A Twist of Orchids

by Michelle Wan

  Prudence had said, when Mara had finished the wall, that she supposed she could find some kind of large, decorative object to put over it.

  “What’s the point of my refinishing it if you’re just going to cover it up?” Mara had been really hurt.

  “If you’d done what I asked, I wouldn’t have to cover it up,” Prudence had responded.

  And now, a burglary.

  “My problem,” Prudence went on, “is that I don’t know what they took. You have a key. Can you do me a huge favor and check things out? I need a list of what’s missing, and you know the interior as well as anyone. My insurance agent has a record of the really big-ticket items that you can use. His name is Sébastien Arnaud. He’s with Assurimax, and if you call him in advance, he can meet you there. You’ll like him. He’s cuddly, like a teddy bear. Oh, and I also need the shutter and pane repaired.”

  “I’ll deal with it.”

  “Thanks,” said Prudence. “You’re a treat.”

  •

  Sébastien Arnaud arrived late at Prudence’s house the following day. He was a tall, stooping, slightly overweight man whose umber hair stood up in tough little bunches that curled in opposing directions, giving him more the air of a rough-coated terrier than a teddy bear. An Airedale, Mara decided. He even had round, laughing doggy eyes.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, pumping Mara’s hand cheerfully. “I’m always running behind schedule. It’s my kids, you see. I have six of them. All boys, and they give me no peace. Today my youngest fell in the duck pond. I had to fish him out. Then I had to change my clothes.” Sébastien’s broad face pleated into a grin. “C’est la vie. I expect you understand.”

  There was something about Sébastien, a shaggy, ambling, good-humored likableness, that made it easy for one always to understand, Mara thought, as she followed him around to the side of the house where he studied the shutter that had been pulled loose and the broken door pane it was supposed to protect.

  “Hmm,” he said.

  They went inside.

  It was a neat, selective job. No trashing. The burglar had simply entered and taken what he wanted. And he had known what to choose. All of the valuable antiques were gone: Prudence’s entire collection of eighteenth-century bronze animalier, including a wonderfully wrought little greyhound that Mara loved and secretly coveted. The thief had also taken a pair of Lalique lamps worth a few thousand and, most treasured of all, a statuette of a dancer attributed to Degas. True to form, no paintings had been touched, nor had a state-of-the-art espresso maker, the television, the DVD player, or the CD–tape deck. Sébastien told Mara that it was just as well. Appliances were easily disposed of and notoriously hard to recover. However, the objets d’art might be found if an attempt were made to sell them to straight dealers. More likely—he gave a chuckle, half apologetic, half amused—they would find their way to not-so-fussy intermediaries or even private purchasers in London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, New York, Tokyo. The burglar was probably working in league with someone in the antiques trade who acted as a ready fence. It was clever thievery. Small, highly collectable items that would sell quickly for sums hefty enough to provide a good return on effort but not so extraordinary as to attract attention.

  •

  Mara only learned that another piece of doggerel had been left on site through the following day’s Sud Ouest. Number Six and Counting, the headline read. The poem, reproduced in toto, was seen as a nose-thumbing riposte to Adjudant Compagnon’s dire prediction about the burglar’s career. In French it read:

  Cher compagnon, mon vieil ami

  Tu sais, c’est pas encore fini

  Which translated in English as:

  Dear companion, my old friend

  You know, it’s not yet at an end

  It was easy to understand why Adjudant Compagnon, even though the burglary had not occurred on his turf, took the latest billet-doux as a personal challenge and affront. Easier still to sympathize with his indignation over the fact that the burglar had had the insolence to use the familiar tu.

  • 16 •

  The wind wakes him, and he sees that the clock has gone mad. Its digital display winks crazily: 9:13, 5:47, 3:25, 11:50. The red numbers frighten him a little. They flash like dragons’ eyes, without logic, without mercy, telling him the power has gone off and then on again, as it is wont to do in heavy weather, leaving the clock to scroll through its senseless hours.

  The wind buffets the house as it has done for nearly two hundred years. Is it the same wind, Joseph wonders, that goes and comes, bringing with it the smells of all the places it has been? Or a new wind, born each night somewhere high up in the sky? He does not know how long the power has been out. A minute? An hour? He will have to reset the time by the grandfather clock in the living room. He is learning to do things for himself: to boil an egg, to pay the bills (although the nurse Jacqueline Godet helps him a bit with that), to reset the time when the power goes out. He knows that his life is controlled by the clock, by the yellow and white pills that he must take every so many hours.

  It is hard work, turning over on his side. His body feels as if it were filled with sand. But he succeeds, using the bedside railing for support, stretches out his arm, fumbles for the light cord behind his head. Slow fingers close on the familiar bulb of the switch. He draws comfort nowadays from the familiarity of things. As quickly as it comes on, the light goes out.

  The eyes go out, too. Joseph is now in complete darkness, without even the red glow of the dragon that, smiling, simulates sleep. He lies rigid in the bed, a prickle of fear telling him that this time it is not the wind that has blown the power lines down, for he has heard the light scraping of the kitchen door over flagstones.

  The last time, they had tried to tell him it was a nightmare, that it was not his dead wife in her rubbery shroud, wet hair hanging over the void of her face. But if not Amélie, who? Or what? Now he hears again the telltale creaking of the floorboard in the hall and knows he is not dreaming, was not dreaming the time before. The thing has returned. It has chosen its moment with cruel delay.

  In his mind he outruns even the wind, legs spinning, bare feet skimming the ground. His heart is the only thing about him that races. It pounds so hard he thinks it will explode. Dimly, he remembers that he has taken precautions against this moment. His fingers grope, seeking the hard little slab of plastic with its confusing array of buttons. He can’t find it. In a panic, he realizes it isn’t there. With another effort he manages to roll onto his side, to push himself up on one elbow, to extend a shaking hand over the surface of the bedside table. It meets with objects that his crazed fingers can make no sense of. But the thing is gathering shape in the breach of the doorway. It seems to swell up blackly before his eyes. His wail of terror is choked off in his throat.

  And now it shrinks upon itself, becomes a dark form writhing slowly across the floor, low to the ground, until suddenly it is rearing over him and reaching out to strangle him in its heavy embrace. As before, it has no face. Joseph sinks down dizzily onto the bed, preparing himself for what is to come. Something touches his head lightly, almost like a caress. The pressure grows stronger, pushing him face down into the pillow. His nose and mouth are full of pillow. Joseph struggles, driven by a tardy auto-nomic sparking of the brain that triggers a feeble self-defense. Only now do the fingers of his right hand, in spasms, make contact with the numbered buttons of the cellphone buried beneath the confusion of the bedclothes.

  •

  The ringing woke Mara first. She swept her hand around on the nightstand for the phone, found the receiver.

  “Allo?” she mumbled in a pasty voice. “Allo? Allo?” She groped for the lamp and switched it on.

  By now, Julian was awake. He sat up, eyes puffy with sleep. “Who is it?”

  Mara blinked stupidly at the number display.

  “Shit!” she cried and grabbed her coat from the closet. “It’s Joseph!”

  •

  They fo
und him lying face down. The light over the bed was on, enabling them to appreciate fully the frightening twist of his body and the twitching of his legs. In his struggles, he had somehow managed to hit the automatic dial for Mara’s number. His fingers still clutched the cellphone that she had bought and programmed for him. They had to pry it from his grip.

  The only thing to suggest that Joseph had not been hallucinating was the clock. Its flashing random display indicated that the electricity had indeed gone off and come back on. As for the rest of his ordeal, which he recounted in a broken, quavering voice—the faceless form, the attempt to smother him—he had to have been dreaming. Mara and Julian exchanged worried looks. He had told a similar story the last time. Joseph stubbornly refused to let them call the doctor. Or the gendarmes.

  Mara left Joseph with Julian and went into the kitchen to make a pot of chamomile tea. As she stood waiting for the water to boil, she noticed how soiled everything had come to look, even though she and the other neighbor women made sure the dishes were washed and put away every day, the counters wiped down. It was as if, while Amélie lived, her presence had stood between the viewer’s eyes and the walls discolored with age, the range top and counter tiles chipped with use, the worn upholstery of the chairs only partly concealed by flat, loose cushions—cache-misères, “hide shabbiness,” Amélie had jokingly called them. Mara was beginning to doubt seriously Jacqueline’s assertion that Joseph would be fine on his own, even with the promise of additional home care. Besides, his condition would only worsen with time. She wondered whether the shock of Amélie’s death had not accelerated the progress of his disease, causing him to muddle nightmares with reality the way he did. Someone ultimately had to take responsibility for him. It puzzled Mara that no one seemed to consider Christine Gaillard a viable option, perhaps because at the funeral she had fulfilled everyone’s expectations: she had not come. What would it take, Mara wondered, to persuade the daughter to show some interest in her ailing father? Did anyone even know how to get in contact with her?

  She sat down heavily on a chair. The cache-misère not quite doing its job, she felt the stab of the broken wicker seat even through the coat she had flung over her pajamas. It was possible, she supposed, that someone could have come in. After all, there was a rhyming housebreaker about. As a precaution, she got up and tried the back door. The mechanism was a typical deadbolt affair that one engaged by raising the handle and double-turning the key. She was relieved to find it locked.

  Then she saw the leaf.

  It lay pressed flat on the floor just inside the doorsill: a hazelnut leaf, one of last year’s litter, brown, partially decomposed and glistening with moisture. She crouched to inspect it more closely. From that perspective, she also saw faint patches of moisture tracked across the flags. Her mind suddenly went very still, overwhelmed by a silence as heavy as a stone in free fall. It took her a moment to realize what she was seeing. Someone had come in through the back door, had tracked footprints and a telltale leaf into the house. Very recently. The leaf was still wet, the traces on the floor still damp. That person had not broken in. That person had had a key.

  The scream of the kettle caused her to jump. She made the tea and carried three mugs on a tray into the room next to the kitchen.

  “Drink it slowly, Joseph.” Mara steadied the mug for him. Jacqueline had warned her that he had trouble swallowing. His hands shook badly, his jaw jumped up and down. “It’s just past two. Is it time for your pills?”

  “Not till three,” he managed to say.

  She continued to help him sip his tea. She asked, “Joseph, where’s your fuse box?”

  He raised his head from the mug and appeared to think. Then he told her that it was at the back of the house, in the hangar built onto the kitchen, where the wood was kept. Mara nodded. Hers was outside, too. It was an arrangement that allowed tampering by anyone. She remembered the last time Joseph had claimed someone had come into the house. The power had gone off then, as well, and come back on. She and Jacqueline had found the clock flashing. The nurse had had to reset the time. And Joseph’s phone line had been down. Or had it been cut? Olivier had said that the wire had been broken cleanly. Maybe Joseph was not hallucinating after all.

  •

  Mara said, “Everyone here has a key. You, me, the Roches, the Boyers, Suzanne Portier, and probably Olivier Rafaillac for all I know, even though he’s not doing meals for Joseph. And who else but the neighbors would know that his fuse box is in the woodshed?”

  Julian’s eyebrows lifted to the top of his head. “Are you saying it’s one of us? And you’ll have to include Jacqueline and that other nurse who rotates days with her.”

  Mara did not reply but climbed back into bed and huddled under the duvet.

  “It may not be as suspicious as it looks,” said Julian, getting in as well. “Who did his dinner last night?”

  “Francine Boyer. Look, whoever it was could have cut the power at the fuse box and let himself—or herself—in, and then turned the power back on when he or she left. But they forgot about the digital clock, and they didn’t spot the leaf or their tracks on the floor.”

  “See sense, Mara. There could be a reasonable explanation for everything. There might have been a real power break. It’s always going out here, you know that. And the leaf and the tracks could have been made when Francine came.”

  “Our power didn’t go off. Our clocks weren’t flashing. And the leaf and the footprints would have dried out by now if it was Francine.”

  “Okay. Maybe she came back much later for something. Just let herself in without disturbing him. Or Joseph could have gone outside himself.”

  “But suppose someone really has it in for him?”

  “And what? Is trying to give him a scare? Why? You know he suffers from nightmares and hallucinations. All of this is in Joseph’s head.”

  Mara hunched back into the pillows. It was not unheard of for bad blood between neighbors to fester quietly beneath the skin of everyday appearances for a long time until some event—Amélie’s death?—caused the rot to erupt like a suppurating boil. She was checked by Julian’s reminder that Joseph’s grasp of reality was unreliable and the fact that she really couldn’t see anyone wishing him harm. Perhaps Joseph was having more trouble adjusting to the loss of Amélie than any of them realized. Perhaps he was making things up to get attention. Either way, he needed help. She made a decision: the daughter, Christine, had to be found.

  • 17 •

  Mara thought that Christine was more of a missing person than Kazim. She had dropped out of sight and stayed that way for far longer than the Ismets’ son. Mara was more than a little resentful, therefore, when Julian laughed dismissively at her intention to trace the Gaillards’ daughter. They were having breakfast.

  “Good luck,” he said in a way that struck Mara as irritatingly know-it-all. “I think you’ll find it’s not as easy as it sounds.”

  “Who said it would be easy? She might be living in Timbuktu for all I know. I just think Joseph needs his family around him. Whatever happened in the past, she’s still his daughter. Someone’s got to make the effort.”

  “And that someone is you? Maybe you should find out how Joseph feels about it first before you launch Project Christine.”

  Her head snapped up. “What about Project Kazim?”

  “Kazim is a runaway kid who has his parents very worried.”

  “Christine is also a runaway who’s made her parents unhappy for a lot longer.”

  “Betul and Osman asked me to find their son.” “You haven’t done a very good job of it, have you?” “Give me strength! I’m only trying to tell you it’s not that simple finding someone who doesn’t want to be found.” Then he said it: the F word.

  Mara swung around on him, eyes blazing. “For your information, to ferret means to search out diligently. I looked it up. And a ferret is a smart, active animal with a hell of a lot more energy and initiative than you seem to show.”

 
Julian avoided another fight by jumping up and declaring that he had things to do.

  •

  For the rest of the morning Mara stewed over Julian’s condescension toward her “project.” However, she did decide to take his advice about asking Joseph first. She opened the subject obliquely that evening when she brought the old man his dinner. It was an adaptation of her mother’s meatloaf recipe. Mara’s last attempt at it had come out dry and rubbery, according to Julian. This time, she did not try to prepare it as a loaf. Instead, she simply scrambled all of the ingredients together in a kind of hash. It turned out rather well, she thought, nicely browned and bubbling in its own juices. Joseph received the offering doubtfully. He belonged to a generation of people who were accustomed to eating solid cuts of meat, who associated ground beef with dog food.

  “Joseph,” Mara said, sitting down beside him at the kitchen table while he ate. “These nightmares you’ve been having.”

  “They’re not nightmares,” he said stubbornly. He frowned and poked his fork into the unformed mass on his plate.

  “You think the thing without a head was real?”

  “It’s what I’ve been saying.”

  “Then it can only mean that somebody is coming in dressed up as a monster to try to frighten you.” She hoped to force him to come to grips with the reality of the situation.

  He looked puzzled, not making the connection. “Who’d want to do that?”

  “You tell me. Look, has there ever been any trouble between you and any of the neighbors? Say, a dispute or some kind of quarrel that was never settled?”

  Joseph took his time, pushing food onto his fork with his thumb, moving the fork in a wobbling trajectory to his mouth, chewing, swallowing. He had to swallow several times, with visible effort, before the food went down. The mask of his face registered neither pleasure nor displeasure. Eventually he said, “Old Rafaillac didn’t like it much when I told him he looked like one of his own artichokes.” He cackled softly. “The choke part. That was before he lost his hair.”