At first I thought Yvette’s father or brother had cut off her call, but the dead silence on the line told me the ice storm had claimed another victim, the telephone service. With no cell coverage in this area, I wouldn’t be able to phone Yvette back or call the police. At least the familiar static on the line had provided me with her location, her father’s house, which took me by surprise. Although Yves hadn’t said specifically, he’d certainly given the impression that her stay at her sister’s convent in Montreal would be for more than a couple of days. Very worried, I grabbed my snowshoes with their ice-biting pitons, a flashlight and the keys to the truck. I didn’t even hesitate when I saw my truck vacuum-packed in ice.
With the long-handled snow scraper, I hammered and smashed at the ice coating the door until I could wrench it open. I started the engine, switched the windshield’s heating vent on full blast then returned outside into the freezing rain. As precious minutes ticked by, I scraped and hacked at the stubborn thickness on the windshield, desperate to make a hole large enough to see through.
Yvette’s plea kept replaying in my head. Something was seriously wrong for her to speak in her native French and not the English she always insisted on with me. I worried that her brother had learned of her involvement in the disappearance of the incriminating notebook.
Finally, the cab’s heat kicked in, and the ice began to crack and slither to the bottom of the glass. I glanced at my unchained tires. I hadn’t seen the need to put them on this early in the winter season. I debated wasting more precious time, then decided it was better to expend another fifteen minutes putting them on than not reach Yvette at all.
Although I didn’t think her family would physically harm her in their efforts to learn what she had done with the notebook, I felt that the sooner I got to the farm the better, before their anger got out of control. After all, one of them had already killed twice.
With the chains secured to the tires, I nudged the truck slowly forward. The wheels moved. Straight ahead. They didn’t slide the truck sideways. And miraculously, I could see through the windshield, barely. But within thirty metres, I came to an abrupt halt in front of a crystallized birch arched over the road. I put the truck into gear and crunched slowly forward. A million tendrils of ice scraped over the hood, up the windshield and over the roof. I made it through, but before proceeding on what was going to be a treacherous five-kilometre drive to the Gagnon Farm, I decided to run back to retrieve the axe from the back porch. I might need it before this was over.
Several times I was forced to stop, scramble out and knock the ice from overhanging branches until they sprang upwards and allowed passage. On the main road, I had to avoid a truck and a car, one nose down into the ditch, the other cantilevered halfway across the road, where it was propped against a tree that had splattered onto the road. After checking that no one remained inside, I edged my truck around the stranded vehicles and continued on my way, until I too was brought to a final halt about a kilometre from the Gagnon farm.
The headlights shone on a line of fallen hydro poles, their wires a tangle of frozen spaghetti. Fearful of being electrocuted, I backed the truck up a safe distance and parked it at the side of the road. I’d have to continue on snowshoe. With my flashlight in one hand and the axe in the other, I gave the downed wires a wide berth by detouring into the neighbouring woods.
I felt as if I’d been plunged into a petrified ballroom in which the only living things were the reflecting crystals tinkling in the wind. In a surreal, macabre way, it was beautiful. They were a thousand beaded gowns swaying to the rhythm of their jingles. They were a thousand glittering chandeliers ringing their chimes. The spell was broken by the brittle snap of a breaking branch. The ballroom changed back to what it was, a forest imprisoned in ice.
Once the danger of electrocution had passed, I returned to the road and continued until I finally reached the turn-off to the Gagnon farm. An hour and a half had passed since Yvette’s call. I prayed I wasn’t too late.
Across the frozen fields, the barns blazed like two islands of light in an ocean of darkness. Confirmation enough of their independent power supply and the value of the harvest growing inside. But the farmhouse, with no power source of its own, had melted into the surrounding night.
As I walked towards the black bulk of the house, I tried to push back my fear. To help Yvette, I would have to stay calm. About twenty metres from the house, I stopped and searched for any indication that Yvette was inside. The house sat heavy in its silence. No smoke rose from the chimneys. The windows remained opaquely noncommittal, with no sign of a candle’s radiance or a flashlight’s brightness to banish the darkness within. It seemed unlikely that Yvette was still inside.
To make sure, I crunched up to the side living room window and gingerly shone the flashlight through the window. I saw the room where only the day before I’d sat sipping tea with a man I now thought could be a killer. Either he or his father. That much the notebook had told me.
But the room remained uninviting and empty. I passed on to the next window that turned out to be the dining room and encountered the same stark emptiness. I continued to the back of the house, to the kitchen. Although it revealed a more hospitable atmosphere, it was equally devoid of life. A chair lay on its side on the floor, as if someone had pushed it over in their haste to leave. And I used the word leave, for I was confident now that the house no longer held Yvette. But where would she have gone? Or more correctly, where would her father or brother have taken her?
I flashed my light around the barnyard in search of Papa Gagnon’s truck or Yves’s Mercedes. I saw neither. Nor did I see the scarred evidence that tire chains would have left on the smooth ice. The lights from the barns beckoned. I started towards them.
At that point I thought I heard a muffled bang from inside the house. I put my ear against the kitchen window. The noise sounded again, louder.
I debated calling out, but didn’t for fear that Papa Gagnon or Yves would hear.
The knocking continued. I raised my axe to break the window and stopped when I realized the back door was partially open. Removing my snowshoes, I stepped quietly into the cold air of the kitchen and listened.
A muffled shout came through the ceiling above me, accompanied by more banging.
I followed the flashlight beam along the hall, up the stairs and into the room I’d learned from my first visit belonged to Yvette. Once again I was struck by its monastic simplicity, almost virginal in its lack of decoration and pervasive white colour. I expected to find her there. I didn’t. Then I saw it, partially hidden by the bed. Streaks of violent red crawling up the wall.
“Shit,” I muttered under my breath. With my heart in my mouth, I stepped around the bed, terrified at what I might find.
For a second my heart stopped. I thought it was Yvette, just her head sticking out from under the bed. I realized with horrified relief that the matted auburn fur belonged to her cat, or what was left of it. His plump body had been brutally slashed. One leg hung by a tendon, another was missing altogether. And beside it, in its own pool of frozen blood, was the poor cat’s head. It was all I could do not to vomit.
“Au secours,” came a high-pitched cry for help from outside the room.
“Thank God. Yvette, you’re alive,” I called back. “Where are you?”
“Ici, ici” was the response.
I followed the cries down the hall, to the last room on the second floor. The door was locked. The key missing.
“Stand back,” I said and with my axe hacked an opening large enough for me to step through. Another monastic cell greeted me. But, whereas Yvette’s bedroom furniture was faintly feminine, this dark mahogany furniture with its refined but unbending lines shouted that this room belonged to Yves. A nun’s habit lay crumpled on the oriental carpet. Soeur Yvonne. She’d returned from Montreal with Yvette.
I raced across the room to where the banging was coming from behind another closed door. It too was locked.
“Are you hurt?” I cried out, the image of the dead cat still vivid in my mind.
“Mon Dieu,” she groaned. “Can you stand away from the door? I’m going to use my axe.”
“Hit high. I’m lying next to it on the floor,” came a reply, this time in English with a familiar Ottawa Valley twang.
I splintered the top of the door and ripped out the segments of wood with my gloved hands. I shone my flashlight on the woman lying tied up on the cupboard floor.
Thérèse’s hazel eyes blinked back at me.