Bones to Ashes

The man slumped by the tree was a Malo thug named Serge Sardou. When Sardou challenged Bastarache’s charge up the driveway, Bastarache shot him. The wound caused a lot of bleeding but only minor muscle damage. Sardou started bartering as soon as the anesthesia wore off.

Turned out Mulally and Babin had been smitten with the Escalade, not with Harry and me. It was Sardou who’d threatened me by e-mail and phone. And, my personal favorite, thrown me down the stairs. Malo had asked him to recover the contact sheet of Évangéline, and to back me off. Sardou decided to double-task at Cormier’s studio.

Bastarache and Malo both went directly from Rustique to jail. Bastarache claimed self-defense, saying Sardou had threatened him with the Winchester. A lawyer had him out on bail the next day.

Based on statements from Sardou and Kelly Sicard, Malo was charged with three counts of homicide and a zillion counts of offenses involving kids. Unlike Bastarache, Plucky Pierre was going nowhere soon.

Wednesday, June 27, I was in my lab at Wilfrid-Derome. Five boxes lined the side counter, remains packaged for release to next of kin.

Reading my handwritten labels, I felt a bittersweet sense of accomplishment. Geneviève Doucet. Anne Girardin. Claire Brideau. Maude Waters. LSJML-57748.

Cause of death would never be determined for Geneviève Doucet. No matter. Poor Théodore was beyond understanding. Or blaming. Maître Asselin would be collecting her great-niece’s bones.

There would be no justice for little Anne Girardin, Ryan’s MP number three. Daddy had died of a self-inflicted bullet to the brain. But Adelaide had been located and could now bury her daughter.

From age seventeen to nineteen, Claire Brideau had starred in dozens of Peter Bad Productions. Pierre Malo. Peter Bad. Pure poetry.

We’d guessed right about Cormier. The photographer had funneled girls to Malo in exchange for a few bucks and a steady supply of pedophile smut. Kelly Sicard had been one. Claire Brideau had been another. There would be no more. Fearing Cormier might roll to save himself, Malo had killed him.

According to Sardou, in 1999, Malo strangled Brideau in a rage for lifting money from a nightstand in the house on Rustique. Ordered to dispose of the body, he’d offloaded Brideau from a buddy’s boat into the Rivière des Mille Îles. She became Ryan’s DOA number one.

Ryan’s DOA number three, the Lac des Deux Montagnes floater, was identified as sixteen-year-old Maude Waters. The previous year, Maude had left her home on the Kahnawake Mohawk Reserve hoping to make her way to Hollywood and a star on the Walk of Fame. Instead, she ended up with Malo doing porn.

Malo was claiming Maude OD’d while living in his house. Sardou’s version had Malo strangling Maude because she’d threatened to leave. As with Brideau eight years earlier, Sardou was ordered to dump the corpse. Feeling invincible, the loyal employee simply drove a few blocks and tossed Maude from the Bois-de-L’Île-Bizard boat ramp.

LSJML-57748. Hippo’s girl. For now, the Sheldrake Island skeleton would lie under an anonymous iron cross in the lepers’ cemetery in Tracadie. But I was working with an Acadian historian. With luck, and hard work, we hoped to learn who she was. The lab in Virginia had sequenced DNA from her bones. Perhaps someday we might even find a relative.

The lab door opened, breaking my reverie. Hippo entered, carrying coffee and a bag of St. Viateur Bagels. As we spread cream cheese with little plastic knives, I considered what I’d learned of the saga of Évangéline.

I’d been right. Laurette Landry had worked at the lazaretto, and had lost her job upon its closing in ’65. Years later, she developed leprosy. So great was the family’s distrust of government, Laurette was hidden away with Grand-père Landry. At fourteen, Évangéline became the family’s primary breadwinner and nurse.

While Laurette was alive, Évangéline lived at home and worked days for David’s father, Hilaire Bastarache. Upon her mother’s death, she assumed the position of resident housekeeper.

At that time Pierre Malo, Hilaire’s illegitimate son, was also living in the Bastarache house. Malo pressed Évangéline into posing for him, threatening her with loss of her job. David Bastarache had fallen in love with Évangéline. Appalled by his half-brother’s activities, he vowed to sack and boot Malo as soon as control fell to him, as Hilaire had told him it would.

Though I’d gained some insight into Bastarache’s character, the man still mystified me.

“Explain it to me, Hippo. How could such thinking exist today?”

Hippo chewed as he gave my question thought.

“Every Acadian kid grows up on tales of ancestors being hunted down and deported. Le Grand Dérangement still haunts us as a people. And it’s not just ancient history. Acadians see their culture as constantly threatened by a hostile, Anglo-dominated world.”

I let him go on.