52

That morning, Mickey woke up early, showered, dressed and headed into Boston.

Sue Michaud, the investigator for the law firm, had called him yesterday morning, and, after Mickey explained what he needed, she offered to dig in for the low, low price of two hundred an hour. Mickey didn’t hesitate. He said yes.

What surprised him, though, was how fast Sue got back to him. She had called him back later that evening, as he and Jim were wrapping up for the day at the job in Newton.

‘That was quick,’ Mickey said.

‘We’re one big happy global family, all of our secrets loaded on the Internet.’ Sue Michaud had the kind of rough, deep voice, with a thick Boston accent, he associated with women who smoked and drank beers and got into fistfights at Bruins hockey games back in the old days at the Boston Garden. ‘The address on the envelope you gave me belongs to a café in Paris. Your mother never worked there – at least not under the name René Flynn.’

Sue told him she spoke French – definitely not the sort of skill a woman who got into fistfights at hockey games would have – and went on to say how she’d spoken to the owner of the café, who told her how the business had been owned and operated by the same family for two generations, the family having also branched out and built two very successful restaurants in the area. He had no record of a woman named René Flynn working at either place, nor any memory of her, but not all his records had made their way into the company’s computer system. It was possible, Sue said, his mother had gone by another name when she arrived in Paris, maybe even had legally changed it for fear of Sean finding her.

Mickey had now caught his mother in two lies: paying for the tuition at St Stephen’s and working at the café.

‘Timothée Peltier,’ Sue said, ‘is still alive. He’s still the owner and operator of his father’s paper company, Peltier Paper. He’s sixty-eight and still lives on the Île Saint-Louis. He married only once, a woman named Margot Vermette. The marriage happened about two years before your mother married your father. Timothée divorced Vermette in November of 1976.’

‘That was the year my mother moved back there.’

‘He never remarried. No kids either.’

Mickey recalled Sean’s comment about Timothée not wanting children.

‘He’s constantly on the move, Timothée,’ Sue said. ‘He has multiple phone numbers. I finally managed to get his contact info by pretending to be the vice-president of some big-name paper company here in the States.’

‘What did he say about my mother?’

‘You asked me to track him down for you, and I did. You didn’t say anything about my talking to him.’

‘I don’t speak French.’

‘But he speaks English. A decent amount, anyway. I can be on the other line, translate for you, when you talk to him. If you want to talk to him.’

‘I do,’ Mickey said. ‘Absolutely.’

Now, though? As he drove, he wasn’t so sure. He was afraid of what other lies his mother had told him. He was afraid of discovering Sean had been telling him the truth. He was afraid of a lot of things right now.

He recalled two lines from the first letter: And remember to keep this quiet. I don’t have to remind you what your father would do to me if he found out where I was hiding.

And now the second letter: I’m coming for you. I know it’s taking longer than I said, and I know you’ve been patient. I need you to keep being patient … Don’t let your father get this address … If you father knows where I’m hiding – well, I don’t have to remind you of what he is capable. Mickey pictured his mother dropping each of these letters off at a mailbox or whatever they called them over there in Paris, his mother knowing exactly what she was doing, mailing him lies. He knew that now.

And yet … and yet, on some level, even before he’d found out about Sean’s trip to Paris, hadn’t a part of him believed his mother wasn’t coming home? Hadn’t he known that, over the course of the months she was gone, if she had really wanted to come back for him, wouldn’t she have made some sort of arrangement? Some sort of effort? Wouldn’t she have tried something?

Your mother could be very persuasive with that soft, gentle voice of hers. Smoothest liar I’ve ever met.

Funny thing about the mind – how it could take each trauma and shave off the parts it didn’t like. Made things easier to store, he supposed. Or maybe it was a survival mechanism. Maybe the brain simply couldn’t handle cataloguing the polarizing depths of how some people could love and hate and kill in equal measures. Maybe the reason why he couldn’t see himself as an alcoholic with a violent temper that mirrored his murderous father’s was the same reason why he couldn’t see Claire willingly walking off with Byrne or his mother never coming home because she didn’t have any room for him in her new life. To accept the truth was to accept all of it, and he could feel his mind starting to crumble under the sheer weight of it.

And now here he was, heading into Boston, to confirm it.

Sean’s words from that day in prison came back to him: Admit it. Your life was so much simpler when you were busy hating me.