Family mourns after woman, 50, dies on Aylmer footpath
Body lay undiscovered in snow for several hours
It was 9 a.m. Sunday that Paul Armstrong heard the voice message on his cellphone. It was from his common-law wife, Vivian Maret, a message she had left the evening before.
By then, Armstrong already knew that Maret had died Saturday evening, likely only minutes after she had called his phone. Police determined that the 50-year-old suffered a heart attack as she walked from an Aylmer corner store to her nearby home.
Although Maret left the store at about 5 p.m., her body, just a few feet from the parking lot, wasn’t discovered until about 11:30 p.m.
Armstrong said he was at his farm in the Pontiac when Gatineau police called him at 4:30 a.m. Sunday. He drove to Aylmer right away and they told him what happened.
Later, when he got the phone message, it sounded to him as if Maret was struggling for breath.
“If I had known I would have driven and picked her up and taken her to the hospital — just by the way she was talking.”
Maret, who was from Calgary, was a special-education teacher.