Deadly Slipper

by Michelle Wan

  He was back with a mug of tea and a couple of aspirins. “Here. Take these. When you feel better, if you can’t drive, I’ll run you back wherever you want to go.”

  Mara managed a smile. “Thanks. I’ll be okay.”

  “No problem, really. Where are you staying?”

  “Ecoute-la-Pluie.” She opened her bag and gave him her card: Mara Dunn—Interior Designer/ Décoratrice ensemblière.

  Julian looked surprised. “You’re not a tourist?” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I should have made that clear. I’m Canadian, but I live here.”

  “Ah,” he said, as if that explained something. “Of course.” He lowered himself into a leather easy chair—obviously his favorite since the arms and seat were badly worn. “And the photographs? Look,” he said, against his better judgment, “don’t you think you’d better tell me what this is all about?”

  Wearily Mara let her head fall against the sofa back so that she gazed past him at an indeterminate spot on the ceiling. “Yes,” she said at last. “The photos.” Briefly she closed her eyes. “You see, nineteen years ago, my sister Bedie—Beatrice Dunn—I think my sister may have taken those pictures.”

  He stared at her blankly, waiting for her to go on.

  “In 1984, my sister, Bedie, disappeared in the Dordogne.” Mara had told this story many times. With each telling, the recital became bleaker, more mechanical, reducing the people in it to mere essential facts. “She’d come over with her boyfriend, Scott Barrow, for a hiking holiday. They were camping not too far from here at a place called Les Gabarres. It was early May, and they’d had a lot of rain. Scott wanted to push on. Bedie wanted to stay. They had a fight about it, and Scott packed up and took off.” Mara was silent for a moment. “When he came back to the campsite a couple of days later, Bedie was gone. Scott waited around for a few more days. He was sure she’d be back because, although she’d taken her backpack and camera, a Michelin guide, and a book on flowers, the rest of her things were still in the tent. We—none of us—ever saw her again.”

  Her eyes wandered to the windows. Darkness, the early darkness of remnant winter days, was closing in, but the rain was letting up. “The police launched a massive search. It was in all the papers. They questioned everyone in the area and followed up with campers who’d left during the critical period, anyone who might have seen her or given her a ride. A German family said they saw her go out of the campsite the morning after Scott left. Alone and on foot. No one else knew anything.”

  Throughout this narrative, Julian had been regarding his visitor with an increasingly troubled gaze. Now he stirred, rising to poke mechanically at the dying fire. He spoke with his back to her. “What about the boyfriend? Surely he must have had some idea where she might have gone?”

  “No. In fact, for a time Scott was a prime suspect. The police were sure it was a crime passionel. They put him through hell, poor guy. Why did he leave? Why had he waited so long before reporting her missing? Scott told them that he had simply hitched a ride to Bordeaux and back, and that he hadn’t been particularly worried about Bedie, at least not right away, because, as anyone who knew her could tell you, Bedie was perfectly able to look after herself. The police didn’t believe him. On the other hand, they had no proof of foul play. There was no body, you see.

  “My parents and I came over as soon as we were notified. We stayed on for three months, looking for her. Scott stayed, too. We showed her picture to everyone—hikers, campers, waiters, shopkeepers, farmers. My father offered a reward for any information about her. We had dozens of leads that went nowhere. Finally, the police told us we were complicating things by trying to run our own investigation. They told us to go home.”

  “And then?” Julian turned back to sit down again.

  “And then, a couple of months later, in the fall, the French police contacted us again. Someone had found a woman’s body in a wood near Carennac, over in Quercy. Her skull had been bashed in. They wanted dental records. But it turned out not to be— to be someone else. The woman was later identified as a Dutch tourist. Bedie just went on … missing.”

  Julian scratched his beard. “It could have been an accident. The entire region is full of underground fissures and pits. She could have fallen down one of them. Or—or drowned in the river.”

  “We went through all that. We thought of mental breakdown. Amnesia. I pictured my sister wandering mad and nameless through the streets of Marseille. For years we all hung on to the hope that somehow she would just turn up. Eventually, my parents just found it easier to accept that she was dead.”

  “And you?” His tone was tentatively probing.

  She shook her head. “It hasn’t been that simple for me. You see, we were very close. Closer than ordinary siblings. We’re twins.”

  She fumbled in her bag for a photograph, cracked and ragged at the edges, encased in a plastic sleeve. It was Mara’s face, the same oval shape, straight brows, and pointed, determined chin. But taken long ago, frozen in time. The hair was different, longer and worn pinned severely back at the temples by metal clips. The eyes gazed out at the world with a challenging, quizzical stare. Find me, they seemed to say.

  “I see,” Julian spoke quietly. Unlike most people to whom she had shown this photograph, he did not display intense interest, merely glanced at it, then back at her, before placing it with a hint of distaste on the low table between them. He cleared his throat. “And so you came back to look for her?”

  Mara shook her head. “Not right away. I got on with my life. I married, I divorced, I moved around. Finally, I realized I couldn’t go on like that. I had to find out what happened to her. That’s when I decided to make the move. My parents loaned me the money to set myself up in business here. I pushed to have the case reopened. The police haven’t been very helpful. I tried myself to follow up old leads, but most were cold by then. The campground at Les Gabarres doesn’t even exist anymore. People we had talked to at the time were dead, or moved away. It was hopeless, after so many years. But at least I was doing something. It made me feel somehow closer to Bedie, that I wasn’t letting her down.” She paused.

  “And then, a few weeks ago, I found the camera.”

  He raised his head sharply. “The camera?” She nodded. “Last month I stopped off in Villeréal to check out a brocanteur I sometimes use—I’m always on the lookout for antiques for my clients, to go with their renovated barns and farmhouses. They like the genuine thing, or at least the appearance of it. Anyway, there was a big basket of junk. Dishes, figurines, books, and a camera, an old Canon. It was in pretty bad shape, the leather case all mildewed, like it had been stored for a long time in a damp place. It caught my eye because it was exactly like the cameras our parents had given my sister and me for our high school graduation. I looked at it more closely, and I realized, incredibly, that it was in fact the twin to mine!”

  Julian regarded her doubtfully, eyebrows jacked up to the top of his head. “How could you be so sure? There must have been thousands of tourists with cameras like that coming through the Dordogne in the past—what did you say?—nineteen years.”

  Mara hesitated, then gave him her proof: “There were initials written on the inside of the case. B.D. Beatrice Dunn.”

  “Ah.”

  She set the ice pack aside, swung her feet to the ground, and sat facing him squarely. “But that wasn’t all. Needless to say, I bought the camera. After I got it home, I found there was still film in it! I didn’t try to have the film developed myself. I didn’t want to risk a commercial lab. After all, it might be evidence, and the film was bound to be in a fragile state. I took everything to the police in Périgueux. They weren’t very interested in reopening a missing person case nearly two decades old. However, I finally persuaded them to examine the film and have it processed in their lab.”

  “And these,” he surmised grimly, “were the photos you showed me?”

  She nodded. “It was a roll of thirty-six, intact, although in pretty bad conditi
on, as you saw.”

  “Well, did the police at least try to trace the camera? What about fingerprints?”

  “There were residual prints on the film, but they were too deteriorated to be analyzed. The police did try to trace the camera but got no further than I had. The brocanteur in Villeréal could only say that it had come from a clear-out of someone else’s stock, an old junk dealer named la Camelote who died last year. The police kept the negatives but gave me back the camera and a copy of the prints. They aren’t willing to take it further.”

  Julian grunted. “I suppose to them it’s an old incident. Cold file.”

  “That’s right. Most of them weren’t even around when it happened. However, there’s one man I’ve had contact with on and off. Lieutenant La Pouge. He’s retired now, but he actually worked on Bedie’s case. I looked him up again. He wasn’t very encouraging, though. He dismissed the initials as coincidence and said the photos could have been taken by anyone who’d done the usual tourist circuit and who liked wildflowers.”

  “He may have had a point.”

  “But that’s just it,” Mara cried, her frustration breaking through. “That was the most important part. Once I found out what the flowers were, I realized that was the link. Bedie, you see, loved orchids! She was what you’d call an orchid freak.”

  “I see,” said Julian. He thought a moment and then nodded his comprehension. “Sure. Orchid fever. Gets in your blood. With some people it’s an obsession, especially the tropicals. Fanciers spend big money on them. The field varieties you get around here are free but, for my taste, just as addictive. I know a Dutchman who hikes around France every spring with a donkey, just orchid hunting. His wife remains in Amsterdam. I’m not even sure they’re still on speaking terms.”

  “Well, I’d say Bedie was obsessed. I tried to explain the importance of this to the police. I got nowhere. And that was when he thought of you.”

  “Who?”

  “Lieutenant La Pouge. He’d heard you were something of a local authority.”

  “Oh well!” Julian lounged back in his chair.

  “So, you see, I thought if you could help me …” She locked her gaze on his. “Julian, I’m not only convinced these photos were taken by my sister, I believe that somehow they’re a clue to where she was before … before whatever happened to her.”

  He looked startled, almost aghast. “But they’re just photographs of flowers. There’s nothing in them that could indicate—”

  “Maybe not directly. But I was hoping they could serve as a—a kind of signpost…”

  She trailed off, not saying to where, but she could see him thinking it: a shallow grave?

  “Please,” she said after a long silence, “these photos are the only lead I have. Won’t you have another look at them?”

  TWO

  There were thirty-four of them, each numbered on the back in order of exposure. Julian sat down next to Mara on the sofa and laid them out in a line on the coffee table. He put his glasses on and scanned the array. As he had noted before, all showed some degree of damage, streaks and staining, as if by light or moisture. Not surprising if they really had been taken by Mara’s sister, with the camera lying about god knows where for nineteen years. It was a bloody miracle that the film had survived at all.

  He was able to identify most of the flowers easily: dainty Helleborines; pink, conical Pyramidals; frilly Lady Orchids; white Butterflies. The final frames were the hardest to make out. They had suffered the greatest deterioration because they had formed the overlying tail of the film.

  “What do you think?” Mara asked.

  He sighed. “Well, I’ll say this much. Whoever took these—your sister—knew something about orchids and had some experience documenting floral material. Look, each one’s been photographed at least twice, once up close as a full-plant shot, showing the flower and the leaf base. That’s important for identification. And then again from a few meters back to show the growing environment. For example”—he picked out a portrait of a compact spire of creamy florets lightly tinged with maroon—“this is Aceras anthropophorum, Man Orchid, so called because the labellum is shaped like a little man.”

  He saw that he had lost her, so he explained: “Orchids have three petals, surrounded by three sepals. The sepals are like—like a kind of cup holding the petals in place, you might say. One of the distinctive features of orchids is that the middle petal, the labellum or lip, is specialized, sometimes in fantastic ways.”

  He jumped up to fetch his botanist’s loupe and held it out to her. “Here, see for yourself. The photo’s got some bad patches on it, but you can just see that the labellum of the Man Orchid has four prongs, like arms and legs, with the sepals closing over the top to form a little head.”

  Obediently she peered through the lens.

  He went on. “Now, the close-up is fine, but it’s not that informative. All you get is the flower. So it’s the habitat shot that’s going to be the most useful for what you want.” He pointed to the next photograph in line. “This is a middle-distance shot of the same plant. Here you can see that it’s part of a scattered stand of Man Orchids, growing on a patch of rocky, sloping ground. So this tells us we’re looking at, say, an eroded hillside, which would account for the lay of the land and the stones at the surface.”

  He skipped to a view of a grassy field awash in purple blooms. “Or this one. These are some kind of Marsh Orchids, which only grow in wetlands. So this has got to be a water meadow. The dark line there is probably a stream, and you can make out a wood in the background. This is an identifiable place. Of course, exactly where is the problem.”

  He continued scanning slowly, pausing with a grunt of approval over a portrait of a single brownish-yellow sprig. “Neottia nidus-avis. Bird’s-nest Orchid.” The grunt changed to a low whistle when he saw the companion photo. What he had initially dismissed as a badly stained exposure now proved to be a view of an extensive carpet of the plants. How big he couldn’t exactly tell, because the plants filled the entire frame.

  “Nice,” he muttered admiringly. “A bloody great stand of them. Certainly bigger than anything I’ve seen.”

  Mara peered through the lens at a swarm of pale, fleshy specimens. “Those are orchids? They look like some kind of fungus.”

  “In fact,” he nodded, “they live on fungi, and they’re that browny-yellow color because they have no chlorophyll, no green in them at all. It’s their matted roots that give them their name. Bird’s-nests aren’t that uncommon around here, but a big colony like this is extremely rare. Again, the problem is finding the location. If it even still exists,” he added doubtfully.

  He pored lengthily over the remaining photos. Suddenly, through the staining and speckling, he saw something that made him stiffen.

  “My god!” he uttered.

  “What?”

  He grabbed the loupe from her to squint intently at a flower. It was taken in close-up, a startling plant bearing what looked like a deep-pink, swollen median lip flanked by two long, thin, spiraling, dark-purple petals. A blackish-purple dorsal sepal, arching forward like a hood, gave the flower an almost sinister appearance. Unfortunately, the picture was so badly damaged that he couldn’t tell if he was truly seeing a slipper-shaped labellum.

  “If I didn’t know better”—he sprang up and carried the photo to where he could study it under better light—“I’d say it was some kind of Cypripedium.”

  Mara frowned. “What’s that?”

  He was at his shelves, pulling down reference books.

  “Cypripedium? The French have various names for it—Sabot de Vénus, Venus’s Shoe. Sabot de la Vierge, Virgin’s Shoe.” He thumbed rapidly through Delforge’s Orchids of Britain & Europe. “In English we call it Lady’s Slipper. The only known Western European species is Cypripedium calceolus.” He flipped through a few pages and came over to show her a picture of a handsome flower bearing a bright-yellow slipper flanked by two twisted maroon side petals and backed by sepals
of the same hue. “Here. The color and shape of the one in your photo are different, but it’s definitely in the same genus. I’ll be damned if I’ve ever seen the like of it, and certainly not around here.

  “The problem is,” he went on, more to himself than to Mara, “it’s impossible. Cypripedium doesn’t grow in the Dordogne. In fact, it’s been wiped out in most places in Europe because of picking and habitat destruction.

  “It’s got to be the photo that’s misleading me.” He scowled irritably at the blackened print, slammed Delforge shut and plunged into Landwehr’s double volumes on wild orchids of France and Europe. A serious orchidologist, he was sorely tempted to put the matter of Mara’s missing sister entirely aside, itching as he was to pin down an identification. But there was only the single portrait of this tantalizing flower, and it was the last shot. Filming had stopped before the end of the roll. From what he could tell, the final couple of frames had not been exposed. He stood for a long moment, lost in thought.

  Mara’s voice brought him back. “If it’s not a Lady’s Slipper, what is it?”

  He shook his head. “Damned if I know.”

  It was a question he would have gladly given everything he owned to answer.

  •

  They were sharing an omelet, the only food Julian had to offer. The bread was day-old, but the eggs were fresh, bought that morning from Madame Léon next door, the shells in fact still crotted with dung and feathers. He also had a decent bottle of Pécharmant on tap and a bit of chèvre, from another neighbor (Edith’s putative owner), who made, in Julian’s opinion, the finest goat cheese in the region, smooth and mild, not rank and gritty like some.

  Julian had finally coaxed the fire to life. They ate companionably before it. Edith, released from captivity, lay dreaming on the hearthrug. Mara, with her ankle propped up again, was in less pain now and looking better. Julian was aware of the way she sipped her wine, the rim of the glass pressed against her lower lip, the flickering flames glowing in her dark eyes, lending color to her cheeks.