Her eyes came back to mine. “I have no friends. Who are you talking about?” Her voice was small and flat.
“Sandy O’Reilly. She was replacing you that day.”
“Sandy wants my hours. Why are you here?”
Good question.
“I wanted to talk to you and to Dr. Jeannotte.”
“She’s not in.”
“Could you and I talk?”
“There’s nothing you can do for me. My life is my own business.” The listlessness chilled me.
“I appreciate that. But, actually, I thought you might be able to help me.”
Her glance slid down the corridor then back to me.
“Help you how?”
“Would you like some coffee?”
“No.”
“Could we go somewhere else?”
She looked at me a long time, her eyes flat and empty. Then she nodded, took a parka from the hall tree, and guided me down the stairs and out a back door. Bending into the frigid rain we trudged uphill to the center of campus, and circled to the back of the Redpath Museum. Anna took a key from her pocket, opened a door, and led me into a dim corridor. The air smelled faintly of mildew and decay.
We climbed to the second floor and sat on a long wooden bench, surrounded by the bones of creatures long dead. Above us hung a beluga whale, casualty of some Pleistocene misfortune. Dust motes drifted in the fluorescent light.
“I don’t work in the museum anymore, but I still come here to think.” She gazed at the Irish elk. “These creatures lived millions of years and thousands of miles apart and now they’re fixed at this one point in the universe, forever motionless in time and place. I like that.”
“Yes.” That was one way to view extinction. “Stability is a rare thing in today’s world.”
She gave me an odd look, then turned back to the skeletons. I watched her profile as she studied the collection.
“Sandy talked about you, but I didn’t really listen.” She spoke without turning to face me. “I’m not sure who you are or what you want.”
“I’m a friend of your aunt.”
“My aunt is a nice person.”
“Yes. Your mother thought you might be in trouble.”
She gave a wry smile. Obviously this was not a happy subject for her.
“Why do you care what my mother thinks?”
“I care that Sister Julienne was distressed by your disappearance. Your aunt is not aware that you’ve taken off before.”
Her eyes left the vertebrates and swung to me. “What else do you know about me?” She flicked her hair. Perhaps the cold had revived her. Perhaps escape from her mentor’s presence. She seemed slightly more animated than she’d been in Birks.
“Anna, your aunt begged me to find you. She didn’t want to pry, she simply wanted to reassure your mother.”
She looked uncertain. “Since you seem to have made me your pet project, you must also know that my mother is crazy. If I’m ten minutes late she calls the cops.”
“According to the police your absences lasted a bit longer than ten minutes.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly.
Good, Brennan. Put her on the defensive.
“Look, Anna, I don’t want to meddle. But if there’s anything I can do to help you, I’m more than willing to try.”
I waited but she said nothing.
Turn it around. Maybe she’ll open up.
“Perhaps you can help me. As you know I work with the coroner, and some recent cases really have us baffled. A young woman named Jennifer Cannon vanished from Montreal several years ago. Her body was found last week in South Carolina. She was a McGill student.”
Anna’s expression did not change.
“Did you know her?”
She was as silent as the bones around us.
“On March seventeenth a woman named Carole Comptois was murdered and dumped on Ile des S?urs. She was eighteen.”
