She tries to speak again, but he cuts her off before a single word can make it out.
“You’re going to shut that mouth of yours,” he says, his voice cold, “or I’ll shut it for you. Forever. Got it?”
She nods.
Then, sometime later—she has no idea how much time, and she couldn’t even estimate if she tried—Pierre Bergmann comes back. He’s terrifying, looming over her, his face full of grim resolve. He tells her what she’s going to say to the Fortiers when they come back.
She put Michelle to bed. She went downstairs to watch the television. She didn’t see or hear anything. In the morning, when Michelle didn’t come down for breakfast, she went to check her room, only to find the window wide open and Michelle nowhere to be seen. That’s all she knows.
Laura doesn’t think she can do it. They’ll know she’s lying, she’s sure of that, and she tells Pierre so. Pierre only frowns. Well, you’ll have to convince them.
And in the end, she does convince them. That’s the part that surprises her the most. It doesn’t take any convincing at all. They seem to just believe her—no one even asks her to tell the story for a second time. When she tells Gaetan and Marie, they only exchange a glance in which Laura reads dread unlike anything she’d seen before.
Marie puts her hands on Laura’s shoulders and looks her in the eye. “I’m so very sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry I made you do this. I never should have brought you here without warning you what you’d be dealing with. This is all my fault.”
Laura is so stunned she doesn’t know what to say.
Marie hands her money. It’s a lot of money, more than they’d agreed on. At first, she wants to refuse it but Marie presses it into her hand. “Take it,” she says. “You must. And please, please do me a big favor. Don’t tell anyone you were here in the first place. All right?”
Laura nods.
“Do you promise?”
Laura promises.
Then she goes home.
It’s still early morning when she gets back to the mobile home.
No one has had time to realize she was gone at all.
And no one reported Michelle missing until several days had passed.
THIRTY-FOUR
2017
It was Frank who told Laura she was never to leave Marly again. That she had to stay right where Frank and his father could see her and keep her mouth shut.
Which she did. For thirty-eight years.
When she first got her cancer diagnosis, right before I left, she tried to come clean for the first time. That night, Frank had brought her home from the bar, and he threatened her that if she talked, I’d be in trouble.
Laura didn’t talk.
This time, the cancer had spread to lymph nodes and organs and to her bones. She likely had only months to live. She was going to drive to the city in secret and confess everything to the SQ, but then I came back to town.
Laura decided to stay silent once again. After all, who would it serve, after all these years?
And her last attempt to come clean would have been successful had I not accidentally told Frank about it.
Frank was arrested. For a while, it looked uncertain. There seemed to be a good chance they’d just let him go, with only Laura’s word to go on and mine.
Then something unexpected happened. Pierre called the police from the care home. He’d had a degenerative disease for the last few years and was now confined to his bed, but he corroborated Laura’s story. He had, indeed, taken Michelle’s body and hidden it inside one of the buildings under construction at the time. He did it all to protect his son, but now, he said, he had nothing to lose.
Because of his condition, they decided not to prosecute him.
Michelle’s case, it seemed, was now solved.
I’d begun to record a tentative follow-up podcast, half-heartedly, but stopped after a while. Not just because of the connection to my mother but because the sheer banality of it just didn’t make good—what a ghastly way to put it—entertainment. I figured I might try again once Laura was gone.
I didn’t go back to Montreal. I decided to stay with her for her last few months. But fate, in a new curious twist, decided that Laura shouldn’t be the first to die. Just a few weeks after confessing to his role in Michelle’s killing, Pierre Bergmann succumbed to his condition and passed away.
That part, in and of itself, wasn’t too surprising. But I sure was surprised when Laura received a call from the Bergmanns’ notary’s office, inviting us to the reading of the last will and testament.
What turned out to be even more surprising was Laura and me showing up at the office, where we sat in an excessively formal, overly air-conditioned room under the hostile glares of Frank’s ex-wife, to finally be told that Pierre had divided his remaining fortune between his grandson Luc and none other than Laura herself. He’d put the money in a trust in her name, as well as mine, once he’d learned about Laura’s declining health.
The ex-wife cursed and stomped her feet and finally left, threatening epic lawsuits that probably wouldn’t happen.
After the reading, while Laura went to the other end of the parking lot to smoke (the building prohibited smoking within ten feet of the entrance with no exceptions for people about to keel over and die, as Laura angrily put it) I found myself face-to-face with Luc, who’d parked his truck right next to Laura’s old Honda.
It was awkward, to say the least. Especially now that I’d taken a sizable chunk out of what was to be his inheritance. I figured if he decided to just pretend like I’m not there, I’d be fine with it. I’d let him get in his truck and leave. Go back home to his wife.
Then, as I approached the Honda at a pace as slow as I could manage, I had to concede that he was there on purpose, waiting for me.
“Hi,” I said. After how we last parted ways, the least I could do was speak first.
“Hi.”
