I see them to the door. Outside I notice a police car parked to the side of the drive. Noël sees it too, and tenses dramatically.
‘Take it slow,’ I tell him, but he isn’t paying attention. He pulls his helmet on with a swagger, eases himself in front of Martine and revs with exagerrated force. I watch them whizz away and sink into a moment’s self-pity.
In the living room, my brother is holding forth on the moral challenges faced by contemporary youth. I realise it is a staying ploy. He doesn’t know what to do with the two women. He is as nervous as a virtuous thirteen-year- old in the company of rank temptation.
Mme Tremblay is staring at her lap as if it contained the answer to the riddle of the sphinx. She refuses Monique’s imploring glances. But suddenly she asks, in a pointed voice. ‘Where is your son, Monique?’
‘I haven’t mislaid him, if that’s what you’re implying,’ Monique fires back, and then covering her rudeness moans a little. ‘Those Montréal cops were beastly to him. He preferred to stay away.’
‘And your other children?’
‘Louis is working in Galveston. He’s got three kids of his own now, you know. I’m a grandmother,’ Monique glances at my brother and laughs girlishly. ‘And you’re a greatgrandmother. How the years fly! But I don’t see them very much. Louis had a terrible row with his father and then, well…’ Her voice dies away, but she picks it up again, brightly. ‘C’est la vie, as you say around here. And Rachelle, well, she’s shacked up with a man in Pittsburgh. Awful man,’ she flushes suddenly and races on. ‘But Martin, he’s the good one. He’s a teacher. He inherited your brains. He lives in Omaha. I go and visit them in the summers for a week or so. His wife is… is very refined. Madeleine helped him out, you know. When he was at university.’
‘That was kind of her.’ There is a sudden leap of tears in Mme Tremblay’s eyes.
‘But when I wrote to her… oh, never mind.’
‘What?’
Monique pushes the tortière round her plate and then swallows a forkful.
‘When I wrote to her about poor Arthur, my husband, being ill, she didn’t even bother to answer.’
The self-pitying whine in her voice grates on my skin.
‘No. I would imagine not.’ Mme Tremblay is severe.
‘Why would you imagine not?’ Monique flutters her eyelashes and like some rebellious adolescent, mimicks her mother’s dry tones exactly.
‘Because she had no affection for him. And if you stop to think about it for more than two seconds, you’ll know exactly why that was.’
‘Why was it?’ Monique’s voice rises in stridency. ‘Because you turned her against us. Little Princess Goldilocks, spoiled by you until she thought she was too good for us.’
As the two women confront each other, they seem to take on age-old postures. We have entered a time-warp. Like fossils which have lain untouched in some deep geological stratum and awaited this moment to spring back into life, they can only replay ancient familial wars.
‘And I’ll tell you why it was, you wilfully stupid woman. It was because as soon as your belly grew big, Arthur Blais started to beat her. Worse. I saw it with my own eyes.’ Mme Tremblay’s face is twisted into a scowl.
‘Ridiculous! You even turned her against Marcel who wanted only to be useful to her. You treat your handyman better than us. He wouldn’t even have let us in out of the cold, if it hadn’t been for Père Jerome.’
‘Michel Dubois has always been loyal and kind. Unlike that brute of a man you married.’ Mme Tremblay scrapes her chair back from the table and rises slowly. ‘I’m tired now. If you want to stay here, I won’t throw you out. You can sleep in the guest room. But no more of this.’
‘I just hope Madeleine has seen fit to rectify your joint sins in her will,’ Monique mutters under her breath and then as Mme Tremblay leaves the room, turns tearful eyes at Jerome. ‘She hates me, you know. She’s always hated me. I’m not clever enough for her. But family ties should be stronger than that. You understand that, Jerome. You’re like your father.’
‘Maybe if you behaved just a little better,’ I hear myself saying.
‘Pierre!’ Jerome chastises. ‘You of all people.’
‘She’s an old woman. She’s suffered a severe shock.’
‘And me? What about me?’ Monique strikes the pose of a bereaved mother.
‘You --’
‘Pierre!’ Jerome cuts me off.
The stark severity of his face catapults my guilt to the surface. I want to shake him so that all the things he thinks he knows about me will at last tumble out into the open. Instead with barely a nod, I push my chair back from the table and leave.
There are no stars tonight. My house rises out of the gloom like some ungainly prehistoric creature, its cavernous jaw opening at my approach. For a moment, I rue the human, bickering, warmth of Mme Tremblay’s, but by then the garage door has already slid shut behind me.
The cold wind blowing down the basement stairs alerts me. It whistles and gusts with unusual force as I make my way into the kitchen. Have I, in my abstraction, left a door or window open?
I switch on the lights and rush through the dining room where a table lamp lies toppled. But the front entrance is shut and locked. I hurry towards the salon.
Glass crackles and skids beneath my feet. Myriad shards and splinters cover the floor, stipple the old floral sofa. I stumble over something hard and recognize the outline of a brick even before I see it.
The double paned window gapes, a vast yawning mouth fed by hooligans flushed by recent exploits. I check the brick for a message. But this one contains none. It doesn’t need it.
Did the boys come here, drunk with their New Year’s Eve celebrations, to teach me a lesson, Noël Jourdan amongst them? The room is cold enough to have been open to the wind for some time. On the window ledge a small heap of crusty snow has gathered.
Quickly I fetch a pan and broom and cardboard box from the kitchen and clear away the principal mess. In the basement, I find two large pieces of ply, a hammer and nails.
It is as I am about to fix the boards, that the thought creeps up on me, treacherous, more chilling than the wind. A brick has indeed shattered the window. But the cavity in front of me is larger than that, different too. The glass has been picked at and eased away, leaving a gap big enough for a man to crawl through.
My eyes scud across the room, searching for signs of theft. There doesn’t seem to be anything missing. The stereo is in place, the artifacts still neat on their shelves.
I hammer the wood into position across the frame. The blows echo uncannily through the house, making it creak and judder. When I finish, the silence is heavy. Too heavy - as if a deep anticipatory breath had been taken and held. The certain sense that I am not alone suddenly overtakes me. The intruders are still here, crouching in some dim corner, waiting to pounce. Why have I assumed that the brick was launched on New Year’s Eve? Why not today? Why not just moments before my return?
I stop all my activity and listen. Listen for the shift of floor boards, the whisper of feet on rugs. Nothing. I can hear nothing but the wind wailing round the cracks.
From the fireplace I take a poker and creep towards the stairs. Half way up, I pause to listen again. I stand there for a good few minutes. Still nothing. I try to calm my fear. The kids wouldn’t get up to anything really vile. A group protest, yes, an egging each other on against the outsiders. Even a drunken threat against the faithless authority I might be seen to represent. But nothing more than that. No. Certainly not.
Yet what if some vengeful character really does want to pay me back for taking sides against the crowd? Or what if someone knows that it is I who has tipped off Gagnon about the drugs? Worse still, what if there is someone out there who, like Contini, suspects I am guilty of Madeleine’s death and wants to take immediate revenge?
I switch on the upstairs lights and stealthily open doors. Fear prickles at the base of my spine. As I struggle to calm it I wonde
r at myself. Why is it that I am prepared to believe the worst of myself yet am so unwilling to suspect anyone I know of violent malice? Is my tolerance simply a defence against emotion or a deep knowledge of my greater guilt? I run through the faces in the crowd outside the Rosenberg house, discounting them one by one, pitting reason against dread.
When I open the door to my bedroom, dread wins. Everything here is helter skelter. Clothes have been tumbled from drawers, lamps broken, books ripped, their spines arched and cracked like so many broken necks.
My eyes refuse the worst of it. At the tip of my dissheveled bed, there is a bundle of streaked and burnished fur. Minou. Her head is at an odd angle, the pillow behind her red with the blood that has oozed from her mouth.
My stomach heaving, I cover her gently with a sheet. Foreboding clutches at my throat and with it a rising anger. I race from the room and down to the far end of the corridor.
The door is closed, intact. The keys still in my pocket. I almost walk away and then something makes me twist the knob. It gives. I have forgotten to lock the attic. I hold my breath. Poker at the ready, I walk stealthily up the stairs.
Through the glimmer of light from the door, I scan the alcoves, the only possible hiding places. Nothing moves. I take a step forward and then another. Something rustles and crunches beneath my feet.
‘Get your hands up,’ I hear myself shouting as if Contini had once again lent me his guise.
There is no answering stir.
I switch on the light and look round. A groan comes to my lips. The floor is heaped with film, loops and coils and strands of it, like the rapids of a stream rippling down blue velvet, breaking across smooth aluminum stones. Ripped posters and crumpled photographs indent the flow. Here and there Madeleine’s mutilated face looks up at me with a plea.
The shrine has been desecrated. Its altar toppled. The shattered lens lies next to the projector on the floor.
I walk slowly round the graveyard of my dreams. For some reason, I can’t bring myself to touch anything, to move or right.
It is only on my third trajectory that I notice that the video tapes and recorder are gone. Oddly, the television is untouched. It stands just where I left it.
My legs are unsteady as I move down the stairs. The poker scrapes the wall, re-ignitning my fear. Who would do such a thing? Why?
I cannot think straight. Not here in this burial site. Not now.
With sudden speed, I make for my bedroom. From the cupboard, I extract a clean white sheet. Carefully I wrap Minou in it and head down to the basement. There is a small metal moulded trunk here which still houses a childhood collection of tin soldiers. I pour these out and delicately place Minou in the box, then carry her out through the front door. Like Madeleine, she cannot yet be buried. It would take a flame thrower to break the ground tonight. Instead, I place her between two ornamental garden firs and cover the casket with snow.
The outdoor light illuminates the porch and as I approach it again, I can see fragments of glass sparkling amidst the iced blue of the gathered snow. The pieces of pane are bigger here than on the inside and amidst them, despite the hardness of the snow, there is the indentation of a boot.
I gaze at it for a moment, then with a shiver race inside and double lock the door behind me. I leave all the lights on and head for the garage. I do not want to be here. Fear claws at me. An odour of death stifles my breathing.
It doesn’t get better in the car. I am so intent on the rear view mirror, that I can barely focus on the curves in front of me. I think of Maryla and the car that bludgeoned hers off the road as she left my house just three nights ago. Was that accident really intended for me? A warning, perhaps?
With a surge of gas, I speed past the place. I recall my sense of being followed on my way home from the Rosenberg’s, my assumption, probably mistaken, that it was Contini. And later that evening, the incident in the shed, a first attempt perhaps to perpetrate the abomination which I discovered tonight - a first attempt foiled by Jerome’s presence with me in the house. Was Minou’s crushed foot also a warning?
I check the road for shadows and signalling in the opposite direction, turn right into the highway, then zip into the first gas station.
No one comes after me. I fill up and take off again, with too much speed. Yet I don’t quite know where I am going. I can’t contaminate any local household with my potentially dangerous presence. Somewhere, it comes to me with sudden stinging clarity, there is a madman poised to strike a second time. Yes. A second time.
I know I should contact Gagnon and report the break in. But I am not ready. Not quite ready to have him trekking through my inner sanctum. Pride perhaps. Or shame.
Suddenly I notice a car behind me. It is cruising at the same speed. Its beams are low. I cannot make out the model or licence plate. As I speed up, it matches my pace. I slow down to let it overtake me, but it creeps along, maintaining its distance. With sudden decision I veer into the slip road which leads to the autoroute. I take it fast and the car disappears from view. But it is there again at the junction. I rev away winding in and out of the hurtling traffic and after some five miles I assume I have lost him.
My brain feels addled. All the faces I have seen this last week float and churn through my mind like figures in a nightmarish identity parade. Their features fade into each other, blur into other faces. Figures remembered, seen dimly on street or screen, propped against desks or walls or pillows, moving forward or back, gliding, screaming, chanting, lying ripped on the ground. Swinging. Madeleine.
With a shudder, I collect myself and check the rear-view mirror. The cars in front and behind are indistinguishible. So, too, on this starless night, is the section of the autoroute I have reached. I drive until a sign appears. With it comes a sudden grim suspicion.
The road is quieter than when I was last here. There are no night-time skiers on the slopes. Chair-lifts swing desultorily in the wind and cast strange robotic shadows onto the snow as my headlights graze them. The holiday amusement park is asleep.
I drive slowly, not altogether certain of my turn off. Last week I arrived from the opposite direction.
Where the mountain gives way to the lake, I hear a car behind me. Hear, but don’t see. There are headlights nowhere, yet I can feel the vibration of another engine. I speed round a bend, but the noise is still there, coming closer and closer. Sweat moistens my brow. I am doing a hundred and ten and the road cannot take it. The banks of ploughed snow on my right look hard and steep. Then a house appears. I calculate where the drive might be and swerve towards it.
There is a terrible scraping noise as the car clips my right side and sheers off my wing mirror. I am wedged on the bank. For a moment I think he may reverse back on to me in a funfair replay of bumper cars. But he doesn’t slow. I have no time to read his plates. There is only the impression of redness. Nor do his lights go on. He accelerates into darkness.
In his wake my headlamps pick up something flying through the air, looping into the wind and landing not fifty feet from me.
I wait. I wipe my brow. And then, my lights still on I whisk out into the cold and retrieve what my tracker has dropped.
When I find it, the perspiration returns. The strip of film is some three feet long. I don’t need to examine it to know whose image is embedded there.
For some fifteen minutes, I linger in the drive. It is better to wait here. I need to collect my wits, to make myself ready.
No lights flash across the Auberge Maribou sign tonight. In my tense state, I almost miss it and have to reverse back down the road. I leave my car at a little distance, in the shadow of trees, then creep round to the parking lot. A single sedan is parked by the inn’s side. I examine it closely for redness and dents. It has neither and the hood is cold. I search out the garage which is tucked behind the building. The doors are solidly locked.
A lone lamp illuminates the dining room. My fists clenched I peer through the window. There is no one visible. My shoulders squared, I
ring the bell and wait for what feels like a long time.
‘Pierre!’ Giorgio Napolitano is clad in a burly track suit. His hair is wet and tousled as if he may just have emerged from the shower. ‘Come in. come in. No problem with rooms tonight. Holidays are over.’ He smiles at me with too much warmth. ‘But I’m not so sure about the food. Paloma and Sylvie are in Montréal.’
‘I’m not worried about food.’ I try to peer behind his uncertain smile, glance at the snowshoes stored by the door.
‘No,’ he considers me. ‘I can see that. But I’m glad you’ve come. We couldn’t talk the other night.’ He ushers me into the dining room, pulls a bottle of wine from the rack.
‘How long have you been back here?’ I keep my voice even.
‘Back? Back from where?’
‘Ste-Anne.’
The look he gives me is a study in incomprehension. ‘Saturday. Just after I saw you. I’m sorry about bursting in on you like that.’ He puts a glass of wine in front of me. Dark eyes meet mine. ‘What’s wrong, Pierre?’
‘Where’s your car?’ I size him up as I ask. I am taller than him, but he seems sturdier.
‘My car? What do you mean? Have you broken down? Paloma’s taken mine to pick up Sylvie with. The old one’s still here though.’
‘In the parking lot?’
‘No. That’s our single guest. Mine’s in the garage. Where do you need to go?’
My shoulders relax a little. ‘Can I see it?’
‘Sure. It’s not much to look at. What’s wrong, Pierre?’ he asks again.
‘Why did you come and see me on Saturday?’
He pulls out a chair and straddles it, waves me towards another. ‘Sit down. Please. You look as if you’re about to slug me.’
With a shrug, I perch on a chair opposite him.
‘I came to see you, because I wanted to talk. Talk about Madeleine. About the fact that, as Detective Contini had made clear, she had been murdered.’ He shivers slightly. ‘And… yes, there was something else.’ He studies my face carefully, as if he were trying to make up his mind about something.
The Dead of Winter Page 33