Asylum (2 page)

I love that we have municipal bicycles to grab and use at regular intervals, that there are bike lanes crisscrossing the city, that we take being green to heart. I love that we’re all bilingual, often in the same sentence, shopkeepers’ greetings usually consisting of “
bonjour
, hello.” I love all the neighborhoods, with their odd and twisting outside staircases and their brightly painted doors and window boxes, the heat of Montréal’s summers and the cursed snowbanks of its winters.

But maybe what I do love best of all
is
this small section of my city, this place where I work, the original Iroquois village by the life-giving river, once called Hochelaga and then Ville-Sainte-Marie when the French moved in … where now tourists are taken about in
calèches
, the clopping of the horses’ hooves echoing off the buildings in the narrow streets, where Rollerbladers skim along the waterfront, and museums guard the past and welcome the future.

I flipped my ID badge to the security guard in the lobby of the (even I have to admit) extremely impressive
hôtel de ville
and took the elevator up to the fourth floor. My administrative assistant, Chantal, looked up from her computer screen as I came in. “Did you see the news?”

“I did,” I agreed grimly. “Any messages?”

“You know there are,” she said, handing me the stack of pink slips. “And Janine from the mayor’s office called twice to remind you about the meeting this morning.”

“As if I could forget.” I sighed and hooked my foot around the door, closing it behind me, my hands full. Even a moment of solitude would help before facing the politicos for whom I worked.

My office has a decent view of the old city, with the coveted south-facing orientation that enables me to see the river and the beautiful island called the Île des Soeurs, the nuns’ island; if I went right up to the window and peered in the right direction, I could make out the casino. Sometimes, when I was feeling lonely or romantic, I’d go and look over there and whisper erotic messages to Ivan. He’s never given any indication that he received any of them. Apparently my extrasensory communication skills are a little subpar.

My desk holds the usual paraphernalia—art deco lamp, computer, framed family photographs. Pictures of Ivan and me summering in Nova Scotia, laughing in each other’s arms. A serious picture of him, alone, with the Jacques Cartier bridge in the background. And pictures of Lukas and Claudia, Ivan’s kids: on the rides at la Ronde, the permanent amusement park on the Île Sainte-Hélène that was now part of the Six Flags franchise; playing with sparklers on our rooftop terrace; eating crêpes down at the Old Port. Family stuff.

The buzzer on the desk sounded. “The mayor is ready,” said Chantal’s disembodied voice.

And on that happy note, it was time to go.

I suppose that there had been a life sometime before the orphanage, but I could never really remember it—not really, not as a whole. There were only scraps left, understanding a colloquial expression I couldn’t remember having heard before, a tune that wouldn’t get out of my head, a sense of something almost familiar lurking in my peripheral vision that disappeared as soon as I turned my head to look at it.

They say that you don’t remember anything before you’re four or five years old, but there
are
memories, I know there are, they just lack the clarity and specificity of more recent ones.

But there had been a time when I wasn’t at the orphanage. There had been a life. It was a small truth, but it was my only one. I had had a life, before.

And I knew that I was lucky in my truth. Some of the others, they’d been left with the sisters, the
bonnes soeurs
, as soon as they were born, baskets on the doorstep. No time for memories there.

I even knew my mother. At least for a while. Until she got married, and didn’t come to visit anymore, drawing with her absence a line plainly and firmly beneath who she’d been, so that she could become who she needed to be.

Later, much later, I recognized how brave that was, her coming to visit me, being willing to see me at all. The sisters never tried to hide their disgust at—and contempt for—the moral lapse that had resulted in my conception, and I’m sure they made her continued presence in my life very difficult.

At the time, of course, all I knew was that I wanted her to return—but only so that she could take me away. Every time she came, I begged her to take me with her; I pleaded, crying, and she never did. I think—or maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part, maybe I made this up so I could feel better, feel loved—that her plan was to marry someone who would understand. Someone who could come with her to the orphanage and pluck me out of the long dormitory room under the eaves and take me back to Verchères, the village upriver from Montréal in the Montrégie district where I had apparently been born. He would adopt me; we could be a family together.

But there were few enough men willing to marry a fallen woman, and fewer still eager to raise her illegitimate child; after she married, my mother never came again.

I waited for her, of course; every time I could get to a window, I watched for her, waiting for my name to be called to the front parlor, disbelieving that she would abandon me. There had to be some sort of mistake. She would come again one day.

I don’t know that I ever really believed she wouldn’t.

I kept going back. For months, I kept going back, lurking by windows, hearing car doors slam and running with wings on my feet to see who had come. One of these days, it would be her; I was sure of it. One of these days she could come for me.

I couldn’t believe that I was something she needed to hide.

I should be grateful, I suppose, that she’d kept me away from the nuns for as long as she had. As long as she’d been able. Maybe she knew, in her heart of hearts, the lie behind the cloister door, that the
bonnes soeurs
—the “good sisters”—weren’t actually all that
bonne.

Maybe she knew the truth behind that lie, that despite what parents and guardians were told in the polished front parlors, the children left with the nuns weren’t ever going to be put up for adoption, or educated, or really cared for at all.

It sounds like neglect, doesn’t it, when I write it like that? Like their sin (and trust me when I say that sin there was) was a sin of omission, not of commission. But not loving us, not caring for us—that was really only the beginning.

The rest was so very much worse.

CHAPTER TWO

Mayor Jean-Luc Boulanger was prompt. My boss is always prompt; in the next election, he’s probably going to run on his ability to be on time.

He certainly has precious little else to run on. He may well have appointed me to my position, but ours was an uneasy relationship: I needed his political connections, he needed my skills and expertise. I didn’t vote for Jean-Luc, and working for him hasn’t improved my opinion of the man. But we can’t always choose the people we work with, can we?

He noted my arrival in the conference room on the first floor with a curt nod. “
Bonjour
, Madame LeDuc.”

“
Monsieur le maire
,” I murmured politely, sliding into a seat across the table from him, opening my planner and pulling out a pad of blank paper, writing the date and time on the top sheet. September 18. 10:00 a.m. Anything to avoid small talk.

Richard Rousseau, my deputy, came in and sat next to me, swiveling his chair to move it a little closer. “Do you have any idea what the meeting is about today?”

“
Non
,” I answered, under my breath. A lock of hair had escaped and was on my forehead; I tucked it back behind my ear. “But I’ll give you three guesses.”

He grimaced. “Danielle Leroux?”

“Danielle Leroux, Annie Desmarchais, Caroline Richards, and Isabelle Hubert,” I reminded him, appalled that I knew the names by heart. Appalled at the
reason
for knowing their names. “All of the above.”

Richard nodded and scowled across the table as the police director, along with the assistant director, two aides, and their public relations officer seated themselves obsequiously around the mayor. They were from the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal
,
or SPVM, the city police.

Just to keep our lives interesting, we have three police forces that can potentially all be working in Montréal. They sometimes even actually acknowledge each other’s existence.

There was the SPVM (the city police), the Sûreté de Québec—police who cover all of the province—and the national Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Three levels of policing, and they do not always play well together. The city police resent it when the provincial police try to hone in on anything in the city; and they both resent the Mounties, who aren’t all that popular anywhere in the province.

Here in the province of Québec we often choose to forget that we are, after all, part of Canada.

Ivan says it’s not so different in the States, where there’s a general understanding that city cops and state police and the FBI tend to step on each other’s toes. I waved that information away when he was trying to explain it to me: my life was complicated enough as it was; I didn’t need to know how they do things in Boston. Police are police are police, right?

I turned to whisper something about the police to my deputy and found Richard staring hard at the director. No surprise there: Richard was constantly at odds with the police. Their public relations representative was as communicative as a brick wall, and my own small department subsequently found itself doing more damage control in more instances of potential public relations nightmares than should have been strictly necessary. One wondered why they’d bothered hiring someone for PR if they didn’t plan to do any of it. Most of the consequent problems fell onto my deputy’s plate, hence the scowl. I couldn’t really blame him.

The mayor nodded to the mousy aide who had just seated herself in the background and she got up to close the door. He cleared his throat importantly. “
Bon
. Time to begin.” He looked around the table. “We’re rapidly becoming the murder capital of North America,” he said, crisply and inaccurately, “and I’d like to know what people are doing to stop it.”

We all looked at the police contingent from the SPVM. The director cleared his throat in turn. “We have all available people working on it,
monsieur le maire
,” he said uncomfortably. “I’m not at liberty to say exactly—”

“Not at liberty?” barked the mayor. “Not at liberty, you say? The way that you’ve been running—or should I say not running?—the department over this past year, I’d say that you didn’t have a clue what exactly is going on! As for being at liberty, need I remind you for whom you work? It’s intolerable, the way that things have been going…”

I tuned him out. I’d heard this particular diatribe before, more than once, and it was getting a little more grating every time I heard it. Arguments seldom improve with age. The mayor and the director were famous for hating each other, and for taking any possible opportunity to make each other look bad in public. A dreary exercise at best, but it also engendered a major headache for those of us entrusted with the city’s image.

And in the meantime, the body count was up to four. We were in September, still prime tourist season for Montréal, and still with a compelling reason for people to stay away. Which made it my problem.

I sighed out loud. It was everyone’s concern. We were all behaving as though these deaths were somehow a great public relations fiasco. Yet to Danielle Leroux, Annie Desmarchais, Caroline Richards, and Isabelle Hubert, they were anything but. For them, it was the end.

I glanced up and caught the mayor’s eye, belatedly realizing that everyone had heard the sigh. “So, Madame LeDuc,” he was saying, fixing me with a baleful glance, “I want you to be coordinating things between the police director and my office. As from now.”

“
Monsieur le maire?
” I’d definitely missed something.

He nodded briskly. “You’ll make sure that there’s a report on my desk every morning, recounting the previous day’s activities and what progress is being made,” he said, liking the idea. “And you,
monsieur le directeur
, will give
madame
every facility.”

I cleared my throat. There was no way around what was about to happen. “
Monsieur le maire
, isn’t there someone else who is better qualified—who has more experience with police work?”

“Madame LeDuc,” he said, a patronizing smile already spreading across his features. “Everyone else is very busy with immediate, important duties.”

Say it
, I thought. Say that you think my office is window dressing. Say that you think we don’t need a publicity department.
Dis-le
.

He managed not to, because he knew it would come back to bite him in the elections. I’d done a lot to bring conventions, tourists, great visiting musicians, new festivals, and important events to the city—as everyone but the mayor acknowledged. “You are the one,” he said finally, “who can best work it into your schedule.”

I looked across the table at François Desrocher, the police director. He scowled back at me. The mayor hadn’t exactly made his day, assigning someone for him to report to. And the fact that it was me—a woman—in particular … well, suffice it to say that it wasn’t the best news he could have received. Desrocher had a reputation for his treatment of women in the police force—looking the other way when male officers humiliated them, refusing them promotions, assigning them to clerical posts, not sending them for training. Having a woman breathing down his neck now, second-guessing him, was probably last on his list of desirable outcomes to this meeting.

I smiled sunnily back, just to annoy him, and turned to the mayor. “
Monsieur
, have you considered calling in the Sureté?”