Bones to Ashes (26 page)

Harry’s passport lay among my old bills and receipts.

“She’s gone somewhere in Canada,” I said. “Oh God. She’s probably cooking up another of her surprises.”

“Or maybe she figured the little side trip wasn’t worth mentioning.”

Worth mentioning. The phrase triggered a worrisome thought.

“Yesterday, I told Harry about the phone call, the e-mail, and the guy on the stairs. She was incensed. Immediately fingered the pair in Tracadie.”

“Mulally and Babin.”

“Harry didn’t know their names. You don’t suppose she’s gone to Tracadie?”

“That would be nuts.”

We looked at each other. We both knew Harry.

“Harry’s not convinced Obéline killed herself.” My brain was starting to spin possibilities. “Actually, though I’ve never said so, neither am I. Obéline seemed content when we visited her. Maybe Harry’s suspicions drove her to do some snooping on her own.”

“While there, ferret out Mulally and Babin. Ream them. Kill two birds with one stone.”

Even Harry wouldn’t do something that stupid. Or would she? I searched my mind for alternative explanations.

“Last night we also discussed
Bones to Ashes
.”

Ryan gave me a questioning look.

I told him about the book Harry had filched from Obéline Bastarache’s bedside table. And about Flan and Michael O’Connor’s vanity press, O’Connor House.

“Harry thinks Évangéline wrote the poems. Maybe she’s gone to Toronto to talk to Flan O’Connor.”

Another thought.

“Harry found out that the print order for
Bones to Ashes
was placed by a woman named Virginie LeBlanc. LeBlanc used a post office box in Bathurst. Maybe Harry’s gone to Bathurst.”

“Not the easiest place to get to.”

“Jesus, Ryan. What if she
has
gone to Tracadie?” Even to myself I was starting to sound a bit loony.

“Call her.”

“What if—”

Ryan placed a hand on my arm. “Call your sister’s cell phone.”

“Of course. I’m an idiot.”

I picked up the portable, punched Harry’s number, and listened to clicks as the call was routed. In my right ear, a phone rang. In my left, Buddy Holly and the Crickets chirped “That’ll Be the Day.”

Ryan and I both looked at the chair.

Grabbing Harry’s new red leather jeans, I dug through the pockets. And almost flinched when my fingers touched metal.

“She changed pants and forgot,” I said, extracting Harry’s sparkly pink cell.

“She’s fine, Tempe.”

“The last time Harry did this she wasn’t so fine.” My voice cracked. “The last time she almost got herself killed.”

“Harry’s a big girl. She’ll be OK.” Ryan opened his arms. “Come here.”

I didn’t move.

Taking my hands, Ryan reeled me in. As though by reflex, my arms went around him.

Frightening images played in my head, memories of my sister’s long-ago brush with crazies. An ice-pelted windshield. The crack of bullets.

Ryan made comforting noises. Patted my back. My cheek nestled into his chest.

Harry drugged and helpless.

Ryan stroked my hair.

A puppet dance of bodies in a darkened house.

I closed my eyes. Tried to calm my overwrought nerves.

I don’t know how long we stood there. How long it took for the pats to elongate into strokes. Grow more languid. Morph into caresses.

Other memories slowly took over. Ryan in a tiny Guatemalan
posada
. Ryan in my Charlotte bedroom. Ryan in the bedroom just beyond the wall.

I felt Ryan bury his nose in my hair. Inhale. Mumble words.

Slowly, imperceptibly, the moment redefined itself. Ryan’s arms tightened. Mine responded. Unconsciously, our bodies molded to each other.

I felt Ryan’s heat. The familiar curve of his chest. His hips.

I started to speak. To protest? Doubtful.

Ryan’s hands slid to my throat. My face. He lifted my chin.

I realized I was still clutching Harry’s mobile. I turned to place it on the desk.

Ryan twisted my hair in his fist, kissed me hard on the mouth. I kissed back.

Tossed the phone.

Our fingers groped for buttons and zippers.

The digits on my clock glowed 8:34. At some point I, or we, had migrated to my bed. Rolling to my back, I extended an arm.

Cold needles prickled my chest. I was alone.

The refrigerator door whooshed, then a drawer rattled.

Relieved, I grabbed a robe and hurried to the kitchen.

Ryan was fully dressed, holding a beer, staring off into space. Suddenly it struck me. He looked exhausted.

“Hey,” I said.

Ryan started at my voice. “Hey.”

Our eyes met. Ryan grinned a grin I couldn’t interpret. Sadness? Nostalgia? Postcoitus languor?

“You good?” Ryan asked, extending an arm.

“I’m good.”

“You look tense.”

“I’m worried about Harry.”

“If you want I can put out a few feelers, check airlines, trains, car rental agencies.”

“No. Not yet. I—” I what? Overreacting? Being cavalier? The anonymous call and e-mail had implied a threat to my sister as well as to me. “Harry’s just so impulsive. I never know what she’ll do.”

“Come here.”

I moved to Ryan. He hugged me.

“So,” Ryan said.

“So,” I repeated.

Awkward tension filled the kitchen. Birdie wandered in and broke it.

“Birdster!” Ryan squatted to deliver an ear scratch.

“Do you have to rush off?” I asked. To Lutetia? I meant.

“Is that a hint?”

“Not at all. If you’re hungry I can throw something together. But I understand if you have to get back…”

Ryan’s knee popped as he rose. “I’m starving.”

I made my standard bare-cupboard meal. Linguine with clam sauce and a tossed salad. As we prepared the food and ate, I told Ryan what I’d found out about Hippo’s girl. He listened, asked good questions.

“Leprosy. Like, clapper and bell, unclean, go away?”

“The bells were as much to attract charity as to warn people they were approaching the sick. By the way, it’s now called Hansen’s disease.”

“Why?”

“
Mycobacterium leprae
was discovered by Hansen in 1873. It was the first bacterium identified as causing disease in man.”

“Whatever the label, it’s a bad trip.”

“Leprosy actually exists in two forms, tuberculoid and lepromatous. The former is much milder, sometimes resulting in little more than depigmentation spots. Lepromatous leprosy is far more serious. Skin lesions, nodules, plaques, thickened dermis. In some cases the nasal mucosa becomes involved, resulting in chronic congestion and nosebleeds.”

“Not to mention the little buggers cause your flesh to rot.”

“That’s actually a misconception. It’s the body’s attempt to rid itself of the bacterium that causes tissue destruction, excessive regeneration, and eventually mutilation, not the bacterium itself. More salad?”

“Bring it on.”

I handed Ryan the bowl.

“I keep seeing that scene from
Ben Hur.
”

I raised both brows.

“Ben Hur’s mother and sister got leprosy so they had to live in a cave in a deserted quarry. The colony was fed by lowering food over the quarry rim.”

“OK.”

Ryan twirled and downed the last of his pasta. “Now that I think about it, I vaguely recall rumors of leprosy in the Maritimes. But it was always hush-hush. I think there was a leprosarium somewhere out there.”

“Yes. Sheldrake Island.”

“Nah.” Ryan’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “This was a hospital. I’m thinking New Brunswick. Campbellton? Caraquet?” Ryan swallowed, then air-jabbed his fork in sudden realization. “I’ll be damned. It was Tracadie. There was a lazaretto in Tracadie.”

“The town of Tracadie? As in Évangéline? Obéline? Bastarache?” I was so shocked I sounded like a moron. Or a teacher calling roll.

“Trendy burg.”

“No one ever heard of Tracadie. Now the place is in my face every time I turn around.” I pushed back my chair. “Let’s see what we can dig up online.”

Ryan’s eyes dropped to his plate. Sighing, he laid down his fork. I knew what was coming.

“Time to go?” I tried for cheery. Failed.

“I’m sorry, Tempe.”

I shrugged, a false smile slapped on my face.

“I’d rather stay.” Ryan’s voice was very quiet.

“Then stay,” I said.

“I wish it was that simple.”

Ryan stood, touched my cheek, and was gone.

Hearing the door, Birdie lifted his head.

“What happened tonight, Bird?”

The cat yawned.

“Probably a bad move.” I rose and gathered our plates. “But the nookie was great.”

After showering, I logged onto the Internet and Googled the terms “leprosy” and “Tracadie.”

Ryan’s memory had been dead on.

I
SURFED LONG INTO THAT NIGHT, CHASING LOOPS INTO LOOPS into loops. I explored the history of the Tracadie leprosarium, or lazaretto in local parlance. I read personal stories. Educated myself on the cause, classification, diagnosis, and treatment of leprosy. Worked through shifts in public policy concerning the disease.

With regard to Tracadie, I learned the following.

In 1849, after five years of staggering mortality, the New Brunswick board of health recognized the inhumanity of forced quarantine on Sheldrake Island. A site was chosen in a backwater called Tracadie, and meager funds were appropriated for the construction of a lazaretto.

The building was a two-story frame, upstairs for sleeping, downstairs for sitting and dining. Privies were out back. Small and basic, the new digs must have seemed lavish to the seventeen individuals who survived the island.

Though still imprisoned, the sick now had some lifelines to the outside world. Families were closer and could manage visits. Over the decades, doctors showed varying degrees of commitment. Charles-Marie LaBillois. James Nicholson. A. C. Smith. E. P. LaChapelle. Aldoria Robichaud. Priests came and went. Ferdinand-Edmond Gauvreau. Joseph-Auguste Babineau.

Despite better conditions, the number of deaths remained high in the early years. Moved by compassion, a Montreal-based nursing order, les Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph, volunteered to care for the sick. Arriving in 1868, the nuns never left.

I stared at grainy images of these brave sisters, somber in their stiff white wimples and long black veils. Alone, in the dark, I pronounced their musical names. Marie Julie Marguerite Crére. Eulalia Quesnel. Delphine Brault. Amanda Viger. Clémence Bonin. Philomène Fournier. I asked myself, Could I ever have been so selfless? Would I have had the fortitude to sacrifice and to such degree?

I pored over patient photos, scanned from the archives of the Musée historique de Tracadie. Two young girls, heads shaved, hands hidden under their armpits. A bushy-bearded man with a concave nose. A babushkaed granny with bandaged feet. Circa 1886, 1900, 1924. Fashions changed. Faces. The expressions of despair remained ever constant.

Eyewitness accounts were even more heartbreaking. In 1861, a lazaretto priest described a sufferer’s appearance in the end stage of the disease: “…features are not but deep furrows, the lips are big running ulcers, the upper one greatly puffed and turned up towards the seat of the nose which has disappeared, the lower one hanging over the glossy chin.”

The lives of these people were too painful to imagine. Despised by strangers. Feared by family and friends. Exiled to a living tomb. Dead among the living.

Now and then I had to leave the computer. Walk the rooms of my home. Brew tea. Take a break before I could continue.

And, always, my thoughts were plagued by the question of Harry. Where had she gone? Why didn’t she phone? My inability to contact my sister made me feel restive and helpless.

The lazaretto was rebuilt three times. Repositioned slightly. Expanded. Improved.

Various treatments were attempted. A patent medicine called Fowle’s Humor Cure. Chaulmoogra oil. Chaulmoogra oil with quinine or syrup of wild cherry. By injection. By capsule. Nothing worked.

Then, in 1943, Dr. Aldoria Robichaud visited Carville, Louisiana, site of a four-hundred-bed leprosarium. The Carville doctors were experimenting with sulfas.

On Robichaud’s return, diasone treatment was introduced at Tracadie. I could envision the joy, the hope. For the first time a cure was possible. The postwar years saw more pharmaceutical breakthroughs. Dapsone. Rifampicin. Clofazimine. Multidrug therapies.

The final tally shows 327 souls treated for leprosy in New Brunswick. In addition to Canadians, the sick included patients from Scandinavia, China, Russia, Jamaica, and elsewhere.

Besides the fifteen corpses left on Sheldrake Island, 195 were buried in Tracadie, 94 in the founders’ cemetery, 42 in the church cemetery, and 59 in the lepers’ cemetery beside the final lazaretto.

Hippo’s girl had come from Sheldrake Island. Thinking of her, I scanned the names of the dead. Some were pitifully young. Mary Savoy, seventeen. Marie Comeau, nineteen. Olivier Shearson, eighteen. Christopher Drysdale, fourteen. Romain Dorion, fifteen. I wondered, Did I have another young victim in my lab? A girl of sixteen who died an outcast?

My eyes drifted from my laptop to my cell. I willed it to ring. Call, Harry. Pick up a phone and dial. You must know that I’m worried. Even you can’t be that inconsiderate.

The thing remained obstinately mute.

Why?

I left my desk, stretched. The clock said two-twelve. I knew I should sleep. Instead, I returned to the computer, horrified yet fascinated by what I was learning.

The lazaretto’s last patients included two elderly women, Archange and Madame Perehudoff, and an ancient Chinese gentleman referred to as Hum. All three had grown old in the facility. All three had lost touch with their families.

Though cured with diasone, neither Madame Perehudoff nor Hum ever chose to leave. Both died in 1964. Ironically, Archange never contracted leprosy, though her parents and seven siblings had had the disease. Admitted as a teen, Archange endured to become the lazaretto’s final resident.

Down to one patient, the good sisters decided it was time to close shop. But Archange posed a problem. Having lived her whole life among lepers, she was unacceptable to any senior citizens’ residence in town.