Through Sea Glass, Darkly
by
Geraldine Glodek

​

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:

now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 

​

  — Corinthians 13:12

​

Chapter 1
Covered Bridge

​

            Despite the October chill, Lucie Giroux ran the air conditioner in the car. The body in the passenger seat had to pass for a person who had just died, a body that someone, Lucie hoped, would discover at daybreak. Her jaw ached from clenching it during the long drive from her cabin to the isthmus leading from Nova Scotia into New Brunswick. Two more hours to go.

            “I’m an ordinary person,” Lucie declared aloud, though there was no one else present but the dead woman whose car she was driving. “An ordinary person! Not some seasoned criminal. Not some sociopath like my no-good brother. Garion has no conscience. I do. That poor old man he ran over. Left him to die on his own front lawn, splattered with the garbage he was taking out to the curb. Our well-connected parents quick with the cover-up. Twenty-some years later and still no justice. I am not like them! So how can I be driving an innocent person’s body to some dump site?”

          Recriminations bounded through Lucie’s head. How shrewd, how calculatingly clever, turning on the air conditioner. Am I, Lucie Giroux, really that calculating? Here I am, clipping along the Trans-Canada Highway, carrying out this scheme like an old hand at this. Smoothing over my best friend’s crimes. And look at Monique up there, driving my car. Stark out of her head she is. That terrified toddler she stole strapped into the car seat. Thank God she hasn’t balked at my instructions. She seems glad to have an orderly to-do list. Look at her, driving exactly where I told her to drive. It’s as if I’m maneuvering a toy car with a battery-operated remote.

            Monique pulled into the motel in Sussex. As instructed, she waited behind the wheel while Lucie parked the mother’s red Toyota on a service road. Lucie, paying cash for the room, wrote a fake name on the registry slip, and jumbled the last three digits of her own Nova Scotia license plate. Anxious to get rid of the body, she tried to help the little boy settle down on the couch, but he kept flopping around like a caught fish, kicking off the blanket, crying out for his mommy. Monique’s efforts to comfort him only left her gripping her head, locks of her dark auburn hair hanging over her wrists.

            “Where’s his teddy bear?” Monique asked. “Antoine can’t fall asleep without Mister Penington.”

        “Oh stop, Monique! Please stop! I told you I don’t know where Mister Penington is.” Lucie backed up to the dresser and groped for the car keys on it. She slipped them into her back pocket so Monique couldn’t go looking for the bear. “I’m sorry, Monique. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”

            “I know. And I don’t mean to— It’s— It’s just that Antoine needs his bear. And he needs warm milk. Warm milk always helps him sleep when he’s upset.”

            Lucie wanted to shout, “This boy is not your Antoine! Antoine died. Died!” Instead, she said softly, “I’ll get some milk at the truck stop next door. Be back in a minute.”

      Lucie returned with milk and two types of screwdrivers to remove the Pennsylvania license plate from the mother’s car. Monique microwaved some milk in a mug. It did help the child give in to his utter exhaustion. “Thanks,” Monique said, taking a nightgown out of her overnight bag. “Guess we can turn in now. Would you mind taking the bed by the window?”

           “That’s fine. You get settled, Monique. I have to run out for a while.” She picked up the TV clicker. “Shall I put something on?”

              “Yes, to drown out the trucks.”

            Leaving Monique in the care of an old movie, Lucie got back on the highway. She took the exit that said Fundy National Park/Saint Martins, which led to a two-lane road parallel to the shore. The Bay of Fundy tides in that town would rise so high they’d fill the famous caves along the red cliffs. Lucie, calculating that it would be low tide about now, had borrowed a plastic sled from her rented cabin. The water in the stream passing in front of the caves would be drained so low that she could easily tow the body across it. Then she’d weigh the body down with rocks so it wouldn’t get dragged out of the cave with the next outgoing tide. I’ve thought of everything, she noted with disgust.

            When she arrived, the sky was clear. Moonlight on the stony beach, was helpfully bright, but it was mid-tide, the point at which the reversing waters in the stream were most turbulent. No way she could cross it now. She panicked. This wasn’t any old dump site. She had chosen these caves to ease her conscience. Tourists visited them year-round. Someone would surely discover this woman’s body that very day. Her family wouldn’t be left hanging. Her wallet was in the purse strapped across her chest. Her American passport would be in her child’s pocket when he was dropped off anonymously at some church in the States. Lucie would take him there as soon as Monique came to her senses and realized he was not her own little Antoine.

            The caves were out of the question, but Lucie thought of another good place to hide the body—one of the covered bridges over the Irish River, which flowed into the bay. She had just driven across one. It had a narrow pedestrian section as well as the section for a single vehicle. Lucie drove back through it and immediately turned left, parking on a patch of gravel by the colorful fishing shacks along a wharf. She got out and looked around. A pair of street lamps lit up the small harbor, where two fishing boats and three lobster boats bobbed midway down the pilings. Lobster traps were stacked between Lucie’s car and the first shack.

            The area was very secluded. The only structure across the road from Lucie’s car was an old lighthouse converted to a tourist information center. Behind that, a rock cliff. No one would see what she was doing.

            Lucie walked to the pedestrian side of the bridge, which was facing the boats. Through the glassless windows on the outside wall, the street lamps along the wharf cast five bright blocks of light down low on the solid inside wall. Near the ceiling, the same lamplight, reflecting off the restless water, projected five murky blocks of light that trembled, as if alive. Rumblings of terror stirred in Lucie. But not from fear of getting caught. Even if no one discovers it was me who left the body here, she thought, can I even do this? This poor young woman fought to the death for her child. She died in my arms, pleading for me to get him home. If I just—just drive away—what kind of monster will I see next time I look in the mirror?

            But I have to do this. Monique will go to prison! What good would that do? She’s no threat to anyone else. Monique is still alive. Too late to save this woman. “Ohhh, stop thinking! Just do it!” Dragging the petite woman out of the car, she placed her in the pedestrian passageway, careful not to view this mother’s face. She had already made a point of not learning her name, had not opened her wallet or her passport. Knowing her name would make it impossible to live with herself.

            Hoping to calm down, she looked out at the boats, only to get a ghastly view of the dewy webs in every glassless window, each web occupied by a pot-bellied spider. Laying the body down, she tried to run back to her car without another thought. But her feet would not obey. Her back was pressed against the inside wall. “Something should be done for her, something respectful.” Recalling that there was a candle in a metal cube in the mother’s car, she said, “I’ll get that.”

            Lucie set the cube on the board traversing the middle of the outer wall. The flame shone through glass inlays: a golden crescent moon and a smattering of stars. The planks of the tunnel lit up in toasty shades of brown and amber like the reading nook back at her cabin. She pictured Monique sitting in that nook, motionless in sleep, a book on her lap. Monique, the one who would die next, die of a broken heart if the police wrested that little boy from her arms.

            Lucie closed her eyes as she spoke to the mother. “I am so, so sorry. If you can hear me—if there is a heaven and you can hear me—take comfort in knowing your son will soon be home. I’ll make Monique understand. I will. Then I’ll get him home. I promise.” She blew out the candle. Its beeswax smoke drifted across her face.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​