Theory of Remainders (37 page)

“Or rather the
Mountain of Yews
. Like the tree.”

“What tree?”

“The Hill of If, the Mountain of Possibilities.”

Roger began to object to this string of absurdities, then stopped, his eyes widening. “My God. You mean . . .”

“Le Mont de l’If.”

Philip steadied himself. It was the turnoff he passed nearly every day on the back road to Rouen. Not even a mountain, Morin had said, just a long hill. The connection was remote, spanning the very first meeting at the hospital and the very last. But wasn’t that what Morin had insisted on?
I’ve been telling you all along
.

“That’s it,” said Roger. “That has to be it.”

“Grab your jacket,” Philip said. “We’re going for a ride.”

Twenty

Roger was struggling with the seat adjustment when Philip braked at an intersection, resulting in a collision between his forehead and the glove box.

“Ugh. I should have insisted on driving,” Roger said. “Then we wouldn’t be stuck in this absurd little vehicle.”

Philip didn’t respond. Inside him stirred the sense of an ending, like the leaning rhythm of a coda or the final stanza of a poem. Morin’s words had fallen together, pointing with sudden clarity. It was a lucky strike, a happy accident that yoked chance with opportunity, hinting at the possibility that was named Le Mont de l’If.

But how had he gotten this far? How had he made this leap? To his right, his brother-in-law wrestled with his seat belt, his elbow knocking the button that sent the window scrolling down. Philip found himself reassessing. Was it mere chance that Roger had nudged the search in the direction of Saint Louis and the Calvary? That he’d urged for them to look for Father Cabot? Or that he’d happened upon the translation of the
montagne de possibilités?
Yes, everything was fitting together except for one thing: Roger’s role in this story. A shadow of caution swept across his hopefulness. But he had no other choice besides giving up, which was the same as no option at all.

Soon they were on the outskirts of town, then in the open countryside. Off to the right was the field where Philip had slowed on the day of his arrival, the place where the burly man in blue coveralls had walked out with an unexploded artillery shell cradled in his arms. They passed a strip of woods, and then the land began to rise. To the left a slim spur of asphalt curved up into the woods, a small arrow pointing to the destination:
Le Mont de l’If.

The road here was unlined, barely wider than the car itself, rising along the crest of a slope bordered first by grassy fields, then by dark woods. The further they drove, the deeper the road sank into the terrain, the shoulders rising three, four, then five feet high, the road cutting like a gash through the land. Woods crowded the passage on both sides and trees tipped inward like rafters. Still the land rose, and finally the car climbed out, reemerging into a stretch of pastureland. A cluster of cream-colored cows congregated by the fence, one scratching her great neck against the barbed wire.

They passed by a low house with a slate roof. Then came a rattletrap out-building, followed by two more. At the summit of this gentle incline stood a lump of masonry still identifiable as a church, the structure bearing the scars of multiple makeshift repairs.

Philip pulled over onto a bald plot of beaten earth. They extracted themselves from the car and looked around, taking in the surroundings. The church had been patched over the years, and then the patches had been patched, resulting in a façade of old stone pocked with stretches of red brick and even cement block. The south slope of the roof had been covered with squares of corrugated sheet metal, and on the remaining tiles tufts of moss competed with lichens for territory.

Across the street stood the ruins of a house, long ago abandoned. To the right leaned a block monument to those whom the hamlet had lost to the world wars. The names of six men, three from the same family, were inscribed upon it in worn letters.

A hundred yards up the road lay what could be called, by a stretch of the imagination, an intersection, though one of mostly theoretical value, catering to the hypothetical passage of unlikely travelers, and marked by a tall stone cross—a
calvaire
.

It was a forlorn dot of land. Le Mont de l’If made Sorquainville look like a city, Yvetot a metropolis. It hardly qualified as a place at all.

The word that came to Philip’s mind was
non-lieu
.

He turned to Roger. Where would his brother-in-law lead if given half a chance? “What do you think?” he asked.

Roger blinked in the low sun. “I think that if I ever need to hide a body or two, Le Mont de l’If should be on my list.”

Philip nodded. A ball had formed in his chest. It was the old feeling of proximity and imminence, stronger than ever. Along with it came a flutter of anticipation. Was this what he’d become—a man excited by the prospect of finding his daughter’s decomposed remains? In his mind he ran through the series of snapshots—Sophie playing tennis, Sophie on skis, Sophie with her arm in a cast, Sophie mocking the camera. He pushed these images away.

“Where would you like to begin?” Roger wanted to know.

Philip surveyed the land under the setting sun. Le Mont de l’If wasn’t high, but it was broad, and trees lined much of the road. Normandy had hundreds, if not thousands, of stone or wood
calvaires
marking intersections. Le Mont de l’If represented one chance among many. It reminded Philip of Guérin’s old story about Louis XVI: You needed just one person who had kept the memory.

One person.

He turned and looked at Roger. “You choose.”

Roger seemed surprised at this invitation but didn’t argue. He stalked through the weeds, examining the terrain. The pastures and fields, he said, were out of the question: nothing could have gone unnoticed there. The only real chance was the long forested stretch they had driven through on their way to the top.

So they drove back to the start of the woods, and parked where Roger said. Here, too, it would be necessary to narrow the focus of their search, for the woods were long, and they extended a great distance to either side.

Roger recommended a first swath about fifty yards wide, starting just a stone’s throw from the asphalt. Each took one side, Philip on the higher ground, Roger down below, and they began the slow crawl forward, walking in tight zigzags. Philip caught flashes of Roger’s white shirt between the trunks of the trees lower down. The terrain here was uneven, and sometimes his brother-in-law would disappear for minutes at a time under the bump of a rise or in the V of a small ravine. Philip found himself a sturdy branch to serve as a walking stick, using it to steady his climb and to part ferns and underbrush as he examined the ground.

His mind began to lay traps for him. Every mound, every depression looked suspect. In the darkest thickets, where the ground was freckled with sunlight, twigs had a way of turning into bones. A rock became a skull. Any number of times he stopped and prodded the dirt with his branch, digging at the surface, only to find the soil hard, matted with roots. How long did it take for such organic cement to form? How long would the loose earth of a shallow grave retain any discernible difference from the rest?

And most of all: was he looking where Roger wanted him to?

The hillside was scraped and scarred with ridges, too rugged for anyone to clear for farmland. A few dry creek beds cut through the slope, and Philip scrambled down into each gully, poking at the sides. There were natural cracks and crevices in the walls, but no hastily dug sepulchers, as far as he could tell.

Behind a thicket far from the road Philip encountered a dry creek bed that led to a lumpy knoll rich with bulges of earth and tufts of vegetation. What might lie beneath this mound? Or that one? He probed with his stick.

When a branch cracked behind him, he wheeled about to find himself facing two men, unshaven, of uncertain age, standing just ten feet away. The first was as thin as a rail, the other huskier, with a long face. Both wore rubber boots and soiled trousers, topped with dirty blue sweaters—typical farmer’s garb. The thin one carried a walking stick with a knob of metal at the end, and he smiled the way a dog bares its teeth. It was a windfall for them, a stroke of luck. All of Yvetot had grown impatient with the American, warning him and informing him, but he hadn’t taken the hints. And now here he was in the woods, alone, far away from town. They gave each other a sly look. The husky one stepped forward.

“Halloo!” crooned Roger’s voice from deep in the woods. Philip looked for him down the hill, obscured by brush. Roger called again, now closer. When Philip turned back, the men were gone.

When they met up, he didn’t bother mentioning this strange encounter. He didn’t want anything to interrupt them now. He had to play it out.

Roger suggested a second swath, fifty yards further in. “Maybe we should switch sides?” he suggested.

“Why is that?” Philip shot back, watching for his reaction. “Are you worried I missed something?”

Roger gawked. “Are you all right?”

“A second swath,” Philip confirmed. “And we’ll switch.”

They started back in the other direction, deep in the woods. It was late now, and the sun was floating low on the horizon. Sometimes, as the ground dipped and rose, Philip found himself cast in deep shadows, the patches of darkness tricking him all the more. Outlines became more elastic, stretching to fit the elongated shapes of his imagination. The sensation of expectation gradually yielded to one of mere inevitability. All he needed to do was wait. Whatever he was looking for would find him if he gave it time.

Then he heard his name echo through the woods. Roger was high above, perhaps a hundred yards away, standing on the road and beckoning to him. Philip saw him cup his hands around his mouth, calling again. There was a tightness to his voice, but no urgency. Whatever Roger had to show him wasn’t going anywhere.

His own lack of surprise stunned him. He’d felt it coming, the way one feels the winding of a spring.

Without haste, but never stopping, he mounted the hillside. His throat had gone dry.

When they met on the road, Roger just nodded to the right and led Philip up the hill into the trees. The underbrush caught at Philip’s ankles, and he used his stick to push the clinging branches aside. He lagged behind.

Eventually they arrived at the edge of a small ravine. Philip looked to the right and left. Hadn’t he already passed by here? Roger stepped and skidded his way down the embankment to the bottom, waiting as Philip followed.

Roger nodded toward the left, “I think you—”

“Shut up, Roger,” he croaked as he pushed past.

A hole, overgrown with brush, showed in the flank of the ravine. Speckles of sunlight filtered through the brambles, and inside the cavity Philip made out the unmistakable contours of bones. A human skeleton. His vision blurred, then cleared. He’d done the anatomy classes all those years ago. It hadn’t been pleasant, but he knew how to do it. You focus on the details, that was the trick. You don’t look with the eyes of a father. You look with the eyes of a doctor.

Not three feet in, a broad gray skull loomed, half covered with dirt. The sockets of the eyes gaped, the rise of the nasal passage opening between them. The jaw stood slightly ajar, all the teeth present.

So this was where it happened. Where Morin had pinned her down. This hill, these trees, that stump—they were the last objects she saw. Perhaps it was with one of these stones, perhaps this one right here, that he had bludgeoned her.

A hand fell upon his shoulder, and he wheeled about. A maudlin look of sorrow furrowed Roger’s face. Philip wrenched himself away.

“What’s the matter?” Roger said.

His fists felt massive, like great weights swinging at the ends of his arms. “Are you happy?” Philip barked. “Now that I’ve found her? Now that you’ve guided me to her?”

“What?”

“Is there more, Roger? Anything else I should know?”

“Have you cracked? You’re totally raving.”