The Prisoner of Castillac (Molly Sutton Mysteries Book 3)

by Nell Goddin

  No one home. No one home anymore.

  It was dark and she lay on the filthy mattress squinting up at a tiny crack of light that had recently appeared between two of the logs that formed part of the ceiling. It was not enough of a crack to give her ideas about enlarging it and somehow making an escape, because she no longer thought of escape. It was a concept that had gotten away from her. It wasn’t that she didn’t think it was possible, it was that escape, the idea, did not exist anymore.

  He barely came now. He would open the door and push in a bowl of lentils and a jug of milk, he would take out the bucket that served as a toilet and empty it, then bring it back. But he no longer talked, not like he used to.

  He avoided looking her in the eye.

  It was bad before, unimaginably horrible. She was not suited for captivity, not that anyone is. She spent almost all of her time underground, in a root cellar he had made over many months, dug into a slope next to the barn. And all of that time, the long days—it was endless. Her old life, her old self, just a fleeting dream.

  It was bad before, but now, with him not talking to her anymore and not looking her in the eye—now it was worse. Valerie felt herself beginning to lose any hold she still had on what was real; the hold was already frayed, already tenuous, and now it threatened to snap altogether. But Valerie was not afraid. It was as though over the years the fear had been so profound and so constant that it had worn itself out.

  La li la, la li lo.

  She sang to herself as though she were a baby that she was taking care of. La li la. Her voice was rough and cracked, as were her her lips, and the skin on her hands and behind her knees.

  Sometimes the man still opened the door wide and let her come out into the sunshine. He would tie a rope around her waist and around his own waist, and walk around the back field with her, out of sight of the road. In the beginning, he had tied her legs together so that she could only walk with short steps, but eventually he had trusted that she would not run. And he had been correct, because eventually the hope that would have fueled her running had been all but extinguished. She believed that her friends and her family had forsaken her. Stopped looking, left her to stay in the root cellar with this man forever.

  Forever is a long time for anywhere, but even longer, unsurprisingly, trapped underground, in the dark, alone.

  12

  At the farm next door to Achille Labiche’s, nine-year-old Gilbert wished for his mother to hurry up and finish dinner, but oh, she was so very slow about everything. So methodical, so plodding. He felt as though he might burst into flames from impatience.

  “Maman, is there anything outside you’d like to me do to before I start my homework?” he asked, thinking that even doing chores would be an improvement over sitting at the table for one more minute.

  Madame Renaud tilted her head. Then she pushed some peas onto her knife and ate them, chewing slowly. She took a sip of wine. “Gilbert, you know I don’t like you going outside at night. Do you want to be snatched up like poor Valerie Boutillier?”

  Gilbert jerked his head up, and then looked down at his plate. Before today, he would have moaned inwardly at his mother’s fears, sick of hearing her endless warnings about something that had happened practically before he was born. Madame Renaud had pinned some of her boundless anxieties onto the Boutillier case—a newspaper clipping, now seven years old, was taped on the refrigerator, so that Gilbert had grown up looking into the missing girl’s cheerful face—and when her mother mentioned Valerie, it was always in order to prevent him from doing something he wanted to do.

  You mustn’t go out after dark. You cannot go to the market without me. You must be aware, Gilbert, of people around you and the horrible things they might be capable of.

  But despite his mother’s anxieties, Gilbert was not a scared child but rather fearless, wanting to be out in the world exploring instead of cooped up inside the farmhouse. And while Gilbert loved his mother, he resented her nervousness, and thought of Valerie as someone more mythical than real, like a character from a fairy tale.

  But that was before last Sunday.

  What had happened was: Gilbert was an avid reader, and he had read an article in the local paper about how the price of truffles was expected to go through the roof next season. He was alert to the mention of anything that he might be able to do to make some money, since he and his mother had little of it, and there were plenty of things he desperately wanted: a microscope and a remote-control helicopter were on his list that particular week. The article on truffles got him thinking about the oak trees on the back of their property. He wondered whether there might just be a treasure there, hiding in the leaves, if only he could figure out a way to find the precious little nuggets.

  Dogs are almost universally used to find truffles these days, and Gilbert knew this. And he also knew that a dog would need special training—he couldn’t simply borrow a friend’s pet for an afternoon and expect it to find truffles right away. He figured the old-fashioned way of truffle-hunting with a pig, would do the trick. A pig can smell the truffle and will want to eat it, so the trick is to let the pig find it and then jump in and snatch the truffle before the pig can gobble it up.

  Gilbert walked among the oaks for a few days, going there straight after school and daydreaming about presenting his mother with a stack of euros he had earned at the truffle market, and setting up his shiny new microscope on the kitchen table. He only needed to borrow the neighbor’s hog and he would be in business. He understood that it was May, and truffle season was in winter, but figured that only gave him more months to collect them.

  The neighbor was a dairy farmer, a quiet sort of fellow, not very approachable. So Gilbert thought it over and decided that he would borrow the hog on the sly—just slip a rope around its neck, lead it to the oaks at the back of the property, and get rich.

  He was only nine years old. To his optimistic mind, the plan seemed solid.

  So on Sunday, he fed and watered the chickens and brought in the eggs, swept his room, and helped his mother in the garden for what felt like an endless hour, until finally she told him he could go and play. He put on a pair of green pants and a green T-shirt, thinking it approximated camouflage. He took off for the grove of oaks first, and then through a bit of woods to the edge of the Monsieur Labiche’s property.

  The neighbor and his mother got along well enough, though they managed this by having as little contact as possible. Madame Renaud thought Monsieur Labiche was difficult to talk to. For a few years they had traded eggs for milk, but that arrangement had ended over eight years ago when Madame Renaud’s husband died, since he had taken care of dealing with Labiche, and Madame Renaud did not want to, even though the trade was in her favor.

  Gilbert saw Labiche’s barn come into view though the trees. He crouched down as he made his way closer, stopping every now and then to listen, and hearing nothing but the sounds of springtime in the woods: birds making a racket, and the buzzing of insects, a random croak of a frog.

  Since he had never visited the neighbor’s farm, Gilbert wasn’t sure where the hogs were kept. He stood behind an oak and peered around it, lifting a branch to see under the new green foliage.

  He heard something…a woman singing. Gilbert was at the very edge of the woods and he lay down in the leaves, thinking someone was about to come around the side of the barn.

  And someone did. Two someones.

  Monsieur Labiche was walking ahead of a woman, and they were tied together at the waist. She was very thin, and Gilbert saw even from a distance that she was very pale.

  “But why do you not come anymore?” the woman cried out, her voice rasping like sandpaper. “I’m your Valerie! Look at me!”

  Gilbert did look. He wriggled forward in the leaves and squinted at the woman’s face. With awe, he saw without a doubt that she was Valerie Boutillier. He was looking right at her, her face having the same blurry quality as the newspaper clipping he had grown up with.

 
The woman who had been missing for seven years was not lost—she was living right next door.

  Gilbert was a clever boy. He noticed the rope, and even though she had said I’m your Valerie, he did not forget the rope, or misunderstand what it was for.

  * * *

  Achille rinsed out the can that had contained his early lunch and put it in the garbage under the sink. He considered lying down for a nap. But then, with an unusual burst of confidence—or maybe it was simply giving way to the inevitable—he went outside and started up the tractor and turned left on the road towards Salliac.

  It’s gotten stale.

  The village was six kilometers away and the tractor was slow. Luckily there was no traffic so he was spared having to decide whether to pull over and let someone by. Achille had plenty of time to change his mind, and knowing that was helpful to him. It was as though he could put himself on the road towards the small village but tell himself he had not yet committed to going, even as he got closer and closer.

  Salliac had four streets that criss-crossed each other at either end. Achille parked his tractor on the wide shoulder just before the streets joined up, and walked towards the center. It was market day, though if he remembered correctly, that did not amount to much in Salliac, and he did not expect much activity.

  And in fact, there were only a handful of vendors. A rosy-cheeked woman was there with a display of vegetables that had not been locally grown, Achille noticed right away. He walked hurriedly by, trying to hide himself behind a few of the sparse customers. Next he saw an older woman, about the age his mother would be if she were alive, selling homemade cannelés.

  Achille loved cannelés, and they reminded him of his mother since she had once made them for him. They were an odd sort of cake, almost a cross between cake and custard, baked in fluted molds with a caramelized and slightly waxy crust. He closed his eyes for a moment, savoring the memory of his mother’s allowing him to eat several when they were warm from the oven, and he could practically taste the vanilla and exotic flavoring of rum.

  He flicked his eyes at the old woman, trying to see if she was approachable. She looked almost asleep, her face turned up to the sun, her eyes half-closed.

  That could be a good sign. Or she could be like a snake, poised to strike.

  Then he looked at the cannelés again, and his hunger for a taste of his childhood overcame his resistance. “Bonjour, Madame,” he said, his voice surprising him by sounding confident. “May I have six?”

  She opened her eyes, nodding, and slowly collected six of the cakes into a small paper bag while Achille dug into his pocket for some money.

  “Merci, Madame,” he said, the manners taught him by his parents coming automatically, as though a button had been pushed.

  He walked away, thinking that his father would have wanted him to take the cannelés home and eat them after a meal. But with effort Achille pushed that thought away and looked for some privacy in which to enjoy his treat. And then, in an unexpected moment when all he wasn’t even looking, he saw her: a teenage girl, standing next to a bike, chatting on a mobile phone.

  Achille stood rooted to the spot, his eyes on her. The girl was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and some high-top sneakers that looked strange to Achille since he was hardly up on the latest fashion trends. He walked a few steps closer, reaching into the paper bag and eating a cannelé without realizing it. He stood chewing and watching, but the girl was focused on her phone conversation and did not notice him.

  He saw the way her shirt was wrinkled around the bottom as though she had picked it out of a laundry basket to wear instead of from a bureau drawer with neatly folded items. It was dark red with something written on it that Achille could not make out. He saw her greenish eyes widen and then almost close as she threw her head back laughing.

  Finally she said goodbye and slipped the phone into her knapsack. Achille walked nearer, standing up tall, looking more assured than at any other moment since getting off his tractor at the edge of the village.

  She was a lovely girl. Fresh-faced and not yet old enough to think being jaded was attractive. A scattering of freckles across her nose, and light brown hair tumbling down to her shoulders. He could see something in her expression that drew him in; he could tell she was trying to look brave when she did not feel that way. It was Monday, right around lunchtime, and doubtless she should have been in school.

  When he offered her a cannelé, she smiled and said thank you.

  “Let me guess your name,” said Achille with a shy smile.

  The girl laughed and shook her head as he ran through all the girl’s names he could think of. Achille was laughing too and hiding his frustration at not being able to guess.

  “I’m Aimée,” she said finally, and Achille beamed at her, because her name was perfection itself: Loved.

  Achille prided himself on having an exquisite sense of timing. So before any of the people at the market noticed him talking to her, he smiled and said goodbye, and was rewarded with a big grin, which he thought about during the whole trip home.

  The beginning…the beginning was the best part, and he hoped to prolong it as long as he possibly could.

  Loved.

  Yes.

  13

  Gilbert had tried to think it all through before he took action. After he saw Valerie, his first thought was to tear home and tell his mother, so she could call the gendarmes immediately.

  But as he ran home through the field he hesitated. His mother thought he was a daydreamer, always lost in the world of a book. She continually told him his head was full of cotton and outlandish ideas. She would accuse him of reading too many detective novels and fancying himself Inspector Maigret or some such.

  It made Gilbert sad to realize it, but his mother was not someone he could go to and be believed.

  All right, he had said to himself, I need to make a Plan B. And quickly he had come up with the idea of leaving an anonymous note for the gendarmes. It was only luck that his mother had needed to drive into Castillac later that day and allowed him to come with her, and even more luck that he had managed to get away from her long enough to sprint down the street to the station, the note carefully folded in his jacket pocket. And luck beyond all imagining that when he stood at the door and looked around, there was no one nearby, no one watching—and he could affix the tape to the green door and walk nonchalantly away, his heart pounding.

  He had been tempted to go in and talk to the gendarmes himself. Perhaps if Chief Dufort had still been there, he would have. But the new man who was in charge—whenever Gilbert had seen him, he was glowering and looked unfriendly. The kind of grown-up you wanted to avoid, not go to with any sort of problem.

  No, it was better to deliver the big news anonymously. It was the only way the grown-ups would listen.

  On the way home, Gilbert had realized with horror that despite enjoying what had seemed like all the luck in the world, he had done something really, really dumb: he had failed to say in the note where Valerie was.

  That was last Monday, over a week ago. Another whole week that Valerie had to live tied up, with her family and friends probably thinking she was dead. He didn’t know how he could have been such a complete idiot. The whole point of the note was to alert the gendarmes that Valerie was actually still alive so they could save her! But he had gotten so carried away with the process of finding the right letters and cutting them out of the newspaper and gluing them—all without his mother discovering what he was doing—that he had left out the most important piece of information. Part of the trouble was that once he had the idea of cutting out letters rather than simply writing the note with a pencil, he got committed to doing it that way, even though all he could find to use was a four-page local newspaper his mother sometimes picked up for free at the supermarket.

  There hadn’t been enough headlines for him to spell Valerie’s whole name, or even just “Valerie”, so he had compromised by putting her initials, just glad that he had managed to f
ind a “V” and a “B”.

  If he had written the note, he told himself, everyone would have thought it was just a kid’s prank. That angry-looking gendarme would have balled it up and tossed it in the trash.

  But now, stuck on the farm away from the village, with no resources—how could he correct his error?

  He considered calling the station and leaving a message, deepening his voice as much as possible, maybe putting something over the receiver to make his voice sound funny. But again—they’ll think I’m just a kid fooling around. He considered trying to copy a grown-up’s handwriting, but his own handwriting was so horrible—by far his worst marks in school—that he gave up that idea quickly.

  Not for the first time, Gilbert wished for his father. If he was sure of anything at all, it was that his father would be someone he could tell something like this, and he would know exactly what to do. He had a quick flash of riding on his father’s shoulders and watching a parade, with Valerie riding on a float and waving to everyone, and the whole village cheering.

  All he could think to do was make another note and tell the gendarmes that way. But he wasn’t so lucky this time around. His mother did not bring home the newspaper. She made no mention of needing to go into the village for anything—and if he had ridden his bicycle, the trouble he would be in would be so terrible he wasn’t sure he would ever come out the other side.

  So here it was the second week, and he had no way to make the note, no way to deliver the note, and no idea what to do next.

  * * *

  Now that the new guest, a Mr. Wesley Addison from Cincinnati, was due to arrive, Molly wondered if she had made a mistake. The Australians were staying an extra week, and she was thrilled about that since she dreaded having to say goodbye to little Oscar. They were all settled in the cottage, and when Addison’s arrival was over a week away, it had seemed the easiest thing simply to move him into her house and leave Ned and Leslie where they were.