Bones to Ashes (17 page)

“You’ve done some doggie-poop scooping,” Harry observed.

“I’m multitalented.”

“I’ve got something else.”

Reclaiming her purse, Harry pulled an object from the side pocket and laid it on the bed.

The significance didn’t register at first. I picked the thing up.

And felt a buzz of excitement.

“Where did you get this?”

“Obéline’s bedside table.”

I
WAS HOLDING A SMALL BOOK WITH A DELICATE GREEN RIBBON curling from the binding. The cover was red. The lettering was black.

Bones to Ashes: An Exultation of Poems.

“Looks like one of those sixties things quoting Mao,” Harry said.

“You stole this?”

“I liberated it.” Sanctimonious. “Mao would approve.”

I turned back the cover. The pages were grainy and yellow, the same cheap paper used in comic books. The print was faded and fuzzy.

No author. No date. No ISBN number. Besides the title, the volume’s only identifier was the name of the publisher. O’Connor House.

I flipped to the last page. Sixty-eight. Blank.

I opened to the ribbon. It was marking a poem titled the same as the collection.

“It’s poetry, Tempe.” Harry’s body language told me she was pumped.

“I’ve never heard of O’Connor House. Could be a vanity press.”

“What’s that?”

“A vanity press charges the author for printing and binding.”

Harry looked confused.

“A commercial publisher’s intended market is the general public. A vanity press’s intended market is the author him-or herself.”

The heavily mascaraed eyes widened.

“OK. That computes. Évangéline wanted to be a poet, right?”

“Right.”

“What if she’s the author?”

I looked at Harry’s excited face.

“We have absolutely no reason to believe that’s so,” I said, knowing I was about to hear one of my sister’s imaginative but virtually baseless hypotheses.

“Any guess why I snitched this particular little volume?”

I shook my head.

“Did you notice the books in that parlor?” She didn’t wait for my answer. “’Course not. You were parlay-voo-ing. But I did. There were dozens. Scores. Every last one in French. Same in the bedroom. Which, don’t get your gizzard twirling, I had to traverse to get to the loo. The one and only English book in that whole place was this one. And it was lying right by Obéline’s bed.”

“What’s your point?”

“One lonely little English paperback? Right there at her bedside?”

“That hardly means—”

“Maybe Obéline rounded up Évangéline’s poetry and had it printed. Like a memorial. You know? Her sister’s dream made real?”

“I suppose it’s a possibility. In that case it was very wrong of us to take it from her.”

Harry leaned forward, eager. “We’ll return it. It’s a clue. We run this publisher to ground, maybe we learn something about Évangéline. Maybe we tank. So what? It won’t hurt the book.”

I couldn’t argue with her reasoning.

“My thinking, it’s worth a look-see.”

“I have to help Ryan tomorrow. And I need to reexamine the skeleton.”

Harry scrambled from the bed, tossed her hair over her shoulders.

“Leave it all to baby sister.”

Ryan arrived at seven-forty. I buzzed him in, suspecting the early landing was geared toward a glimpse of Harry.

Sorry, buckaroo. The Starlet of Slumber won’t rise for four hours.

I pointed Ryan to the coffee, then finished my morning toilette, wondering if he and Harriet Lee actually had “hooked up” during her previous visit. Katy lingo. My prurient curiosity.

When I emerged from the bathroom, Ryan was deep in conversation with Charlie. Birdie was observing from the sofa back.

“Cheaper to keep her.”
Sidestepping back and forth on his perch.

“Buddy Guy.” The cornflower eyes swiveled to me. “Charlie’s a blues man.”

“Charlie’s a cockatiel with a bawdy beak.” I forced my voice stern. “Are you using his training CD’s?”

“Religiously.” All innocence. “Aren’t we, pal?”

As though complicit, Charlie whistled a line from “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

“He’s picked up Korn lyrics,” I said.

“I told you. I’m not into Korn.”

“Someone is.”

Embarrassed realization. Pulling on his nose, Ryan looked away.

Something clicked in my mind.

New CD’s. New musical taste. Lutetia had already moved in with Ryan. I wondered how long it had been.

“Let’s go,” I said, unhappiness settling in my stomach like lead.

Cormier’s studio was in a redbrick three-flat near the intersection of Saint-Laurent and Rachel. The building’s first floor was rented by a dentist named Brigault. The occupant of the third offered something that required a reading knowledge of Chinese.

Ryan noticed me studying the nameplate.

“Ho. Does acupuncture and Tui Na.”

“What’s Tui Na?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

Hippo was unlocking Cormier’s studio when Ryan and I clomped onto the second-floor landing. At his feet sat a cardboard tray holding a white paper bag and three plastic-lidded cups.

During my brief absence in New Brunswick, Montreal’s heat spell had soldiered on undiminished. The cramped hall was cooking, the air reeking of dust and mildew.

Pushing open the door, Hippo pulled a hanky from his pocket and wiped sweat from his face. Then he looked at me.

“Jet-lagged?” he asked, not kindly.

Not waiting for an answer, he squatted, scooped the tray from the threadbare carpet, and disappeared into the flat.

“What was that all about?” Ryan asked.

I shook my head.

I’d telephoned Hippo from the Moncton airport, but as we were leaving, not when we’d arrived. His displeasure was apparent. He’d asked for detailed descriptions of Cheech and Chong, then rung off abruptly.

Cormier’s apartment was what Montreal realtors call a four-and-a-half. He used the large living-dining room in front for his shoots. Arranged next to the walls were various types of photographic equipment. Lights. Backdrops. Meters. Sheets of colored plastic.

One bedroom functioned as an office, the other was strictly for storage. I estimated the rooms held maybe forty file cabinets between them.

The larger bathroom had been converted to a darkroom. The source, I assumed, of the vaguely acrid odor permeating the flat. Curling irons, blow-dryers, and lighted mirrors suggested the smaller bathroom served as a makeup and changing area.

The tiny kitchen retained its original function. There, we had sticky buns and coffee, and discussed strategy.

“How are the cabinets organized?” I asked.

“They got drawers. Each drawer’s stuffed with folders.”

Ryan’s brows lifted at Hippo’s sarcasm, but he said nothing.

“Are the folders arranged alphabetically by client name? By date? By category?” I spoke patiently, a parent to a derisive teen.

“My best assessment, Cormier’s system went something like this. Done. Paid. Shove it in the drawer.” The rusty voice was cool.

“So he separated paid from unpaid accounts?”

“Convoluted, eh?” Hippo reached for his third sticky bun. “Probably take some air travel to crack this baby.”

Ryan jumped in. “Cormier kept an in-basket on his desk for open accounts. Otherwise, his filing doesn’t seem to follow any pattern.”

“The cabinets should at least reflect a rough chronology, right?”

“They’re not that old,” Ryan said. “At some point, Cormier must have transferred materials from elsewhere. Looks like he just shoved crap into drawers.”

The strategy we settled upon went something like this. Take a cabinet. Work from top to bottom, front to back. Pull any file in which the subject was young and female.

Who says detective work isn’t complex?

Though Ryan opened windows in the parlor and kitchen, little breeze penetrated to the windowless bedrooms in the back of the flat. Four hours into the task, my eyes itched and my shirt was saturated.

Cormier had stored many of his records in large brown or blue envelopes. The rest he’d placed in standard manila jackets, the kind you buy at Staples.

And Ryan was right. The guy was lazy. In some drawers he hadn’t even bothered to set the files upright, choosing instead to dump them flat in piles.

Most envelopes were marked with the client’s name in black felt-tip pen. Most file folders were labeled on their tabs. Both envelopes and folders contained contact sheets and negatives in shiny paper sleeves. Some contact sheets bore dates. Others did not. Some files held photocopies of checks. Others did not.

By early afternoon, I’d stared at hundreds of faces frozen in variations on “I’m so happy” or “I’m so sexy.” Some had caused me to linger, pondering that moment when Cormier clicked the shutter.

Had this woman curled her hair and glossed her lips for a disinterested husband? Was her head filled with hopes of rekindled romance?

Was this child thinking of Harry Potter? Of her puppy? Of the ice cream she’d been promised for cheerful compliance?

Though I’d set several folders aside, solicited the opinion of Hippo or Ryan, in the end, I’d added each to my stack of rejects. Some resemblance, but no match. The girls were not among the cold case MP’s or DOA’s of which I was aware.

Hippo was shuffling paper on the far side of the room. Now and then he’d stop to Dristan a nostril or swallow a Tums. Ryan was across the hall in Cormier’s office. It had been almost an hour since either had sought my opinion.

My lower back ached from lifting armloads of folders, and from leaning at an ergonomically inappropriate angle. Rising from the small stool on which I was balanced, I stretched, then bent and touched my toes.

The shuffling stopped. “Want I should order pizza?”

Pizza sounded good. I started to say so.

“Maybe phone Tracadie?”

“Give it a rest, Hippo.”

I heard the
thup
of paper hitting wood. Then Hippo’s face rose above the far row of cabinets. It looked parched and cross.

“I told you this Bastarache is a real piece of work. It would have been useful to have some people keep an eye on you from a distance in case things got close.”

He was right, of course. Hippo’s informants were legion. He could have kept track of us, and perhaps learned who else was doing so.

“Who’s the blonde?”

“My sister.” So he
had
gotten feedback. Probably after my call. “We talked to Obéline. That’s all. We didn’t do any prowling around.”

Hippo did the hanky thing on his brow and neck.

“Do you want to know what we learned?”

“Is the skeleton this kid you knew?”

“I’m holding out for the pizza.”

Hippo circled his row of cabinets. His shirt was so damp it was almost transparent. It was not a good look.

“Anything you don’t eat?”

“Knock yourself out.”

When he’d gone, I remembered. Ryan hates goat cheese.

Little chance, however, that Hippo would think outside the traditional sausage and cheese box. If he did, tough.

I got through another shelf before Hippo returned. I was right.
Toute garnie
. All dressed. Sausage. Pepperoni. Green pepper. Mushroom. Onions.

As we ate, I described my visit to Tracadie, repeating the encounter with the two thugs outside the brasserie. Hippo asked if I’d caught any names. I shook my head in the negative.

“Bastarache’s henchmen?” Ryan asked.

“Most of those guys are too stupid to hench.” Hippo tossed his crust into the box and scooped another slice. “That don’t mean Bastarache can’t jam you up.”

“All I did was visit his wife.”

“The wife he beat up and set on fire.”

I was determined to ignore Hippo’s bad temper. “I’ll send the DNA samples off tomorrow.”

“Coroner likely to cough up the dough?”

“If not, I’ll pay it myself.”

“You put skeletal age at thirteen or fourteen,” Ryan said.

“This kid was sick. If illness slowed her development, I could be low on my estimate.”

“But Obéline said her sister was healthy.”

“Yes,” I said. “She did.”

At five-fifteen, I heaved the last stack of files from the back of the bottom drawer of my eighth file cabinet.

The first was a glamour shot. Claire Welsh. Pouty lips. Pouffy hair. Pushy-up cleavage.

The second was a toddler. Christophe Routier. On a tricycle. In a rocker. Hugging a stuffed Eeyore.

The third was a couple. Alain Tourniquette and Pamela Rayner. Holding hands. Holding hands. Holding hands. The contact sheet was dated July 24, 1984.

Where was I the summer of ’84? Chicago. Married to Pete. Mothering Katy. Finishing a doctorate at Northwestern. The next year Pete switched law firms and we moved to Charlotte. Home. I joined the faculty at UNCC.

My eyes drifted to the double row of gray metal cabinets. I felt overwhelmed. Not merely by the thought of plowing through that immense repository of human stories, but by everything. The dead and missing girls. The skeleton I was calling Hippo’s girl. Évangéline and Obéline. Pete and Summer. Ryan and Lutetia.

Mostly Ryan and Lutetia.

Suck it up, Brennan. You were colleagues before you were lovers. You are colleagues still. He needs your expertise. If someone intentionally harmed these kids, it’s your job to help nail the bastard. Nobody cares about your personal life.

I opened the next file.

S
CRAWLED ON THE TAB WAS THE NAME KITTY STANLEY.

Kitty Stanley stared into the lens, blue eyes rimmed with impossibly long lashes, amber curls sprouting from a black cloche hat pulled low to her brows.

In some shots, she sat with her arms circling a chair back, head resting on them. In others, she lay on her stomach, chin propped on interlaced fingers, feet raised, ankles crossed. Several frames showed tight facial close-ups.

The intensity. The heavy, straight brows.

Adrenaline flowing, I opened an evidence packet, chose a print, and held it beside Cormier’s contact sheet. The strips of images were so small it was hard to evaluate.