“I’ll give you a couple more minutes,” she says.
“No, no. Just… a chicken sandwich?”
“Sure.” She gives me a shrewd look. Or it could just be my imagination.
“Do you remember when Michelle went missing?” I ask. I throw a glance at the tag on her uniform because she may know my name from somewhere but I sure as hell have no clue about hers. “Genevieve?”
She shrugs, but I can see the sheer delight on her face. This is a day she’ll relish for months. “Oh, I was a bit young to remember. At this point, I can’t even tell what I remember myself from what I heard from others. People were talking about it for years. It was on everyone’s mind.”
But not a lot of them volunteered for the search, I think. This brings me back to Tony. Sure, he was probably just raving, but something stuck with me.
“I talked to Tony Bergmann today,” I say casually.
Her eyebrows shoot up. I belatedly realize this isn’t such a great idea. Genevieve will make sure to repeat every word I tell her to anyone who will listen before the day is out. “Oh, Tony. Leave poor Tony alone. He’s pitiful enough.”
“He is,” I agree with absolute honesty. “But it’s for my podcast.”
“Right,” she says, nodding with enthusiasm. “Well, if you’re wondering about Tony, I doubt it. I don’t think he had anything to do with Michelle… you know.” The somber look on her face hardly disguises her obvious delight at all this juicy gossip fodder.
“Oh no?”
She shakes her head. “Of course people thought about it. I mean, it’s Tony. He was trouble even then. But it couldn’t have been him.”
“You sound awfully sure.” At least for someone supposedly too young to remember anything.
“Oh, I am! I have this on the authority of my own mom. She used to be a nurse at the regional hospital until she retired. Tony was in hospital that week. In the ICU.”
I can hardly contain my surprise. “Why?”
“What do you mean why? Head trauma. That’s why he’s…” She twirls her index by her temple.
“Head trauma? What happened?”
“That, I couldn’t tell you. Heck, even my mom couldn’t. No one knows for sure. Someone found him, called the ambulance, the ambulance took him to the hospital, and when he woke up after a few days in a coma, well, he wasn’t quite himself. So no one knows what happened, but it can’t have been too good. One thing’s for sure, though. That whole week he was accounted for, since before Michelle went missing. That’s why the police never even questioned him at all.”
That’s news to me. I’d assumed the police never questioned him because his father is Pierre Bergmann. But now that I think about it, that would be too corrupt even for Marly.
“But what now?” Genevieve asks in a loud voice. “They’re saying the body’s not Michelle. That has to be baloney, right?”
“I think they know what they’re doing,” I retort feebly because, truth be told, I have no idea.
“Of course it’s baloney. Who the hell else would it be? It has to be Michelle.”
“You sound like you really want it to be Michelle,” I say.
“Well, at least it would bring everyone some closure,” she grumbles. “Right?”
“Right,” says a middle-aged man at the next table over. “And the police? They don’t know their asses from their elbows. Wouldn’t be the first case they bungled.”
“They have pretty advanced technologies,” I say. I’m not sure why I’m playing devil’s advocate for the SQ. “DNA and stuff.”
“Hubris,” the man says. “Maybe there’s such a thing as too advanced. All this mumbo-jumbo only obscures the real truth, which is staring you in the face the entire time.”
“It’s just unbelievable,” says his dining companion, a woman about his age with bleached-out hair the texture of a dish sponge. “Even if it isn’t Michelle—”
“It’s Michelle,” says the man authoritatively.
“—even if it isn’t Michelle, this is a child. A child! And no one knows who she is or where she came from? How can a child be unaccounted for? We don’t live in the third world!”
“More coffee?” Genevieve asks, clearly looking for an excuse to linger and keep listening to the conversation.
“What is the world coming to?” The blond woman ignores her, and the man gestures for more coffee.
What indeed. I should be asking that. Almost forty years ago, a child went missing, and no one made any real effort to find her. And now I find out that a teenager was between life and death with a head injury, and no one really seems to care about what happened either. The only child of the Fortiers and the youngest Bergmann son. Hardly people you’d expect to be overlooked.
I’m deep in thought so I barely notice when the bell chimes above the door. Genevieve turns away from me to greet the new arrival.
“Hi there! Long time no see. The usual?”
“Yeah,” says the painfully familiar voice that sends an electrical charge down my spine. “And a Heineken if you have any.”
I look up before I can think better of it. My gaze tumbles straight into Luc’s, who, to his credit, doesn’t flinch away.
“Stephanie!” he says with a bright smile. “Didn’t expect to see you here. Can I join you?”
“Sure,” I say numbly.
Immediately, he saunters up to my booth and slides onto the opposite bench. He doesn’t seem aware of what a bad idea this is. The town gossips all around us will have a field day. But then I realize it was the only logical thing to do. If he’d started evading, playing mind games, it would have been weirder. This way, for all intents and purposes, he’s having a beer with an old friend. Genevieve gives him a fond look as she fetches him the Heineken.
