Asylum (24 page)

“In conjunction with the police,” I said smoothly. Yeah, right.

You never know.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“It’s all well and good to know what,” said Ivan on Saturday morning. “And even why. That doesn’t do much to tell you the
who
, though, does it?”

“I know,” I said, frustrated. Upstairs, the kids were quarreling over the use of the computer they shared when they were at our house; they didn’t have to share, apparently, at their mom’s. I didn’t have the energy to go play referee, and Ivan had his hands full making sandwiches for lunch. Creative sandwiches; Claudia had just informed us that she’d turned vegetarian and that anyone who ate meat was, ipso facto, contributing to murder.

Reason number four hundred why I’d never really wanted children: I just didn’t have the patience. I was dealing with enough mayhem already: it was annoying, on top of everything else, to be told—and in the most patronizing voice imaginable—that I should be worrying about where my ham came from.

I slumped down in my chair at the kitchen table. “Julian’s off the case,” I said miserably. “
Monsieur le directeur
having concluded that they were all sex killings and that the perpetrator is locked up.”

“Won’t he change his mind if there’s another?” asked Ivan.

I stared at him. “What did you say?”

He shrugged; somehow he always looks more Russian when he’s shrugging, making hand gestures. His body in movement is different from his body at rest. I don’t know what that’s about. Genetics? DNA?

It’s not like he’s ever spent time in the cafés of St. Petersburg.

“Martine, just because you’ve found these connections between the victims doesn’t mean that there’s not somebody else out there who’s still in danger from this guy, whoever he is,” he said, and immediately got distracted. “Oh, damn. Vegetarians eat eggs, don’t they?”

“You mean that someone else—”

“Look,” he said, pulling out a chair and sitting across from me. “Whoever this is, he’s going around eliminating women who he feels are putting him in some sort of danger because of their investigations into the Allan and the asylum, right? So who’s to say that these are the only four? Maybe there’s someone else, someone who’s not even on your radar. Maybe even a man.”

A man. That was a thought. How would they pass off a man’s murder as the work of a psychotic rapist? Then I had a thought. “Dr. MacDougal?”

Ivan shook his head. “If they wanted to keep him from talking, wouldn’t they have done it by now?”

“I don’t know.” The professor
did
seem to have all the facts, I thought, and maybe a dawning willingness to share them; yet the killer hadn’t even considered eliminating him. What was the difference? Or was he the killer? He could have, after all, just been been putting on some act in front of me. I stared into space, biting my bottom lip. There was still too much that we didn’t know.

Ivan got up again and bustled around the counter. “Lunch is ready!” he called out, then turned to me. “Let’s not talk about it now,” he said. “There’s no reason for the kids to hear this.”

I nodded, still thinking, dazed by the revelation. We had to narrow all this down to a person, I thought; not the Allan, or the asylum, or even McGill or Lansbury Pharmaceuticals. A
person
had raped and killed these women, not a corporation, not an institution. Who was it?

Claudia was not happy with the egg salad that Ivan had determined was the only nutritious non-meat we had in the refrigerator, and sulked. Lukas, happily tearing into his ham-and-brie on baguette, made piggy noises at her. “Stop it!” I said, rather more sharply than I’d meant to. “Claudia, eat the egg salad. We’ll go out for crêpes tonight. And Lukas, stop teasing your sister.”

“I’ll be hungry all afternoon!” she wailed.

“Not if you eat the egg salad.”

“Eat it, Claudia,” Ivan intervened, his voice brooking no nonsense. “We’re going to be walking a lot this afternoon, you need to have something in your stomach.”

“Why are we walking a lot this afternoon?”

“Because we’re going to Notre-Dame-des-Neiges to see your
belle-maman’s
mother.”

“Oh, yuck,” said Claudia. “I hate going to the stupid cemetery.”

“You make it sound like we’re going to have tea with her or something,” said Lukas to Ivan, watching his sister, enjoying the show. “She’s dead,” he added loudly, for Claudia’s benefit.

Every month Ivan and I visit my mother’s grave in the cemetery high up on the hill—the “
mont
” or “mount” part of Montréal. If the kids are spending that particular weekend with us, they come along. We trim the grass and weeds that seem to always be springing up, we plant bulbs if it’s fall, we whisk the snow away if it’s winter, we add fresh flowers in the summer.

I’d had a fairly—okay,
very
—problematic relationship with my mother when she was alive, but I’m nothing if not dutiful now that she’s dead. It’s guilt, no doubt. But it has to be said that interactions with her now are certainly a lot easier than they were before.

“Well, we’re going, anyway,” said Ivan.

“I vote that we don’t,” said Claudia.

“Me, too,” added Lukas, for once with his sister.

“This isn’t a democracy,” I said calmly. “There are no votes. So eat your lunch, or you’ll have the same thing for dinner.” I took a prosaic approach to meals. I had no idea whether it was good psychology or not. You didn’t eat it at lunch, that’s what you got for dinner. You didn’t eat it at dinner, it would be waiting for you at breakfast. After the first two days of howling and slamming doors, the system continued to work well.

“I thought we were going to the
crêperie
tonight. You said we were going to the
crêperie
!”

“And go to the
crêperie
we shall,” Ivan agreed. “But if you don’t eat your sandwich now, you’ll be eating egg salad at the
crêperie
.”

“This is so unfair!”

“Yes,” Ivan and I agreed in unison.

Notre-Dame-des-Neiges—our Lady of the Snows—is one of the most beautiful places in the world, at least of the places I’ve ever been. Maybe it takes the edge off dying, if you know that forever you’ll be in this gorgeous quiet place. Comparable to Cambridge’s Victorian-era Mount Auburn cemetery, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges is the third-largest cemetery in North America and part of the historic register. People come for many reasons: to visit the graves and mausoleums, to bird-watch, to see the plant and tree and animal species, to feel calm and reflective. I come because I am a daughter.

Maman
’s stone isn’t as imposing as many of the others, but it’s in a nice place under a tree on the upper slopes of the cemetery, and as always, as soon as we arrived I put my hand on it and murmured something that was part prayer, part conversation, part incantation.

“You miss her?” Ivan’s voice was light in my ear.

“Of course,” I said automatically, though the reality was far more complicated than that. My connection with my mother had been intense: we’d alternately passionately loved and passionately hated each other,
maman
and I, all throughout my childhood; the feelings, as could be expected, gained both momentum and intensity once I hit adolescence.

Unpleasant memories, most of them. There was no overt abuse; she never, ever laid a hand on me; but she did manage to make me feel awkward and unintelligent for most of my life. I’d had to fight it to get where I was now. Most of the time I was pretty damned successful.

“At least,” he said, as though following my thoughts, “your relationship was never boring.” His, apparently, had been.

“No,” I agreed. “It was never boring.” I watched as Lukas and Claudia pretended to embrace a nearby weeping statue; they were giggling, and I could almost hear what my mother would have said about that. “But she ruined kids for me,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged. “Thanks to her, I was absolutely terrified of not being an adequate stepmother, and I’m still not sure I’m getting this whole parenting thing right.” I sighed and looked past her grave, out into the middle distance. “I never told you this, but I almost didn’t marry you, because of your kids, because of those feelings.”

Ivan shook his head. “Stop it. You’re doing better than ninety-five percent of the parents out there. You know that. Stepmothers have a difficult act to follow. By definition, you entered a house of grief. And you’ve done wonders with it. The kids love you, you get along better with Margery than I do, and you make it look easy.”

I stared at him, aghast. “Easy?”

He shrugged. “You bring your own style to it. You bring your own self to it. And sometimes it explodes, because that’s what parenting is all about. Just realize I know that this stepmother gig isn’t exactly a walk in the
parc
. And whether your mother would realize that or not is strictly irrelevant.”

I grinned and kissed him. Some day Ivan isn’t going to say exactly the right thing at the right moment and I’m going to faint.

Maybe.

We got to work. The kids, easily bored, wandered off together, arguing fiercely about something they weren’t going to remember ten minutes later. The afternoon was warm, one of those long autumn days that make you believe you can hold off the winter just a little longer, that fill your heart and lungs with sunshine and hope. We trimmed and polished and put some flowers in the vase in front of the stone, then just sat there with our backs to the stone and looked off together into the distance, the city below us, each of us immersed in thought—or not. In my case, my mind was pretty much a blank, I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. “What a perfect day,” I said on a sigh.

“It is that,” Ivan agreed. “Lucky to stay forever in such a perfect place.”

And that was when it hit me.

The sheer privilege of this place, the luxury of space and beauty, the option of remembrance, of having your name on a stone, even when there was no family left to tend the grave, even when one hundred years had passed, that reminder that you had once been here, breathed this air, walked these streets.

He was right: there was memory here.

Something the orphans buried without tombstones would never have. No beauty, no names, no remembrance. It was as if they had never lived or breathed or suffered or died. People write books, compose music, make discoveries, become saints or murderers, and all of it ensuring that, for a little while at least, their names will not be forgotten. Parents have children so that their names, their genetic code, their fortunes will live on after them. Vast cemeteries are built so that someone walking through them can happen on a name, read the dates and the inscriptions, maybe say something out loud, and for that brief moment the person can live again.

I looked around me at the beauty, the tranquility, the peace of all these monuments, the thousands and thousands of people whose names are still read, still remembered, still wondered about, and I thought of that unmarked burial ground by the pig farm, of those small bodies taken from the asylum morgue in the dead of night and buried together, no markers, no memories of names or faces or anything that proved they had lived short unhappy lives and died in terror and pain. The lobotomies. The electroshock. The injections. The drugs.

“What’s going on?” Ivan’s voice interrupted my thinking, his concern clear. “Martine, are you all right?”

I shook my head as though I could rid it of all those thoughts. “Everyone should get a chance to be buried along with their name,” I said, feeling my throat closing up. “Everyone should at least get that chance.”

He reached over and took my hand. He didn’t say anything.

“Whoever it is,” I said, not even realizing how savage I sounded, “I’m going to get him.”

*   *   *

Julian shared my resolution.

“It’s about narrowing it down to a person rather than a company,” I told him after mass on Sunday. The kids and Ivan were playing Monopoly in the living room, and I was sitting on the edge of my bed, talking quietly into the telephone so no one would hear. Ivan’s one request was that the kids not know anything of what I was doing. It seemed a small enough favor. “It’s either McGill University or Lansbury Pharmaceuticals, there’s little doubt of that. But a company didn’t rape those women. A university didn’t kill those women. Someone real, someone flesh-and-blood did. But who?”

“You’re sounding strident,” Julian observed.

“
Pardonne-moi
,” I snapped. “It’s not a topic I can be completely calm about. And I find the fact that you
can
be so calm particularly disturbing.”

“Stop it,” he said without heat. “You’re too emotionally connected here, Martine. Stand back. We have to be rational.”

“I’ll be rational,” I said grimly, “when we can put this person behind bars—and expose everything, make it all public, say whatever it is they don’t want said.”

“That’s all well and good, but there’s no particular need to make a target of yourself,” Julian said mildly. “Why don’t you say all that about Lansbury a little louder? I don’t think they can hear you all the way to City Hall. You really want to show your hand before we know what’s going on?”

City Hall. And my job. He was right; it had to be considered. But my job was small potatoes compared with people’s
lives
. “Wait,” I said. Some of my synapses were finally firing. Dancing, actually. “I
know
someone from one of the pharma companies! Well, that is to say, at least I’ve
met
him, he’s an attorney.” That City Hall association … and I remembered the amused eyes, the connection I’d felt with him. “He said his company’s a big donor to my boss.”

“Is he Lansbury?”

I hesitated, trying to remember. I thought he was from Lansbury, but I couldn’t remember. “Maybe.”

“Doesn’t let McGill off the hook,” he said.

“But listen. Think about it for a second. There’s a lot more oversight at the university. McGill’s been making a show of putting the past behind them. They need the city’s goodwill. But Lansbury’s only responsible to their shareholders.”