Death Du Jour (4 page)

Removing the casket was not easy. Though it was small, the wood was badly damaged and the coffin interior had filled with dirt, increasing the weight to about ten tons. The side trench had been a good call, though I’d underestimated the space we’d need. We had to expand outward by two feet to allow plywood to slide under the coffin. Eventually, we were able to raise the whole assemblage using woven polypropylene rope.

*   *   *

By five-thirty we were drinking coffee in the convent kitchen, exhausted, fingers, toes, and faces thawing. Élisabeth Nicolet and her casket were locked in the back of the archdiocese van, along with my equipment. Tomorrow, Guy would drive her to the Laboratoire de Médecine Légale in Montreal, where I work as Forensic Anthropologist for the Province of Quebec. Since the historic dead do not qualify as forensic cases, special permission had been obtained from the Bureau du Coroner to perform the analysis there. I would have two weeks with the bones.

I set down my cup and said my good-byes. Again. The sisters thanked me, again, smiling through tense faces, nervous already about my findings. They were great smilers.

Father Ménard walked me to my car. It had grown dark and a light snow was falling. The flakes felt strangely hot against my cheeks.

The priest asked once more if I wouldn’t prefer to overnight at the convent. The snow sparkled behind him as it drifted in the porch light. Again, I declined. A few last road directions, and I was on my way.

Twenty minutes on the two-lane and I began to regret my decision. The flakes that had floated lazily in my headlights were now slicing across in a steady diagonal curtain. The road and the trees to either side were covered by a membrane of white that was growing more opaque by the second.

I clutched the wheel with both hands, palms clammy inside my gloves. I slowed to forty. Thirty-five. Every few minutes I tested the brakes. While I have been living in Quebec off and on for years, I have never grown accustomed to winter driving. I think of myself as tough, but put me on wheels in snow and I am Princess Chickenheart. I still have the typical Southern reaction to winter storms. Oh. Snow. Then we won’t be going out, of course. Les québécois look at me and laugh.

Fear has a redeeming quality. It drives away fatigue. Tired as I was, I stayed alert, teeth clenched, neck craned, muscles rigid. The Eastern Townships Autoroute was a bit better than the back roads, but not much. Lac Memphrémagog to Montreal is normally a two-hour drive. It took me almost four.

*   *   *

Shortly after ten, I stood in the dark of my apartment, exhausted, glad to be home. Quebec home. I’d been away in North Carolina almost two months.
Bienvenue
. My thought process had already shifted to French.

I turned up the heat and checked the refrigerator.
Bleak. I micro-zapped a frozen burrito and washed it down with room temperature root beer. Not haute cuisine, but filling.

The luggage I’d dropped off Tuesday night sat unopened in the bedroom. I didn’t consider unpacking. Tomorrow. I fell into bed, planning to sleep at least nine hours. The phone woke me in less than four.

“
Oui,
yes,” I mumbled, the linguistic transition now in limbo.

“Temperance. It is Pierre LaManche. I am very sorry to disturb you at this hour.”

I waited. In the seven years I’d worked for him, the lab director had never called me at three in the morning.

“I hope things went well at Lac Memphrémagog.” He cleared his throat. “I have just had a call from the coroner’s office. There is a house fire in St-Jovite. The firefighters are still trying to get it under control. The arson investigators will go in first thing in the morning, and the coroner wants us there.” Again the throat. “A neighbor says the residents are at home. Their cars are in the driveway.”

“Why do you need me?” I asked in English.

“Apparently the fire is extremely intense. If there are bodies, they will be badly burned. Perhaps reduced to calcined bone and teeth. It could be a difficult recovery.”

Damn. Not tomorrow.

“What time?”

“I will come for you at six
A.M.
?”

“O.K.”

“Temperance. It could be a bad one. There were children living there.”

I set the alarm for five-thirty.

Bienvenue.

I
HAVE LIVED IN THE
S
OUTH
ALL OF MY ADULT LIFE
. I
T
can never be too hot for me. I love the beach in August, sundresses, ceiling fans, the smell of children’s sweaty hair, the sound of bugs at window screens. Yet I spend my summers and school breaks in Quebec. Most months during the academic year, I fly from Charlotte, North Carolina, where I am on the anthropology faculty at the university, to work at the medicolegal lab in Montreal. This is a distance of approximately twelve hundred miles. Due north.

When it is deep winter, I often have a talk with myself before deplaning. It will be cold, I remind myself. It will be very cold. But you will dress for it and be ready. Yes. I will be ready. I never am. It’s always a shock to leave the terminal and take that first, startling breath.

At 6
A.M.
, on the tenth day of March, the thermometer on my patio read two degrees Fahrenheit. Seventeen below, Celsius. I was wearing everything I possibly could. Long underwear, jeans, double sweaters, hiking boots, and woolen socks. Inside the socks, I had sparkly insulated liners designed to keep astronaut feet toasty on Pluto. Same provocative combo as the day before. I’d probably stay just as warm.

When LaManche honked, I zipped my parka, pulled on gloves and ski hat, and bolted from the lobby. Unenthused as I was for the day’s outing, I didn’t want to keep him waiting. And I was extremely overheated.

I had expected a dark sedan, but he waved at me from what would probably be called a sport utility vehicle. Four-wheel drive, bright red, with racing stripes.

“Nice car,” I said as I climbed in.

“
Merci
.” He gestured to a center rack. It held two Styrofoam cups and a Dunkin’ Donuts bag. Bless you. I chose an apple crunch.

On the drive to St-Jovite, LaManche related what he knew. It went little beyond what I’d heard at 3
A.M.
From across the road a neighbor couple saw occupants enter the residence at nine in the evening. The neighbors left after that and visited friends some distance away, where they stayed late. When they were returning around two they noted a glow from down the road, and then flames shooting from the house. Another neighbor thought she’d heard booming sounds sometime after midnight, wasn’t sure, and went back to sleep. The area is remote and sparsely populated. The volunteer fire brigade arrived at two-thirty, and called in help when they saw what they had to deal with. It took two squads over three hours to put out the flames. LaManche had talked to the coroner again at five forty-five. Two deaths were confirmed, others anticipated. Some areas were still too hot, or too dangerous, to search. Arson was suspected.

We drove north in the predawn darkness, into the foothills of the Laurentian Mountains. LaManche talked little, which was fine with me. I am not a morning person. He is an audio junkie, however, and kept an unbroken succession of cassettes playing. Classics, pop,
even C&W, all converted to easy listenin’. Perhaps it was meant to calm, like the numbing music piped to elevators and waiting rooms. It made me jittery.

“How far is St-Jovite?” I picked a double-chocolate honey-glazed.

“It will take us about two hours. St-Jovite is about twenty-five kilometers this side of Mont Tremblant. Have you skied there?” He wore a knee-length parka, army green with a fur-lined hood. From the side, all I could see was the tip of his nose.

“Um. Beautiful.”

I nearly got frostbite on Mont Tremblant. It was the first time I’d skied in Quebec, and I was dressed for the Blue Ridge Mountains. The wind at the summit was cold enough to freeze liquid hydrogen.

“How did things go at Lac Memphrémagog?”

“The grave wasn’t where we expected, but, what’s new? Apparently she was exhumed and reburied in 1911. Odd that there was no record of it.” Very odd, I thought, taking a sip of tepid coffee. Instrumental Springsteen. “Born in the U.S.A.” I tried to block it. “Anyway, we found her. The remains will be delivered to the lab today.”

“It is too bad about this fire. I know you were counting on a free week to concentrate on that analysis.”

In Quebec, winters can be slow for the forensic anthropologist. The temperature rarely rises above freezing. The rivers and lakes ice over, the ground turns rock hard, and snow buries everything. Bugs disappear, and many scavengers go underground. The result: Corpses do not putrefy in the great outdoors. Floaters are not pulled from the St. Lawrence. People, too, burrow in. Hunters, hikers, and picnickers quit roaming the woods and fields, and some of last season’s dead are
not found until the spring melt. The cases that are assigned to me, the faceless in need of a name, decline in number between November and April.

The exception is house fires. During the cold months, these increase. Most burned bodies go to the odontologist and are identified by dental records. The address and its occupant are generally known, so antemortem files can be pulled for comparison. It is when charred strangers turn up that my help may be requested.

Or in difficult recovery situations. LaManche was right. I’d been counting on an open agenda, and did not appreciate having to go to St-Jovite.

“Maybe I won’t be involved in the analysis.” A million and one strings began “I’m Sitting on Top of the World.” “They’ll probably have records on the family.”

“Probably.”

We arrived in St-Jovite in less than two hours. The sun had risen and was painting the town and countryside in icy, dawn tones. We turned west onto a winding two-lane. Almost immediately two flatbeds passed us, heading in the opposite direction. One carried a battered gray Honda, the other a red Plymouth Voyager.

“I see they have impounded the cars,” said LaManche.

I watched the vehicles disappear in the side mirror. The van had infant carriers in the backseat and a yellow smiley face on the rear bumper. I pictured a child in the window, tongue out, fingers in ears, mugging at the world. Googly eyes, my sister and I had called it. Perhaps that child lay charred beyond recognition in an upstairs room ahead.

Within minutes we saw what we were looking for. Police cruisers, fire engines, utility trucks, mobile press
units, ambulances, and unmarked cars lined the road and flowed up either side of a long, gravel driveway.

Reporters stood in clusters, some talking, some adjusting equipment. Others sat in cars, keeping warm while waiting out the story. Thanks to the cold and the early hour, there were surprisingly few sightseers. Now and then a car passed, then returned slowly for a second sweep. Round-trip gawkers. Later, there would be many more.

LaManche signaled a turn and angled onto the drive, where a uniformed officer waved us to a stop. He wore an olive green jacket with black fur collar, dark olive muffler, and olive hat, earflaps tied in the up position. His ears and nose were raspberry red, and when he spoke, a cloud of vapor billowed from his mouth. I wanted to tell him to cover his ears, immediately felt like my mother, and didn’t. He’s a big boy. If his lobes crack off, he’ll deal with it.

LaManche showed ID, and the guard waved us in, indicating we should park behind the blue crime scene recovery truck.
SECTION D’I
DENTITÉ JUDICIAIRE
it said in bold black letters. The Crime Scene Recovery unit was already here. The arson boys, too, I suspected.

LaManche and I tugged on hats and gloves and got out. The sky was azure now, the sunlight dazzling off last night’s snow. The air was so frigid it felt crystalline and made everything look sharp and clear. Cars, buildings, trees, and utility poles cast dark shadows on the snowy ground, clean-edged, like images on high-contrast film.

I looked around. The blackened remains of a house, as well as an intact garage and a smaller outbuilding of some sort clustered at the head of the drive, all done in cheap Alpine style. Footpaths formed a triangle in the snow, linking the three buildings. Pines circled what
was left of the house, their branches so laden with snow that the tips bowed downward. I watched a squirrel scamper along a limb, then retreat to the safety of the trunk. In its wake, clumps of snow cascaded down, pockmarking the white below.

The house had a high-pitched roof of red-orange tile, partially standing but darkened now and coated in ice. That portion of the exterior surface which had not burned was covered in cream-colored siding. The windows gaped black and empty, the glass shattered, the turquoise trim burned or darkened with soot.

The left half of the house was charred, its rear largely destroyed. On the far side I could see blackened timbers where roof and walls had once met. Wisps of smoke still rose from somewhere in the back.

The front was less badly damaged. A wooden porch ran its length, and small balconies jutted from upstairs windows. The porch and balconies were constructed of pink pickets, round at the top, with heart-shaped cutouts at regular intervals.