The Stone Boy (19 page)

She was paralyzed by nerves. The muffled sound of small knocks kept getting through to her, but nobody else seemed to be able to hear them. Outside, night began to fall. Cutting the cake, Mr. Desmoulins nodded his head.

“An apple tart, this really is too kind of you. Blandine loves it.”

“Yes, it’s my favorite. Laurie, come to the table, please.”

Reluctantly, the girl left her cartoon and took her place. The only one missing was the stone boy.

“And you, Mr. Desmoulins, what’s your favorite dessert?”

The man put down the long kitchen knife and picked up a cake knife.

“Oh, I don’t eat dessert. I’m diabetic. No sweets! May I?”

Madame Préau blanched. She hadn’t thought of that. Fortunately, there was cider. Provided he would give in to alcohol…

“Yes, it’s very annoying,” stressed Madame Desmoulins, holding a plate for the surprise guest. “Philippe doesn’t drink alcohol, either.”

“Apart from a beer from time to time.”

“Yes, well, a little at night.”

Madame Préau’s heart quickened. Her plan was turning into a fiasco. A piece of tart was handed to her.

“No thank you,” she said. “There is cinnamon on this part of the tart, and I’m not supposed to have any because of my high blood pressure. But I’d gladly take a piece without.”

Mr. Desmoulins gave the portion sprinkled with cinnamon to his wife and served Madame Préau, joking about the disadvantages of age when it came to health and dietary restrictions. Then he handed the madeleines to the children and offered cider to his wife and neighbor. Both agreed and, finally, he was tempted himself, to Madame Préau’s great relief.

“It won’t kill me,” he said jokingly.

Madame Préau did not touch the glass but ate her tart. Laurie’s mother had another cider, which she found “a wonderful little taste of the countryside, or hay,” and the children feasted on madeleines. They were allowed to leave the table quickly, and were now dozing on the sofa in front of an episode of
Barbapapa
. Mr. Desmoulins, who hadn’t touched a thing but had drained his glass of cider, was recounting how he had designed the house, creating a garage/studio with removable sliding-panel curtains, which he had installed himself on all the doors and windows to the ground and then demolished the hundred-year-old boundary wall damaged by ivy and replaced it with a sturdy latticed concrete. Madame Préau pretended to be interested in what he had to say, but it was hard to concentrate.

Granny Elsa… Granny Elsa…

In her head, with the regularity of a metronome, the sound of knocking against a wooden wall in the kitchen was getting slowly louder. Madame Desmoulins seemed lost in her thoughts, batting her eyelashes gently. She realized that night was falling when she saw the garden in darkness, and called the children. It was bathtime. But nothing stirred on the couch. On the TV, the cartoon had given way to ads. She got up, in pain.

“Laurie, Kévin, come on, get up,” she stammered.

Madame Desmoulins wavered. Her husband hardly paid her any attention. He was drawing an invisible floor plan of the foundations of the house with his index finger on the tablecloth, searching for his words, as if in slow motion. Madame Préau saw Laurie’s mum take five or six steps before collapsing. This time, her husband turned around. With a limp hand, Madame Desmoulins tried in vain to grab the arm of the couch.

“Blandine?”

Madame Préau met his incredulous gaze.

“Your wife isn’t feeling well,” she observed.

Her husband leapt up and walked over to his wife to help her up. Madame Desmoulins was groggy.

“The children…” she said just before she lost consciousness.

The man looked up at the couch: sprawled in the middle of the cushions, Kévin and Laurie seemed to be deeply asleep.

He didn’t understand right away how dramatic a scene was playing out in his house.

He didn’t understand it when he saw Madame Préau stand to face him with a hammer.

“Damned diabetes!” he grumbled with regret.

Come on, Granny Elsa, kill him!

Mr. Desmoulins saved his life with a reflex, raising one arm to protect his face. The hammer crashed down on his left forearm, which was horrifically painful.

“What’s the matter with you?”

Madame Préau struck his arm three times before realizing that she would never manage it with this hammer. Panicked, the old woman recoiled as far as the table. She hadn’t foreseen this.

I’m here, Granny Elsa!

Sweat beaded on her nose. Bastien’s voice clanged in her head. Madame Préau closed her eyes for a few seconds.

Get a hold of yourself.

Do it, no matter what.

Save the child.

She’d use the kitchen knife.

“What are you doing? Are you crazy?”

The man, who had fallen back on the tiles, was now trying to get back up. But his body wasn’t reacting like he wanted it to. His legs bowed beneath him. The Stilnox mixed with cider had had some effect on his body.

“What’s wrong with Blandine and the kids?”

The old woman came back over to him, her hair a mess, holding the knife and hammer in front of her.

“Where is he?” she demanded.

Mr. Desmoulins crawled to the sofa, where he pulled himself up with difficulty between the children. He groaned between each word.

“What did… what did you put in your cakes?”

Help, Granny Elsa!

Madame Préau’s gaze vacillated between the kitchen and the living room. She stamped her feet.

“Where is he?” she insisted.

The man checked his children’s breathing, shaking their motionless little bodies. The groaning gave way to rage.

“You’ve poisoned my children!”

“The dose of sleeping tablets in the madeleines was too weak to kill them—but I’m no expert on the subject,” she qualified.

Mr. Desmoulins screamed. He sprang up from the sofa with the intention of hurling himself on the old woman, but fell onto his knees at the first step. Madame Préau moved back toward the kitchen, still brandishing her two weapons in front of her.

“Calm down!”

“You drugged all of us! I don’t understand… you had some, too…”

His eyes rested on the tart. He could clearly see the part dusted in cinnamon that his wife had eaten. You didn’t have to be too clever to see which part hid the sleeping tablets.

“I did this for the little boy,” Madame Préau argued, “because you’re filth, and so is your wife… and because no one wants to believe me, starting with those two bitches at the social welfare center!”

She glanced at the sofa.

“And those two are in on it, too.”

Granny Elsa! Granny Elsa!

In the kitchen, the knocking became twice as strong. The child was there, right there. Madame Préau trembled with fear. The handle of the hammer slid in her damp palm. Mr. Desmoulins got back up with difficulty.

“Is this the boy in the garden, again? It was you who made a complaint to social services? That’s why you came here? You’ve completely cracked!”

I’m here Granny Elsa! I’m here!

The old woman turned to the right where a broom cupboard stood about a meter and a half tall. She struck the door with the hammer. The noises in her head stopped instantly.

“Is that where you hid the boy? Is he your son?”

The man tried twice as hard to stay upright.

“I only have one son, and that’s Kévin.”

“So it must be a child you kidnapped.”

“You’re nothing but a senile old woman.”

Without breaking her gaze with the man, Madame Préau pulled sharply at the door. It opened. Was the child being held there, in darkness? Mr. Desmoulins came toward the kitchen, reeling.

“Stay where you are!” she ordered.

Madame Préau peered inside.

Nothing.

Nothing but rows and rows of jam.

The husband let out a feeble laugh.

“You found the kid? That’s the house speciality: preserved little boy!”

Furious, Madame Préau couldn’t breathe. With her hammer, she cleared out all the jam to get to the back of the cupboard.

Don’t leave me, Granny Elsa. Don’t leave me!

The man was less than two meters from Madame Préau.

“There’s nothing in that cupboard! You won’t find a thing.”

“He’s there, behind… I’m certain of it… There’s a false back, is that it?”

Madame Préau hit the inside of the cupboard with her hammer. It sounded hollow. Her face lit up.

“Bastien? Are you there?”

She hit harder and faster, gouging the chipboard.

“It’s me! It’s Granny Elsa!”

Granny Elsa never saw the man throw himself at her in a last-ditch effort.

Cruel stars.

Thousands of yellow stars.

I can’t die.

Not now.

Bastien! Bastien!

The phone rang at about seven thirty. Martin had to interrupt his consultation and leave his patient sitting on the examination table for a moment, his shirt rolled up under his armpits. Dr. Préau couldn’t immediately identify the speaker on the other end of the line. It was a thick voice, and the speaker seemed out of breath.

“It’s Isabelle, your mother’s housekeeper. You should come, Dr. Préau, your mother might be in trouble.”

“What are you saying?”

“It’s because of the shutters.”

“The shutters?”

“The shutters on her house—she hasn’t closed them. It’s not normal.”

Martin sighed. He’d just done two back-to-back house calls for two probable cases of swine flu. There wasn’t time to be wasted on some story about shutters.

“Have you been to see her?”

“Dr. Préau, I rang the bell but no one answered. We tried, me and my husband, to open the door, but the key wouldn’t go into the lock.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The police are there, Dr. Préau. You should come right away. Something has happened at the neighbors’ house.”

“What does this have to do with my mother?”

The housekeeper hesitated for a moment.

“I’m not sure, but I think that your mum… she went to their house.”

A memory of a conversation from Sunday came back to the doctor. He cleared his throat.

Dr. Martin Préau wrapped up his consultation briskly, practically pushing the patient out the door. He threw his bag on the desk and took out an envelope that had been hastily torn open. Inside, there was an old postcard with a picture of Rue des Lilas in 1925, such as it was—a vague dirt path through fenced-off gardens. On the back of the card, his mother apologized to him. When he had read the words written in a careful hand, he knew that they had been deliberately chosen in keeping with his mother’s perennial rambling logic. The message had now taken on another meaning entirely.

He put on his duffel coat, closed the office, and, a moment later, pulled out of the Boulevard de l’Ouest at the wheel of his Peugeot 307 at seventy kilometers per hour.

So long as she hadn’t done it again.

He saw his mother’s pale face in a courtroom, eight years before. The thinness of her body. And her determination to be convicted.

My neighbors… as I tried to tell you, they hit one of their sons. You know how sensitive a subject violence against children is for me…

Why go to the neighbors’?

What was she hoping for?

Martin’s greatest fear had always been finding his mother at the bottom of the stairs one day. At her age, the slightest fall could bring on a loss of mobility. That she was still capable not only of dressing herself, doing her own shopping, and cooking her own meals, but also of managing a budget for herself put the idea of her being placed in a medicalized facility on the back burner. With crutches or a wheelchair, staying in a two-story house became out of the question. A fracture was tantamount to a one-way ticket to the hospice. And with her history, she’d end up in an Alzheimer’s ward on Tiapridal, her brain turned to mush, being fed through a straw—but all that was nothing in comparison with what might reemerge from her past.

Driving along Allée Victor Hugo, Martin swore.

He knew it.

He just didn’t want to see it.

His mother had stopped taking her medication and he hadn’t reacted.