Theory of Remainders (47 page)

After sleeping much of that day, he grew restless at night. It didn’t help that Roger, the self-appointed nurse, was snoring loudly in the next room. Finally he gave up on sleep and limped downstairs, sitting down to drink a cup of tea in the halo of light at the kitchen table. There lay the old voice recorder. And the diary.

So he’d finished the job he’d started fifteen years ago. Not that there was much to show for it. Still, Sophie’s remains would be moved twenty yards to the south, to the tomb bearing her name. Her empty grave would finally be occupied. He hoped it would mean something to Margaux for her sister to have been laid to rest. Moreover, he had himself learned a few things. Reforged old connections. For all this he could thank the one other person who had found Sophie’s fate as unbearable as he, and with whom he felt an awkward kinship: Édouard Morin.

Philip was familiar with the mechanisms of guilt. Many of his patients struggled with this emotion. Some were paralyzed by it. Others wielded it as a weapon. What differed in Morin’s case was this extraordinary delay, the fact that he had kept a lid on his shame for so long, nearly fifteen years. Even when he had begun to reveal the truth, he’d done it indirectly, punishing himself for each revelation.

On his way back to the bedroom he paused before the mantel, where the portrait of Guillaume Aubert looked down. Maybe the old man would have felt more kindly about him now?

As Philip lay in bed, it astonished him to realize that he felt no hatred. In fact, having come to understand Édouard, he could no longer even imagine him as his daughter’s killer. His mind could still call up the scene—Sophie twisting on the ground, the dirt and weeds, the thrashing of arms, the muffled cries, the whimper—but try as he might, when he followed the imagined man’s hand to the wrist, the wrist to the sleeve, the sleeve to the shoulder, he couldn’t make the face resemble Édouard Morin.

They say that understanding is forgiveness, but this didn’t even feel like a pardon. It felt like the setting aside of a verdict.

It was sleep that provided the final piece. He woke early in the morning with a feeling of certainty. How had he failed to understand? He needed to return to Rouen, one last time.

By six a.m. he had showered, shaved, and dressed. Roger still snored in the other room, and Philip let him continue. Outside, he backed the car around and pulled onto the road, heading south.

Fog slumbered in the hollows of the countryside. He drove past farms just beginning to stir with the morning. As he slowed in a hamlet, the shutters of a window split open, pushed by a red-haired woman in a nightdress. Finally he curved around the last stand of trees, and the great wheat-colored hospital came into view, the long wings spread across the hilltop.

He arrived at the ward far too early to meet with Suardet, so he haunted the waiting room, fueling himself with espressos from a vending machine in the hall. Shortly after nine o’clock the doctor appeared, his mustache quivering with irritation at the sight of this visitor.

“What are you doing here, Monsieur Adler?” The old doctor sounded bone-tired. “Why won’t you leave this poor man alone? You can’t think I’d really allow you to see Édouard Morin again?”

But it was with Suardet that Philip wanted to speak.

“Fifteen minutes. That’s all I’m asking for. Then you can turn me away.”

“I don’t have time for this.”

“Where can we talk?”

Suardet’s shoulders sagged. “You just don’t know how to let go, do you, Monsieur Adler?”

“You’re exactly right. That’s one thing I have never learned.”

The doctor shook his head, and with reluctance he pushed open his office door and led him in.

There Philip told Suardet the story as he understood it, pointing out Morin’s tics and habits, explaining the indirect communications, the evident desire to speak, the reluctance to reveal, the limits Morin would not cross, the allegiances he bore, the compulsion to even things up, the struggle to accept that which remained asymmetrical.

“I don’t need Morin’s psychological profile,” Suardet interrupted. “You’re not telling me anything new.”

Philip leaned forward in his chair. “What if I said that Édouard Morin is innocent? That he never killed my daughter?”

Suardet’s jaw slackened, and Philip began his explanation. Édouard had tried to tell them this, and in so many different ways. Philip had understood it first in Morin’s exaggerated British accent.
I’m nawt at libuhty to discuzz thiz any fawther
, he had said.
No fawther at all.

“Why this switch?” he asked Suardet. “There was nothing British about what Morin had to say.” In fact, he explained, what had mattered was the accent. Morin needed to take advantage of the vanishing R.
Fawther
became a way to utter one word masked as another.

“What are you going on about?” Suardet demanded as he looked at his watch.

“Don’t you see? Édouard also referred to French as his father tongue, and he always spoke of the fatherland—which he feared languages might betray.”

Suardet frowned, and Philip continued. There was all the wordplay.
Nothing compares to a parent
, Morin had said.
I understand the despair of parents
.
They aim to repair the irreparable
. “The rhyming word here is
pair
,” Philip said. “Which means
even
in French—the very evenness that is so dear to Édouard. And yet it’s also
even
with another word, with which it is paired in a very odd way. By sound alone.”

“
Père
,” breathed the doctor, troubled. He peered at Philip. “But that’s madness.”

“Precisely. And this is its grammar.
I am the boy of my father
.”

“But Olivier Morin is
dead
, Monsieur Adler.”

“Not for everyone. Not for those who live by his law.”

Philip explained what he believed to have taken place. Édouard would have been nothing but a substitution, a proxy. A pawn used in a gambit. Sophie had been raped and murdered by the father, by Olivier Morin. Édouard would have surprised him in the act. The father then threatened his own son, swearing him to secrecy. Probably Édouard Morin had moved the body himself, almost certainly without his father’s knowledge. He was a smart boy, so he did what he could to make things right, to even them up. Then Olivier Morin made Édouard take the fall for the crime, and the boy accepted his father’s law. He revered Olivier, could not break his promise to him, and agreed to be sacrificed in the place of another. To bear that cross. To mount that Calvary. Which meant avoiding, at all costs, mentioning the name of the grave where he had placed the body:
Hesse
,
S
, and all words containing that sound.

“The secret held as long as the father was alive,” Philip continued. “He could maintain control over the boy at the same time that he shielded him from the prying of others. But after Olivier’s death, over the months, the father’s imperative thinned. Édouard began to look for a way to communicate the truth, but to do so
without saying it
. He wanted to make things right, even to tell us the location—but without breaking the vow of silence he had made to his father.”

Suardet gaped. Philip could see him searching for objections, but the weight of conviction was settling upon him.

Finally the doctor spoke. “Even if all this were true,” he said, “what do you propose to do about it?”

“That’s obvious, isn’t it?” Philip said, spreading his palms outward. “Édouard Morin needs to know that his message has been received. The entire case should be reopened. At the very least, his innocence should be recognized. He needs to understand that he no longer has to bear this burden.”

Suardet folded his arms over his chest and creaked back in his chair, gazing at the ceiling while he thought. He nodded, paused, nodded again. His eyes thinned, and he looked back at Philip. “But don’t you see?” he said. “That’s precisely the one thing you must not do.”

It was Philip’s turn to be taken aback. “What do you mean?”

“Look, Monsieur Adler,” the doctor said. “I’m glad you’ve found what you were looking for. I really am. But think about this clearly. There are two possibilities here, and they both lead to the same place. If you’re
wrong
about Édouard, then you have nothing to thank him for, nothing needs to be said, and nothing changes.”

Philip nodded. “Yes. But if I’m right . . .”

“If you’re
right
, the very last thing you can do is reveal it.”

Philip began to protest, but Suardet lifted a hand. “Consider this,” the doctor said. “Édouard reads the newspapers. He’ll know you have found your daughter, and that’s all the news he needs. But if he learns that you understand how she got there, that you have deciphered what he has tried so hard
not
to say, then he’ll have broken his oath to his father. That’s how he’ll feel. You know it is. He’ll see it as a betrayal. As you said, this promise means more to him than anything else.”

Philip opened his mouth, but words failed him.

“From where I sit,” Suardet continued, “it would appear that Édouard Morin has given you a tremendous gift. And the only possible way for you to reciprocate is by not acknowledging it.”

Philip searched for the flaw in this logic, but Suardet was right. Either Morin bore the public guilt for a murder he didn’t commit, or he suffered a deeper and more private guilt for betraying a man who had never deserved his trust. One guilt would gnaw at him every day of his life, but the other would destroy him. It was a Hobson’s choice, and both men knew how it had to go. It wasn’t fair. It might not even have been legal. But Philip would have to keep silent about what he thought was the truth. There was no way to even the situation up. His intuition about what had really happened in July of 1993 would have to go unconfirmed. The most generous thanks he could offer Édouard Morin consisted of swallowing hard and not seeking an answer to this lingering question.

The two doctors exchanged handshakes, and Philip took his leave, heading down the hall toward the exit, passing before the observation window looking into the commons area of the ward. The room on the other side of the wired glass teemed with patients, a few seated at tables, playing cards or dominos, others engaged in solitary activities. A woman with auburn hair sat in an armchair chatting vividly with no one Philip could see. A stooped man paced like a bear in a zoo, walking along the back of the room, reaching out and touching the wall with his index finger before turning in the other direction. As two patients moved to the left, they revealed a man hunched over a table, a large volume open before him: Édouard Morin, the man who had been so
eager to help
, who had wanted everything in its place.

Philip turned and headed for the exit.

Twenty-Seven

It took one more day to
complete the arrangements
. In reality there was nothing left to prepare. The grave had been waiting for years, its occupant long overdue. Family didn’t have far to travel. Father Cabot had ample time in his schedule.

In short, they were standing on ceremony. The delay allowed Philip and Yvonne the time they needed to steel themselves.

He told Yvonne his suspicions about Édouard Morin’s father. She deserved to know. And when he finished his explanation, she was convinced he was right, but she also saw the bind that led to Édouard’s purgatory. The one person who should be punished was already dead, she said, and you can’t free a man imprisoned within himself. Some things were simply not subject to resolution, like the great tortures described in Antiquity—Sisyphus rolling his stone for all eternity, Ixion spinning on his wheel of fire, Tantalus always reaching, never grasping. Then there were all the scenes from Dante. Yvonne had plenty of examples.