by Nell Goddin
“Salut, Gilbert!” yelled another boy.
It was his schoolmate, François Bardon. Gilbert hadn’t thought in advance about running into any friends. “Can’t stop right now!” he called back, and sped up.
The street in front of the station was empty. Perfect. He let his bike clatter to the sidewalk and slipped off his backpack. His hands were shaking as he unzipped it and took out the math book. Laying it on the sidewalk, he got out the tape and tore off a piece, then another. He pulled the note from the book and taped it to the door. Looking around and seeing no one on the street, he used another piece of tape, and then another.
The feeling as he rode back through the village was indescribable. The guilt of having failed to tell the gendarmes where Valerie was had been so oppressive that he had barely felt a moment of joy since. But now he flew through the narrow streets with a huge grin on his face, taking his hands off the handlebars which would horrify Maman, his arms up over his head as though crossing the finish line at the Tour de France.
“Gilbert!”
He had forgotten about François. His intention had been not to stop for anything no matter what, but now that the note was safely taped to the door, he changed his mind. Maman would probably take forever at that friend’s, talking about knitting and the weather and all that other boring stuff. He wheeled over to the sidewalk.
“I thought you weren’t allowed to ride your bike to the village,” said François, who was desperately excited to tell Gilbert the news of how he found the dead body of Erwan Caradec right in back of his house, but delaying the pleasure as long as he could.
“I’m not allowed, so what,” said Gilbert, shrugging. François was so annoying.
“Guess what I found this morning before school.”
Gilbert shrugged again.
“A dead body. Right in back of our house, over there.” He pointed in the alley. “My father called the gendarmes and everything.”
Gilbert’s eyes widened in spite of himself. “A real dead body? Who was it?”
“Monsieur Caradec,” answered François, wishing it were someone more unexpected.
“Wow,” said Gilbert. “What did he look like?”
“He was all slumped down and his skin was gray. It was weird. I mean, I’ve seen Monsieur Caradec passed out a million times, but I could tell the second I saw him that this wasn’t like the other times.”
“Probably choked on his own puke,” said Gilbert.
François nodded, sorry that he couldn’t claim it had been murder.
The two boys stood without speaking, looking at the spot where Erwan had breathed his last. “Well,” Gilbert said finally, “I’ve got to get home. See ya later.” François nodded and went inside.
As Gilbert left the village, pedaling fast and swerving around cars, he forgot about François and Erwan and was suffused with the pleasure of having corrected a painful failure. The worry that his mother would find out he had been gone nagged at him, but manageably so.
It was only when he was almost home, when the skies opened up and rain came pouring down in buckets, that he gave any thought at all to the weather. Would the tape hold through a rainstorm like this? he wondered. And how could he possibly know, one way or the other?
This is horrible, Gilbert thought as he turned into the driveway of the farm, soaked to the skin, seeing the car already parked in front of the house.
Horrible.
* * *
“But who in the world would want to kill Erwan?” Perrault asked Maron as they sat in his office talking about their newest case.
Maron shrugged. “I don’t think Nagrand could be mistaken about a broken neck.”
“But couldn’t he have fallen and broken it that way?”
Maron sighed. “Not according to Nagrand. He says the neck was wrenched around with great force. Not at all what you would see in a fall. Plus the only falling Erwan could have done was from standing to lying down. He wasn’t near any steps, nothing like that. Nagrand was unequivocal.”
Perrault was wrestling with her usual conflicted feelings about the situation. Things had been awfully slow around Castillac for months, and she was privately thrilled to have a murder investigation to sink her teeth into. On the other hand, of course she would never have wished Erwan ill—he had enough problems without getting murdered to top them all off.
“All right then, Chief, now what?”
“Let’s start with the usual. We’ll canvass the neighborhood, see if anyone saw or heard anything.”
“I already talked to Madame Tessier. She’d spoken to Erwan on Saturday on her way back from the market, around eleven. Said he’d got a bottle of brandy and had put a pretty good dent in it. But he was alive, if not sober, when she left him.”
Maron furrowed his brow. “I was hoping Tessier might come through for us again. Bon, let’s get to it.”
Perrault jumped up and put on her slicker. The big rainstorm had passed but it was still sprinkling outside. “I’ll take west of rue Saterne?” she asked Maron.
Maron nodded. He thought Perrault a decent-enough officer, and got along with her better now that they weren’t both vying for Dufort’s attention. She would likely be reposted in the next few months, and he would miss her—which for Maron was high praise.
They left the station. Perrault was deep in thought, trying to come up with any reason why a person might want to kill a pathetic soul like Erwan Caradec. She reached down and picked up a soaking piece of paper on the street. She did not look at the side with the carefully arranged cut-out letters. The tape hadn’t held and the whole thing was a soggy mess, and thinking it was litter, she dropped it into a trashcan on her way to find someone to interview.
33
Molly rode her scooter up on the sidewalk outside Chez Papa, leaned it on its kickstand, and hurried inside.
“I laugh every time I see you on that thing, “ said Nico, drying a glass with a dishtowel.
“You’re just jealous,” said Molly. “And who wouldn’t be, she’s so gorgeous.”
“So are you, my dear,” said Lawrence, looking at home on his usual stool with a Negroni parked on the bar in front of him.
“Why, thank you,” said Molly, genuinely happy for a compliment. She had not been feeling tip-top of late, she and Ben having made zero progress on the Boutillier case. “Now what is this latest bit of gossip you have for me? It’s not like you to be so coy when you text me.”
“It’s not gossip, actually—it’s news. And since it happened a few days ago, you’ve probably already heard.” Toying with her, he paused for a long sip of Negroni.
“Kir?” asked Nico, already with crème de cassis in hand. Molly nodded.
“There’s been another murder in the village,” said Lawrence.
Molly gripped Lawrence’s arm. “What? Really? Who?”
“Erwan Caradec. You’ve seen him around the village, no doubt…most of the time drunk off his wrinkled old bottom?”
“You mean the guy who hangs out down by the Desrosiers mansion?”
“That’s the one. He was a fixture of the neighborhood. No place to live, and alcoholic, obviously. The neighbors looked out for him—gave him food, shelter when it got really cold, that sort of thing.”
“That’s kind of them,” said Molly distractedly. “Was he a bad drunk? Yelling, violent, anything like that?”
“No, I don’t believe so. Sometimes he would get worked up about politics and go up and down the block ranting about how the right wing was a bunch of proto-Nazis and should be run out of the country. But I don’t think he ever directed any of his ire at anyone here in the village, not that I ever heard about.”
“Are you sure he was murdered? How did you find this out?” asked Molly, always wondering about Lawrence’s sources.
“Definitely murder. Perrault and Maron spent yesterday afternoon going door-to-door, to see if anyone knows anything.”
“Nico, can we have two plates of frites?”
Nico
nodded and went around the corner into the kitchen. No one else was at Chez Papa that Tuesday, early in the evening. Molly got off her stool and paced back and forth.
“I do notice you come alive when someone dies,” said Lawrence drily.
“I’m just thinking,” said Molly. “It just seems so random, doesn’t it? A homeless guy—harmless—that everyone knows is killed, out of the blue? It doesn’t sound right.”
“Well no one would say there was anything right about it. I haven’t heard if Perrault and Maron have any leads.”
“But who would do something like that? What could the motive possibly have been?”
“Maybe there was no motive,” said Lawrence. “Maybe the murderer did it simply because he could.”
Molly shook her head. “Maybe in some places in the world, that would make some sense. But that kind of cold-blooded depravity, here in Castillac?”
“I do love the way you hold on to your fantasies. It’s a charming thing about you. But Molly, why would you imagine anyplace—including Castillac—to be magically free of sociopaths?”
“I didn’t say that,” she answered grouchily. “Or, I didn’t mean that, exactly. You know, supposedly the percentage of people who are sociopaths is higher than you might think, something like four per cent. It’s just that while most of them are incredibly difficult, they aren’t violent.”
“Duly noted,” said Lawrence, smiling as Nico returned with the frites. “You’ve utterly spoiled me, you know. I used to eat at proper mealtimes the way the French do, and now I’m stuffing in frites any time of the day or night, thanks to you.”
“Glad to be of service,” said Molly, plucking a scorching hot frite off the top of the glistening pile. “So Nico, how’s Frances? I barely see her anymore.”
“She’s got a screw loose,” said Nico, glowering.
“Uh oh,” laughed Molly.
The door opened behind them and the sweet smell of spring livened up the room. “Salut, Dufort,” said Lawrence.
“Salut Lawrence, Nico, Molly,” said Ben, then kissed Molly on both cheeks.
“So who could have killed Erwan Caradec?” Molly asked.
Ben stepped back and raised his palms in the air. “Whoa, Molly, you jump right to it, don’t you?”
“Lawrence just told me. What the hell? I mean, murder for a reason is one thing. But now random people are getting killed, here in Castillac? The place I thought was going to be all calm and serenity?”
Nico and Lawrence laughed. “Has it occurred to you yet that you don’t actually like those things all that much?” said Lawrence.
Molly shot him a look. “Seriously, guys. Just give me one halfway believable motive and I’ll shut up about it.”
No one said anything.
“How was he killed?” she asked.
“Neck broken,” said Ben.
No one said anything. Lawrence bowed his head.
Ben asked Nico for a glass of whiskey. When he leaned over to the bar to pick it up, he got close to Molly and she smelled the forest on him. It smelled good, until she remembered why he had probably been out there.
“In the woods today?” she asked.
He looked into her eyes and nodded. And then pressed his lips together and shook his head.
Molly wanted to ask for details but knew the arrangement with Boney had to remain private—and so with Nico and Lawrence looking on, she changed the subject to which vegetables needed to be started inside before planting in the garden, which none of them, including the full-time organic farmer sitting next to her, knew the slightest thing about.
* * *
The next day Molly worked in the front flower bed in the morning, trimming and weeding and daydreaming. And then, feeling restless, she hopped on the scooter and went into the village, thinking she would walk around the Desrosiers neighborhood again and check out where Caradec had been killed. She wasn’t really trying to solve the case, just feeling curious about Castillac’s latest murder, which as far as she could tell, was entirely without motive.
I guess it couldn’t possibly be connected to Valerie, she thought, having parked the scooter and wandered down rue Saterne. It’s funny how our minds always want to make patterns and connections even where there aren’t any.
“Bonjour, Madame Tessier,” she said to the old woman sitting in a chair outside her front door. They had not been introduced but each knew who the other was, and had a certain semi-professional respect for the other, busybody to busybody.
“Bonjour Madame Sutton,” the old woman answered. “I was just about to go inside and start dinner, but the weather is so spectacular, isn’t it? No sign of another big rainstorm this afternoon.”
Molly smiled in agreement. She wanted to ask exactly where Caradec had been found but thought it would be rude to leap right in with it, so she talked instead about the salad she had made the night before with frisée, lardons, and a mustard dressing. Mme Tessier nodded her approval and then, appearing a bit impatient, told how she was the last person to talk to Erwan Caradec. Molly was relieved at the change in subject.
“Unless, of course, the murderer talked to him,” added Mme Tessier. “Can’t speak to that, of course. Officer Perrault didn’t seem to know when he was killed. That alley isn’t frequented much. I won’t say he could have been lying there for days because as I said, I spoke to him the day before he was discovered. Did you know it was a little boy who found him? François Bardon, lives in that house right over there, backs up on the alley, you know. Was taking out the trash like a good boy, and stumbled on poor Erwan.” Mme Tessier shook her head sadly.
“Death is part of life,” she said, waggling her finger at Molly. “But I think we can agree it is not the most pleasant part, even if it does give one a brief spurt of happiness when one realizes it was someone else’s turn and not one’s own.”
“How true that is,” said Molly gravely. The two women said their goodbyes and Molly kept walking to the end of rue Saterne, glad to be out in the sunshine getting a little exercise. She turned onto rue Baudelaire and admired the lamps in the window of the lamp shop (which always seemed to be closed) and passed Mme Gervais’s house. And then, without having intended to go there at all, she found herself looking in the window of Lapin’s newly opened shop. Laurent Broussard, the sign said, his formal name outlined in gold, and looking very serious.
She pushed open the door to the tinkle of a bell. He wasn’t kidding about having plenty of inventory, she thought, looking at chairs stacked up against one wall and several boxes of antique toys at her feet, the whole place nearly filled to the rafters with other people’s junk and treasure.
“Lapin?” she called.
She heard some rustling in the back, then cursing. But no one appeared.
“Lapin?” she called, louder.
More rustling, more cursing.
Then she saw Lapin’s big head appear over a stack of boxes. “La bombe!” he said. “I thought I heard the bell a minute ago. You do me great honor, paying my humble shop a visit,” he said, moving through the furniture and boxes to where she stood by the front door, and kissing her firmly on both cheeks.
“Now, I know a thing or two about customers,” said Lapin, his eyes bright. “I’ve worked enough flea markets to learn some things: some people like to be shown around. They like having the good bits highlighted, they like the personal touch. You?” he laughed. “You, Madame Sutton, are the type who likes to browse without any guidance, am I correct? So that if, say, I suggested you might like some of the jewelry I have right here—these necklaces for example—you’ll bristle and want to be left alone.”
Molly laughed. “Nailed it, Lapin,” she said. “Although not left alone, exactly. Just no hard sell. Let me look and decide what I think before you try to tell me what I should think, you see?”
“Oh yes,” he said with a grin, “I see.”
Reflexively Molly crossed her arms and walked down a crowded aisle. “So all this stuff is from people’s est
ates?”
“Almost everything. This and that I picked up at attic sales and the like. But mostly, when someone dies, a pile of objects remains that the family doesn’t want, and that’s where I come in. Or the family wants to make a little extra money, so they have me in to appraise what they’re willing to part with.”
“So. much. stuff,” said Molly, coming back up the other aisle. “It’s weird thinking that at some point people were really attached to everything here, you know? Someone’s child sat in that little chair and learned to read, or some woman looked in that mirror every afternoon to fix her hair before her husband came home.”
“I always knew you were a romantic, Sutton.”
“Don’t get any ideas,” said Molly. “All right, it’s time I went home.” She stopped at the front counter and looked at the rings piled on a gold-rimmed platter, and slipped one on her hand. “Pretty,” she said, holding out her hand and looking at the delicate silver ring with a small blue stone.
“Since we’re old friends,” he said, “I can make you an unbelievably low offer on that. It’s extremely rare, that sort of ring. A real original.”
“We’re not old friends and you’re so full of it, Lapin,” laughed Molly. She slipped the ring off and put it back on the platter. Then she let the hanging necklaces lie across her fingers, gold and silver, someone’s former treasures.
She started to peek into the box where, unbeknownst to her or Lapin, Valerie’s necklace lay, but just then the bell tinkled and another customer came in, and Molly turned around, waved goodbye to Lapin, and went home.
34
Molly was lying in bed listening to Wesley Addison clomp around over her head, delaying getting up in the fruitless hope that he would leave La Baraque for the day and give her some peace. Her window was open and the racket of birds was astonishingly loud. A fresh breeze stirred the curtains. Bobo was outside performing her post-dawn patrol of the grounds, the De Groots had not been spotted in three days, and she had finally gotten a booking for the cottage—another family for two weeks—and would be able to pay off Pierre Gault and stop worrying about the electric bill.
