Nicolas was the only one who had any idea Hodkann was gone. He didn’t know what he was scared of, but he was terribly scared of whatever it was. Just the night before, when they’d talked over what they called their plan of action, Hodkann had thought (or pretended to think) that he might be able to come up with some clue by carefully searching the area around the chalet – even though three feet of snow had fallen since René’s disappearance – or by casually asking the villagers if they’d happened to notice any strange vans around lately. A worried Nicolas had urged him over and over to be careful. He would have preferred that Hodkann not question anyone – even casually – and that, on the pretext of pursuing their investigation, they simply continue each night their secret whispered conversation, made thrilling by an impending danger that would have lost nothing in Nicolas’s eyes by remaining make-believe. Now that the tragedy had occurred, what was Hodkann up to? What would happen if he hadn’t returned in an hour? Or by tonight? If he disappeared too? If they found his dismembered body in the snow tomorrow? Nicolas would be guilty of having kept quiet. By speaking up in time, which meant immediately, he might be able to prevent the worst from happening.
It was growing dark out; the lights had been turned on. Nicolas hovered around Patrick, looking for an opportunity to talk to him privately, but every time he had a chance he hung back and let it slip away. It occurred to him that they might all of them be lured outside the chalet, one by one, each child going off alone in search of the one before, and in the end it would be he, Nicolas, who would find himself alone, truly alone, waiting until the man who had killed them all decided to come in and finish the job. Nicolas would watch the front-door latch slowly open – and it would be time to confront that nameless evil he’d always felt skulking around him and which was now closing in.
When they began setting the table for supper, the teacher remembered Hodkann off in his room and craned her head up the stairwell to shout that he could come down now. Nicolas shivered, but what happened was what he least expected: Hodkann strolled down and joined them as though he hadn’t been out of his room all afternoon. When, how he’d gotten back inside – this Nicolas never found out.
Supper was eaten in an atmosphere of gloom that no one tried to dispel, after which they went to bed, earlier than usual. ‘Try to sleep well, guys,’ said Patrick. ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ Nicolas headed for what had become his room, but the teacher told him he wasn’t sick anymore and could rejoin the others.
When he went to get his pajamas, left rolled up in a ball beneath the sofa cushion, he lingered for a moment in the office, which had ceased to be his special place ever since the policemen’s visit. The soft light of the small lamp beneath its orange shade made him feel like crying. To hold back the tears, he bit down on his wrist, the one around which Patrick had tied the bracelet, now somewhat frayed. He thought once more about the day his family had moved, a year and a half earlier. The decision to leave the town where he’d spent his earliest childhood had been made very quickly, with a haste that had completely baffled him. His mother had kept telling him insistently, vehemently, that he would be much happier where they were going, that he’d make plenty of new friends there, but her agitation, her fits of anger and tears, her way of brushing aside, as though it were an enemy, the lusterless hair that would immediately fall back over her face like a curtain – these things made it almost impossible for Nicolas to believe her words of reassurance. He and his little brother had stopped going to school, and she kept them home all the time. Even during the day, the shutters remained closed. It was summertime: they stifled in a climate of calamity, siege, and secrecy. Nicolas and his little brother had asked for their father, but he’d gone on a long sales trip, she said; he would be joining them in the other town, in the new apartment. On the last day, when the boxes the movers would be coming for after their departure had all been packed, he’d sat in the middle of his empty room and cried the way you do when you’re nine and something dreadful is happening that you just don’t understand. His mother had wanted to take him in her arms to console him, repeating over and over, Nicolas, Nicolas, and he knew that she was hiding something from him, that he couldn’t trust her. She had begun to cry, too, but since she wasn’t telling him the truth, they couldn’t even really cry together.