Nineteen

Saturday evening

February 2, 2019

IT HAD BEEN A GLORIOUS DAY. Marie had gone for a long and arduous cross-country ski on the network of trails that started right out of her back door. It was perfect weather for it—about fifteen degrees below zero, not even a sigh of wind, and a cloudless, sunny sky. She had climbed the mountain that rose up directly behind her house and descended into a little valley, then up again to a spectacular lookout that offered a view of Mont Tremblant in the distance and the hills that gave way to its summit. On the way there she had almost impaled with her ski pole a spruce grouse who was buried in the snow and startled it into frantic flight. Marie loved looking at the tracks of the animals who also made their way up and down her trails. The dead-straight line of red foxes, the wide band of a beaver tail, the giant back feet of the snowshoe hare in frenetic patterns, and the deeper but delicate step of the deer. Once, Marie had practically ploughed into a couple of moose who were clumsily getting to their feet from the crib they’d made in the deep snow. For a few moments they both just stared at each other, their breath suspended in the frozen air, and then Marie turned around and skied off as fast as her legs and arms could take her.

Marie’s quota of student papers was marked for the day, and she was now lounging guilt-free on the sofa in front of the fireplace in her little house in the woods with Roméo who was opening a second bottle of wine. The vegan meal she’d made for him had been a success; Marie was feeling very pleased that it actually had tasted like something. Roméo filled their glasses again and listened to Marie attentively as she got him caught up on all the local news in her little town of Ste. Lucie des Laurentides.

“You remember that Michelle Lachance, Louis’ wife, died last week?” Louis Lachance was the local homme à tout faire who’d worked in many of the homes in Ste. Lucie for over sixty-five years and had been married for sixty-four. He was also the person who had found the body of Marie’s neighbor, Anna Newman, in the case that brought Marie and Roméo together. They both suspected that despite being a devoted husband, Louis had been just a little bit in love with Anna Newman.

“Mr. Lachance’s daughter is insisting he move into a nursing home and he is devastated. Apparently, he is refusing to leave his house or give up his tools. He wants to keep working. But his daughter is also stubborn. The house is on the market and they’re selling all his stuff. I think she’s sending him to Louiseville of all places, where he knows no one. But his daughter lives there.”

Roméo frowned. “I guess it’s easier for her to dump him in a home—”

Marie cut him off. “Is that what you think I did with my mother?”

Roméo took her hand and kissed it very gently. “Of course not. You had no choice. But from what I remember of Mr. Lachance, he is very old, but he is also very lucid and capable.”

Roméo didn’t believe in retirement if the person was still competent and wanted the work. He saw what happened to old people when they didn’t feel needed anymore. It was an often hasty decline towards isolation, depression, and death. He wished Louis several more years of whatever work he wanted to do.

“Madame Lachance’s funeral is next week—the very last before they deconsecrate our little church,” said Marie. The white clapboard Ste. Lucie church stood at the crossroads of the little town. They hadn’t had a resident priest in years, and the congregation was down to about thirty people.

“Another one bites the dust. The church, I mean. Good riddance.”

Roméo frowned. “I don’t know why, but I find it a bit sad. No more Italians parading through town with the blind Santa Lucia, no more Christmas crèche, no more midnight mass with that terrible choir—”

“And no more priests assaulting children.”

“Let’s not discuss that, shall we? Maybe not tonight?”

Roméo extricated himself from Marie and got up to put two more logs on the fire. Barney and Dog, passed out in front of it, were unappreciative of how carefully Roméo stepped around them. Let sleeping dogs lie, Roméo thought.

“We are invited to Joel and Shelly’s for brunch tomorrow, remember? It’s a Groundhog Day party. A day late.”

Roméo squatted on his haunches and poked around at the logs.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever been to one of those. Is it an Anglo thing?”

“February second is the exact half-way point of winter in the north—Joel and Shelly are old hippies—they celebrate that.”

“Will there be a groundhog present?”

Marie laughed. “Are you kidding? All the groundhogs are still hibernating up here. Except us.”

“Who knew life could be so busy in little Ste. Lucie?” Roméo mused.

Marie rearranged her feet on his lap as he returned to the sofa and got deeper under the blanket.

“And…we are babysitting for Ben and Maya three weekends from now. They have a wedding in Toronto, no kids invited. I can’t wait to get a whole weekend with that little boy.” Marie was often overwhelmed by the powerful, animal love she felt for her grandson.

“Can you be up here with us?”

Roméo hesitated. “I think so, yes.”

Everyone kept telling Marie how lucky she was to have Roméo in her life. No one ever said to him how lucky he was to have her. Was it because she was ten years older and fortunate that anyone, let alone a man who looked like Roméo, even looked at her? She knew perhaps that things should be left the way they were—they were good companions who had occasional great sex, but Marie wanted more. She wanted to share her life completely again, but she sometimes worried that Roméo felt too pulled into her orbit, that he didn’t have his own life anymore. Maybe that was why he resisted the move into her house. In the early days of their relationship, Marie thought, they would have torn each other’s clothes off by now and done it in front of the fire. Now the sex was still passionate but less frequent and certainly no clothes were ever in danger of ripping. Marie took a big gulp of her wine, and decided to remind Roméo that they were supposed to make The Decision that weekend.

“I guess we are not going to discuss the elephant in the room tonight, are we?”

He took a deep breath. “There are a couple of things going on I need to deal with.”

Roméo hadn’t told her that he’d rented an Airbnb flat in Montreal, just for a few weeks. For him and Sophie. In fact, he hadn’t told her anything about Sophie’s crisis, and amazingly, Marie hadn’t asked.

“I told you about that hit-and-run case—”

“Oh, that poor woman. It’s so—awful! Did they find who killed her?”

“So, I told you they found my cell number in her pocket, and—”

“But you didn’t know her at all, right?”

Roméo made the face he did when Marie wouldn’t let him finish his sentence. She got quiet.

“No. I don’t know her at all. But my phone number was written on the back of a photograph found on her body—”

“What?”

“And…I am pretty sure the person in the photo is Hélène Cousineau—”

“Who?” Marie interrupted. “Oh. Sorry. I’m just a faster talker than you.”

“Hélène Cousineau is Ti-Coune’s sister.”

“Ti-Coune is that friend you went to high school with, right? Who lives near here?”

“Well, he’s not a friend, exactly. Just someone I’ve known a very long time.”

Roméo paused, waiting for the interruption that didn’t happen.

“Hélène pretty much fell off the radar three years ago—she went missing out west. Ti-Coune asked me to look into her disappearance then, but I never turned up anything, so this…this is a big deal, because the photo is fairly recent, I’d say.”

“Do you think she’s living in Montreal?”

“I’m hoping there’s a possibility that she’s alive, for starters. I’m going to talk with Ti-Coune about all this more tomorrow. They were very close as children.”

Marie emptied the last of the wine into their glasses.

“So you think this young…woman—knew Hélène? This Inuit woman? Did they find who ran her over?”

Roméo hesitated. “No.”

“Are they even bothering to look?”

“I would hope so.”

Marie withdrew her foot from Roméo’s hand and sat up. “I meant to tell you this at supper on Thursday, but then you didn’t show up….”

Roméo nodded for her to go on, and Marie described the police abuse she had witnessed against the two Inuit women at the mall.

“I mean, the police were completely out of line. It’s not the first time I’ve seen them practically beat up the homeless. And then this awful woman called them Eskimos, for God’s sake. When was the last time you heard that word?”

Roméo grimaced and shook his head.

“Montreal cops are so fucking racist.”

Roméo thought of Detective Cauchon and how shocked he’d been by his attitude towards the dead woman. Still, he hated when Marie painted everyone with the same brush. It was too simple.

“Marie, sometimes I have seen such kindness from those cops. They have to deal with some very difficult people every day—”

Marie began to protest.

“—and every single day they have to deal with the same problems, the same mental health and addiction issues. And most people get to walk right past them. It’s not so black and white. It’s much more complicated—”

“That’s what people say when they know they’re wrong. It’s complicated. Imagine if Ruby was homeless, or, or…Sophie? Imagine some cop grabbing your daughter like that. It’s a disgrace, Roméo. I mean, they’re treated like animals. And that poor girl who was hit by the car—and just left like that.”

He went to embrace Marie. “I agree.”

Marie squirmed away from his arms. “Something ought to be done.”

“It is a huge, systemic problem, Marie—”

“And we’re the system, so we are part of it.”

Roméo briefly closed his eyes. He just didn’t want to get into anything tonight.

“If she were a young white woman from a ‘good home’ the cops would be all over this. You know that’s true, Roméo. You have to investigate this—”

“Marie, I have no jurisdiction in Montreal—I have no influence on this case—”

“Can’t you work with the Montreal police?”

“I’m not sure ‘working with’ is accurate. I would more aptly describe it as ‘working around.’ Or ‘in spite of.’”

“You have to—you have to…find the fucker who killed that woman, Roméo. Who just…left her there like she was worth…nothing.”

Roméo fell back deeper into the sofa and exhaled.

“I guess I could leave Nicole LaFramboise in charge of the cold cases for a few days. I could look a little closer at this hit-and-run—and how she was connected to Hélène.”

A large log suddenly split and fell, startling both dogs awake.

Neither Roméo nor Marie got up to fix it. Marie took his free hand in hers and squeezed it.

“Thank you for this.”

They both stared into the dying fire and finished the last of their wine.