Page 29 of Miss Wolcott’s Ghost

“Dead.”

“Our dead?”

“No. According to his wife, when he cut short his visit to Clara’s in November, he really wasn’t feeling well. A few days later, he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Went into hospice and died a month later.”

Jean-Guy exhaled and turned to stare at Clara’s list. “Okay, so neither of them is the body nor the murderer. Who does that leave?”

“Allô?” called a voice from behind the fire truck. “Am I in the right place? I’m looking for Inspector Lacoste.”

The botanist had arrived.

CHAPTER 13

“I’m not sure my grandparents would really have considered themselves heathens.” The unexpected statement came out of the old cassette player.

The gang in the bookstore stared at it, as people before television had stared at the huge wireless sets in their living rooms while a radio program was playing.

Even Rosa stared, but then ducks often did.

A thin laugh, a sort of cackle, came out of the speaker. “At least they weren’t heathens before the two strangers arrived.”

This was the voice of a woman long dead and buried. A ghost, come to help them solve a murder.

Armand glanced at the empty file on the table between Reine-Marie and the young archivist. Where the transcript of this tape had been. Before someone stole it.

In March.

Why wait until almost four months after the murder to take it? Perhaps the killer had only just realized the oral history existed. But how could this old interview possibly have anything to do with the body in Lost Nation? What could Flossy Fuller have said in 1967 that led to a death more than fifty years later?

Conjecture, Armand warned himself. Be careful. Just listen.

“It wasn’t called Lost Nation at the time,” Flossy Fuller continued. “It was called Pleasant Valley.”

Armand smiled. Yes, that was the word. An almost old-fashioned description and notion. A word rarely used today, “pleasant.” It had a nice ring to it. And that was how the place felt, even now.

“Mind you, they had to work hard,” Flossy continued. “Most of the people came from the United States or Britain for the free land. Can you imagine leaving a town in England and ending up in the middle of a forest in Québec? But people seemed to thrive. They bought oxen and used them to drag logs out of the forest. That was mainly how they made their living. Logging. Not clear-cutting. They harvested selectively. They grew their own food and kept meat in tight waxed bags in the river to stay cold. They built a schoolhouse for the children. My grandmother rode a horse to school, climbing on Nelly with her two brothers. Once a month, on a Sunday, prayer services would be held in the school. What was that?”

Off mic, they could just hear a murmured voice, a question being asked, but couldn’t quite make it out.

“No, there was no minister. They took turns leading the prayers. My grandmother said there was singing too. Lots of it.”

Now the thin voice unexpectedly broke out into song.

“Rock of Ages, cleft for me. Let me hide myself in thee.” She stopped singing and gave a small, almost embarrassed laugh. “They’d hold a community supper after the service. Well, it was called supper, but it was their noonday meal. Their big meal was always in the middle of the day.”

There was silence. So much so that Clara reached out to press stop, thinking it was over.

“Then they showed up and put a curse on the place.” The elderly woman’s voice had gone from slightly amused to somber.

“Who were they?” The archivist’s voice off mic could now be heard.

“No one knows their names or what became of them. Two men appeared one day and installed themselves in the schoolhouse. Every night they preached. Little by little, word spread and the residents of Pleasant Valley began showing up. There was nothing else to do, you see. It was like entertainment. But it wasn’t fun. The strangers started out okay, at least sane. Then, little by little, they started yelling at everyone. They banned singing and were preaching hellfire and damnation and told the people if they didn’t donate to them, they were all going to burn. They’d pass the hat, and some did give, even though they had precious little themselves.

“Eventually people grew tired of being yelled at. You would, wouldn’t you. Then they got angry and became convinced the preachers were charlatans. They finally ran them out of Pleasant Valley. As they left, the preachers cursed it, shouting back, ‘Oh, what a lost nation is this.’”

There was another reedy laugh, without much amusement.

“That’s how Pleasant Valley became known as Lost Nation. The funny thing is, not long after that, a road was built bypassing the community, and it slowly died.”