“You can change your name,” he says with a shrug. “You can’t change who you are. Your name don’t mean shit, in the end.”
“I’m Laura’s daughter.”
He chuckles. “Yeah, right. I don’t know who you are, but you sure as hell are too old to be Laura’s daughter.”
Alarm mingles with excitement as I realize that the last thirty-five years or so are a bit of a blur for Tony Bergmann. His sense of time is at best vague. Perhaps, deep down, he still thinks he’s a teenage thug.
This opens up some intriguing possibilities. But I mustn’t push my luck, or I might lose him. Better start from afar.
“That looks bad,” I say, nodding at the scar that pokes, as it always has, out from under the hem of the beanie. “What happened?”
“Like you don’t know what happened,” he mutters. Wincing, he raises his hand (with dirt caked into the deep lines and encrusted under his fingernails) and rubs the spot like it’s still fresh and still hurting him. The scar looks like it’s gotten deeper over the years, a sharp vertical crack across his weathered skin.
I wait for him to go on, but he’s silent. I decide to try another approach. “Tony, I’ve got some cigarettes here. Do you want one?”
“I don’t want your fucking cigarettes.” But the look on his face says the opposite. It’s fixated on me, earnest. I give him the cigarette I swiped from Laura before I left, and he takes it. A plastic lighter appears from one of the anorak’s pockets. “It’s not fucking fair,” he mutters as he lights up. “It’s just not fucking fair.”
“What’s not fair?”
“I’m not the bad guy here,” he says, much louder now, which startles me. “I’m not the bad guy. People treat me like the bad guy but I’m not the bad guy! I didn’t do any of these things! I didn’t touch those animals. But everyone thinks it was me.”
What is he talking about? What animals?
“Your little Michelle,” he rasps, and my heart does a somersault, “she’s not such an angel.”
“Tony, what about Michelle? Where is she now?”
He grins. Suddenly, he leaps to his feet. I don’t have time to stumble back, and before I know it, his hands grip the lapels of my jacket. The smell emanating from him is hard to describe. I come to realize in that moment how much taller he is and how strong, despite the deceptively frail appearance.
“Michelle is in the basement wall,” Tony says in singsong. “In the wall, in the wall.”
He lets go of me. My heart hammering, I try to gather my composure, but it’s proving hard. “How do you know that?”
He laughs. “Everyone knows that, stupid. The river came and flooded the town, and when the river left, out came Michelle from the basement wall. You’ve let her out. Everybody knows.”
I take a small step back. I may have been wrong about him after all.
“You’ve let her out!” Tony bellows as I turn to leave. “And now she’s back! She’s back! And she’ll finish what she started! She’ll get to all of us this time!”
His voice follows me all the way to the car. I get inside, shut the door, lock it, and only then start to feel more or less safe. I start the engine and peel out of the parking lot as fast as the laws of physics allow.
By the time I get back to the house, Laura has had time to calm down. She’s sitting on the couch, watching a news show on TV, smoking nonchalantly. The smell of the cigarette reminds me of Tony, and a shudder runs through me.
“Look who’s back,” Laura says. “Any luck with the detective work?”
“Oh, now you care about the detective work?” I can’t help myself.
“Well, I figure the SQ and the RCMP sure as hell aren’t getting anywhere,” Laura says. “So you might as well step in. Who knows, you might have a stroke of unprecedented luck.”
My mind gets stuck on the word unprecedented, but I shake it off. “What did you just say?”
Her eyes go round. Her face wears a look of glee like someone watching the drama unfold on a reality show. “Oh! You haven’t heard.”
“What haven’t I heard?” I start to get seriously annoyed. Those shiny eyes of hers—she’s been drinking since I left, hasn’t she? I check, and sure enough, the bottle of brandy is on the makeshift side table next to her.
“Don’t take my word for it,” Laura says, and now it’s obvious she’s slurring her words. “Here. Look. It’s on again.”
She reaches for the remote control and raises the volume on the TV. The image changes right as my gaze alights on the screen. It’s now a photo of Michelle Fortier, that same faded sepia-toned photo I got from the archives, the one I once planned to use in the promo materials for my podcast.
“A reversal for the investigation in the case of the body found after the flood in Marly,” says the anchor’s well-poised voice off-screen. “Allow me to remind you that the body of a child was discovered inside a house ravaged by the floodwater when the Chaudière river overflowed last week, flooding the historic downtown of this Beauce municipality. The SQ is investigating. The body was determined to be several decades old and was previously believed to be Michelle Fortier, the nine-year-old daughter of Marly residents, who went missing in 1979.”
My mouth goes dry. Previously believed to be?
“The SQ just released a statement that, after thorough analysis of available data, they determined that the body is not that of Michelle Fortier.”
SIXTEEN
2017
“Isn’t that something,” the waitress says as she refills my mug with coffee from a cloudy glass carafe.
I nod numbly. The diner is full to bursting—the TV over the counter is set to the news channel where the same program replays over and over. I drove straight here from Laura’s. I don’t know how—I just drove, my subconscious did the rest. I had no idea this place was even still open. Back in the day when I lived in Marly, the teenagers mostly stayed away, as it was popular with the senior citizens and had a beer license but carded the young’uns religiously.
Right now, a beer is sounding better and better, but I judiciously decide to stick to the tar-like coffee. It seems like every set of eyes in the place is riveted on the TV, even though I suspect they’d all heard everything there was to hear already. And the report is stingy with the details. There’s nothing much except the body wasn’t conclusively proven to be Michelle Fortier’s. Make of that what you will.
“Have you decided what you want to eat, Stephanie?” the waitress asks sweetly. I’m a little taken aback at the familiarity. I never told her my name, did I? Which means she remembers me from all these years ago. That, or another customer or staff member already filled her in.
“Huh?”
