by Michelle Wan
“Then let me ask you something else. How much do you trust him?”
“Julian?” She thought about it. “I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
“Because”—Alain was watching her closely, judging her reaction—“I’m starting to wonder if he wasn’t the person who was stalking you that day in the forest.”
Mara laughed. “But that’s crazy! It was Vrac. You said so yourself.”
Alain shook his head vigorously. “I said it could have been. I now realize that was impossible.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mara, on the afternoon you were in the woods, Vrac was in Saint-Cyprien, picking up a new motor for a water pump. Our pump, in fact. I can show you the printed invoice for it, with date and time, together with Vrac’s scrawl. And he spent the rest of the day at the château installing it.”
“I don’t believe it,” Mara declared. But the words were scarcely out of her mouth when she was reliving her panicked flight, her encounter with Alain, and Julian coming up behind, crashing through the bushes only seconds later.
“But why?” she whispered, horrified. “Why would he do that?”
“To frighten you? To put you off the hunt? Mara, are you sure this Lady’s Slipper is Julian’s only reason for helping you?”
“Oh yes. He’s desperate to find it, of that I’m sure.”
Alain thought for a moment. “Look, let’s approach this logically. You believe that someone was responsible for your sister’s disappearance. You don’t know who this person is. Your only clue is a set of orchid photographs. But maybe the answer has been in front of your nose all along: Julian. He’s an orchidologist. Your sister was an orchid amateur. Supposing she met him by chance, went with him?” He paused, raking his fingers through his hair, leaving it pushed back and tousled.
Mara stared at him. Loulou had said something like that: Bedie would have been easily approachable by anyone who shared her interest. She would have gone trustingly with Julian into the forest.
“And you,” Alain went on, “you could have come as a nasty shock to him when you turned up, the spitting image of your sister, asking him to help you find a woman he might have killed nineteen years ago!”
Again, had not Loulou warned her of exactly the same thing? Your face, Mara. Your face. She recalled Julian’s look of shock when he had first opened his door to her.
And yet something did not fit.
“No. It doesn’t make sense,” she cried. “I swear Julian was genuinely amazed at the photo of the Lady’s Slipper. If he’d been with my sister at the time she took it, wouldn’t he have seen it, too? Why would he need her pictures to trace it? He’d already know its exact location.”
Alain frowned. “What if,” he said slowly, “she took the photos before she met him?”
“But even so, why would Julian try to help me? He’s known all along that the whole point of reconstructing my sister’s trail was to find out what had happened to her. Why would he want to lead me to himself?”
“Maybe,” Alain suggested grimly, “that’s part of the kick.”
Mara’s eyes widened. Her experiences in the forest and in the bog came rushing back to her. “Are you saying this is all part of some kind of sick game?”
“Maybe. Or perhaps,” Alain added after a moment’s reflection, “it’s simpler than that. You see, it really hangs on the camera. You’re convinced it belonged to Bedie. But don’t you think her assailant—Julian—would have destroyed such a vital piece of evidence? Especially the film it contained? But he didn’t. So it really argues the case that the camera you found can’t have been your sister’s. And the only person to know that would be Julian. In which case, there would be absolutely no risk to him in searching for an interesting sequence of plants that some other, totally unrelated person had photographed. Particularly if it led to a rare orchid that he very much wanted to find.”
In fact, Mara realized, she’d virtually blackmailed Julian into it. No help, no photos. Those were her terms.
Then reason asserted itself. Julian had behaved oddly, even inexplicably, at times. She knew very little about him; he gave nothing away. He was every bit as irascible and botanically obsessive as Géraud. But none of this made him a psychopath or a killer.
“I don’t buy it,” she told Alain.
He said gently, “I’m sure what I’ve said comes as a bit of a shock, Mara. But I’d like you at least to consider it. You can’t afford to ignore the possibility that Julian may be the very person you’re looking for.”
She turned away, glancing through the restaurant window at the gathering darkness outside. “I don’t know what to think,” she murmured dully.
“Then don’t. For now, at least.” He took her hand again. This time he did not examine her palm, but cradled it in his own. “Let me tell you instead,” he said quietly, “about dawn in the Cameroon highlands.”
•
Mara drove Alain back to Les Colombes. He let her take him all the way up the narrow lane leading to the rear courtyard. It was late, the old ones would be asleep, and there would be no risk of awkward questions from his father.
The dark mass of the château rose above them as she cut her headlights before pulling up. She keyed off the engine and turned to him.
“You know,” she said, “there’s no way of proving if your suspicions about Julian are true.”
“I agree. You need hard evidence.”
“Such as what?”
“Something tying him to your sister? Or any of the other women. If he’s responsible for their disappearances, maybe he kept something of theirs. I don’t imagine it will be easy to find. Julian seems to have covered his tracks well.” Alain sat facing her in the car. Moonlight glinted on his brow, the strong profile of his nose. The rest of his face was cast in shadow.
“Whatever you do, Mara, I don’t want you to take any stupid risks. Remember, I’m here if you need me.”
He leaned across, cupping her face in both his hands. “This is for luck,” he whispered. And he kissed her, long and hard.
Mara watched him slip away from her. His form was quickly swallowed in darkness. There had been something of hunger in his kiss, almost of ferocity. The feeling of his mouth on hers stayed with her, his smell, a faint musky odor, filled her nostrils. In that kiss something indefinable had sprung up, a brief frisson, like electricity arcing momentarily between them. Mara was shaken to acknowledge the depth of attraction she felt for Alain de Sauvignac. It expressed itself in a lurch of the heart, a yearning she had not felt for years. In fact, not since Hal. The realization disturbed her. She put her car in gear and circled about, tires crunching quietly on gravel until they met the rough surface of the lane. A warning sounded in her brain. Hal had been a bastard.
FIFTEEN
Mara chose a morning when Prudence could confirm that Julian was working in her garden.
“He’s digging more of those trenches, he and that brawny helper of his,” Prudence informed her when she phoned. “Don’t ask for what. Why do you want me to call you on your cell phone if he leaves?”
“Too complicated to explain. Just do it the minute he goes, will you? And thanks, Prudence.”
“Whatever helps, sweetie.”
•
Julian’s front door was locked. His back door, as usual, was not. Mara opened it and stuck her head inside.
“Hello?” she called, just in case.
No response.
She made rapid work of the kitchen, ignoring the clutter of pots and pans, the dirty dishes in the sink. His shelves were stocked with cans of cassoulet and beef ragout, packets of dry soups, rice, sugar, instant coffee, a canister of tea. A lower shelf was taken up with large tins labeled Borax, Silica Gel, Glycerine. For drying plants, she assumed. What exactly she was looking for she did not know. Something to tie him to Bedie, Alain had suggested, or to any of the other women. A part of her was equally interested in any intimate information on Julian. Family photographs, love letters, birthday cards, anything
to give him a past, dimension. She was torn between wanting to condemn him and to prove Alain wrong, to find nothing more incriminating than the sundry silly, embarrassingly personal desiderata that clutter any normal person’s life. She would have been dissatisfied and yet relieved to walk away empty-handed, allowing Julian to continue undisturbed with his earthy if eccentric pursuits.
The scarred dining table at one end of the front room displayed the remains of past meals and a bilingual clutter of old newspapers: La Presse, The Observer, and the monthly News, serving the local English-speaking community. There was an old desk, its surface covered in bills. A glance informed her that Julian was none too prompt about paying his accounts. The drawers stuck. She pulled them out with difficulty: more bills, bank statements, string, a dried-out bottle of glue, paper clips, a hunk of beeswax, leaky pens, a broken watch, loose batteries, nursery catalogues, letters. This man was a hoarder. The letters were all business correspondence: queries from interested customers, confirmations of landscaping projects. One was a complaint regarding plants that had lifted the coping around a swimming pool. Mara wondered that there should be so little clue to Julian himself. Or perhaps that was how he wanted it.
The shelves sagged with books. Texts on wild-flowers, orchids, and plant physiology. She spotted a field manual: Wildflowers of the Dordogne/Fleurs sauvages de la Dordogne, by Julian Wood. She pulled it out. It had been published in 1983 and bore the dedication: “To lovers of wildflowers everywhere.” The biographical information on the back cover described the author as an authority on local flora, living in Grissac, and showed a photograph of a younger Julian, smiling, with slightly fuller features and no facial hair. It made Mara realize that she rarely saw Julian smile.
Mara flipped through the book. It was filled with photographs of all kinds of wildflowers, taken, as Bedie had done, close up and at a distance and annotated with details on plant structure, habitat, and flowering season. Many were orchids that she recognized. Pyramidals, Bees, and Lizards. Lady and Man Orchids. She saw a portrait of a Bird’s-nest Orchid with an accompanying view of a thin scattering of the plants. There was no doubt that it was the same location she and Julian had found in the Bessède Forest. The oak in which Jazz had treed the marten was just visible in the background. Neottia nidus-avis was described as thick-stemmed, fleshy, yellowish-brown, with sepals and petals curving into a hood, and labellum pendant. It flowered between May and late June, liked shade, and was partial to beech and coniferous woodlands. These plants, Julian had noted, were possibly representative of a much larger stand, which, owing to several years of dry conditions, was either in decline or semi-dormant. Both photographs were dated 1980.
Suddenly the kitchen door banged. Mara dived down behind the sofa.
“Allo?” cried a woman’s voice. “Julian? C’est moi, Francine Léon. Vous avez oublié vos oeufs.” There was a silence as Madame Léon waited, with the eggs that Julian had forgotten, for a response.
“Bon,” Madame Léon called, even though it was apparent that Julian wasn’t there. “Je les mets dans le frigo.”
Mara heard the refrigerator door open and close, and then the clack of the kitchen door as Madame Léon left. Raising her head, Mara saw Madame Léon cut across Julian’s back garden on her way to her own, adjoining property.
Mara let her breath out and moved to the bathroom. The medicine cabinet was full of bottles and tubes, including a vial of prescription tablets and a jar of something that, as best she could make out, was a preparation for hives.
In another room she found a dented metal cabinet crammed with cardboard boxes stacked precariously one atop another. The boxes were filled with prints and slides of not only flowers but plants of every description. The backs of many of the prints were inscribed in Julian’s untidy script, providing cryptic details on identification, date, and place.
She had only the bedroom to go. The bed was unmade. Clothes trailed over every piece of furniture. One leather slipper, trodden down at the heel, had been kicked under a scarred walnut armoire; the other lay by the door. She checked out Julian’s bedside table, stirring around in the contents of the single, shallow drawer: reading glasses, nail clippers, throat lozenges, buttons. Her cell phone went off.
“Hello?” she answered tensely.
“Mara? That you? You sound funny. It’s Prudence. Look, I know you wanted me to ring you if Julian left. Well, he took off just around twelve.”
“But it’s nearly twenty past,” Mara exclaimed, with a glance at her watch. “Why didn’t you call me straightaway?”
“Couldn’t, sweetie,” returned Prudence’s voice. She seemed to be blowing on something. “He went right in the middle of me doing my nails. Takes an age for them to dry. Matter of fact, they’re tacky even as we speak.”
Mara cursed as she disconnected. If Julian were returning for lunch, he could be walking through the door at any moment. So far she had come up with nothing.
She rammed the drawer shut and hurried back into the front room. Julian’s wildflower book still lay on the floor behind the sofa where she had left it. She scooped it up and shoved it back on the shelf, not where it had been, but at the end of a row of books, wedging it upright with a small plastic box. Her hand hesitated over the box. She took it down and flipped back the hinged lid. It was filled, as she had expected, with personal and business cards. She riffled through them quickly, spotting her own among them, and then another card that caused her to catch her breath. She pulled it out and studied it with narrowed eyes, puzzling over it, and then coming to a conclusion. She did not know if she was sorry or exultant as she slipped it into her pocket.
A volley of barks at the front of the house alerted her. Through a window she glimpsed Jazz, head thrust out of her car, happily greeting Julian’s arrival. By the time Julian walked in the back door, Mara was seated at his kitchen table, reading a crumpled newspaper. The kettle was heating on the gas burner.
“Hi,” she said, affecting casualness although her hands were shaking. She had to force herself to look at him. “Hope you don’t mind me making myself at home. I just dropped by and was about to leave when Prudence called.” She gestured at her cell phone. “She happened to say you might be on your way here, so I thought I’d wait. I—er—I’m making some tea.”
“You’re a stranger,” he said coolly. He seemed on edge, suspicious of her presence in his house. Nevertheless, he must have thought tea was a good idea because he took down a couple of mugs and rinsed out the teapot. “What did you want to see me about?”
“Oh.” She stopped. What did she want to see him about? She glanced nervously at the newspaper which she had found on the kitchen counter, hoping for inspiration. A front page photograph of le Mur’s mangled Ferrari, in all its graphic detail, saved the moment. “I just wondered if you’d gotten the film developed. The one you shot at La Binette.”
If it occurred to Julian that she could have as easily phoned for the information, he didn’t show it. In fact, he looked evasive. “Er, no. Not yet.” He stuck his head in the fridge and pulled it out again. “Haven’t had time. Have you had lunch?”
“Who, me? Oh, don’t worry about me. I can’t stay.” Figuratively she kicked herself. That was stupid. She had just said she’d been prepared to wait. “That is, just the tea. Then I have to run.”
“Close call,” she told Jazz as she drove off ten minutes later. She reached the intersection with the main road and turned onto it, trying to collect her thoughts. The card pointed her in an unexpected direction. However, she still lacked anything tying Julian directly to Bedie.
Or did she? Alain had suggested that Bedie had met Julian by chance, gone with him because of her interest in orchids. An idea began to form in her mind. Wildflowers of the Dordogne/Fleurs sauvages de la Dordogne, 1983, which included many species of wild orchids. Bedie could have seen Julian’s book in any bookstore and bought a copy. In fact, hadn’t Scott said that Bedie had taken some kind of book on flowers with her? Given her keen intere
st, she would not have hesitated to seek Julian out—he was described in the biographical blurb as “an authority on local flora living in Grissac.” And it would have been easy—she could have simply looked him up in the phone book, just as Mara herself had done. The more Mara thought about it, the more plausible her idea seemed. It could be the very link she needed. But was it enough?
An oncoming truck bearing a load of chickens rumbled past, crowding her onto the verge of the narrow road. Then she remembered the Bird’s-nest Orchids. She threw her head back in mirthless laughter.
“Damn it, Jazz,” she cried. “It’s been staring me in the face all along.”
Julian had pronounced Bedie’s photo to be an almost certain match with his colony in the Bessède Forest, based on the law of probability. A stand this big is rare, he had said. The chances of there being two like it are low. By the same argument, if the colony was as exceptional as Julian claimed, what were the odds that Bedie had simply stumbled on it by herself? Mara had seen the spot. It was in the middle of nowhere. Julian himself had raised the question of how Bedie had come to be there. The only reasonable answer was that someone who had known about the colony had led her to it.
“And that person,” she addressed her dog with grim finality, “could only have been Julian.”
He had been clever, initially feigning astonishment at Bedie’s photograph, carrying out the charade of consulting Géraud, pointing out that the stand as he had originally seen it was scarcely recognizable as the one Bedie had captured on film. But he had guessed that the colony was representative of a much larger growth—his own words in print gave him away—and as the expert he should have made the connection. Finally, Julian’s photo was dated 1980. This meant that, when Bedie had turned up in 1984, he had already discovered the plants and would have been able, and for his purposes more than willing, to guide her to them.
Yet Mara was still nagged by a troubling point. She did not accept Alain’s idea that the camera had belonged to some unknown third person. Her sister had taken those photos, she was sure of it. The Bird’s-nest Orchids clearly placed Julian with Bedie near the beginning of her trail, so Julian must have known that Bedie had a camera with her and that she was photographing orchids. Maybe he had even helped her set up some of her shots. So how was it that he did not know about the Cypripedium? And why, as Alain had asked, didn’t he destroy the camera? The only conclusion she could draw was that Julian must have left Bedie before she found the Lady’s Slipper. But why would he have done that?
