Roxanne Bouchard - The Coral Bride

That night, the killer had sailed the Close Call II to L’Anse-aux-Amérindiens half an hour before high tide. The place had been deserted, the sea a millpond. They’d killed the engine and gone to the bow. Cut the anchor line and removed the anchor from its chain. Carried the chain and line across the deck and bound the legs of Angel Roberts, who was drugged and left slumped against the wheelhouse. Then the killer had gone inside the cabin of the trawler, found the old wooden lobster trap, stuffed it with blankets, grabbed a length of cord and gone to the stern. There that person had attached the trap to the chain, then opened the tailgate, taken the cord and tied one end to the trap and the other to the boat, so the trap filled with blankets would be suspended over the water from the stern. Finally, the ‘monster’, as Dotrice Percy had described the killer, had undressed, stuffed those clothes into a plastic bag, dived into the sea and swum ashore. The water was frigid, but it hadn’t taken long for the killer to make it to the shore, because the slack water had held the trawler completely immobile just metres from the beach.

As he drove, Moralès played out the scenario in his mind. He pictured the gentle curve Annie Arsenault’s boat had followed that morning, when the current had started to flow along the coast. Angel Roberts’ lobster trawler must have drifted the same way, very slowly, for more than two hours. Then, two and a half hours before low tide, before the dawn, the Close Call II was caught in what Annie had called a rip, a powerful current that had carried the boat out of Gaspé Bay and into the open sea.

Moralès turned off the road and onto the gravel driveway. He was amazed how meticulously the whole thing had been planned. The further out to sea the boat drifted, the choppier the water became. As the waves began to crest, the blankets in the lobster trap soaked up the spray. The heavier the trap became, the closer the cord suspending it from the stern came to snapping. When it did, the trap plunged into the sea and sank, dragging the chain and line overboard – and carrying Angel Roberts to her watery demise. The current had swept the Close Call II out to sea without her, until the vessel was discovered some seventeen kilometres offshore.

While Sébastien dunked his head in the river, Kimo went inside to make him some breakfast. Then she came back to fetch him with a mug of coffee in her hand. Could it be that he had led her, like Maude, in a direction other than her own? And had he perhaps unjustly accused his father as a means to justify his own behaviour? Sébastien Moralès took the coffee from the young woman’s hand. He felt ashamed. He wished he could shed this skin of his, delete this whole narrative of clinking pots and pans.

‘Did you plan for us to spend last night here?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she replied.

‘But when you saw how drunk I was getting, you felt obligated to stay here with me.’

‘It’s all right, it’s good for me too to take a bit of a break.’

He took an embarrassed sip of coffee. ‘The day we met, you asked me if I was a decent man, a loyal man, and I didn’t give you an answer.’

She turned away from him. She’d had enough of men who didn’t care about her, who courted her only to engage in cockfights on the wharves and indulge in petty acts of vengeance. A craving for liberation was what had drawn her to him. She wanted to be free to think of nothing but her own desire.

‘I invented a way to love that wasn’t right. I’m sorry,’ Sébastien continued.

She felt awkward as she led him back to the cabin. She had never liked that kind of conversation. ‘Come and eat while it’s still hot.’

He kept on talking as they walked, as if he needed to vent all his frustrations at once. ‘My dad always says criminals make up their own truths to believe in.’

‘We all do that to some extent. Don’t beat yourself up about it.’

They went inside and she sat beside him.

‘You were right the other day when you said I manipulated people.’

‘That’s not what I said.’ She reached for her coffee.

‘I did exactly that with my dad. The other day, I told him I was all messed up because of him. I accused him of ruining my life.’

Suddenly, she frowned. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I did some stupid things. Cruel things that messed up my relationship. And I found it hard to admit to myself what I’d done, so I pointed the finger at my dad instead. I told him I had acted the way I did because of him and the way he always behaved.’

Sébastien leaned over his plate of scrambled eggs and picked up his fork. He took a mouthful and turned to Kimo. She was staring at him.

‘Out of loyalty to him?’

‘Yes. That was exactly the word I used. But it’s not true. What I’m trying to say is, I’m sorry, Kimo.’

She wasn’t listening to him anymore.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘It’s just that when you brought up loyalty, it reminded me of a conversation I had…’ She froze and slowly shook her head as her words tapered into an eerie silence, as if she had just seen a ghost.

‘What’s wrong?’

Kimo sprang to her feet.

‘I know who killed Angel!’

At the winter mooring yard, the detective wove his way between the shrimp trawlers and pickup trucks, found a spot to park and got out of his car.

The Close Call II , relieved of her skipper and engine power, had glided away towards the horizon. Twenty-four hours later, Leeroy Roberts and his sons, Bruce and Jimmy, had found the boat by following an approximate trajectory Bruce had calculated based on the current and the tide.

Moralès hated these rickety metal stairs. He climbed up to the deck, very carefully. He was kicking himself for not having given more thought to the currents earlier in the investigation. When he had first gone aboard the Ange-Irène , Leeroy Roberts had mentioned his son’s calculations and the detective should have caught on that this was a key clue.

Instead of feeling relief when he set foot on the deck, he felt an unpleasant sensation of dizziness and nausea. He opened the door to the wheelhouse and stepped over the threshold, trying to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. Did all shrimp trawlers have a similar layout? he wondered as he descended the interior staircase that turned ninety degrees and released him on the port side of the vessel.

He continued into the kitchenette with its harsh overhead lights and cast a glance into the berth at the bow. This part of the boat was eerily silent. He retraced his steps, turned left at the staircase and continued down the starboard side of the vessel. His eyes fell on the gaping mouth descending to the deck below, and he paused. He should really go back above deck, call Lefebvre and wait for backup. No, there was no danger, he reasoned with himself. The fisherman had never shown himself to be threatening, so there was no cause for concern. Besides, he had no proof to support his theory, not yet. Before making any formal accusations, he would have to wait until Lefebvre had checked what he had asked him to.

Moralès descended the second staircase in silence. The overheads cast a severe light on the rust-streaked walls and the salt-encrusted treads of the metal steps. The doors leading to the hold were closed, and the lights along this side of the vessel were off. He shivered. It was damp and cold down here. Turning towards the bow he saw the door to the engine room was ajar. He was drawn towards it like a moth to a flame. As he inched closer, he heard the fisherman’s voice ring out through the silence.