Bones Never Lie (Temperance Brennan, #17)(47)

Tawny McGee was seventeen when she was finally set free. I imagined her somewhere in the sun, laughing over lunch with women her age. Pushing a stroller. Walking a golden retriever or a Saint Bernard. Free of the rancor we’d just witnessed. The constant bickering.

Was Bernadette correct in her optimism? That her daughter was doing well? Or did Jake have it right in viewing Tawny as permanently broken?

I understood Ryan’s desire to focus on the hunt for which I’d dragged him from Costa Rica. Pomerleau had scripted the nightmare that had robbed Tawny of her childhood. Perhaps her sanity.

Still. I wondered where Tawny was and what she was doing.

Ryan dropped me at my condo. No goodbye. Just a promise to call in the morning.

I phoned Angela’s and ordered a small pizza with everything but onions. Then I walked to the corner dépanneur for coffee and a few breakfast items. No point in provisioning when I’d be returning south soon. Groceries in hand, I picked up the pizza and headed home.

I ate with Wolf in the Situation Room. The pizza was good. The conversation did nothing to brighten my mood.

Then, all of a sudden, I was exhausted. The grueling trip to Costa Rica, followed by draining days in Charlotte. The long hours yesterday, then the late-night flight. Today the disturbing file review, then ping-ponging across the island to visit people not happy to see us.

Had we learned a single useful fact? Or simply wasted our time?

I stretched out on the couch and replayed each interview in my mind.

The Violettes had been a bust. Fair enough. We’d anticipated little from them.

Ditto for Pomerleau. Barely lucid. What was the one thing she’d said? That her daughter was in the cimetière Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Marie-Jo?lle Bastien was buried there, not Anique. Anique was alive.

Tawny McGee was the only person I’d thought might prove helpful, but we hadn’t laid eyes on her. Bernadette and Jake were clueless concerning her whereabouts. They themselves were pathetic.

Maybe the therapist? Had we gotten her name? Easy enough. But Tawny wasn’t dead. The woman would invoke doctor-patient privilege. If they were still in contact, might she deliver a message to Tawny?

Wolf reported that the fires in Australia were worsening.

Ryan said that Pomerleau was in Vermont. Jake Kezerian strode toward him, angry. Thrust a paper in his face. Ryan took the paper and placed it in a bright yellow folder.

Wolf said something about economic indicators.

Kezerian crossed his arms on his chest. Spread his feet. “Grand-mère and Grand-père.”

The sky behind Ryan transformed into a green floral web. Ivy, twining nothing, meandering free-form in space.

Ryan opened the file.

The ivy snaked and twisted.

Ryan looked up. Slowly, his face morphed to that of Nurse Smiley. Simone.

“Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?” Kezerian asked. What do you want? “Saint John,” Simone said.

This was backward. The nurse was speaking English, Kezerian French.

“Maladie d’Alzheimer.” Kezerian.

“She’s not buried.” Simone.

“Qui est avec les saints?” Who is with the saints?

Simone wagged her head slowly from side to side.

My eyes flew open.

Wolf had been replaced by Anthony Bourdain.

I rewound the dream.

Juggled the pieces my id had gathered and stored.

They fit.

Jesus. Could that be it?

I lunged for the phone.





CHAPTER 20


I CHECKED THE time as I punched in the number. 11:15. A twinge of guilt. I ignored it.

“Umpie Rodas.”

“It’s Dr. Brennan. Tempe.”

A sliver of a pause as the name registered.

“Yes.”

“I’m in Montreal. With Ryan.”

He waited.

“This may be nothing.”

“You wouldn’t phone this late about nothing.” A mild reprimand?

“In the course of your investigation, did you ever come across the name Corneau?”

“No. Why?”

“When we shut Pomerleau down back in ’04, she was working with a guy calling himself Stephen Menard. The story’s complicated, so I’m simplifying. The house they occupied on de Sébastopol originally belonged to a couple named Corneau, Menard’s grandparents. The Corneaus died in a car wreck in Quebec in 1988. You with me?”

“I’m listening.”

“Menard’s mother was Genevieve Rose Corneau, an American. She and her husband, Simon Menard, owned a home near St. Johnsbury, Vermont. The deed was in Simon’s name. Stephen Menard lived there for a time before relocating to Montreal.”

“To set up his twisted little fantasyland.”

I figured Rodas had learned about Menard recently, either from Ryan or Honor Barrow, or perhaps on his own, when the DNA recovered from Nellie Gower’s body led to Anique Pomerleau.

“Right. This afternoon Ryan and I visited Sabine Pomerleau, Anique’s mother. She’s eighty-two and suffers from dementia. But she said one thing. Could be I’m reading too much into the ramblings of a senile old woman—”

“What did she say?”

“That Anique is avec les saints. Saint Jean. Then in English she said buried.”

Silence hummed as Rodas considered that.