I chose a Sunday morning to visit the scene of the crime; Somehow, it just seemed fitting, almost as if I was reliving “that” cold Sunday morning sixteen years ago.
I had spent hours at the library reading newspaper articles on microfilm and knew I needed to see the place it all started. Morrell Siding was a foreign place to me; only a few hours from home, but a lifetime away just the same.
Despite having previously seen grainy black and white pictures of the field, it didn’t prepare me for the sheer isolation of the location.
Donnelly Road: two very narrow chip-sealed lanes; no yellow line and no shoulder markings. It was every man or woman for themselves out here on this back road that meandered not far from the border with northern Maine. I knew that sixteen years ago this country lane had been an unpaved, frozen,wheel-rutted mudbog known only to locals.
Overnight, that all changed. Donnelly Road became infamous. It’s melodic name belied the horror and depravity that had occurred in a place and time where no one locked their doors.
I sat in my car and stared across the wind-swept field that had captured my imagination all those years ago and, had become the object of my obsession for the last six months. Dried yellow grassed poked up through the soft powdery snow. A west wind blew through those long blond strands, and the grass swayed to and fro, beckoning for me to come take a closer look.
I got out of the car and looked both ways before I crossed. Foolish really, there wasn’t another vehicle in sight. The only sound was the crying wind and the crunch of my boots on the hard-packed snow. It only reinforced my sense of loneliness.
A ditch lay between me and the field. I stood at the edge and tried to estimate how deep it may be. Tired looking cattails jutted from the snow, bent over, as if in perpetual mourning. With trepidation, I stepped in amongst the reeds, hoping I wouldn’t end up to my waist in snow and marshy water. It was cold, at least -20, surely any water that had been there was frozen solid.
Climbing out on the other side, I looked across that lonely field. There were no houses, and along this stretch there weren’t even any telephone poles. Back in 1984, this had been wide open, a shortcut for snowmobilers. It had been one such early morning snowmobiler cutting through here who had come across the horrible scene in the snow.
I stepped up to the fence and laid my mitted hands lightly across the wire. There would be no more snowbilers cutting across this field now I thought. But on that cold January morning, it had only been luck that he had spotted tracks in the snow; bootprints, clothing, then blood and finally, pale pink flesh, warm and cold.
Had he smelled the coppery scent of death over his exhaust fumes, I wondered?
Not mindful of my mittens catching, I gripped the barbed wire even tighter; steeling myself against that bitter wind, or maybe, just bracing myself against the enormity of what had happened here.
The sun was low in the east, but already the day was bright, only the way it can be in the dead of winter, when the sky is clear and sapphire blue. In my mind’s eye, I tried to imagine what it had been like that night, when the weather had been bitter cold, and the only light was the icy pin-pricks of Orion, marching westward. The great celestial hunter had not been the only predator to watch over this lonely hay field during that long ago night.
Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine their fear. Alone in this god-forsaken meadow, their screams unheard. Only one had made it out alive.
Time had stood still here, mostly. The barbed wire fence I currently gripped had been erected some time after that night and, no doubt, people now locked their doors. Donnelly Road: a place name on a map that had lost its innocence.
I shivered inside my parka. I thought of the mourning cattails in the ditch behind me, perhaps they mourned for Chantal Gagnon. The land here, it had a memory. The barbed wire fence was a reminder that the people here, too, had a memory.
The rest of the world may have forgotten the horror that had occurred on Donnelly Road on January 22, 1984, but the people here would never forget the night my brother had murdered one of their own.
