The Prisoner of Castillac (Molly Sutton Mysteries Book 3)

by Nell Goddin

  Then Ned had appeared and reported that Leslie was throwing up like crazy—had perhaps eaten a bad cream puff—and would Molly mind terribly looking after Oscar to keep him out of the way?

  Well, the cottage was small, and way smaller if one inhabitant was upchucking every fifteen minutes. Molly said yes.

  And in approximately three minutes, before she knew what had hit her, little Oscar was in her arms and she was smelling the sweet smell of his hair and squeezing a chubby thigh in one hand.

  “Not sure how I keep ending up with you,” she murmured to him. “But of course I’m very happy to see you.”

  “Mum,” said Oscar.

  “You like chocolate, don’t you?” She hitched Oscar higher on her hip and opened up the refrigerator and peered inside. “I’ve got cream. Cream makes everything better, have you learned that yet?”

  Oscar stuck his hand in her hair and yanked.

  “Yowch!” she said. “Whoa!” Molly moved out of the kitchen and put Oscar down on the sofa. “That really hurt. Don’t pull my hair.” Oscar looked at her uncertainly. “But look, I’ve got the best thing ever right here. Check this out.” She reached down to the woodbox and pulled out a stick and handed it to him.

  Oscar’s eyes lit up as though she had given him his heart’s desire. “Mum mum mum mum!” he said.

  “Right. I have a feeling Mum might not approve. Don’t eat it, okay?” She put him down and watched as he immediately put the stick in his mouth. “Okay, listen, we’re both going to get in trouble if you end up with a mouth full of splinters. Tell me this,” she said, wiggling the end of the stick to keep it out of his mouth, “how am I supposed to get ready for this dinner party if you’re going to be munching sticks the minute my back is turned?”

  Oscar smiled at her. Molly felt a kind of melting happiness surge up in her body that she wasn’t used to. She leaned over and kissed the top of his head, picked him up, and went to find the scarf she used for a sling the day before. Distracting him with another chocolate bell, she managed to get him strapped onto her back with minimal complaint, and went back in the kitchen.

  The presence of Oscar somehow allowed her to stop dilly-dallying over dessert, and she decided to make a coeur à la crème, which had the advantage of requiring a special mold that she would need to go into the village to buy. She had given enough dinner parties to know that shopping for kitchen equipment on the day of wasn’t the best idea, but it would give her an excuse to go into the village for the second time that day, and this time maybe she could get someone to talk about Valerie.

  Plus she had a secret desire to have a kitchen so well outfitted it could make meals for the President of France, so it was the perfect two birds with one stone situation.

  7

  The dinner went better than she expected. Ben had come a little early and brought some asparagus from Rémy, and the resulting soup was absolute perfection, like putting a spoonful of delicate springtime in your mouth. Frances had managed not to spill anything important, and Molly was highly amused to see Nico watching everything Frances did with an utterly besotted expression.

  “It’s good to have you back, Larry,” Nico was saying, although his eyes were on Frances. “Chez Papa has definitely not been the same without you.”

  “I expected Molly to hold the fort until I got back. I am shocked and disappointed to hear that was not the case.”

  “Oh, I did my best,” she answered, bringing a pot of coffee to the table. “But deep down, I’m really a placid sort of person—”

  The whole table guffawed at that. “Yup, that’s you, Molls. Tranquil as a cow, just happy to chomp a little grass.”

  “Well, maybe ‘placid’ wasn’t the right word. Anyway, I’m glad you’re back, too, Lawrence. To long vacations! And coming home!” she said, raising her glass of red from the Sallière vineyard just outside the village. “And now I’ve got what I hope is a stunning dessert.” She went back to the kitchen and took the coeur à la crème from the counter. A mixture of goat cheese, cream cheese, honey, and cream—shaped like a heart thanks to the ridiculously expensive mold she had bought that morning—and surrounded by a sauce of strawberries and vanilla. With a soupçon of peppercorns, cinnamon and cloves tossed in just to make things interesting.

  “That,” said Frances, “looks amazing. Out of my way, people!” She stood up and waved her fork around.

  “All right, old timers of Castillac,” said Molly, as she passed out dessert plates. She was hoping her guests would be so involved with dessert they didn’t notice the awkward transition, or sense her intense interest in what she was about to bring up. “I’ve been wondering about Valerie Boutillier. I know, it happened ages ago, but you know I’m a gal who likes to dig in to a mystery. And what could be more mysterious than a popular, clever girl disappearing without a trace?”

  Dufort shot her a glance and then a sly smile when no one else was looking; they had not told anyone about their plans to investigate. And Molly had been right about the coeur à la crème: Nico and Lawrence were digging in with rapturous expressions and apparently enjoying the dessert so much it made them deaf. Molly ate a spoonful of the delicious cheese and struggled to be patient. Finally Lawrence took the bait.

  “Valerie Boutillier. Hmm. That all happened not long after I moved to Castillac,” said Lawrence. “How long ago, eight or nine years, was it?”

  “Seven,” Molly said quickly.

  Nico said nothing. Molly saw him reach for Frances’s hand underneath the table.

  “And so?” Molly said, trying to sound nonchalant. “What do you remember, Lawrence?”

  “Not a whole lot, I’m afraid. She was apparently quite a firecracker. People liked her. A bit of a troublemaker, but not in an annoying way.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Oh, I can’t remember now.” He ate some of the strawberry sauce and closed his eyes, savoring it.

  “Ben, you got anything?” Molly asked. They wanted to maintain their privacy, but it would look odd not to ask the chief investigator to comment.

  Dufort sighed. “The case was one of my biggest failures. And one of the reasons I quit the gendarmerie.” He had drunk more wine than usual, and the effect was that he said things that normally he would have kept to himself.

  “Can’t win ’em all,” said Frances.

  “But I want to,” said Dufort, with a hard sort of smile.

  “Nico?” prodded Molly. “Anything?”

  Nico slowly dragged his gaze from Frances. “I was in school, in the U.S, when Valerie disappeared. I did know her though. She was younger than me by a few years, but she was the sort of girl who had older friends. Younger ones too, for that matter. Anyway.” He ate more dessert and then smiled at Frances.

  This was getting annoying. “Well come on, what are your guesses, then? What do you think happened to her?”

  “She’s not a parlor game, Molly,” Ben said in a low voice.

  “Of course not,” she said, almost snapping at him. “I’m just curious about how people deal with something like this. What kind of explanations do they come up with, so that they can live with the unexplainable and possibly incomprehensible?”

  “Is it totally impossible that she just ran away?” asked Frances. “She was eighteen, right? I’m sure when I was that age, I wanted to get lost. That whole adulthood thing wasn’t looking so good to be honest. Bills, work, all that studying….”

  “Not totally impossible, no,” said Dufort. “But we were not able to find a single indication that she felt that way, Frances. She had been a bit wild, but it was more pulling pranks than rebelling out of dissatisfaction or unhappiness. She was very interested in journalism and some of her teachers told me she couldn’t wait to start nosing around where she didn’t belong so she could uncover corruption and bad behavior on the part of the rich and powerful.”

  “Now that could get you killed,” said Nico, finally alert to something besides Frances. “I completely believe some corpor
ations kill people who threaten them too much. But I guess that wouldn’t apply in this case—Valerie might have ended up making some powerful enemies, but she hadn’t even started her career yet.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” said Molly.

  Everyone at the table startled when a cry pierced the air.

  “Oscar!” said Molly, jumping up and running to her bedroom, where she had made a makeshift bed for him by putting boxes around some bedding on the floor, trapping him in so he couldn’t crawl into any mischief. He was sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

  “Are you wondering where everybody is?” Molly said to him, her voice soft. “I’m just in the next room, having dinner with some friends. Your Mum and Dad are back in the cottage and will be here soon. Can you go back to sleep? Do you need a fresh diaper?”

  Oscar raised his fat arms up and made fussy noises.

  “All right,” said Molly, feeling that melty happiness again. She reached down and lifted him into her arms, holding his small body close. “I don’t have a rocking chair, I’m afraid. I’ll have to get right on that.” Instead of rocking the boy, she walked back and forth in her bedroom, singing gently, old nursery rhymes and snatches of songs she half-remembered from childhood. He continued to fuss and she kept walking, and before long she felt his body start to relax, and his head dropped to her chest.

  She loved this little Australian child. Just two days of being around him and Molly felt as though his safety and well-being and happiness were more important to her than anything. But the joy she felt holding him—she couldn’t help wondering—how did mothers stand the possibility of something terrible happening? Your popular daughter just disappearing one day, without a trace? How do the mothers bear it?

  Spending an evening with her friends around the table, eating wonderful food and drinking good (and cheap) wine—that was one of the deep pleasures of life. And so was this time with Oscar, holding him and rocking him in her arms as his little body let go and sailed into sleep.

  Molly let go too, and she wept. Her tears bounced off Oscar’s head and onto his playsuit. And then he was asleep and she laid him down on the makeshift bed and crept out of the room, glancing back to make sure he stayed asleep before returning to her guests.

  * * *

  Molly was a moderate drinker, except on the rare occasions when she let herself get swept up into a festive mood and ended up drinking something like Lawrence’s lethal Negronis. At dinner parties, she didn’t get drunk, or even tipsy, usually…but still, over the long course of the evening, she had ended up drinking enough wine that the next morning she felt a little foggy.

  The night had ended late. After the coeur à la crème, she had made coffee, and then they polished off her cognac while arguing about politics, and it was nearly 2 a.m. when they said their goodbyes.

  Molly was not about to clean up at 2 a.m., but of course that meant that when she staggered into the kitchen the next morning intent on making coffee, the destruction of the party was there to greet her.

  “Oh my,” she said, reaching for the can of coffee beans. She washed a few pots while waiting for the coffee to drip through, added a big splash of cream, and went out to the terrace. It was shady that early, being on the north side of the house, and too chilly, but Molly didn’t feel like going inside to find a sweater and so sat on the edge of the metal chair shivering and enjoying the cool spring morning.

  “Molly!”

  It was Ned. He had come to collect Oscar around midnight, saying that Leslie was finally asleep and the worst appeared to be over.

  “On the terrace!” she answered, and Ned came around the side of the house, holding a cup of coffee.

  “Bonjour!” he said. “Thanks again for keeping Oscar last night.”

  “I hope Leslie is doing better?”

  “Oh yes, she’s fit and ready to go. Nothing keeps her down for long. Say, we’re loving the Dordogne so much. Never been here before and there’s just so much to do.”

  Molly nodded and sipped her coffee. Was he about to ask her to watch Oscar again? She hoped so.

  “Anyway, we’d like to stay longer, if we could. I know you’ve probably got bookings and everything, but I jut thought I’d ask. Or maybe you know of another place we could stay? Though I’d be sad to leave La Baraque,” he said with a smile.

  “Well, I do have someone coming. The day you leave actually, so there’s no space for even an extra day.”

  “Ah. Well then.”

  “But listen. The new guest is a single, and I have plenty of room in my house. Let me email him to ask if that suits him—I can lower his rate since he wouldn’t be getting his own cottage—and I’ll let you know when I hear from him?”

  “That’s awesome, Molly, thanks!” They chatted about which local castles to see, and where to get the best ice cream, and then Ned went back to the cottage. Molly considered going with him so she could say good morning to Oscar, but instead neglected the kitchen clean-up to wander through the garden.

  She had expected surprises when spring came, and she was not disappointed. Clumps of daffodils popped up next to the front door and along the stone wall that bordered rue des Chênes. Snowdrops had appeared in February under some viburnums in the yard. And now she spotted tulips coming up beside the wall of the potager. It was like little pieces of the people who had lived at La Baraque were still there, sprouting up in springtime, even though of course Molly couldn’t know why they had chosen the color of tulip, or snowdrops over crocus, or that particular cultivar of daffodil.

  But she felt as though she was getting to know those former inhabitants, very slowly, as their flowers showed up in spring and she uncovered the beautiful tiles in the potager.

  8

  Monday morning dawned sunny and bright. Molly took her camera over to the newly-furnished pigeonnier to take some photos for her website before the light got too harsh. Bobo bounded along at her side holding a stick in her mouth, hoping for a little tug-of-war, but Molly was thinking about the photos and didn’t take the hint.

  Wiping her feet on the new doormat, Molly looked around the bottom floor, pleased at how appealing it looked. Ridiculously cozy and comfortable. Unusual sunbeams coming through the tiny windows Pierre Gault had made. He was an artist, really—his mark was on the place and the feeling he had created was all good: original, but not for novelty’s sake, and stylish without trying too hard.

  She ran her hand over the smooth plaster wall, pleased that the old mortar would not be weeping dust all day and night and forcing Constance to clean more often and then Molly to clean up after Constance. Lifting the camera to her eye, she started snapping pictures, getting the sunbeams, the polished wood, the pretty jug she’d found at the flea market. And upstairs, the old carved bed with luxurious bedding—a real splurge—with more sunbeams and the rows of little plaster-lined nest-boxes.

  She was planning to charge a lot for it. Even though she hadn’t gone anywhere or bought anything remotely extravagant, her expenses were higher than she liked. She was just barely breaking even this month—although since the Australians were staying longer, that might be enough to push her accounts more comfortably into the black.

  So what kind of stories will play out here, she wondered. Will a couple have the final fight from which there’s no reconciling? Will someone propose? Have an idea that will change her life?

  Or even—because Molly was a little bit stuck on the idea—plot a murder?

  She closed the door and locked it, even though she gathered that door-locking wasn’t quite the custom in Castillac. But she knew herself as a teenager, and thought the pigeonnier would have made the most awesome hideout from parents imaginable for doing all those teenage things parents don’t want them to do. And then she hurried back to the house to get the photos online, hoping for a quick couple of bookings.

  Bobo flew along beside her in the meadow and then with a yip disappeared into the forest after something Molly couldn’t see.

  She wondered wh
y she had not heard from Ben since the dinner party—shouldn’t they be making plans, going over evidence, something? Because although she was able to take care of her daily tasks, make meals, and run her business, she was always thinking about Valerie in the back of her mind. But so far, there was not much concrete to think about.

  A note on a door was all they had.

  * * *

  Not wanting to be overheard, Molly and Ben decided to have their first unofficial meeting about Valerie Boutillier at La Baraque. Molly had of course laid in a supply of pastry and made some strong coffee. Ben brought her a bag of spinach from Rémy and the Boutillier file Thérèse Perrault had passed to him on the sly. Without wasting a moment, they went out to the terrace and set to work.

  “First, I’d like to say that I don’t want to be acting like a gendarme, now that I’m no longer in uniform,” said Ben. “What I mean is, I don’t want you to think you’re my subordinate, or that I’m going to be insisting on any protocol out of the gendarmerie.”

  “Ha! Well, that’s a relief, because no doubt I’d drive you crazy,” Molly said, grinning. She reached for a croissant aux amandes and noticed she had a big muddy paw-print on her shirt.

  “I have been doing some thinking about how to handle our investigation though. Let me lay it out and then tell me what you think.”

  Molly nodded and sipped her coffee.

  “Setting aside the note for the moment, there are only three possibilities I believe for what happened. Number one, Valerie left the village, willingly or not, and is living somewhere else, freely or not.” Ben laughed. “I see already I have more than three possibilities and I have just begun. Bon.