The Lost Highway (45 page)

He had intended to bring Plato and Cicero and Aristotle, and ended up with this.

After it was dried just enough, he closed his eyes for a long time, and decided that he would give this God a chance. That is, he would open the book and read one line. This line would in fact tell him if there was a God watching him or not. He knew this was a silly self-delusion. Yet—what James Joyce thought might not be what he any longer thought. Or could think. That is, the fact that he was implicated in murder had made him confront the very nature of himself and his relation with God, if there was one.

He realized when he opened his eyes he was sitting very much like he had when he was a child in his room. He opened the little faded book and read one line.

He stared at this line for ten minutes, wondering if it was real. That is, if the line was meant for him to read, at that moment, or simply a random bit of writing that had nothing whatsoever to do with him. That is, there was only one of two ways to look upon this. Either some greater force, mysterious and unseen as it was, had allowed him to read this line—the very line he was searching for (though he wouldn’t quite admit to it)—or nothing he did meant anything outside this horrible little place. The one line was from the Gospel of John: “And you are unwilling to come to me that you may have Life!”

He suddenly thought that it was the first time Jesus had spoken to him in sixteen years. And what he said was—true.

Darkness was coming, night’s sweet silence. He picked the knife out of the hiding place, the blood still on it from Poppy Bourque, and held it until the dark night fell.

So he thought suddenly not of Saint John but of magnificent five-foot-four John Keats: “Darkling I listen and at times have been half in love with easeful death.” From a poem of genius almost no one read anymore.

—

A
MY WENT TO TWO PEOPLE THAT DAY, TO SEEK HELP
. B
UT
she did not find it. Her face in its troubled state was even more delightfully kind and human. It was the feature of its impish humanity, her unruly hair, her feet that seemed to dance when she walked, that Rory had loved as a boy.

Robin and Rory were now an item, and like all kids had moved off from the little world to the big world and had no time for people like Amy now. And Robin attended to a much more uniform philosophy of the world, where society dictated that her whims be taken seriously, and only her future, her ideas, her pleasures, and her hopes mattered, and her parents, and even her schooling, were there for the fulfilling of these as best they could.

Rory’s father was an adjuster with Doan Insurance, and Rory looked upon his life as more positive because of it and the people his father dealt with, some of whom were influential men in the area. So he too had finally left his Gum Road sweetheart behind. He had stopped going to church, and shrugged with condescension that she still did. He had the stubble of a little beard he was trying to grow, his self-amused blue eyes staring out of a chubby, somewhat impertinent face. And Robin had her license now, so she and Rory were sitting in her mother’s small car near the church lane, smoking and talking, when Amy walked up to them. When they realized she was there, they both looked at each other wisely and then began to giggle as Robin blew smoke into the silent late summer air in petulant superiority.

“What the heck are you doing?” Rory said like an older brother.

“What?” She smiled, her heart pounding at the disrespect he now was capable of showing for her, staring out the window as if she was the joke she herself didn’t get.

“Yer damn pants, what have you got on them?” Robin asked.

“I put glitter snaps on them,” Amy whispered. “I thought they’d look nice—so?”

“God,” Robin said, “country bumpkin. Those went out of fashion ten years ago.”

Amy smiled. Even more in her sorrow her face somehow looked wondrous.

“Well I’ve been waiting ten years to put them on,” she said. “And I have mastered ‘All Along the Watchtower.’ That’s over ten years old and that’s not out of fashion! And there is no country bumpkin in that!”

She walked back down her lane by herself, and after a time, tears in her eyes, she began to run.

Who could she speak to now?

——

She made the call to Markus the next afternoon. The afternoon of September 2. The afternoon Mrs. Hanson went down to Moncton to pick up her mother and father.

Bauer took the call, but why should he tell Markus Paul, simply because a young girl said she had seen a truck off a back lane? The girl probably wanted attention. Bauer and Paul had just had an argument over charging Proud that had lasted three hours. Bauer had won an argument which he himself took to be irrefutable. So in this regard Amy was at least three hours too late.

—

M
ARKUS
P
AUL LOOKED INTO HIS BOOK OF NOTES WHILE
sitting against the desk in the outer office of the small clapboard RCMP building, with the flag moving in the autumn heat.

It was now September 23.

The truck had been confiscated the day after he had taken John Proud to Richabucto. That is, on September 3.

It sat impounded in the yard, up on blocks, its tires off, its doors off, its seat taken out. The sky was deep, deep blue, the bay—not so far away that it couldn’t be seen—was as blue, and wind chimes tinkled in the office like small angels were moving them.

Markus had found out, by miracle or accident or a little of both, that there was a lotto ticket sold by Burton when he stopped at the garage to buy some cigarettes for his charge, John Proud, on the day he drove him to jail in Richabucto, September 2.

Burton, when Paul asked the question about the now infamous lotto ticket, because he realized Burton sold them, said simply, “I sold it most likely.” And looked very sternly at his friend.

“Oh, you did—well, to who—Poppy Bourque?”

“Not so likely,” Burton sniffed. “No, not so likely—sold it to someone else.”

“Who, Burton? I would appreciate it if you could tell me. Why didn’t you tell us before, you must have known that I was interested—I asked a hundred people. It might solve everything.”

“Yes, it might.” Burton shrugged. “No one believed me in the first place,” he said, sniffing a little sanctimoniously in the pulpy afternoon air. “So I sit here and say nothing—and you sent those other two in, and didn’t come yerself, I figure you didn’t care enough!”

“Well, try me,” Markus said, “see if I will believe you,” realizing the last thing to do was to become exasperated with a soul who had been belittled and beaten most of his life.

“Jimmy Chapman,” Burton said, turning away and straightening some fall fliers on the counter, as if he was trying to hide the name behind his actions.

“Mr. Jim Chapman?” Markus asked.

“Why yes,” Burton scolded, “Jimmy Chapman—I assume!”

Paul drove to Richabucto and then to Moncton, knowing that with this information, if it was true, the case would soon be solved. He did not tell his cousin yet. For his cousin had other serious problems, and he wanted to get him help.

“Alex found the ticket—the old man was fishing—Bourque got involved—why? Blackmail. So they went to Poppy—to get him to claim it?”

If that was the scenario, it was now very easy to see how things had gone wrong. Markus jotted this down, as he always did. “It was Poppy’s honesty that killed him.”

The one thing he never realized was the danger Amy Patch was in. That she was the one elusive witness to the two of them with the truck.

—

N
OW, ON
S
EPTEMBER
23, M
ARKUS WAS REVISITING HIS
notes. He came to a page that said, “Bodecia,” and turned it to read what he had collected and written about her.

Amy was eighty-six pounds. She had spent the summer putting snaps on all her jeans and shirts and decorating her room, to make it more grown-up. She wore red sneakers with the tongues turned down, and she would try and make sure she stepped around every puddle so not to stain them. So her friends now said, when he asked why they had abandoned her, “Her life was random—”

It was more random because she was a girl on a lane and was leaving them to go away. They liked to talk that way—it confused the adults, without which confusion life itself would be no fun—and not move a muscle toward the future. It was strange that Markus, for all his driving the highway, never knew this little girl.

Still, Markus Paul had now pieced together what had happened that summer with her, from the moment she left grade 9 and took the bus back down the old highway to the night of September 2, when Mrs. Hanson drove down to pick up her parents in Moncton.

He knew the times she went for ice cream, or each time she went to the mall, telling her mother she was meeting friends. Most days were spent with either Fanny or her mother—or looking for Burton’s hat, or his boat, which the kids hid on him. She would wade along the shore looking for it until she spied it, then find the oars and row it back up the Bartibog. Two or three days later it would have disappeared again.

Markus had made a note of this too, and those children now denied they hid Burton’s boat on him or took his hat. This, in fact, was what put her in conflict with other kids, because many of them, bored and indolent, had taken to playing pranks on a man she was honor bound to help. So she would look for his hat and find it in the weeds, or look for his scow and find they had hauled it up on ground near the church—or that they had pulled the plug on his freezer full of ice cream. Amy went online and messaged her friends to leave Burton alone.

She had a handle: Ghosty. But she sometimes strayed and went, as they told Markus Paul, “Bodecia on us, which was the British warrior against the Romans!”

“She went Bodecia on you—is that right?”

“Yes sir.”

“Why would she?”

“She was smart, and liked to say she lived in the woods, and had all the things collected on Bodecia.”

“Is that right?”

“She was seriously smart—I mean space-station smart.”

“Is that right?”

“Oh, that’s right,” one boy said, as if reprimanding Markus for his lack of understanding. “That’s right!”

“Space station,” another said, who had his head shaved except for two strands of green hair that hung down over his eyes.

They talked on, crowding about him at the small lace-curtained store, on the steps, as the traffic to and from Tracadie went randomly by. Messaging was a new language and a new way to write, and it took a few days for Markus to decipher it.

They told him she had started to go from random to spiritual. Took a course on Saint Mark. This came about because they, her friends, had abandoned her, though they did not admit this outright.

“Sometime in July.”

“You lost touch with her?”

“Yes sir!”

Markus knew when she had written to Rory that summer. The messages were very ordinary until about August 9.

On August 9 things started to change.

“Bodecia has signed on, C U 2MORO 10, 2 put pollys in the pond?”

And Rory wrote back, saying, “K, c u at 10.”

Markus discovered the child had waited that afternoon in the listless, boring heat. One thing she wanted to show was her sparkling jeans. So she signed on and wrote again: “Wh r U—waiting near pathway? I won’t go to pool alone—U know so, U come 2?”

He didn’t answer. She messaged Robin: “U C him?”

Robin wrote back: “NO—U put wogs in pond?”

“Not so much yet—where is he?”

“Dunno—he’s random, gotta go.”

That day Amy left the house an hour later to go to Fanny’s. The snaps she put on her jeans reflected the sunlight and water and her hair fell softly. She came to the path to Glidden’s pool, which she didn’t want to take alone. So she placed the frogs near the brook that led to the pond, and let them go there. For some reason she did not turn and go back to Fanny’s, which she was supposed to do. She continued walking, thinking she would go check to see if Burton was being teased. But when she came to the very bottom of the lane she saw Rory’s bicycle laying in the field of tall cow corn. She ran toward it, but stopped dead when she saw him and Robin tending to her bicycle. Fixing the chain, and Robin laughing. And so she knew. Later that week she heard Robin had her license.

So every day since then, she would go online to see Rory’s last message, hoping for a new one. Rory, signing on as The Roaring Boy, had written: “K, c u at 10.”

Yet time passed and the days got further and further away from his last message. As summer wore on she wrote: “Bodecia is on, U come 2 Me, Must C U—have something most important to say—secret I have to tell someone! K?”

She wrote August 12, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25 about this secret she could tell no one else. And then August 31: “Bodecia is on, Plez Roaring boy U come over, Redbreast is no longer my friend! You could stay with me at F G—just when Mrs. Hanson goes away to get dad and mom, on Sept 2nd. She is leaving at supper. I would be grateful for just that one day! I could make you Pizza? K??? Please??? I need to tell someone—I think I know something! You tell me if I do?? It is its own World.”

Markus flipped a page with an energy that came from anger.

“The trouble with all of this is it was right before our noses,” Sergeant Bauer said. “So, who knew?”

Markus knew Amy had phoned, but he said nothing now. Bauer had confiscated all of her messages.

Amy wrote Robin on August 31, saying, “Redbreast have U C’n R—I wn R to come to Fanny’s with me—just that day when Mrs. Hanson goes to pick up mom and dad? That is the one and only time, and make U pizza?”

But Redbreast no longer answered.

Amy sent some emails to her father: “I am sure you are happy to be able to come home for a while, wait until you get my hug. My hug will last for an hour and two minutes. But I don’t want to leave the Miramichi—do you think we have to?”

Markus read all of Amy’s messages on a soft September afternoon when kids were now back to school. Little Bodecia, Markus wrote on one of the pages, was abandoned by most of us, most of it accidentally.

He paused. It was all there. That is, reading these things, as strange and as arbitrary as it seemed, everything was in place to make her drowning what Leo hoped it would be: a tragic suicide that all could live with after a certain length of time. Especially if they put a statue to her on Chapman’s Island. Especially if Minnie came back to Alex, and Doreen to Leo.