*
“You’ve got the wrong department,” said the receptionist.
She was middle-aged and tired. The only members of the public who ever came into her office were there to complain. And seemed to blame her personally for their tax bills, the potholes in their roads, blackouts, and one mother screamed at her for twenty minutes because her child had measles.
“We want to find out who made this map,” said Huifen, pushing it across the worn counter toward the weary woman.
“And I want you to understand,” she said, slowly pushing it back. “I. Don’t. Care.”
“But the Commission de toponymie has an office here, doesn’t it?” asked Amelia.
The clerk looked at her with distaste, then turned back to the least objectionable of the two. The Chinese Girl.
“The commission puts names on places,” she explained. “It doesn’t map them.”
“But it used to, didn’t it?” asked Amelia, but now the receptionist refused to even look in her direction.
“Can we speak to the person anyway?” asked Huifen, and beamed at the receptionist, who was impervious to good humor.
“Fine.”
“Yeah,” said Amelia. “I bet you are.”
The clerk picked up the phone and jabbed her finger at a button.
“Someone here to speak to you. No, I’m not kidding. Some Chinese Girl. Stop laughing, it’s true.”
Hanging up, she waved at the waiting area, then turned back to her desk.
“I’ve become the Invisible Woman,” said Amelia, as they took their seats.
“That must be a new experience for you,” said Huifen, and Amelia smiled.
After a few minutes of waiting, Huifen turned to Amelia. “Why did you apply to the academy? You don’t exactly fit in.”
“And you do? Chinese Girl.”
Huifen smiled. “Ahh, but Chinese Girl with Gun fits in everywhere.”
Amelia laughed, and the receptionist looked over, disapproving.
“I can’t actually remember why I applied,” said Amelia. “I must’ve been drunk or stoned.”
The landlady, fat legs splayed, cigarette hanging loosely between her yellowed fingers. And on the TV, a smartly dressed woman, feminine and poised.
Amelia saw her two futures, right there.
“I didn’t think I’d be accepted,” she admitted. “And you’re right, I don’t fit in. Anywhere. Might as well not fit in there.”
“With the academy, that’s not exactly a bad thing,” said Huifen. “Why didn’t you listen to me?”
“What? When? I am listening to you.”
“I don’t mean now, I mean at that first party, in the Commander’s rooms. I told you to stay away from him.”
“I didn’t know who you meant, the Commander or Leduc.”
“Well, now you know.”
Amelia nodded. She wished with all her heart she’d known then what she knew now.
“Do you have any idea who killed him?” she asked Huifen.
“The Duke? No.”
“But you must’ve known him well.”
“Why d’you say that?”
“You seemed chummy.”
“Chummy? With the Duke?” said Huifen. “No one was chummy with him. Like you, we did as we were told. Were you ever alone with him?”
“No.”
But the Goth Girl colored, and Huifen knew that was a lie. She hesitated, then touched Amelia’s hand. Lightly. As though a moth had landed, then taken off.
Just then the receptionist stood up and looked over. Seeing the gesture, she shook her head. It was worse than she’d thought.
“He’ll see you now. Down the hall, first door on the right.”
*
“Merde,” said Jacques.
He leaned over the open drawer and looked down the long line of file cabinets marching into the darkness.
“How’re we ever going to find the records on that property? These aren’t even in chronological order. They’re alphabetical. It’s fucking crazy.”
Nathaniel didn’t disagree.
To make matters worse, the township didn’t recognize the village of Three Pines as a separate entity. There were absolutely no references to it.
And to make matters even worse, Jacques was getting antsy. Bored. Impatient. And Nathaniel knew what that meant. Once he stopped berating the filing system, Jacques would go looking for another target.
“You’re right,” said Nathaniel. “Since they’re alphabetical, we could look up the names of the boys until we find one that fits.”
Nathaniel brought out his iPhone and tapped it a few times until he came to the photographs he’d taken of the memorial window in the chapel and the names below it.
“The stained-glass boy is probably one of them. If we look up the family names, we might find someone who lived in that building in 1914. Good idea.”
Jacques nodded, either not realizing, or not admitting, that the idea hadn’t been his. He had, in fact, been thinking about how dark and cold it was. And wondering what was in the corners. And what was dangling overhead. And how to get out if there was a fire. Or an earthquake. Or a huge spider that had lived down here, undisturbed, for years …
Something brushed against his face and he jerked away, flailing his arms and wiping wildly at his head. Putting his tuque and gloves back on, he grudgingly got to work.
Down the wall, Nathaniel’s bare head was leaning over the files while his fingers worked nimbly, almost frantically, through the cards.
*
Monsieur Bergeron, the manager of toponymie for the region, was a balding, precise, desiccated man. His office was also bald and precise, with no personal items at all, except for a dusty Plexiglas plaque congratulating him on thirty years of service to Québec. The entire wall behind him was taken up by a detailed map of the area.
The dry little man hooked his fingers on the edge of his desk like a little bird and sat forward.
He gave an audible sigh, then looked from the map to the Chinese Girl and the Goth Girl.
“A Turcotte.” He sighed again. “Where did you find this?”
“In a wall, in Three Pines,” said Huifen.
“Where?”
“The village,” said Amelia.
He looked momentarily lost, then dropped his eyes to the map.
“Turcotte,” said Huifen. “Is that the person who made it?”
“Oui, oui,” said Monsieur Bergeron dreamily.
“How do you know?” asked Amelia.
She was both amused and annoyed by the reaction of this man. He seemed to be not only absorbed in the map, but absorbed by it. As though he’d fallen between the thin topographical lines and gotten trapped there. Happily.
“It’s unmistakable, isn’t it?” he said, with all the confidence of an expert who was surprised that everyone couldn’t see what was so obvious to him. “May I touch it?”
The young women nodded, not mentioning that just a few minutes earlier a jelly doughnut had touched it.
He reached out, letting his thin finger hover over the paper, as though it might bring the map to life, like Michelangelo’s Adam in the Sistine Chapel.
When his finger did finally descend, it was an act so delicate, so intimate, Amelia felt she should look away.
She was about to tell him it was just a photocopy, not the original, but decided not to. This man knew that perfectly well. And he was still smitten.
“Turcotte was a mapmaker?” asked Huifen.
“Not just a mapmaker. Antony Turcotte was the father of all of Québec’s modern maps. He created a department dedicated to mapping and naming the province. That was back in the early 1900s. He was a giant. He recognized the connection a people have to where they live. That it isn’t just land. Our history, our cuisine, our stories and songs spring from where we live. He wanted to capture that. He gave les habitants their patrimoine.”
Monsieur Bergeron had used the old word, the slang word, for the inhabitants of Québec. Les habitants. Over the years it had become almost an insult, conjuring images of lumbering rustics.
But this man, and Antony Turcotte before him, used the word correctly. Les habitants had tended the land. They’d cleared it, farmed it, built homes and businesses. They’d lived on it and loved it. They were born on it and buried in it.