The Prisoner of Castillac (Molly Sutton Mysteries Book 3)

by Nell Goddin

  “The second is that she was killed not long after the abduction, and the body is still hidden somewhere locally. And the third is that whoever took her still has her, holding her prisoner all this time. Which honestly—it’s hard for me to believe that’s what happened.”

  “Or maybe just hard to stomach. Those kinds of cases do come up. I was just reading about one in Los Angeles—”

  “I know cases exist, Molly,” said Dufort quietly. “Though my brain seems to revolt against the idea. Which is exactly why I wasn’t much of a detective.”

  Molly gave Dufort a long look. She decided he was not speaking from self-pity but from trying to be objective about himself, although she thought he blamed himself for things that were not his fault. “You know, nobody gets it right all the time.”

  Dufort nodded and drank his coffee.

  “All right,” said Molly. “Three possibilities altogether, or three-plus. But if we bring the note to bear on those possibilities, it seems to me like number three—that she’s being held captive somewhere around here—is the most likely.”

  “Unfortunately, the most likely is that she was killed soon after being taken. It’s the high percentage outcome. But as you say, that means the note is a fake, or a joke.”

  “And—correct me since I have no idea what I’m talking about—but it would seem like, if Valerie got taken and killed right away—if the criminal is local, why did he stop with Valerie, you know?”

  “Could have been a tourist. Could have been someone who lives in the next département who travels around to do his evil business. Or it could have just been a one-off.”

  Molly nodded. “ That’s a lot of ‘could have’s.”

  “Yes. It was without doubt the most difficult case of my time at the gendarmerie. Much worse than the other unsolved case of Elizabeth Martin. Not because it was complicated but quite the opposite—I never had even the smallest shred of a lead. As you’ll see, the file is nearly empty. All we could do was interview her friends and family, look at her phone messages, her computer…there was not a single moment during the entire investigation when I thought, ‘aha! now we’re got something!’”

  “That must have been miserable.”

  Dufort’s face was stony. He just nodded, then reached down and petted Bobo’s speckled head.

  “But now we have the note!” said Molly.

  “Yes. I admit I felt almost gleeful when you told me about it the other day. Since then, less so. Perhaps I’m just reluctant to get my hopes up. But hopes are beside the point, really—I’m willing to work together and do whatever we can think of to find out whether Valerie is still alive.”

  “I’m totally in,” said Molly, finishing the last of her croissant, the wonderful tip that was a little bit dry and crunchy, but in a delicious, buttery way. “Obviously I don’t know how they do things at the gendarmerie, but how about this. We work together, but you concentrate on what you say is the most likely scenario—that she was killed quickly and her body is still somewhere nearby. And I concentrate on finding out who wrote the note and who might be keeping her captive.”

  Dufort considered. “Works for me. I might be able to borrow a cadaver dog from a friend in Toulouse. He’s in the gendarmerie there and has developed quite a kennel of dogs trained in police work.”

  “Will they let you have one if you’re not in the gendarmerie anymore?”

  Dufort smiled. “Well, one of the benefits of no longer being on the force is that I can break some rules. My friend is sort of a secret renegade,” he said, chuckling. “I think he’ll be able to sneak me a dog—and enjoy himself mightily.”

  “I just…if there’s a body? I want you to find it, not me,” said Molly.

  “Got it,” said Dufort. They shook hands, and grinned at each other, filled with the pleasure of a shared mission and with optimism, at least for the moment.

  9

  It’s gotten stale.

  That’s the sentence that kept going through Achille’s mind all day as he did the milking, lifted hay-bales onto the tractor trailer and drove into the front field, and ate his solitary lunch in the farmhouse kitchen. The small windows had not been cleaned since his father died, and the spring light did not penetrate beyond a vague glow. Achille was frugal and avoided using electricity if it could possibly be avoided, so he ate his lunch by candlelight.

  The candle was made of tallow. He had to butcher his girls once they got too old, but he did his best to make use of everything he could. He rendered the tallow and then poured it into a glass jar with a piece of waxed string for a wick. The flame cast a flickering light in the drafty room.

  It’s gotten stale.

  Maybe he should attempt a trip to Castillac. Or Salliac, the village in the other direction. Salliac was smaller, and Achille considered whether that was better or worse. Better because not crowded. But worse because he might stand out, might attract dreaded attention. It had been months since his last try out in public, which had not gone well.

  Even though he did not yet know what he was going to do, there was no doubt he was going to do something. That’s how it always was. He would begin to hear a sentence in his head, over and over, and the words would not let him alone. The pressure would build and build until he took action. It was the rhythm of life for Achille and had been that way ever since he could remember.

  When he was quite young, perhaps six years old? Squatting by the pond in the west field. He had watched the tadpoles hatch out of the egg masses along the bank, and then seen them develop over days into tiny frogs. It was spring and he was in school, so every day when he got home he would run down to the pond to see their progress. In his head, over and over like the refrain of a song, he heard “take the frog.” Take the frog. Take the frog. The phrase beat itself into him, drumming insistently, so that finally he had stolen a jar from the kitchen, driven a nail through the lid several times so the little thing would be able to breathe, and gone down to the pond when his parents were busy with other things.

  Catching one of the baby frogs was easy enough. He hid the jar in his room, bringing it out only after going to bed at night, and talking softly to the tiny creature. He didn’t hide it because he thought his parents would object to his having a pet—it was that he liked the secret. Liked having the baby frog all to himself.

  When it looked sick the next day, Achille was heartbroken, partly because he realized it was his own fault for failing to give it proper food. He had changed the water in the jar and given the frog a stick to climb on, but somehow in his fascination with his secret he had forgotten that the animal needed to eat. So once again he waited until his parents were occupied, and then took the jar to the pond and let the little frog go.

  He had missed it, sometimes painfully so. But he no longer heard take the frog every waking moment, which was at least some compensation.

  * * *

  His legs were so plump that she couldn’t help giving them a squeeze now and then as though she were a very particular shopper looking for exactly the right chicken for Sunday dinner. Oscar was once again wrapped in her scarf-sling, bumping against her as Molly walked into the village. Ned and Leslie hadn’t come knocking on her door this time; Molly had simply missed the little boy and asked if she could have his company while she ran a few errands.

  Oscar had clapped his hands and beamed at her, and her heart swelled even more than before. She even had fantasies—ridiculously morbid fantasies, she knew very well—that Ned and Leslie died in a car crash and they had no family whatsoever and it turned out she got to keep Oscar and raise him.

  She knew she was being silly, and she didn’t actually want that to happen. But more for Oscar’s sake than Ned and Leslie’s, if she was entirely honest.

  Now what did I come into the village for, she thought. I need a couple of potatoes from the épicerie, and a light bulb. I wonder when the strawberries will come in? And the big question: could Valerie be hidden right in the village somewhere?

  And if
she is, how am I going to get inside people’s houses to find her?

  She got the potatoes, greeting the woman at the épicerie but as usual avoiding any other conversation because Molly couldn’t understand her accent. She introduced Oscar to a few people that she knew to say bonjour to, and he babbled charmingly at them, leaving everyone smiling.

  Molly stood on the sidewalk in front of the épicerie, looking around at the houses on the street. Many of the ground floor spaces were shops, with apartments on upper floors. No way could anyone be hidden for seven years in a building like that, she reasoned. No way to keep Valerie from screaming, or banging on the floor or the walls.

  So making that assumption narrowed her search at least a little. She would focus on free-standing houses. And probably the bigger the lot they were on, the easier it would be to hide someone. It was time to pay her friend at the mairie a visit—there must be maps showing all the houses in and around Castillac, and she supposed until she had a better idea, she could begin somehow checking them out one by one.

  Somehow, indeed. Castillac was not huge, around four thousand people, but that was still a daunting number of habitations to get through. Even if half of those four thousand lived with someone else, and a quarter of those lived in apartments, that was still fifteen hundred houses to inspect. That would take years.

  Not to mention—just how exactly did she think she was going to get inside these houses? And even once inside, she couldn’t run around looking for trap doors and hidden compartments behind trick bookshelves without people thinking she’d lost her mind. She started home, walking slowly.

  “Oscar, how am I going to pull this off?” she murmured into his soft hair. He beat his little feet against her belly, his eyes half-closed.

  Molly stopped short. Parked on the sidewalk (probably illegally) was a scooter. The swankiest, most delicious scooter Molly had ever seen. Its lines swooped and curved, the paint almost glowed, even the instrument panel was adorable. “I want that,” she said to Oscar, and he opened his eyes and kicked harder.

  I can’t afford it, she told herself. But…

  She checked the beautiful machine out more closely, getting the make and model, then glanced around the street to see if anyone was headed towards it. She wanted to know where such things were for sale, and how much they cost. Because dammit, if she couldn’t have a baby, she was going to have a scooter. And that was that.

  10

  That night Molly was at loose ends. With Constance’s help, she had prepared a room upstairs in her house for the new guest who had agreed to take the upstairs room—she called it the “haunted room” although nothing had ever happened to make it deserve the name. It was a small room with a low ceiling and something about it gave her the creeps, so the name had stuck. Probably it was nothing more than the faded wallpaper, which was vaguely pink in a pattern of roses. She remembered wallpaper like that in a scary movie she had seen as an eleven or twelve year old, in which an old lady had been murdered by a handsome stranger to whom she rented a room.

  Maybe, now that she thought about it, running a gîte business as a single woman wasn’t the best idea she ever had? Why hadn’t she remembered that movie before now?

  But Molly brushed that worry off, knowing that despite the small risk of renting to a very bad egg, the business suited her perfectly. She had liked every single one of her guests; some of them she had no doubt would keep up contact, and return to visit for years to come. She put away the cleaning supplies, took a shower, and walked to Chez Papa, picturing how stylish she was going to be when she cruised in on her new scooter.

  “Should I get red, or maybe a snazzy green?” she asked Lawrence, once she was on her stool at the bar with a kir on the way.

  Lawrence sipped his Negroni. “How about black? You can never go wrong with black.”

  “Too tasteful.”

  “Ah. Then perhaps the pink?”

  “There’s a pink?”

  “I would imagine you can get any color you want, if you want it badly enough. Its not like the scooter is very big. You could probably hire someone to paint it neon pink with glitter if that’s what you have in mind.”

  “Now that would be tacky,” said Molly, laughing. “Why’s Nico looking so morose?” she said, low enough that he wouldn’t be able to hear.

  “Trouble in paradise, apparently,” said Lawrence.

  “Uh oh. I was afraid of that. Have you seen Frances?”

  “Nico just told me she’s gone off to the coast with someone she met the day before. He looked inconsolable.”

  “Someone male or female?”

  “Female.”

  “Eh, he may not have anything to worry about. Though with Frances…she’s left a trail of romantic wreckage behind her since we were thirteen. You know I love her. But constant in love she is not.”

  Lawrence nodded. “I know the type.”

  “Your Moroccan Julio?”

  “Oui,” said Lawrence, and turned so that Molly could not see his face.

  Chez Papa was quiet for a moment. The sun was dropping towards dusk but sunlight still poured in through the plate-glass windows, so bright it made the place look dusty, and put an unflattering light on everyone’s faces. Then two men at the other end of the bar started arguing about politics, and a young woman came in holding a young boy on her hip, calling for Nico, and the rhythm of the restaurant picked back up.

  “I’m sorry,” Molly said to Lawrence, wishing she had something more useful to say.

  Lawrence turned back to her and shrugged. “So tell me, Miss Molly—don’t you have any interesting irons in the fire? Any curious deaths in the village this week? Any mysterious strangers come to town?”

  She smiled. “No, not that I’ve heard. I do have a question for you though, since you know everybody. The Dordogne was important for the Resistance, back in World War II, am I right?”

  “You are,” he said, interested in why she was asking.

  “I was wondering if there was anyone I could talk to about that—I mean, anyone who might have been around then?”

  “Have you met Madame Gervais? She’s 102, I believe, something like that. Lives on…what’s that street that has the shop with the lamps?”

  “Rue Baudelaire,” said Nico, as he walked over. “Another?”

  “By all means,” said Lawrence. “I love that lamp shop. I could buy lamps all day.”

  “Mme Gervais’s house is the teeny one right next door,” said Nico.

  “What’s got you all interested in history all of a sudden?” asked Lawrence, eyeing her closely.

  “Oh, nothing,” said Molly. “Nico, bring us some frites, will you? And a salad for me. Lawrence, did I tell you I’m having a guest stay in my house, since the Australians are staying longer?”

  “Is it so you can talk to your guests about the history of the region, is that what you’re after?”

  “Exactly,” said Molly, feeling slightly bad for not coming clean with Lawrence, but on the other hand, not quite sure how good he was at keeping anything under his hat. “Guests do like to know interesting stories about history, you know? And what’s more interesting than the Resistance?”

  Lawrence nodded and sipped his drink, but he was not fooled. She was up to something, but apparently he was not going to find out what just yet.

  * * *

  Molly walked once around the yard with Bobo before locking up and going to bed. She had wanted to dive into the Boutillier file the minute Dufort had left the day before, but then found herself delaying and finding other things to do, as though putting off the disappointment at facing how little they had to go on.

  Now it was time. She washed up and came to bed, telling Bobo firmly that her paws were muddy and she had to sleep on her own bed, which was a pile of moth-eaten blankets in the corner of the room. Molly climbed into bed and fluffed the pillows up behind her, opened the file, and began to read.

  First the transcript of an interview with Mme Boutillier. Painful to read
, as of course her agony was apparent in every word she said.

  Valerie was an excellent student and got top marks in her class.

  She was going to École Normale Supérieure, an extremely competitive university in Paris. Was beginning to pack for her departure, the date only two weeks after her disappearance. No boyfriend. Never a serious boyfriend. Had mostly hung out with a large group of schoolmates.

  Wanted to be an investigative reporter. Strong sense of social justice.

  Molly looked up and rubbed her eyes. It was just so wrong for this ambitious, vibrant young woman to be wiped away like this, disappeared, lost. It was an atrocity—small scale for the world, perhaps, but immense for her family and friends, and the village where she had grown up.

  Valerie was something of a tomboy, in jeans most of the time.

  She wore her light brown hair in a braid down her back.

  She was allergic to wool.

  Her favorite food was aligot. (Molly had to look this up. Aligot is a dish from Alsace, in which cheese, Cantal or Tomme, is slowly melted into mashed potatoes, creating a wonderfully comforting and delicious stretchy, cheesy, potatoey mess.)

  She wore a necklace with a charm in the shape of a star, which her brother had given her.

  On the day of her disappearance, Valerie had been wearing a green sweater, blue jeans, sneakers, and a checkered scarf made out of silk. Hair in a braid down her back, no ribbon; the star necklace around her neck.

  No rings, no bracelets, no coat. Her mother said she despaired of Valerie wearing coats when the weather got cold—she was always running around without one.

  She had no visible birthmarks, moles, warts, or scars.

  She liked pulling pranks. She laughed a lot.

  The last time her mother—or anyone else—had seen her was October 29, 1999.

  11

  La li lala lo.