The Lost Highway (39 page)

—

P
OPPY’S HOUSE HAD NO ONE IN IT FOR ABOUT AN HOUR AND
a half. Then suddenly the door opened and Markus came in again. He began to look through the cupboards and baskets and cups, the drawers everywhere. He upset that vase, and looked through bills and receipts. Angry and resentful with himself that he had not discovered what should be discovered. But now his face was determined, his methods professional, and his search intricate.

Why?

Because he had gone home and cooked himself some spaghetti, was sitting before the TV waiting for the sports and saw an advertisement for the 649 lotto, and the information that a ticket worth thirteen million had been sold in northern New Brunswick and so far not claimed. He stood, and began looking here and there for a ticket he himself had bought three weeks before.

While doing so, he realized he was searching in very small places for a piece of paper.

Christ almighty, he thought, this is ridiculous.

He went to John Proud’s wallet, and opened it carefully, looking through it. He zippered it up again. He went back and sat down, stared at his dinner, finished his tea, lit a cigarette, and thought of Alex, and Leo Bourque.

Over the last four days he had written down twelve things all of this might be about, scratching things off one minute and adding things the next, unsure of why he was doing so, like, as he thought, a gamester playing a Ouija board. He kept these silent thoughts away from Sergeant Bauer and others, for they had no use for his obsession with the truck.

Things like “car payment,” “money owed,” “hidden assets,” “real estate,” “fear of Poppy knowing something,” “fear Poppy will tell something,” “couldn’t let him out of the truck,” “couldn’t let him go home,” “couldn’t let him go to the fair,” “gambling money owed,” “must have a weapon.”

And every once in a while he kept coming back to “couldn’t let him out of the truck.”

And then this, after he initially came back from Poppy’s: “Some small item at Mr. Chapman’s house—they were looking for a piece of paper—a piece of paper—looking in drawers and small bill jars for what—it has to be a piece of paper—Poppy discovered they found this piece of paper. They didn’t search Poppy’s house for it!”

A piece of paper!

Over the last two days Markus Paul had thought of a piece of paper. And what would be on a piece of paper one was looking for. He had put down “numbers to a safe,” and thought that had to be it. But what if Old Chapman had no safe? He would have to get into the house and look. But if that was the case, he was at a loss.

And then this, just now which even he laughed at: “lotto ticket worth $13 million.”

But he knew from his work the old Sherlock Holmes adage, even if he himself never read Conan Doyle or watched Sherlock Holmes movies: If one excludes all other possibilities, the possibility that is left, no matter how unlikely, must be the one that is true.

—

B
OURQUE WAS NOT AT ALL CALM, FOR
M
ARKUS
P
AUL WAS AT
his uncle’s all day. He could see the squad car there, and wanted to go over and ask him what was going on. But he hesitated. He knew that if it was nothing to do with him, Markus would come over and speak. He waited, and Markus did not come over. Therefore, it had to be something to do with him. So he walked up the road, and thumbed a ride to Brennen’s tavern. Then after a few beers, with his nerves settled, he went to see Alex. He was now very angry and knew things had to proceed quickly. He had to convince his Siamese twin or be doomed. The only way to convince him was to prove to him how esteemed he would be once this was done. This was the sleight of hand on which everything else hinged.

So he said, “We will have one opportunity and no more. We drown her in the current of Glidden’s pool. The day she is alone—that day and no other!”

“People will find out,” Alex said, as a challenge.

“No,” Bourque explained. “They will say: ‘That crazy little kid, she loved that boy so much that she couldn’t stand going away.’”

This was the one and only hook on which it could all ride.

Yes, she had trouble with a boy and was depressed about leaving him and going out west. In fact, the idea of her leaving had not only made it imperative that they kill her but logical that she, depressed about going out west, would take her life.

Bourque knew very well what to say to his partner, and spoke now as if his life depended upon it: “That is what they will say, Alex—listen to me, they will say you visited her when Sam was away, and tried to comfort her. Got her into a course on ethics to cheer her little bauble head up. But you who knew she was depressed could not help her with this boy. The ethics course was done for that reason! SEE! Once that is realized nothing will stop us—we will be as free as birds! Look how it can be envisioned by people! To benefit you!”

Alex listened to this, and it seemed logical as long as Bourque spoke. It was Plato’s noble lie that could catapult him into the future. Plato’s noble lie stating that someone might be sacrificed and a lie be told, a public manipulated if great good could come of it. So if he held on to this, then it could be managed. That is, the very manipulating of the truth sounded far more tempting and very much more desirable than the truth. Alex wasn’t immune to succumbing to it, as long as he listened to Bourque speak. In fact, he had manipulated the truth all of his life.

Bourque in a way had become the new Plato. Because Bourque by now knew exactly how to play on Alex’s vanity and make it seem like reason. The desire to believe that his own altruism concerning this girl tried to prevent her from taking her life, even though the girl’s mother had shunned him, was something the very noblest of humans could say was splendid. In fact, this alone urged him to carry out their plan.

There was even something else—it might be discovered that his family had set aside money for her scholarship, something in Chapman’s will. Alex knew he could say very easily he had insisted upon this. And he would have, if he had thought of it, he decided.

“I knew she was bright—I tried to keep her alive!”

“Well,” Markus Paul would say, “from the earliest time you have tried to show wisdom in the face of your enemies!”

“I am just an ordinary man!”

“How many of us would like to be as ordinary as you! Look what you have done—tried to give back whole islands and everything else!”

So Bourque continued in this soothing and in many respects brilliant vein: People would think that Amy had relied upon him and him alone, because she was so bright. That she could not rely upon her semi-illiterate father. In fact it might be better if she did die, so people could have Alex say, Yes, she was coming to visit me—brought me buckets of blueberries—I insisted she be allowed, because I knew I must try to help her. But there was this boy, and you know young girls and boys! Once she came from the church, from some course she was taking down there, and cried her little eyes out! Father Mac didn’t understand!

“Oh, I’m not going to say that—I will only say she herself came to me.”

And there was of course one more advantageous bit of fiction that could be catapulted into the truth: “Some very worthy people at the university know what you tried to have done—when she was about the size of a sweet pea—but they will see how you stood for life once she was born,” Bourque said with sympathy and understanding. It was as if he himself were changing his stringent mind about this procedure.

And Alex was somewhat comforted. He mulled this over, and ate a carrot.

“My good God, you know—just like with John Proud he tried to protect them his whole life,” Bourque whispered. “That’s what they will say—you won’t even have to grow a beard to be recognized as an intellectual!”

And Minnie; the idea that this might bring her to him some night was a fact not to be sneezed at.

“Not to be sneezed at,” Bourque said, continuing his polemic, and rubbing Alex’s shoulders as if he was a boxer getting ready to stand in the ring.

Alex thought of this for a moment.

“Paul is getting closer,” Bourque said. “I don’t think he has much figured out—and Sergeant Bauer and others are angry at him for leading the department on a wild goose chase and making a mockery of justice. So it might all quiet down once Proud is charged. Paul might face charges himself!”

“How do you know that?”

“I only know what everyone else on the damn highway knows. They are thinking of charging Markus Paul with impeding a police investigation—that’s what some people say, and how angry the police are with him. Soon after this is all over, you will be the only man—the only one the river looks to.”

——

Bourque told him to come with him, and they went down to the beach. It was cold again, and the waves looked mean and choppy toward the North Cape. Alex stared across the water to the island, and the old barricade he had helped the First Nations men build when they took over the island.

“Come with me now,” Bourque said.

They walked along the shore all the way to Arron Brook and then back through the woods to Glidden’s pool.

“What will happen to our souls?” he asked Bourque as they approached Glidden’s pool in the evening, with the trees swaying above them. “I mean, on the very off chance that we have one?”

Bourque was startled, his hands moved slowly and he folded them and leaned against an old black spruce.

“Better off for it,” Leo said, rubbing his nose.

“How in God’s name will we be better off for it?”

“Makes it stronger,” Bourque said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—” Bourque said angrily, “you are worse than my wife—what I mean is better off. What I mean in the intransigence of the morning air, in this small little square root of a place we now exist in—what I am saying, what I am saying is that, well, in a way we will be quite a bit better off—financially. And if we build that center and put Amy’s statue up, we will end up helping far more children than we hurt—a thousand children helped, and one hurt—that is the only way to think of it. And if you don’t think governments don’t think of it this way, we must act then like a government just for this brief moment.”

Bourque continued: “You will stand in by Vince’s rock—you silly, stupid fucker—and I will stand about the turn near Glidden’s pool. She won’t come here alone, even when she puts her pollywoggles in she has someone come with her—so you will get her and bring her to me. But if she goes down on the road to seek help, I will be able to see her. We will get her, and we will quickly, without hesitation, put her in the water—we have to get a lot of water in her puny lungs. She won’t feel so much—we will tell her we want to take her somewhere, her mom is sick or something!”

“But she is afraid of water,” Alex said, smiling, as if this was a hitch in their whole plan.

“Can you swim?”

“No,” Alex admitted, “I don’t swim.”

Bourque slapped him again. “There, for being stupid.”

“Stop that, Jesus Christ!” Alex yelled.

“Don’t you see, that doesn’t matter—we are not going to ask her if she likes water—don’t be ridiculous, you just don’t do that. Besides,” Bourque calculated, “the fact that she hates water shows the kind of state her poor little pea brain was in over this boy Rory. And this boy treated her bad, don’t you worry—he needs a good slap, he treated her so bad, which means, when it all comes down to it, that killing herself was probably the only thing she could do!”

They were silent for a long time.

Then Bourque added with compassion, before they started to walk back, “So what do you think, how does that sound?”

—

M
ARKUS
P
AUL REMEMBERED IN THE
N
EW
T
ESTAMENT HOW
Jesus told his listeners they wanted a sign for everything, and he would not give them one for they lacked belief. They mocked belief and wanted a sign. Well, here it was. Everything pointed away from John Proud, but no one believed him. Sergeant Bauer, who was incensed that a man who had confessed was not yet in jail, was the worst. Yet the signs were everywhere and they did not see those signs.

The simplest things they did not understand. They did not understand ambition as much as greed. Greed they saw as being compatible to the estate of John Proud. Markus had come to see this as a crime of ambition. He did not know how or why, but he felt the two had killed Poppy for ambition. Perhaps, strangely enough, for a lotto ticket that Poppy himself did not have. And why? Because, as he said, of the rapacious ambition of those two. By “of those two” of course he meant Bourque and Chapman. They were both exceedingly ambitious. What was the ambition about? He knew Bourque had grown up in a house without a chair. That could make a man ambitious.

There was something else very obvious. Leo Bourque had been to Poppy Bourque’s that night. Why? Simply a process of elimination. It had to be him, for no one else had visited old Mr. Bourque in the past twelve years except for the girls, their mother, and Leo Bourque himself. So unless Poppy left with a complete stranger then by easy process of elimination Markus had whittled it down to Leo. There was something else. Poppy Bourque’s lights were out, but the porch light was left on. Poppy had turned the lights out, left the porch light on because he believed he would come back in the dark. So as far as Markus could fathom, Poppy was thinking of going out for an hour or so with someone he knew, at least coming back before daylight. That means he either got lost or was taken away. He did not take his flashlight, which, Markus was informed by Bridgette’s aunt, he always did when he walked up the highway at night. This meant he was with someone and being driven somewhere. And it meant that most likely, with the porch light on, he went willingly. Also, all of this information he had acquired without the help of Leo, who was not forthcoming. But when Markus Paul said this to Sergeant Bauer, just as when he said things about the truck, few listened to him.

But Markus now had something else. He had confirmation of Leo Bourque’s fingerprints on one item in Old Poppy’s house. Bourque’s fingerprints were on file because of him having gotten angry and threatening his wife. And one might say his fingerprints should be on everything in Poppy Bourque’s house, because he was always there. But then again, it was what it was on that was the salient point, which no one seemed to think important. So Markus kept it to himself.