“They’re looking in the wrong place,” she repeated. “She’s not there.”
Father Ménard and I exchanged glances.
“Where is she, Sister?” I asked.
She bent to the diagram once again, then jabbed her finger at the southeast corner of the church. “She’s there. With Mère Aurélie.”
“But, Sis—”
“They moved them. Gave them new coffins and put them under a special altar. There.”
Again she pointed at the southeast corner.
“When?” we asked simultaneously.
Sister Bernard closed her eyes. The wrinkled old lips moved in silent calculation.
“Nineteen eleven. The year I came here as a novice. I remember, because a few years later the church burned and they boarded it up. It was my job to go in and put flowers on their altar. I didn’t like that. Spooky to go in there all alone. But I offered it up to God.”
“What happened to the altar?”
“Taken out sometime in the thirties. It’s in the Holy Infant Chapel in the new church now.” She folded the napkin and began gathering coffee things. “There was a plaque marking those graves, but not anymore. No one goes in there now. Plaque’s been gone for years.”
Father Ménard and I looked at each other. He gave a slight shrug.
“Sister,” I began, “do you think you could show us where Élisabeth’s grave is?”
“Bien sûr.”
“Now?”
“Why not?” China rattled against china.
“Never mind the dishes,” said Father Ménard. “Please, get your coat and boots on, Sister, and we’ll walk over.”
Ten minutes later we were all back in the old church. The weather had not improved and, if anything, was colder and damper than in the morning. The wind still howled. The branches still tapped.
Sister Bernard picked an unsteady path across the church, Father Ménard and I each gripping an arm. Through the layers of clothing, she felt brittle and weightless.
The nuns followed in their spectator gaggle, Sister Julienne ready with steno pad and pen. Guy hung to the rear.
Sister Bernard stopped outside a recess in the southeast corner. She’d added a hand-knitted chartreuse hat over her veil, tied under her chin. We watched her head turn this way and that, searching for markers, getting her bearings. All eyes focused on the one spot of color in the dreary church interior.
I signaled to Guy to reposition a light. Sister Bernard paid no attention. After some time she moved back from the wall. Head left, head right, head left. Up. Down. She checked her position once more, then gouged a line in the dirt with the heel of her boot. Or tried to.
“She’s here.” The shrill voice echoed off stone walls.
“You’re sure?”
“She’s here.” Sister Bernard did not lack self-assurance.
We all looked at the mark she’d made.
“They’re in little coffins. Not like regular ones. They were just bones, so everything fit into small coffins.” She held her tiny arms out to indicate a child-size dimension. An arm trembled. Guy focused the light on the spot at her feet.
Father Ménard thanked the ancient nun and asked two of the sisters to help her back to the convent. I watched their retreat. She looked like a child between them, so small that the hem of her coat barely cleared the dirt floor.
I asked Guy to bring the other spotlight to the new location. Then I retrieved my probe from the earlier site, positioned the tip where Sister Bernard had indicated, and pushed on the T-bar handle. No go. This spot was less defrosted. I was using a tile probe to avoid damaging anything underground, and the ball-shaped tip did not pass easily through the partially frozen upper layer. I tried again, harder.
Easy, Brennan. They won’t be happy if you shatter a coffin window. Or poke a hole through the good sister’s skull.
I removed my gloves, wrapped my fingers around the T-bar, and thrust again. This time the surface broke, and I felt the probe slide into the subsoil. Suppressing the urge to hurry, I tested the earth, eyes closed, feeling for minute differences in texture. Less resistance could mean an airspace where something had decomposed. More could mean that a bone or artifact was present underground. Nothing. I withdrew the probe and repeated the process.
On the third try I felt resistance. I withdrew, reinserted six inches to the right. Again, contact. There was something solid not far below the surface.
I gave the priest and nuns a thumbs-up, and asked Guy to bring the screen. Laying aside the probe, I took up a flat-edged shovel and began to strip thin slices of earth. I peeled soil, inch by inch, tossing it into the screen, my eyes moving from the fill to the pit. Within thirty minutes I saw what I was looking for. The last few tosses were dark, black against the red-brown dirt in the screen.
I switched from shovel to trowel, bent into the pit, and carefully scraped the floor, removing loose particles and leveling the surface. Almost immediately I could see a dark oval. The stain looked about three feet long. I could only guess at its width since it lay half hidden under unexcavated soil.
“There’s something here,” I said, straightening. My breath hung in front of my face.
As one, the nuns and priest moved closer and peered into the pit. I outlined the oval with my trowel tip. At that moment Sister Bernard’s escort nuns rejoined the flock.
“It could be a burial, though it looks rather small. I’ve dug a bit to the left, so I’ll have to take this portion down.” I indicated the spot where I was squatting. “I’ll excavate outside the grave itself and work my way down and in. That way we’ll have a profile view of the burial as we go. And it’s easier on the back to dig that way. An outside trench will also allow us to remove the coffin from the side if we have to.”
“What is the stain?” asked a young nun with a face like a Girl Scout.
“When something with a high organic content decays, it leaves the soil much darker. It could be from the wooden coffin, or flowers that were buried with it.” I didn’t want to explain the decomposition process. “Staining is almost always the first sign of a burial.”
Two of the nuns crossed themselves.
“Is it Élisabeth or Mère Aurélie?” asked an older nun. One of her lower lids did a little dance.
I raised my hands in a “beats me” gesture. Pulling on my gloves, I started troweling the soil over the right half of the stain, expanding the pit outward to expose the oval and a two-foot strip along its right.
Again, the only sounds were scraping and screening. Then,
“Is that something?” The tallest of the nuns pointed to the screen.
I rose to look, grateful for an excuse to stretch.
The nun was indicating a small, reddish-brown fragment.
“You bet your a—. That sure is, Sister. Looks like coffin wood.”
I got a stack of paper bags from my supplies, marked one with the date, location, and other pertinent information, set it in the screen, and laid the others on the ground. My fingers were now completely numb.
“Time to work, ladies. Sister Julienne, you record everything we find. Write it on the bag, and enter it in the log, just as we discussed. We’re at”—I looked into the pit—“about the two-foot level. Sister Marguerite, you’re going to shoot some pictures?”
Sister Marguerite nodded, held up her camera.
They flew into action, eager after the long hours of watching. I troweled, Sisters Eyelid and Girl Scout screened. More and more fragments appeared, and before long we could see an outline in the stained soil. Wood. Badly deteriorated. Not good.
Using my trowel and bare hands, I continued to uncover what I hoped was a coffin. Though the temperature was below freezing and all feeling had left my fingers and toes, inside my parka I sweated. Please let this be her, I thought. Now who was praying?
As I inched the pit northward, exposing more and more wood, the object expanded in breadth. Slowly, the contour emerged: hexagonal. Coffin shape. It took some effort not to sho
ut “Hallelujah!” Churchy, but unprofessional, I told myself.
I teased away earth, handful by handful, until the top of the object was fully exposed. It was a small casket, and I was moving from the foot toward the head. I put down my trowel and reached for a paintbrush. My eyes met those of one of my screeners. I smiled. She smiled. Her right lid did a jitterbug.
I brushed the wooden surface again and again, teasing away decades of encrusted soil. Everyone stopped to watch. Gradually, a raised object emerged on the coffin lid. Just above the widest point. Exactly where a plaque would be. My heart did its own fast dance.
I brushed dirt from the object until it came into focus. It was oval, metallic, with a filigreed edge. Using a toothbrush, I gently cleaned its surface. Letters emerged.
“Sister, could you hand me my flashlight? From the pack?”
Again, they leaned in as one. Penguins at a watering spot. I shone the beam onto the plaque. “Élisabeth Nicolet—1846–1888. Femme contemplative.”
“We’ve got her,” I said to no one in particular.
“Hallelujah!” shouted Sister Girl Scout. So much for church etiquette.
For the next two hours we exhumed Élisabeth’s remains. The nuns, and even Father Ménard, threw themselves into the task like undergraduates on their first dig. Habits and cassock swirled around me as dirt was screened, bags were filled, labeled, and stacked, and the whole process was captured on film. Guy helped, though still reluctant. It was as odd a crew as I’ve ever directed.
Removing the casket was not easy. Though it was small, the wood was badly damaged and the coffin interior had filled with dirt, increasing the weight to about ten tons. The side trench had been a good call, though I’d underestimated the space we’d need. We had to expand outward by two feet to allow plywood to slide under the coffin. Eventually, we were able to raise the whole assemblage using woven polypropylene rope.
By five-thirty we were drinking coffee in the convent kitchen, exhausted, fingers, toes, and faces thawing. Élisabeth Nicolet and her casket were locked in the back of the archdiocese van, along with my equipment. Tomorrow, Guy would drive her to the Laboratoire de Médecine Légale in Montreal, where I work as Forensic Anthropologist for the Province of Quebec. Since the historic dead do not qualify as forensic cases, special permission had been obtained from the Bureau du Coroner to perform the analysis there. I would have two weeks with the bones.
I set down my cup and said my good-byes. Again. The sisters thanked me, again, smiling through tense faces, nervous already about my findings. They were great smilers.
Father Ménard walked me to my car. It had grown dark and a light snow was falling. The flakes felt strangely hot against my cheeks.
The priest asked once more if I wouldn’t prefer to overnight at the convent. The snow sparkled behind him as it drifted in the porch light. Again, I declined. A few last road directions, and I was on my way.
Twenty minutes on the two-lane and I began to regret my decision. The flakes that had floated lazily in my headlights were now slicing across in a steady diagonal curtain. The road and the trees to either side were covered by a membrane of white that was growing more opaque by the second.
I clutched the wheel with both hands, palms clammy inside my gloves. I slowed to forty. Thirty-five. Every few minutes I tested the brakes. While I have been living in Quebec off and on for years, I have never grown accustomed to winter driving. I think of myself as tough, but put me on wheels in snow and I am Princess Chickenheart. I still have the typical Southern reaction to winter storms. Oh. Snow. Then we won’t be going out, of course. Les québécois look at me and laugh.
Fear has a redeeming quality. It drives away fatigue. Tired as I was, I stayed alert, teeth clenched, neck craned, muscles rigid. The Eastern Townships Autoroute was a bit better than the back roads, but not much. Lac Memphrémagog to Montreal is normally a two-hour drive. It took me almost four.
Shortly after ten, I stood in the dark of my apartment, exhausted, glad to be home. Quebec home. I’d been away in North Carolina almost two months. Bienvenue. My thought process had already shifted to French.
I turned up the heat and checked the refrigerator. Bleak. I micro-zapped a frozen burrito and washed it down with room temperature root beer. Not haute cuisine, but filling.
The luggage I’d dropped off Tuesday night sat unopened in the bedroom. I didn’t consider unpacking. Tomorrow. I fell into bed, planning to sleep at least nine hours. The phone woke me in less than four.
“Oui, yes,” I mumbled, the linguistic transition now in limbo.
“Temperance. It is Pierre LaManche. I am very sorry to disturb you at this hour.”
I waited. In the seven years I’d worked for him, the lab director had never called me at three in the morning.
“I hope things went well at Lac Memphrémagog.” He cleared his throat. “I have just had a call from the coroner’s office. There is a house fire in St-Jovite. The firefighters are still trying to get it under control. The arson investigators will go in first thing in the morning, and the coroner wants us there.” Again the throat. “A neighbor says the residents are at home. Their cars are in the driveway.”
“Why do you need me?” I asked in English.
“Apparently the fire is extremely intense. If there are bodies, they will be badly burned. Perhaps reduced to calcined bone and teeth. It could be a difficult recovery.”
Damn. Not tomorrow.
“What time?”
“I will come for you at six A.M.?”
“O.K.”
“Temperance. It could be a bad one. There were children living there.”
I set the alarm for five-thirty.
Bienvenue.
2
I HAVE LIVED IN THE SOUTH ALL OF MY ADULT LIFE. IT CAN NEVER be too hot for me. I love the beach in August, sundresses, ceiling fans, the smell of children’s sweaty hair, the sound of bugs at window screens. Yet I spend my summers and school breaks in Quebec. Most months during the academic year, I fly from Charlotte, North Carolina, where I am on the anthropology faculty at the university, to work at the medicolegal lab in Montreal. This is a distance of approximately twelve hundred miles. Due north.
When it is deep winter, I often have a talk with myself before deplaning. It will be cold, I remind myself. It will be very cold. But you will dress for it and be ready. Yes. I will be ready. I never am. It’s always a shock to leave the terminal and take that first, startling breath.
At 6 A.M., on the tenth day of March, the thermometer on my patio read two degrees Fahrenheit. Seventeen below, Celsius. I was wearing everything I possibly could. Long underwear, jeans, double sweaters, hiking boots, and woolen socks. Inside the socks, I had sparkly insulated liners designed to keep astronaut feet toasty on Pluto. Same provocative combo as the day before. I’d probably stay just as warm.
When LaManche honked, I zipped my parka, pulled on gloves and ski hat, and bolted from the lobby. Unenthused as I was for the day’s outing, I didn’t want to keep him waiting. And I was extremely overheated.
I had expected a dark sedan, but he waved at me from what would probably be called a sport utility vehicle. Four-wheel drive, bright red, with racing stripes.
“Nice car,” I said as I climbed in.
“Merci.” He gestured to a center rack. It held two Styrofoam cups and a Dunkin’ Donuts bag. Bless you. I chose an apple crunch.
On the drive to St-Jovite, LaManche related what he knew. It went little beyond what I’d heard at 3 A.M. From across the road a neighbor couple saw occupants enter the residence at nine in the evening. The neighbors left after that and visited friends some distance away, where they stayed late. When they were returning around two they noted a glow from down the road, and then flames shooting from the house. Another neighbor thought she’d heard booming sounds sometime after midnight, wasn’t sure, and went back to sleep. The area is remote and sparsely populated. The volunteer fire brigade arrived at two-thirty, and called in help when they saw w
hat they had to deal with. It took two squads over three hours to put out the flames. LaManche had talked to the coroner again at five forty-five. Two deaths were confirmed, others anticipated. Some areas were still too hot, or too dangerous, to search. Arson was suspected.
We drove north in the predawn darkness, into the foothills of the Laurentian Mountains. LaManche talked little, which was fine with me. I am not a morning person. He is an audio junkie, however, and kept an unbroken succession of cassettes playing. Classics, pop, even C&W, all converted to easy listenin’. Perhaps it was meant to calm, like the numbing music piped to elevators and waiting rooms. It made me jittery.
“How far is St-Jovite?” I picked a double-chocolate honey-glazed.
“It will take us about two hours. St-Jovite is about twenty-five kilometers this side of Mont Tremblant. Have you skied there?” He wore a knee-length parka, army green with a fur-lined hood. From the side, all I could see was the tip of his nose.
“Um. Beautiful.”
I nearly got frostbite on Mont Tremblant. It was the first time I’d skied in Quebec, and I was dressed for the Blue Ridge Mountains. The wind at the summit was cold enough to freeze liquid hydrogen.
“How did things go at Lac Memphrémagog?”
“The grave wasn’t where we expected, but, what’s new? Apparently she was exhumed and reburied in 1911. Odd that there was no record of it.” Very odd, I thought, taking a sip of tepid coffee. Instrumental Springsteen. “Born in the U.S.A.” I tried to block it. “Anyway, we found her. The remains will be delivered to the lab today.”
“It is too bad about this fire. I know you were counting on a free week to concentrate on that analysis.”
In Quebec, winters can be slow for the forensic anthropologist. The temperature rarely rises above freezing. The rivers and lakes ice over, the ground turns rock hard, and snow buries everything. Bugs disappear, and many scavengers go underground. The result: Corpses do not putrefy in the great outdoors. Floaters are not pulled from the St. Lawrence. People, too, burrow in. Hunters, hikers, and picnickers quit roaming the woods and fields, and some of last season’s dead are not found until the spring melt. The cases that are assigned to me, the faceless in need of a name, decline in number between November and April.
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