And died?
The parents hypothesis was my strongest, and I’m still not sure I’ve fully let go of it. It just seems like the most likely explanation. But after two steps into the Fortier house, it already starts to feel shaky.
Everything in here is eerily preserved. Like a late-seventies time capsule. There’s a strong smell of humidity in here with an undercurrent of sewage that makes it hard to breathe, but I can’t see any obvious water damage. What I do see is furniture, neatly covered in plastic, books on shelves, knickknacks. Clearly vagrants (or the partiers outside) haven’t had time to wreck the place yet.
And most of all, I see photos on the walls.
There are framed photos of Michelle all over the place. My flashlight snatches them out of the darkness one after another. They’re old photos, never that clear to begin with, and faded with time even despite the protective glass of the frames. Michelle as a baby, and as a toddler. Michelle dressed up in all manner of frilly dresses, Michelle on Santa’s lap looking like she’s about to bawl.
No. Whatever happened in 1979, these people loved Michelle. It can’t be denied.
I’m seized with a sudden rush of sadness for Marie Fortier. She lived in here for years and years, surrounded by this dated furniture and those photos. The more I imagine it, the more unbearable it seems, and I’m not sure what’s worse: not knowing what happened to her daughter… or knowing it.
I proceed farther into the house, peek into the kitchen and the dining room, and then enter the vast living room.
Something feels off almost immediately, although it takes some time to figure out what. It’s a typical seventies living room, complete with a clunky TV stand and massive couches and armchairs. There are more photos here: more Michelle, of course, but also of the other inhabitants of the house. I pause at a large photo of Marie and Gaetan on their wedding day. Marie is clad in a high-necked dress heavy with lace and beads, her dark hair is parted neatly down the middle and styled in a big bouffant updo. Gaetan wears a dark suit, his hair too long in the back. They both look serious, which makes the photo look like it belongs in the 1900s rather than sixty years later. There’s a picture of Marie holding the infant Michelle, but not one of the three of them.
I’m inwardly yelling at myself for failing to bring a real camera. I take photos with my phone as much as I can, all too aware of the low-quality results. Of course, that means I have to turn off the flashlight, and so the only source of light is the flash of my phone camera.
Flash: Marie Fortier posing in front of the house with a pram. Flash: Michelle, tiny tot in a frilly dress sitting atop a tricycle. Flash: Marie and Gaetan at a barbecue, Marie holding a tray piled with food, her husband with a beer in his hand, clinking the neck of the bottle with another man standing next to him.
“You’re out of your mind. You’re really here.”
I shriek and nearly drop my phone. When I spin around, I’m momentarily blinded by the powerful beam of a real flashlight.
“Luc,” I say. My heart hammers.
Luc lowers the flashlight. “Someone texted me and told me you showed up here. I almost didn’t believe it.”
I can’t tell if he’s mad. He seems merely incredulous. It doesn’t occur to me to wonder who texted him, how they recognized me, or why they’d bother sharing the information with my married ex.
“Wow, you’re really determined,” he says, shaking his head.
“You say that like it’s bad.”
“It’s just… do you think there’s something to find here?”
“I don’t know.”
He raises his flashlight and inspects the photos, whistling through his teeth. “They just left all their stuff here. Isn’t it weird? And a little disrespectful.”
“There’s no one to claim it all anymore,” I say, shrugging.
“Not even the photos and mementos.” He sighs. “It doesn’t seem right.”
“Well, Marie is in the care home—” I almost blurt that I saw her but hold back at the last second. “And there are no other relatives, I guess.”
“Maybe I could take that one,” Luc says, shining the flashlight at the barbecue photo.
“What for?”
“Give it to Dad. Look, he’s in it, along with my granddad.”
I can’t quite believe my ears. I lean in to have a closer look. There’s no way I would have recognized them in this faded photo without Luc to point it out, but the more I look, the more I realize it’s true. The man clinking his beer bottle to Gaetan’s is unmistakably Pierre Bergmann. And the two boys frolicking in the background of the photo must be Pierre-Francois and Pierre-Antoine, aka Frank and Tony.
“They were friends?” I ask. “I had no idea.”
“They were on good terms,” Luc says. “As far as I know.”
They were on good terms with everybody, I think, but it didn’t translate into any real friendships. Not as far as my research could tell. People liked the Fortiers enough, certainly enough to take their money, but no one went out of their way to invite them to a casual backyard barbecue.
Well, that explains why Pierre was one of the few to actually make an effort to search for Michelle.
“Oh, wow,” Luc says. He’s leaning closer to the photo, the light of the flashlight pointed at the very edge by the frame. “Look at that. Even my grandmother is in it.”
I peer closer to see that Luc is right. Standing off to the side, her face blurry as if in the act of turning away from the camera, is a tall, bulky woman with sloppily cut frizzy hair. She’s such a sharp contrast to the stylish, slender Marie that it’s no wonder I didn’t notice her at first. She hardly looks like she belongs in the photo. Her legs look like tree trunks and the rest of her is hidden under a shapeless, sack-like dress with a flower pattern that had to be unfashionable even then.
“Yeah,” says Luc good-naturedly. “If I do take it to my dad, I’ll have to crop her out.”
For some reason, I feel affronted. “That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?”
Luc chuckles. “Look at you, the ardent defender of La Grosse Sophie. She did ditch my granddad to run off with some guy and never even called again.”
“Geez, imagine if the whole town called you La Grosse. And even your own husband. I bet that’d do wonders for your morale.”
Luc shrugs. “Different times. Back then, people just called things as they saw them, I guess.”
I seethe. “Yeah? Like Crazy Tony?”
