What are you doing there? my brother asked, then he started bawling me out under his breath. You’re out of your mind going out alone in the middle of the night. What were you thinking of? You know there’s a killer roaming around, and blablabla, and blablabla, but I was so happy it was Bob and only Bob that he could have chewed me out all night and I wouldn’t have talked back. Of course, the nearest cop heard us, the second cop heard the first one call his name, Carver! And they came towards us with their flashlights held out in front of them. Fortunately my brother Bob had just become a man, so he was able to explain to them, it’s my little sister, I’m keeping an eye on her, and blablabla. I nearly burst out laughing when I saw him shaking the policemen’s hands, but I bit my cheek, Bob had just saved my skin, Bob had seen death, he deserved a bit of respect.
Once Carver and his partner had returned to their posts, Bob came to sit down beside me, his back to the prehistoric rock, like he used to. We were a bit more cramped, Bob had grown, me too, but not the rock, and we had to pull apart a bit so our shoulders wouldn’t touch. We stayed like that for a few moments in silence, then Bob asked me if I remembered the day we’d painted rust marks onto Papa’s car with an old can of yellow paint we’d taken from the shed. I hadn’t forgotten that day, no more than I’d forgotten the anger of my father, who’d gone around for six months in a blue and yellow automobile, until he was able to pay for a new paint job. But I remembered especially the solidarity that held us together then, Bob and me, all for one and one for all, and I was sure Bob was thinking the same thing. That was why he’d brought up that blunder, because we were together again, arm in arm, beside our rock.
Then we talked about Picard the grouch, who preferred throwing out the apples from his orchard rather than giving us some, the birth of Millie, the squirrel called Gobeil who’d almost swallowed one of my fingers along with his peanut, a bunch of old memories a brother and sister have, somewhere there among those images that hold a life together and make blood ties what they are. All this time, though, I had only one idea in my head, to ask Bob about what he’d seen in the clearing. I was waiting for just the right moment, but he was the one who broached the subject. His voice suddenly got serious, and he talked to me about the trap, the pale shape in the midst of the tall grass, about Victor Morgan, so beside himself that at first it took three pairs of arms to bring him under control, before he collapsed next to Sissy. That’s why you mustn’t go out alone, Dédée.
It had been a long time since Bob had talked to me like that, a long time since he’d called me Dédée, and I would have started to sob if someone else hadn’t got there first.
Bob was telling me how the father of Jane Mary and Silas Brown had brought up all over his rubber boots, when a cry tore into the night, a shriek from the dead that spat out my name, Andrée, Dédée, my mite. My mother had just realised I wasn’t in my bed, and she’d thought the worst, what any normal mother would have imagined, finding her daughter’s bed empty in the middle of summer when the werewolves had decided to go back into action and limber up their claws. Hearing her shout, Carver and his buddy rushed back at top speed, lights went on in cottage windows, the McBains’, the Grégoires’, doors were flung open, and my brother and I went running up to the cottage, it’s all right, mom, we’re here.
The slap I received was as spontaneous as my fuck a bit earlier, but I hardly felt the burn because I’d just found my brother again, who’d disappeared for the last few years behind his hoarse voice and his long monkey arms, which had grown along with his beard.
The letter M, he repeated, the letter V, the letter W… sitting under a reading lamp, Stan Michaud studied the Polaroids taken by Cusack in the clearing. It was the first moment he’d had since the day before to look at the photos in peace, with nothing to distract him. When he’d got home, Dorothy was waiting. She’d kept some macaroni for him, which she reheated while he poured himself a bourbon and filled her in on the broad lines of the affair. Sissy Morgan, he said, abandoned in the forest, a terrible sight, a tragic beauty, he didn’t know which of the images was the most compelling.
Despite the fact that his story was full of gaps, gaping holes where words refused to venture, Dorothy let him talk without interrupting, hearing the pain in his voice, his impotence in the face of an evil too cunning to be grasped. She listened to his rage as he described the edge the killer had, always outpacing everyone else by a few lengths, his determination to catch him, even if I have to take giant steps, Dottie, like in those tales where the hero dons some kind of seven league boots, because he’d sworn to Sissy Morgan in the clearing, to Esther Conrad in the stench of the Salem dump, to Frenchie Lamar while handing her a handkerchief, I’ll find him, I swear. You will, replied Dorothy, her hand on his shoulder, then she threw out the macaroni he’d barely touched, and wished him good night. She knew she had to leave him alone, and there was no point in insisting that he come to bed. He’d go up when his second or third bourbon had got the better of his fatigue and blurred the faces of Elisabeth Mulligan and Sissy Morgan, poor girls he preferred not to think about, dead sleeping beauties.
Dottie could understand that Stan was distraught, who wouldn’t have been for less than that, but his tenacity puzzled her. He seemed almost to believe that to arrest the murderer would bring the young girls back to life, and that they would at last be able to answer the question he’d been asking forever: why? Why was evil more powerful than the police, more powerful than God, stronger than beauty or the unalloyed joy of the innocent? Why? His behaviour did not hide a desire for vengeance or even a need to have justice prevail, as Stan believed no more in justice than in honesty. He took upon himself the guilt of criminals, and he wanted the dead to know that he was there, sleeping beside them, that someone cared about their last breath, about the truth it contained, the only truth, finally, worth attending to. If he could hear that breath, its burden of truth, he could perhaps tap into a silence within himself, and catch a glimpse of the killer.
While she was getting ready for bed and thinking of those strange sins her husband accused himself of, neither venial nor mortal, sins of conscience, like long snakes whose venom induced insomnia, Michaud brought out the photos, hoping to find there a detail everyone had missed, but this post-mortem orderliness told him nothing new. There was only that letter, under the wound at the elbow, which Cusack saw as a bird in flight. Maybe he was right, the letter might only be a smudge of dirt shaped like a bird, like a premonitory sign representing the soul’s ascension, but deep inside he wanted to believe that Sissy Morgan, in a last attempt at vengeance, had traced one of the killer’s initials on her brown skin. For several minutes he turned the photo every which way, unable to see anything but Mark Meyer’s double initials, even though there was also an M in Mulligan and Morgan, in Ménard, in Maheux, in McBain, in mother… His judgement was skewed, but there was nothing he could do, he couldn’t get over Meyer’s young, thuggish face, une face à fesser dedans – good for smacking? – like he heard Bob Lamar say, an expression you couldn’t translate literally. A clown face, he concluded, because he didn’t like the duplicity of clowns’ faces, and Meyer was certainly a clown, a lecherous buffoon. He’d check out his alibis again the next day and would question the dolt himself, after which he’d maybe be able to get him out of his mind.
Dottie had been in bed for a long time when he finally put his photos away in an envelope and went up, exhausted, to slip into the sheets with their scents of a mature woman and warm fruit. Three miles away, Cusack, for his part, was staring at the ceiling of his room, his stomach weighed down by the four cutlets he’d put away under the uneasy gaze of Laura, who’d never seen him eat with such indifferent, robotic avidity. And she’d never known him to be so silent. Normally, he told her about his day when he came home, happy to have nabbed some lowlife or to have stopped some kid from getting into trouble, but since the start of this affair, she could only draw out of him a few details here and there. Too
sad, baby, too dark, he replied, don’t wanna talk about it. Everything she knew about the investigation, or almost, she’d got from Dorothy. A second girl, Dottie had told her that morning, after Stan’s phone call, killed in the forest, like in novels, like in films. It was the young girls that obsessed Jim, to the point where she almost felt jealous of them, of two dead girls to whom she apologised for her foolishness, staring at the wind stirring the curtains.
And yet it was her face that Cusack saw everywhere, in the underbrush and in the graves, in the reflections cast by the curtains. Aware that Laura wasn’t sleeping, he searched for words that might reassure her, but how to reassure a woman whose death obsessed you? He gazed up at the unlit ceiling light, telling himself that he too had to sleep, that at this rate he wouldn’t make it. His four cutlets were burning his stomach as much as his anxieties were choking off his air, and he couldn’t shut his eyes without a procession of supplicant women rising through the aqueous red veil behind his eyelids. Weary of the struggle, he got up and went down to sit in the yard, from where he watched the sky clouding over, while miles from there, Brian Larue, stretched out on a chaise longue he’d set up near the lake, was also gazing at the clouds. He heard the weak stirring of the waves, and he prayed to the heavens that he might sleep, but too many images were warring inside his head, Stella McBain busying herself so as not to collapse, Valère Grégoire pounding the table with his fist, Sam Duchamp describing the death of a fox, his little Emma who’d be arriving the next day, and whom he’d have to entrust to the Duchamps while he went around the lake with Michaud, one cottage after another, until nightfall once more. He wasn’t made for this police work that forced you to invade the homes of people who only wanted to be eating peacefully, sleeping peacefully, living quietly. He was ashamed of dirtying their floors with his big boots, though he knew that it wasn’t really him walking in on the people, but the killer, the killer and his dirty boots.
It was two o’clock when he finally dozed off to the sound of the waves, at about the same time that Stan Michaud began to snore, and just a little after Jim Cusack dragged himself to the couch in his living room, where he buried his head in a pile of cushions that smelled of summer’s dust. A gruelling day lay in wait for the three men, the third day of the investigation, which would begin under an overcast sky and would end with the rumbling of a storm.
Sissy Morgan was wandering aimlessly, her mind still enclosed in a glassy surround that made the whole world look unreal. Where were you, Zaz? What have you done? Even the wind was no longer the wind, it couldn’t dry her damp skin. She went down Snake Hill like a zombie, are you lonesome tonight, and turned towards Weasel Trail, where she sat on a pile of rocks, not tired, not thirsty, just weary, and not knowing any more if she should walk to the ends of the earth or stay there, on the pile of rocks, until her arms came loose from her trunk.
The sun was still high when Sissy heard steps cracking the branches, a fox or a hare, a fox or a man. She was getting ready to leave, not wanting to see a hare or anyone, when she spotted a man, or rather his shirt, a patch of white among the leaves. Another busybody who wanted to warn her off, tell her not to go alone into the woods. Fuck you! She left the path, following the windings of a half-dried stream, Peter’s or Weaver’s Brook, it didn’t matter, then climbed a hill, Snake Hill, Shit Hill, Whatever Hill, scraping her knees but not wanting to stop, because the steps were following her. At the top of the hill she asked who was there, who’s there? Leave me alone! Faced with silence, she picked up a stone and threw it down in the direction of the steps, in the direction of the patch of white moving through the trees, leave me alone, you pain in the ass!
Her anger was stronger than her fear, and for the first time since her friend’s death Sissy Morgan felt the blood rushing back into her limbs and her heart beating in her temples. You won’t frighten me, you bastard! She grabbed another stone, bigger than the first, and took shelter behind a tree. Down below it was supper time, Michael, Marnie, supper time, down below it was sunny, and Sissy missed the days when she ran with Zaza, answering that call, Zaza, Sissy, supper time, scampering down the hill to go and stuff herself with hamburgers on the Mulligans’ deck, relish and mustard with fries.
She was gauging her chances of running back down at full speed without breaking her neck, run, Sissy, run, when a hand closed on her shoulder. Ready to bite and to kill, she leaped to her feet, her stone at arm’s length, but she held herself back. You? Then Sissy saw the stone, the white stone she’d thrown before, in the hand ready to bite, in the hand of the man who was ready to kill.
Why? Why…
After some vain appeals, some curses, some insults, stupid idiot, loser, goddam fucking son of a bitch, Sissy Morgan began to back off. She’d barely had time to turn around when the stone came down on the back of her skull, blacking out the unreal world where her thoughts had their dwelling place.
DAY 3
When Stan Michaud and Jim Cusack parked in the Boundary campground access road on Monday 14 August to question the campers, it was not yet raining, but all of nature was suffused with that inert perfume that heralded a storm. This was cheering to Michaud, as were all restful scents; they were a balm for anxiety, for the mindless disquiet of gusty days. The peace radiating from the trees would help him to start the day without thinking only of the travails to come, that’s what he was saying to himself when he saw two reporters coming his way, one with a notebook, the other with a camera. Son of a bitch, he swore, turning towards Cusack, but the camera’s flash was already popping. Chief Inspector Stanley Michaud arriving at the scene of the crime, or some other nonsense of the sort, that’s what he’d be reading the following day under a picture showing him turning his back or waving his arms in an attempt to shoo the busybodies off, as one tries to rid oneself of a swarm of black flies.
He had known they’d turn up sooner or later, that bunch could smell blood from hundreds of miles away. Naively, he’d hoped that Boundary’s isolation would keep them at a distance. Might as well wish for a wolf to resist a captive lamb. At first he thought he could get away with one of those all-purpose formulas you heard every day on TV, “No comment, guys, you know as well as I do that anything I say could compromise the investigation,” but those formulas only worked when the investigation was being conducted in isolation. As it was, the reporters had already wormed information out of a dozen idiots all agog at the idea that their names would show up in the newspaper. Given that, better to bring them up to date, more or less, and get rid of them right away.
With his bad day smile, he led the reporter and his photographer to the table carved with dozens of names, the tattooed table, beneath a maple whose leaves, curiously, were beginning to redden. An old tree that no longer knew how to gauge the light’s intensity and thought itself already in autumn. He allotted them ten minutes, no more, during which he went over the broad lines of the affair, avoiding any mention of the letter M or W, as well as Sissy Morgan’s sawed-off hair, as this detail, both morbid and sensational, was perfect fodder for the sort of headlines he abhorred: Young Girl Scalped in Boundary Pond Woods, Stripped of her Hair, then Murdered. Then he told them to go and finish their work in town and to let him carry on with his own. I’ve got enough people already underfoot, guys, give me a bit of air. But he knew he’d see them the next day, and that the appearance of their article would bring more scribblers in their wake. He was trying to buy time, just a little, before the affair hit the papers with the version of the first victim’s neighbour alongside that of a housewife concerned about her children and an adolescent who spotted a stranger going into the woods with his Stetson and a horse. If it were possible, he’d force all of Boundary to keep its mouth shut, but his powers didn’t extend that far. No power did, other than that of violence. However much you asked everyone to be totally discreet, there’d always be someone yielding to the temptation of sharing secrets or making up stories.
Suddenly, the heavin
ess in the air didn’t seem so comforting. He went back to Cusack with his head lowered, with no other desire than to go and stretch out under a tree and shut himself off, to be left in peace. But there was no peace and no absolute power and he had to be content with taking off his tie as he greeted Brian Larue, who arrived in an old red pickup truck that could have used a good wash. After parking, Larue jumped out of the truck, humming the tune of Mystery Train, which he’d been listening to on the radio. He’d slept little, but he felt energetic this morning, which wasn’t the case for Michaud, who seemed to be dwindling in size under the weight of the clouds. Faced with others’ misfortune, Michaud was one of those people who aged before your eyes, the way sponges soaked up the fecal matter of their fellow creatures. By the end of this investigation he’d have lost several years that he’d never regain, crushed by the accelerating hours in a bad time, his life consumed as by a huge black hole.
Still, Larue’s good humour did perk up Michaud, who smiled when he recognised Little Junior Parker’s old hit. Michaud liked Negro music, and owned a small collection of blues albums which he sometimes dipped into on Saturday night, when Saturday nights were still Saturday nights, drawing Dottie’s body in on his own to the sound of the guitar or harmonica. When it was all over… but he let the thought go in order to explain to Larue that they were setting up for questioning in the building facing the lake, a kind of refectory where the campers could take shelter on rainy days when there was nothing to do but play cards while waiting for the sun to come back out. Flipping through his notebook, he said he’d start with the campground’s owner, after which he’d deal with Meyer, not yet seen since his return from West Forks at dawn, and he’d end with the campers.
Boundary Page 17