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Was there ever a good circumstance for anyone to go to court?
On this bleak and freezing early February afternoon, Elenora Bello sat on a wooden bench in the third row on the prosecution’s side of courtroom number three. Next to her, attorney Jean-Philippe Gendron sat stiffly, his breathing shallow. Despite his sharp dressing, the man, who was used to being on top of things—especially in a courtroom—looked like a lost boy. Elenora’s heart ached for him.
As a social worker with the police, she went to court regularly with a victim or a witness to soothe their worries and put them at ease. But since she couldn’t turn off her sense of empathy, she inadvertently absorbed her fair share of second-hand stress and anguish.
When a trial went well for a client, it brought her and them great joy and relief, a sentiment that some justice had been restored. But heartbreak, grief, and desperation were also frequent and devastating outcomes, regardless of the efforts made.
Elenora was used to accompanying unfortunate and disoriented souls from early on, from their first moment of crisis when the police had to intervene to break up a fight or a psychotic episode, to answer their call for help, or to take their statement. She listened to them, calmed them down, advised them in their decisions to get help or press charges.
More often than not, she felt like she made a bit of a difference in their life somewhere along the way, sometimes nudging them into changing the course of a severely broken path, helping them take a better, healthier direction. Sometimes leading them to forgiveness or redemption.
She made herself available to them and guided them as much as they would let her. It felt like a privilege to her, especially when someone asked her to help them face an abuser, always an excruciating experience for a victim.
Today was such an occasion.
Jean-Philippe Gendron’s long fingers fidgeted against his thigh. He was a bundle of nerves under his cool facade.
How torturous it must be for him, Elenora thought and hoped he would heal regardless of the trial’s outcome.
She put a gentle hand on his upper arm, and he took a deep breath. She offered him a sympathetic smile. He forced his lips to smile back, but his eyes betrayed his apprehension. She knew he had owned this very courtroom countless times. But today, she also knew there was no amount of confidence he could summon and no amount of acting he could do to feel like it was just a normal Friday.
Jean-Philippe Gendron himself was not on trial, but he was about to face the man who was, a man who had robbed him of his childhood and killed something inside of him a long time ago.
Father Albert Callahan.
The man sitting in the accused box.
Pushing eighty, the priest was frail and had the looks of a doting grandfather. Listening to the current testimony from one of his other victims, he appeared confused, shaking his head gently, as if he could not believe what he was hearing. Like this could only be a big mistake.
Jean-Philippe’s fingers stopped fidgeting and balled into a fist. Elenora squeezed his hand to make him aware of how tense he was. He relaxed, but whispered sharply, “The bastard’s gonna lie through his teeth. I just know it.”
Elenora nodded. She, too, suspected the old man was putting on a show. A convincing one. And she knew that Jean-Philippe’s main fear was not the embarrassment or uneasiness of admitting, in front of a room full of colleagues and strangers, that this man had sexually abused him when he was young. What he feared most was that the monster would get away with it, and he was afraid of how he’d react if that happened.
“You’re doing the right thing,” Elenora whispered back to him.
“I know.” His gaze flicked to the ceiling. “I just hope my mother will forgive me.”
“If she had known, she would have understood.”
“If she had known, it would have destroyed her.”
Father Callahan had been present in Jean-Philippe’s life, not only at church when the lawyer was a choirboy but also at home when his mother became ill. The priest was there for her while she was on her deathbed. He helped give her a peaceful and dignified death.
Jean-Philippe had confided to Elenora that he was ambivalent about testifying against the man and telling the world about his true nature. He felt it would diminish what the priest—as monstrous as he was—had done for his mother. And that this would somehow tarnish her memory.
Elenora understood where he was coming from and how torn he was. “Nothing will ever take away what that man did right for your mother,” she assured him. “Nothing can take that away. But he needs to be brought to justice for what he did to you and the other boys and to prevent him from striking again. I think your mother would understand.”
Elenora’s words had seemed to settle something in Jean-Philippe. His initial reluctance vanished, and he became determined to turn the page and help seek justice for everyone involved in the class-action suit.
And here he was, about to put himself out there against Father Callahan. Vulnerable and ready to bare his soul in front of his abuser. He shut his eyes and took in another deep breath. When he opened them, there was a new resolve in his gaze. His composure looked solid.
He was ready.
Elenora couldn’t help feeling admiration for this kind of courage in the face of evil.
A shiver went through her, and the most jarring thing happened: she felt a spark at her core, as if a bright light, a heatwave radiated inside of her. Like a miniature, internal big bang.
What the hell was that?
It didn’t feel like a gastric issue. Still, she thought about what she had for lunch. She and a colleague had gone to a new brunch place with cutely named items on the menu. Elenora had chosen the Rays of Sunshine breakfast—a plate loaded with home-style potatoes and fruit with two sunny-side-up eggs in the middle, surrounded by strips of bacon strategically placed around the eggs to mimic sun rays. But unless there was anything radioactive on the plate, and as funny as it’d be to think the plate’s name was literal, she couldn’t see what could have caused this eerie disturbance inside of her.
Having recently turned forty, she hoped she was still a little young to have hot flashes.
As her mind tried to find a plausible explanation for the bizarre warmth still dispersing through her, she felt a light touch on her left arm, where no one had been sitting.
The touch was quickly followed by what felt like a hug. Someone was hugging her arm.
She turned and was surprised to see a young girl smiling at her. Her appearance was striking, pigtailed hair so light as to appear white and eyes of a deep, blueberry-like blue. She appeared alone and unbothered by the cold, adult surroundings of the courtroom. What was this kid doing here?
Before Elenora could ask the little girl if she needed help, she felt a tug on her other arm. The judge had called Jean-Philippe to testify.
“Wish me luck,” he said to her in a poised voice.
“You won’t need luck. You have the truth on your side. And my admiration.” Elenora knew that the truth didn’t always win in court by a long shot, but she meant it.
He gave her a nod and stood tall, ready to go into battle.
Elenora’s gaze followed him for a moment before she turned her attention back to the little girl.
But the little girl was gone.
The court adjourned late in the afternoon. When Elenora emerged from the courthouse, darkness had already fallen, and the freezing air had become even more biting thanks to the merciless gusts of wind. She decided to take a cab instead of walking or waiting for the St-Laurent bus to travel the few long blocks to her small office at her downtown precinct.
Jean-Philippe had given a strong and heartfelt testimony and she felt proud of him, but she was also glad that the trial session was the last thing on her schedule for the week. That meant she could wrap up some paperwork while basking in pride and contentment before calling it a week.
In the quietness of the short, toasty cab ride, Elenora’s mind went back to the little girl in the courtroom. Had she been real, or had she imagined her?
The kid had seemed real, and Elenora thought she couldn’t have dreamed the touch on her arm. She was engrossed in Jean-Philippe’s plight, and the touch had made her turn. How could it have gotten her attention if it had not been real?
Elenora thanked the driver and headed inside the station, her thoughts drifting back to the child again. She had a clear mental picture of her, like an afterimage engraved in her memory. Almost as if she knew her. Could she have met her before?
She considered the possibility and almost went through her past case files. But she met few young kids in her line of work, and they were all so memorable to her, she would have known instantly if she’d encountered this striking little girl before.
And if she had, given that the child couldn’t have been more than four or five years of age, this would have happened recently.
How very odd.
“Busy figuring out the toppings?” A familiar teasing voice made her look up. Her husband, homicide detective Tom Madigan, was standing in the doorway with a smirk on his face.
Friday night was restaurant delivery night at their house, usually pizza. Elenora and Tom were both decent cooks, and most of the time she didn’t mind cooking—unless she finished work late and cooking meant having to eat late and fast while exhausted. But she also deeply appreciated those times when she didn’t have to prepare food. Man, did it ever taste good when she didn’t have to make it.
She smiled at Tom’s ribbing and reached for her cell phone, holding it up. “Caller’s choice! I got my finger on speed dial,” she teased back.
His smirk turned sheepish. “Well, the good news is…you get to pick whatever you want tonight.”
Elenora wrinkled her nose. This meant he had to work late.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Not your fault. I’ll see if Pierre’s available. It’s been a while.” Pierre Deveraux was a retired detective who had been in Elenora’s life and a father figure to her ever since she was a young girl and had lost her father in a freak car accident.
“And if he’s not, I’ll grab some takeout on the way home,” she added. The precinct was within a stone’s throw of just about any type of food, from fast to fancy. Finding something to eat was never a problem.
Tom rapped his knuckles a few times against the doorframe. “Sounds good. Try to have a cozy evening, okay? I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
“There should be red wine in the fridge,” Elenora said to Pierre as she left the kitchen to meet the delivery man at the front door.
Pierre took out plates and cutlery for the two of them and set them down on the table. Elenora waltzed back into the room with two large pizza boxes—one vegetarian and one all dressed. She was counting on leftovers.
“D’you want some?” Pierre asked, holding a wine glass in one hand while his other rested against the glasses and mugs shelf.
As Elenora was about to answer, the face of the little girl in the courtroom flashed in her mind, and a funny thought dawned on her: could she be pregnant? With a girl?
Is that what the weird internal fireworks had been?
She didn’t remember ever reading about women feeling anything specific, let alone spectacular, the moment they’d conceived. But somehow, she had a strange feeling this might be the case for her. And the timing added up: they’d made love two nights earlier, so it was a possibility. A very odd one since they’d tried to conceive unsuccessfully for ages. If she were pregnant now, it would be a pleasant yet daunting surprise.
“Wine shouldn’t be a matter of life and death. I apologize for the pressure,” Pierre joked.
“Sorry about that. I think I’ll pass.” Just to be on the safe side.
“Any news to share?” Pierre gave her a suspicious look. Even though he was no longer a cop, he was still unnervingly observant.
She was tempted to share with him her bizarre gut feeling and what had happened at the courthouse, but she caught herself before going down that rabbit hole with him. For years, Pierre seemed to have been waiting for—expecting even—something extraordinary to happen to her, when all she ever wanted was to live a normal life.
“Too early to tell?” Pierre read into her hesitation.
“I’m just tired. It’s been a long week.”
“All right.”
Elenora spent dinner and the rest of the evening obsessing over the little girl—and what this strange incident might mean for her—while trying to take part enough in the conversation so that Pierre wouldn’t feel the need to grill her. Good thing that his favorite TV shows were on, and as they watched them together, it allowed her to remain away from his scrutiny.
She might be pregnant, and that made her giddy. She wanted to tell Tom but feared she would sound crazy. And if this turned out to be a false alarm, like several times before, it’d be cruel to get his hopes up.
She decided to keep this unfounded news to herself for now and hope for the best.
Pierre would never forget that deadly, late November night thirty-seven years ago in a mountainous part of the Mauricie region, when he first met a young Elenora, who was only three years old at the time.
The little girl and her family were driving home late at night along a sinuous road on a high embankment next to the St-Maurice River. Back then, lumber companies used the wide waterway from spring to fall to send logs cut by lumberjacks down the river to paper mills in towns settled downstream. The river was deep and its current powerful, ideal for this kind of activity.
The Bello family car was traveling down a deserted narrow road. The temperature had dropped, leading to intermittent freezing rain. Patches of black ice covered the pavement in random places, and now a dusting of snow added a layer of difficulty to the already treacherous road conditions.
The car had skidded a few times since they’d left a gathering in a neighboring town. Martin Bello, Elenora’s dad, was a cautious driver and took his sweet time to reassure his wife Muriel, Elenora’s perpetually anxious mother.
Snow started to fall more heavily, and visibility reduced even further. However, it wasn’t the snowstorm that would lead to tragedy but a deer appearing in the middle of the road.
Upon seeing the animal, Elenora’s dad yanked the wheel just in time to avoid hitting it. But this course correction and the hairpin turn ahead brought the car right onto a patch of black ice at an unforgiving angle.
The car careened and hit a boulder by the side of the road, sending the vehicle spinning down a hill. Elenora’s dad struggled to regain control, but it proved impossible.
Muriel’s screams and the curious swaying of the car woke up Elenora, who had been asleep on the back seat. Before her little mind could process what was going on, the car plunged down a cliff and landed in the icy waters of the river, piercing through the thin layer of ice that had barely started to form at the surface.
A group of hunters playing cards in a nearby cabin heard the accident. One of them phoned the authorities while his friends rushed to the scene.
As a member of the Québec provincial police in charge of that territory, Pierre was dispatched to the scene. When he arrived, one of the hunters was fishing Muriel out of the water. She was barely conscious, her lips a deep purple from the frigid water, and her savior carried her to the cabin to warm up.
Moments later, another hunter brought Martin out of the river. Unlike Muriel, he was pronounced dead, no matter the effort to revive him.
Pierre would never forget that night, not only because of the man’s death and the woman who had barely made it, but mostly because as paramedics did CPR on the man, a little girl—Elenora—showed up at Pierre’s side.
Where she had come from would always be a total mystery to him. Her clothes and her hair were damp, and she shivered softly, supporting the theory that she’d been in the car when it plunged into the river. But none of the hunters had seen her, let alone saved her. How could a child so young have escaped by herself from such an extreme scenario unscathed?
Her collected demeanor, given the circumstances, also felt eerie to Pierre. He whisked his jacket off his back and wrapped it around her tiny shoulders. He scooped her up and jogged them to the cabin.
“What’s wrong with my daddy?” Her little voice bounced along with Pierre’s feet hitting the ground.
“That’s your dad?”
Elenora nodded. “Where’s my mom?”
“She’s in there. You’re gonna see her in a minute. And we’re gonna get you warmed up, okay?”
At the sight of her daughter, Muriel broke into uncontrollable sobs, holding on to her in a tight grip while a paramedic attempted to examine the girl.
Pierre was itching to ask Elenora how she had escaped from the car, but he gave the grieving mother and daughter some privacy first and went back outside, where the other paramedics slipped the gurney with Martin Bello’s body into the ambulance.
Pierre soon felt a tug on his sleeve and startled to see Elenora at his side, his enormous jacket engulfing her.
“What happened to the little boy?” she asked him.
“What boy? Do you have a brother?” Alarm took over Pierre. Please, let there not be a dead child in the river. Elenora’s mom, despite being deeply in shock, had not mentioned a missing son.
“I don’t have a brother,” Elenora replied with a small frown.
“Then who’s the boy?”
“The boy in the field at the bottom of the river.”
“The boy in the field at the bottom of the river?” Pierre repeated, puzzled. He thought she must have misused the word “field”—the most logical explanation. But the thought of a “boy at the bottom of the river” in itself was distressing enough, and if there was a boy down there, he sure as all hell wasn’t alive by now. What horror had this little girl seen?
“Was he…asleep?” he tried, not wanting to ask her bluntly if she had seen a dead kid.
Elenora frowned again. “He wanted to play with me.”
“He wanted to play with you… What did you tell him?”
“I told him I had to go. It’s past my bedtime.”
“And then what happened?”
“I think he was mad at me.”
Back then, Pierre was a young bachelor who seldom interacted with kids, both at work and in life in general. He couldn’t help wondering if conversations with three-year-olds were always this maddening.
“What makes you think that?”
“He pointed at me with mean eyes.”
“He pointed at you with mean eyes?”
Elenora nodded matter-of-factly.
“And then what happened?” Pierre asked.
“I came here.”
“You swam from the bottom of the river?”
She looked at Pierre like he had said the silliest thing. “I’m not allowed to swim without my floaties.”
Pierre massaged his forehead. The child’s words made little sense, and yet she seemed to be telling the truth. It must have been the trauma talking.
“I see…” Pierre had rarely been this perplexed in his life. “We’ll see what we can do about the boy.”
Pierre never found out who the mystery boy was—or found the body of a boy, for that matter. A team of divers had combed the bottom of the river extensively to find him, unsuccessfully. Pierre had also phoned around to find out more about the Bello family, but there was no boy to be found.
“Good morning, sweetie, and Happy Valentine’s Day!” Tom said, entering the bedroom with a latte in one hand and a red rose in the other.
Elenora stretched in bed, a smile lighting up her face. “Oh, that’s lovely.” She took the mug and the flower and inhaled both of their enticing perfume. “Thank you.”
Tom slipped back under the covers and gave her a tender kiss on the lips.
She put the coffee and the rose down on her nightstand before opening the top drawer and retrieving a small, gift-wrapped box. “I’ve got a surprise for you too.” She handed him the box.
He quickly unwrapped it, uncovering a box of After Eight chocolate mints. “My favorites!”
She chuckled. “Every chocolate out there is your favorite.”
“Anything wrong with that?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
Tom made a mock frown and shook the box to guess its weight. “Hmm. The plastic wrap is missing, and this sure feels light for a full box. Have you eaten half of it already?” he teased.
“God, no. I wouldn’t eat what’s in there.”
“Oh?” Tom’s brows shot up with curiosity, and he opened the box. There was a pregnancy test stick in it, with a little plus sign announcing it was positive.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, daddy,” Elenora said with a big grin. Her courthouse insight that she was pregnant turned out to be true, whether by fluke or otherwise, whatever otherwise would mean.
It took Tom a moment to register what this meant. “For real?” His eyes were twinkling.
“For real.”
“When did you find out?” he asked quietly, as if he couldn’t yet believe the news.
“I took the test late last night before bed. I tried to stay awake until you came home to surprise you, but I fell asleep.”
Tom looked at her with so much love in his eyes. “Come here.” He pulled Elenora into an embrace, nestling his head into the crook of her neck. “That’s such wonderful news. I’m so happy.” He pulled back. “Though a bit bummed I’m not getting chocolate…”
She slapped him playfully on the arm. “Want me to take it back?”
He moved the After Eight box away from her, well out of her reach. “No way in hell.”
She laughed.
“How are you feeling?” He resumed his embrace.
“Very happy. And not feeling sick yet. So, very happy.” After a pause, she couldn’t help adding, “I think I saw her.” But the moment the words escaped her lips, she regretted it. There was no way to tell Tom about her vision without sounding like a loon or making him freak out if he believed her.
Or both.
“Who?”
Now she didn’t have a choice but to give him something and hope she didn’t dig herself into a deeper hole. “Our daughter.”
“We’re having a daughter?”
“I think so.”
“Isn’t it a bit early to know?”
“Not for a gut feeling, apparently,” she replied with a light laugh.
“And your gut’s often right, so I won’t be betting against it.”
He kissed her. “What is she like?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said you saw her. What does she look like?”
Dammit.
“She’s beautiful and has light hair.” She didn’t say “almost white” on the off chance he’d remember that detail and their daughter did turn out to have white hair, as unlikely as it was since they both had dark hair. Elenora’s was a deep brown bordering on black, a few shades darker than Tom’s.
“Her face is round, like mine, and she has blue eyes.” She should stop talking now, keep her predictions vague.
“I’m sure she’ll be lovely no matter what she looks like,” he said, amused, not taking her seriously for a minute.
“You do dare question my gut!” she feigned offense, happy to have dodged a bullet.
He kissed her again. “Can we start sharing the news?
