Asylum (14 page)

*   *   *

“Well, that was thoroughly useless,” I said, sliding into the booth across from Julian. “She’s either scared, or hiding something, or both; but she’s not talking.”

He had ordered poutine for two. A boy after my own heart. Poutine is Québec’s unique contribution to the hardening of the world’s arteries: crisp French fries, mixed with cheese curds and smothered in chicken gravy. It’s horrible. It’s heavenly.

His mouth full of food, Julian shook his head. “What did you expect?” He swallowed and washed the bite down with cider. “She’s not going to give up a secret they’ve kept for decades, and certainly not to someone without a name.”

“I beg your pardon?” I stared at him, a gravy-coated French fry halfway to my mouth.

He gestured dismissively. “Not a Name,” he said, “with a capital N.”

I nodded slowly. “Ah, I see. Not like a Fletcher. One of
the
Fletchers.”

“Got it in one.” He nodded approvingly.

“Okay, so I’ll bow out gracefully and let you take her on. What about Isabelle’s mother?” I asked. “What’s going on there?”

He swallowed more cider, wiped his mouth, and nodded. “Well, one of us had to be successful,” he said as he pulled out his notebook and flipped through the pages. “And I found out about Isabelle’s mother. Here’s the scoop: Juliette Hubert was barely out of diapers when her father was killed in a farm accident.” He looked at me. “What’s a ‘farm accident’?”

I shrugged. “What do I look like—an agricultural expert? Who knows? The machinery they use looks terrifying, maybe that was it.”

“Hmm.” He returned to his notes. “Mother couldn’t support the five children on her own. Enter the parish priest. ‘We’ll take good care of the little ones for you, don’t worry about them.’ She, of course, believed him.”

“Not sure she had a lot of other options.”

“True enough,” he conceded. “So off went Juliette, along with”—he flipped a page back—“Thérèse, Lysette, Marie-Claire, and Frédérique-Aimée.”

“All girls,” I said. “Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if she’d had boys instead. Farms need boys.”

“Maybe not,” said Julian. “Anyway, needless to say, Mom never saw any of them again. She didn’t even know where they were. Probably thought they were living in clean, happy convents somewhere, learning to read and write.”

“What happened to her?”

“Juliette’s mother? Died,” he said. “Don’t know where, don’t know when, don’t know how.”

It didn’t matter, I thought. What a bleak life. She lost the farm and her children when her husband died; she probably left Québec altogether and went down into New England to work the mills, thinking her children were safe and cared for. Poor woman, at least she had the fantasy. “And Juliette?”

“Ah, Juliette,” he said. “She went into the asylum and didn’t know much outside that life. But she was feisty, that’s for sure. What records there are—and, mind you, they’re few and far between—show that she was in trouble most of the time. And being in trouble was big. Really big.”

All of the lightness had drained from his face. “Hell, Martine,” Julian said. “Freezing water. They put little kids’ heads into freezing water to punish them. Juliette spent a lot of time being cold.”

We were both quiet then, thinking about this. It was Dickensian, I thought, pictures from a horrible past that happened not all that long before I was born. That was part of the horror, I realized: its immediacy. A small child, alone and afraid, the nuns, the doctors.

The water.

I pushed my poutine away, nauseated. At this rate, I was going to lose a lot of weight.

Julian rallied. “So she grew up. And who knows what happened to her, but it was bad—nothing good happened in those places. No records of the so-called medical stuff that went on—I think that was all through the Allan—but you can imagine they were probably more likely to use the difficult children for the experiments. It’s one way to keep everyone in line.” His voice was grim. “Anyway, Juliette didn’t stay in line. She survived longer than many of the other kids—she was a survivor, our Juliette. And when she was sixteen years old, she scaled the walls. Literally. Not knowing what was on the other side. You have to admire that.”

I couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of courage that took.

Julian shook his head. “Over the wall and out into the city.”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “Where was she?”

He looked surprised. “The Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu asylum.”

“Where Annie Desmarchais lived until
she
was ten years old.”

We stared at each other. “It means something,” Julian said.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “But what?”

Juliette Hubert had not fared particularly well once she was free in Montréal; but perhaps that didn’t matter. Perhaps, after where she’d been,
anything
was better. Possessing no skills, social or otherwise, she drifted into the life of the night, worked the streets and the brothels of the Sainte-Catherine area. She survived; she survived longer than most. Thinking herself sterile, she was astonished when, in her forties, she became pregnant. Juliette had the child, and at a time when it was nearly impossible to be a single mother, she kept the child, making a life for the two of them in a one-room convenience flat in Chinatown, taking her daughter to school every day, leaving her to the owner of a local noodle shop to feed and supervise in the evenings, coming home late to sing lullabies and tuck her into the one single bed they shared.

Like Victor Hugo’s Fantine, she sickened and died, but not until Isabelle was in her teens and had her own ideas about the world. Isabelle finished school, finished university even; and though she returned to her mother’s profession, it wasn’t because she had no other options. It would be interesting, I thought, to analyze why Isabelle had taken to prostitution; but she had, and in a way that justified all her mother’s sacrifices, at least if making a lot of money is a justification.

I looked across the table at Julian, exhausted. “What’s the point?”

“Hmm?” He finished his poutine and pushed the bowl away. “The point of what?”

I gestured toward his notebook. “All that. So her mother was in the asylum. Her mother’s dead, Julian, she’s been dead for years. Why would the killer go after Isabelle?”

“Isabelle did something,” he reasoned, “that made her a danger to someone. That’s what we’re saying, isn’t it?” I nodded. “And we have to think that it was connected to her mother, to her mother’s early life. So what did she do? That’s what we have to find out. For twenty-some years she did whatever she was doing, and no one cared about her. This summer she did something else, and she had to die.”

I sighed. “Julian, what we’re saying is that out of the blue, suddenly
this summer,
all of these women did something, learned something, said something that meant they had to die. All of them at once. How big a coincidence is that?”

“Exactly.” Julian nodded. “So it’s not a coincidence.” He sat forward in his chair. “They aren’t just connected,” he said slowly, “they also connected, somehow,
with each other
. They had to have connected, it’s the only way it can work. So we have to figure out how they did. And when. And why.”

And that was the hundred-thousand-dollar question.

*   *   *

Julian wasn’t ready to descend on Violette Sobel yet. “Let me make a few calls first,” he said. “Smooth the way. We saw how well she reacted to your impromptu visit.”

“Ah,” I said. “That’s not the way
it’s done
.” I sketched quotation marks in the air.

“Precisely, Watson, you know my ways.” He beamed as he held the door for me and we left the poutine place. “In the meantime, you’ve got to check in with
monsieur le directeur
. And I’m going to play connect the dots.”

“E-mail?” It’s what I had been thinking about.

He shook his head. “You’re better at that than I am,” he said, and his voice grew brisk. “I’m going to see how Caroline Richards fits in. She’s the only English one in the lot.”

“She was a reporter,” I pointed out. “She was writing about the asylums, about the drug experiments. I’d say that her involvement is obvious.”

Again, the finger on the side of the nose. “We’ll see,” he said, then switched his attention to the street. “I don’t believe it! Did you see that? Some idiot cop ticketed me!”

I looked at the TT, double-parked as usual. “What a surprise.”

“Methinks you mock me, lady.” He jumped up, made a sweeping bow, then hopped into the car. “Catch you later.”

Speaking of drugs, I thought facetiously as I hurried toward the Métro,
that
level of energy just had to be chemically induced.

I had a feeling I could use some of them myself.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Monsieur le directeur de la police
was pleased. He was brilliant, and didn’t mind, for once, sharing his exuberance over his brilliance with me. “We’re very close,” he told me unctuously that afternoon. “Very close indeed.” Uriah Heep–like, he rubbed his hands together. Had he been able to dance a jig, I had no doubt that he would.

“Close?” I asked.

“To solving the murders, of course!” He beamed. Even though Richard did most of the liaison work with the police, I knew the director well. I’d never, in seven years at this job, seen him beam before.

It was a little scary.

“I see,” I said cautiously. “What have you found?”

He kept rubbing his hands together. It was getting irritating. “We have a viable suspect in custody.” He nodded, pleased. “Very viable indeed.”

“That’s good news,” I said automatically. And it was, of course; but it also seemed very convenient. Not that I was going to teach the director his job, and I certainly didn’t want to spend my time going off on tangents if they weren’t going to lead to the truth, but still. Still. “Um … You’re sure about him? What evidence do you have? The—mayor will want to know,” I added hastily.

“But of course,
madame
. He is a
clochard
, a homeless man. He had, in his possession, belongings of two of the victims.”

Yikes. That could throw a curveball into my investigation. But it still wasn’t necessarily proof of murder. Homeless people picked up anything they saw lying around. I cleared my throat. “
Monsieur le directeur
—”

“There is more, of course,” he said briskly. “And we’re not ready to charge him yet. But it is looking good,
madame
, very good.”

Very circumstantially good, I thought. Of course he was going to jump on the first and easiest answer that came along. Julian had better be making progress, and so had I, or else they were going to railroad some poor, possibly mentally ill, homeless man— “How old is your suspect,
monsieur
?” I asked suddenly.

“
Comment?
His age?”

“The mayor will wish to know all the details you are free to share,” I said apologetically.

“Ah. Yes.
Bien sûr
. The suspect, he is in his fifties.”

I wrote it down dutifully. “Thank you,
monsieur le directeur
.”

He beamed again. “It is my pleasure,
madame
.”

It was all enough to make you sick.

*   *   *

I walked down to the river after I left the director’s office. The news, such as it was, would wait; and Montréal was experiencing one of its few perfect fall days, the sun bright and warm, the leaves starting to turn, the air slightly crisp but far from cold. The cold would come soon enough.

I got as far as the Old City and sat on a bench, though not without a shiver. The river walk was filled with people, some of them in suits and dresses, playing hooky from their offices; others were in the traditional tourist garb—mismatched clothing, souvenir hats, and cameras—that made my heart glad. A horse-drawn carriage clip-clopped lazily past, and two young men on roller skates did intricate circles in front of the Labyrinth. Even the ducks at the fountain at my back seemed joyous.

It wasn’t a time to think about murder, but the reality was that there were four women who should have been there with me, enjoying the people, drinking in the sun. That was the perspective one had to keep.

That it was preplanned murder, and not random sexually motivated serial killings, I was now convinced. Yeah, okay, so it wasn’t as if I were drawing on years of experience in criminal investigation. But I’m intelligent, and any intelligent person—it seemed to me—would be thinking the same thing. It was premeditated, planned, carefully calculated murder.

Restless, I got up after a few minutes and walked back through the Old City, dodging the inevitable tourists, buskers, and double-parked cars along the way, glad I was wearing my flats to navigate the cobblestones. Maybe I wasn’t ready to go back inside on such a brilliant day, or maybe I was just curious, but I found myself heading toward the Boulevard de Maisonneuve, and soon enough was staring at one of the city’s remaining convents, big brick institutional buildings that still speak of the past. A past that’s best forgotten.

I felt a sudden stab of guilt: I’ve been a Catholic all my life. I went to a Catholic school and wore the Catholic uniform and at the bottom of my purse even now there’s a rosary that I may not use with any regularity, but that my fingers seek out every time I need to feel grounded, every time I need some sort of physical touchstone to an otherworldly reality. The nuns who taught me were extraordinary women, smart and connected to the world, interested and involved and—most important—not at all convinced that they had all the answers. “We all have our own roads to God,” Sister Evangeline told me once. “He doesn’t care how you get there, only that you do.”

And truth be told, I’m not crazy about a lot of aspects of my church—who could be? But it’s still my family. You don’t leave your family just because your uncle Jean-Louis was arrested, or because your father’s too authoritarian, or because your mother’s too remote. You criticize them; you try to change them; but you don’t leave them.

Some days, that was harder than others.