Theory of Remainders (33 page)

Another pause. “Also like me.”

“Stop this, Melanie.”

“Maybe it can’t be fixed. Not everything is fixable, you know.”

“What do you mean?” What was she talking about? Him? Or her?

“Nothing,” she said quickly.

“What’s not fixable?” he pressed. He sensed the conversation slipping from his grasp.

“Sometimes it can’t be done.”

“Tell me what you’re talking about,” he pressed.

“I gotta go,” she said hastily.

“Hang on a minute.”

“
Seriously
.” It sounded urgent. “I still have stuff to do before I’m done.”

“Hold on!”

“Goodbye, Dr. Adler,” she said, a quaver in her voice.

“But . . .”

There was a pause on the other end, followed by a click. She was gone.

Eighteen

The next morning he awoke from troubled dreams to find the Aubert home undisturbed: the doors still locked, the shutters closed. What else had he expected?

While the coffee machine burped and steamed in the old kitchen, he fired off a text message to Linda so she’d have it as soon as morning rolled over Boston. The call with Melanie had left him uneasy. She was in a difficult patch, and he didn’t know what to give her. His third ear had gone deaf. Briefly he considered handing her case to Jonas, but no, this was his own responsibility. They had made headway—had at least worked out rules for speaking that no longer included the hurling of objects. Fobbing her off on someone else now would jeopardize it all.

He returned to his room at La Cauchoise to shower and change. The laundry had come back and he drew a white shirt from the bundle, now a dingy shade of gray, the fabric stressed, as though it had been pounded with rocks at a river’s edge. The tips of the collar were worn, and every button along the front was cracked.

As he tied his shoes, the second lace snapped. Two for two.

Then, right on cue, a knock came at the door. What surprise had Yvetot cooked up for him today? More butchered animals, or would they have grown more ambitious? He opened the door, steeled for a confrontation, but it was only his breath that he lost. Yvonne stood before him, dressed in a sober skirt, her purse clutched in her hands. She had regained her composure, had become Madame Legrand once again. Her eyes roamed over the unmade bed, the half-open suitcase, the files and papers strewn over the writing desk, and she raised her eyebrows.

“You should have called in advance,” he said. “I’d have polished the silver.”

She gave a tight smile, which made her wince and raise her fingers to her lip.

“Still tender?” he asked.

“A little.”

“Well, I could say
that’ll teach you
, but I suspect it won’t.”

He stepped to the window. Down on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, a man raised his hand to his mouth and a puff of smoke emerged. Hervé.

“What does he know?”

“He asked me how the meeting went, and I told him the basics. What he needed to hear.”

“Suardet never called?”

She shook her head. “It wouldn’t make him look very good, would it—the way things slid out of control?”

That much was true. But what about Édouard? Suardet couldn’t keep him from speaking out. Since Philip’s arrival in Normandy, not a single step had escaped notice. How was it that this incident, the most violent, could go unreported?

In the distance the bells at Saint-Pierre began to ring the hour.

Yvonne looked down. “But people are talking, Philip. You know what it’s like here. All the old wounds are opened up.”

“Is this you speaking? Or Hervé?”

“Both.” She looked at him now as though studying his face for signs of wear. “At the beginning, I thought you’d be here a few days and that would be the end of it. Life would return to normal. But you didn’t leave. And look what it’s led to. Even I don’t understand what you’re hoping to accomplish.”

“You saw Édouard Morin.”

Yvonne paused. “I have to think of Margaux. She hears all the talk. About Sophie. About you. About us. It’s tearing her up.”

Philip closed his eyes and felt the crumbling inside. He himself could take it. But Margaux? He imagined her listening to rumors at school, each word reminding her that the rotting remains of her sister—a girl who resembled her, who had been almost her age—lay somewhere in the vicinity. Did she have to live with these sickening details, every single day?

And yet, if it could actually be resolved, once and for all, wouldn’t that benefit everyone?

“Say the word,” he murmured. “If you want me to go, I’ll pack my things. I’ll be gone by tomorrow.”

She drifted toward the window and stared out over the skyline. Finally she turned to him. “I need to know. Do you really think there’s a chance? Don’t lie to me, Philip.”

There wasn’t a shred of hard evidence to suggest he was any closer now than fifteen years ago. But over the past few days he’d sensed the presence of a possibility, a kind of unraveling.

“Yes,” he said, meeting her gaze. “I can’t put my finger on it, but I think there’s a chance.”

He watched her eyes search his face for a sign.

“Then find her,” she said. “But do it quickly.”

“What about Hervé? Margaux?”

“Find her,” she said again. The meeting was over. She had picked up her purse.

At the door Yvonne offered her cheek, and he didn’t refuse. After his lips left her skin, he slid his hands down the small of her back, and Yvonne allowed him to draw her closer, tucking her head under his chin. He inhaled the earthy scent of her hair. For a moment they were parents again. They’d made a decision together about their daughter. He closed his eyes and held her as long as he dared.

After she left, he watched through the window as she emerged below. Hervé turned, flicking his cigarette into the gutter. He took her by the arm.

The meeting with Édouard Morin had cracked something open inside of Yvonne, and this bought Philip a little time.

His glasses perched on his nose, he turned to the long process of reviewing documents and recordings, spreading his archive over the spare furnishings of the hotel room. In the diary he circled phrases that had the ring of importance, linking passages by arrows and numbers. He noted symptoms in Morin’s speech, words and phrases that bobbed upon the surface of his language like ocean buoys. Particularly wondrous were the linguistic pirouettes—dazzling displays of wordplay: the apparent and despairing parents who sought to repair the irreparable. Then had come the flourishes in Spanish and Italian and German, not to mention the British accent.

Everything circled back to the one soft connection he had made: Sorquainville, Malamare and Adonville. Alphabetically these towns evoked his daughter’s name. Geographically they mapped a vast triangle within Upper Normandy. Historically they were meaningful only as substitutions for more significant locations. These towns called to mind the years of the war, which in turn was tied to Morin’s frequent use of German—and perhaps even to the reference to the fatherland.

What he couldn’t pin down was the logic that bound these elements together. Too much was missing.

So far he’d been standing at the edge, but now he needed to creep into the forest of symbols. To understand more deeply, he would have to stop thinking
about
Édouard Morin, and begin to think
like
him. There was no simple recipe for producing this shift. All he could do was pore over the documents and hope, aiming for a kind of free-floating attention that could glide over the evidence before him, catching on the burrs of oddity or sliding on the smooth spirals of repetition.

At the same time, the problem of Roger tugged at his attention. No, normally it was no crime for a man to visit his sister’s husband—but when it was a question of Hervé, that circle became harder to square. Roger had other connections, too—local ties so close that he had learned about the beheaded rooster before Philip even told him. And now that the mask had begun to slip, everything took on a different hue. Philip’s mind raced: the yellow rose on the grave, the plaintive insistence that Philip stay in Yvetot, the troubles with Élisabeth, and the carousing. Everything led back somehow to that one night in July of 1993, the one which Roger claimed to have spent with Élisabeth—except that when the family gathered around the police in the small hours of the morning, the two of them had arrived separately and hours apart.

That was how he remembered it. Or imagined it. Where was the line between projection and reality? Paranoid delusion, he often told patients, is nothing more than an exaggerated assessment of probability. That definition sounded glib to him now, skirting the real issue: how do you know when you yourself have crossed the line?

He aired his rattled mind on another long walk, circling through town, jostling ideas with each stumbled step on the uneven cobblestones. Eventually he passed by the
Tord-boyaux
, and a flush of defiance filled him. Yvetot had no hold over him. He pushed through the door and trudged past the surly regulars at the bar, taking up his post at the back table. From there he surveyed the group, staring down their awkward glances. It was the old crew—the greasy-haired one with the tweed driving cap, the tall police officer, the men in farmer’s clothing. Sophie’s grave didn’t qualify him for membership in this community. To them he was a trespasser. But he wouldn’t scare easily. They had no understanding of how little he stood to lose.

He could have returned to the Aubert home for the night, but he was keen to stand his ground. Roger wasn’t very happy about his decision to return to La Cauchoise—nor was Monsieur Bécot—but Yvonne’s support had conferred upon him a new truculence.

The next morning, after fitful sleep, he shuffled down to the breakfast room and found Roger waiting for him, already ordering a fresh pot of coffee.

“No,” he was saying to the serving girl’s question. “No milk is necessary. A good cup of coffee should never be adulterated with other substances. Adultery should be reserved for more important matters. Don’t you agree?”

The girl went beet red. “
Oui, Monsieur
,” she murmured before bustling away.

Philip sat down cautiously while Roger raised a pre-emptive palm. “Don’t start with me, Philip. That was nothing more than banter, which is a national sport in France. And as the health professionals keep saying, sport is good for us.”

“I didn’t say a thing.”

“Well, your puritanical thoughts are rubbing off on me,” he muttered. “I’ve even been feeling guilty about my infidelities to Élisabeth. You know, I really wish I could return to Catholicism. It has a wonderful way of handling guilt. The priest waves his magic wand—well, it’s really his fingers moving in the sign of a blessing—and
poof!
Guilt is gone.” He helped himself to half of Philip’s croissant. “So you made it through another night? No horse heads planted in your sheets? No exploding packages? I do worry about your staying here.”

“I imagine Hervé would agree with you,” Philip replied.

Roger looked surprised at the comparison, then smiled. “But there’s a difference. Hervé is worried about you remaining in the western hemisphere, whereas my concerns are more local. Mind you, it’s not Hervé’s fault that he’s combative and disagreeable. It’s the trait of short people—not to mention people from Rouen. I tried to warn Yvonne about this years ago, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“She came to see me, you know.”

Roger arched his eyebrows.

He decided to take a chance. To see if Roger was serving as a conduit to other sources, Philip would have to put it to the test. He studied his brother-in-law’s expression as he recounted Yvonne’s visit, telling how she’d urged him to continue, contradicting the message Hervé had charged her with.