“It’s April,” Laura says.
But her mother, having said her piece, shoves her unceremoniously out of the way. The two bottles of cheap beer in Laura’s backpack clink together with a loud glugging noise, and for a split second, Laura is terrified that her mother’s about to notice them missing. But she doesn’t. She throws open the fridge door and peers inside for just long enough to grab a bottle herself. Then she lets the door swing shut again and sweeps out of the room, leaving behind that lingering smell of cheap perfume and no-name cigarettes from the nearest reservation. That same smell that became the smell of their house, the smell that clung to Laura also, an invisible foe she could never shake, one that announced her from far away, making it clear to any stranger—as if there had ever been strangers in Marly—who she was, where she belonged. It was the reason she ended up cast out, first on the playground, then at school. Laura has embraced the ostracism and made it a cornerstone of her identity, long before she began to suspect in a secret corner of her mind that it had been there first, before the eyeliner and the rock tapes, and would be there to the last.
She hears the back door swing shut behind her mother, knowing that she’ll probably stay out on the porch in the old kitchen chair all through the day and well into the evening, sipping, smoking, cigarette butts accumulating in that first empty bottle.
At least her loot is now safe. Laura makes her way out of the house, the bottles clinking tantalizingly together. She’ll go to her usual place behind the park, by the bleachers. Hopefully she’ll run into someone worthy of sharing that second bottle with. Or if not, she’ll drink them both. The cheap stuff isn’t very strong anyway.
No tickets, no money, no solutions. Babysit, her mother said. Babysit. Ha. As if anyone would let her within a mile of their kids anyway. All she can do is drink her sorrows away.
As she walks toward the park, she can’t help it: She starts to pay attention to the younger kids, the ones she always brushed off and ignored. Could she babysit? Maybe someone might be desperate enough to let her try. The thought makes her chuckle and shake her head in disbelief—Laura O’Malley, babysitter. She’d lose all her cred. But she wants to make it to that concert this badly.
Just then, she hears the happy dinging of a bicycle bell. Like it or not, it pulls her out of her thoughts. She gives a start as she spins around.
“Watch where you’re going, you little shits!” she bellows to cover her embarrassment.
The flock of multicolored, shiny bicycles whirs past her. At the head of the flock, she can make out the blond, beribboned head of Michelle. The one with the newest, best bicycle, of course. Those parents of hers are loaded. All that wasted on this useless little brat. Life is staggeringly unfair, this much Laura realizes already.
Her mood soured, she trudges all the way to the bleachers just as the gray clouds overhead begin to mist with cold spring rain. The park stretches in front of her, empty and grim. Laura huddles beneath the bleachers, at least somewhat protected from the rain, and pulls the first beer from her backpack. She’s assailed with a feeling of despair that creeps up on her more and more often lately. In those moments, she can see her life spread out in front of her, as flat and joyless as this park, this town, the endless farmland that surrounds it. There’s never any respite. No exit, no hope, no options. This AC/DC concert, assuming she ever makes it, just might be the one highlight of her existence.
Maybe if the rain cleared and the older boys showed up, she could share her beer, bum a cigarette, and feel a little less desperate. She might be able to push that feeling back into the unknown recess of her soul where it surfaced from and forget about it for a little while longer. But the rain only grows stronger, and soon, the narrow bench above her head isn’t much help.
That’s when she sees a familiar car crawling along the street that lines the park. It’s alone, no other cars, or bicycles, or people anywhere in sight. She recognizes the car instantly and perks up at once. Maybe the day won’t be a total loss.
As the car draws closer, she makes the decision. She puts the almost-empty beer bottle down by the base of one of the metal beams that hold up the bleachers, emerges from her hiding place, and saunters toward the car.
To her joy and relief, he rolls down his window. That sexy smirk, the cigarette—the good, expensive kind—dangling from the corner of his full lips. It all makes her heart flutter.
“You won’t believe it,” she says, grinning back. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Get your ass in here, O’Malley, before I change my mind.”
She’s only too happy to obey.
You see, people talk a lot of shit about Laura, and they’re wrong—mostly wrong. Laura knows she’s got something that people want, and she uses it sparingly. Laura teases but she doesn’t give it away.
Not unless it’s someone really special.
THREE
VANISHED IN THE PRAIRIE: the disappearance of Michelle Fortier
Narrated by Stevie O’Malley
Marly isn’t a place most people have heard of. Lost in the Center-of-Quebec, too far from Montreal and Quebec City, too far from the ski slopes or the forests or the picturesque lakes, it’s not a place that’s on your radar unless you’re a corn farmer. A small town like so many others, at the mercy of every crisis and recession and decision made by politicians who never visited a place like Marly and never will, it’s the kind of place always described as a close-knit community, whatever that means; but the truth is that it could disappear off the map tomorrow and nobody would blink.
It’s also the site of one of Quebec’s few truly baffling mysteries. Indeed, in a town that was, at its peak in the 1970s, home to just under five thousand people, where everybody knows everybody, how did a nine-year-old girl disappear without a trace?
Michelle Fortier was born on July 10th, 1969. She disappeared just two months shy of her tenth birthday on May 11th, 1979. In the short decade of Michelle’s life, profound changes shook Quebec society to the core—but it was all happening elsewhere, far away, in the big cities. The October Crisis of 1970 left no mark on Marly; the Quebec Liberation Front and its explosive actions were not heard from such a distance. Michelle was among the last children of the Quiet Revolution, even though nobody knew it at the time. In Marly, crops grew and cows grazed and then crops were harvested and planted again next year. High school sweethearts got married right before graduation, had the first of their three or four children, and settled in to take over their pops’ farms. The Fortier family, back then the biggest landowners in Marly, raised their child in the relative luxury of the family home, custom-built by Gaetan Fortier for his future family in a lovely crook of the Chaudière river’s shore. Michelle was, by the standards of the time, a late child; her mother and father were thirty and forty-five respectively. She had no siblings, and all of the family’s love and attention was lavished upon the treasured daughter.
On May 11th, all that would change. A late-evening call to the town police station from the Fortier residence marked town history forever. The only police car in town was dispatched at once. As soon as he got to the Fortiers’ home, the officer heard the story: Michelle was gone from her room, her second-story window left open.
I must stress once again that it was a different time. Quebec, historically, has never been at the forefront of social change, and Marly was, on top of that, a good fifteen years behind the rest of the province. The police officer who showed up simply assumed Michelle had snuck out. Snuck out in the pouring rain, from the second floor without a rope or a ladder in sight? Snuck out at not quite ten years old? This seems like a strange thing to assume, even considering the time and place. And we’ll revisit this down the line. But the point is that no one called reinforcements. No one called the Sûreté du Quebec. There was no such thing as an AMBER alert, and even if there was, no phones to send it to, no internet, and the antlers of the analog TVs sometimes caught CBC on sunny days, and that’s about all they were good for.
So the official version remained that Michelle had snuck out. It stayed that way for another two days. Word spread around town, and the rumors started in earnest. That’s when the Fortiers must have understood they’d have to take action themselves.
A search was organized with local volunteers. And this is where we come up against another strange thing. For the first time out of what will prove to be many, the close-knit community didn’t exactly come together. All in all, about twenty people joined the Fortiers and the police officer, Pierre Bergmann, in their search for Michelle through the town and surrounding areas. They searched the fields, the banks of the Chaudière, and the small stretch of forest on the edge of Marly, on foot, using flashlights once it got dark. As you can imagine, such methods didn’t yield any results. We can only wonder about what potential evidence was trampled on, ignored, overlooked, or simply went unnoticed. Days later, the Chaudière river would overflow, flooding the forested area as it sometimes does after particularly snowy winters or rainy springs. So anything the search party might have missed was gone by the time the SQ finally did show up.
The SQ proceeded to question the parents as well as some townspeople they thought of interest, but it stopped there. As far as I could find out, nothing of interest was discovered.
The case went cold. To this day, no one has any clue what happened to Michelle Fortier the night she vanished from her room.
Today, Marly has changed little, unsurprisingly perhaps. A redevelopment in the late 2000s, much lauded, didn’t bring the revival the town and the mayor undoubtedly hoped for. Attempts at rebranding Marly as a nice place to retire also didn’t take, and not just because of Marly’s regrettable lack of charm. In recent years, the Chaudière’s banks have been eroding, and flooding renders the land near the banks unsuitable for farming. Population keeps slowly but surely dwindling. Soon, there might not be anyone left to remember Michelle.
Before that happens, I have decided to try and shed some light on the case that baffled the quiet rural community almost forty years ago.
For that, we must start close to home with Michelle’s parents, Marie and Gaetan Fortier.
FOUR
2017
Luckily for me, Laura is a creature of habit, and the spare key is still where I remember it, under the crumbling clay urn that once served as a planter but now is more of an ashtray. Like a Victorian detective, I inspect the cigarette butts. Du Maurier, good times. Laura is splurging.
When I retrieve the key and unlock the door, I’m greeted with semidarkness. Crooked rays of light fall through the bent and broken blinds. The rays creep across the floor and onto the couch, where my mother is passed out cold, softly snoring.
“Welcome home, Stephanie,” I say out loud. The snoring stops. Laura stirs and sits up.
“Oh, hey.” She rubs her puffy eyes, forgetting that she has a copious amount of mascara on.
