Mariette: Journey of a Lifetime, #3

By Ruth Hay

Some dire events in life can never be erased. They must be lived with, reconciled, or revenged. When Mariette Theresa Wyatt entered the door to her old home, it was the last step in a long journey and the first step in a new one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ruth Hay
• Release date: Jul 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386631033

Book preview

1

It began in pain and misery, seated in a church beside her grieving parents.

She was eight years old and far from understanding what made this church occasion different from the Sunday outings she knew well.

Her mother was unable to tell her.

Her father was sunk in silent despair.

Her big brother was absent and she did not know why.

When the solemn music began and the priest appeared at the head of a procession of men carrying a box, she was more curious than afraid. The box was placed on a platform and the men withdrew with bent heads, leaving the priest in charge.

The congregation stood for a prayer.

Nothing different there.

And then she heard it.

James John Donovan

Her world fell apart. The priest was asking for prayers for the family of her brother.

Jimmy was in the box. Jimmy was not here beside her. He was gone somewhere.

A wild panic raged inside her and she stock still, paralysed with fear. If something so terrible, that even her mother and father could not speak of it, had happened to Jimmy, then it could happen to her next.

She turned her head and looked up to see her mother’s face, seeking comfort.

There was no comfort there for her. Her mother was bent over with pain. Her father stood straight but his face was turned away from her. She looked over to the tall church windows where she often dreamed her way through a long sermon by imagining the men in beautiful coloured robes saying good things about God and His Angels. She saw the sunlight turn the robes to glory and begged for heavenly help.

Help came in oblivion. Mariette Theresa Donovan collapsed in a heap between the church pews and knew no more.

2

For years afterward, in nightmarish dreams, she found herself back in that church overwhelmed by the feelings she now understood, but still could not escape. Sometimes, she was in the coffin pounding the lid to get the attention of her mother and father. Other times she stepped out of the stained-glass windows and reached out a hand to help. The worst times were when she simply stood and felt the anguished emotions wash over her like a tidal wave and waited to drown in them.

---

The first of many psychologists and psychiatrists, told her she would recover in time.

The experts said, ‘Time heals all wounds’. She laughed at this trivial answer. Time softens the edges, perhaps, but she knew there is no healing some wounds and the death of her brother Jimmy was quite definitely one of them.

On bad days, when life was not moving ahead as she wished, the nightmares recurred and she was forced to consult another ‘expert’ to try to separate herself from the pain. She was labelled as a remote, unsociable teenager. None of the experts seemed to understand she had deliberately withdrawn inside herself since there was no one to help her at home. She could not bear to add the pain her parents bore, to the load she carried on her young shoulders.

Her mother became a different person. The cheerful, involved woman died and her style of mothering the one chick left in her nest, was a confusing combination of overprotection and benign neglect. Mariette never knew which approach was dominant at any particular time until she made some error of speech or activity and drew down upon her head the wrath that she finally figured out derived from her mother’s fear of another loss.

Within five years, Geneva Donovan had slid into dementia and was delivered to a facility where the ghost of her former self was allowed to linger endlessly in her own dimension of hell.

Her husband’s action of choice was to disappear into his work as a city planner. This allowed him to take frequent trips to Toronto for conferences and meetings about how to design the small rural towns, similar to the one where the family lived. He was comfortable with business acquaintances or new friends who did not know about the tragedy. He was not comfortable at home where memories of Jimmy lived on in every corner and his daughter’s presence reminded him of his failures.

Mariette turned her attention to school where there were teachers who knew of her tragic background and helped her to achieve an excellence in education that provided a counterbalance to the gradually fragmenting disaster of her home life. As an eighteen-year-old, she had learned to hide her response to all that changed in her life on that day in that church.

As soon as she finished high school, she fled to Toronto to begin years of unfocussed pursuits starting with a general degree in social sciences, then a graduate degree in psychology and finally a law degree that led her into the field of criminal law. None of these qualifications provided answers, however.

During these years, she lived in student accommodations and worked sporadically in waitressing or secretarial jobs until her next scholarship kicked in. In the summers, she took additional courses in whatever interested her in that moment. She knew her brain would quickly devolve into its default state of chaos if she did not keep it constantly occupied.

Her utter dread of ending up in dementia was a continual threat.

On one of those summer courses she met a young man, Nick Wyatt, who seemed to find her attractive. He was a student of psychology and he found her interesting in a psychological sense. She told him everything, which in and of itself was a tremendous relief.

For a few months, the nightmares fled. She relaxed long enough to agree to marry the young man and they set up house in the large, finished basement of his parents’ home in the suburbs of Montreal.

Nick Wyatt went off to the city with his new wife every day. He worked with a partnership in a Holistic Health establishment as a trainee. Mariette continued to be a student. Learning something, anything, was the only life she knew, and she had never managed to translate her many educational achievements into a possible career.

Eventually, on the encouragement of his parents, Nick Wyatt accused his wife of hiding from reality in the halls of academe and advised her to get a job so they could move out of the basement.

Mariette finished her current course, something in the field of Modern Policing Methodologies, and promptly decided to take up an option in France where she could study European advances in forensics.

Nick was neither pleased nor surprised at this departure. He had deduced his wife was a seriously troubled soul, and there was, seemingly, not much he could do to help her to recover.

His parents’ response to her departure was to utter a combined sigh of relief.

3

Mariette Wyatt arrived in France in the spring. She enrolled in the desired course, moved into student accommodations and went off with a backpack to explore the country.

The farther she went from Canada, the better she felt. It was like she finally, and gradually, began to divest herself of the mental baggage she had carried for years.

She took trains and buses to towns along the Seine and the Loire Valleys and lived among the people, practising her French vocabulary and sinking into the way of life that flowed seamlessly with the summer sun and the viniculture of the seasons. She found places to sleep in farmhouses where another body resting temporarily in the barn was nothing to comment on. She watched the local girls and modelled her clothing on what she saw them wearing. Light dresses, strappy leather sandals and large hats, were sufficient for the hot days and a long cotton shawl gave comfort on cooler evenings. With a light tan, she looked enough like the French mademoiselles that no one passed comment on her.

She swam in rivers and walked for miles on wooded trails. She ate simple fare bought from market stalls. Most surprising of all, she slept well at night.

She was at peace for the first time in her life. She decided to wander in France forever.

One summer day, she woke up, and stretched, and began to smell a scent that was transporting in its intensity. She took a drink of water from a pump outside the barn, chewed on a stale croissant, and followed her nose through the woods until she came to the source of that scent.

It was a field of lavender blossoms stretching as far as the eye could see and alive with the sound of bees. There was no person around to forbid her, so she moved slowly forward along the narrow rows between the plants and when she reached a point at which she was surrounded completely by purple blossoms and their amazing scent, she stopped and stood still and breathed.

Lavender had the reputation of being a healing plant. She remembered hearing something about that but this astonishing plenitude of purple spikes was far beyond anything she could ever have imagined.

It came to her that if healing was available through the scent of these plants, this very place was the source of it. She dropped her backpack at her feet and concentrated.

She began, slowly, in the bee-humming silence, to understand that healing was what she had been unconsciously seeking for most of her life.

Time passed.

She continued to breathe deeply until she became one with the sky, the lavender and the earth beneath her feet.

The sobs rose up from the depth of her soul. Tears dripped from her eyes unheeded and Mariette Theresa Donovan Wyatt was reborn in the middle of field of lavender, deep in the countryside of France.

She knew the change was immediate and thorough, but it required a day or two to absorb the full effect of the transformation.

She walked on to the next village and checked into a pension where she stayed in her small room and slept and ate and washed and slept again while her brain was readjusting to its new reality.

A clarity of mind had begun to crystalize within her; a clarity that her previous brain fog had obscured.

The various forms of running away from her problems that she had attempted until now, were at an end. The years of aimless learning was now congealing into a defined pathway she could follow.

She acknowledged her marriage to Nick Wyatt as a dire mistake.

The tragedy that had marked her life, and that of her parents, now revealed itself to her as her purpose.

She must return to the beginning and become the one who fixes it all.

She must solve the incomprehensible death of her brother and set the world to rights again.

In a sudden flash of understanding, she realized she had been working toward this task for many years. The often pointless-seeming journey through colleges and universities had supplied her with the skills to determine who had taken her brother from his family.

No details of that crime were ever revealed to her. Neither parent could bear to talk about it. Their joint silence had caused the nightmares in which she filled in gaps in her limited information with unnamed horrors.

Mariette had one more course to finish in France and it was to be the most important one of all.

After it concluded, she would return to her hometown equipped to analyze, and investigate, and review artifacts and police procedures to help her get to the bottom of the unsolved crime.

Jimmy Donovan would be avenged, at long last, by his sister.

She emerged from the room at the pension as a new woman, a woman with a defined purpose.

She unpacked her dusty student clothes and cut her long dark hair to chin length with a borrowed pair of scissors. Then she sold her wedding ring for enough cash to buy a train ticket back to the university on the outskirts of Paris.

The course was due to start in a week and she devoted that week to preparing to succeed.

She haunted the University Library and found translation programs that let her read most of the course material ahead of time and make notes in English. She looked up the backgrounds of all the professors and singled out those who might be of the most use to her. She checked into student life in the hostel and searched until she found a study group with one student from England who spoke excellent French. She promised to do anything legal to help Chelsea Fournier if she would study with her.

Chelsea was an art student from Manchester. She intended to devote herself to the pursuit of watercolour painting. She adored the Impressionists and secretly vowed to invent a new style of Impressionism that would set the art world on its heels. She was voluble in two languages (three, including Mancunian), an extrovert and, on the surface at least, everything Mariette was not.

The two young women bonded at once. Chelsea plus Mariette made a formidable uber-person.

They moved in together