by Nell Goddin
She wanted to go by the station and ask Dufort to fill her in, but of course that was out of the question. She wondered if Lawrence’s contacts were good enough to find out what kind of poison? Because without that, without knowing if it was slow-acting or fast, she couldn’t know whether the list of suspects was narrowed to the guests at La Métairie or not.
Could even have been a waiter, for that matter, she thought, taking care not to assume anything, and making notes in the new file that was taking shape in her head, with the title Desrosiers: Murder.
13
He had been feeling so much better lately. The long winter runs, the relative calm in Castillac, his dates with Marie-Claire…Dufort had not even been to see his herbalist in over a month. Anxiety was so low he had stopped noticing it.
And now, another death, and he was patting his pants pocket for his vial of tincture and feeling disappointed when it was not there. This death—it was nothing like the others. Not a young woman cut down and brutalized in her prime, not related to the unsolved Boutillier and Martin cases, but an elderly woman whom nobody liked. Nevertheless, the thought of her lying on her side on the tile bathroom of La Métairie made him feel queasy.
He had to wonder, even after so many years: am I in the wrong job? He knew other gendarmes with his experience had toughened up long before now. Had gained some resilience, some ways to compartmentalize, joke, anything to make death more bearable. But somehow he had not managed to acquire those skills even after ten years on the job.
Then Benjamin Dufort, chief gendarme of Castillac, pulled himself together and took a walk around the village before dawn. He did not rush but observed the village in the lonely state of a frosty December morning. Life-sized Père Noëls emerged from chimneys and decorated trees stood outside most of the shops. A huge snowflake that he remembered from his childhood hung from a wire across the main street, looking a little tattered around the edges.
Florian Nagrand, the coroner, had not called with the lab results, but Dufort knew what they were going to say. It was going to be cyanide, as doubtless he had known the minute he saw the flushed face of Josephine Desrosiers, her cheek pressed against the white bathroom tile. He had known but not wanted to face it. Why? Was it as simple as fear that he would not be able to find the murderer and fail at his job? Or was there more to it than that?
He saw the lights on at the station even though it was barely six in the morning and knew Perrault was inside, trying to find something to do. He envied her excitement about her job, and hoped that as the investigation went on, he caught some of her enthusiasm instead of feeling so morose about the state of humanity.
And himself.
“Salut, Perrault,” he said, putting his heavy coat on a peg by the door. He could easily hide his emotional state but was not sure that was actually a step forward.
“No results yet,” she said, her mouth turned down.
“No matter,” said Dufort. “I think I have a pretty good idea what they’re going to say, once I gave it some thought.” He wanted to talk to Perrault, to tell her that he had avoided the idea of murder and couldn’t understand why, but he knew it would not be an appropriate conversation to have with a subordinate officer. “We need to start talking to Desrosiers’s family. You mentioned knowing the niece? That would be an excellent place to start. And—” he added, on his way into his office, “—early morning is often the best time to talk. People’s defenses aren’t all the way up yet. Especially before coffee,” he said with a small smile.
“Yes sir!” said Perrault. Not wanting to waste a minute, she slipped on her coat and took off for Adele’s apartment on rue Tartine, planning to hang around outside and knock the minute she saw the lights go on.
Dufort sat at his desk, his posture straight but his mind in turmoil. Florian must have thought me such a fool, he thought, feeling the unsettling in his stomach that signaled shame.
The next morning Molly was startled to wander into the kitchen and find Frances, already up and drinking coffee. “Morning!” she said, reaching for a mug.
“I’m awake,” said Frances.
“I can see that,” said Molly.
Molly was wearing a thick flannel shirt lined with fleece, sweatpants, and cozy slippers from LL Bean that she’d had for years. But she was still cold. She took a big sip of coffee, pleased that Frances made it strong, and turned her attention to the woodstove.
“Going for more wood,” she said, and let herself out the French doors to the terrace. The first thought she’d had upon waking was about the Desrosiers murder—she had dreamed her new friend Adèle was guilty. Her second thought was no, not Adèle. If she could get the woodstove going and get warm, she wanted to close her eyes and think it all through, go over every moment of the other night in the restaurant, as well as the other times she’d seen the brother and sister.
The morning was frosty and she paused for a moment to notice the beauty of the white-tipped branches and blades of grass before shivering and walking quickly to the woodpile. She stacked three logs on her arm and turned back for the house, wondering whether she should stop Pierre Gault from working on the pigeonnier in favor of spending the money on a different heating system or some insulation in the main house. Extra bookings won’t matter if I expire of cold, she was thinking.
“So I dreamed last night that Adèle killed her aunt,” Molly told Frances, while shoving a new log in the woodstove and shivering.
“Interesting. Do you think you’re psychic, or was that just your brain throwing sparks?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream like that before. My dreams are usually crazy, incoherent nonsense. Maybe this one was too.” Molly stood, watching the fire, then squatted down and poked another piece of kindling under the log. “I don’t want it to be Adèle, that’s for sure.”
Frances pulled a blanket around her and sipped her coffee. “Well, we know something bad was happening in that family. The aunt was a tyrant, okay, but what’s the rest of the story?”
“Yeah,” said Molly, her voice flat. “The thing is, she and Michel seem so normal, when you hang out with them. They feel like…like people I already knew, somehow. Familiar, in a way.”
France hummed the Twilight Zone theme song.
“I know in the U.S., you’re way more likely to be murdered by a family member than a stranger,” said Molly. “Think that’s true in France, too?”
“Families,” Frances said in a disgusted tone. “Ugh. This is a horrible thing to say, but in some ways, you’re lucky.”
Molly just nodded. She had a younger brother and an assortment of cousins, but that was more or less it for family. Her father had died in a nursing home the year before she moved to France, but in the haze of Alzheimer’s he had not been able to recognize her for at least three years before that. Her mother had died in a car accident fifteen years ago. Molly’s relationship with them had been decent, if not especially close, and even though her grief at their deaths had long mellowed into some other, less-painful emotion that was difficult to describe, still, she never forgot she was an orphan.
And she knew that people who were not orphans, like Frances, were unable to understand what it was like. No matter how old you were or even how close you had been. No matter that it was the natural order of things to lose your parents eventually.
“I dread spending Christmas with my family,” said Frances. “It’s just one long dreary event with a lot of commentary about how my hair is all wrong, how could I possibly have divorced my second husband because he was so nice, and lots of other special Hallmark moments.”
Molly laughed. “Do you doubt my ability to put together a Christmas that will beat anything you could have at home? Franny, listen: I’ve got pastry, I’ve got duck, I’ve got Pascal. By the time this celebration is done, you’re never going to want to leave.”
“You’ve got Pascal? Can you be more specific please?”
Molly laughed. “I mean I can invite him over. That’s all you ne
ed to work your magic, right?”
Frances looked up at the ceiling and a slow smile broke out. “That’ll do,” she said. “Crap, it’s cold in here! Can’t you turn up the heat?”
“This is the heat,” said Molly, gesturing sadly to the woodstove, where the fresh log had failed to catch. “I’m going to have to take the logs out and start over. Please remind me to bring the kindling in at night so I have something dry to start the fire with?”
“Hey, that little electric heater in the cottage works fine, why don’t we go over there?”
Molly poured the rest of the coffee into a thermos, and the two friends walked arm in arm to the cottage, where Molly talked about what to plant in the front garden in spring, and Frances talked about how she had recently discovered that lemonade helped her write better jingles, and no one brought up poison or toxic family ties or anything else that might derail their buoyed-up moods.
14
“I waited outside her place practically all day,” Perrault was telling Dufort. “No sign of her. I thought maybe she’d moved or something, but I checked with some friends and they said Adèle definitely lives there. Apartment in a converted house on rue Tartine.
“I just asked you to talk to her, I didn’t mean for you to set up a stake-out,” said Dufort with a slight smile.
“You don’t think she’s a suspect? I was figuring anyone related to Desrosiers is on the list until we can cross them off. Who knows how much she might stand to inherit, right?”
“I applaud your persistence,” Dufort said. “Since Desrosiers had no children, there is no legitime, the portion that the law insists go to each child. Nevertheless, she would not have been able to leave every penny to whomever she wanted—the extended family will get something. Of course we will have to find the will, if there is one.
“We will begin by addressing this puzzle from the other end, however. Not looking at motive first off, but opportunity, because the timing of her death is limiting, happily for us. Has the lab report come in yet?”
Perrault looked chastened and ran off to check. “Why in the world would they send it by snail mail?” she shouted from the other room, where her and Maron’s desks stood, and where the basket for the mail delivery was.
“Perhaps Monsieur Nagrand thought he had given me enough of a head’s up,” said Dufort. He tore open the envelope and scanned Florian’s note and then the lab report. “As I thought. Cyanide.” He was about to put the papers on his desk when the last bit caught his eye. “Well, this is interesting. The usual routes for cyanide poisoning are swallowing, or even more quickly fatal, breathing cyanide gas, as the Nazis well knew. I had already discounted gas as a possibility because there would be no way for Desrosiers alone to have breathed it in a crowded restaurant. I assumed her food had been doctored, either at La Métairie or sometime earlier in the day.
“But it appears that the coroner’s opinion is that the cyanide exposure was on her skin. Her face, actually.”
“Hmm,” said Perrault. “Did someone give her some face cream for her birthday?”
“Perrault, I believe you have the makings of a real detective,” said Dufort. “Face cream is an excellent place to start.”
Perrault beamed. She thought she was improving too, and it felt wonderful to hear her boss say it. “Would Nagrand be able to tell us how quickly cyanide in face cream would act? Could she have put it on before coming to the restaurant?”
“I will call him to discuss that very thing. Now where is Maron? I’m hoping he will have found something at the restaurant. Not residue on a glass, we’d never be so lucky to find something like that this many days later, not at a ship-shape place like La Métairie. But perhaps he will have found gift cards so we could find out who brought presents,” said Dufort, thinking out loud.
“If there were presents, I wonder what happened to them?” Perrault took a small pad from her back pocket and began to scribble notes of things to ask Adèle when she found her.
Dufort pulled out his cell to check the time. “Let’s get over to the Desrosiers house now. We need to take a look around before the family goes in there and wreaks havoc.”
They took their coats from the pegs and put them on while heading outside. Madame Desrosiers’s house was not far from the station, an easy walk, and Dufort was happy as always to stretch his legs. Now that the investigation was underway and cyanide was confirmed, he felt robust and optimistic, as though his feet were solidly under him again.
“It’s a little weird to kill someone that old,” said Perrault, as they headed down the street.
“Because you think she already had one foot in the grave? Spoken like a young person,” he said, affectionately. “Seventy two is old, yes, but not very old. There are people in Castillac decades older than that. Mme Gervais, who lives in that tiny house down by the shop that sells old lamps? She’s well over a hundred. Hundred and two, I believe.”
Perrault shook her head, unable to imagine lasting that long.
“What, so you like to think you’ll flame out at your peak, or some such romantic nonsense?” said Dufort, teasing.
“Nah. And I wasn’t talking so much about her being almost dead as that I usually think of old ladies as harmless. I mean, my grandmère will have a fit if you don’t wash the lettuce properly—you’ll hear about it for weeks if she bites into a little sand. And I guess sometimes they tell the same story six hundred times a day. But obviously I have not been driven to the point of murder.”
“Perrault, as I have told you before, your life and experiences will be of value you to in your work, so I do not want to sound as though I am diminishing them. But at the same time, you must strive for some objectivity. Just because your grandmère is a pleasant person does not mean that all women her age are. You cannot generalize from one specific example in that way.”
“Yes sir,” said Perrault, telling herself once again to think before she spoke.
They passed through the gate and arrived at the front door. “Quite a place,” said Dufort, gazing up at the huge mansion. “You know about Albert Desrosiers?”
“Everybody knows about Albert Desrosiers. He’s like the one semi-famous person ever born in all of Castillac.”
“Some kind of resistor, or transistor? I don’t know what was so special about it, science was never one of my strengths.”
“All of school wasn’t one of my strengths,” laughed Perrault. “So how can we get in?”
“Well, before you start breaking any windows, let’s try knocking. Possibly a housekeeper might be inside. You do that and I’ll take a look around, see if there’s a gardener or anybody in the back garden.”
Perrault thought to herself that gardening must not be one of Dufort’s strengths either, since it was December and freezing and gardeners were likely to be inside drinking something warm instead of hanging around an iced-over garden with nothing to do. She gave the brass knocker several hard knocks and listened, but could hear no one inside the house. The windows were shuttered though it was afternoon, so if anybody was inside, they would have to put lights on to see. Perrault craned her neck trying to see if any light was coming from under the bottom of the shutters, but she could see nothing.
Dufort had better luck. As he came around the side of the house he thought he heard the sound of a door closing. He was just tall enough to see over the stone wall surrounding the garden, and a dark-haired woman leaving by the back door, carrying several large plastic bags.
In the afternoon Molly left Frances alone at the piano where she hoped to write a lucrative new jingle. All she asked for was a glass of very tart lemonade and a stack of napkins, which she claimed were the best for writing down ideas and snatches of lyrics.
Molly told Frances she was heading into the village to get a few almond croissants (of course) as well as pick up a bottle of wine at the épicerie and a steak at the butcher’s. And she did plan to do those things. Along with as much snooping as she could fit in while Frances was occupied. It wasn�
��t that Frances disapproved of her nosiness exactly, more that she wanted Molly’s attention for herself at the moment, and quickly got tired of having conversations with her friend during which Molly’s eyes would glaze over as she got distracted by thoughts of poison and motives and death.
Out on rue des Chênes Molly pulled her coat collar up against the bitter wind. It wasn’t half as cold as it had been in Massachusetts, but she was acclimated to the Dordogne now, and her measurements for what was cold and what was comfortable had shifted considerably. At any rate it was cold enough that villagers were mostly inside, everyone except for a farmer going slowly past on a tractor. Molly could hear someone splitting wood in the distance, the easy rhythm as the axe lifted up and then came down with a mighty thwock into the log.
First question, she thought, getting her thoughts organized. Did the poisoner kill Desrosiers for her money, or for some other reason? It hadn’t been a happy birthday party, that was for sure. The tension and resentment had been palpable. She wondered if Dufort was going to question her. Surely he would want to know her impressions, wouldn’t he? Going around the table, place by place, Molly tried to remember everyone who was there. She stopped and dug in her bag for her phone, and tapped in a few notes:
Desrosiers
Michel
dark-haired woman and her angry husband
Adèle’s mom
Adèle
another old lady, white bun
She could check with Frances to see if she remembered anyone else. Now all she had to do was find out something about each of the participants and figure out which one had done the deed. She did realize she was acting as though it was all nothing but an interesting puzzle to solve, when in fact a person had died. And the killer, unless the poison turned out to be a long-acting variety, had been in that dining room, sitting near Molly and Frances, on Thursday night.
