Sergei did his usual; chased squirrels, sniffed animal tracks and ran between my skis. He even managed one lucky sighting of a deer and raced after it yelping his high pitched warning. By the time we returned home, the sun had sunk beyond the far hills of Echo Lake and with it sank the temperature. My cheeks were cold and my fingers frosty when I entered the house. It promised to be a frigid night.
The message light was flashing on my phone. “23B Church Street,” the voice said without bothering to identify itself as Thérèse. “I’m off tonight. Bring the money.” There was no message from Eric.
Refusing to let a little thing deter me, like not having Pierre’s money in my possession, I stuffed a wad of papers into a similar brown envelope, wrote “Pierre Fournier” on the front and secured it with many layers of tape to make opening it difficult. With the envelope securely zipped into my jacket pocket, I headed out to my truck.
nineteen
I had little difficulty finding Thérèse’s second storey walk-up. It stood two houses down from the largest church in Somerset, the ornate limestone structure of Notre Dame de la Neige that served the predominant French-Canadian population. During its heyday as a lumber town in the early 1900s, Somerset’s population was comprised mostly of English-speaking Scots and Irishmen come to seek their fortune in the new land, but after the wealth of the surrounding old growth forests had been harvested, the Scottish lumber barons and their Irish mill workers had moved to where virgin forests could still produce riches, leaving a town in decline. The French had moved in to fill up the vacuum.
All that remained of this prosperous past were the brick Victorian mansions of the mill owners. Today only their size spoke of past glory. Their expansive gardens and stables had been replaced by humble two-storey frame houses, their ornate verandahs ripped off and their once elegant rooms divided into apartments. And what remained of the grounds had been paved over for parking.
Thérèse lived in one of the larger ones, its bulk nude without the massive porch that had once softened its stark lines. I climbed the outside metal stairs at the rear of the house to her apartment. Within seconds of my knock, her wiry figure stood framed in the glow of the open door. A light from the back parking lot etched the suspicion on her pinched face, while her jaw moved up and down to the rhythm of her gum chewing.
From the stream of joual she spewed out, I caught the French word for “cops” amplified by “maudit”, “calice” and a few other untranslatable Québécois swear words. The torrent ended with an emphatic “Go away and leave me alone.”
“I’m not the police,” I replied in my stilted French. “We talked on the phone. I’m Meg Harris.”
“Ouais, bien sûr,” she said, then snapped back in English, “Ya got my money?”
“I thought it belonged to Pierre, but yes I do.”
“Where is it?”
“You’ll get it once you’ve answered some questions.”
“Sure ya ain’t from the cops?”
“Would I be giving you money if I were?”
She seemed to accept this circular reasoning, for she walked away from the open door and plunked herself down on an electric blue brocade couch covered in protective plastic. I left my snow-covered boots in the boot tray beside a pair of running shoes too large for her small feet and walked across an amazingly clean white shag rug to a glaring red velvet chair, also wrapped in clear plastic. This concern for cleanliness surprised me, since it seemed at odds with her slovenly manner, whereas her taste in bordello décor didn’t.
I wondered what other decorating horror she could add with Pierre’s money, until I spied the pigs, scores of them, crowding every available tabletop and shelf. Fat ones, skinny ones, many with curlicued tails, some with rosy cheeks. Some were carved out of wood, a couple were crystal, but most were made of porcelain. No doubt she’d feel compelled to add another dozen or so to her collection.
Shoving a strand of limp brown hair behind her ears, she snapped her gum and said, “Like I been telling the cops, Pierre’s not here.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“You promised you’d give me the money, eh?”
I waved the fake brown envelope in front of her, then zipped it back into my jacket pocket.
The sight of it seemed to serve the desired purpose, for she immediately answered, “I ain’t seen him in days.”
I counted back to the day of Chantal’s murder. “Have you seen him in the last ten or eleven days?”
“Nope.”
“Any idea where he’s gone?”
“Nah, off on some business trip. Always doin’ that, and don’t tell me neither.”
“What kind of business?”
“How should I know, I ain’t his keeper, eh? Look, I already told all this to the cops. Sure you ain’t with them?”
“What do the cops want with Pierre?” I asked.
“Ain’t saying.”
“Anything to do with Chantal’s murder?”
“That two-timing bitch,” she punctuated with a loud crack of her gum. “Won’t be doin’ much two-timing where she’s gone, that’s for sure.” And she emitted a peel of hoarse cackles. “Too bad the Indian done it, eh?”
“If you mean John-Joe, he didn’t kill her.”
“Ya, sure. They was fighting real bad last time I seen ’em.”
“When?”
“My birthday two weeks ago. J. J. got all fired up over her seein’ some other guy.”
“Any idea who the guy was?”
“Nah, coulda been anyone. Felt sorry for J. J. He fell for her real bad, that’s for sure. And ya knowed she was gonna throw him over the next time a pair of tight pants walked by. She even twitched her ass at Pierre. Couldn’t keep her hands off him. And it was my fuckin’ birthday.”
I compared her scrawny flatness to Chantal’s sumptuous curves and asked, “Could Pierre have been this other guy?”
“No fuckin’ way,” She said with such ferocity, it made me wonder if he hadn’t also sampled Chantal’s sexual favours.
“But I thought Chantal and Pierre were friends.”
“They knowed each other, that’s all.” She jumped up from the couch and went into the kitchen. “Want a beer?” she shouted. I declined. “How well did you know Chantal?”
She returned to the living room, beer bottle in hand, and slumped back down on the couch. But rather than drinking directly from the bottle as I’d expected, she demurely poured the beer into an empty glass sitting on the coffee table. She did, however, take the long, slow draft of a seasoned beer drinker.
What a strange creature, I thought. Full of contradictions.
