Never Forget

by Martin Michaud

  Victor was still scanning the room for the old archivist when a woman came up to him and asked with a smile if he wanted to play. When he responded that he was looking for someone, she suggested that she might know the person …

  “His name is Joseph Binet,” Victor said.

  The woman shook her head and was about to walk away without another word when he corrected himself. “Everyone calls him Joe Beans.”

  The woman smiled broadly and signalled for him to follow her. Of course she knew him! Who didn’t know Joe Beans?

  She led Victor through a warren of hallways into the bowels of the church, stopping at a small, windowless space that served as a storage room but had probably once been a meeting room for priests.

  Joe Beans was by himself at a table in a corner, with a stack of documents in front of him. A powerful desk lamp lit up the work surface. As he drew closer, Victor realized that the lamp was actually part of a magnifier that dramatically enlarged documents inserted into it, enabling the old man to read them.

  “You have a visitor, Joe,” the woman said before turning and heading back to the battlefield.

  Joe lifted his head and looked toward the detective sergeant.

  Remembering Joe’s weakness for Boston cream donuts, Victor had stopped off at Tim Hortons and bought a box of them. He placed the box on the table, but there was no reaction. Surprised, Victor waved his hands in front of Joe’s face, but the elderly archivist showed no awareness of them.

  The situation had deteriorated since the last time: Joe couldn’t see anymore.

  A white film covered his eyes. Though his cataracts had been removed surgically, they kept coming back.

  “Hello, Joe,” Victor said softly.

  The old man’s brow furrowed, as it did whenever he was concentrating. The two men hadn’t spoken in several years, but it took only a moment for Joe’s features to light up. His hand reached out and touched the detective sergeant’s face. His fingers moved over the rough cheeks.

  “Victor? Victor Lessard? Is that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me, Joe.”

  Victor opened the box. The donuts’ aroma filled the room.

  There was a tear on the old man’s cheek as he took one of Victor’s hands in both of his own. He was skeletally thin.

  Eyes closed, Joe chewed each bite with a care that bordered on obsession. Then, using one of the paper napkins that Victor had brought along, he wiped the traces of cream from the corners of his mouth. There was such surrender in his gestures, such appreciation for the pleasure of the moment, that Victor couldn’t help being moved.

  Joe ate three donuts before taking a pause, temporarily satisfied.

  Victor closed the box and set it aside, assuring Joe that the remaining donuts were for him, which brought a smile to the archivist’s lips.

  Looking at the yellowed documents on the table, Victor asked what Joe was up to. Joe answered that he had agreed to give up bingo for a while in order to help the parish put its archives in order.

  The job was difficult, the old man added, because, despite the magnifier, he was finding it harder and harder to see.

  Then, like old friends reuniting, they talked about the past.

  It was a not-so-distant past in which they had seen each other regularly — a period Joe referred to as the time when he still had eyes.

  Without going into too much detail about the investigation, Victor finally set out the reasons for his visit and explained what he was trying to find out.

  Joe Beans raised an eyebrow and sat there for a long time, gazing absently into space.

  “An event that took place on October 23rd, 1964. Hmm …” He shrugged. There was a long silence. “That was a while ago, my friend …”

  The archivist talked about several murders that had been committed in 1964, but nothing in October. Nevertheless, Victor made some entries in his notebook.

  Then, after another long silence during which he seemed to have dozed off, Joe added, “The only event that matches that date is a hunting accident. I don’t know if it’s what you’re looking for, but as I recall, it happened in a wooded area, not far from Joliette. If you’re lucky, the police will have kept a file. Otherwise, you’ll surely find an article in the records of the local paper or the Journal de Montréal. Unless I’m mistaken, the accident involved a father and son. At the time, news of the case reached here because investigators wondered at first whether it wasn’t a mercy killing followed by a suicide. The son was mentally handicapped.”

  Victor shook his head, incredulous. “I know you have a great memory, Joe. But how can you possibly recall details of a case that’s nearly half a century old?”

  The old man smiled sadly. “My older brother died in a hunting accident in 1959. That left a mark.”

  OCTOBER 23RD, 1964

  IN A WOODED AREA, NOT FAR FROM JOLIETTE

  Dad and Léonard have gone hunting for moose. Charlie wanted to go too, but Mom said no because of Charlie’s fever. Sweating, Charlie clutches the sheet and bites a clenched fist in rage. The fever is nothing compared with the heartless remark Dad made as he was leaving, wearing his checked jacket, rifle under his arm: “Besides, Charlie, hunting is for men. And how many times do I have to tell you to take that cap off your head when you’re in the house?”

  Affronted, wearing an angry expression, Charlie wanted to yell, “Then why are you bringing Léonard along? He may be a man, but he’s a retard!”

  But Charlie kept quiet, not wanting to make Mom sad. Also, Léonard has never done anything hurtful to Charlie; it would have been unfair to be mean to him when the only guilty person in this situation was Dad. How could he have dared to say a thing like that? It was an insult.

  Since those two days in September when Dad went missing and then returned, thrown from a moving car onto the gravel, Charlie has had the impression that Dad is a shadow of his old self. His injuries weren’t serious: they healed quickly. Yet, since that time, Dad has stopped getting into the car each morning to go add up numbers at the office. He spends his days shut up in the darkness and silence of his workshed behind the house. Often, when he emerges, he doesn’t say a word to the family. Worse, sometimes it seems like he doesn’t even recognize them.

  Charlie also finds it strange that Dad looks out the window every time they hear a car going by in the distance. He takes his hunting rifle with him whenever he goes out. Charlie can’t explain things other than by thinking the body is still Dad’s, but there’s somebody else inside his head.

  Still, little by little, life has gone back to normal. They’ve almost managed to forget about what happened, though Charlie sometimes hears Mom crying at night, when the lights are on in the workshed.

  After more than an hour of applying cool compresses to Charlie’s forehead, Mom gives Charlie a kiss and heads for the door. The medication has brought down the fever, but Mom wants Charlie to sleep and get some strength back. While Mom watches from the doorway, Charlie makes a show of nodding off, breathing regularly, the way Lennie does when he falls asleep.

  After Mom goes downstairs, Charlie dresses silently and struggles to suppress a cough before grabbing a pillow to muffle the noise. Wiping away the spittle afterward, Charlie knows Mom has gone down to work on her thesis. She won’t come upstairs again for hours. Before opening the bedroom window, Charlie puts on rubber boots, a green raincoat, and the ever-present baseball cap.

  Charlie has slipped out of the house in secret many times before, meeting Cantin in the woods to smoke cigarettes and trade stories about flying saucers coming to abduct children, and also to talk about René Desharnais and the other jackasses at school.

  But that was before Cantin’s parents decided to move back to the city, because there were no jobs in the country and money doesn’t grow on trees. Now, all those fun times with Cantin belong to the “good old days,” an expression Charlie learned from the books Dad used to read out loud each night before bed.

  Except now Dad is the one who was abducte
d by aliens. They did weird things to his brain, and that’s why he’s stopped reading to Charlie before bed.

  Charlie concentrates. From the bedroom window, it’s a matter of jumping onto the porch roof without being heard, then, at the edge of the roof, grasping the rainwater pipe — it’s very solid — and climbing down silently, rubber boots braced against the cedar shingles. Reaching the ground, Charlie crouches and listens: silence. No one in sight.

  Stealthy as a Sioux brave, Charlie crawls beneath the kitchen window to avoid Mom’s notice, then, reaching the corner of the house, straightens up and runs toward the field. Seconds later, Charlie is moving through the high grass along the path that disappears into the woods. The trees sway tranquilly in the breeze.

  If Dad and Lennie are going hunting, then so is Charlie!

  The day is grey and overcast, but Charlie is warmly dressed in a fleece-lined raincoat. The forest, dripping from rain showers, sings and glistens. A carpet of leaves muffles Charlie’s footfalls on the moist earth.

  Charlie knows by heart how to reach the blind that Dad built with Lennie a few years ago.

  From the pond, Charlie veers onto a secondary path that makes it possible to reach the blind by a safe route, never getting into the line of fire, the way Dad has taught, “in case there’s an emergency.”

  Dad will be annoyed, but Charlie has already come up with a story: the fever broke, so Mom had a change of heart and said it was okay to go out to the blind. Charlie knows there’ll be a price to pay later, when Mom and Dad figure out the deception.

  A gun goes off, its sound echoing through the trees and sliding away among the branches. Charlie jumps, then smiles and hurries onward. Dad is bound to be in a better mood if they’ve already caught something.

  Suddenly, a scream rends the silence. A long, terrified scream that freezes Charlie’s blood.

  Lennie!

  Without thinking, Charlie springs forward, running at top speed, pushing branches out of the way, ignoring the stinging blows of their whiplike resistance. Something serious must have happened to Dad for Lennie to scream like that.

  A second scream, more terrifying than the first, shatters the air, followed closely by another gunshot.

  Charlie stops short, standing very still. Heavy silence has fallen over the forest.

  Dead silence …

  Charlie sets off again, running desperately, with a parched mouth and constricted throat that make it impossible to call out. Heart hammering, fighting down a flood of terror, Charlie is trying to repel the thought that keeps coming back: they’re dead.

  Straight ahead through the brush, a camouflage jacket appears — a jacket that doesn’t belong to Lennie or Dad. Instinctively, Charlie dives into a thicket of ferns and takes refuge behind a broad tree. Lying flat, fingernails sunk into the bark, Charlie risks a cautious look out from the hiding place. A man in combat fatigues is approaching along the path. He has a pistol tucked into his belt. His face is streaked with camouflage face paint.

  That angular face — it’s the driver of the ’57 Chevy!

  The man stops close by.

  Trembling, Charlie doesn’t dare move. There’s a smell of ammonia and a muffled sound of liquid striking a hard surface.

  Wide-eyed, Charlie realizes the man is urinating onto the trunk of the tree, which has become the last line of defence between Charlie and death.

  The man clears his throat and burps like a pig. A gob of snot and saliva hits Charlie in the shoulder and trickles slowly downward.

  “Goddamn shitty life.” The man sighs, closing his zipper. “It was about time.”

  Biting down hard on one fist so as not to cry out, Charlie sees the combat boots stamp, pivot, and walk off toward the road that winds through the woods less than two hundred metres to the east.

  Charlie lies still for a long time, trembling, until the sound of the Chevy’s engine fades away in the distance and only the bird calls remain. Numb, stiff limbed, Charlie moves warily along the path. The blind appears through the trees a short distance away.

  The wind rises. Raindrops start slapping Charlie hard in the face.

  There’s a human form on the ground. Lennie is lying at the base of the blind, right leg bent under his body at an impossible angle. Charlie edges closer, lower lip quivering. Lennie’s face has been obliterated by the gunshot, reduced to a shapeless mass of bloody tissue.

  In shock, Charlie can’t look away from Lennie’s remaining eye, which shimmers in the forest light. Then, as the brain connections start to work, Charlie retreats, falls backward, and struggles to stand up again, feet slithering in the mud. Charlie’s hand falls on an object and grasps it. In the instant it takes to realize what the object is, Charlie throws it to the ground: it’s a fragment of Lennie’s skull.

  Catching a breath has become a struggle. Images are tumbling over one another, the forest is spinning, the wind is keening, and a black shroud is descending over everything. Charlie is about to lose consciousness when a noise drifts down from overhead. A kind of gurgle. Charlie looks up at the blind built into the tree boughs fifteen feet off the ground and listens. It’s not a gurgle. It’s a voice. A groan.

  Dad!

  Charlie’s hands clutch at the rungs of the wooden ladder, climbing as fast as humanly possible.

  The first thing Charlie sees, entering the little space, is the blood. It’s everywhere, on the floors, on the walls. From the splatters, Charlie’s gaze falls on Dad. Blood is flowing from his mouth. His breath comes in murmurs, punctuated by bubbling. Through the hole in his abdomen, his guts have spilled out. He’s lying in a pool of red.

  “… arlie …”

  Charlie puts a small hand under Dad’s neck to cradle him, and kisses his forehead. Dad smiles through his agony.

  “Breathe, Dad.” Starting to cry, Charlie tries to press the guts back into Dad’s body. “You have to hang on, Dad. I need you. You can’t leave me.”

  “Re … member, Char … lie. Re … re … me …”

  “Breathe, Dad. I’ll go get help!”

  A long sigh rises in the dying man’s throat and floats out through his mouth. His eyes flicker and roll back. The lids droop. His head sags gently to one side.

  “Breathe, Dad. Breathe! No, Dad … Breathe!”

  The rain pounds on the roof of the little hut and begins to seep in between the planks.

  The cries die in Charlie’s eight-year-old throat.

  67

  SURPRISE GIFT

  Victor smoked his cigarette all the way down, stubbed it out in the ashtray near the door, and went inside. His meeting with the pit bull had been brief but encouraging. Martin was in good hands. Before getting onto the elevator, still hoping for a call or text from Nadja, he checked his voice mail. Even though, deep down, he knew the fault was his, he was suppressing the urge to make the first move and call her.

  In the kitchenette, while he made himself a cup of decaf, the popping of bubble gum mixed with another kind of popping: Loïc was making microwave popcorn. The kid had an appointment later in the afternoon with the owner of a shop that specialized in archery equipment.

  Victor took a handful of popcorn from the bowl that the young detective offered, then instructed him to assemble the investigation team in the conference room.

  The whispers fell silent when he entered the room. Jacinthe was slouched in a chair with her feet up on a second chair. In front of her, the bowl that had been full of popcorn moments ago now lay empty.

  Lemaire and Loïc were on their feet, bent over a laptop. Loïc snapped it shut when he saw the detective sergeant.

  Victor knew they had been looking at online reports about his son.

  “So, where should we start?” he asked, pretending not to have noticed.

  When no one spoke up, he continued. “Let’s start by checking to see if there’s a file in provincial police archives in Joliette. With a little luck, there may be an investigator or a member of the victims’ family who’s still alive.”

&
nbsp; “Hold on, hotshot,” Jacinthe said. She hadn’t been totally convinced earlier in the day when she’d heard Victor’s account of his meeting with Joe Beans. “MK-whattayacallit, the Kennedy assassination, the Northern file that isn’t a Northern file, and now a hunting accident in October of 1964 … am I the only one who doesn’t see how this all fits together?”

  She looked pointedly at each of her colleagues.

  “You forgot the matchbook with ‘there were others’ written on it,” Victor added calmly.

  Jacinthe chuckled and rolled her eyes.

  “I’m sure there were others, but other what? We have four murders using two different methods, a suicide, and, if you throw in Will Bennett, a dingbat in a coma. And now you want us to start looking into some prehistoric accident because one old codger says it happened on the same date? Wake me up, somebody,” she said with mock desperation, “I’m having a bad dream.”

  “Let’s be clear, we’re not neglecting any of the other leads,” Victor said, refusing to be provoked. “But yes, we’re going to start looking into the hunting accident in Joliette. I spoke to Paul about Tousignant. We’ve agreed to put a wiretap on him. Someone needs to draft the warrant. We’ll deal with other things as they come.”

  Jacinthe rose to her feet, grumbling, pushed her chair aside and said she’d take care of the warrant. Loïc volunteered to look into the hunting accident, then jumped up enthusiastically and headed off to his desk.

  Victor turned to face Lemaire. They were the only ones left in the room. There was an awkward silence. “The kid isn’t ready to handle this by himself, Gilles. Would you mind tactfully …”

  The Gnome assured Victor that he’d give Loïc a hand. He also said he’d call Jacob Berger to get an update on the Rivard autopsy, and he’d recontact the forensics team that was handling the crime scenes at the cemetery and Parc Maisonneuve.

  Stricken to the soul, Victor was left alone to brood, his head in his hands, wondering whether Martin would be all right and asking himself why Nadja wasn’t calling.