The Stone Boy (27 page)

The DNA tests would take a few weeks. But the medical examiner could already provide some information about the general state of the child before his death. The poor condition of Rémi Chaumoi’s teeth, the presence of old fractures in his skeleton and the hollow in his skull—the result of a violent blow with a metal bar and his cause of death—spoke to the nutritional deficiencies and abuse that he suffered. If it was difficult to put an exact date on his death, the retrieval of certain evidence steered the technical division toward a hypothesis—a hypothesis that would be confirmed later by Desmoulins before the judge. The presence of minuscule bloodstains on the mattress and the child’s clothing (not the result of spatter, but probably from drops from his stepfather’s wounded arm), along with a bloody print taken from the door of the cupboard that belonged to Desmoulins (visible in the pictures, but not taken into consideration in the early days of the investigation), allowed them to establish that the child had been killed in the minutes after Madame Préau fell in the kitchen. Rémi’s stepfather caved in his skull “so that the cops wouldn’t hear him screaming,” he explained.

One question haunted Martin. Why did this scumbag Desmoulins call the police?

“I’ve thought about that a lot,” Audrette answered.

Sitting in a wicker armchair in the middle of the baby’s room, she was folding lilac baby clothes, which she then put into the drawers of an apple-green dresser.

“What are Philippe Desmoulins’s options? His beloved wife and kids are half-conscious. He has one arm in bits and can barely stand. He can’t do much other than call for help, even if there’s a risk they’ll find the kid. Will you pass me those Onesies, please?”

Martin handed his wife the little pile of warm, freshly ironed laundry.

“I understand why Sevran wouldn’t be too sure. In this situation, the cops would be careful with a homicide.”

“Did Sevran tell you that Desmoulins had a record?”

“Not enough to make anyone worry—misspent youth stuff, driving under the influence.”

“Huh! That reminds me of someone. A famous twenty-fourth of December, St. Adèle’s Day.”

“Let me remind you that both of us had been drinking that day.”

“Look! It started snowing.”

Through the bedroom window, snowflakes danced, pushed by the wind, wheeling toward the tops of the pine trees.

“Adèle… Adélie… That’s pretty, Adélie. I like that.”

“You want to name our daughter after part of Antarctica?”

“
En terre Adélie!
Nine hundred thousand kilometers of ice. A heart that’s hard to conquer… Adélie would share her saint’s day with Adèle. What do you think, love?”

Audrette spoke to her belly as she rubbed it, nearly joyful. Fear of childbirth would come later, with the panic of a contraction far more aggressive than the last. Martin left his wife to her baby talk and walked out of the room.

As he went down to the utility room, the memory of something Dr. Mamnoue said about one of his mother’s dreams came back to him; the one where a window was “fighting” with the wind and the curtains were “angry,” and the child—Bastien or Rémi—was playing the piano, his face and mouth stained with dirt. Had she foreseen a terrible fate or expressed her outrage at the death of her grandson, as the psychiatrist thought? His mother had only been wrong about one thing: the stones in the jar. Six months after the assault at the Desmoulins’ home, the DNA test results had come back. The blood belonged to an animal.
Felis silvestris catus
. Thus the trail definitively went cold as far as the existence of a child was concerned. Martin plugged in the iron, turned up the temperature to the maximum setting and threw a sheet across the table to iron.

Three days before Christmas, Martin received a call in his office. There were fewer patients, so between appointments he was catching up on reading lab leaflets and sorting through old mail.

“Am I disturbing you?”

“No, not at all. How are you?”

“Well, thanks. I’ve just left the police station.”

“Oh yeah?”

Valérie Tremblay’s voice was completely flat.

“My job as social worker has been transferred to Clichy-Montfermeil, at the new police station promised by the government after the riots in two thousand five.”

“You don’t seem too enthusiastic about it.”

“I don’t know anyone there. I’ll lose all my contacts. As if they couldn’t have created a job for me. What will happen to the people who need me here? Who’s going to help them? Let’s talk about something else.”

The social worker hadn’t just called Martin to wish him a happy Christmas. She wanted to know if he had received a letter sent by the juvenile crimes division.

“It’s nothing important, don’t worry. It’s from Laurie Desmoulins.”

Martin put the phone on speaker and picked up the pile of letters that had amassed on his desk. He sifted through them quickly before putting his hand on a brown envelope with the insignia of the French Republic on it.

“I think I have it. How is she?”

“She must be traumatized by her parents’ arrest. She’s been placed in a foster family and separated from her brother.”

“The poor things.”

Martin rummaged in his desk drawer and found a letter opener.

“Sevran had got news of her from the juvenile crimes investigators,” Valérie continued. “She hadn’t been very forthcoming with the police. But the drawings that she did at the psychologist’s spoke volumes. In one of them, she’s drawn herself, holding a telephone. A bubble is coming out of the phone and in it she wrote the number for ChildLine. That allowed juvenile crimes to go back to listen to a call she made last August.”

“Had she called the number?” Martin asked, slicing open the envelope.

“Yes. Her father had become violent with her little brother. Kévin was drawn very small next to her with red tears like fat raindrops. Do you know who told her about that phone number?”

Martin pulled a sheet of paper out of the envelope.

“My mother,” he said, surprised to discover a drawing.

“Yes. The little girl hadn’t said enough for them to be able to act at the time. She had totally understood what had happened and why her parents were in prison, even if she preferred to be with them. But she refused to believe that the old lady who gave her piano lessons was dead.”

The drawing, done in colored pencil, showed a big house with two big eyes. It took up almost the whole page.

“Your mother had promised her something that the little girl hasn’t forgotten…”

In front of the door, Laurie had drawn her piano teacher, with a smiling face, a helmet of hair on her head, dressed in a long purple dress. She held in her hand an object that Martin didn’t recognize right away.

“What was the promise?”

“She would teach her to make crêpes.”

In Elsa Préau’s hand, Laurie Desmoulins had drawn a frying pan. Martin and Valérie wished each other a happy Christmas.

The doctor got a box of drawing pins out of his desk drawer.

He chose four in different colors.

A minute later, the drawing was up on one of the walls of his office.

Dr. Gérard Préau stroked the walnut-veneer frame. He crouched down to feel the base of the columns of the carved console.

“It really is a marvel,” he murmured admiringly.

He got up, brushed the dust off his hands, and looked at his son, moved.

“Do you know why your mother so wanted me to inherit her Gaveau?”

“The two of you did things on the piano?”

The old man smiled. His steamy breath escaped from his mouth. Martin’s garage, where the instrument had been stored, was never more than six degrees centigrade.

“More than that,” he answered. “Your mother, at the time, had literally enchanted me.”

He lifted the cover and tinkled the keys covered in yellowed ivory. The piano sounded sadly out of tune.

“Elsa fascinated me.”

“Really?”

“Someone who talks to ghosts is by definition captivating.”

Martin pulled up the collar of his jacket.

“Mum was a bit special.”

“She was an exceptional woman.”

“But you left her.”

Dr. Gérard Préau met his son’s eyes.

“Because she asked me to, Martin. And I think that it’s the greatest proof of her love that she ever gave me.”

Martin scraped his heel through the dust, tracing sinuous lines across the tiled floor.

“That, Dad, you’ll have to explain.”

Martin’s father closed the cover of the piano and put the plastic tarp back in place to protect it from the dust.

“Your mother was a very good mother, and a remarkable teacher. But she would have driven any man in her life mad, starting with me. She had to have it all. We lived in an exhausting meeting of minds. She made of me what she would. When I found myself back in Algeria, I understood just how symbiotic our relationship was, fed by our own frustrations, our childhood suffering, our hopes, our aspirations…”

Martin gave a nervous laugh.

“This has to be the first time you’ve ever spoken about her like that.”

The old man looked annoyed.

“Have I ever said a bad word about her to you?”

“… No. That’s true.”

“I warned you about her excesses, her contradictions, but never against her. And if mental illness did take such a firm hold on her, it’s because pain carved a bottomless pit in her.”

Martin’s father took a handkerchief out of one of his pockets and blew his nose discreetly.

“Why didn’t you come to the funeral?” Martin asked brusquely.

“She was dead. I didn’t see what my presence would have changed. And you seemed perfectly capable of dealing with it by yourself.”

The handkerchief went back in his pocket.

Martin stiffened.

Something wasn’t right.

His father had never seemed so upset talking about his mother. In the last weeks since her death, he hadn’t stopped making his almost shocking indifference clear to him by phone and e-mail. Up until now, when he got emotional when faced with an old piano no one knew what to do with, himself first and foremost.

“Did Elsa ever speak to you about her mother?” he asked in a broken voice.

“Not much. She died when Mum was very young, right?”

“A bit before the end of the war. Your mother was eight.”

Gérard Préau took a few steps, and shivered.

“Do you know what happened to her?”

Martin repeated what his mother had told him: that his grandmother had left the house one day and never come back, because she had been unhappy with her husband. She had got together with a man somewhere, with whom she made a new life. An adventurer, or a rich businessman.

His father cast his eyes down to the beige buttons on his coat.

“That—that’s just the fairy tale she told herself. One day in May nineteen forty-four, my aunt Deborah, Elsa’s mother, went to turn herself in to the French police. The idea of not following her parents and her brothers and sisters into deportation had become unbearable to her.”

“What?”

The old man opened the garage door, letting a glacial wind cut inside. He gestured to Martin to follow him.

“She was among the last people deported from the camp at Drancy. She never found her family members. Deborah, née Mathias, was gassed on arrival at Auschwitz. A pointless sacrifice.”

“Why? Why did she do that?” demanded Martin, stupefied, following his father.

“She was Jewish, Martin. Like your mother. And like you.”

Martin needed more than a coffee to warm him up. Standing in the kitchen, his hands still frozen from the December cold, he stared at the contents of the boiling cup between his fingers. His father was busy putting logs in the living room fireplace. The crackle of the fire highlighted the wooly silence that reigned in the house in the absence of Audrette and Madelyn, Gérard’s second wife, who had gone out to pick up useless Christmas nonsense in the Rosny II shopping center. Since his father arrived, Martin had been bitter: Audrette had to be pregnant for Dr. Gérard Préau to deign to visit his son. There was also a medical conference that the cardiologist attended each year, penciling in time in his schedule for a lunch with his son. Rarely would he show him any affection. He hadn’t been particularly encouraging about his son coming back to join him in Canada in the fifteen years since he decided to leave his mother. Nor had he prevented him from going back to France eight years later. His son embarrassed him. Dr. Gérard Préau was much more affectionate with his other children, those Madelyn, the Quebecois medical secretary he had met after his divorce, had given him. Something didn’t click with Martin. His father had, however, taught him to tie his shoelaces and to drive on his knees. But the two had taken part in a stubborn cold war, using obsolete weapons, ignoring the origin of the conflict. No doubt he hadn’t been aware of it, but was his father, deep down, waiting for the day when his son would start talking to ghosts? Even if that did turn out to be true, didn’t they have some secrets to share?