town of Ste. Lucie des Laurentides.
“You remember that Michelle Lachance, Louis’ wife, died last week?” Louis Lachance was the local homme à tout faire who’d worked in many of the homes in Ste. Lucie for over sixty-five years and had been married for sixty-four. He was also the person who had found the body of Marie’s neighbor, Anna Newman, in the case that brought Marie and Roméo together. They both suspected that despite being a devoted husband, Louis had been just a little bit in love with Anna Newman.
“Mr. Lachance’s daughter is insisting he move into a nursing home and he is devastated. Apparently, he is refusing to leave his house or give up his tools. He wants to keep working. But his daughter is also stubborn. The house is on the market and they’re selling all his stuff. I think she’s sending him to Louiseville of all places, where he knows no one. But his daughter lives there.”
Roméo frowned. “I guess it’s easier for her to dump him in a home—”
Marie cut him off. “Is that what you think I did with my mother?”
Roméo took her hand and kissed it very gently. “Of course not. You had no choice. But from what I remember of Mr. Lachance, he is very old, but he is also very lucid and capable.”
Roméo didn’t believe in retirement if the person was still competent and wanted the work. He saw what happened to old people when they didn’t feel needed anymore. It was an often hasty decline towards isolation, depression, and death. He wished Louis several more years of whatever work he wanted to do.
“Madame Lachance’s funeral is next week—the very last before they deconsecrate our little church,” said Marie. The white clapboard Ste. Lucie church stood at the crossroads of the little town. They hadn’t had a resident priest in years, and the congregation was down to about thirty people.
“Another one bites the dust. The church, I mean. Good riddance.”
Roméo frowned. “I don’t know why, but I find it a bit sad. No more Italians parading through town with the blind Santa Lucia, no more Christmas crèche, no more midnight mass with that terrible choir—”
“And no more priests assaulting children.”
“Let’s not discuss that, shall we? Maybe not tonight?”
Roméo extricated himself from Marie and got up to put two more logs on the fire. Barney and Dog, passed out in front of it, were unappreciative of how carefully Roméo stepped around them. Let sleeping dogs lie, Roméo thought.
“We are invited to Joel and Shelly’s for brunch tomorrow, remember? It’s a Groundhog Day party. A day late.”
Roméo squatted on his haunches and poked around at the logs.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever been to one of those. Is it an Anglo thing?”
“February second is the exact half-way point of winter in the north—Joel and Shelly are old hippies—they celebrate that.”
“Will there be a groundhog present?”
Marie laughed. “Are you kidding? All the groundhogs are still hibernating up here. Except us.”
“Who knew life could be so busy in little Ste. Lucie?” Roméo mused.
Marie rearranged her feet on his lap as he returned to the sofa and got deeper under the blanket.
“And…we are babysitting for Ben and Maya three weekends from now. They have a wedding in Toronto, no kids invited. I can’t wait to get a whole weekend with that little boy.” Marie was often overwhelmed by the powerful, animal love she felt for her grandson.
“Can you be up here with us?”
Roméo hesitated. “I think so, yes.”
Everyone kept telling Marie how lucky she was to have Roméo in her life. No one ever said to him how lucky he was to have her. Was it because she was ten years older and fortunate that anyone, let alone a man who looked like Roméo, even looked at her? She knew perhaps that things should be left the way they were—they were good companions who had occasional great sex, but Marie wanted more. She wanted to share her life completely again, but she sometimes worried that Roméo felt too pulled into her orbit, that he didn’t have his own life anymore. Maybe that was why he resisted the move into her house. In the early days of their relationship, Marie thought, they would have torn each other’s clothes off by now and done it in front of the fire. Now the sex was still passionate but less frequent and certainly no clothes were ever in danger of ripping. Marie took a big gulp of her wine, and decided to remind Roméo that they were supposed to make The Decision that weekend.
“I guess we are not going to discuss the elephant in the room tonight, are we?”
He took a deep breath. “There are a couple of things going on I need to deal with.”
Roméo hadn’t told her that he’d rented an Airbnb flat in Montreal, just for a few weeks. For him and Sophie. In fact, he hadn’t told her anything about Sophie’s crisis, and amazingly, Marie hadn’t asked.
“I told you about that hit-and-run case—”
“Oh, that poor woman. It’s so—awful! Did they find who killed her?”
“So, I told you they found my cell number in her pocket, and—”
“But you didn’t know her at all, right?”
Roméo made the face he did when Marie wouldn’t let him finish his sentence. She got quiet.
“No. I don’t know her at all. But my phone number was written on the back of a photograph found on her body—”
“What?”
“And…I am pretty sure the person in the photo is Hélène Cousineau—”
“Who?” Marie interrupted. “Oh. Sorry. I’m just a faster talker than you.”
“Hélène Cousineau is Ti-Coune’s sister.”
“Ti-Coune is that friend you went to high school with, right? Who lives near here?”
“Well, he’s not a friend, exactly. Just someone I’ve known a very long time.”
Roméo paused, waiting for the interruption that didn’t happen.
“Hélène pretty much fell off the radar three years ago—she went missing out west. Ti-Coune asked me to look into her disappearance then, but I never turned up anything, so this…this is a big deal, because the photo is fairly recent, I’d say.”
“Do you think she’s living in Montreal?”
“I’m hoping there’s a possibility that she’s alive, for starters. I’m going to talk with Ti-Coune about all this more tomorrow. They were very close as children.”
Marie emptied the last of the wine into their glasses.
“So you think this young…woman—knew Hélène? This Inuit woman? Did they find who ran her over?”
Roméo hesitated. “No.”
“Are they even bothering to look?”
“I would hope so.”
Marie withdrew her foot from Roméo’s hand and sat up. “I meant to tell you this at supper on Thursday, but then you didn’t show up….”
Roméo nodded for her to go on, and Marie described the police abuse she had witnessed against the two Inuit women at the mall.
“I mean, the police were completely out of line. It’s not the first time I’ve seen them practically beat up the homeless. And then this awful woman called them Eskimos, for God’s sake. When was the last time you heard that word?”
Roméo grimaced and shook his head.
“Montreal cops are so fucking racist.”
Roméo thought of Detective Cauchon and how shocked he’d been by his attitude towards the dead woman. Still, he hated when Marie painted everyone with the same brush. It was to
o simple.
“Marie, sometimes I have seen such kindness from those cops. They have to deal with some very difficult people every day—”
Marie began to protest.
“—and every single day they have to deal with the same problems, the same mental health and addiction issues. And most people get to walk right past them. It’s not so black and white. It’s much more complicated—”
“That’s what people say when they know they’re wrong. It’s complicated. Imagine if Ruby was homeless, or, or…Sophie? Imagine some cop grabbing your daughter like that. It’s a disgrace, Roméo. I mean, they’re treated like animals. And that poor girl who was hit by the car—and just left like that.”
He went to embrace Marie. “I agree.”
Marie squirmed away from his arms. “Something ought to be done.”
“It is a huge, systemic problem, Marie—”
“And we’re the system, so we are part of it.”
Roméo briefly closed his eyes. He just didn’t want to get into anything tonight.
“If she were a young white woman from a ‘good home’ the cops would be all over this. You know that’s true, Roméo. You have to investigate this—”
“Marie, I have no jurisdiction in Montreal—I have no influence on this case—”
“Can’t you work with the Montreal police?”
“I’m not sure ‘working with’ is accurate. I would more aptly describe it as ‘working around.’ Or ‘in spite of.’”
“You have to—you have to…find the fucker who killed that woman, Roméo. Who just…left her there like she was worth…nothing.”
Roméo fell back deeper into the sofa and exhaled.
“I guess I could leave Nicole LaFramboise in charge of the cold cases for a few days. I could look a little closer at this hit-and-run—and how she was connected to Hélène.”
A large log suddenly split and fell, startling both dogs awake.
Neither Roméo nor Marie got up to fix it. Marie took his free hand in hers and squeezed it.
“Thank you for this.”
They both stared into the dying fire and finished the last of their wine.
Twenty
SHE DIDN’T EVEN SEE HIM COMING. That fat-fuck security guard had her by the arm and was already on his stupid radio before she even realized what was happening. That’s why she hadn’t made it to the Berri Street squat, and now Nia Fellows was getting frantic.
She had spent the last two days trying to find Christian, but he was nowhere. Nowhere that they had ever spent the night together. Nia had gone to the squat on Berri first, and one guy told her Christian had spent Wednesday night there, as Nia had instructed him to. After that, the guy said Christian and the dog had just left. No one had asked where he was headed. Nia then continued her search and walked west along rue Roy to avenue des Pins and then Milton Street, to the shiny new shelter that almost everyone hated.
The nice but very young and overwhelmed intake worker there checked the register; Christian had never signed in there. Of course not. Dogs weren’t allowed, and Christian would never leave Hamlet tied up outside anywhere. There was that Salvation Army closet guy who loved Hamlet, but he was only there on Tuesdays. Nia then went to The Bunker down in the Gay Village, but there too, he hadn’t been spotted. When they saw the look on her face, a few of the kids tried to be helpful and speculated as to his whereabouts, but Nia had already been to most of their suggestions. He had to be somewhere that she knew—a man cannot disappear into thin air, especially with a dog that never left his side. Nia then decided to go downtown.
She ducked into the Mr. Steer on Ste. Catherine street—one of the waitresses used to live on the street, too, and she was always kind to Nia. She ordered a coffee and tried to think. Throngs of shoppers swaddled in their winter gear hustled along outside, making those last-minute runs before the shops closed at six. The manager with his stupid green vest and clip-on tie was watching her a little too closely, and she knew he’d be asking her to move on soon. Loser. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe the way Christian had taught her. Think. Think. Think.
When she didn’t show up at the squat as planned, maybe he panicked. By why didn’t he stay put and wait for her? Because you were gone for almost two days, idiot. She sipped at the dregs of her coffee and went over the sequence of events that had caused this particular clusterfuck. When Nia had left Christian outside St. Michael’s mission on Wednesday, she had hopped the bus and headed downtown. It was almost noon by then, and she knew everyone at the housing office would be on lunch break, so she went to The Bay’s basement market, and nicked a couple of apples along with a bag of walnuts and chocolate-covered blueberries.
She noticed the security guard was watching her, so she hightailed it over to McGill metro where she panhandled for about two hours. She amused herself by watching all the cheap, ditzy girls on their way to university—some wearing those lame, bright red McGill hoodies with their program labeled on them—Law! Medicine! Basket-Weaving! They never dropped so much as a quarter in her hat. The guys weren’t much better, either. Every now and then one of them would flirt with her and tell her she was too cute to be a beggar. The best were old ladies—well, not old, but middle-aged, she guessed. They at least carried change. She could see them struggling with their consciences—her sign helped them along. Anything helps—even a smile—but we prefer $$!
On her way to the housing office, she decided to get Christian some new socks—his were finished because he had lost his shoes on one very difficult afternoon and had walked around in his socks all day. Nia would not let him get frostbite again. She ducked into the huge department store, Simon’s, on Ste. Catherine street and headed up the escalator to the sock section, right next to the linens, where she meandered for a few minutes. She liked to just go and touch the brand new duvets and sheets. When she and Christian got their own apartment, she’d try to find some of this stuff secondhand. Or maybe when she got a job, she could finally afford to buy it new.
A saleswoman in a tight skirt and an even tighter face moved closer to her, and asked, “Je peux vous aider?”
Nia just shook her head, said a bright “Non, merci!” and wandered back to the sock section. She knew better than to draw attention to herself. She had to move fast and get out of there, so she stuck three pairs of heavy men’s socks down her pants and was already down the escalator and heading to the main exit when she felt the hand on her arm. Security. The next thing she knew he’d called the manager, and the same bitch who’d spotted her upstairs came down, barely able to move in that skirt. She demanded that Nia remove whatever she’d stuffed down her pants. And shirt. Nia refused.
Two cops arrived in minutes, and her heart sank as she recognized one of them. He knew Nia from an older shoplifting incident—and he’d ticketed her and Christian several times for indigence. When you couldn’t pay the tickets, which was always, you just spent a night or two in detention. That was a euphemism for getting locked in a room by yourself while horny cops said filthy shit to you and made you feel like no shower would ever wash it off. Sometimes the women cops were bad, too. She should’ve kept her cool. But when Creepy McCreeperson put his hand on her in that store, she’d lost her shit. It had been her problem her whole life—she just couldn’t keep her mouth shut when it really mattered.
By the time they released her with a fine and a warning that one more arrest would put her in a whole new category of offense, it was Friday afternoon. She hadn’t seen Christian and Hamlet in almost forty-eight hours.
After two coffee refills deeply resented by the manager, Nia stepped out of Mr. Steer and onto Ste. Catherine. It was frigging cold. The sun rarely penetrated the high-rise buildings that lined the street, and now it had been down for a few hours. Nia pulled her jacket tighter and flipped her hood up. Which way should she go? She suddenly recalled a story she heard once. Somewhere in the South Pacific
was an island called Yap—Nia loved the name. Certain Yap sailors can navigate from the South Pacific all the way to Japan in a canoe, just by tasting the water. Tasting the water. Nia wondered if she could just taste the snow and follow Christian and Hamlet’s trail to wherever they had wandered.
Although they didn’t usually hang out in Cabot Square, Nia remembered Christian liked the scene there and particularly the shelter Alexis Nihon mall offered—especially in the winter. She decided to walk the twenty or so blocks, tucking her hands into her jacket, chilled raw in the frigid air. Someone had nicked her mittens at this place in the Plateau where they had couch surfed for a few nights. Nia glanced in every doorway and checked every single pile of bedding on her way west. No Christian and Hamlet. She felt a panicky dread begin to overwhelm her, and she stopped to control her breathing again. Christian and Hamlet were what made her matter. If she lost them, she could imagine no future at all.
Cabot Square was pretty deserted for a Saturday night. A couple of cops were sitting in a squad car drinking coffee and keeping an eye out. Nia instinctively gave them a wide berth. She headed towards a few of the street regulars who were hanging around the Atwater metro station doors, sucking on cigarettes and huddling in the warmer air. Two women were in some kind of drunken tussle, while a toothless man pointed at them and laughed uncontrollably. Nia went up to the metro lurkers.
“Hey. I’m looking for a friend of mine. His name’s Christian. Tall. Skinny. He has a dog with him. He was maybe looking for a place around here?” Nia pulled out a photograph of Christian and Hamlet he’d given her, taken about three years earlier, and passed it around.
“You seen him? He’s with our dog. This dog.”
Nia lit a cigarette and offered her pack to the group. They each eagerly grabbed a smoke, all but one tucking it away for later. The picture was passed around but each one shook his head in turn and mumbled various versions of “no.” One guy who’d refused the cigarette offer but had watched the scene unfold from his perch on a bench asked to see the photo again. He examined it carefully and then shook his head as well. “Sorry. I didn’t see him.”