Bones to Ashes (14 page)

I let her go on.

“I’ll get my heinie on a plane to
la Belle Province
. You book us tickets to New Brunswick.”

“You’re suggesting we visit Obéline?”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, Hippo will be pissed.”

“Don’t tell him.”

“That would be unprofessional, and potentially dangerous. I’m not a cop, you know. I rely on them.”

“We’ll text him from the forest primeval.”

H
ARRY’S PLANE WAS DUE IN AT TEN. I’D BOOKED A NOON FLIGHT to Moncton. Our plan was to meet at the departure gate.

Montreal’s main airport is situated in the west island suburb of Dorval. For years it was simply called Dorval. Made sense to me. Nope. Effective January 1, 2004, YUL was rechristened Pierre Elliott Trudeau International. Locals still call it Dorval.

By ten, I was parked, checked in, and through security. Harry wasn’t yet at gate 12-C. I wasn’t concerned. Dorval’s “welcome to Canada” immigration line usually makes Disney World’s snake-back-and-forth-through-the-ribbon-maze queue look short.

Ten forty-five. Still no Harry. I checked the board. Her flight had landed at 10:07.

At eleven I began to get antsy. I tried reading, but my eyes kept drifting to the tide of faces passing by.

At eleven-fifteen, I started running possibilities.

No passport. Maybe Harry didn’t know that a government-issued photo ID was no longer sufficient to enter Canada by plane.

Missing luggage. Maybe Harry was filling out forms in triplicate and quintuplicate. From previous visits I knew she didn’t travel light.

Smuggling. Maybe Harry was batting her lashes at some steely faced customs agent. Right. That works.

I went back to reading my Jasper Fforde novel.

The man to my right was beefy, wiry-haired, and overflowed a polyester sports jacket several sizes too small. He kept bouncing one knee up and down while tapping his boarding pass on the armrest between us.

Montreal is not Toronto. Unlike its stodgy Anglo neighbor to the west, the island city celebrates gender and sex. Nightly, bars and bistros host the pheromone ball into the wee, small hours. Billboards proclaim upcoming events with risqué double entendre. Along the highways, half-naked models hawk beer, face cream, watches, and jeans. The town pulses with hot blood and sweat.

But the Big Easy North is never prepared for my sister.

When wire-hair went motionless, I knew Harry had arrived.

She did so with her usual flamboyance, standing in the cart, arms spread like Kate Winslet on the
Titanic
bow. The driver was laughing, tugging her waistband to reconnect her rump with the seat.

The cart slowed, and Harry hopped out. In jeans tight enough to be mistaken for skin, rose and turquoise boots, and a pink Stetson. Spotting me, she whipped off and waved the hat. Blond hair cascaded to her waist.

I stood.

Behind me, wire-hair remained frozen. I knew others were sharing his sight line. Others with a Y in each of their cells.

Harry bore down. The driver followed, a Sherpa pack-muling Neiman Marcus and Louis Vuitton.

“Tem-pee-roo-nee!”

“I was starting to wonder if you’d gotten lost.” Spoken from the con-fines of a spine-crushing hug.

Releasing me, Harry arm-draped the Sherpa. “We were parlay-vooing, weren’t we, An-dray?”

André smiled, clearly at a loss.

As though choreographed, a microphone voice announced the boarding of our flight.

The Sherpa combined two of Harry’s carry-ons and handed them to her, along with a saddlebag shoulder purse. The Neiman Marcus bag was offered to me. I took it.

Harry gave the Sherpa a twenty, a high-beam smile, and a big “mer-cee.”

André zoomed off, a man with a story.

The rental car I’d booked at the Moncton airport was somehow unavailable. An upgrade was offered at the same price.

What type of vehicle?

Spacious. You’ll like it.

Do I have a choice?

No.

While I signed the rental agreement, Harry learned the following.

The agent’s name was George. He was forty-three, divorced, with a ten-year-old son who still wet the bed. Tracadie was a straight shot up Highway 11. Gas was cheap at the Irving station just past Kouchibouguac. Le Coin du pêcheur in Escuminac served a mean lobster roll. The trip would take about two hours.

The spacious upgrade turned out to be a shiny new Cadillac Escalade EXT. Black. Harry was pumped.

“Would you look at this bad buggy. Kickass engine, four-wheel drive, and a trailer hitch. We can boogie this iron pony uphill, downhill, and off the road.”

“I’ll stay on the pavement, thanks. Don’t want to get lost.”

“We won’t.” Harry patted her purse. “I’ve got GPS on my phone.”

We climbed in. The iron pony had that new car smell and an odometer showing forty-five miles. I felt like I was driving a troop carrier.

Though dead on about the sandwich, George had been wildly optimistic on the drive time north.

When we pulled into Tracadie my watch said seven-twenty. Eight-twenty local. Why so long? You guessed it. Harry.

The upside? We’d made friends with an RCMP constable named Kevin Martel, and with most of the residents of Escuminac. We also had snaps of ourselves arm in arm before Le plus gros homard du monde. Shediac was a detour, but how often can one pose in front of the world’s biggest lobster?

At check-in, the nice motel lady told Harry of a restaurant with traditional Acadian food and an outdoor deck. I waited while Harry blow-dried her bangs, then we headed to the waterfront.

Plastic tables. Plastic chairs. Plastic menus.

Nice atmosphere, though. We shared it with men in ball caps hauling on long-necked beers.

The air was cool and smelled of fish and salty mud. The water was dark and restless, flecked by white from a rising moon. Now and then an insomniac gull cried out, stopped, as though surprised by its own voice.

Harry ordered spaghetti. I went for the cod and potatoes. When the waitress left, Harry pointed to a newspaper abandoned on the adjacent table.
L’Acadie Nouvelle
.

“OK, chief. Background. Starting with where the hell we are.”

“Tracadie-Sheila.” I pronounced it Shy-la, like the locals.

“That much I know.”

“In the belly of L’Acadie, homeland to the distinctive, four-century-old Acadian culture.”

“You sound like one of those travel brochures in the motel lobby.”

“I read four while you were doing touch-up on your bangs.”

“They were greasy.”

“Except for the little jog into Shediac, we traveled north today, paralleling the Northumberland Strait. We’re now on the Acadian Peninsula. Remember driving past signs for Neguac?”

“Sort of.”

“The Acadian Peninsula stretches approximately two hundred kilometers up from Neguac, along New Brunswick’s northeastern coast, out to Miscou Island at the tip, then around Chaleurs Bay to Bathurst. There are about two hundred and forty-two thousand French speakers living in the province; about sixty thousand of those are right here on the peninsula.”

Our food arrived. We spent a few moments adding Parmesan and shaking salt and pepper.

“People here trace their unique brand of French, their music, even their cooking style back to Poitou and Brittany.”

“In France.” Harry was a master of the obvious.

“Ancestors of today’s Acadians started arriving in the New World as early as the late seventeenth century, bringing those traditions with them.”

“Didn’t they all move to New Orleans? Évangéline used to talk about that.”

“Not exactly. In 1755, the English ordered the expulsion of some ten thousand French speakers from Nova Scotia. Acadians call the deportation le Grand Dérangement. Lands were confiscated and people were hunted down and shipped off, mainly to France and the United States. Today, maybe a million Americans claim Acadian ancestry, most of those in Louisiana. We call them Cajuns.”

“I’ll be damned.” Harry pounded more cheese onto her pasta. “Why did the English want them out?”

“For refusing to pledge allegiance to the British Crown. Some managed to escape the sweeps, and took refuge up here, along the Restigouche and Miramichi rivers, and along the shores of the Bay of Chaleurs. In the late 1700s, they were joined by Acadians returning from exile.”

“So the French were allowed to come back?”

“Yes, but the English were still dominant and hostile as hell, so an isolated finger of land jutting out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence seemed like a good bet for a place in which they’d be left alone. A lot of them hunkered in here.”

Harry twirled spaghetti, thought working in her eyes.

“What was that poem you and Évangéline were always playacting?”

“‘Evangeline,’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It’s about a pair of doomed Acadian lovers. Gabriel is carried south against his will by the English order of expulsion. Evangeline sets out across America looking for him.”

“What happens?”

“Things don’t go well.”

“Bummer.” Harry downed the pasta, retwirled another forkful. “Remember how I’d nag until you’d give me a part?”

“Oh, yeah.” I pictured Harry, skinny arms crossed, suntanned face a mask of defiance. “You’d last about ten minutes, start whining about the heat, then wander off, leaving us with a gap in casting.”

“I got lousy roles with no lines. A tree. Or a stupid prison guard.”

“Stardom doesn’t come overnight.”

Rolling her eyes, Harry twirled more pasta.

“I always liked Évangéline. She was”—Harry searched for a word—“kind. I also thought she was exceedingly glamorous. Probably because she was five years older than me.”

“I was three years older.”

“Yeah, but you’re my sister. I’ve seen you eating Cool Whip out of the carton with your fingers.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“And Jell-O.”

We smiled at each other, remembering a time of backseat car rides, roller-coaster birthdays, make-believe, and Nancy Drew searches for lost friends. A simpler time. A time when Harry and I were a team.

Eventually, conversation shifted to Obéline.

Should we call ahead, give warning of our upcoming visit? Obéline was barely six when we’d last been together. Her life since had been rough. Her mother was dead, perhaps her sister. Bastarache had abused her. She’d been disfigured by fire. We disagreed on the warmth of the welcome we’d face. Harry felt we’d be greeted like long-lost friends. I wasn’t so sure.

When we settled the check it was well past ten. Too late to phone. Decision made. We’d arrive unannounced.

Our motel was across the inlet from the restaurant. Heading back down Highway 11, I guessed we were recrossing the Little Tracadie River Bridge No. 15. I remembered Hippo’s story, pitied the hapless soul who’d stumbled onto the crankshafted corpse.

I had only one revelation that night.

When Harry wears jeans, she goes commando.

Harry insisted on pancakes in the morning.

Our waitress was squat, with maraschino lipstick and wispy hair somewhere between butter and cream. She provided copious coffee, advice on nail polish, and directions toward the address Hippo had given me.

Highway 11, then east on Rue Sureau Blanc. Right turn at the end of the green fence. Then another. What’s the family name?

Bastarache. Do you know them?

The wrinkled lips crimped into a thin red line. No.

Obéline Landry?

That’ll be all, then?

Even Harry couldn’t cajole the woman into further conversation.

By nine we were back in the Escalade.

Tracadie isn’t big. By nine-fifteen we were turning onto a residential street that might have fit into any suburb on the continent. Well-tended flower beds. Neatly edged lawns. Fresh-enough paint. Most of the houses looked like they’d been built in the eighties.

Hippo’s address took us to a high stone wall at the far end of the block. A plaque gave notice of a residence beyond. An unclasped padlock hung from the rusted iron gate. Harry got out and swung it wide.

A mossy brick drive bisected lawn losing out to weeds. At the end loomed a brick, stone, and timber house with a weathered shingle roof. Not a mansion, but not a shack, either.

Harry and I sat a moment, staring at the dark windows. They stared back, offering nothing.

“Looks like Ye Olde Rod and Gun Club,” Harry said.

She was right. The place had the air of a hunting lodge.

“Ready?”

Harry nodded. She’d been unnaturally quiet since rising. Other than a brief tête-à-tête concerning her aversion to underpants, I’d left her in peace. I figured she was sorting remembrances of Obéline. Bracing herself for the scarred woman we were about to encounter. I was.

Wordlessly, we got out and walked to the house.

Overnight, clouds had rolled in, thick and heavy with moisture. The morning promised rain.

Finding no bell, I knocked on the door. It was dark oak, with a leaded glass panel that yielded no hint of a presence beyond.

No answer.

I rapped again, this time on the glass. My knuckles fired off a sharp
rat-a-tat-tat.

Still nothing.

A gull looped overhead, cawing news of the upcoming storm. Tide reports. Gossip known only to the
Larus
mind.

Harry put her face to the glass.

“No movement inside,” she said.

“Maybe she’s a late sleeper.”

Harry straightened and turned. “With our luck, she’s in Wichita Falls.”

“Why would Obéline go to Wichita Falls?”

“Why would anyone go to Wichita Falls?”

I looked around. Not a neighboring structure nearby.

“I’ll check in back.”

“I’ll cover the front, sir.” Saluting, Harry slipped her saddlebag purse from her shoulder. It dropped by her feet with a
thup.

Stepping from the porch, I circled to my right.

A stone deck ran almost the full length of the back of the house. A wing paralleled the deck’s far side, tangential to and invisible from out front. It looked newer, its trim brighter than that on the rest of the structure. I wondered if I was looking at the site of the fire.