I stared at her. “Then adopting Annie was a kind of experiment?” I asked, aghast.
She shrugged, looking at her hands as though not knowing what to do with them. She ended up clasping them in her lap. “I cannot speak to his motivations,” she said, still looking at her hands, her voice precise and careful. “There had been a death in the family. That seemed reason enough to adopt. I’m sure that he meant nothing but the best for both his daughters.” She looked up at me. “He arranged for their education. He arranged for good marriages for both of them.”
“He arranged for their marriages?” I asked. “Wasn’t that a little old-fashioned?” A man who sends his daughters to college but arranges their marriages, I thought. Was I the only one who found that a little weird?
She tipped her head, considering. “Perhaps. But the old families have old-fashioned values. It certainly didn’t seem to shock anyone at the time.”
I looked at her sharply. “At the time? You knew Annie then?” I’d assumed they’d met through the foundation.
“Of course,” she said. “Annie and I were in school together. She was enrolled starting in sixth form; I remember us all thinking that was a little odd, but she only said she’d been abroad. And we accepted that, of course.”
I readjusted my thinking to accommodate this new information. “Did she ever discuss her past with you?”
A shadow crossed Elizabeth’s face. Annie had talked about it, all right. “Occasionally,” she said, flicking an imaginary piece of lint off her sleeve. “Once we were adults. But mostly we talked about the future.”
“What about her father? You said he was a doctor; was he a psychiatrist?”
She looked pained. “I don’t see how sullying his memory is going to do any good!” she exclaimed. “Martine, really, I want to help you, but—”
“Then help me,” I said. “Help Annie.”
Another stretch of silence. “He was a psychiatrist,” she conceded at last. “He was in private practice, but he had some sort of affiliation—don’t ask me, I honestly don’t know what—with the asylum where Annie had been living. And with the Allan Institute, through some work he’d done at McGill. Even when she was in her teens, he still went back there occasionally. Maybe regularly.” She looked again at her pristine fingernails. “Please understand, this was the seventies. We are all a product of our times.”
Just get on with it, I pleaded silently.
She took a deep breath. “We were, all of us, very concerned about what was happening in the Soviet Union, about the spread of Communism,” she said at last. “Dr. Desmarchais was passionately anti-communist. Well, so many people were in those days, weren’t they? He felt that we should all do our part to help keep the free world free.”
“And what was his part?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. I thought I already knew.
She shrugged and used my own expression. “You can make the inferences.”
“He was involved with the experiments,” I said. “With the mind-altering drugs.”
She nodded. “He thought that there could be some use for a drug that would incapacitate a subject’s ability to think and to remember. It was all so very convenient. You see, no court of law can rule against psychological warfare because of the difficulty in prosecuting psychologically induced states of mind as proof of assassinations and other orchestrated events.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And, you know, everyone back then was so concerned about what was happening in the United States,” she said. “Take Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Let’s face it, nobody just picks up a gun on some sunny day and decides that all of a sudden they’re going to start shooting people. The precision and cold, calculating nature of the shooter has to be thoroughly ingrained into a subject with rigorous conditioning and mind control.”
“Uh-huh,” I said again.
She looked up then and met my eyes, sensing my withdrawal. “It’s irrelevant, anyway,” she said briskly. “He wasn’t the only one doing the experiments, and he died a long time ago. I cannot see that this has any connection with a murder that happened over half a century later.”
“Was Annie one of his subjects?”
She looked me straight in the eyes. “I don’t know.”
I shook my head. “With all due respect, Elizabeth, I don’t believe you. She was your best friend for years. You can’t tell me she didn’t tell you.”
“She didn’t know!” Her hands went into a frenzy of straightening her already-perfect clothing. “She didn’t know. Once she was older, once she went to university and started understanding what he’d done, she wondered, yes. She asked him! But he denied it, he always denied it.”
“She came to his attention for some reason,” I pointed out. “Why did he adopt her, out of all the children in that place?”
“We wondered that, too,” Elizabeth replied. “Annie was sure that there was something dark behind it all; but her parents would never tell her, and Violette was too young to know, so she never found out.”
“Maybe she did,” I said.
The look she gave me was pure anguish. “I hope you’re wrong,” Elizabeth Romfield said. “I pray to God that you’re wrong.”
When I looked to see what had become of our audience, the old man was gone. There was no one there. I wondered if there ever had been.
* * *
I grabbed a coffee and a sandwich at the closest St. Hubert, and headed back to the Old Port. Chantal was typing, Richard’s door was closed, everything was fine. “You’ve had three calls from Ottawa,” Chantal said. “You know that smartphone the office bought you? You’re supposed to keep it turned on.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Don’t know. Someone named Elodie Maréchal. Said you’d know who she was.”
I was already looking at the pink slips. “Thanks, Chantal,” I said. “Can you get her on the phone for me now, please?”
I shut my door and waited at my desk for the call to go through. I knew that I’d upset Elodie. Let’s see if anything had come of it.
Chantal buzzed her through almost immediately. “Martine?” Elodie asked plaintively. “When are you going to learn to answer your mobile?”
I sighed, cradling the telephone against my shoulder as I removed my shoes. “Et tu, Brute,” I murmured. “I was busy.”
“So it seems. Okay, here’s what I’ve got for you. This guy is willing to talk, but only if you don’t know who he is.”
“Talk about…?”
“The drugs. The experiments. The whole thing.”
I could feel my heart rate quicken. “Does he know of a connection between that and the murders?” I asked.
“If anybody knows, he will,” Elodie predicted. “He’s high up, Martine. I mean, really high up.” There was a burst of static. “Can he call you tonight?”
This was a call that I didn’t particularly want to be traceable to my home telephone, and after last night, I wasn’t staying late at the office for a while. Besides, I had plans. “I have to go to a wake tonight, Elodie. Can he call tomorrow?”
“I’ll check.” She sighed. “You may have opened a big can of worms here, mon amie.”
“Better to have left it a secret?” I countered.
“You make a good point. Be in your office in the morning, chérie. I’ll tell him you’ll be there.”
“Thanks, Elodie.” I knew that if this all blew up, heads would roll, and hers could well be on the chopping block. She probably knew it, too.
“Yes, well, let’s wait and see how it all shakes out.” Oh, yeah: she knew.
I sighed and called Julian. No answer. He was starting to become as elusive as the ghosts we were chasing.
Ivan, on the other hand, was at his desk. “I’m going to Danielle Leroux’s wake tonight,” I told him. “Can you come along?”
He thought about it. “Bad guys going to be there?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Okay, sure. Let me just put out a cou
ple of fires here and I can get away. Want to get a bite to eat first?”
“Is that an invitation?”
“Of course.” He yawned. “Gotta go play some poker, babe. Where and when?”
I thought quickly. “Meet me at La Raclette on Saint-Denis at six-thirty. Can you? That’s close enough to the funeral home to walk over after.” And I hadn’t had fondue in ages.
He groaned. Ivan has a very American approach to walking: he doesn’t do it much. “That means it’s about sixteen blocks away,” he said.
“Ah, but every one of them in my scintillating company,” I reminded him. “Thanks, sweetheart.”
“No problem. Watch yourself until then, okay?”
“Doing my best.” I hung up and wondered if that were true, then eased back into my shoes. It was time to go talk to the police director, and see if he’d extracted a confession from his prisoner.
I fully expected that he had.
I worked with Régine, but my closest friend at the asylum was Marie-Rose. She’d come with me from the orphanage, on the same bus even, but we really only got to know each other once we’d worked on the farm together. She was younger than me, though by how much—who could say? As I said before, we didn’t celebrate birthdays.
We didn’t celebrate anything at all.
Marie-Rose and I contrived to have beds next to each other in the dormitory, which gave us the opportunity to whisper together when Sister’s back was turned. Those conversations, I have to say, kept me going for a long time. They assured me that I was not, in fact, going crazy myself.
It was an easy enough belief to espouse. People were mean and then said they did it to be kind. People treated one like an animal and then said it was for one’s own good. People hurt other people—children, even—and then said it was to make the world a better place. Who wouldn’t sometimes feel a little crazy?
“Maybe we’re the crazy ones,” said Marie-Rose.
“No!” I said it fiercely; but sometimes, in the night, it was something that I wondered, too. Who was crazy here?
Sometimes as I went about my work, bringing notes to disparate parts of the building, I caught a glimpse of the occasional—and rare—visitor being ushered into the large bright parlor that the sisters reserved for outsiders. What did they think of the place, I wondered. What did they think of the scrubbed walls and gleaming floors, the fresh flowers that were always in the entrance hall, the smiling faces of the sisters who met with them? Did they think that good things happened here?
Once I carried a message to the sister in the hydrotherapy room. Here they tried to make people less crazy by putting them in baths of cold water, adding ice cubes to make sure it stayed cold, keeping them there for hours. I was no doctor, I said once to Régine, but I didn’t see how cold water made crazy people less so. She did her usual quick scan around to make sure that no one could hear us. “They only send the women there,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“Experiments,” was all she’d say, and I never really understood what she meant. But there was so much at the asylum that I didn’t understand. “Keep your head down and pray it doesn’t happen to you,” was Régine’s counsel, and it was good advice.
There was so much there that I prayed would never happen to me. But I suspected that everyone in the building was praying the same thing, and it didn’t work for a whole lot of them, did it?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ivan was late. Ivan is often late. It’s one of the few things that I don’t love about my husband.
I flipped through my notebook while I was waiting. Julian had been right: there was no way that I would ever have kept any of this straight in my head if I hadn’t written it down. As it was, I was still having trouble keeping everything straight in my head.
My wine arrived and I sipped it slowly, reflectively, looking to see if there was some connecting thread I had missed. I got to the interview with Violette Sobel and wondered if Julian had had more luck with her, and if so, when exactly he planned to share that information with me. I read a little aimlessly, my hand turning the pages automatically …
And stopped. Violette had said that Annie and her husband had tried to have children, but they hadn’t been able to. Okay, I know, so a lot of people have infertility problems. But let’s pair that with Annie’s past and the percentages start rising. I didn’t know if the Duplessis orphans were infertile, but with what had gone on at the asylum, I wouldn’t ignore the possibility.
It was a poker hand, I thought, that Ivan would surely bet on.
Annie must have been part of the experiments, part of the program. She had been adopted, I thought, either out of guilt or—I would bet—because Dr. Desmarchais was conducting a little experiment of his own. Take a damaged child and put her in an optimum environment. Does she survive?
I shook my head. No: he’d been interested in drugs, in using pharmaceuticals to combat Communism and make the world safe for democracy. Annie had nothing to do with that, surely.
By the time Ivan arrived I was more puzzled than ever.
He was in high spirits. “Getting closer to tournament approval,” he said. The Montréal Casino was applying to be a stop on a number of world poker tours; it would be important for Ivan to secure its status. The question had been occupying him, off and on, for over a year.
I raised my glass. “Congratulations, sweetheart.”
“Thanks.” He looked around for a waiter. “What are you drinking?”
“Côtes du Rhône,” I said. “But don’t get a bottle unless you want to drink it yourself; we have a wake to go to, and I probably shouldn’t be tipsy for it.”
“Ah, yes. Danielle Leroux.” He put his hand over mine. “I’m unaccustomed to being married to an investigator, my love. Sorry.” He paused. “I won’t tell you how worried I am about you,” he resumed conversationally. “Because I know how little you’d appreciate it.”
“I’ll consider it said.” I smiled. “Thanks for caring, Ivan.”
He squeezed my hand before releasing it. “My pleasure, babe.”
The funeral home was filled to overflowing. There were snacks in the front room, Danielle’s coffin in the back, flowers and insipid piped-in music surrounding us. The coffin was closed, and I remembered the photographs I’d looked at, that first day, at the police station.
I found her brother sitting near the coffin, a faded-looking overweight woman in a tight black dress sitting next to him, a glass of wine untouched and perhaps even forgotten in her hand. “Monsieur Leroux?” I asked in French. “I don’t know if you remember me, we spoke a couple of days ago. My name is Martine LeDuc.” I gestured behind me. “Je vous présente mon mari, Ivan Petrinko.” The two men shook hands gravely. “Monsieur Leroux, again, I’d like to say that I’m very sorry for your loss.”
He raised mournful eyes. “The police have caught her killer,” he said, his voice dull. “Thank you for your help.”
I exchanged glances with Ivan; he nodded and turned to the woman sitting next to Jacques. “Madame Leroux,” he said, extending his hand to her. “Please accept the expression of our most sincere condolences.” Okay, so it sounds better in French, even with Ivan’s accent.
She started murmuring a reply in her upriver accent that Ivan would never understand and I turned to her husband. “Will you be staying on in Montréal to settle your sister’s affairs?” I asked.
He shrugged. “There is little to settle,” he said. “The funeral is tomorrow. We will clean her apartment and we will go home.” His callused hand sought and found that of his wife and closed around it, whether for support or to support her, it was hard to say. It was a curiously touching gesture.
I wasn’t about to shatter what little peace they were finding here. I gave him my card. “Please, monsieur, if you need any assistance, call on me.”
He looked at it and then looked back to me. “I thought you were with the police,” he said dully.
Oops. “Not officially,” I s
aid, “though I have been helping them with their inquiries.” A phrase that could cover a plethora of situations. “Monsieur, if there is anything in your sister’s affairs that strikes you as unusual, will you call me then, too?”
He laboriously put the card in a pocket without letting go of his wife’s hand. I knew how that felt, I knew how many times Ivan’s touch had been a lifeline for me. “But they caught the man,” he said again.
I shrugged. “There are always details,” I said cryptically. “And he has yet to go to trial.”
“Bien, alors.” Our audience was clearly over. Ivan was still saying nice things to Madame Leroux and receiving incomprehensible replies in return. I shook her hand and we walked away.
“What now?” Ivan was eyeing the sweets table. “Besides the pastries, I mean.”
It was a good question. I saw Richard, across the room, deep in conversation with the woman I’d met the first day I went to the UQAM library; but it was Ivan who suddenly pulled me aside. “Shit. Who was this woman, anyway?” he asked, his voice low and intense.
“What? Why? What do you mean?”
He turned his back to the other people. “The three guys over there? In the expensive suits? Don’t look,” he added quickly. “They’re Americans. Persona non grata at the casino. Lots of money, lots of connections, got thrown out and asked not to return because they were trying to take over some of the action.”
He was talking like somebody in a Rat Pack movie, and I said so. “What does that mean, anyway, take over the action?”
“I don’t have time to give you gambling lessons, Martine,” Ivan said impatiently. “I’ll be happy to explain at length later. What you need to be asking yourself is why they’re here, at the wake of a relatively unimportant librarian.”
I leaned up to kiss his cheek, and glanced at the three men he had indicated. He was right, of course. “Do they have government connections?” I asked softly.
Ivan shrugged. “Who doesn’t, these days?”
It was a non-answer. I looked around again. Maybe Richard had an idea of who was who in the room; it appeared he was the closest thing Danielle had to a friend. “Okay,” I said, “wish me luck.”
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