by Nell Goddin
Everything at La Baraque was as it should be…except, of course, for the continually nagging problem of Valerie Boutillier.
She was expecting Ben to come by for a planning session and so she gave up on avoiding Addison and put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, thinking that after Ben left she would spend some hours in the garden.
Coffee, a hunk of yesterday’s bread smeared with some sweet butter, and she was ready to go.
Bobo barked her “hello, friend” bark (which sounded much different from her “who is this stranger?” bark) and Molly went to open the front door before Ben had time to knock. They said their bonjours, kissed cheeks, and then looked at each other with expressions of disappointment.
“The thing is,” started Ben, “I don’t know whether the note was just a hoax and we’ve been on a wild goose chase, or whether we’ve—or rather I—have failed her again.”
Molly nodded. “I know.” She gave him a cup of black coffee. “Want to walk around outside while we talk? It’s such a beautiful morning.”
They strolled through the meadow, Ben throwing sticks for a delighted Bobo, the orange cat shadowing them at a distance.
“So you got nowhere with Boney?”
“Well…” said Ben, “as far as Valerie is concerned, that’s right. I would make a pretty large bet that her body is nowhere near Castillac. Boney and I covered a lot of ground. I only had him for a week, but I asked Rémy for some time off so I could do as much as possible before Léon came to pick him up. That dog is amazing, he really is. I swear I think he understood exactly what I wanted him to do and why.
“He did however find something else of interest, unrelated to the Boutillier case. A body buried deep in the forest of La Double. No telling how long it’s been there—Florian is investigating and I hope to have some information by early next week.”
“Jeez—another body!”
“It could be quite old, might be nearly impossible to get anywhere with it. Or of course a natural death with no crime involved at all. But there is a list of missing persons, both for the département and all of France—hell, we might have to look on the international list—so hopefully we’ll get some useable DNA and Florian can give me some idea of how long the body has been there.”
“Will he still report to you since you’re no longer at the gendarmerie?”
“Well, not ‘report’. But I think he will make time to have a conversation,” said Ben with a small smile. “Florian and I annoy each other. But that’s a matter of style more than anything else. Respect is mixed in there as well.”
“Do you miss the gendarmerie?”
“No. Yes. Well,” he said, laughing, “I don’t miss the stress. I really enjoyed this week with Boney, being able to focus on one thing without worrying about neglecting other duties or having to justify the time spent. I really, really like being my own man instead of part of a military unit.”
“So you’re not going back?”
“I don’t think so. That means I’ll have to find something else…it turns out organic farming is not where my talents lie, according to Rémy.”
“He told me you buried the spinach seedlings under a foot of mulch,” said Molly, laughing.
“Oh, that was an early mistake. I’ve done much worse since then. He gave me the day off today even though it’s peak season and there’s a ton of work to do. The poor man would have fired me long ago if he weren’t such a good friend.”
They passed the pigeonnier where all was quiet, and reached the end of the meadow.
“Have you explored these woods much?” asked Ben.
Molly shook hear head. “Want to keep walking?”
“Let’s do,” he said. “I did come through here with Boney, so at least I can assure you that you won’t be surprised by any bodies.”
“Glad to hear it. So…Valerie.”
“Valerie.”
“I was just so sure that the note was real,” said Molly. “Of course I had no basis for believing that, and I understand that detective work is about tracking leads and finding evidence and using your brain, not just having feelings. But I couldn’t see who would bother making a note like that, you know? I wasn’t seeing—and still don’t see—what the payoff would be. Wasting the gendarmes’ time? Why would that be at all satisfying?”
“Remember that you found the place on the door where the note had been taped, and it was low? Probably a kid. And kids do things that make no sense all the time. Might’ve been a dare, something like that.”
“I guess,” said Molly. “I wish there were a way to measure the height of the note and then approximate how tall the kid is likely to be, and then canvass all the kids at school within that range of height.”
“Very scientific of you,” said Ben, reaching his hand out to take her hand but letting it drop.
“I just can’t believe we spent all this time and effort and we’ve gotten absolutely no new evidence at all, not one teeny tiny shred.”
“Welcome to my world,” said Dufort. “No doubt Perrault and Maron are struggling now with Caradec’s murder—when I spoke to them, they had absolutely nothing to work with.”
“That’s another thing I do not understand. Who would have anything to gain from killing that poor man?”
“You’re making the mistake of assuming the murderer acts logically,” said Ben. “And while there is always a certain underlying logic in a murderer’s thinking, there is often a wild streak of insanity, of chaos. And it is that streak that a good detective tunes into.”
Molly kicked the leaves and thought this over. “It was never this frustrating for Nancy Drew,” she said, and this time Ben reached for her hand and took it, and they walked for a long time taking in the beauty of the woods in spring and not saying anything at all.
* * *
It’s a simple matter of tying up loose ends—that’s how Achille thought of it to himself as he rode his tractor around Castillac to the north, turning onto rue des Chênes on the other side of the village. The street didn’t have a shoulder for him to park on, so he drove past the cemetery and kept going until he got to a field, and tucked the tractor in next to a tree where it did not look at all out of place. Achille didn’t know anyone on that side of town so had no idea whose field it was, but he wasn’t worried that anyone would look twice at a tractor beside a field. It would blend in and attract no attention at all, just as he himself had managed to do all these years.
He set off on foot going south, back towards La Baraque, where Florence had told him Sutton lived.
Molly Sutton, he thought darkly. With her snooping and laughing and incessant talking: coming right up to his house, and knocking on his door! Interfering with Madame Renaud and her son! It was unconscionable, meddling in a family like that.
Intermittently he remembered Erwan Caradec and how easy killing him had turned out to be after all, much easier than killing a farm animal when you got right down to it; that realization gave him a bright new sort of confidence in his ability to do whatever a particular situation warranted. Even if it seemed too hard when he first thought about it.
Achille couldn’t help thinking about how stunned his father would be if he found out Achille had killed a man—Achille, who had never been able to pull the trigger while hunting without closing his eyes, who always tried to talk his father into trapping the animals and turning them into pets.
He was a man now. It was shame his father was long dead and not there to see him, but Achille puffed his chest up a little as he walked along the road. His father would probably abhor the killing, since he had hunted to put food on the table and not from any pleasure in killing for its own sake. But Achille was sure that deep down his father would have been proud, too. He had done what needed to be done and wasn’t that the whole problem with his mother—that she could not? That she would be mumbling in a corner of the kitchen, talking to people who weren’t there, not doing what needed to be done?
Why oh why had he told Sutton they were stil
l alive? If he had only kept his mouth shut!
A car was coming from the direction of the village and he jumped into the woods and stood still until it had gone past. Where was that house? He was impatient, looking forward to the moment when he first fixed his gaze on Sutton, and could watch her without her knowing he was there.
He knew he could kill her, he had proven that to himself. But he wasn’t so tunnel-visioned that he couldn’t see the potential in that for making his circumstances worse. If someone killed Sutton, maybe the Americans would send over the FBI and who knows how many detectives and police, the whole village would be crawling with them. It’s not like he could run, not with Bourbon and his herd to take care of.
It’s not like he could run with Valerie, either. Not to mention Aimée.
When he was about fifty meters away from La Baraque he slipped back into the woods. Now that it was late May, the leaves hid him from view almost immediately. He had no particular attachment to woods, always preferring to be in the fields where his girls grazed, but he appreciated the cover once he caught sight of the house.
He stayed still, well-hidden, and watched.
It was dusk. He saw a light come on, and then another. A shape went quickly past a window but he couldn’t tell if it was Sutton or not. He needed to get closer but he worried that she might have a dog that might bark at him or even try to bite him.
And of course, Molly did have a dog. But at the moment when Achille Labiche was spying on Molly’s house, turning over the idea of snapping her neck and shutting her up for good, Bobo was deep in the forest chasing after a red squirrel. She might have protested, if given a chance to defend herself, that she wasn’t really a guard dog…though if anything happened to Molly she would never get over it.
When it was not quite dark but dark enough, Achille crept out from the trees and walked towards the house. It was a hodgepodge sort of place, he thought, lacking the pleasing symmetry of his farmhouse. It was hard to figure out where anything was from the outside—was the kitchen over that way? Was her bedroom in this addition, or the one sticking out in the other direction?
He kept one ear cocked, listening for anything that might give him away. He thought his father would be happy to know he had taught his son to move quietly, to listen, to anticipate problems as he stalked his prey.
There she is.
Achille could clearly see Molly making dinner in the kitchen. As far as he could tell, she was alone, standing at the counter, piling lettuce into a big bowl. Then she chopped something and threw that in. Poured herself a glass of rosé. Broke the end off a baguette, smeared it with butter, and ate it standing up, next to the refrigerator, as though she were so starving she couldn’t wait another second.
Achille thought her almost grotesque, with her unkempt hair and her blue jeans. His mother had been demure, her hair in a neat bun and always dressed in a skirt, even while she did farm chores.
Molly Sutton was no one’s mother. No one would even miss her.
35
Wesley Addison was in his room, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, looking out of the one small window. He had taken a long rest that afternoon, having fallen asleep while reading a monologue on dialects of southwest France.
He did not like to nap. They made him feel groggy afterwards which made him uneasy.
So it was groggily that he sat in the uncomfortable chair, looking out at the meadow and thinking about his wife. Seven years is a long time, but he had had moments, in the Dordogne, of feeling as though she had only stepped into the next room. Moments when the sound of her voice and the feel of her soft skin was so vivid he nearly spoke out loud to her.
She had understood him, his wife. She had been able to laugh at him in a way that helped him to laugh at himself, and she had somehow been able to hear all the things that he meant but was not able to find ways to say.
Wesley watched the speckled dog fly through the meadow and into the woods, and he would have smiled at the dog’s energy except he considered himself a cat person and so smiling at a dog would be a sort of betrayal.
The window had been cleaned recently, but the glass was old and had a foggy patch in one corner, and spots in the glass itself; his view was not crystal clear. So perhaps this imperfect view would account for why he thought he saw something in the woods, right on the border of the lawn. Not something—someone.
He leaned closer, nearly pressing his nose against the glass. Dusk was falling fast and he squinted, losing the person’s shape and then finding it again. Wesley stood up with a sigh. His wife had liked a cocktail at dusk, and making it for her had been one of the daily traditions of their life together, and so every day for seven years he had drooped at the cocktail hour.
He thought, since I am on vacation after all, I will have a cocktail myself for once. I’ll ask Miss Sutton to toast Catherine with me. And then I will see to packing, and be ready to leave in the morning.
He clomped downstairs. He passed a window in the hallway.
“Miss Sutton!” he called out when he saw her standing at the kitchen counter.
Molly startled violently. “Mr. Addison! Good evening,” she said, trying to recover. “Sorry, I’m feeling a little on edge. Have you seen Bobo?”
“Oh yes, she was after a rabbit, off like a rocket,” he said, as he thought: though I am a cat person.
“Ah, she does love to chase rabbits. Can I get you a drink?”
“That is precisely what I came to ask for,” said Wesley.
Just outside the window, hidden in a viburnum, Achille saw the big man come into the kitchen. He couldn’t quite hear what they were saying but he could see the size of the fellow—his gigantic feet, his hands as big as toasters. Achille crept along the side of the house, away from the window. And then he scampered across the lawn and back into the woods, and ran all the way back to his tractor, which took four tries to start.
He knew where she lived, and that was a start. But he was not going to try anything with that bear of a man hanging around.
He wasn’t crazy.
* * *
Gilbert had managed to keep Maman from finding out he had ridden his bike to Castillac. Thinking quickly when he saw that she had gotten home before he did, he put his bike in the garage and wiped it down with a rag, and then went in the back door with a convoluted story about a fort he was building up in the woods and how he had hoped the roof he built was waterproof but sadly it turned out to leak.
He got Maman talking about the different ways you might be able to make a watertight roof out of sticks as she heated him up a cup of broth to warm him, and got him some dry clothes.
It was a miracle her suspicions had not been aroused, especially since her sick friend had told her all about Erwan Caradec and how he had been murdered. A story like that would normally have made his mother even more fearful and apt to overreact to any little thing, even getting wet in a rainstorm, but thankfully for once she told him about it without adding a long list of things he would no longer be able to do because of it.
Caradec would have been a major excitement at any other time, but Gilbert was single-mindedly focused on Valerie. Not to mention that the elevation of Caradec’s death to murder was going to make François completely impossible to be around.
In any case, neither the illegal bike ride nor Caradec’s murder had led to more tightening of restrictions for Gilbert, and so he was able to get away that Thursday after getting home from school and doing his chores, and sneak over to the Labiche farm to check on Valerie.
Once he was out of sight of the house, he slowed down. Gilbert was a boy who noticed things, and he touched the rough bark of the oak, saw the dappled shade made by the bright green leaves, listened to the birds. All his senses came alive in the woods and he felt happy and free, and full of purpose.
When he got to the edge of the woods bordering Labiche’s farm, he settled down in the leaves as he had before. This time he had worn a brown shirt so he wasn’t as worried about being spot
ted.
All was quiet. The cows were out of sight, probably in the west field. Gilbert could hear the odd moo in the distance, along with crowing from his mother’s roosters coming from behind him.
Okay, where could she be? he asked himself. In the house, maybe in the attic. Or a secret room Labiche made just for her. The barn is gigantic, there’s got to be room enough in there. Or what about that root cellar, dug into the hill just past the barn.
Seven years in a root cellar? Just thinking about it made Gilbert gasp for air, imagining the endless darkness.
He watched, his chin on his hands, looking for any sign of life, and listening hard for any cry for help. He wondered whether Valerie had yelled at first but no one had heard her, which to Gilbert seemed like pretty much the worst thing he could think of.
The sun beat down on his head, comforting and warm. It had been a long day at school and he had played hard at soccer during recess.
His eyes closed, and he fought against it for a moment, then fell asleep.
It was such a peaceful sleep, lying there in the soft bed of leaves with the gentle sun on his face, that it was all the more jarring when the dog started to bark nearby. Gilbert’s eyes flew open and he saw a border collie racing up the hill straight for him, and Labiche standing about thirty meters away, watching the dog.
Uh oh.
He knew it was hopeless, but all he could do was jump up and run as fast as he could. He darted through the woods, his heart in his throat, the dog nipping at his heels. He was fast, for nine years old, and having been sound asleep only seconds earlier.
But not fast enough. Labiche caught up to him and grabbed the neck of his shirt and then quickly held Gilbert’s wrists behind his back.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Achille asked him, leaning down near the boy’s face. “Spying on me? Taking notes?”
