The Orchid Shroud

by Michelle Wan

  Mara thought with renewed bitterness about Julian’s defection. There was no other word for it. He had blatantly shown her that he could not be relied on.

  But if I didn’t do it, who did? And why? So try this on for size. I told you about Jean-Claude’s Gévaudan/Sigoulane Beast theory, as well as Paul’s idea that our genial genealogist might have been trying his hand at blackmail. Supposing Jean-Claude, in threatening to reveal a werewolf, unwittingly hit on a lycanthrope?

  Again she paused, reading on-screen the words she had just entered. She knew her hypothesis sounded far-fetched. But was it? She was convinced that Jean-Claude had believed in his werewolf idea, at least enough to try to profit from it. And Christophe, with his extreme family pride and horror of scandal, might well have reacted violently, especially if his antecedents were not as faultless as he liked to make out. Once again, she put her fingers to the keyboard:

  Okay. I know exactly what you’re going to say: before I begin criticizing the de Bonfond bloodline or concluding that Christophe killed Jean-Claude to keep him from revealing his lycanthropic alter-ego, I’m going to need proof. So what have I got? Unfortunately, nothing, apart from what Jean-Claude told me about the Gévaudan and Sigoulane Beasts and the de Bonfonds. However, who knows what I’ll turn up with a bit of digging? In any case, it’s better than sitting here feeling sorry for myself. Leave it to the gendarmes, you say? Since they think I did it, Ican hardly count on them to get me off the hook. And that’s the other thing. The only way I can see to clear my name, let alone continue to make a living out here, is to find out what really happened. I mean, who wants to hire a suspected murderer to redesign their kitchen? Werewolf or not, I think the answer is somehow bound up with Christophe. Wherever he is, he must have heard about Jean-Claude’s death by now. So why hasn’t he come forward? What’s he hiding, or more to the point, why is he hiding? But, as you’re sure to point out, I’m going to need a lot more evidence than I have before I go public with accusations. I suppose that’s where I’ll have to start. Getting the evidence. Wish me luck, Mara<

  Mara got to the public library in Le Buisson at half past one. Even in the short walk from le parking to the entrance, she was sure she caught the odd sideways glance, saw heads come together as she passed. Really, the media might as well have named her outright as the person questioned in regard to Jean-Claude’s death. She was generally known in these parts as la canadienne. There weren’t that many other Canadian women in the region. She kept her sunglasses on while she moved furtively among the bookshelves.

  On leaving the library, she remembered that she needed food. She slipped into a mini-mart she normally never used a few minutes before closing. The produce bins contained only the wilted leftovers no one else would buy, and the single staff person, a youth with spiky hair, was unconcernedly flipping off banks of lights, so that she had to finish her shopping almost in the dark. Dark was fine by her. She was glad, as she hurried out to her car, that it had begun to rain again. Bad weather obscured things.

  When she returned home, she picked up a phone message from Patsy:

  “Listen, Mara, I’m not saying don’t get your evidence. But if you’re thinking about chasing down a real live lycanthrope, think again. These folks are potentially dangerous. My advice to you is to stay out of it and let the cops do their job. Stay right out of it, do you hear?”

  The sharp concern in Patsy’s voice brought a grim smile of determination to Mara’s lips. She did not call Patsy back, knowing she would only get more of the same. She heated up the remains of the morning’s coffee and drank it off. Then she sat down to read. She read until eight o’clock, when she prepared a package of instant vegetable soup. While she sipped it, she watched, with a kind of mindless, fatalistic fascination, the evening news coverage of Jean-Claude’s death.

  “Accident? Murder? Or something more horrific?” a woman reporter cried shrilly into the camera. She stood in the little square in Sigoulane against a backdrop of houses. Had the same animal that had killed André Piquet and attacked Clémentine Dupuy also fed on Jean-Claude Fournier’s cadaver? Or had the thing leaped at him, causing him to fall to his death, before devouring his body?

  Mara sat up. It was Paul’s theory, and, journalistic hyperbole or not, she liked hearing it broadcast for general consumption. Let the Sigoulane Beast or whatever it was take the blame.

  The reporter went on, conveniently blurring the line between animal attacks and murder: “This death represents the latest in a string of macabre and terrifying incidents that have rocked not only the region, but all of France.” She noted that Colline Basse, Les Ronces, and the other places where the animal had been active were clustered near the heavily forested north end of the valley. However, Tirac, where Jean-Claude Fournier’s house was situated, was some seventeen kilometers away to the east. Was the thing shifting its area of operation? The Sigoulane Forest was linked to other forests of the region by wooded corridors through which a predator could easily move. Residents in surrounding areas were warned to take precautions. The reporter also pointed out, with ominous overtones, that the Colline Basse and Les Ronces attacks had occurred at or around the full moon.

  She wrapped up: “Here in the valley, where werewolves have a certain track record, people are talking openly about the return of the Sigoulane Beast, a legendary werewolf that terrorized the area during the 1700s and 1800s. Gendarmes are urging calm, but that’s unlikely to happen until they trap the thing responsible and, more important, find out what really happened to Jean-Claude Fournier.”

  Mara laughed bitterly.

  The pendule struck eleven. Its harsh chime, reverberating unpleasantly through the house, jarred her nerves. Mara made the decision then and there to sell the clock off as quickly as possible, even at a loss. She pulled off her glasses and leaned back in her chair. Jazz had long ago retired for the night. Around her, spread across her dining-room table, were books from which she had gleaned the basic facts about her subject.

  In the course of three years between 1764 and 1767, 230 Beast attacks were recorded in Le Gévaudan, of which 121 were fatal. The majority of the victims were women and children, whom the Beast in some cases stripped of their clothing. In one instance, with a kind of horrific coquetry, the Beast left a woman propped up against a tree, her hat placed jauntily on her head. The Beast partially ate many of the bodies, often selecting the internal organs. It also seemed to delight in mutilating its victims. Some were decapitated, their heads deposited at a distance from the bodies. The Beast seemed invulnerable to guns, spears, pitchforks, and all other kinds of weapons. Some witnesses claimed it wore protective armor. Others remarked on the uncanny intelligence with which it managed to elude every trap set for it, spurning poisoned bait and avoiding the parties of beaters and hunters who tried to flush it out. Finally, it appeared to be able to cover great distances with supernatural speed.

  All of the books sought to unravel the true nature of the Beast, which to this day remained a mystery. Eyewitness reports (the murderous career of the Beast was documented in parish records and written statements) described it as an animal resembling a huge wolf or dog, reddish with black markings. This did not prevent subsequent theorists from suggesting that it was a scourge of God; a pack of wolves (a notion supported by the fact that the attacks occurred over roughly 150 square kilometers of mountainous, forested terrain, a big area for a lone animal to cover); a giant wolverine; a hyena escaped from a menagerie; or one or several madmen dressed in wolf skins. Related to this, Mara had also found frequent reference to a deeply rooted popular belief that the Beast was a werewolf, an idea that drew strength from contemporary accounts of a wild-looking, hairy stranger seen in places where attacks had subsequently occurred.

  A smaller group of writers espoused the idea that the Beast was a canid of some sort that had been trained to kill by a sadistic human owner. She considered this theory seriously, turning over its possibilities. Several sources inculpated members of the feared Chastel fami
ly, working together or alone, perhaps with the complicity of the decadent Count de Morangiès, with whom the Chastels were associated. Well, they were off the hook, Mara concluded, if what Jean-Claude had said about Xavier de Bonfond was true.

  In fact, it was Jean Chastel who dispatched the Beast with a silver bullet on 19 June 1767. It had to be remembered, however, that the Beast had also purportedly been killed by the King’s gun-bearer, Antoine de Beauterne, twenty-one months previously. Was the animal that Jean Chastel shot really the Beast? All that Mara could determine with any certainty was that the attacks had ceased after that date.

  And had begun five years later over three hundred kilometers away, in the Sigoulane Valley. Initially, livestock had been the main targets. Wolves might have accounted for all of the depredations, but for the fact that frightened shepherds and farmers claimed that the thing, a large wolflike creature, rose up monstrously on two legs when confronted. Soon people were in no doubt that a werewolf was at work. Attacks on humans began in 1775, although at a much less murderous rate than in Le Gévaudan: four children and two women over the next two decades. The attacks ceased in 1810. Peace returned to the valley for forty-nine years.

  Then, in the fall of 1859, the terror recommenced. Three children disappeared, believed to have been taken by the Beast. Their bodies were never recovered. Then a fourteen-year-old boy was found with his throat ripped out. An old washerwoman known as la Claudine was killed on the road between Buffevent and L’Espeyre, with her throat so savagely bitten that her head was nearly severed from her body. Then, three weeks before Christmas 1871, the naked body of a seven-year-old girl was discovered in the woods below Aurillac Manor. Her throat, too, had been torn open. The main difference between the new attacks and the earlier ones was that no definitive sightings of a wolflike animal were reported. The thing had struck, leaving no witnesses and no trace of its presence.

  All of this Mara had read in a thin monograph recounting the career of the Sigoulane Beast. The work, based on parish records and published in 1995, had been written by Jean-Claude Fournier. Was a single creature of supernatural longevity responsible? Or had the Sigoulane Valley been plagued by two separate Beasts? The author had favored the latter idea. He had not, at that point, made the connection with the de Bonfonds.

  The phone rang. Mara, pulled out of her thoughts, checked her watch. At this time of night, it was surely not Patsy, who was aware of the six-hour lag between France and New York.

  “Hello?”

  There was a live presence at the other end of the line, that much she knew, but no response.

  “Patsy, is that you? Julian?” The sudden, steady note of the dial tone sounded in her ear. Mara replaced the receiver, feeling disappointed and annoyed. She had been the target of either a prank or a wrong number. Obscene callers usually breathed heavily or said lewd things.

  She was exhausted. She went into the bedroom and sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. Jazz, stretched lengthwise across it, squinted up at her against the glare of the overhead light. She fondled his big head. He dropped it heavily into her lap.

  “I need sleep,” she muttered as she pushed him over to one side. “No snoring. No farting. No barfing in the night. Got that?” She kicked away her shoes, pulled off her T-shirt and unbuckled her belt, an expensive item with a heavy ceramic buckle that she’d bought in a trendy boutique just the week before. It dropped with a thud to the floor. She looked at it stupidly.

  “My god,” she whispered as the realization hit her brain. “The wolf belt.”

  What wolf belt?” Julian mumbled. She had jerked him out of a deep sleep, and he was struggling to surface. It was a bit like swimming through golden syrup.

  She went on talking rapidly in his ear. “Jean-Claude showed it to me and then rolled it up and put it on the trolley. But when I went back, it wasn’t there.”

  “Hmm. Maybe you just didn’t see it. I mean, you said the terrace was a mess. It would have been easy to miss.” Not that long ago, she had ordered him from her house for doubting her. He wondered if he was putting his foot in it again. However, she seemed to have forgotten all about it.

  “Not something like that. It really gave me the creeps. Don’t you see, Julian, he must have put it away. He was very careful with it. He said it wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to leave lying around. Compagnon didn’t believe me about my cell phone. Well, he’ll have to listen to me about the belt. If the police find it in the house, it will prove Jean-Claude was still alive after I left him!”

  25

  WEDNESDAY MORNING, 12 MAY

  Adjudant Compagnon had just returned to brigade headquarters from a meeting called by the company commander. Other heads of brigade from neighboring cantons, an agent from the Ministry of Ecology, and someone from the departmental prefect’s office had also been present. Another sighting of the feral dog or wolf or whatever it was had been reported the previous evening, near Rezac. Several brigades would assist in yet another battue of the woods between Rezac and Sigoulane. Laurent Naudet intercepted his superior as he entered the building.

  “Just took a call from Madame Dunn, mon adjudant. She wanted to know if we’d found some kind of belt made out of animal skin at the Fournier house. She called it a wolf belt.” Laurent explained with slight embarrassment, “It’s supposed to turn the wearer into a werewolf.”

  Compagnon snorted and kept walking. Laurent followed him into his office.

  “She said Fournier brought it out onto the terrace to show it to her on Sunday night. Apparently he was very interested in werewolves. She said she remembers him rolling it up and putting it on the drinks trolley, but she didn’t see it anywhere on the terrace when she returned for her phone. She thinks this proves Fournier was alive after she left him because he must have taken it back inside the house. I went through the procès-verbal, sir. I found no mention of a belt of that description anywhere on the premises.”

  Compagnon pulled off his képi and tossed it on the desk. His carroty hair stood up on end. “That’s because she’s lying, Naudet. She’s a complicated liar, that one. Tried the same thing with her cell phone, if you recall. And the row the neighbor said he overheard. She says there was no fight, but I sense she slices the truth very fine. Well”—Compagnon unbuttoned his jacket and gave his trousers a hitch—“let her have her head. She’ll try one fancy trick too many. We’ll have her in the end.”

  The phone rang. Compagnon scooped up the receiver with a big paw and moved behind his desk to sit down. “Oui?” He was silent for a moment, a thundercloud gathering on his face. “Say that again?” he demanded. While he listened, his nostrils flared dangerously. Then, “You’re sure? Of course it does,” he barked. “Okay, okay. Just keep me informed.” He dropped the receiver into its cradle.

  “That was Lamartine,” he told the sergeant grimly. “He says the fall broke Fournier’s neck all right, but that’s not what killed him. He didn’t spot it right away because the destruction of tissue and bone by whatever ate him was so massive. But something about the way the hyoid was fractured led him to examine the eyes more closely. He found petechiae in the conjunctiva. He thinks Fournier was strangled. Fournier’s throat was destroyed, but he found marks on the back of the neck that suggest a straplike object. Madame Dunn could still have done the pushing, but either she or someone else climbed down there afterward and finished the poor bougre off.”

  Naudet took a deep breath. “The wolf belt, sir. Maybe that’s what was used to strangle him.”

  The orange eyebrows leaped. “Get that Dunn woman down here, Naudet,” Compagnon bellowed. “I want a statement and an exact description of that belt. Then you and Batailler go back to Fournier’s place. Look for it. Search his closets and drawers. It might have been left in among his clothing, where it wouldn’t be noticed. Comb the ravine and the area around the house. And talk to the neighbors again. I want a full report on anything that moved in the area Sunday night. Someone’s bound to have seen something. We need to make
progress with this case. I’m getting rumblings from above, and I want the powers that be to know we have things firmly in hand.”

  26

  WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, 12 MAY

  I’m off now,” said Thérèse. “Stéphanie is driving me.” The housekeeper stood in the doorway leading from the library into the adjacent grand salon. She carried her coat over one arm, a canvas valise in the other hand. She was going to her sister’s in Gourdon. She had heard the Wailing Ghost again the night before and refused to stay on any longer alone in the house.

  Mara looked up from the library table where she was working her way through the de Bonfond archives. She was doing it methodically. First the family papers. Then Cécile’s diary.

  “Thérèse, are you sure you don’t know where Christophe is?” Earlier she had spent an hour giving Laurent Naudet a description of the wolf belt and its history, and the rest of the morning convincing a twitchy juge d’instruction that she would hardly be likely to raise the matter of the belt if she had used it as a murder weapon. Christophe’s whereabouts was an increasingly pressing concern for her. The examining magistrate did not believe that she had gone to see Jean-Claude solely on de Bonfond business. He thought they had been lovers.

  “I already told you. And I told the police. He never says where he goes, and it’s not my place to ask.”

  “But he’s disappeared before?”

  “When he’s in one of his moods.”

  “Well, did he do it in April, around the fifth of the month?”

  “I don’t keep track of him. I have my work to do.”

  “Yes, but this is important, Thérèse. Please try to remember.”

  “Why do you want to know?”