Chapter 8
When Gérard brought Inès and Nassim home the following Sunday, he seemed in better spirits than usual. He actually bothered to get out of the car and show up with the children on the doorstep, which demonstrated, if not a conciliatory intent, at least a willingness to communicate.
Nora was taken aback at first, but she quickly recovered and gave him a welcoming smile.
She hugged her children to her, showered them with kisses, her face radiating joy at seeing them again.
Then she turned to Gérard and suggested he come in for a few minutes.
He hesitated briefly, before declining the invitation with long-suffering courtesy.
“Come on, don’t make me beg,” insisted Nora. “If you’ve gotten out of the car, it wasn’t to stand here on the doorstep.” Gérard gave a half smile, then eventually nodded. Nora took a step back to let him into the house.
Once inside, they had to contend with the awkwardness of being in each other’s presence. It was the first time they had seen each other since Nora’s move. Until now she had only glimpsed him through the windows of his car, and he had never given her so much as a nod or a smile.
“Would you like coffee?”
“A quick one.”
“Are you in a hurry?”
“I don’t want to disturb you.”
“You’re not disturbing me.”
She led him to the kitchen, invited him to sit down, and began preparing the coffee.
“It’s rather nice here,” Gérard remarked, looking around.
“Thank you.”
Silence. The kind that’s broken only by some trite observation uttered in a deceptively upbeat tone of voice.
“What’s the landlord like?” Gérard asked.
“Nice. I don’t really know. Discreet, which is all I care about. You still take two sugars?”
“Yes. Some things never change.”
Nora flinched imperceptibly. She knew by heart all Gérard’s acerbic little comments and equivocal asides.
This one wasn’t malicious, but it betrayed a state of mind that was not hostile exactly, but undeniably bitter.
Gérard was resentful by nature; he found it hard to forgive anyone who hurt him, and rarely failed, when the opportunity arose, to hold a grudge.
Nora didn’t rise to the bait. She poured out two cups of coffee, handed one to Gérard, and sat down opposite him.
“I know this house,” he declared, as if he had been waiting for her to sit down before making this revelation.
“You do?”
“Yes. This one or the one next door, I’m not sure. They all look the same.”
“What are you talking about?”
“A couple of days before Nassim was born, I was summoned to the police station to represent a suspect. A murder disguised as a heart attack. Don’t you remember?”
“Vaguely.”
“Yes, you do! You were literally about to give birth, Nassim could have arrived at any moment, and you didn’t like being home alone in the evening with Inès.”
“It’s coming back to me now. And?”
“The cops didn’t really have any evidence against the guy, and he was released that evening. I drove him home. And it was here. The next day, they found him hanging in the stairwell.”
Nora shuddered. “Thanks for the information,” she said sarcastically, making no attempt to hide her displeasure.
“The dumbest thing,” continued Gérard, as if he hadn’t heard her, “was that the cops had nothing on him. He’d have been fine.”
“Do you think he was guilty?”
“Honestly, I have no idea. The guy hanged himself, which everyone took as an admission of guilt, and the case was closed, bang. I must admit I didn’t delve into it any further. To be honest, what with Nassim’s birth, I had other things on my mind.”
Though eight years had gone by, Gérard remembered the case pretty well.
David Brunelle had a teenage history of petty crime, and a criminal record for drug possession, home invasion, and armed robbery.
He’d spent four years in jail, but then seemed to have cleaned up his act and become a loving husband and exemplary father with a well-ordered life.
Until that Saturday afternoon when Ernest Wilmot, his sixty-five-year-old former probation officer and Milo’s godfather, suffered a fatal cardiac arrest at the Brunelles’ house.
At the autopsy, the medical examiner detected in the man’s body unusual quantities of digitoxin, a powerful cardiotonic extracted from the foxglove, whose diuretic action can seriously damage kidney function.
The form of digitoxin found in Wilmot’s urine after his death was so pure that the coroner was able to conclude that the plant itself had been ingested.
When they searched the Brunelles’ house, the police found a pot of beautiful purple foxgloves on the deck.
That was all it took for him to be arrested.
Of course, having flowers on one’s deck is not in itself a crime, and Gérard Depardieu, his court-appointed attorney, took less than two hours to get his client released.
There was one thing that still played on the attorney’s mind: he remembered the way Brunelle never stopped protesting his innocence.
He was rambling a lot, and not always very coherent, but Gérard recognized the sincerity in his client’s voice.
The news of Brunelle’s suicide two days later had unsettled Gérard, challenging his faith in his own instincts, but he had never quite managed to rally behind the police detectives’ insistence that this desperate act amounted to an admission of guilt.
“What are you trying to tell me?” said Nora, losing her temper. “That I’m living in a murderer’s house?”
Taken aback by Nora’s anger, Gérard glanced at her with a look of surprise.
“Maybe not a murderer,” he said with a nonchalant shrug. “But there’s a fifty percent chance a man hanged himself here.”
With that, he lifted the cup to his lips and emptied it in a single swallow. He stood up.
“Thanks for the coffee.”
Nora glared at him.
“Seriously? You came in just to tell me that?”
“You’re the one who invited me in.”
“Next time you can stay in the car!” she retorted angrily.
She went into the entryway and opened the front door. Gérard, following behind her, seemed to regret the turn their meeting had taken.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“It’s a shame that you were, then,” she replied dryly.
“Can I make it up to you?”
“I doubt it.”
“Nora . . .”
Standing very close to her, he looked at her pleadingly.
“Come back to me,” he murmured.
She rolled her eyes in exasperation.
“Please, Gérard, don’t do this.”
“I won’t work so hard. I’ll spend more time with you and the children.”
“Stop it!”
“Let’s give it one more try.”
“It’s too late.”
“Too late for what?” he said. “To save our family?”
“Oh, enough with your fancy phrases, we’re not in the courtroom now.”
Hurt, Gérard stopped. His features grew hard, and his manner changed. Now he looked at her with a contemptuous expression.
“You’re making the biggest mistake of your life.”
Nora’s heart sank. She didn’t like the look on his face, as if he were struggling to control a surfeit of violent anger.
She was familiar with his explosive temperament, the barrage of reason that collapsed under a wave of fury if he didn’t get what he wanted.
She felt a ball of anxiety in her solar plexus, and with it the need to get away from him, to protect herself from the simmering cruelty that he exuded from his entire being.
Instinctively, she stepped back. Gérard gave a brief, mirthless smile, a fusion of malice and mockery.
“Am I scaring you, Nora?” he said, going toward her.
Nora tensed.
“Get out of my house!”
Gérard didn’t move. He stared at her in silence for a long moment, spurred on by tenacious resentment.
She had dared. She had dared to leave him, to take him away from his children, to make him unhappy.
To cast him into the darkest solitude. And all this for what?
To live in this ridiculous little house on her own every other week, with barely enough money to survive?
The poison of bitterness was slowly making its way into his veins, swelling the fury that he was increasingly unable to keep in check.
Nora sensed danger. She tried to stay calm and control the fear that gripped her, paralyzing her ability to think. Gérard had nothing to lose now. And she knew him sufficiently well to anticipate his reactions.
“Go and say goodbye to the children,” she ordered in the firmest tone she could. “And then I would like you to leave.”
Gérard, glaring, blurted out with a sardonic laugh, “You say goodbye to them from me.”
He stormed out of the house, got into his car, slammed the door, and sped off.
Alone in the entryway, Nora, trembling, softly pushed the front door closed.