Asylum Read online

  “What?” I hadn’t heard that. “Why, because prostitutes are just asking to be raped? To be killed?”

  “Take it easy,” said Julian. “I’m on your side, okay? Turns out, it was moot. Mademoiselle Hubert practiced safe sex with her client that night; and her killer, unfortunately for us, did the same. Rien.”

  “But you know she was raped?” It was difficult to get the words out.

  Julian nodded. “Unless the client was violent with her, which he says he wasn’t, and I believe him: they saw each other regularly.” He put the car into gear as he spoke.

  Again the dramatic entrance into the stream of traffic. I was starting to get used to it. “But the blood,” I said. “Am I remembering right?” I was thinking back to the newspaper accounts that I’d read with such consternation, the first dramatic murder in the city since I’d become publicity director. “There was a lot of blood, wasn’t there? She was stabbed, I know I read that … wouldn’t her blood have been all over him?”

  “Undoubtedly.” Julian checked his rearview mirrors before pulling a sudden exciting U-turn. “But he could have been prepared, he could have worn some sort of covering, or nothing at all. Forensic countermeasures. Then he could have changed back into street clothes after he left her on the bench. Her heart had stopped pumping by then.” We passed a taxi with inches to spare. “If that’s the way it happened, then that would put him in the organized and not-too-crazy section of the bus, by the way. There were a lot of people out that night, even that late, and you can be sure that if anyone had been staggering around covered in blood, we’d have heard about it.”

  We were heading west and north, into the English-speaking part of town. Street names were gradually sounding more and more Anglophone as we went up the hill, and houses were getting grander and grander, and then we were, suddenly it seemed, in the heart of McGill University on Sherbrooke Street. And Julian was continuing his tour. “Moving along to Caroline Richards. You’ll recognize the name, of course.”

  I did, as I had when her mutilated body had been discovered, back in the beginning of July. Caroline Richards had been an investigative reporter, writing for the English-language Globe and Mail newspaper. She had failed to show up for a staff meeting on a Monday morning; her body was discovered that evening by a family strolling along the St. Lawrence River, over in the working-class section called Verdun. She, too, had been displayed on a park bench. Unlike Isabelle, who had been lying on the bench, Caroline had been sitting up straight, as though relaxing and watching the water flow by in front of her.

  I’d wondered at the time how long that family would have to stay in therapy. Collateral damage.

  “She lived up here,” Julian was saying. “Got divorced sometime last year, he got the house, she moved into an apartment near campus, wanted something closer to the action. You know the drill.”

  “I’m happily married,” I pointed out, a little tartly. “So I wouldn’t know.”

  He shrugged. “Good for you,” he said. “Thing is, she was grabbed the night before, on the Sunday; the medical examiner says she died then, sometime during that night. But he had to hang on to her body for a while, all day in fact, ’cause that path where she was found? It’s real popular, even on a Monday. Joggers, cyclists, elderly people out walking, half of Verdun is all over those paths when it’s good weather. She had to have been dumped just minutes before she was found. Raises a lot of interesting questions.” He slanted a look at me.

  “Why didn’t he dump her during the night, like Isabelle Hubert?” I asked obediently. “Why hold on to her, and where? What’s the significance of park benches?”

  He nodded approvingly, his eye wandering over a group of young women passing by the car, books and notebooks clutched to them as they chattered together. “Good questions. And three months on, the answers are, we don’t know, we don’t know, and we don’t know.”

  “I begin to see why the director is having a coronary,” I said.

  He put the car in gear and eased off the clutch. “Next one. Annie Desmarchais was killed in August,” he said. “Both Isabelle and Caroline were in their twenties. Annie, as you saw, was in her sixties. She was a widow, lived with her sister—also a widow—over in Westmount.”

  “Was the sister helpful?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Wanted to be. The sister’s sixty-eight, and all I can say is, I hope I’m that energetic when I hit that age.” For him, I thought sourly, that was probably a matter of light-years away. Ever since I’d turned thirty-five, I was very conscious of time—and youth. “She and Annie spent a lot of time apart, it’s probably why they got along so well. The sister—her name is Violette Sobel—teaches yoga at the community center on Maisonneuve, plays bingo, takes an art class, and has a boyfriend, himself being almost seventy and not a suspect by any stretch of the imagination. Annie was pretty much up there with Violette in terms of activities, but hers were more cerebral. She worked as administrator for this foundation, a place called the Providence Foundation, some kind of local philanthropy that the Demarchais family started and funds. She read books, and was working on her first novel.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend, too?”

  “Nope. Claimed she wasn’t interested, though I gathered that Violette did her part to try and change Annie’s mind. She says she hadn’t set her up with anybody recently. Annie said she was too busy. Said she’d been married once, that was enough for her, thank you very much.”

  Some days, I knew how she felt. Some days, once was more than enough.

  “Anglophone?” I asked, assuming I knew the answer. Living in Westmount was a dead giveaway.

  “Interestingly, no. Desmarchais is the ladies’ maiden name. Apparently Papa made it big as a medical doctor and bought a place where all the rich folks were living, but the family’s Francophone.”

  We’d turned south again, and Julian was pulling over. “There’s the house. It’s in both their names.”

  “She lived the farthest from downtown,” I observed, wondering if it meant anything. Cars passed by. The house, large and elegant and aloof, stood silent.

  “True, but she spent a lot of time down there, our Annie, and over on Sherbrooke, too: that’s where she worked, at the Providence Foundation. It was kind of her foundation; actually, she and her sister started it, though Violette was strictly hands-off.” He paused. “Annie was last seen there on a Thursday night, fairly late. There was a meeting that apparently ended acrimoniously. Someone offered her a ride home, but she called a taxi and left to meet it outside.”

  “What happened then?”

  It was, I thought, a very Gallic shrug coming from someone as determinedly Anglophone as Julian Fletcher. “Who knows? A city worker heading out for the night shift found her up in the Plateau, in the Parc Saint-Louis.”

  I felt a headache building. “I think I can guess.”

  “You got it. The interesting thing is, by now he’s either getting sloppy, or less creative, or else he’s just feeling at home in the Plateau, because that was where we found Danielle Leroux, too.”

  Oh, great. Ivan and I took the kids there. A small park flanked by brightly painted houses. Picture-postcard pretty. Maybe we’d have to find another place to feed the pigeons—at least until I could look at the Parc Saint-Louis without flashing on the image of women’s mutilated bodies propped up on benches.

  It was after the winter that it happened. It had been a bad one, that winter, even by our usual standards, with the orphanage and convent cut off from the rest of the city by snow and electrical failure. We generated our own electricity, so that mattered little; but we were unable to bring any of the work we did to market, or the meat or eggs that we sold, and so everyone looked a little pinched.

  And the cold—Jesus wept, the cold. There was snow coating the inside of the dormitory windows, and when the lights were put out at night, all you could hear was the chattering of hundreds of sets of teeth. No one slept much, not when it was that bitter, and several of
the youngest children died, and we couldn’t even bury them because the ground in the small graveyard beyond the chapel was frozen under six feet of snow.

  So as you can well imagine, when spring came, it was cause for celebration.

  Something was going on, though, and we all knew it; we just didn’t know what “it” was. There was an undercurrent of something among the sisters, and more than once voices were raised behind closed doors—something expressly forbidden. I suppose that should be some comfort to me, shouldn’t it? The fact of there being a rebellion? The knowledge that some of them, at least, tried to protect us?

  I suppose I should be grateful. But it’s hard to see beyond what happened, and feel anything at all.

  That day … Every detail is etched in my mind as clearly as if it happened yesterday. I am the small child standing in line, looking lost. What I didn’t know was that I was standing at the edge of a cliff, about to topple over.

  They never told us what was happening. Perhaps I blame them the most for that. There was no announcement. There were no reasons given. There was only Sister waking us up before dawn, urging us to dress in the dark.

  When the buses were full, they pulled away from the convent, and as I looked back, all I saw was Sister Mary Martha sobbing into her hands.

  On the bus, we just kept going and going, from the outskirts of the city through Montréal itself, then, slowly, the scenery changed, and what I was looking at was more desolation and more isolation as we bumped along what turned into a country lane.

  When we finally stopped, it was after going up a long driveway. In front of us stood a tremendous gray building that wasn’t altogether different from the one we’d left; large and imposing, its stone walls sweeping up several stories with rows and rows of windows, all of them in a line, wings flung out from a central staircase and entrance. There were words carved into the stone above the doorway, but I didn’t know how to decipher them. “Where are we?” I whispered to Marie-Rose, the girl sitting beside me.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  I raised my voice. “Can anyone read?”

  One of the boys—Bobby it was—spoke from the back of the bus. “Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu,” he said. “That’s what it says.”

  Which told us exactly nothing.

  The bus’s engine had stopped and it was getting a little warm inside. The sun had come up and was shining directly in our faces over a field across the road. Finally a sister—not one we knew, and wearing a different habit from “our” sisters—got onto the bus and stood there facing us. “Your attention, children!”

  Most of the chatter subsided.

  “My name is Sister Catherine,” the nun said. “And this is your new home. You’ll need to learn the rules and do what the sisters and their helpers tell you. If you do that, you will have a good life here.”

  A wave of whispers as we all consulted each other, feeling grounded not in this woman’s words but in the familiarity of the other children, of knowing each other in this strange new place.

  And that was the beginning.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  There was trouble at home.

  I could hear it as soon as I turned my key in the front-door lock. Claudia’s wailing voice, then Lukas, sharp and angry. And Ivan, trying to be soothing.

  Welcome home, I thought grimly, then raised my voice cheerfully. “Hello! Anybody here?”

  Lukas arrived almost immediately from the back hallway. With his tousled dark hair and his brilliant blue eyes, my eleven-year-old stepson looked a lot like the posters his sister put up in her room of baby pop stars, though she never seemed to notice the similarities. “Belle-Maman! Dad said you’d be late!” Lukas seemed, on the whole, rather glad that I wasn’t. He threw his arms around my waist.

  I gave him a hug and a kiss, then slid out of my shoes and jacket, dumping them both in the foyer along with my briefcase, and started toward the back of the house. “Your dad making dinner?” I asked hopefully.

  “More like being an umpire,” said Ivan, emerging from the kitchen. He hugged me, whispering, “I think they’re scared about Margery, but they’re taking it out on each other.”

  Lovely. I forced a smile and went past him into the kitchen, the biggest and brightest of the rooms in our apartment, where the family seemed somehow to spend most of its time. Claudia was perched on one of the high stools at the island, doing her nails. What business a nine-year-old has in growing and maintaining long fingernails is a battle I’d long ago given up fighting, since it was clear that Claudia was going to do whatever Claudia chose to do. There were more important things in life to fight over.

  Lukas had disappeared into his room.

  I ignored her as I went across to a glass-fronted cupboard, took down a wineglass, and filled it with Merlot. The sun was most definitely over the yardarm after the day I’d had, and besides, I had a feeling I was going to need the sustenance. “Claudia,” I said conversationally, sipping, “nice to see you, too.”

  An exaggerated sigh, which was apparently the current preadolescent response to anything or anyone. “Hello, Belle-Maman,” she said, her accent slightly worse than her brother’s had been. When Ivan and I married, I resisted having his children call me by my first name. “I just don’t see it as respectful,” I’d told him. After a night of argument, we settled on belle-maman, which literally means “beautiful mommy” and can be used (because French sometimes is a very odd language) to refer either to one’s stepmother or to one’s mother-in-law. As it had no connotations to either the kids or their mother, the name stuck.

  Claudia had more to say. “Daddy says I have to set the table, and I’m not going to do it. It’s not just that I don’t want to, either. It’s illegal. There are child labor laws, you know.”

  I looked over her head at Ivan, now back in the kitchen and with a dish towel slung over his shoulder. That meant that he was, at least, preparing to cook. He was trying to hide a smile, though.

  “Not in Canada there aren’t,” I told Claudia cheerfully. Well, no labor laws that prohibited the setting of the table, anyway. “Have you heard anything about your mom yet?” That was the real issue here; might as well get right down to it.

  “No!” she wailed, and with a sweeping gesture, spilled the nail polish all over the countertop, jumped down from the stool, and ran from the room. Ivan and I stared at each other in dismay.

  “Well,” he said, opening the refrigerator, “that went well.”

  “Yep,” I said, taking a hefty swallow of the Merlot. The smell of the nail polish was bringing on a headache, and the chances of getting Claudia in any state to clean it were nil. I got nail polish remover and pulled out some paper towels and started mopping the noxious stuff up. “What time did you guys get here?”

  He was laying chicken breasts in a pan, assembling olive oil and rosemary. Did I mention that my husband is a brilliant cook? Nights like this, it’s what keeps him alive. “Late. Sylvie picked them up at the airport this morning, and she said traffic at of the airport was horrible, both ways. You’d think on a Friday people would be trying to get out of the city, not into it. And then tonight, traffic from the casino was worse.”

  I shook my head, disposing of the last of the nail polish as I did so. At least she wouldn’t be wearing any of it this weekend. “Montréal’s a tourist destination,” I reminded Ivan. “That’s why I’m gainfully employed, remember?”

  “Speaking of which,” he said, putting the pan into the oven and turning to face me, “what happened today? Are you all right?”

  I took a deep breath. “No,” I said, and even I could hear the tremor in my voice. I took another swallow of the wine. “Boulanger’s assigned me to monitor the police department until they solve these murders, and—”

  I broke off as Lukas entered the kitchen. The kid had enough on his plate with his mother in the hospital; he didn’t need to think his stepmother was falling apart, too. “So what horrible task has your father assigned you that’s
in violation of child labor laws?” I asked.

  He made a face. “Claudia’s just mad ’cause she’s scared about Mom, and it’s easier to be mad than scared,” he said perceptively. He got a soda from the refrigerator and hopped up on the stool his sister had vacated. “Mom’s in the hospital,” he told me.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry, Lukas. Has your stepdad called yet? Do you know how she’s doing?”

  “We’re supposed to call after nine,” Ivan said. “We’ll know pretty soon.” He paused, put an arm lightly around Lukas’s shoulders. “She’s going to be fine,” he said.

  “I know.” Lukas’s voice sounded casual, but the fear in his eyes betrayed him.

  I drew in a deep breath. “Let’s go out,” I suggested, meeting Ivan’s eyes. He hated giving the kids junk food in about the same proportion that they loved eating it. “Instead of just waiting around here to make the call.”

  Lukas brightened immediately. “McDonald’s?” he suggested. “St. Hubert?”

  “Not McDonald’s,” Ivan intervened, but he was already turning off the oven. “That’s a good idea,” he said to me across the room, relief in his eyes. Even Claudia couldn’t sulk, we had found, when eating greasy French fries out of a greasy paper wrapper.

  And so we went to St. Hubert, and it was only as we were waiting in line under its bright neon lights that I remembered the fast food place shared a last name with the first of that summer’s victims. And found that I suddenly wasn’t hungry at all anymore.

  * * *

  Margery was fine.

  The kids went to bed, exhausted and relieved, and Ivan and I sat together in the living room, our fingers entwined, my head on his shoulder. “So,” he said softly, “are you okay?”