by Nell Goddin
“Bonjour, how are you, Thérèse?” They kissed cheeks.
“Not bad, Fred. I’m just—I’m anxious to get back to work. We finally have something to do, I mean something real.”
Fred nodded. “You’re happy in your work?”
She beamed. “Very much. I mean, I don’t want to sound glad that someone is possibly in trouble or hurt, I know that sounds awful. But I admit, a missing persons investigation is a whole lot more interesting than giving tickets for speeding, you know? It feels like what I’m doing counts for something.”
“I understand,” said Fred. He turned to watch his children zoom by and disappear around the other side of the house. “Is it all right for me to ask what you are doing to find her? I mean, I’ve been trying to imagine what needs to be done, and it seems overwhelming. Even if, say, someone murdered the girl here in Castillac—there are empty buildings galore, and then there’s all that countryside. Impossible to look everywhere, no?”
“It is daunting,” answered Thérèse. “That’s why we put so much effort into looking for information, for clues, so a search can be targeted, instead of just randomly attempting to cover a wide area. We’re all conditioned from watching cop shows, but of course television makes it look easy since everything has to be wrapped up in an hour. In real life, as I’m sure you’d guess, the work is much more time-consuming and painstaking.”
“I’m a little surprised you have taken to it so,” he said. “In school, I remember….”
“I know, I was a terrible student,” said Thérèse laughing. “And those office jobs I got after graduating—I was just as bad. I guess I’m one of those people who just has to find the exact right thing.”
Then they stood listening to the children yell, and waiting for Maman to call them in to eat, both of them wondering about Amy Bennett and where in the world she might be.
10
It was nearly dusk on Sunday evening, and at long last Molly could proclaim freedom from the wretched hangover that had kept her in sunglasses and popping aspirin all weekend. She was feeling so much better that she thought she would venture out for a walk. Sadly, Pâtisserie Bujold would be closed, so perhaps she would go in the other direction, out of town, to see how things looked out that way and feel gratitude for not dying a death of two Negronis.
Rue des Chênes was quiet, and before long the houses were quite far apart and she was in the countryside. She strolled along, wishing she had a dog for company, and checked out the houses and then farms along the way, trying to be sneaky about her staring, but it seemed everyone was inside, gathering themselves for the week to come. She remembered how unpleasant Sunday evenings had been when she was working in an office—how hard it had been not to feel consumed with regret at the weekend’s being over, and the prospect of the week ahead, not even begun, seeming to stretch to infinity.
Molly had not been happy in her work as a fundraiser. She had gotten the job because she was chatty and sociable and generally good with people, but as it turned out that did not include being good at asking people for money. She much preferred sharing gossip and laughing at their jokes. When the moment arrived for her to ask for a check—and she recognized the moment all right, her sense of timing was just fine—she would start to mumble and the change the subject. Running a gîte business was turning out to be infinitely more suited to her, though she acknowledged she could hardly make an informed judgment yet, after barely a week.
The road was curving and a forest had sprung up on either side with no houses in sight, but instead banks of ferns with a tinge of autumn yellow, darkening as the sun dropped with no sunset color in the sky. It was so quiet she could hear nothing but choruses of birds. I should really get a CD of birdcalls so I can learn which birds I’m hearing, she thought, knowing full well she would do no such thing.
She heard footsteps, someone running. Suddenly her heart seized up and she thought of the missing girl. Fear coursed through her body and her veins felt like ice. She stopped walking, frozen, unable to decide whether to turn and run or jump into the ferns and hide.
She flapped her hands out at her sides and tried to pull herself together. If anything had happened to the girl, and no one even knew that it had, then whoever went after a college girl was unlikely to be coming after her, practically forty years old whose husband had unceremoniously left her after hooking up with a barista at Starbucks. And then she closed her eyes tight and opened them again, realizing how utterly nonsensical that thought was.
The footsteps got louder. They came from in front of her, just around the next bend. Molly arranged her face to seem more in command of her emotional state than she felt, and strode forward pretending to be confident. Around the curve, a man appeared, jogging easily. He was powerfully built—of medium height with broad shoulders and muscular arms and legs. His hair was not cut in the current fashion but in a brush cut, very short. He was sweaty, and Molly noticed, in spite of her qualms, that he was rather handsome.
Yet as he got closer—he sped up, she was sure he was moving faster now—she felt another stab of fear, simply because there was not much daylight left, and she was a woman out on the road alone.
Alone except for a strange man who could run fast and who was heading straight for her.
When he reached her, he stopped. “Bonjour!” he said, making a slight bow. “You are Madame Sutton, of La Baraque? I am Benjamin Dufort, of the gendarmerie. I am pleased to make your acquaintance.” He nodded and smiled.
The tension in Molly’s legs relaxed so quickly she nearly fell over.
“Enchantée,” she said, her voice sounding a little funny. She figured she didn’t need to mention that he had just transformed from being an axe-murdering rapist to a cop in a split second.
He was a cop, right? This wasn’t just a line to make her drop her guard?
Hold on a minute. I’m in Castillac, she reminded herself, not some sketchy neighborhood back home where the murder rate is through the roof. I shouldn’t be expecting to see sex offender cop imposters around every bend in the road.
She realized the man had been talking to her while her brain tried to get the situation sorted.
“Pardonnez-moi,” she said. “My French is not good and I lose concentration easy.” She tried to have a friendly expression on her face and hoped it would make up for her deficits in language. He was very handsome. There was something deep about this man, she could feel it.
Although she should have learned by now not to trust her feelings when it came to handsome men, she told herself in something of a shriek inside her head.
“A pleasure to meet you. Welcome to Castillac. I’m going to continue my run,” Dufort said. And with a smile and a sort of salute, he took off.
Molly stood for a long moment and watched him go. She smiled to herself, shook her head, and started back home, deciding that maybe she had recovered enough that she could risk drinking a kir while she was making dinner.
* * *
“In London, we wouldn’t have this problem,” said Dufort, slamming his hand down on his desk.
Perrault’s eyes widened.
“They have CCTV everywhere, I mean everywhere. You don’t sneeze without its being recorded. Sure, people protest about the loss of privacy. I say—yes, let’s take away the privacy of the cretins who commit violent crimes. Let’s get their asses on videotape so we can lock them away where they can’t hurt anyone else.”
Maron looked impassive, his lips pressed together.
“I’m right with you, sir,” said Perrault. “At the least it might give somebody pause, make them think they might get caught before they act.”
“I don’t think the people who commit this kind of crime worry about getting caught,” said Dufort. “The person who takes these actions—he thinks he’s above everyone else, the normal rules don’t apply. He can use other people however he likes, because they’re not even real to him, you see what I’m saying? Other people are nothing more than props—necessary perhaps,
for his drama—but props all the same. Replaceable. Disposable.
“Right now, he is consumed with thinking about the next time, and enjoying memories of the other times. He is not bothering about getting caught, even a little.”
“So—definitely a man? And…do you think the disappearances are connected, even being so far apart?”
Dufort took a long breath in and out, and looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know anything,” he said carefully. “I’m talking about likelihood, and I’m talking intuition. Could be female, but you know the stats, it’s highly unlikely, nearly impossible. Should we keep a door open in our minds in case this turns out to be very unusual? Of course. And the intuition part…yes, I’ll tell you and Maron, no one else, that I’m working under the assumption that whoever took Amy also took Valérie and Elizabeth. Unproven, of course. Nothing linking the cases except for our village.”
“Then it is someone who lives here, one of our neighbors.”
“I believe so. Yes.”
A long pause while they all considered this. “Maron? You have any thoughts?” Maron was young, it was true, but Dufort thought he had a decent head on his shoulders. There was something bitter and disconnected about the young man, and Dufort made extra effort to show that he wanted to hear his opinions.
“The video. How many do we have?” asked Maron.
“Three. Well, two plus some that are of limited use, as I’ll explain. That’s it. Chez Papa put a camera in after the break-in last year that turned out to be some tourist’s kids, teenagers looking for alcohol. The Presse has one because Michel verges on paranoid about everything. And Crédit Agricole and the other banks have cameras on their street-side ATMs, but I’m afraid the angle of vision is quite limited since they’re aimed directly down on users of the ATMs. At best, you can see the bottom third of people going past on the sidewalk, no more. I don’t expect them to be very helpful.”
“How soon are they getting the videos here?” asked Perrault.
“They’re sending them digitally right away,” said Dufort, making it clear with his annoyed expression that ‘right away’ was not nearly soon enough. “I will be open with you,” he said after a pause. “I have a bad feeling about this situation. Something turned overnight, I don’t know how to explain it, but—I had the bad feeling before, but when I woke this morning, it was closer to a certainty.” He pressed both palms on his desk and dropped his head. Maron and Perrault heard him inhaling deeply through his nose.
Perrault nodded her agreement. Maron narrowed his eyes as though the talk of feelings did not sit well with him.
Dufort lifted his head and said, “We are going to treat this as an active investigation. No more pussyfooting around because of a law that should never have been changed. That young woman needs us. Her family needs us. So we are going to find Amy Bennett, and find out what happened to her.” He clicked his mouse and a large photo opened on the screen.
Amy Bennett was smiling, eyes into the camera. It was an interior shot, a close-up. Several paintings on the wall behind her were out of focus. Amy had chestnut hair, shoulder-length and wavy. Freckles across her nose. Green eyes, wide apart. Dufort studied her face for any distinguishing characteristics, and at first he saw none. She was not beautiful, but she was appealing, and attractive in the way that smiling young people were.
“Good work, Maron, getting these photographs from the roommate. Both of you, study the series. She gave us fifteen, look closely at all of them until you know her like she’s your sister. I’ll be back in a moment.”
Maron and Perrault moved to see the monitor, and Dufort quickly left his office and went outside. He tilted his face up to the sun and tried to take control of his breathing, feeling on the edge of hyperventilating. Seeing Amy on his monitor like that, smiling and happy—and then allowing what came next, the certainty that the girl was dead—all of it was making his anxiety ramp up faster than he could manage it.
Dufort looked both ways and saw that he was alone on the street save for an old woman pulling a shopping cart behind her. He stepped into the alley as though he had important business there, and pulled a blue glass vial from his pocket. He shook several drops under his tongue and counted to ten, looked up at the sun once more, and then headed back inside.
As he entered his office, the monitor gave a honk. “There’s the video,” he said. “We’ll watch, and we’ll keep watching, until we see something. You know who you’re looking for now.”
He tapped his keyboard a few times and the first video began to play. They were looking at the sidewalk, a blurry gray.
“This is one from a bank, I think it’s the BNP.”
Some legs went by, the trousers a bit too short, the shoes with run-over heels. No one spoke. Next they saw a flurry of legs, but they could not recognize anyone they knew, nor have any idea whether the legs belonged to strangers or old friends. The images were too fuzzy and people were not walking close enough to the camera.
The phone rang in the outer room.
“Maron, get that, will you?”
Maron took one more moment to watch the bank video, and then went to answer the phone. Dufort and Perrault could not hear his words, but they could guess from his tone that the call was something routine.
“How are we going to find her?” said Thérèse. “She looks…she looks like a million other girls. I don’t see any way to describe her to make her stand out, am I missing something?”
“Almost makes you wish for an ugly tattoo on her forehead,” said Dufort.
Thérèse smiled to herself but said nothing. She had a snake on her right butt cheek, the result of a wild weekend at the beach when she was nineteen. She rather liked having something private about herself like that, something that hardly anyone knew about.
“Let’s look at the others,” Dufort said, clicking the mouse. “Look at her body type, think about how someone who looks like her might walk, run—you’re trying to get her physical reality into your mind, do you understand?”
“Yes sir,” said Thérèse. Amy was slender, and looked to be of medium height. Pretty enough, but so ordinary. It seemed impossible to find anything to separate her from the crowd of other women her age.
“That was Madame Vargas on the phone. Her husband has disappeared again.”
Dufort blinked and looked away from Amy Bennett. “Ah. Hopefully we will find him in the usual place and set him back home. Maron, see to it, if you would.”
Maron did not look pleased but he nodded and left without a word. Thérèse and Dufort spent another hour looking at the photographs Maribeth Donnelly had provided. They tried to make Amy Bennett come alive in their minds, tried to imagine the sound of her voice, what she liked and what she didn’t, what made her Amy Bennett and no one else. They did not get very far with this exercise, but the investigation had only just begun, and they very much hoped there might be a break when they got through the rest of the video.
11
Perrault and Dufort watched the rest of the bank videos and the Presse video, but were still waiting to receive the one from Chez Papa. The rest of the day had been almost entirely taken up with the usual bureaucratic nonsense, apart from a few hours in the afternoon when all three gendarmes had taken to the streets and searched for Amy, by foot and by motorcycle. Now at least they had photographs they could show around, and a better idea of who they were looking for, even if they had yet to find a way to describe her in a way that would lead to someone saying, oh yes, I saw that girl!
At the end of the day, Thérèse stopped by Chez Papa to ask what was holding up the video transfer, and to have a kir after a long and frustrating day.
“Bonsoir, Alphonse!” she said grinning.
“And what have you been up to today, ma chérie?” he asked, ruffling her hair as though she were six.
“You’ve heard about the missing girl?”
“Oh yes. I had Nico send the video, you got it this morning?”
“No, actually, we didn’t.�
�� Thérèse worked to keep her naturally expressive face impassive. It wouldn’t do to scowl at people now that she was a gendarme.
“Can’t imagine why not, I spoke to him about it right when Ben called—first thing. I leave the computer stuff to Nico. I’m just too old for all that now! That camera has been nothing but trouble since I put it in, always on the fritz one way or another. Technology, bah!” Alphonse laughed and rolled his eyes. “So tell me, do you have any leads?”
“You know I can’t talk about that,” said Thérèse, but she shook her head. “So far I haven’t been able to figure out who she is, if you understand, what kind of personality she has. She’s a talented painter, apparently, but that’s all I’ve got. She looks totally average, like anybody really.” Thérèse, like almost all the locals of Castillac, had known Alphonse since she was a baby, and it was easy and natural for her to talk to him about anything.
Alphonse nodded his shaggy head and said nothing.
“Ah, here’s Nico!” he said. “Now we can get you your kir and straighten out this business of the video, all in one go. Come say goodbye before you leave.” He ruffled her hair again and went around the bar and into the kitchen.
“Hey, Nico.”
“Bonsoir, Thérèse.” He smiled and leaned over the bar so they could peck each other’s cheeks, once per side.
“You were supposed to send the video from the surveillance camera to us?”
Nico slapped his forehead. “Oh mon Dieu, I knew there was something I was forgetting! I will get that over to you right away, as soon as my shift is over.”
Thérèse looked around at the nearly empty bar. It was barely five o’clock and there was no one else there but Vincent the taxi driver, drinking an espresso and reading the paper at a table in the corner. “Maybe you could do it now. There’s nobody here, and my kir can wait.”
“Oh no it can’t,” Nico said with a laugh. “Never let it be said that someone at my bar is going thirsty!” He pulled the bottle of cassis off a shelf and poured a small puddle into a white wine glass.
