Lake of Echoes by Perrat Liza

Author:Perrat, Liza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perrat Publishing
Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

30

November 1969

Léa

The old church bell clanged thin and soulful as Dommy and I approached the cemetery of Sainte-Marie-du-Lac, my sister holding my arm as if I were a feeble old woman.

It was the first day of November, la Toussaint, and this All Saints Day had dawned overcast, fog as thick as the smoke plumes from the Gauloises people were puffing on. A fog that had slithered beneath my skin, stolen the last fragments of my energy, and left me without the slightest will to go on.

The tail end of October had brought full, dark clouds, and misty rain so faint it was barely visible. Like unshed tears. You only knew it was raining when your clothes became wet, the damp creeping beneath your skin, hurrying you indoors shivering, to a glowing hearth.

Linda walked beside us, carrying the basket containing two pots of yellow and pink chrysanthemums. Her father, as usual, hadn’t come with us, and since Paul had cut all ties with his twin sister and family, he never went to the cemetery in Romans either, where Louise had told me Yves Rocamadour had recently laid his wife to rest.

‘Bonjour,’ we said to Père Châtaigne who was clipping the rose bushes that leaned up against the old stones of Saint Julien’s, church in which I’d married Bruno Bellefontaine almost ten years ago. Sadness shrouded me again as I thought how that happy celebration had degenerated into an almost continual battle and, finally, our separation.

‘Bonjour, Léa, Dominique.’ The old priest, the only person who called my sister by her full name, raised his clippers in greeting.

We said hello to our hairdresser, Madeleine Sorel, who was tidying a plot.

‘Seeing Madeleine reminds me I haven’t had a haircut for over six months,’ I said.

‘A tidy-up of that bird’s nest might cheer you up a little,’ Dommy said, glancing over my tangle of hair that I no longer had the energy to drag a brush through.

‘As if a haircut would make any difference,’ I said, that tomb-cold sliding right to my core. ‘Since Clotilde’s card reading six weeks ago, you know as well as me there hasn’t been a speck of news about Juliette — no more sightings of men who resembled either of the identikit pictures, no more suspects. Nothing. I’m really wondering if, like you all think, I’m deluding myself believing in Clotilde’s vision of Juliette alive and well?’

Like a shipwrecked sailor adrift, days passing without rescue, and no fresh water or land in sight, I was also finding it harder to battle my frustration with Major Rocamadour’s lack of progress. Surely if he was going to find this evil abductor, and rescue the girls, he’d have done so by now?

Dommy, Linda and I moved through the cemetery, greeting more villagers tidying up family graves and planting bulbs, so that the following spring this place of the dead would blossom with life of a different kind –– irises, pansies, tulips and daffodils.

As Linda raced off to jump rope with Elise and Sonia

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