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onto the soil and closed his eyes.
Clelia looked from him to the discarded gun. She picked it up,
opened the cylinder and dislodged the single bullet, silently
thanking Erwan for teaching her to handle his rifles and guns. She
dropped the bullet in her pocket and the gun in her backpack, just
in case he had more bullets on his person. Without looking back,
she ran to the gate, only faintly aware of the thorns and sharp
twigs digging into her toes and the sides of her feet. She ran all
the way to Carnac and caught the last bus to Larmor. When she
passed Josselin’s abandoned childhood house, she noticed a cleaning
service van from Vannes parked in front of it.
     

 
    Chapter
Three
     
    When Clelia got home, it was dark. Erwan sat
by the kitchen table smoking his pipe. This made her stop in her
tracks. Erwan never smoked in the house. The last time he smoked
between the four walls was when Tella, her grandmother, had passed
away.
    “Erwan?” she said in an unsteady voice.
    Tripod looked up from his cushion by the
stove and wagged his tail. From far away she heard Snow howl. A
distant part of her distressed brain registered that it was strange
that Snow wasn’t by the door to greet her.
    Without looking at her, Erwan said, “We need
to talk.”
    She came around the table with her heart
fluttering in her chest. “What’s going on?”
    Erwan’s gaze moved to her knees. He lowered
his pipe slowly. “What happened, grandchild?”
    “I tripped over a rock,” she said, brushing
his concern aside. “Erwan, what’s the matter?”
    “Do you remember the story I told you about
your mother?”
    Clelia sat down in the chair opposite Erwan.
She frowned. “Yes.”
    There was only one story Erwan told about her
mother, and that was how a Japanese fishing boat had docked in the
harbor and left a little girl behind, the girl Erwan and Tella had
adopted and called Katik, her mother.
    Erwan looked at his hands. “Well, I didn’t
tell you everything.”
    Clelia closed her eyes briefly. Instinctively
she knew she didn’t want to hear what was coming, yet, a part of
her had always known there was something Erwan had kept from her
and that part longed for the truth.
    “Thirty-seven years ago a Japanese trawler
docked in the Gulf. They were carrying a cargo of fish, and
something very unusual.”
    Even if Clelia had heard this part of the
story many times before, she sat quietly, realizing that Erwan
needed this well-worn introduction to an old story so that he could
tell her the part he had omitted. For whatever sinister reasons he
had done that, it made her feel as if a thousand red fishing worms
were crawling over her scalp.
    “The freight they carried and wished to
offload was a girl. She was six years old. No one knew her name.
She didn’t speak. They found her abandoned on a yacht in the middle
of the ocean and had to assume that her parents, and whoever else
she had been with, had drowned in some accident. There were signs
of a fire on board, and it was a wonder that she was still alive.
There was no clue as to her identity, no papers, no evidence of
another soul on that vessel. What happened was a mystery they never
solved. They took her aboard and sailed with her as far as
Brittany.”
    He looked at the table and when he didn’t
speak for a while, Clelia said, “And you saw her at the harbor and
brought her home. You and Tella adopted her because you couldn’t
have children of your own.”
    And we all didn’t live so happily ever after,
Clelia thought, but didn’t say. She never knew her mother who died
giving birth to her. She only suffered the insults about her
mother, the merciless teasing and the exclusion from the close-knit
community.
    Erwan glanced at her, but lowered his gaze
again. “It didn’t exactly happen like that.”
    Clelia grew cold. “How did it
happen?”
    He cleared his throat. “The men wanted to get
rid of your mother because they said...” He paused. “They said she
had brought a curse