—The children had long since been put to bed when Zaza Mulligan, on Friday the 21st of July, started up the forest path leading to her parents chalet humming A
Whitet Shade of Pale driven on by Procul Harum alongside Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds in the sparkling lights of the summer of 67. She’d drunken too much but she didn’t care.***
Welcome to Boundary Pond, a lake on the Quebec, Maine border, which picked up the name of Bondrée from Pierre Landry a long since dead trapper. In this book about the great out doors around the lake and its surrounding forest, Peter’s forest, Michaud manages the feat of presenting us with a closed set up mystery. At the outset of the story Zaza Mulligan is found dead after having her leg sectioned in one of Pierre Landry’s old bear traps, and after investigation by the American detective Stan Michaud the enquiry returns an accidental death but Michaud has his doubts:
—Life reorganized itself around this absence and everyone, except for friends and family as well as cops like himself, unable to hold back the ghosts, would forget that in this space, filled by absence, there was once a young girl. It had to be so, the game didn’t allow the participation of the deceased.***
And then the second death in similar circumstances leaves no doubt, there is a killer out there. Michaud shows us the tired and haunted detective, The mix of holiday makers around the lake, part American and part Québécois, only managing a few words of each other’s language as well as several chapters narrated by the young Andrée Duchamp, no longer a child but not yet an adolescent:
—I’d only seen my mother in such a state at the death of her father grand-dad Fred. For weeks after papys funeral, she just disappeared at any time. Her body was still there bent over the sink or over the kitchen counter, but the essence of my mother was gone. Her hands hung in the air in front of her, our questions slid from her ears and it needed for her to drop her knife or her potato for her to re-enter her body. These absences scared me, because the false grimace that froze her looks belonged to a stranger that I wouldn’t have wanted to cross in the dark.***
And who is Little Hawk, an erstwhile friend of, and who had been taught more than twenty years previously to trap by, Pierre Landry and who finding Landry hung in his hut swore that:
—Nobody, ever, will touch my son, my daughter, my father or my brother.***
Michaud, who manages to have a detective with her surname and a narrator with her christian name, much like Agatha Christie before her, even though we know all of the families around the lake, keeps us guessing till the end.
First published in French as ‘Bondrée’ by Les Éditions Québec Amérique in 2013
Translated into English by Donald Winkler as “Boundary” and published by No Exit Press in 2017
*** My translation
South of Paris books 