by Michelle Wan
“I mean, something serious enough for a person to play nasty tricks on you as a way of getting back?”
The fork resumed its exploration of the hash. “What is this, anyway?”
Mara stifled her frustration and became more direct. “Listen, Joseph, the fact is I’m worried about you. I’m afraid you’re not managing very well by yourself.”
“I’ll be all right soon as I get a home helper. I’m trying to get someone to live in full-time.” The old man added ungraciously, “You lot won’t have to bring me my meals anymore.”
“You also have a daughter. Christine, isn’t it?”
He was silent for a moment. Then: “She didn’t come to the funeral.”
“Maybe she didn’t know. I’d like to think she’d be concerned if she realized you’re living here on your own.”
Joseph made a noise in his throat that could have been a comment or a swallow.
“When is the last time you were in contact with Christine, Joseph?”
The old man took in another load of hash.
“Do you know where she is?”
He rolled the food around in his mouth. “It needs more salt.”
Mara knew that her questions had registered with him and that they had upset him. His right hand descended in a shaky arc and came to rest with an accelerated trembling that made the fork rattle noisily against the rim of his plate. She decided not to press the matter. Find out the background and the psychology of the case, Loulou had said. Ask around. That should have been her first step.
•
In a hamlet such as Ecoute-la-Pluie, everyone knew everyone else’s business. They knew the state of their neighbor’s health like the weather. They knew if someone had a drinking problem; if a husband beat his wife; if a wife made her husband’s life a misery; if a cow was sick. Any major expenditure—repairs to the roof, a new car or piece of farming equipment—was immediately remarked upon, discussed as to value for money, and generally pronounced to be daylight robbery. The history of a place was archived in the collective memory of its residents.
So the neighbor women were Mara’s other line of inquiry. She thought at first to bring them all together over coffee and cake (since she didn’t bake, she would buy something at the fancy pâtisserie in Belvès). That way she could sound them out on her idea and hopefully enlist their help. She could also explore—delicately, of course—the possibility that someone was acting out an old grudge against Joseph. Then it occurred to her that talking to each individually might produce franker disclosures. She was quite pleased with her decision. Julian should not be allowed to flatter himself that he was the only sleuth on the street.
She tackled Francine Boyer first. Louis Boyer had been one of Amélie’s pallbearers. The Boyers had held the funeral reception. That had to count for something.
As she sat in the Boyers’ dim, unheated salon, Mara reflected that the reception was the only other time she had been in their house. Then, the space had been filled with people. Now, Mara saw it for what it was: a long, severe room filled with dark upright furniture squarely placed. It matched Francine, a tall, no-nonsense woman with bushy, iron-gray hair. A former teacher, Francine still had something of the schoolmistress about her.
“Bad blood between the Gaillards and one of the neighbors? You won’t find any of that here,” she answered stiffly, making Mara sorry she had asked. “Joseph’s monster, as you call it, is in his head. On Tuesday night I took him his meal, and I went back the next morning to clean up and collect my dishes. I’m quite sure”—she drew herself up—“I never tracked a leaf into his house. As for Christine, yes, I knew her. She was a disciplinary problem at school, but then her life wasn’t easy. I don’t know why you’re asking questions about her, but I think you’ll find people here don’t like raking up old matters. You’re a newcomer, so perhaps you see things differently. However, if I were you, I’d leave Christine where she belongs: in the past.”
Mara went away feeling very much that she had been put in her place and told firmly to let the matter drop.
•
Huguette Roche, pink and plump as a pillow, was more forthcoming. She served Mara coffee in the parlor and knitted while they talked. A wood stove gave off a blast of heat. It was funny, Mara reflected as she pulled off her coat, then her cardigan, how people’s environments matched the people themselves. Francine’s house had been cold and forbidding. Huguette’s house was stifling and filled with overstuffed chairs, crocheted antimacassars, and lamps with beaded shades. A budgerigar hopped about in a cage by the window. Like her bird, Huguette fluttered when she spoke.
“But the Gaillards have always gotten along well with their neighbors. Except”—Huguette paused to think—“maybe Olivier Rafaillac. He and Joseph rowed over silly things. Olivier’s dog, and then there was some problem over the sale of a tractor. Of course,” she added coyly, “I always thought Olivier was rather sweet on Amélie and hoped to marry her after her first husband was killed. She came with quite a bit of land, after all. But then she married Joseph, who didn’t bring a bean with him. In any case, Olivier might hold a grudge, but—grand Dieu!—he’s not one to play nasty jokes on people. You surely can’t be thinking that?”
Mara’s questions about Christine elicited a bosomy heave.
“That poor, unfortunate child.” Huguette said it as if Christine, who must be in her fifties by now, had never grown up. Perhaps for Huguette she had not.
Mara put her coffee cup down. “Unfortunate? How?”
“She was so unhappy, you see.” Huguette stopped knitting and leaned forward, unintentionally hiking her skirt up to expose a stout thigh above a woolen stocking that ended at the knee. “She ran off young with a man. The relationship ended badly, as these things always do, and it started her on the wrong track. I always suspected there’d been a baby, although Amélie and Joseph kept very tight-lipped about the matter. They brought her home, but she made life very difficult for them. She kept running off, you see. They couldn’t control her. One day she simply stayed away for good.”
“But why was she so unhappy?” Mara asked. “Surely Amélie and Joseph were good and loving parents?”
“Oh.” Huguette exclaimed softly. “I thought you knew. She—she was terribly deformed. She had a harelip.”
Mara sat back, surprised. “Couldn’t they operate?”
“Well, yes. They did. But it was badly done, and it gave her a complex. In my opinion, that’s been the root of all her problems.”
“Listen, Huguette,” Mara said, taking the plunge. “Maybe it’s none of my business, but Joseph needs help. Whatever happened in the past, I think it’s time Christine was reunited with her father. Do you have any idea how to get in touch with her?”
Huguette went quite pale. “Oh dear.” She fidgeted. “Get in touch? No, I don’t. And I—I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Not a good idea at all.” She stood up, clutching her knitting to her like a woolly shield. “And now, if you don’t mind, I really don’t think I ought to say any more about the matter.”
•
It was down to Suzanne Portier. Mara sat in her spacious kitchen. The big woman, sweater sleeves pushed up to the elbows, was making bread at a table in the middle of the room. Suzanne believed in bread, the kind of bread with body that lasted a full week, not those degenerate baguettes that went stale as soon as you got them home. She was often heard to say that the pap being turned out by today’s boulangeries heralded the downfall of France, the French people, French culture. Mara watched in fascination as Suzanne turned the dough out onto a floured board where it sat like a fat body, lightly blistered over its entire surface. She began to knead it, leaning her weight into it, pressing down with the heels of her hands, turning and folding the heavy mass. Suzanne’s bare forearms were powerful, like a man’s.
“There’s no one around here who would even think of trying to frighten Joseph, if that’s what you’ve come about,” she said sharply, letting Mara know that the news of
her visits with Francine and Huguette had run ahead of her. “As for your idea of reuniting Joseph with Christine, have you asked him how he feels about it?”
“Ye-es.” Mara took a deep breath. “I honestly think it’s worth a try. I don’t suppose you know where I can find her?”
“What if she doesn’t want to be found?” Suzanne’s hands continued to work swiftly, as if they were somehow more intimately bound to the shiny, elastic mass they were kneading than to herself.
“She might if she knew how much her father needs her. These hallucinations of his. They’re getting serious. And after all, how many years have passed? People change, you know.”
“Then why hasn’t she come forward? She could have turned up at her mother’s funeral.”
It was what Joseph had said.
“Maybe she didn’t know.”
“Oh, she knew all right.”
Mara caught her breath. It was the first real break in the mystery that surrounded Christine Gaillard. She waited for the other woman to say more. Suzanne lifted the dough, placed it in a large bowl, and left it to rise under a cloth. She went to the sink to wash her hands. With her back still to her visitor, she said in an almost resigned tone: “Look, before you go stirring things up, you should know that it might be for the best for everyone if Christine didn’t come back.”
“But why?”
Suzanne turned around, holding her wet hands before her. “Christine had her own ideas about things, and she had a violent temper. It’s something no one here likes to talk about. When she was a kid, she stabbed a schoolmate in the back with a pair of scissors. Created an awful fuss, although the other child wasn’t badly hurt. And then”—Suzanne dried her hands on her apron—“she tried to kill her mother.”
Mara started. “Tried to kill Amélie?”
Suzanne’s eyes glinted. Got you there, they seemed to say. “She pushed her down the garret stairs.”
Mara sat speechless, thinking of the dark, narrow stairway leading up to the Gaillards’ dusty attic. She recalled the looks exchanged at Amélie’s funeral, Joseph’s unanswered question (Why was she up there?), and understood the conspiracy of silence that only Suzanne was bold enough to break. Amélie’s death had been caused by a fall down another flight of stairs. Had the Gaillards’ daughter tried again and succeeded?
Suzanne stood watching her, hands on hips, her face impassive. “So now you know. If you want my advice, you’ll leave well enough alone. But if you’re really determined to get in touch with Christine, last I heard she was living somewhere outside Les Faux. I’m sure anyone there could tell you where to find her.”
• 18 •
Adelheid Besser waited almost two weeks for Julian to fall in with her plans. When he did not, she contacted the other best-known wild orchid expert in the region, Géraud Laval. A retired pharmacist and Julian’s botanical bête noire, Géraud was a trolllike man with hair in his ears and an unpredictable temper. Géraud, too, had been searching for Cypripedium incognitum ever since the day Julian had shown him a badly deteriorated photo of a Lady’s Slipper orchid, purportedly found growing in the Dordogne.
The orchid was a point of bitter contention and rivalry between the two men. Publicly, Géraud denied it existed at all. Privately, like Julian, he was obsessed with finding it. Géraud had been hunting orchids in the Dordogne for most of his considerable lifetime (compared with Julian, who had been in the region a measly twenty-seven years) and was deeply committed to the belief that the honor of discovering a second indigenous species of Cypripedium for Western Europe rightly belonged to him.
At the moment, Géraud was as near as he ever got to speechless. He was the proud possessor of a host of tropical orchids that he tended lovingly in a glassed-in area attached to the back of his house. The greenhouse he now stood in was five times bigger than his. The space was broken up into different environments, each providing controlled amounts of light, moisture, and temperature. Ceiling fans turned slowly above their heads. In a separate glassed-in laboratory, a woman in overalls was moving between shelves filled with flasks of germinating seeds.
“I don’t let just anyone see my darlings.” Adelheid addressed him in French; Géraud spoke nothing else.
They grew in pots on rolling metal tables or hung from overhead baskets, ranks of them, orchids he would have killed to own, or at least would have stolen (Géraud acquired his orchids any way he could). However, Adelheid’s great breasts were trained on him like torpedoes, and he decided thievery might not be such a good idea after all. They were all of the Slipper type. She had acquired them from all over the world, she said, and often went in person on collecting forays. She had Cypripediums from China; Paphiopedilums from Borneo; Selenipediums from Brazil. Grudgingly, Géraud acknowledged the honor she was doing him. The woman had a reputation for secrecy, terrific orchid snobbery, and, if you were looking to buy, exorbitant price tags. One did not view if one did not have world-class credentials. And deep pockets.
He stared hard at a plant with three remarkable blooms on a single stalk. The labellum of each flower was maroon with yellow markings, the dorsal sepal yellow with maroon stripes. The lateral petals tumbled in spectacular falls, like twisted ribbons, as long as his arm.
“This Paphiopedilum sanderianum seems to be doing well.” He tried to sound casual, but the words nearly choked him. The orchid was rare. Months ago, he had fought desperately to save a juvenile representative of the species in his collection from some kind of brown rot. It had died.
“Ah,” said Adelheid knowingly. “You have tried to grow it?”
“Susceptible to bacterial infections,” Géraud muttered.
“Nonsense. Overwatering. That, mon cher monsieur, is the most common cause of orchid death.”
He glared at her furiously. That this female should accuse him of overwatering!
To change the subject, he pointed at three young plants, nothing more than clusters of narrow leaves, on a stand by themselves. “And what are those?”
A cagey expression flitted across her face.
“Guess.”
He frowned, trying to appear knowledgeable. While he struggled she grinned at him, seeming to take an amused interest in his hairy ears.
“Give up,” she laughed and socked him on the arm, hard. “They are nothing less than plantlets of the fabulous Phragmapedium kovachii!”
“Phrag—!” His eyes bulged. It was the most sensational find of the twenty-first century, a magnificent Peruvian orchid with a flower as big as a man’s hand. Its discovery and subsequent importation into the U.S. had been the focus of intense controversy. He said nastily, “I heard it had been poached to extinction right after it was found. How did you come by it?”
“Ach, I bought it legally.” She waved dismissively. “As a flasked seedling, of course.”
“Hanh.” He made the sound through his nose, conveying his utter disbelief.
“So,” she said, steering him out of the greenhouse. “You have seen enough?”
She conducted him into her house, where she pushed him into an overstuffed armchair in her front room. “Sit. Let’s talk business.”
“Business?”
“Mmm-um. I have need of you.”
“You do?” He felt absurdly pleased.
What she said next, however, nearly caused him to explode: “I approached someone else first, you know. But he did not respond. Julian Wood. You know him?”
“That amateur!”
“I don’t agree. I have seen his book. It is very comprehensive. In it he has an orchid.”
“You’re talking about Cypripedium incognitum, I suppose,” Géraud said sneeringly.
“Mmm-um.”
“It’s a shameful piece of botanical trickery. This Wood fellow is crazy. He has no evidence—no evidence whatever—that this orchid exists. An absolute dog’s breakfast of a photograph. I’ve seen it. Yet he has the gall to include it in a book. That alone should tell you what kind of an orchidologist he is. Anyway, what
do you want with him? Or with me, for that matter?”
“That is the business we will discuss. This Cypripedium incognitum. I wish to have it.”
“Ha! Good luck.”
“I want to hire you to find it for me.”
“Me?”
“Mais oui.”
“You’re mad. I told you. The thing doesn’t exist.”
“Julian Wood thinks it does. So do I.”
“Then look for it yourself. You’re an experienced orchid hunter.”
“I have no time. I have a very busy schedule with my darlings. I make collecting safaris all over the world. I do research. I attend conferences where my presence is demanded. I will pay you well.”
Géraud, who had been on the point of heaving himself up from his chair, paused.
“How much?”
Adelheid said cannily, “First we must talk terms.”
“What terms?”
“The attribution. I will, of course, share the glory of the discovery with you. You will take your place beside me in the orchid hall of fame. However, I want it named after me.”
Géraud sank back into his seat. Share the fame? Name it after her? He almost laughed aloud. If he found the orchid—when he found it—the credit of discovery would be all his, nomenclature and all. He knew her type to the core. She was as violently possessive, as bitterly jealous, as nastily competitive as any he had ever met. But she had fired his ambition and his greed, and the thought of besting Julian at his own game was too tempting.
“However,” she went on, “you will have to hurry. It is now April. Cypripedium incognitum is said to flower in May. Monsieur Wood has been looking for it already several years. Now that he knows I am after it as well, he will redouble his efforts. Don’t underestimate him. I think Julian Wood will give you a run for your money.”
“That clown couldn’t spot a daisy in an open field,” Géraud said with more certainty than he felt. He leaned forward. “Madame Besser—”
