The Stone Boy (28 page)
Authors: Sophie Loubière
Tags: #Mystery, #Suspense, #Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense, #Fiction / Psychological, #Fiction / Literary
Martin went to the fireplace.
“Why didn’t you tell me anything about this before?” he said with a sigh.
“Because your mother was still in this world, and that wasn’t her truth.”
“But still, I could have understood that—”
“You would have ended up talking to her about it some day, Martin, and that would have hurt her no end. Do you have any idea what she endured all those years? Being abandoned by her mother—is there anything more devastating for a child?”
The poker glowed amid the flames. Martin’s father used it to ensure that no bit of wood went untouched by their tongues, adding in twigs.
“My uncle didn’t know what to do with her anymore. She was regularly expelled from the private schools he sent her to. She finally quieted down as a teenager. She stopped talking to her mother but didn’t break from her… her fantasy.”
Satisfied, he leaned the poker back in its stand and put the Plexiglas fireguard back in place.
“Elsa was eccentric,” he said fondly. “Charmingly, deliciously eccentric. That’s what made her fascinating, and so different from the others… Your mother saw things that we couldn’t even imagine, things that reassured her. For her, there was no divide between the real and the unreal. If your grandmother came to speak to her at night, she would give her a sneaky little sign on a train platform or do a little dance move in the attic, and that was entirely normal, because she was alive somewhere, on the arm of a handsome adventurer.”
The old man stood, making his knees crack.
“Elsa was a great beauty and had a rare mind,” he said.
Then he sat down on the sofa and, with an affectionate gesture, invited his son to join him.
“You know, Martin, when you were born, it was the best day of her life. And for me, too. I was so proud of having married that woman. But how to forgive her for Bastien… your little gent.”
Martin sat down next to his father.
Dr. Gérard Préau put a hand on his son’s knee.
A sweet warmth filled his eyes.
The fire emblazoned the last of the twigs.
Sleep, Bastien, sleep tight.
Granny Elsa is watching over you.
I won’t let them make you suffer
like they made my poor mother suffer.
They won’t get you with a needle like they did
to my father and like they do to animals.
I won’t let them give you any more injections
of that rotten stuff in your blood that makes you ill
and makes you vomit, my Bastien.
You’ll never be part of something bad.
I won’t leave you.
I’ll stop them from getting to you.
I’ll always be by your side.
You’ll never be cold again.
Sleep tight, my little kitten.
Granny Elsa’s watching over you.
This work was created thanks to the patience and support of the people around me and whom I love biggest and best, as my son would say: my husband, my children, my friends. I would like to thank in particular my friend and doctor, Françoise Brélivet-Iscache—my very own Martin!—who could single-handedly take on the job of GP in Seine-Saint-Denis any day. Thanks also to police captain Olivier Martin, Sgt. Pascal Delannoy, and Madame Alexandra Depauile, social worker, who occupied a post similar to that of Valérie Tremblay for a time at the Gagny police station. All three do remarkable work with a socially marginalized population in which violence against women prevails. May they continue to do their work in the best possible conditions. Thank you to Jean-Marc Souvira for weighing in on my prose and removing the last niggling doubts of a worried author. And to my lovely neighbors—may they forgive me for drawing inspiration from their garden. Now that J.–B. Pouy has seen right through me in revealing my dishonest and perverse nature, it won’t be a piece of cake to invite them over for tea.
It would be unfair not to mention the composers who through the emotional force of their film scores started me on the right note and gave me the tone of the characters and the events in this book. Elsa Préau owes a lot to Alexandre Desplat (
Benjamin Button
,
The Queen
,
Afterwards
), Gabriel Yard (
1408
), and James Newton Howard (
The Interpreter
,
Snow Falling on Cedars
,
The Sixth Sense
). The melancholy and the internal clash of feelings in Martin’s character were sketched out listening to the music of Terence Blanchard (
Inside Man
), Thomas Newman (
Cinderella Man
), and Deborah Lurie (
An Unfinished Life
), not forgetting Erik Satie, whose music Elsa Préau uses to build bridges.
This novel was born on a table at the Salon du Livre in April 2009, a Sunday, at the end of the afternoon. I recounted what I knew of my story without knowing its true ending to Céline Thoulouze. It took a good three-quarters of an hour, until the Salon was closing—they had to throw us out! It was thanks to Céline that this book exists. And as I would never have met Céline without Nicolas Watrin and Anne-Julie Bémont-Lelièvre, thanks to them.
Sophie Loubière is a novelist, journalist, and radio producer. The author of five novels, detective short stories, and a children’s book, Sophie Loubière won the Lion Noir prize and the Ville de Mauves-sur-Loire prize for
The Stone Boy
. She is also the winner of the SACD Meilleur Jeune Auteur Radio prize for her work in radio.
1
French sculptor César (César Baldaccini, 1921–1988) was a founder of the Nouveaux Réalistes group: artists who took inspiration from urban, everyday life and materials. In the early 1960s, César used scrap metal and car parts to mold his works, compressing them to the point of being unrecognizable.
2
Estelle Mouzin was nine years old when she disappeared on 9 January 2003 in Guermantes, Seine-et-Marne, on her way home from school. Though her case was covered extensively in the French press, and reopened repeatedly by the police as they followed different domestic and international lines of inquiry, she has never been found.
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Copyright © 2011 by Sophie Loubière
Translation copyright © 2013 by Nora Mahony
First published in France in 2011 as
L’enfant aux cailloux
by Fleuve Noir
Cover design: Brigid Pearson
Cover photo: © Bjanka Kadic/Arcangel Images
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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First ebook edition: October 2013
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ISBN 978-1-4555-4760-9
