* * *
Philippe Toussaint never returned and Sasha remained at Madame Bréant’s.
After he’d been absent for a month, in 1998, I went to the police station to report the disappearance of my husband. I did so on the advice of the mayor. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered. The sergeant who received me made a strange face. Why had I waited so long to report someone missing?
“Because he often went off.”
He took me into an office next to the reception to fill in a form and offered me a coffee that I didn’t dare refuse.
I gave his particulars. The police officer asked me to come back with a photo. We hadn’t taken any since arriving at the cemetery. The most recent was the one taken in Malgrange-sur-Nancy, when he had put his arm around my waist while giving the journalist a nice smile.
The sergeant asked me to specify the make of his motorbike, the clothes he was wearing the last time I had seen him.
“Jeans, black leather biker boots, black biker jacket, and a red polo-neck sweater.”
“Any distinguishing features? Tattoo? Birthmark? Visible moles?”
“No.”
“Did he take anything with him, important papers that might suggest a prolonged absence?”
“His video games and the photos of our daughter are still in the house.”
“Had his behavior or habits changed in recent weeks?”
“No.”
I didn’t tell the police officer that the last time I had seen Philippe Toussaint, he was about to go to Eloïse Petit’s workplace in Valence. He had tracked her down, she was an usher at a movie theater over there. He had phoned her from the house, she had said she would meet him on Thursday the following week, at 2 P.M., outside the theater.
On that day, Eloïse Petit had called in the afternoon. She must have traced the number Philippe Toussaint had called her from. When I answered, I thought it was the town hall, the death-notice department. It was the time they regularly phoned me to inform me of something, or to ask me details about a funeral past or future, a surname, a first name, a date of birth, a vault, a cemetery location. When Eloïse Petit had introduced herself, her voice was shaky. I hadn’t immediately understood what she was saying. When I had finally grasped who she was, what her call was about, my hands had gone clammy, my throat dry.
“Was there a problem?”
“A problem? Mr. Toussaint isn’t here, we had an appointment at 2 P.M., I’ve been waiting for him outside the movie theater for two hours.”
Anyone else would have imagined there had been an accident, would have called all the hospitals between Mâcon and Valence; anyone else would have said to Eloïse Petit: “Where were you the night Room 1 burnt down? Were you sleeping easy next door?” But I had replied to her that there was nothing to understand, Philippe Toussaint was, and always would be, unpredictable.
There had been a long silence at the other end of the line, and then Eloïse Petit had hung up.
I didn’t tell the sergeant that, seven days after Philippe Toussaint’s “flight,” seven days after the appointment with Eloïse Petit he had missed, a young woman had come to pay her respects at the tomb of the children, of my child. And that, distraught, she had found herself, like many other visitors, buying flowers and having a hot drink at my place. When I had seen that young woman behind my door, I had recognized her instantly: Lucie Lindon. In the photo I had kept, she was younger, in color, and smiling. In my kitchen, she was white and had shadows under her eyes.
I had made her some tea and added more than a drop of eau-de-vie—paradoxical, when I would have liked to pour in rat poison. I made her drink a cup and a little glass of spirits, two little glasses of spirits, then three. And as I was hoping, she had finally poured her heart out.
I still have the marks from my nails on the palm of my left hand. The marks I made as Lucie Lindon spoke. My lifeline is covered in scars since that day. I remember the dried blood in my palm, my clenched fist so she wouldn’t see, so she would never know.
Lucie Lindon told me that she was on the staff at the château of Notre-Dame-des-Prés.
“You know, that holiday camp where everything burned down five years ago, the four children are buried here. Since the tragedy, I can’t sleep anymore, I can still see the flames; since the tragedy, I’m forever cold.”
She continued to talk. And me, I continued to serve her. With my left fist clenched, my nails digging into my flesh; I was already suffering too much to feel physical pain. After soliloquizing, she finally let out that “poor Geneviève Magnan” had had a relationship with the father of little Léonine Toussaint.
“A relationship?”
I had a kind of iron taste in my mouth. A taste of blood. As if I had just drunk steel. But I managed to repeat, “A relationship?”
Those are the last words I uttered in front of Lucie Lindon. After that I kept quiet. After that she got up to go. She stared at me. With the back of her arm, she wiped away the tears streaming from her eyes, nose, and mouth. She sniffed noisily and I felt like hitting her.
“Yes, with the father of little Léonine Toussaint. It went on one or two years before the tragedy. When Geneviève worked at a school . . . Near Nancy, I think.”
I didn’t tell the sergeant that I had screamed my hatred and my pain in Sasha’s arms when I had realized that it was Magnan who had killed four children to get her revenge on him, on us, on our daughter. I didn’t tell him that Philippe Toussaint had questioned the staff from the château where our child had met her death. And that was after the trial, because he no longer believed anyone. And for good reason. He
