Disturbing the Dark
a Maggie MacGowen Mystery
Wendy Hornsby
2016 • Palo Alto–Mckinleyville
Perseverance Press • John Daniel & Company
This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, companies,
institutions, organizations, or incidents is entirely coincidental.
The interior design and the cover design of this book are intended for and limited to
the publisher’s first print edition of the book and related marketing display purposes.
All other use of those designs without the publisher’s permission is prohibited.
Copyright © 2016 by Wendy Hornsby
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-56474-801-0
A Perseverance Press Book
Published by John Daniel & Company
A division of Daniel & Daniel, Publishers, Inc.
Post Office Box 2790
McKinleyville, California 95519
www.danielpublishing.com/perseverance
Distributed by SCB Distributors (800) 729-6423
Book design by Eric Larson, Studio E Books, Santa Barbara, www.studio-e-books.com
Cover image: Bernard Allum / iStock
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Hornsby, Wendy.
Disturbing the dark : a Maggie MacGowen mystery / by Wendy Hornsby.
pages ; cm
ISBN [first printed edition] 978-1-56474-576-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. MacGowen, Maggie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.O689D57 2016
813’.54—dc23
2015029320
As always, this is for Paul,
without whom there would be no book.
I also want to acknowledge
the help and encouragement of
two dear friends we lost too soon.
Sharon Zukowski,
amazing writer, sounding board,
and the best travel companion ever;
Sgt. Richard Longshore,
Homicide Bureau, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office,
story-teller extraordinaire,
loyal friend:
I miss you every day.
Contents
Maggie Macgowen’s Extended Family
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
About the Author
Maggie Macgowen’s Extended Family
Casey MacGowen, her daughter
Élodie and Henri Martin, her grandparents
Freddy Desmoulins, her half brother
Isabelle Martin, her biological mother
Gérard Martin, her uncle
Antoine Martin, Gérard’s elder son
Bébé Martin, Gérard’s younger son
Grand-mère Marie Foullard, née Dumond, Maggie’s godmother, Gérard’s mother-in-law
Ma Mère, the abbess, Maggie’s godmother, Marie Foullard’s sister
Julie Foullard Breton, Marie Foullard’s granddaughter
Jacques Breton, Julie’s husband
David Breton, Julie and Jacques’s son
Jacqueline Cartier, Jacques’s niece
1
Occupied Normandy, February 25, 1944. Night. A waning gibbous moon.
For the fourth night in a row, Élodie watched Allied bombers stitch through the clouds, far out above the Channel as they headed home to their bases in England after blasting targets in Germany. She paused in the moon shadow alongside the cider house to watch them, sleek black silhouettes against the cold dark sky, as thick as flocks of geese flying north in spring. A sign, she hoped, that the long, soulless chill of life under the Occupation might end. That night, that moment, with fear hammering through her body, more than ever before Élodie wished she could open her arms across the breast of the wind and fly like a bird. Fly far, far away.
The din coming from the cider house surged and fell as the Germans inside grew drunk on the potent double-distilled apple brandy they were being served. On empty stomachs, they swilled the brandy like beer. Now and then, a raucous chorus of some German song was punctuated by bursts of laughter that sounded lurid to her ears, though after nearly four years under their thumb, even when they were sober everything the Germans said sounded lurid to Élodie. At that moment, as planned, the detested Boche were far from sober. Shouts for refills were quickly answered by the village women: As you wish, monsieur le unteroffizier, or oberfeldwebel, or, if he was really drunk, mon chèr gros chien, and then another generous pour from an earthenware pitcher. “The feast is coming, but first, how about another little sip?”
The women told the Occupation soldiers billeted at the Martin estate on the Cotentin Peninsula that tonight was a traditional winter festival. Come and celebrate the bottling of the year’s brandy; the fall harvest was brilliant and what a wonderful brandy we’ve made. A delicious feast, the women promised, fat hens and good cheese, with plenty of strong drink. An evening of camaraderie. We are friends, are we not? Partners in this war. Not a single soldier turned down the invitation.
Élodie turned as the coal hatch at the side of the building opened on freshly greased hinges. Her school friend when they were still in school, Marie Dumond, peered around the edge, saw Élodie, and came outside.
“How many?” Élodie asked, handing Marie the basket of Camembert and bread she held over her arm, the first and only food that would be offered to the men inside.
“Only sixteen,” Marie said, lifting the cloth under the cheese to make certain that the sharp, hooked pruning knives were hidden there. “Major von Streicher is still up at the house.” And then, with a catch in her voice, she added, “And so is my sister.”
“Go back inside, chérie, get underway,” Élodie said, slipping one of the pruning knives into her apron pocket. “But leave the coal door ajar for me. I’ll be back in five minutes.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Take care of von Streicher.”
Marie said a silent prayer and crossed herself before she gave Élodie a quick embrace. “Courage, my friend,” she whispered before she slipped back inside.
The soldier who should have been standing watch over the stone-walled compound was missing from his post, lured inside for refreshments. Discipline among the Occupation troops had faltered as war news worsened for Germany. The Allies were in Italy and the Russians were in Poland, speeding toward Berlin. Dresden was a pile of rubble. As arrogant as ever, the soldiers had become rapacious, drunken, and even more brutal with every discouraging report. Élodie wondered if these men who before the war had been low-level clerks and government functionaries were having a last fling with power before the inevitable end of the war dumped them back into impotent anonymity.
Out of caution, in case one of the men came outside for a piss or dragged a woman out to satisfy a baser urge, Élodie kept to the shadows along the cold wall as she made her way toward the main house. Using her own key, she entered from the rear and slipped into the kitchen. Through the swinging door, she could hear two voices in the main salon: the officer-in-charge, Major von Streicher, loud and guttural; fifteen-year-old Anne Dumond, soft and frightened.
>
She pushed the door open enough to see into the salon. Von Streicher had his back to her, with Anne, struggling, clutched against him.
“Please, monsieur, I am still bleeding,” Anne said, trying to pull out of his embrace.
“Can’t you call me Horst by now, little Anna?” Von Streicher lowered his face to hers and spoke to her as if he thought she must somehow like him. “I don’t mind a little blood. As long as you are bleeding we don’t risk having that little complication to take care of again, do we?”
Élodie shoved through the door and walked boldly into the room.
“Take me instead,” she said, putting her hand on von Streicher’s arm. “After the procedure you forced on her, Anne would be too uncomfortable to satisfy you. Take me. I won’t disappoint.”
“What is this?” He grabbed onto her hand and she did not pull away. “Maybe I should have you both.”
“You won’t need us both, Major,” she said, leaning into him.
He laughed and released Anne with a shove.
“Élodie, no.” Anne, wracked by sobs, dropped to her knees. Élodie touched her hair. “Go now, chérie. Go.”
“Yes, Anna, go.” Von Streicher nudged Anne with his black boot. “So, what are you waiting for? Leave.”
Élodie moved between them, pressing close to von Streicher. She reached up and undid the top buttons of his tunic to run her hand over his chest and up the side of his neck until her fingers found the rhythmic thrum of blood through his carotid. Roughly, he took her into his arms and pressed his face between her breasts as he began pulling up the back of her skirt. With his big hands busy cupping her ass, Élodie slipped the pruning knife from her apron pocket and drove the sharp, curved blade into his neck behind the carotid before she gave it one quick, practiced twist.
Von Streicher’s hands flew to his neck as great jets of blood streamed from the severed artery. Before he realized what had happened, Élodie unholstered his sidearm, pressed the end of the barrel against his chest where there should have been a heart. And pulled the trigger.
2
Normandy. Late August. The present.
The skull came up out of the earth atop a scoop of rich Normandy farm soil. By the time I realized that this object I saw through the lens of my video camera was something other than a big round, dirt-encrusted stone, Olivia, the archeologist from l’école du Louvre in Paris, had raised her hand and started yelling for my half brother, Freddy, to stop his earthmover.
In the sudden lull, the farm’s summer symphony of buzzing insects and rhythmic whacking of stout wooden poles against apple-laden branches in the orchard behind us was joined by a chorus of electronic taps and blips, as Olivia’s five graduate students and my quartet of interns from the UCLA film school memorialized and sent out into the ether digital snaps and videos of the grisly discovery turned up on the edge of my grandmother’s carrot field. The tapping and blipping was soon joined by the pings of incoming responses. As the harvesters in the orchard, a baker’s dozen of international agricultural students working with my cousin Antoine, received messages from the dig-site youth, they dropped their poles and came running out through the trees like a pack of hungry pups called home for supper.
Freddy set the earthmover’s hand brake and hopped out for a closer look. He was every bit as hopeful as Olivia was that during the excavation necessary to build his new housing development along the shoreline bordering the Martin family estate, he would disinter an artifact or two from a pre–Gallo-Roman village, or better yet, a Viking burial ship. A significant archeological find would certainly garner some free publicity for Freddy’s development, and maybe draw some tourists who would be so charmed by rural Normandy that they would buy one of his cottages. All morning, as he dug a trench along the edge of the carrot field to lay a sewer line, he’d kept one eye on the ground and the other on Olivia, waiting for her Eureka signal.
Guido, my longtime film partner, who came running out of the orchard at the head of the harvester pack, raised his own video camera and zoomed in on the skull.
“Hey, Olivia,” Guido said, then training his camera on her. “If you drop the skull into a bucket of bleach, by tomorrow it will be as white and shiny as a new pearl.”
Olivia was aghast. After several tries, she managed to utter, “Never! Do you wish to destroy the integrity of this fragile specimen? It appears to me to be very old, very old indeed. Centuries, perhaps millennia.”
I elbowed Guido as a warning. All morning, he had twitted Olivia at every opportunity as payback for the tongue-lashing she had given him the night before. If she caught him anywhere near Solange Betz, one of her graduate students, distracting the young woman—emphasis on young—from her work, Olivia promised she would rip Guido a new one. Or something to that effect. My rusty French had improved daily during the two weeks we’d been in Normandy, but even if I could have kept up with Olivia’s verbal barrage I wouldn’t have found some of her words in my pocket dictionary.
The approach of my ninety-two-year-old grandmother, Élodie Martin, in the little Kubota Rough Terrain Vehicle my uncle Gérard gave her so she could get around the estate more easily, added some bass notes to the general chattering and exclaiming. I saw the plume of dust trailing her as she sped along the farm’s unpaved access road, coming from the general direction of the raspberry bramble. She was going so fast that I was afraid she would spin out when she reached the sharp turn at the end of the orchard, but she gunned the RTV’s motor just as she hit the straightaway and held her course. Or stayed on target, i.e., us.
Grand-mère was out of the RTV and calling for Freddy before the dust stirred by her sudden stop had settled; she is amazingly spry for ninety-two.
“Freddy!” Grand-mère looked up into his face with an expression of reproach that could have chilled the fires of hell. “I told you, dig your sewer trench down the middle of the road.”
“Yes, Grand-mère, but when we started digging up the road, Jacques said it was impossible. He has cheese to deliver and he’s expecting a new whey separator for the fromagerie. He can’t do without the road for ten days. But, as you see—” Freddy, nonplussed, waved his hand to show Grand-mère the course of his trench so far, a straight line running between the edge of the access road and the first cultivated row of the field. “We are not disturbing the carrots, Grand-mère.”
Maybe Freddy, a banker by training and not a builder, hadn’t set the little Volvo earthmover’s hand brake properly, or maybe he failed to lock the scooper arm in place correctly, because just at that moment the apparatus suddenly jerked. That one sharp jolt was enough to start the skull rolling from its perch. There was a moment of absolute silence as it tumbled off the end of the scoop bucket and down into the trench, losing the lower mandible during its descent. When the skull finally rolled to a stop, it was upside down, grinning up at the clear blue sky. The chorus of digital taps and blips immediately resumed.
“So, Olivia.” Guido looked up from the monitor of his video camera. “Who knew the pre–Gallo-Romans had fillings in their teeth? Is that bridgework on the molars?”
“Freddy.” Grand-mère pinched his cheek to get his attention. “Don’t you realize? This is where we buried the Germans.”
3
At the butcher, the baker, the café tabac, news that a body had turned up that morning chez Martin spread every bit as fast and wide as postings on the Internet had.
It was August, the month that French schools set their pupils free and urbanites abandon their cities and take off en vacances until September. Along the Normandy shore near Grand-mère’s village, shutters had come off seasonal cottages and humanity poured in ready to relax and play. Except for local tradesmen who were happy to rake in the vacationer’s euros, the residents of the area were generally too busy tending to summer crops and chores to pay much attention to the visitors unless some idiots, fueled perhaps on the region’s potent Calvados, or more potent eau de vie, decided to off-road through the carrot fields, enta
ngle their speed boats with commercial fishing nets, or wander among the livestock while looking for bucolic photo ops. If vacationers clogged the narrow village roads on market days, they also spent freely on the local produce, sausages, cheeses, and cider, so there wasn’t much grumbling about their presence.
As nothing especially interesting had happened in the area since the carrot festival over in Créances a week earlier, villagers and summer visitors alike began to arrive for a look before the gendarmes from the local barracks had finished putting up blue police tape across the end of Grand-mère’s access road and placed privacy screens around the area of Freddy’s trench where the skull still lay. Cars, tractors, bicycles, and a pair of fine crossbred Arabian mares clogged the two-lane road leading from the village. There was such a large and festive crowd that if we were in California, where I live and where I work making investigative films for one of the big television networks, I might expect to see vendors working their way through the crowd selling churros, balloons, and frozen fruit out of bicycle carts. The French, who don’t snack much, managed to have a good time without the ding of vendors’ bells in the background.
Usually, the village’s municipal policeman would handle crowd control. But something had happened to the poor man, so the district gendarmerie had taken over handing out traffic citations and maintaining civic order until another could be hired. The gendarmes did their best to keep the village road clear and the crowd from trampling the crop or falling into the open sewer trench, but with limited success. I watched a well-fed man wearing bright vacation togs venture beyond the blue tape, paying no heed to the crop he crushed under his flip-flops as he strained for a better look. Young Jacqueline Cartier, looking crisp in her blue gendarme uniform, blew her whistle to get his attention.
“Monsieur, Madame Martin sells her carrots by the kilo,” Jaqueline scolded. “Shall I have her send you an invoice?”
Properly chagrined, now stepping gingerly between rows, the transgressor moved back behind the tape where he belonged.
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