The Stone Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

leave near the shed at the end of the garden. The shutters were closed at seven thirty. Madame Préau had a light dinner in the dining room while watching the news on France 3, and then did some more reading before getting ready for bed. The bedside lamp was turned off at ten thirty. If she couldn’t sleep, she’d count high-speed trains. The echo of their infernal race would reach her with reassuring regularity from the railway platform a hundred meters away.
    On Saturdays between nine and noon, a nurse, Ms. Briche, would visit to check her blood pressure. If she picked up on the slightest agitation or sign of an anxiety attack in her patient, she informed Dr. Martin Préau—which she had never had to do until now.
    Sunday was the hardest day. On Sundays, Madame Préau would fast, drinking vegetable soup and organic herbal teas concocted by Madame Budin, the chemist. No one ever came to Madame Préau on Sunday, and Madame Préau had no one to visit. She didn’t keep up any particular acquaintances among the neighbors, who kept to themselves. They were content to say hello as they passed each other on the footpath every other day when the bins went out. Only one of her former students, who lived in number four, sometimes stopped to smile or exchange pleasantries in front of Madame Préau’s house. Though she was in her fifties, Ms. Blanche seemed twenty years older. The poor woman had lost her mind years ago. She filled her days by hoarding anything recyclable in her house, in her garden, and even in the trunk of her car. Cardboard boxes, bottles, corks, plastic wrappers, newspapers—fragile structures heaped like peaks of whipped cream were visible behind the outer fence where a tangle of shrubs clung, forming random snares. Having scaled the front wall, a clematis had meandered inside the house via the first-floor window that Ms. Blanche left open throughout the year, and through which other piles of reusable materials were visible. The mind of the young woman who had once studied the piano at Madame Préau’s house had clearly meandered, too, and her clothes were impregnated by the smell of mold.
    Sunday was a terrible day. The children weren’t coming back from school, singing along the path; the postman wasn’t doing his rounds, dinging his bicycle bell; the ballet of dumper trucks and JCBs working on nearby building sites was brutally called to a halt; the windows of Madame Préau’s house weren’t vibrating each time they passed; the street was deserted, the neighborhood had been siphoned of all its commotion; not even a one-eyed tomcat snuck across the dew-covered garden.
    So Madame Préau would watch the neighbors.

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    High-pitched screams and the squeak of a swing forced Madame Préau out of her Sunday nap at about three o’clock. She got up, opened the double curtains, and discovered the children playing in the garden. A little girl and two boys. The smaller of the two boys was barely more than three and was sniveling a lot, the victim of his sister’s taunts. Aged five or six perhaps, she was deliberately making him fall out of the swing, grabbing the ball from his hands, or pushing him off a little truck so that she could take his place. She was using her physical superiority with some skill, taking advantage of the lack of supervision by either her mother or her father. For their part, they were happy enough to glance over at their children when they got too rowdy. Occasionally, the father came out to smoke a cigarette and drink a coffee or a beer. He would sit on a plastic garden chair and would pay the most attention to his mobile phone. The mother rarely appeared outside the house; she would charge across the garden, but only to take down the laundry that was hanging in front of the wall of the garage. Both were blond of a rather Nordic sort, like the little boy and his sister.
    The other boy, the bigger one, had dark, chestnut-brown hair. He must have been Bastien’s age, seven or perhaps