‘I brought you some waterproofs. I thought you might not have any at the auberge.’
Moralès gladly accepted the protective gear from Jacques Forest and pulled it on over his clothes.
‘Have you heard anything from my Sébastien?’ he asked. ‘He didn’t come back last night.’
Forest shook his head. ‘I tried to call him last night, but he didn’t answer.’
‘His phone’s dead.’
Annie Arsenault chimed in. She took her fishing seriously. ‘I don’t want to put a damper on your father-and-son fishing trip, but we can’t hang around and wait, because we’re going to L’Anse-aux-Amérindiens. It’s already half past five, so we’ll get there about half an hour before high tide. Then after high water we’ll only have about half a knot behind us for three hours or so. We’ll have to pack up and be on our way by half past nine though, because two and a half hours before low tide, the rip will be running.’
Forest nodded. Moralès had barely understood a word besides the fact they wouldn’t be able to wait for Sébastien. He nodded, all the same. Jacques unhooked the mooring lines and Annie guided the boat away from the dock. It struck Moralès how quiet the engine was, then he realised it was an electric outboard motor.
The sun was just beginning to rise over Forillon Point. There was a refreshing chill to the air. None of them spoke for a while, as if the sea were demanding a certain silence. A solitary gull cried as the boat passed. None of the others in the flock bothered to look their way; these seafarers were none of their concern. Cormorants flew by so low, they seemed to skim the surface of the water.
To the north, Moralès saw the road he had driven so many times in recent days, snaking along the shore. As the village of Cap-aux-Os came into view, it reminded Moralès of Caplan, the village along the coast he now called home. He thought about Cyrille, who had gone to sea one last time. Last night, he had happened upon a voicemail message the old fisherman had left for him on the same evening he and his son had cooked dinner together. Cyrille had always said the stormiest seas made the strongest sailors. Sitting on his bed, Joaquin had listened to the sound of his friend’s voice and cried the tears of a child. He had saved the message not only because he couldn’t bring himself to listen all the way to the end, but also because he sensed that if he deleted the voice of Cyrille Bernard, it would strip all the salt out of the Gaspé. As they passed the cove at Petit-Gaspé, the cold tickled his eyes and he had to blink to keep the tears at bay.
They were in the national park now, and Annie Arsenault was hugging the coast. Moralès looked up at the cliffs and recalled how, not so long ago, he had been walking there in the dead of night and heard Simone Lord’s voice carrying over the water. Just before he’d taken a beating by the wharf at Grande-Grave, where the Close Call II now sat in her winter cradle, guarding her secret.
He turned away and scanned the horizon, looking out to sea, where they had found Angel. Then his gaze crossed Gaspé Bay and landed on Haldimand Beach on the opposite shore. It was like pulling a plug in places like these, when summer ended and drained the tourists away, shuttering the souvenir shops and seaside snack bars for the winter. Moralès thought about the happy places to which people flocked that he had seen stained with blood. On that beach, next summer, would people look out to sea, right where the sun dazzled the eye, and say that was where they found the body of a young lobster fisherwoman just last autumn?
The sand would be filled with colourful parasols, folding chairs, tousled beach blankets, gleeful children, sunburned teenagers, boys and girls hunting for crabs and building palatial sandcastles for the sea to consume with just a few careless waves. Hordes of hardy youngsters would run shrieking with joy into the chilly water and emerge with shivering smiles on their faces. Through their veils of lavender- and coconut-scented sun cream, lulled by their faith in the summer sun, they would cast a fleeting glance to the horizon and remember that the waiter at the restaurant last night had said the woman was wearing her wedding dress when they found her.
‘This is the best spot for fishing.’ Annie all but whispered the words.
The boat had stopped moving, but Moralès hadn’t noticed. It had also escaped his attention that Annie Arsenault had turned off the engine and Jacques Forest was now holding a fishing rod out to him. He took the rod quickly, embarrassed to have drifted away.
Angel’s deckhand gave him a wink that suggested he had been following the detective’s train of thought. ‘Welcome to L’Anse-aux-Amérindiens,’ he said.
‘I love it here,’ Annie added. ‘You won’t find a calmer spot than this.’
They were alarmingly close to shore. The sand seemed almost within their reach.
‘It’s quite a deep pool we’re in,’ she explained, as if reading his mind. ‘We’re protected by the coast. We’re not going anywhere for a while.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘The water’s so slack for the next half an hour, there’s no need to drop anchor.’
Joaquin cast his line and took his time reeling it in. The boat rocked gently beneath their feet. It suddenly dawned on him that these were Angel Roberts’ fishing grounds. Perhaps this was one of the places where year after year, around this time of day, she and Jacques Forest would haul up her traps to harvest the lobster and dump out the mud before lowering them back down to the seabed. It was a cold morning, but there was a peaceful air blanketing this cove. Was this what Angel searched for when she went to sea? He reeled the line in all the way and cast it out again.
‘Everything was hard, that first summer. Do you remember, Annie? You were so pregnant, we thought you were having triplets.’ Jacques Forest’s voice was a hoarse whisper, no louder than it had to be on a boat in this place, at this tranquil time.
‘You can say that again!’ Annie chuckled.
‘There was that one day at the beginning of July when there was a storm forecast to blow in.’
The three of them reeled and cast their lines with the calm, gentle cadence this place seemed to command, as if commemorating something unspoken.
‘The other guy who was fishing these grounds didn’t come to pull up his traps that morning. He just let us get on with our fishing, and didn’t say a word. We just thought he was taking it easy that morning. So we headed out here, pulled up our traps, brought the lobster on board and dropped the traps again, and back to shore we went. That day, he waited until after sunset to go out and pull his own traps up, and we thought that was strange. You know why he did that? Because about four the next morning, that’s when it started to blow, and it was a hell of a storm. It was gusting seventy knots. The seas were so bad, we couldn’t go out for two days. We drove out here to check on Angel’s traps from the shore, and they were all smashed on the rocks. Then we understood why the other guy had gone out after dark, so we wouldn’t see him hauling up his traps and dropping them a kilometre and a half offshore. He knew the waves here would tear them loose and smash them all up. If he’d come out fishing that morning at the same time he always did, we’d have seen what he was doing and done the same. He went out of his way to keep us in the dark. He made Angel learn the hard way and have to pick up the pieces.’
As time slipped by, the boat glided slowly out of the cove and the rising sun peeked over the cliffs. Cyrille often used to talk about the beauty of the sunrise, how it captured the eyes while they were pure and fresh from the night, whereas the sunset flooded pupils already filled with a day’s worth of images. The air felt milder now, and Moralès was enjoying the warmth on his face and his hands. Annie opened a flask of coffee and filled a travel mug for each of them.