The Third Girl (Molly Sutton Mysteries Book 1)

by Nell Goddin

  Molly bought her sausages and headed home without making a detour to Pâtisserie Bujold. Her head was pounding and she felt like she needed to lie down. Manette’s words were disturbing. Had she really left the high crime of her native country only to find herself in the middle of a village crime wave, complete with abduction and murder? She really believed she had not.

  But she knew even as she was putting some effort into hoping, that hope, in circumstances like this, did not count for much.

  * * *

  Benjamin Dufort left the tiny office on a backstreet of the herbalist he frequented, a new blue glass bottle of a stress-relieving tincture in his pocket. He made his way through the market, chatting with old friends and neighbors, always with an ear out for the thing out of place, the chance bit of information that would help him with his new case. So far, not a single bit had crossed his path, or at least, he had not recognized it as such. It was always possible that he had come across it but did not grasp what it was, no matter how attentive he was trying to be.

  He was headed to L’Institut Degas again, hoping to catch one of Amy’s teachers for an informal interview. A chat, nothing more, just for background—that’s what he would say to Professor Gallimard, who was not on the list of suspects, which unfortunately at this juncture, was entirely blank. By all accounts he was a serious man who was entirely wrapped up in his art and his teaching, and Dufort had not heard a single word to suggest there was anything untoward in his relationship with Amy Bennett. A serious, dedicated student and a serious, talented teacher—that can make quite a profitable pairing, thought Dufort, and he hoped that Gallimard was going to have something helpful to say, though he did not try to guess what it might be.

  In the meantime, Dufort enjoyed the beautiful Saturday morning. The weather was absolute perfection, clear and sunny but not hot, with occasional cumulus clouds puffing by with a light breeze. He smelled a strong scent of lavender and saw that he was passing a vendor from Provence who had sacks of the flowers open, with small signs stuck in each sack giving the price. Farther along he saw Rémy, an organic farmer, who had a mountain of beautiful tomatoes for sale. They kissed cheeks, one peck to each side, friends since childhood.

  “Mon Dieu, Rémy! How many varieties are you growing now?”

  “Bonjour Benjamin! I’ve lost count. They are all heirloom, bien sûr, you should see my seed saving files! It’s complicated keeping track of it all and takes up a lot of time, but when I come to market with a haul like this, it’s worth it. Come on, even a crusty old bachelor like yourself needs some tomatoes on your kitchen counter—look, try one.” Rémy took a serrated knife and sliced through a round yellow tomato with green stripes, then held out a slice.

  Dufort shook his head but took the slice and ate it. Quickly he nodded and said, “All right, I won’t argue! Give me a few kilos, something I can finish up in a few day’s time.”

  Rémy smiled and started putting tomatoes on his scale. Dufort turned and surveyed the market, watching.

  “So what’s the story with the missing girl?” asked Rémy.

  “Nothing’s secret here, is it?”

  “Of course not. Everyone’s talking about it, got their pet theories, you know how it is.”

  Dufort absently reached for another slice of the yellow tomato and ate it. “I have nothing to tell you. Not holding anything back for official reasons—I’m saying I have nothing. No idea where she is, whether she’s been abducted or went somewhere on her own by choice. Nothing.”

  Rémy put his hands on his hips and looked at his old friend. He wished Benjamin had something in his life besides work, but somehow now, in his mid-thirties, that is what Benjamin had. Work, and working out. Rémy shook his head.

  “And I have to ask…” Rémy lowered his voice and leaned close to his friend, “…do you think there is any connection…with the others?”

  Dufort’s face looked stony. “I don’t know,” he said simply. The men made eye contact then, all their emotion in the looks they gave each other.

  “So, good to see you as always,” said Dufort, feeling his anxiety ramp up. “I should be off, got much to do as you might guess.”

  Rémy nodded. “Here,” he said, holding out the bag of tomatoes. “But be gentle with them, they don’t like being knocked about.”

  Dufort dug in his pocket for some money but Rémy waved him off. “Just take them,” he said. “And invite me over for an apéro someday, huh?” He grinned and looked behind Dufort at a woman waiting her turn.

  Dufort moved out of the way and walked out of the Place, down the road that led to L’Institut. He was thinking about questions he could ask Gallimard, wondering what unexpected route he could take with the conversation that might produce something helpful, and on the outskirts of his thoughts was Valérie Boutillier and the tiny handful of details he had gathered on her case. She too had no apparent reason for disappearing—in fact, she had been celebrating her acceptance to a prestigious university program the night before she went missing.

  As he walked, he took a tomato out of the paper bag and bit into it absently, but the flavor was so intense he stopped in his tracks, giving it his full attention, making sure not to drip juice all over his shirt, amused at how horrified his mother would be to see him eating by the side of the road like a barbarian.

  9

  Sunday mornings in Castillac were quiet. The Romanesque church on the Place had a trickle of visitors because it was something of an architectural oddity, but the congregation attending weekly services shrank nearly every year as the elderly members passed away. What the village did on Sunday mornings was spend time with family, prepare the big Sunday meal, go to Pâtisserie Bujold or its competitors for pastries, and laze around in slippers reading the paper or perhaps a new detective novel. The more ambitious might putter in the garden.

  It was a day for family, for relaxation, and food.

  For Gilles Maron, Sundays were a boring nuisance. He was from the north of France, near Lille, and he was glad to have that much distance between him and his family because they were a poisonous pack of hyenas and it was much better that way. He appreciated food of course, but had found that ambitious cooking for one person was more depressing than satisfying, and he had developed a hatred for leftovers after living alone for eight years.

  After breakfast, Maron strolled over to Degas, figuring that students far from home did not have Sunday plans either, or at least if they did, the plans would not involve family obligations that would be difficult to extricate from. He wanted to talk to Maribeth Donnelly, the roommate who had called in to report Amy missing.

  There was only one dormitory and he found that easily enough, but saw no directory or anything that would tell him which room was hers. The main door was locked. Maron wandered around campus for some minutes, wondering how tight a rein Dufort expected him to be on. Could he investigate on his own, without direct instructions? Would his boss be pleased if he came in with some evidence, or annoyed that he had acted on his own?

  Maron had been in Castillac for over a year, but they hadn’t had a real case yet, nothing but a few domestics and a stolen wheelbarrow, if you didn’t count drunk driving and parking violations. Parking violations! He certainly had expected to be much farther along in his career by now, not writing stupid parking tickets. Of course he had heard about the other disappearances, but they were way before his time.

  When he came back to the front of the dorm, he saw a young man ahead of him on the path. When the student swiped his ID to unlock the door, Maron was right behind him, and slipped inside the door so quietly the student heard nothing. He trotted up the stairs and out of sight. There were two hallways going off the foyer on the ground floor, and Maron opened the door to the left and walked as silently as possible, looking for some way to identify Amy and Maribeth’s room, and hopefully find Maribeth there. Some of the students had stuck whiteboards on the outside of their doors—odd in this era of texting, thought Maron, but most had drawi
ngs on them instead of messages, which made sense since it was an art school dorm, after all.

  He heard some young women talking, and went towards the sound, cocking his ear. When he got to their room he held his breath and listened, and when their voices were still a little too indistinct, he furtively pressed his ear up against the door.

  “I don’t know, I just…don’t think so.”

  “I’m telling you, he’s interested! Why do you think he comes to our room all the time?”

  “He just wants my class notes.”

  “Your notes are really good.” Pause. “Listen, I know he flirts with me, but I’m telling you, he’s only doing it to try to rile you up. It’s about you, not me!”

  “Oh, shut up!” The women laughed.

  Maron lifted his head from the door and kept going down the hallway. He considered knocking, showing his badge, and asking where Maribeth’s room was, but he wanted to find a less direct way, something less noticeable. At the far end of the hall was a set of stairs, and Maron went up two at a time, and then started down the hallway on the second floor, straining to hear voices, footsteps, clues.

  Just as he crept past a door, a student came out and nearly knocked into him.

  “Pardon,” said Maron. “Could you tell me the room of Maribeth Donnelly?” He had his hand on his badge but hoped he wouldn’t have to use it.

  “Third floor. 314, I think,” said the young man, and hurried down the hallway and clattered down the stairs.

  Maron smiled and followed him to the stairs and went up to the third floor. The hallway was quiet. He heard no talking, no movement. Security was obviously inadequate—he had gotten into the building with barely any effort. The students kept their doors shut, but Maron was willing to bet, mostly unlocked. At least on Sunday morning, there was no activity in the halls, no groups of students socializing that would be a deterrent to anyone who didn’t belong there.

  If a person wanted to, he could treat these hallways as hunting grounds. Students were easy marks—young and distractible, often gullible, still confident in their immortality. And beautiful, too. Often very beautiful indeed.

  He found 314 and put his ear to the door first. He thought he heard something, not talking but movement, possibly the sound of a book dropping to a table. He knocked firmly.

  A young woman opened the door a crack. “Yes?” she said.

  “Bonjour Mademoiselle, I am Gilles Maron of the gendarmerie. I am sorry to bother you. Are you by any chance Maribeth Donnelly?”

  She opened the door. “Yes, I am,” she said. Maron noticed that her French accent was quite good. She was wearing sweat pants—so American!—and a hoodie, and flip-flops. Closing the door behind her, she stepped into the hallway. “Are you here about Amy?”

  “Yes,” said Maron, wishing she had invited him into the room. “You haven’t heard from her by any chance?”

  Maribeth shook her head.

  “Then I wonder if you might have a photograph of her you could give me. If we’re going to search, we need to know what she looks like.”

  He smiled, but Maribeth did not smile back. She thought there was something cold about this gendarme, and wished that the pleasant woman she had spoken to when she called had been the one to pay her a visit.

  “Sorry, I’m afraid not. I have tons of snaps on my phone, but no hard copies of anything.”

  “Snaps on your phone will work,” said Maron. “Of course I am not suggesting I take your phone from you,” he added, seeing her expression of horror. “Perhaps you could come to the station with me, and we can make some prints there?” He knew this was unnecessary, but thought he could get her talking on the walk back into the village.

  “Yes. I’ll do anything to help,” said Maribeth, seeming suddenly to remember that her roommate was missing, and feel the force of her anxiety about it. Over the last days Maribeth had found that if she didn’t put the whole thing aside at times, she went absolutely insane. And then once she remembered and realized she had been going about her business and blocking it out, she was wracked with guilt.

  “Could I email them to you? I can do it right away?”

  “Of course.”

  Maron dug in his pocket for his card, and handed it over. “My address is right there. Thank you very much for your help, Mademoiselle Donnelly. While I am here, may I ask—what is your opinion of the situation? Do you think your friend might have gone off for some reason—a boyfriend, or perhaps something to do with her art?—and simply forgotten to let anyone know?”

  Maribeth jammed her fists into the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie. “Zero chance of that. Amy’s not a flake. I mean, at all. She’s a fantastic painter, super talented, but she doesn’t go in for all that bull about artists being wild and crazy and practically mentally ill. Amy’s like, you know, serious about stuff.”

  “And…I’m sorry to bring this up, but no inkling that she may have committed suicide? Anything like that?”

  “God no. She’d just won the Marfan Prize, she was on top of the world!”

  “Marfan?”

  “It’s a prize given every year to a very promising art student. People who’ve won it tend to go on to successful careers. Plus she was going to get some cash.”

  “Any idea how much?”

  “Nope, sorry. Don’t think it was huge. Just that anything is huge to students, you know?”

  Maron nodded and tried to smile amiably. “And her things—is her handbag still here? Wallet and so forth?”

  “She always carried a backpack with her, a pretty large one. Art supplies and junk food,” said Maribeth with a thin laugh. “That’s not in the room, or her phone either.”

  Maron hesitated to continue the interview since he was conducting it without Dufort’s knowledge. He could call for permission, but for reasons he didn’t identify, he wanted to keep this meeting to himself. “All right, that is helpful, Mademoiselle. And the photographs will be as well. Thank you and have a pleasant Sunday.”

  Maribeth nodded to Maron and then watched him go down the hallway and through the doors at the end. He was a handsome enough man, tall and fit, with a face almost chiseled enough for a model. Yet she did not find him attractive. Quite the opposite in fact.

  * * *

  Maron was not the only junior officer working on Sunday, or at least trying to. Thérèse Perrault had spent the morning with her family: parents, both sets of grandparents, her older sister with her husband and two children, and an uncle who was “strange” and had been coming for lunch every Sunday as far back as Thérèse could remember. For her, Sunday lunch was a pleasant part of her week. She looked forward to whatever delicious things her mother and grandmother produced from the kitchen, she enjoyed joking around with her father, and she even tolerated her older sister.

  The only less appealing part of it was that the older she got, the more hints got dropped about how her career as a gendarme was getting in the way of having her own family. She was tired of deflecting the comments. It wasn’t that Thérèse had any objection to husbands and children, she just wasn’t interested yet. She was only twenty-four, after all, not exactly a wizened old crone.

  And this Sunday she was jumpy and a little impatient, wanting lunch to be over with so she could go to the station, do a bit of research and think in peace, and then later on, when the Place got lively, she planned to go mingle and see what she could find out. Someone had to have seen something or heard something, if Amy Bennett hadn’t gone off on her own. Thérèse just needed to talk to the right person. Or persons.

  Amy could have just gone off on her own, that’s still possible until proven otherwise, Thérèse reminded herself. She stood by the old cast iron stove in her mother’s kitchen where she used to play all winter when she was little, and peeked in a copper saucepan at sliced carrots bubbling away in a butter sauce.

  “Love these, Maman,” she said brightly.

  “You’re not fooling me,” her mother said. “You want to get back to the office, don’
t you? You’d skip lunch right now if we let you.” She wiped her hands on her apron and picked up a chef’s knife and started cutting radishes into paper-thin coins.

  “First of all, it’s a station, Maman, not an office. And plus, yes, finally I have something to do that’s important, and it’s not like my kind of work can just be put off until I get around to it. It’s time-sensitive. You understand.”

  “I do understand,” said her mother, turning and looking into her daughter’s face. “And I am glad for this girl that she has you looking for her.”

  The two women didn’t speak for awhile after that, both of them thinking about Valérie, Elizabeth, and now Amy, and grappling with their desire to be optimistic as well as their fear. The kitchen was warm and smelled of butter and roasting duck. “Wash the lettuce, will you?” said her mother.

  “Oui, Maman,” said Thérèse, wondering where her grandmother was since she was so fussy about lettuce she usually did the washing herself.

  After arranging the washed and dried leaves in the salad bowl, she stepped through the kitchen door to the outside, where her niece and nephew were playing a game that involved a home base made of a broken plate, various super powers, and brandished sticks.

  “Don’t hurt me!” laughed Thérèse as she went by. The children charged at her and threatened to poke her, shouting a gibberish of incantations. “I surrender!” she said, holding up her hands.

  The children shrieked and ran around the side of the house, crashing into their father, Frédéric, which brought on louder shrieking and more waving of sticks and shouting of spells.

  Frédéric walked over to where Thérèse was pretending to look at the garden but actually thinking over the scant details of the Bennett case.