‘You’re not exactly looking your best,’ Oscar tells me now as he uncorks a bottle of wine and puts it down on the chequered cloth which covers the large rectangle of a kitchen table. ‘Hardly surprising, I guess. How about a bowl of Elise’s soup to set you up?’
Without waiting for my reply, he lights a hob beneath a vast copper pot and cuts a thick slab of bread.
‘The children asleep?’ I ask. Oscar and Elise’s brood of three have taken on the status of godchildren for me.
He nods. ‘And from the depth of the silence, I imagine Elise has dropped off with the babe.’
‘Just as well. I’ve forgotten all the presents.’
‘Poor little underprivileged darlings will just have to forgive you,’ Oscar snorts and shunts aside the toys which litter the table. ‘So tell me. Tell me everything. We’ve followed the papers, but what with the grandparents here until yesterday…’ He shrugs with full Gallic emphasis and straddles the stool opposite me.
‘In fact, I’d like to do some asking.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. You know the holiday house about a kilometre north of here?’
‘Dr. Rosenberg’s property? Someone interested in buying it?’
‘Is it for sale?’
‘He had it on the market a few years back. He rarely comes here anymore. But no one wanted to buy. The sign’s gone now. I think his kids use it from time to time. Changing bands of them. It’s beginning to look like a squat.’ He gives me his puzzled frown. ‘What’s all this about, Pierre?’
‘Do you know the kids?’
‘Not really. Layabouts from what I can make out. Students maybe. Stoned out of their heads most of the time. Gone are the days, eh…’
He gets up to ladle soup into a bowl. It steams in front of me, hot and fragrant. I suddenly feel very tired.
‘Have you heard that Mme Tremblay’s barn was torched?’
‘No! When? We didn’t catch the news today.’
‘Early this morning. The police think one of those kids did it. They’ve arrested a youth called Will. Gagnon is convinced he murdered Madeleine as well.’
He stares at me in utter stillness, his cheeks drained of their usual ruddiness.
‘Mauditcriss! I didn’t like to believe that when Mme Tremblay said it. Not around here. Not murder. How ghastly for Madeleine.’
He unearths a pipe from an ornate box on the counter and plays with it absent-mindedly.
‘Two nights ago, maybe three, Elise was putting things away in the playroom, you know at the other end of the house in the back and she turned and saw this face staring in at her. She came screaming up to me, but by the time I got my boots on and went out, there was no one. I told her she was hallucinating.’
‘Did you find anything missing?’
‘No. Don’t think so. Though someone or something had been into the shed. It was a bit of a jumble.’
‘What did Elise say the prowler looked like?’
‘Wild. A savage. But you know, when you haven’t been sleeping much… Anyhow, I didn’t take it too seriously at the time. But now… I’ll have to watch Christophe and Chantale as well. They’re always wandering off on their own. Still the police have got him?’ He looks at me for the reassurance I can’t altogether give.
‘They think so.’ I sip my wine in order not to meet his eyes.
‘What do you make of all this, Pierre?’
I shrug and push back my chair. Like one of Oscar’s canvases, my mind refuses outlines. Everything is a blur of shape and raucous colour.
He puts a staying hand on my arm. ‘Listen, why don’t you stay here tonight? There’s an old misery of a blizzard out there. And Chantale will never forgive me if she hears you’ve been and gone without saying hello. What do you say?’
I hesitate. But I don’t hesitate for long. Though I don’t like to admit it to myself, the last place I want to be for the length of a night is home.
Warm breath on my cheek and the murmur of a ‘bonjour’ wakes me in the morning. I open my eyes to see a small face bending over me.
‘There. I told maman you were awake.’ Eight year old Chantale’s smile is at once innocent and mischievous beneath her China doll eyes. ‘Breakfast is ready, Tonton Pierre, and there’s a mountain of snow.’
I kiss her smooth forehead and whisk her off to tell her mother that I’ll be down in a few minutes. She hesitates at the door, turns back.
‘There’s been a murder, tonton Pierre. A murder!’ Her mouth is round with the emphasis. ‘Just like on the television. I heard maman and papa talking about it.’
‘Does it frighten you?’ I ask softly.
‘Non.’ She shakes her head. ‘They’re going to hang him.’ Her hand flicks across my throat in a swift arc and with a bounce and a skip, she is out of the room.
I stare after her and wonder at the certain precision of her sense of justice. My head is muddy with dreams. Their footprints bog me down, drag me into a murky world where the figures who hang from ropes are transformed with kaleidoscopic speed. Madeleine, the youth called Will, Mme Tremblay, myself. Above and around and through it all, there are words, writing on a page I can’t quite read. Madeleine’s journals, perhaps. An explanation? Something in me resists the notion of murder, refuses it, baulks with all the fury of a rearing stallion. If Madeleine must be dead, I want it to have been by her own hand. Why? Why? I try to shake myself into a semblance of clarity and make my way down the narrow staircase.
The smell of frying bacon curls from the kitchen. Elise glances away from her skillet as I come in and gives me a warm smile. She is a woman of lazy volutptuousness, all generous curves and waving hair and easy charm. Her studio, where she chips away at hunks of stone to reveal surprising shapes, half-animal, half-human, is adjacent to Oscar’s. I have seen her working in there, her concentration total, yet somehow alert to the children playing in the corner.
‘I’ve made your favourite,’ she says to me now and simultaneously gives the baby’s canvas chair a little rock. ‘Pancakes. Because you missed the duck on Tuesday. Why don’t you call Oscar and the kids? They’re outside.’
Oscar is clearing a path between the house and the studio. He scrapes the ground with his large curved scoop of a shovel and heaves the snow into growing mounds at the side. The children pat it into stiff peaks with their spades. Chantale waves to me. I trudge out to join them. It is still snowing, but only a little now.
‘Breakfast is ready. But I could give you a hand, if you point me to another shovel.’
Oscar shakes his head. ‘You go and get yourself a cup of coffee.’ He grins at me. ‘Didn’t your mother teach you to wear a coat before you came out?’
‘Yes, Tonton,’ Chantale scolds in a maternal voice. ‘It’s cold out.’
‘Elise wanted to have a quiet word with you,’ Oscar says for my ears alone. ‘We’ll join you in a few minutes.’
‘He wants me to tell you?’ Elise asks when I report Oscar’s words. ‘Okay.’ She scoops a last pancake from the skillet and pops the plateful into the oven. She pours me a cup of coffee, wipes her hands meticulously on a teacloth.
Elise doesn’t like words. She prefers gestures, has to make several of them before language finds its shape in her.
‘It’s the kids. They were playing in that wooded stretch. Pretending they were space rangers or something. Scouting out a foreign planet. A few days back, it was. Last week maybe. They couldn’t quite remember. They saw two men. One of them had hair like rope, Christophe said. The other one was dark, in leather. They had a knife. A big knife.’ She shivers and grips her mug with both hands.
‘They were cutting marks into the trees. Chantale claims they dropped something into them too. Small bags. Bags of jewels, she said. Something small in any case. When the men spotted them, they shouted and chased after them. But my kids run like furies. Or like space rangers. Luckily.’ She laughs to cover her fear. ‘They didn’t tell me about it, ’cause they knew I’d get mad. What’s going on arou
nd here, Pierre?’
‘Nothing good,’ I mutter just as the children burst through the door closely followed by Oscar.
‘Don’t make a big thing of it now,’ Elise whispers. She smiles a little shakily at her brood, squeeze’s the baby’s foot and repositions his chair at the end of the table before calling out, ‘Right, how many pancakes can each of you eat?’
‘A hundred,’ says tousle-headed Pierre.
‘A hundred and fifty,’ blurts Chantale.
‘Three for me.’ Oscar chuckles.
Elise dishes out pancakes and bacon and generous splashes of maple syrup. We eat and pretend normality and eventually it settles over us, as reassuring as the baby’s gurgle and the soft milky batter in our stomachs.
Maybe because I want to extend my stay in this safe haven, before I leave I ask Oscar if I can have a peak into the studio where I haven’t been for some time. He hesitates unusually, but then with a shrug walks me over and unlocks the heavy double doors.
The first impression, as always, is that of vivid colour leaping out from walls and easels. As the colours take on shape, I notice Madeleine’s profile emerging from a canvas which Oscar is turning to the wall. His manner has an edge of deliberate nonchalance. He doesn’t want me to see.
‘So you did make a start,’ I murmur.
‘I couldn’t resist the temptation.’ Oscar doesn’t meet my eyes.
‘Even though she didn’t have time to come and sit for you?’
There is a veiled expression on his face. He turns away from me. The way his fist is clenched sets up an odd prickle in my spine.
‘Did she?’
‘Once. Just once.’ He veers back at me his body poised in challenge, a glimmer of hostility in his dark eyes.
‘I see.’
‘Drop it, Pierre.’ He up-ends a large canvas. ‘What do you think of this?’
I cannot think of anything except the meaning of that ‘once’.
As I skid along the road in the ridges left by the snow plough, I try to focus only on the innocent white of the newly fallen snow. But the fluffy blanket which has bleached the world evokes a kind of panic in me. How am I to distinguish the proper outlines of things? How am I to distinguish the meaningful from the meaningless, where there is only nature’s impassive whiteness?
Abruptly I take the turn to Mme Tremblay’s house and inch along the drive past the parked cars which no longer surprise me. A dark-jacketed man is shovelling snow from the steps. He looks up at me with overt suspicion. I recognize Michel Dubois just as he recognizes me. From somewhere the dogs bark, their excitement drowning the whirr of the heater.
Michel waves me to a halt, lumbers towards me. I lower my window.
‘Where is Mme Tremblay?’ he asks as accusingly as if I had done away with her.
‘In Montréal.’ I offer no explanation.
He glares at me from beneath bushy brows.
‘Do you need her for something?’
‘Her daughter’s been looking for her.’
From behind him on the porch, a woman emerges. Middle height, dress just a little too tight, buxom figure, blonde hair out of a cheap bottle.
‘Has Maman arrived, M. Dubois?’ she calls in sugary tones.
Trailing her like a welcoming committee are two men. One of them is my brother, Jerome. The second I don’t recognize. He is balding and stocky, his eyes dark smudges half lost in the flesh of his face. As he thrusts a pugnacious jaw in my direction, I remember Giorgio Napolitano’s account of Madeleine’s insistent stepbrother.
Jerome beckons me towards them. Reluctantly I leave the shelter of the car.
‘I thought you’d had the good sense to take my advice and go,’ Jerome mutters and then, his face repositioned into stiff politeness, he clears his throat and introduces me to Marcel and Monique Blais.
Close to, Madeleine’s mother has pouchy rouged cheeks which obliterate the structure of her face, a slightly snub nose and mascara dark eyes which gaze up at me in near-sighted curiosity. There is nothing in her face to remind me of Madeleine. Nor can I conjure up the Monique of my brother’s pubescent fantasies,
‘Pierre Rousseau!’ she breathes. ‘So this is how you turned out. Well, well, well. Madeleine never sent me a photo and I haven’t seen you in I don’t want to admit how long. You were just a baby. You look so like your mother. While Jerome, he’s your father through and through.’
Her face abruptly takes on a tragic cast and she sways a little so that my brother puts a steadying hand on her shoulder and then as if he had been burnt, quickly removes it.
Monique Blais takes a step towards me and buries her face in my shoulder. ‘It’s too terrible, Pierre. Too awful for words. I still can’t believe it!’
I move away from her, watch the tissue come out of her pocket, the dabbing at the eyes, see that my brother is altogether rivetted..
‘I drove here as soon as I heard, but Maman, she…’
‘Where is Mme Tremblay, Pierre?’ Jerome asks in the steely voice of a knight bent on a mission. ‘I wanted to have a word with her. It really isn’t right…’
I cut him off. ‘Mme Tremblay has been taken unwell. She’s had to stay in Montreal.
‘Pauvre maman!’ Monique exclaims. ‘Madeleine was the whole world to her. More than a daughter. Yes I’m not afraid to admit that, Jerome.’
‘Unwell?’ Michel Dubois interjects from behind me.
‘Yes. She should be back in a few days.’ I prevaricate.
‘You’ll give me her number. Monique really needs to be able to stay here. And Marcel.’ Jerome turns a look of sudden distaste towards the man at his side who hasn’t uttered a word.
Marcel wears a look of stubborn and impatient dissatisfaction. ‘Madeleine would have wanted us here. She told me that…’
‘Well, you can’t stay unless Mme Tremblay tells me so,’ Michel Dubois cuts him off with no attempt at politeness. He trudges into the house and is back moments later bearing three coats.
‘What did Madeleine tell you?’ I ask Marcel.
‘Oh nothing,’ he grunts and for a fraction of a second I think he is going to raise one of the large, stubby-fingered hands which swings at his side and hit Michel. But the latter unceremoniously thrusts a thick navy-blue jacket into his arms and without a word double locks the front door.
‘I’ll drop by to see you later, Pierre,’ my brother says with low menace as he passes me on the steps.
I watch Monique get into Jerome’s car, watch Marcel stamp towards his and then, grateful for Michel Dubois’ decisiveness, carry on in the opposite direction.
There is sheer ice under the snow where the fire engines spilled their stream. My tires all but lose their grip. Below me, where the barn once was, only an L-shaped wedge of snow inflects the horizon. The site of Madeleine’s death has been utterly eradicated.
I step out into the wind. I have the odd impression that its whistling gusts carry Madeleine’s laughter.
‘You never see what’s in front of your nose,’ she tells me.
What does she mean? And yet she’s right. Altogether right, I reassure the wind. I never saw Madeleine’s betrayals until I saw too many of them at once and then I couldn’t see for dizziness. But I don’t want to think of that now. It doesn’t matter now. I stand there and gaze at nothing until the cold becomes as painful as my thoughts and forces me into action.
By a sheer miracle of patience and luck, I manage to turn the car round. I skirt my house and drive into Ste-Anne. Even though it is Saturday morning, the snow has made it quieter than yesterday evening. Then too, most people now do their shopping in the vast mall some twenty kilometres away where piped music and airport air can smooth and encourage their purchases.
At the small-scale supermarché, I stop off and buy some instant coffee and a carton of milk to replenish my office supply. For good measure, though I am not sure I want to look at them, I pick up the papers.
The headline in the local rag catches my eye with its sheer
size even before I have reached my office.
‘Barn Blaze: Suspect held in Madeleine Blais Case’, it blares in its second and now official issue of the week.
My office is cold and smells of a week’s abandonment. I turn the heat up and make my way past the front rooms to deposit the supplies in the kitchenette. The back room which serves as my private space overlooks a small garden. Despite the cold, I open the window to allow some fresh air in and glance at the pink terracotta Aprhodite which Madeleine once gave me as a present. Shipping it back from Paris was a madness I have not regretted. The warm stone is now capped with a white hat, but the colour irradiates the garden like a touch of Italian sunlight.
Above my desk, Oscar’s canvas fills the wall, its gashes of blue as vivid as Aphrodite’s earth. The picture, unusual for him, depicts Chantale’s nursery. Cribs and chairs rock, mobiles swing, around a still centre of mother and child illuminated by the blue sky which pours through the windows. I gaze at the picture and will it to blot out the glimpsed portrait of Madeleine, with all its undertones of treachery. It refuses. The papers seem preferable.
Below the local rag’s photo of Mme Tremblay’s burning barn, a heinous story of arson and murder unfolds. ‘An unnamed man is being held in connection with both crimes. Sources close to the police say the suspect is not a local, but was visiting the home of Dr. David Rosenberg on the Shore Road.’
I wonder at these sources close to the police. They can only be a loquacious Mme Groulx.
The Montréal paper takes a slightly different tack. Next to a picture of the blaze, there is a photograph of Mme Tremblay which, given the earnest determination of her face, seems to have been reproduced from her telelvision appearance. The story underlines how correct Madeleine Blais’ grandmother has been in her intuitions.
Seeing Mme Tremblay brings me to my senses. With guilty haste, I ring the operator to get the number of the Montréal General and then hang on for what feels like hours until I am put through to the appropriate ward. At last a Nurse Reynolds tells me that Mme Tremblay is making good progress. She is aware of her surroundings now, though she isn’t talking much.
‘The only troubling thing,’ Nurse Reynolds hesitates, ‘is that she keeps going on about the urgency of a funeral. That it isn’t right the funeral hasn’t been arranged yet.’ She sighs. ‘The doctor wants to keep her under observation for at least another day.’
The Dead of Winter Page 22