“She must have been licensed. She drove across the border.”
“OK. Maybe someone got paid off. Or maybe she was smart enough to read a little and to memorize road signs. Anyway, Philippe took off while Laurette was pregnant with Obeline, leaving her to support the two little girls. She managed for five or six years, then had to quit working. Eventually died of some sort of chronic condition. Sounded like TB to me. This guy thought she’d moved out toward Saint-Isidore sometime in the mid- sixties. Might have had family living that way.”
“What about Philippe?”
“Nothing. May have left the country. Probably dead somewhere.”
“And the girls?” My heart was thumping my rib cage.
“Obeline Landry married a guy named David Bastarache in eighty. I’m running him now. And following the Saint-Isidore lead.”
“What about Evangeline?”
“I’ll be straight. I ask about Laurette or Obeline, I get cooperation. Or at least what sounds like cooperation. I ask about the older sister, people go iceberg.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’ve been at this awhile. I got antennae. I ask about this kid, the answers come too quick, too consistent.”
I waited.
“No one knows shit.”
“Hiding something?” My grip on the handset was raising the cords in my wrist.
“I’d bet money on it.”
I told Hippo what I’d learned from Trick Whalen. The Miramichi pawnshop. The mojo sculpture. The Indian cemetery.
“You want I should call this guy O’Driscoll?”
“No. If you can get contact information, I’ll follow the bone trail while you chase the leads in Tracadie.”
“Don’t go ’way.”
Hippo put me on hold for a good ten minutes.
“Place is called Oh O! Pawn. Catchy name. Says we care.” He supplied a phone number and an address on the King George Highway.
Cellophane crinkled. Then, “You said you found something wrong with the kid’s skeleton.”
“Yes.”
“You figure that out?”
“Not yet.”
“You willing to work on Saturday?”
The 82nd Airborne couldn’t have kept me from those bones.
By eight-thirty I was at Wilfrid-Derome. Contrary to reports, there’d been no rain and the weather hadn’t cooled. Already the mercury was pushing eighty.
I rode the elevator alone, passed no one in the LSJML lobby or corridors. I was pleased that I’d have no disruptions.
I was wrong. One of several misjudgments I’d make that day.
First off, I dialed O’Driscoll. The phone went unanswered.
Disappointed, I turned to the skeleton. Hippo’s girl. Before being interrupted by the Iqaluit skull and the dog exhumation in Blainville, I’d cleaned what remained of her trunk and limb bones.
Going directly to her skull, I cleared the foramen magnum and emptied soil and small pebbles from the cranial base.
At nine-thirty, I tried O’Driscoll again. Still no luck.
Back to teasing dirt. Right auditory canal. Left. Posterior palate. The lab thundered with that stillness possible only on weekends in government facilities.
At ten, I lay down my probe and dialed Miramichi a third time. This time a man answered.
“Oh O! Pawn.”
“Jerry O’Driscoll?”
“Speaking.”
I gave my name and LSJML affiliation. Either O’Driscoll didn’t hear or didn’t care.
“You interested in antique watches, young lady?” English, with a whisper of brogue.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Two beauties just come in. You like jewelry?”
