“My parents aren’t mean. It’s just that Dad gets angry sometimes.”
“Your dad, does he get angry with your little brother sometimes?”
Laurie tucked her chin into her chest and shrugged.
“My dad sometimes spanks us,” she said sheepishly.
Her teacher felt like she had made a breakthrough. She pushed ahead.
“If your dad were hurting your brother, would you speak to someone? To your teacher?”
The child pushed away the plate and spoon, refusing to answer. She wanted to go. Madame Préau helped her put on her coat and while she tied the scarf around her neck, she whispered in her ear: “I’ll tell you a secret, Laurie. There’s a phone number that only children can call. A number with only three digits. It’s a magic number. You can dial it from any phone.”
“119?”
“Yes. If some day you saw an adult hurt a child or hurt you, then you should call the magic number and tell the person who answers.”
The little girl was intrigued.
“Who answers, so?”
“A man or a woman, someone who listens to and protects children. But we mustn’t talk about it to anyone. It’s very important. Not even your mother. It’s a secret.”
Laurie went out onto the front porch, dubious.
“How come you know it, so, the magic number?”
Madame Préau smiled mischievously.
“Because I was a teacher at your school. And all the nice teachers know 119.” Laurie nodded, satisfied, before trotting down the steps. Children’s logic was Madame Préau’s special subject.
After she escorted her student home, Madame Préau received a phone call from her son. He was looking for his Nokia. She swore that he had left her house with it on Sunday night, and was worried about whether he had received her letter.
“We’ll talk about it on Thursday. I’ll come round at around noon.”
Martin hung up without wishing her a good day, as he had always done, even when he was furious at her.
Madame Préau worried herself sick from then on.
47
“Do you understand, Elsa?”
“Yes, perfectly, Claude.”
“It’s a matter of trust between the two of you.”
“Absolutely.”
“So how do you see Martin? As a doctor, or as a son?”
Madame Préau shrugged and sighed.
“What do you want? He is his father’s son.”
“His father’s son. Martin has no mother, then?”
The old lady pouted, dubious, and scratched her chin. The discussion made her uncomfortable. Since the beginning of the session, they had only spoken about Martin.
“That’s not what I mean. Martin is my son, of course, but he mostly takes after his father: same job, same desire to succeed, same size, and they’re both ladies’ men… Both of them abandoned me at a point in my life where—”
“You think that Martin abandoned you?”
Madame Préau bit the inside of her cheek. It was difficult to answer that without saying yes.
“Do you think that a man is selfish for deciding to devote himself to his career, to his work, rather than staying with his mother?”
“When in excess, yes, in a way,” she said in a thin voice.
“And when your son spends three nights at your bedside without returning home, he’s only doing his duty as a doctor?”
Madame Préau stiffened in the armchair. She looked at the hands of the man sitting in front of her. The right held a Montblanc ballpoint pen; the other turned down the left corner of the page in front of him. She had never seen him write during their sessions, and yet he thought it necessary to take notes today.
Dr. Mamnoue had spoken with Martin with on the phone.
Otherwise, how could he recall the story of the three nights?
Martin had certainly alerted him to the fragile mental state of his patient.
Unbeknownst to her, Dr. Mamnoue was going through an assessment to measure how potentially dangerous Madame Préau might be. This was not the time to talk to her about tinnitus. He immediately equated her hearing troubles with a hallucinatory delirium and wondered if she had stopped taking her medication.
“Didn’t he show to you a lot of love in the past?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You don’t want to talk about what, Elsa, the past or the love that Martin has for you?”
A gray veil. Madame Préau’s past had little more to it than a graying lace curtain hanging in a window, quivering in the breeze. She saw the dancing shadows of her mother, father, husband, and Bastien, each wearing the mask of silence.
They were all so far away.
There was no one to hold her hand now.
To rest their head against her heart. To kiss her.
Madame Préau, like many older people, suffered from no longer being touched. Falling ill or complaining of a bad back was her only recourse. It was only because of a bad flu that Martin rested his palm on his mother’s forehead; Mr. Apeldoorn only massaged her back with his burning hands on prescription.
Dr. Mamnoue remained silent. Madame Préau smiled.
“Bastien used to kiss me often. I would have his little arms around my neck like a necklace. At the age of three, he was so loving, telling me, ‘Granny Elsa, I love you’ all day long. His skin was so soft and warm, the scent of his hair so delicious… Sometimes he would stay overnight at my house. His little slippers, toothbrush, and pajamas were all there. When he left with his parents, I slept in his sheets to breathe his scent again…”
“You probably did the same thing with Martin when he was a child.”
“Yes. Well, I think so. That was different. He was in the house every day. And I worked a lot at the time, too. I think I missed out on quite a few things with Martin. When his father left, he had a growth spurt. In six months, he went up two pant sizes.”
Madame Préau apologized, took a handkerchief from her bag, and blew her nose loudly. The sound produced was childlike.
“For someone who’s convalescing, you’re in good shape,” he remarked. “You bounced back from this terrible virus remarkably well.”
“Honestly, Claude, I don’t think I did have swine flu—and if I did, this big vaccination campaign must be nothing more than a plot by the French government to give a lot of money to pharmaceutical companies. What do you think? Did I actually have the flu, or am I totally paranoid?”
Dr. Mamnoue chuckled. Recapping his pen, he said in an affectionate tone, “You are what you are, Elsa. But best that you not get it again.”
He stood up and held out a hand to the old lady to help leave his chair.
“Martin will call you at the end of the week. He’s considering the best way to support you as a doctor and as a son. But you should know that I advised him to put you in the hands of a colleague: Dr. Leclerc. He’s an excellent GP.”
“Really?”
Dr. Mamnoue gave his patient a friendly pat on the shoulder, but she had already lost out to panic, her pupils dilated.
“It is high time, Elsa. For both of us.”
Notes: Thursday 29 October
Woken by the noise of the garbage men at six o’clock. I spent the night on the couch in the living room next to the radio switched on the lowest volume. I can’t stand hearing these noises in my head. Sometimes I feel like the keys on the piano are jangling intermittently. I also always hear knocking in the kitchen cupboards.
The quality of the photos is mediocre. They’re too dark. I asked the photographer to enlarge the one that I took of the child so that we could see his face, but the photographer explained to me that shooting from this distance, with low daylight, the graininess can’t be helped. As for the other photos, the ones where he’s being dragged along the ground by his father, they’re blurry.
Everything has to be redone. These disposable cameras live up to their name.
Waited for Martin until half past twelve. In the end, he won’t com
e today. Too much work, so he says. Postponed his visit to Saturday. He’ll come at the same time as the nurse. My son has, it would seem, decided to give me Risperdal injections.
I do not want to turn into a zombie two days per week.
Fortunately, the locksmith has just finished his work. Isabelle did the cleaning quickly this morning. She’s not happy because I put padlocks on the shutters. I know she opened them to air the place when my back was turned! I held back from telling her that her key wouldn’t work in the door anymore. I don’t want her to tell Martin about it. I just have to keep a lookout through the window in the morning to let her in when she arrives.
The cats’ bowl has been full for two days. At least I got rid of the plague.
Received a call at three from Ms. Tremblay, very annoyed. Said nothing to be done in the current state of things. There is no trace of a third child in the Desmoulins family on either the father’s or the mother’s side. She even did research in the town where they lived previously in the suburbs of Auxerre, where Madame Desmoulins’s family lives. No other child has been enrolled in school there under the name of Desmoulins. I suggested that she dig deeper, and consider the possibility of an adopted or stolen child. Ms. Tremblay is doubtful. In the first case, the child would appear in the family record. The latter case seems far-fetched to her. I think she lacks imagination for a social worker assigned to a council estate police station. Yet she must be accustomed to seeing people who are underdeveloped, emotionally disturbed sadists and perverts capable of anything, including stealing kids to make them their sex slaves. However, I clearly managed to convince her, because she asked me to bring the picture of the stone boy in as soon as I get the enlargement on Friday. She plans to pass it to a colleague—an ex–child protection officer—to launch a possible investigation into a disappearance. But she added: “I don’t hold out much hope.”
She’s right.
A photo of an unknown child in my neighbors’ garden is no proof in itself: it may very well be a friend of Laurie’s or Kévin’s.
Back to square one. I would drop off the jar of red pebbles and the burst ball filled with soil, but I’m afraid they’d think I was crazy. However, if they did a DNA test on the dried blood like they did on these television shows, they would know that I’m right.
It’s all a waste of time.
It’s been four days since I took the pictures.
And Bastien isn’t appearing to me anymore.
I can’t wait any longer.
I have to act.
I’ll head over to the Intermarché to buy cider and fresh eggs.
48
Madame Préau’s baking filled the house with the scent of vanilla. Isabelle cleaned all morning, dreaming of the delicious madeleines that the old lady dipped in dark chocolate before leaving them to dry on a baking sheet.
“It’s bad for your health,” she teased when Isabelle came a little too close to the kitchen table where an apple tart was cooling.
The housekeeper left, slamming the door as usual—that woman had never known how to use a door handle. Madame Préau then prepared the bottle of cider: using a syringe, she pricked through the cap, and injected the equivalent of five Stilnox that she had ground into a powder and dissolved in a teaspoon of water before chilling the drink. Even if the Desmoulins’s father didn’t have a sweet tooth, he wouldn’t refuse a little glass of country cider, beer lover that he was.
The old lady came out then with a tied-up package that she had prepared the night before and went to the post office. There, they wanted to force her to invest in a cardboard box at an exorbitant price, which they justified by the fact that the package could then be identified by a unique barcode, which reduces the risk of loss and allows it to be tracked on its journey. Madame Préau refused to let them put a bar code on her package.
“Don’t you want to tattoo a number on my arm while you’re at it?” she growled at the customer service agent sitting behind the counter, a North African thirty-something with sloping shoulders.
She bought and stuck on the requisite number of stamps to send an ordinary item and handed it over to the puzzled agent. The package would take a few extra days to arrive, but at least no one could intercept it and destroy its contents.
At one, she stretched out on her bed, covering her legs with a blanket. The alarm went off at three. With a slight headache, Madame Préau came down to loosen the madeleines one by one. She arranged them on a white porcelain cake stand and turned out the tart, half-sprinkled with cinnamon, onto a silver tray, which Isabelle restored to its former glory each month with a duster and some silver polish. Then she played Debussy, Chopin, Scott Joplin, and still more Schumann on her piano, trying with each fluid stroke to chase away the hissing and whistling that gushed from both sides of the house.
For fifteen minutes, she stood motionless in her kitchen, facing the window: fringed by purple and golden-yellow foliage, the fruit trees were about to lose their leaves; the October sky reddened. In the garden, the railway line rose to the level of the property wall. On the platform, she saw two RER trains pull away with a final groan in opposite directions.
Madame Préau put on her lined boots, threw a shawl over her shoulders, and slipped the hammer behind her back, held firmly by the waistband of her support tights. Then, with the cake stand and bottle of cider in a Monoprix plastic bag and the tray covered with a tea towel under one arm, she left the house, bolting the door. She also closed the gate, and she could not help but look up at the crane whose muffled growl meant it was still active at this late hour of the afternoon. She could make out a spy from the County Council lurking in the shadows of the cabin, carefully taking note of her comings and goings.
Madame Préau smirked.
If they knew what she was about to do, they wouldn’t let her calmly cross the road like this; they’d set a SWAT team on her.
49
On the third ring, the gate opened. Mr. Desmoulins, in jeans and a green sweatshirt, could not hide his surprise and embarrassment at the old lady arriving uninvited. Madame Préau, however, was not surprised to see him at home at half past five on a Friday; he came home early from work on Fridays. Sometimes, the Kangoo would even be back in the garage by two. Lapeyre employees were entitled to flexible working hours.
“Hello, Mr. Desmoulins. I came to bring some cakes for the children’s teatime. I hope they haven’t already eaten. They’re homemade,” she added, blushing.
The man scratched his neck and head.
“Hello, Madame Préau. That’s very kind of you. But, uh, to what do we owe the honor?”
“I thought it was time that we get better acquainted. After all, we have been neighbors for several months. I brought a bottle of cider, too.”
“You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble for us.”
Hesitantly, Mr. Desmoulins opened the gate.
“Do excuse the mess, we weren’t expecting you… Blandine!”
Walking across the short, unkempt grass, past the clothes dryer and swing, not turning to look at the weeping birch, watching the approach to the lion’s den that was the Desmoulins’ house—which they had tried in vain to improve the appearance of by putting flowering window boxes in two of the windows—was already a difficult task in itself, especially as the silver tray began to weigh.
“Wait, let me help you.”
The man grabbed the pink bag and tray and went ahead of Madame Préau, calling his wife to the rescue.
“Blandine! Our neighbor has come to visit!”
It wasn’t long before she made an appearance on the front steps wearing dark blue tracksuit bottoms, taking Kévin by the hand. She was stunned. A rueful smile spread across her scrubbed face.
“Hello, Madame Préau,” she murmured, holding out a warm hand. “How nice of you to pay us a visit.”
“She brought cider and cakes,” her husband said, pointing to the things as if to justify himself.
They warned her a second time about the mess that
prevailed in the house and to which she shouldn’t pay attention: raising two unruly children like Laurie and Kévin required a lot of work; it was difficult to keep the house in order.
Madame Préau readjusted her shawl, discreetly checking that the hammer at her back hadn’t moved.
“I know all about it, don’t worry,” said the old lady, trying to be reassuring. “I myself have raised a son, a monkey, a goat, and dozens of one-eyed cats.”
They gave a hollow laugh at what hadn’t been a joke and led their surprise guest toward the living room to the left of the entrance. At the back of the room, a low cabinet supported a fabulous television screen almost as wide as the wall. A worn brown sofa darkened the space, which was lit by a rudimentary halogen lamp. Sitting in the middle of the cushions, Laurie was watching a cartoon.
“Kévin and Laurie, say hello to Madame Préau.”
Kévin held out his cheek, not at all shy. The little girl walked up to her teacher and kissed her perfunctorily on each cheek.
“Come on, Laurie, what’s got into you? Aren’t you happy to see your piano teacher?”
Laurie nodded.
“Yes.”
This girl wasn’t as stupid as she looked. Unlike her parents, she twigged that the presence of Madame Préau in the house might be the precursor to a terrible drama.
The old lady stroked her cheek.
“I made chocolate madeleines for you and your little brother. Do you like them?”
This time, the child nodded with more enthusiasm. Appealing to her sense of greed was what worked best with the girl. Madame Préau had understood that. It was then that she heard the first knock behind her. A muffled sound, almost imperceptible.
Madame Préau turned her head.
The Stone Boy Page 13