by Seth Patrick
Pierre clearly sensed the mood too. “Camille has come back to us,” he said, trying to sound upbeat. “And it’s our duty to make her welcome.”
Sandrine’s voice was trembling now, tears pouring from her eyes. “Does that mean…does that mean other children will come back?” The words drew a gasp from others. Claire watched her, knowing the pain she was feeling. The terrible pain of hope just out of reach.
“We don’t know,” said Pierre. “Perhaps there may be others, but we don’t know.”
Another parent spoke. Claire recognized him as Esteban Koretzky’s father, but she didn’t know the man’s first name. “Does she remember what happened on the bus?”
“No,” said Camille. “I’ve tried, but I don’t remember.”
“And have you seen the other children?” said Monsieur Koretzky. “Did they talk to you?”
Camille shook her head, downcast.
Sandrine had been glaring at Camille all this time. “Why you?” she said, harsh and angry and loud. “Why you?”
The room went silent.
Claire found herself close to tears at the way this was going. “Sandrine,” she said, pleading with her. “Now that Camille is here, perhaps Audrey’s turn will come. Like Pierre says, the fact that Camille has come back gives us all hope.”
“Easy for you to say,” said Sandrine bitterly, standing up. “There must be a reason why she’s the one who came back. Why her?” She was crying, shouting. Her husband stood too, his hand on her shoulder, trying to calm her down.
Camille, distraught, turned and fled up the stairs. “Camille!” called Claire, turning to follow her.
“Wait,” said Pierre. “I’ll go.” He went up after her.
Claire turned an accusing eye on those in the room. Nobody met her gaze. “She’s a child, and you treat her like a criminal,” she said. “Please, she needs our help. It’s not her fault.” She looked at their faces one by one, seeing hints of Sandrine’s anger in each of them but seeing also the shame they felt at their unease.
Then she went upstairs to join Pierre, who was outside Camille’s room. The door was closed.
“Go away!” yelled Camille. “I never should have listened to you!”
Claire eased the door open and went inside. Camille was lying on her bed, so Claire sat next to her and took her hand. She waved for Pierre to come in.
“People fear what they don’t understand,” said Pierre. “Imagine how they feel.”
“What about me?” said Camille, her face wet with tears. “Did they wonder how I feel? They’re just like Léna and Frédéric. They look at me like I’m a monster.”
Pierre frowned. “You can be so selfish.”
“What?” said Camille, shocked. Claire looked at Pierre, wary, but gave him the benefit of the doubt.
“You came back,” said Pierre. “Do you realize how lucky you are? You’re a miracle, Camille. And what do you do with it? Nothing.” She looked at him, confused. Pierre turned to Claire and sighed. “It looks like I’m wasting my time.”
“Wait,” said Camille, contrite. “What should I do?”
“Help those who need it,” said Pierre. “You have the power to ease their minds, to soothe the pain they’ve gone through for so long. Think of the good you could do.”
Camille considered it for a moment, then nodded. “OK,” she said, purposeful now. “I’ll talk to them again. If they’ll listen.”
58
Thomas stood in the hospital morgue looking at the still body of Simon Delaître. The air in the morgue had a chill that, he thought, wasn’t just down to the temperature.
“Good of you to bring me a human this time,” said the pathologist. Thomas let that one slide. “We can’t keep him for long, though. The generator’s acting up so they’re planning on closing anything nonessential, which will mean transferring everyone in the morgue, and me along with them. The entire hospital may have to be evacuated, if it stays like this.”
Thomas was looking at Simon’s face: pale, cold. The paperwork on this one would be interesting, he thought sourly. He half expected the man’s eyes to open. “Is he definitely dead?”
The pathologist smiled. “What do you think? Was it you who shot him?”
“Yes.”
“Good work. Right in the heart. Died instantly. Saves on all that messing around with paramedics.”
Thomas looked at the pathologist in silence for a few long seconds, just to let the man know to rein it in. “So, the evacuation,” he said. “Does that mean you won’t be doing a postmortem today?”
“Exactly. I can do a preliminary examination, of course. But a full postmortem will have to wait for a day or two.”
“Tell me if you find anything odd.”
The pathologist raised an eyebrow. “Like…?”
“I don’t know,” said Thomas, irritated. “Just odd. Now do your job.”
• • •
By the time Thomas went home to see how Adèle and Chloé were holding up, it was midmorning. The outside air was just as chilly as the air in the morgue had been. He looked to the sky, wondering if the damp cold would be dispelled as the day wore on, but the heavy cloud didn’t bode well. Without power, the town could have done with a sunny day to lift its spirits.
Chloé had managed to get some sleep, but Adèle looked exhausted. He only had so much sympathy for her: he hadn’t slept either, and after all, this whole thing was fundamentally Adèle’s fault.
Chloé ran over and gave him a hug when he came through the door, but Adèle told her to go to her room. Her voice was clipped, and Thomas couldn’t read her. She clearly wanted the girl out of the way so they could talk freely, but there was every chance it could degenerate into a shouting match.
“Are you going to talk about the ghost?” asked Chloé.
“I told you to go to your room,” Adèle said.
Thomas caught Adèle’s eye and shook his head. “We should answer her questions,” he said. Adèle didn’t say anything, but her expression was cold. He turned to Chloé. “The ghost has gone,” he told her.
“Where to?” asked Chloé.
“To wherever he came from.”
She looked uncertain. “How do you know he won’t come back?”
“Because now he knows we don’t need him.” He knelt down and hugged Chloé again. “Officers will come ask you questions,” he said. “They’ll ask if you knew who the ghost was. You should say no. The first time you saw him was last night in the garden. You were scared and you called me. OK?”
Chloé frowned. “Why do I have to lie? I don’t like lying.”
He looked at Adèle, and Adèle looked away. “Because if you tell the truth, they won’t believe you. They’ll think you’re lying. They don’t believe in ghosts. So everything else is our secret. OK?”
Chloé nodded. She clearly wasn’t happy about it, but Thomas knew she would hold to the story.
“Now,” said Thomas. “Do as your mum told you. Go to your room.” He watched her go upstairs, suddenly overwhelmed by how much he loved her, how much he would do to protect her.
“Is he dead?” said Adèle. She seemed a little combative, prickly. He knew he had to be patient with her.
“He was already dead,” said Thomas. “That wasn’t Simon. Whatever it was, it wasn’t him.”
“Then what was it?”
Thomas shook his head, frustrated. “I don’t know the answers. Neither did Father Jean-François, and unlike him I don’t have the luxury of armchair theology. I couldn’t let Simon torture you like that, Adèle.”
She said nothing for a moment. She nodded, but she was looking at him as if he’d been the cause of everything. Thomas didn’t like it. “What makes you think he’s really dead?” she said. “What if he comes back again?”
“If he does, I’ll be here,” he said. He put his a
rms around her, pulled her close, hugged her. He could feel the reluctance within her, the uncertainty. It would go in time, he knew. “I’ll always be here.” And if Simon did come back? There had to be ways, he thought. Ways to kill a dead man.
• • •
Once he’d dosed Adèle to help her sleep and plied himself with strong coffee, Thomas headed back to the station. He’d done the minimum amount of paperwork necessary on the shooting, but there was still a mountain to get through. He would have to be creative, he knew, if he wanted to protect his own back. As he drove, he realized how quiet the streets were. Schools and some businesses were closed, and many shops still had their shutters down. The power outage had lasted almost fifteen hours now. Much longer, and it would become a ghost town.
“You OK, sir?” asked Michael.
“Strange times,” said Thomas. “Any word on the power failure?” With perfect timing the lights in the building dimmed for an instant, the station generator only just managing the load.
Michael looked frustrated. “Actually, sir, that’s proving difficult.”
Thomas had assigned him to hounding the power company and making sure they were kept up-to-date, but this didn’t sound good. “How so?”
“The company isn’t giving us much information. The last thing they told me was that the power will be back in four to ten hours.”
“Well, that’s something,” said Thomas, but Michael shook his head. “No?”
“That’s exactly what they said last night, sir. Our emergency switchboard is being swamped with people asking about the power and some other rumors that are going around.”
“Rumors?” Thomas was intrigued. “Such as?”
“Mostly that the dam’s going to burst.”
Thomas sighed. The last thing they needed was that kind of panic. It was the sort of thing he preferred to be the first to know about, but dealing with the shooting all night had left him out of the loop. “Anything else unusual?”
Michael gave him an uneasy smile. “There was a case last night…” He passed Thomas a folder. “Here. Two boys were caught in the cemetery searching a grave.”
“Searching a grave?” Thomas opened the folder and scanned over it. He stopped dead when he saw two words: body missing. “They stole a body?”
“Seems so. But they’ve clammed up. No explanation, and no hint of where they took it. We’re waiting for a lawyer who specializes in juvenile cases.”
The two boys were still being held in the cells. He hurried downstairs and went inside alone. He didn’t recognize them, so they probably weren’t among the usual troublemakers. Just two young lads, he thought. Young, but they looked worn thin, fragile. He wanted to get to the bottom of what they’d been up to, and fast. Fuck the lawyers.
“Why did you do it?” he asked, being as aggressive as he knew how without getting physical. The boys both flinched when they saw what was in his eyes. “It wasn’t just desecration, was it? What were you after?” The boys looked as though they were about to shit themselves, but they only shook their heads. Thomas held up the report folder, then opened it and checked the name again. “It was Camille Séguret’s grave. Did you know her? Where’s the body? When the watchman caught you, it was gone.”
“It wasn’t there,” said one of them. He sounded terrified, and Thomas didn’t think his questioning was the primary source of the fear.
“So where is it?”
“We never touched it,” said the other boy. “Jesus, we’re telling the truth. I was holding the flashlight while he opened the coffin, and all that was inside was water. It was full of water.”
Thomas looked at them and said, as gently as he could, “Where is Camille Séguret?”
They looked at each other, then back at him, silent. Thomas could see in their eyes that they were hiding something. “Where is she, right now?” he said. “You know, don’t you?”
The boy who’d opened the coffin nodded. “I think she’s back,” he said, his voice almost a whisper.
“Back?” said Thomas. “Back from where?” He already knew the answer, but he still had to hear it spoken.
The boy stared at Thomas, desperate to be believed. “Back from the dead.”
59
Claire watched as Camille spoke to the group. They all looked dazed, almost traumatized. Claire was sympathetic. She’d gone through the same kind of shock.
“It’s hard to describe,” said Camille. “First, I saw a great light that dazzled me. It felt like I was going blind. I couldn’t hear anything. Gradually, I could make out figures around me.”
“The other children?” said Sandrine, her eyes wet, her expression anguished.
“Yes,” said Camille. “But I couldn’t see them very well. I just felt them there, like spirits. I remember Audrey calling to me.”
“What did she say?” asked Sandrine. She sounded almost forlorn.
Camille glanced at her mother, and Claire suddenly wondered how much of this was the truth and how much was inspired by Pierre’s words. Her daughter looked so earnest, so eager to please them. It worried her that she had no idea if her daughter was lying or not, but right now the most important thing was for the group to accept her.
“She said she was safe,” said Camille.
There was a knock at the front door and the parents exchanged cautious looks. Claire went to answer it.
It was Jérôme. “Hi,” she said, curt but neutral.
“No word from Léna?”
“No.”
He looked agitated, weighed down with frustration. “I told the police,” he said. “They don’t care. They think she’s just run off. So all I can do is look in one place, then in the next, and it’s strange out there, Claire. Eerie. The streets are emptying.”
“People are staying indoors,” she said. “It’s all they can do.”
There were noises from inside. Claire felt her expression freeze and saw the suspicion on Jérôme’s face. “Who’s in there?” he said, pushing past her. He walked down the hall into the living room and looked around at the gathering, appalled. He froze when he saw Pierre. “I might have guessed you’d be involved,” he said.
“Hello, Jérôme,” said Pierre, caught red-handed.
Jérôme turned angrily to Claire. “What have you told them?”
“The truth,” she said, defiant. “Jérôme, listen to me. We have to confide in those who can help, those who can understand. This is bigger than anything we can handle alone. Camille needs protecting.”
“She needs protecting from him,” said Jérôme, pointing at Pierre. “He can’t be trusted. He’s a fraud, but you can’t see it. He acts like he knows what’s going to happen, but he has no more idea than the rest of us.”
Most of the group kept their eyes on the ground, letting them squabble, but Claire saw Camille’s face, saw her despair at her parents fighting. “This isn’t the place to argue,” she said, but then there was another knock at the front door. Claire and Jérôme locked eyes briefly, then Claire looked to Camille, and upstairs. Camille understood and hurried up to her room. They waited until they heard her bedroom door shut before they went to see who had come.
It was the police captain, looking grimly serious. “Can I talk to Alice?” he said. “Your niece.”
Claire could feel the beginnings of panic and knew it was crucial that the officer didn’t notice.
Jérôme had a desperate look too, but he opted to go on the attack. “Shouldn’t you be looking for our missing daughter?” he said.
The captain seemed to weigh this up. “Exactly. We think your niece could be involved. She is your niece, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” said Claire, trying to sound calm. “But she’s not here.”
“When will she be back?”
“I don’t know. She has her own life.”
He looked at them both with undisgu
ised skepticism. “Tell your niece to come to the station with identification. Is that clear?”
Jérôme nodded. They went back inside to the hallway and shut the door, then looked at each other, relieved the officer had gone, but knowing the respite was temporary.
“We can’t stay here,” said Claire. “Whatever your feelings about Pierre, we can’t stay here.”
And that left only one option.
• • •
Within the hour, most of the group of parents had made the same decision and relocated to the Helping Hand. Some of them pretended that the power outage was the main reason, but Claire saw how they all looked at Camille. Wary, but desperate to believe. Desperate to be near. She wondered how she’d feel in their position, if it had been one of their children who’d come back and she was left questioning why Camille hadn’t. She simply couldn’t imagine what it was like for them.
Claire and Jérôme sat with Camille in the canteen, watching her devour the food offered by the Helping Hand staff. It was cold outside; the breeze carried a deep chill and the sun was hidden behind thick clouds. As soon as they’d come inside, the warmth that greeted them was welcomed by all. Only Jérôme had seemed cautious coming here, having Camille in the open.
“I’ll go back soon and stay at the house,” Jérôme told Camille. “In case Léna goes back there. Your mother will sleep here, OK?”
Camille looked up, mouth full. She nodded, her attention more focused on the food than what her father was saying. She cleaned her plate. “I’m going to see if there’s more,” she said.
Always hungry, thought Claire.
As Camille passed a nearby table, the couple sitting there called to her.
“Hello, Camille,” Claire heard the man say tentatively. “We used to see you at school. We’re Esteban’s parents.”
Camille paused by the table, looking a little uneasy. “Hello, Monsieur Koretzky,” she said. “Yes, I remember.”
“I’m sure a lot of people will ask you this, but we wondered…”
“Esteban is fine,” she said, smiling.