I ponder just letting him think that. It’s better than admitting that sure, I’m here for that but also because I’m broke and shit out of luck.
I guess I ponder for too long because he seems to take my silence as acquiescence.
“I’ll take you to the house. I think we should be able to get all the way there by car by now. They’ve reopened most of the streets the other day, now that the water’s gone.”
Right. The flood.
“And then I suppose you’re going to Laura’s?” He gives me a shrewd look. Or so it seems to me. “I mean, the inn is closed because of water damage. It was right on the lowest point of the Main, so…”
“Just my luck,” I say with a shit-eating grin. “Laura’s it is.”
We drive into town. I wonder if he still remembers the exact way to my place. I mean, Laura’s place. After all these years. I can’t decide whether it’s cute and romantic or just a sign to what extent everyone here has absolutely no life.
Then the F-150 turns onto the main street, and I forget whatever I was thinking about. I crane my neck, staring out the window like a tourist. The feeling that invades me is strange, hard to describe. The sight is unsettling. Nauseating, even. It’s profoundly bizarre to see the place I know so well undone like this.
Luc had been right about the inn—it’s cordoned off by tape and cones, the door and ground-floor windows boarded up. The same fate befell many of the other buildings, the quaint family-owned stores, the bakery. I begin to understand how tough it might be for a town like Marly that clings to its history like it has nothing left. I watch it all float by outside the car window, unsure what to say.
“There’s already talk of not rebuilding much of the old town,” Luc says glumly.
This gets even me. “What?”
“There was a town hall meeting, all these environmentalist groups came.” He grimaces. “They say, give it back to nature, it belongs to nature. No matter that these buildings are more than a hundred years old. Global warming is a thing, apparently, so to hell with all that. Town council is pushing for a dike, like the one in that town near Montreal that was on the news last year. But that’s gonna cost a fortune, so no one knows if it’ll work out. The prime minister was here last week. A lot of talk but nothing real, naturally.”
“Naturally,” I echo. The truth is that I expected to feel something like schadenfreude. This stupid town I hate, the town I barely escaped from, with its pathetic pride and its misbegotten ego, finally brought down into the mud it always belonged in, at least in my eyes. But now that I’m seeing it in person, all I feel is queasy.
Finally, we leave the historic part of Marly behind, and I barely have time to breathe a sigh of relief. Here are the newer, uglier constructions from the sixties onward: the dentist’s office, the new drugstore, the garages and repair shops. And then Luc slows the car down in front of one such garage. SUSPENSION PARTS REPAIRS, reads the faded sign. Behind it and to the side is the house that belongs to the garage owner, a squat bungalow with an exterior of burnt-orange tiles tarnished by time. Its one window that faces the street is intact but pitch-black. The walls are stained gray up to a sharp line a couple of feet off the ground; this is how high the water reached. Not all that high, compared to the houses down the street that were hit much worse, but this particular house is surrounded by twice the amount of police tape that flutters nervously in the wind. As I open the window and lean out, I glimpse the padlock on the front door.
“This is the place?” I ask, even though it’s not necessary. In my peripheral vision, Luc nods.
“So it was the Gagnons this whole time,” I muse.
“Not necessarily.” Luc seems to bristle. “And anyway, he died a couple years ago, right before you came back for the first time. She closed the garage and then sold the house.”
“And? How does that mean it wasn’t them?”
Luc shrugs. “I’m not saying it definitely wasn’t. It’s just that there’s no one to hold responsible anymore.”
“It’s not a question of holding anyone responsible,” I say. “It’s a matter of giving justice to the victim. And closure to the family.” I feel stupid as the words leave my mouth. I feel like I’m talking to my boss. Or to my microphone. I don’t sound like me—I sound the way I’m expected to sound. Nobody actually thinks in such words.
“Is that why you wanted to do your show in the first place?” Luc asks. Again, I can’t tell if he’s being charmingly naive or sneaky and sarcastic.
“Something like that,” I mutter. I reach for the door handle and undo my seat belt with the other hand.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to have a look.”
“You can’t. It’s a crime scene.”
Aren’t you the law-abiding citizen all of a sudden, I think. If memory serves me right, we used to steal beer out the back of the convenience store and then trespass on private land to go drink it. I ignore him. I get out of the car and walk toward the house, stepping gingerly on the squelching front lawn. There’s debris everywhere so I better not step on some rusted nail. The nearest hospital is in the next village over, a thirty-minute drive, and the last thing I need is tetanus.
I come to a stop at the edge of the scene. The yellow police tape flutters against my shins. I can’t bring myself to go farther. The house draws my gaze and at the same time repels it; I want to look away but can’t.
There are more squelching steps behind me, and a moment later, Luc is by my side. “They were ripping out the plaster in the basement,” he says. “You know, to dry everything so mold and other crap wouldn’t take hold. That’s what they were told to do, at least in houses that could still be salvaged. And there, behind the plaster, they found a body.”
That must have been pretty damn traumatizing. Luc seems to be thinking the same thing. “The new owners are nice,” he says with a shrug. “I feel bad for them.”
I sort of tune him out. I keep staring at the house that seems to have had all the answers from the start. It’s exactly halfway between Laura’s and the store where I got my cigarettes. I’d driven past it so many times two years ago, twitching from nicotine withdrawal, and meanwhile, what I came here for was inside. Immured in an ugly, late-seventies bungalow with popcorn ceilings. Michelle Fortier, the town mystery, lurking behind a plaster wall while the house’s residents watched Habs games in their rec room.
“Well, they can congratulate themselves. They’re part of town lore now,” I say.
“Assuming it really is Michelle,” he points out.
That remark makes me turn my head, finally, and face him. “What do you mean? Who the hell else could it be?”
“They haven’t formally identified her yet,” he says. And, come to think about it, he’s right. The news never said explicitly the body was Michelle. A child, they said, presumed to be Michelle Fortier.
“It’s Michelle,” I say darkly. “There’s no one else.”
I mean it. There hasn’t been a missing person in Marly since before Michelle was even born. And no other missing child.
“It’s such a shame,” Luc says.
“What’s a shame?”
“We probably won’t know what really happened. It’s been forty years. And what you were saying about closure for the family—there won’t be much of that, either.”
He’s not wrong. Gaetan Fortier died ten years ago, and his wife, Marie, has been in a care home for the last three with worsening dementia. When I was here last, the house, a mansion by Marly standards, had just been put on the market. I don’t even know who managed their affairs on Marie’s behalf—probably some distant relative, since the Fortiers had no other children.
