Disturbing the Dark

by Wendy Hornsby

  “You’ll need to come down to the barracks to give us samples of your fingerprints,” he said, closing and locking the door again. He dropped the keys into his pocket. “Tomorrow when you come for your friend’s hearing will be soon enough. Tell Antoine to do the same.”

  We were headed toward Pierre’s car when my phone rang. I checked caller I.D. It was Vincent from the war salvage shop I visited on Friday.

  “You might want to hear this,” I said to Pierre, putting the call on speaker when I connected.

  “Vincent?” I said into the phone.

  “Righto.” There was a moment of silence. “I was, uh, just seeing if maybe you’re ready to sort out a deal.”

  “As I told you,” I said. “I don’t have anything to deal with.”

  “You would say, luv, with that wanker Harry looking on. But I think you and me can sort a deal to our mutual benefit, if you know what I mean.”

  “Not really,” I said. “But that doesn’t change my answer.”

  He started to say something but then asked me to hold on, he had another call. Pierre held up his palms, asking what Vincent was talking about.

  “He’s looking to buy German war artifacts,” I said. “Especially firearms.”

  Pierre scowled.

  “Oi, miss.” Vincent was back. “What’s that your friend is carrying? All wrapped up careful like.”

  I looked around, and so did Pierre. “Where are you, Vincent?”

  “We’ll talk later, then?” He hung up.

  From somewhere not very far away, I heard a motorcycle rev and speed off, but I saw no one.

  Pierre took my phone from my hand as he hit speed dial on his own set. When the call was answered, he opened my call log and read Vincent’s number to whoever was on the receiving end. Then he called his barracks and ordered an alert to be sent to all units for a Kawasaki motorcycle headed north away from the estate. He wanted every Kawasaki in the vicinity to be stopped, and for the rider to be identified. If there was anything out of order in the driver’s license, bike tags, or proof of ownership, he wanted the rider to be held and the bike to be impounded. Then he ended the call and handed me my phone.

  He asked, “Have you found any German artifacts this man might be interested in buying?”

  “Not unless he wants a tarnished brass button.”

  “Does it have a swastika?”

  “It does.”

  “Then you can’t sell it,” he said with a surprisingly jaunty shrug as he locked the mattock inside his trunk. “I’m sure you found dozens of those buttons in the dirt when you and your grandmother went nighttime digging among the remains. We did. We tossed them into the bags with the bones. Where is yours?”

  “My daughter did something with it.”

  He smiled. “An interesting souvenir of her summer with Grand-mère, yes?”

  We hadn’t been gone more than fifteen minutes, but Grand-mère opened the front door and came outside to meet us as we walked toward Isabelle’s. “I was going to send your brother to search for you.”

  “We were just talking,” I said.

  She looked from me to Pierre, and said, “Hmm.”

  “Madame Martin,” Pierre said with a courtly little bow. “I was just informing your granddaughter that she will be asked to testify tomorrow during the arraignment of Madame von Streicher Karl. Nothing to worry about. She only needs to say that she found the woman in her room and had not invited her to be there.”

  This was news to me. I was glad that Grand-mère was watching Pierre’s face and not mine because she would have seen surprise and dismay written all over mine. He offered her his arm and we walked back inside where Freddy plied us with more of that very good ­Spanish wine.

  “Where’s Gus tonight?” Freddy offered olives to Pierre to accom­pany his drink.

  “Out with friends,” Pierre said. “There’s a new video game.”

  “Well then.” Freddy patted Pierre’s shoulder. “You’ll stay to ­dinner.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Freddy went off to tell Olivia that there would be one more at the table. Antoine and Grand-mère got into a crop-related discussion, leaving Pierre and me to entertain each other.

  “Pierre,” I said, deciding on an opener for a conversation that I hoped would have nothing to do with buried Germans. “Is it common for national police to be assigned to their home towns the way you and Jacqueline Cartier are?”

  He shook his head. “No. In fact, effort is made to prevent such an assignment, for reasons I understand only too well. My job would be much easier without the advice of so many grandmothers.”

  “So, how did you land this assignment?”

  He stalled, sipped some wine, looked for a place to deposit an olive pit. But in the end, he decided to answer. “Jacqueline and I were both allowed transfers for reasons of compassion. My wife was ill, she needed constant care for what could be an extended period. And we had a child to think about. Jaqueline is my wife’s sister. We both offered our resignations so that Gus and my wife could be with family when we needed them close by. Instead, we were offered posts at the barracks here. It meant a demotion for me, but it has worked out well.”

  I had met his son, Gus, but never the wife. I was curious, but I hesitated to ask what became of her. He provided the answer, himself.

  He lightly touched his fingertips to his temple. “I understand that your husband also died from…”

  “Your wife?”

  He nodded. Brain tumor, like my Mike.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  He smiled. “Then I overestimate the grandmother information system. A very old system, you know. No network is speedier than their word of mouth.”

  I had to chuckle. Indeed, there seemed to be very few secrets among this elderly mafia. I asked, “How are you and Gus doing?”

  “We feel that a great hole opened up and something wonderful disappeared into it. But we are getting by. I can’t say we got over losing her, but we are getting used to the reality that she is not with us any longer.” He tipped his head toward me. “And you?”

  “That describes the way I feel very well.”

  “But you have found a new love.” The statement sounded more like a question. “It has been five months for me. I figure that I have about seven more months before the grandmothers begin trying to find someone for me. Long before then, however, I will have been posted somewhere far, far away.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Bien sûr. There is nothing keeping me here any longer. Gus will leave to begin his university prep course the first of September,” he said. “As for me? I am choosing between wrestling with smugglers in Marseille and becoming an instructor at the national training academy. Either will be fine with me, as long as I never have to investigate another murder.”

  “After this one?”

  He took a deep breath. “Please, God, never again a case like this one.”

  Olivia came in from the kitchen carrying a large salad bowl and announced dinner. She was a nervous cook, so she wisely kept her meal simple. We were to have a salade Niçoise and pizza made on the backyard grill using a cooking technique she had perfected while camping at remote archeological dig sites. Grand-mère was skeptical, but the pizza was delicious. Olivia had topped a thin crust with soft goat cheese, fresh tomatoes and basil, and finished it with a drizzle of truffle oil. She began to relax when it was clear that the meal was a success.

  “So, tell me,” I said to her, forking the last sliver of sardine from my salad, “how did you become attached to Freddy’s project?”

  She glanced at him, shrugged, and said, “This is a designated heritage area, so it was required. There is concern that important historical sites will be paved over, as so many already have. So, every building project of a certain size must have an archeologist on staff during the excavation phase. Freddy applied to the government registry, and my name came up.”

  “That explains why you’re foc
using on the sewer trench area,” Antoine said. “Otherwise it makes no sense because that land hasn’t existed long enough to be covering up anything except old seashells.”

  “Even so,” she said, gesturing with her fork, “there is important information to be discovered. My students have taken core samples of soil every five meters along the progress of the trench. There is an interesting and very old history in this region of farmers harvesting and composting seaweed to create arable soil where there had been nothing but tidal marshland. Study of those samples may show us migration patterns, development of agricultural technology, changes in the regional diet, and so on.”

  “But no Viducasse remains?” I said.

  She laughed. “Not unless they fell overboard. That area was still underwater when the Romans arrived.”

  “Sounds like tedious work for young people to be very happy about,” Grand-mère said.

  “You should hear the kids complain,” Freddy said. “Grumble, grumble, all day long.”

  “Of course,” Olivia said with a dismissive little shrug. “They all hope to uncover a Viking burial ship or some other holy grail of the profession to pave their way to publication and from there to appointment on a university faculty. But for young graduates in this discipline, in this economy, such an appointment may be as unlikely as finding a Viking ship. By the work we are doing here, I hope to ground my students in the realities of employment in their chosen field. And right now, the best positions available to the majority of them will involve temporary gigs either following behind excavation equipment at building sites or playing the saxophone in the Paris Metro.”

  Antoine laughed. “I’ll counsel my son to aim toward an employable major.”

  Olivia leaned forward to catch his eye. “I don’t intend to discourage my students. I only hope that being forewarned will save them from despair when their fantasy discovery, and therefore life path, never materializes. And for the vast majority, it simply won’t.”

  “Do they get bitter?” I asked.

  “They may.”

  Pierre had been listening intently. “If there are so few positions, even the brightest students must be very competitive with one another. How cutthroat does it get?”

  “You mean would they kill each other, monsieur l’agent?” After a pause, she said. “Sabotage, bien sûr. Murder, no.”

  At that point, Freddy shifted the conversation to the imminent availability of the swimming pool in his new community center. “Maggie, if the water chemistry is balanced, you’ll be able to swim tomorrow afternoon.”

  I was very happy to hear that. On Monday, after I had sprung Guido from Pierre’s lockup and testified at Erika’s arraignment, a long, hard swim would be most welcome.

  Freddy cleared the table and Olivia brought out a tray of cheese and fruit. The digestif was iced Limoncello served in narrow stemmed glasses, the perfect end to a Mediterranean-themed meal. Soon, Grand-mère was nodding off.

  “I’ll take her home,” I said, rising from my chair. Antoine needed to be there when David brought Grand-mère Marie home; she was having dinner with David’s parents and my daughter. Pierre said that it was time for him to go as well. He’d had a long day and faced another long day on Monday. All of us had had a long day. We thanked Olivia for the meal and Freddy for the hooch, kissed every cheek, said good night, and were shown out.

  At about midpoint in the compound, after another noisy round of good nights, Antoine turned to walk home while Pierre continued with Grand-mère and me all the way to our door. As soon as I had the door open, Grand-mère went straight on inside, announcing that she was going right up to bed. I held back, and so did Pierre. I thought he had something to say, but I spoke first.

  “Pierre, Solange Betz kept a notebook about her work this summer.”

  “Yes, I saw it.”

  “It’s locked up in my studio with her personal things. I wonder if we could take a look at it together.”

  “If you wish.”

  We locked the front door and walked through the house and out the back door, headed for the little studio building. There was only a sliver of a moon in a star-filled sky. I flipped on outdoor lights as we passed them; the floodlight over the back door, the low-watt bulbs on strings under the rose arbor, the strong work light beside the grill. The path lights were solar-powered and came on automatically at dusk. When we came around the side of the studio to the front, the shadows were deeper. But there was certainly enough light to know that the studio door gaped open. My first thought was that the interns were inside, but it was too quiet. And then I saw a little palm recorder lying in the dirt next to the door mat.

  “Bloody hell,” I said, almost afraid to look inside. Pierre put out an arm and held me back. He reached for his belt where ordinarily his sidearm would be. But he had come straight over from cleaning up after the baptism party and was not armed. Cautiously, he peered around the door jamb to look inside before he motioned me forward.

  “Take a look, but don’t go in,” he said, flipping on the light switch with a latex-gloved finger. “Tell me if you can see that anything is missing.”

  I came around beside him, steeled myself, and looked in. The single room was full of very expensive equipment, from cameras to computers. Drawers and cupboards that didn’t have locks stood open and their contents were heaped on the floor, mostly cords and converters and various sorts of jacks and connectors, none of it worth locking up. The middle door of one of the tall steel lockers bolted to the back wall had been crudely broken through and a pair of laptops was missing. Expensive ones, property of the TV network. The thief had made an attempt to open the next locker over, but we’d had heavy-duty combination locks installed on the lockers when we ordered them. To get in, the thief needed to go through the door itself, like opening a can.

  Except for the laptops, the camera that was dropped on the way out and two very similar to it that we’d left on a shelf above the work counter, everything seemed to be intact. In a mess, but intact.

  “They ran out of time,” Pierre said.

  “How did they get in?”

  “Picked the lock,” he said. “Considering what’s in here, you should have had a better lock on the door.”

  “Except for the computers on the counter and the little palm recorders, everything that’s valuable is inside those lockers,” I told him. “I wanted the interns to be able to get at the equipment they need without having to hunt down the guy with the keys. Or worse, to have multiple key sets floating around to get lost or stolen. The irony is, the key to the front door is under the flower pot beside the mat.”

  “Any ideas about who did this?” he asked.

  “You might give that artifact buyer, Vincent, a call.”

  “Anyone else?

  “Not specifically, but I would like you to take the things we packed up from Solange’s tent with you tonight. I planned to ask you what to do with them tomorrow, but since you’re here you should take them now.”

  “Why, Maggie?”

  “Because having them around is beginning to worry me,” I said. “This idiot, Vincent, and apparently some others including your guest Erika von Streicher Karl, seem to have decided that I have, or know where to find, something that they want very much. But of course, I don’t have anything except that button, and even that I can’t put my hands on at the moment.”

  “How does any of that relate to the personal effects of Solange Betz?”

  “I can think of half a dozen scenarios, but I know only one thing: she’s dead. Is there a connection? That’s for you to figure out.”

  He peeled off his latex gloves and gave them to me to put on. “Touch nothing else, but get them.”

  I tiptoed in and opened the locker where we had stowed Solange’s bags. Everything was as we had left it. I tossed the duffel to Pierre, who remained standing in the doorway, and lifted out the suitcase and the notebook. After closing the locker and twirling the combination lock, I took another look around from that vantage
point, saw nothing else missing or amiss, and tiptoed back out carrying the bag so that it wouldn’t leave tracks on the floor. When I was outside again, I asked, “What now?”

  He shouldered the duffel and pulled up the handle of the case. “Now, while we wait for my people to arrive to take over the crime scene, I would like for you to show me what we came out here to retrieve.”

  I made tea and we sat at the big kitchen table with Solange’s notebook between us. I showed him the two sketches Solange drew of the obelisk-shaped piece of iron Raffi found near the old wall.

  “When you searched her tent, did you find anything like this?” I asked him. “I understand that it’s about as long as my thumb.”

  “A small scrap of iron? If I had seen it, I wouldn’t have thought it important.”

  “It was important enough that Solange stole it from another student, a man named Raffi.”

  “Oh là, these academics. The smaller the stakes, the bigger the fight, eh?”

  “I don’t know how big the stakes are,” I said, opening to the pages where Solange had complained about Olivia. “Or how big the fight was. But what I found interesting was that Solange had decided right after she arrived that the area around an old stone wall out in the cow pasture was a far better site to study than the path of Freddy’s sewer was. She and Olivia argued about it. I doubt that any rationalization Olivia delivered to her students about getting a dose of reality by doing archeological grunt work at a construction site would have held much sway.”

  “You don’t buy that Olivia was giving them the advantage of a real-world experience?”