“So the first thing I do is I head for the hole in the fence. It wasn’t a large hole. It was difficult to squeeze through. But I do, ripping my dress in the process, and so I’m standing there, facing the woods, right?” She gestures straight ahead with a squint in her eye, as if she’s really standing in front of the woods and not sitting in Laura’s living room. “I thought, since it had only been a minute since I last saw Seb, he couldn’t have gone very far. I should be able to see him. But I look, and I see a whole lot of nothing. That’s when I started to seriously worry, and I ran back to the house and got my husband. We went through the woods, calling Seb’s name, and—nothing. No answer. After a while—I don’t know how long it was; it felt like forever but can’t have been that long—my husband headed back home to call for help, and I stayed behind. I just couldn’t leave with Seb out there all alone. Or so I thought. I went a little farther by myself, and that’s when I spotted something through the trees. I raced over there and picked it up from the ground, and it wasn’t something of Seb’s. No, it was a blue ribbon. It had rained the other night, but it sat there on the damp pine needles, perfectly dry, like whoever it was only now dropped it.
“And then, it was like, I don’t know how to explain it. A sixth sense or something. I just went really quiet. I didn’t yell or call out. I just stood there and looked around, carefully, focusing on every inch of space all around me, until I finally saw them.
“They were hiding behind a fallen log in a sort of small crevasse.” Helene gives me a significant look. Her eyes flash with anger. “They were crouching there. My Seb, with eyes like saucers. And her.” Helene’s nostrils flare. “Michelle Fortier. That little snake. She crouched there next to him, her arms around him. Of course, I descend on them, grab Seb. He’s so frightened he can barely speak. And she starts lying her little heart out. I was just bringing him back, yeah right, that’s why she hid when she heard us calling. Sadly, by the time my husband came back, she’d run off. Back to her parents’ huge house, no doubt. Where their money would protect her. And it would. For a time. But not forever.”
Helene glances shrewdly around the room. “Not that my husband or me would ever, you know, have done anything.”
“Of course,” I say, nodding.
“But hear this, I talked to Seb. The next day, once he’d gotten over the fright she gave him. He said she asked him to come to the woods. She said there was a puppy. And then she just pulled him along. Into the forest.”
“Did you ever tell anyone?”
“Who was I going to tell?” Helene says, indignant. “The police were on the Fortiers’ side. Protecting their interests, you see. It was my word against theirs.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, frowning.
She huffs. “Oh, please. They were best buddies with Pierre Bergmann. I mean, was he really gonna show up accusing their precious little daughter when he had barbecues at their house every other weekend?”
I think back to the photo I saw at the house, the one Luc took with him. So that’s definitely not false.
“And then, once she… you know…” Helene leans in closer. “We decided we better keep our mouths shut. That’s how things work in this town. We say a word, and the next thing we know we’re being made into scapegoats. Because the Fortiers, if they weren’t going to find who did it, they were going to find scapegoats. I was sure of it.”
And yet. If all my research was to be believed, that’s not at all what happened.
“Anyway,” Helene says, folding her hands in front of her, “I’m telling you, if somebody did it, it’s all for the best. God forgive me for saying so. Because that girl was bad news.”
“Were there—other incidents?”
Helene scoffs triumphantly. “Jeannette Gagnon is waiting outside. Just ask her. Michelle Fortier cut the head off her dog.”
By the time the last visitor leaves and the street outside Laura’s house becomes empty again, I have a laptop full of audio files. My head spins a little just thinking about it. There’s Jeannette’s story of how Michelle killed her Airedale terrier, which had been a present from her father. There are countless others about Michelle killing and torturing small animals and birds. Michelle terrorizing other children at school. Michelle putting bleach into a classmate’s milk at lunch—the tragedy was only averted because someone had glimpsed her and warned the intended target, a girl who had angered Michelle by beating her at a spelling contest. And so on, and so forth.
Outside, it’s completely dark. I’d lost my sense of time back at the hospital, so when I look at the clock in the corner of the laptop screen, I’m a little shocked to realize it’s almost midnight.
“Are you ever going to bed?” Laura grouses. “I’m wiped. If you want me to help you, it’s now, or I’m going to sleep and you’re on your own.”
I sigh and tell her to go right ahead. She grumbles but finally leaves me to my own devices. I listen to her rummage around in the bathroom, run the tap, flush the toilet—taking longer than she usually does. Maybe waiting for me to change my mind?
I’ve never depended on Laura, and I’m not going to start now. I wait until she’s in her bedroom, her door shut behind her with a decisive thump, as if the thin piece of painted plywood could keep out the world. I realize I never asked her about the ruby ring. Maybe that’s what she was waiting for, dreading the moment and yet anticipating it.
I figure I’ll have to ask her about it tomorrow. Anyway, the ring isn’t my top priority right now. All the new information neatly recorded in my laptop is.
I check some news sites, and there’s nothing new about the body discovered in the basement. As far as I can tell, they are no closer to identifying it.
Well, perhaps I can be of some help with that.
It turns out Laura does have an internet connection, but it must be the cheapest plan, so every page loads with excruciating slowness. Still, I manage to pull up the database of missing children in the Beauce region over the last fifty years. The photos, many of them black-and-white, take their time to load and unroll slowly before my eyes.
One of these insouciant, smiling faces is the body found buried in a basement wall after forty years. Of this I’m certain.
Just as I’m certain that Michelle was the murderer.
TWENTY-SIX
1979
Monday finds Laura in a daze.
She half expects the entire world to come crashing down onto her head any second. The thought of leaving the house is almost as terrifying as the idea of staying and facing the wrath of her mother once again. She’d done exactly what she said—went up to Quebec City and came back without the jewelry. Only the ruby ring remained, left behind who knows why. Maybe her mother took a shine to it. Her mother thinks Laura doesn’t know where she hid it, at the bottom of the middle drawer in the old dresser. It occurs to Laura that she could steal it back, but the more she thinks about it, the more the idea of touching it again makes her nauseous.
As she walks to school, she’s all too aware of everything about her surroundings. It’s as if she has no skin; everything jolts her. Every look, every word spoken just out of earshot. She can’t shake the feeling that everyone knows everything. That the police are already on to her. As she takes her seat at her desk in the very back, she pictures, with childlike vividness, Pierre Bergmann bursting through the doors to arrest her and haul her off to jail. No, they probably wouldn’t even jail her. This is Pierre’s own son. Pierre would probably take her into the woods and shoot her.
She knows she has to get out of town, but now, with her only means irrevocably gone, she has no options.
“Pssst.” A voice pulls her unceremoniously out of her head and back into reality. The girl next to her leans closer, her eyes glittering. “Did you hear?”
“Hear what?” Laura is a tiny bit appalled at her own voice. It sounds way hoarser than it’s supposed to. It sounds alarmingly like her mother’s, like it’s her speaking through Laura’s chapped lips.
“Tony Bergmann’s in the hospital,” the girl whispers. “Serves him right.”
“In the hospital?” Laura repeats, incredulous.
“Yeah. My aunt works there as a nurse. She told my mom, and I overheard. He fell into the river and bashed his head on a rock or something.”
In that moment, Laura is certain that her skin has turned transparent. Everyone around her, including this girl she never even liked much, can see right through it, see everything underneath, all her veins and muscle fibers and the whorls of her brain, all her secrets and every lie she ever told, big and small. Her skin twitches and pulses.
