Anne-Marie Montbrun’s accident was another story altogether. And she was the mother of four children. And generally had two or three more at home. She often had to traipse all over Vauvert after supper because one of them—one of her own kids—was missing. She’d go to give everyone a kiss at bedtime and there would only be three of her four.
A fantastic girl. She looked twenty-five in her tight little jeans and her size 6 Paraboots. Ninety pounds, she weighed, if that, and enough energy to knock you over. Bringing up her kids virtually on her own, with a husband who was a petroleum prospector and spent at most one week a month at home in Vauvert; she was supreme mistress of her domain, her house in the woods, always willing to help out, she’d take her old Renault Espace to go and get a butane bottle for Monsieur Menthaleau, or ferry Madame Ageron to the supermarket, because the old lady couldn’t see anymore but wasn’t about to admit it.
Never in a bad mood, Anne-Marie Montbrun was always on time, so punctual that you could set your clock by her trips in the car, four times a day when school was in session, at eight, half past noon, two, and half past four: four roundtrips between Vauvert and Longpré in her old rattletrap, one trip empty, one trip full of kids that she would pick up or drop off here and there, depending on which way she was headed.
So it was a sad day—that Tuesday, November 15—when her car left the road in the wide bend at the top of the hill at Les Galardons; two hundred yards from home, she went hurtling down the slope, and the only reason the car came to a halt before the pond was the good graces of a poplar growing along the bank. Thank God—so to speak—she was alone in her Renault. She was deadheading back to school, just before half past four. There was no reason for her to have gone off the road. It was a gray day, that’s true, and there was a bit of fog lingering on the hills. But Anne-Marie was very sure of herself, she was familiar with all the local roads, and she tended to drive fast. Once or twice she’d been told off by the boys in blue. But they never took it any further. She was a skilled driver, and there wasn’t a family for miles around who would have hesitated to trust her with their kids.
There were no witnesses. There must not be more than ten vehicles a day using the road that leads from the Montbrun house to Les Galardons, and of the ten, eight of them would be trucks from the Rémy Bonnier vineyards on their way to the bottling plant at Saint-Lair. According to the investigation, instead of coming out of the bend, Anne-Marie left the road, for no reason, in the middle of the curve and skidded nose first down the slope as if she really had lost her head, going faster and faster until she finally came to a stop against the poplar tree.
Because she was always so punctual, they were able to establish a time frame for the accident, and she must have spent at most a quarter of an hour unconscious in her beat-up old car. One of the Rémy Bonnier drivers spotted her as he drove up the hill, and he sounded the alarm.
At the school, they hadn’t had time to get worried yet. The Montbrun kids were taken for an after-school snack to the principal’s house, above the school, along with Anthony Fabre and Diane Ottaviani, who normally went home with them. While they were eating their bread and butter in silence—not because they were distressed by any premonitions, but because they were intimidated by the principal—Anne-Marie was removed from her car and transported, inanimate, to the nearest hospital.
It took some time to reach Monsieur Montbrun, who was in a helicopter at the time of the accident, somewhere between Port Arthur and Lagos, but the Fabre family agreed to look after Montbrun children. Arthur Montbrun, from the vantage point of his nine years, nevertheless understood that his mom must be in bad shape, and they had to lie to him quite firmly to get him to go to bed.