Old Bones

by Aaron Elkins

  "But—but—" Ray stammered.

  Ben was more terse. "Why?"

  Mathilde’s hand went to the strand of pearls that lay against her black sweater. "Well, I’m not really—"

  "They let him go for informing on the others, didn’t they?" Gideon asked.

  There was a shocked hubbub of denial, but Mathilde closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and nodded. "Yes," she said, looking straight ahead. "They tortured him with electrical prods." She looked sharply up at him. "How could you possibly know that?"

  He hadn’t known; he’d guessed. Joly had told him that Alain had been picked up at dawn, the others five or six hours later. He’d wondered about it at the time, and now he’d simply put two and two together. He didn’t answer Mathilde’s question. The more she thought he already knew, the more she’d tell.

  "We all thought they’d killed him," she went on without emotion, "but he came here to the manoir the next night, a little before eleven. I’d been here for two days. We were all trying to comfort each other the best we could, waiting to hear something definite. Guillaume, René, me.You too, Sophie."

  "Yes, I remember," Sophie said softly.

  "Guillaume and I were the only ones still awake. When he opened the door and saw Alain standing there he was furious."

  "Furious?" Ray asked. "Why should he be furious?"

  "He grasped what had happened right away. He made Alain admit it. To him, Alain was a traitor, a coward. Don’t forget, Guillaume had already killed that SS pig a few hours before, in revenge for his death. His supposed death." She glanced up irritably at the ring of rapt faces. "Will you all sit down, for heaven’s sake? I feel like a—I don’t know what. And don’t look so ludicrously glum. This happened forty-five years ago."

  They dropped obediently into chairs, pulling them around to face her. Gideon leaned against one end of a marble-topped side table, John against the other. Only Marcel and Beatrice, next to invisible, remained standing at the edge of the room.

  "I had to pull Guillaume from Alain’s throat," Mathilde said. "I was so shocked and happy to see him alive I barely knew what I was doing. He was terribly weak from what they’d done to him. I took him to the kitchen to see if there was some brandy and something to eat. He tried to explain to Guillaume that he’d tried with all his strength to hold out, but Guillaume was beside himself, screaming with rage."

  "No," Sophie said, almost to herself, "how could that be? I was here. If there was shouting in the kitchen I would have heard it from my room."

  "No, my dear, you’re forgetting. You were hysterical. Guillaume made you take a sleeping pill at dinnertime. You were only ten, you know."

  "Was I only ten? Yes, that’s right," Sophie said slowly, remembering. "But René?" She looked at him. "You didn’t hear?"

  "I can sleep through anything," he said. "I always could."

  "Go on, Mathilde," Ben said.

  Mathilde sipped minutely at the vermouth. "Guillaume came into the kitchen after us. He threw Alain against the wall, he knocked him down, he—I truly believe he would have killed him if Alain hadn’t…" For the first time she faltered.

  "…stabbed him with one of the kitchen knives," Gideon said.

  "Oh, no," Claire said, her fingers at her mouth. There were more gasps.

  "Yes," Mathilde said. "Guillaume had raised a fist over his head like some patriarch in the Bible—he was using it like a club—and Alain, to save himself, snatched up a huge knife from the counter and stabbed him. Once only, before I could move." Her lids flickered momentarily. "Guillaume looked so terribly surprised."

  Gideon caught John’s eye and nodded. It jibed perfectly with what they’d learned from the skeleton: the upraised arm, the heavy kitchen knife, the single thrust.

  "And that’s the story," Mathilde said with a shrug. "Guillaume was dead, and Alain ran off, half out of his mind with remorse. I had no idea what to do. I told everyone Guillaume had gone to join the Resistance. I didn’t mention Alain at all."

  "You said Alain ran off?" Sophie said dazedly. "Where?"

  "He did join the Resistance; in the north. He was very brave," Mathilde said defiantly. "He wasn’t a coward, and he was no traitor." She had finished the vermouth and Marcel stepped forward with another. Mathilde shook her head and handed him the empty glass. "The next time I saw him he was in the hospital in Saint Servan. I walked into a room and there in the bed, all—all crumpled, like a—"

  And suddenly the whole starchy edifice came tumbling down. Her lips trembled, her fingers jerked on the pearls, and a single, hoarse, manlike sob was wrenched painfully out of her.

  And no wonder, Gideon thought. What must it have been like when it dawned on that nineteen-year-old girl with skin like rose petals that the maimed, twisted horror lying in a crushed heap on the bed was her handsome, athletic lover?

  René stood up, his arms outstretched. "My dear Mathilde—"

  She sent him back into his chair with a peremptory wave. From somewhere she produced a little handkerchief and dabbed at her nose. The red splotches that had sprung out on her cheeks were already almost gone. The entire emotional outburst had consisted of the one tearless sob.

  "Alain had no idea that Guillaume’s death was still a secret," she said, the handkerchief disappearing into wherever it had come from. "We decided the best thing was for him to pretend to be Guillaume. He didn’t think he could carry it off, but I knew he could. They were so similar in physique to begin with, and with his body so broken, who could say for sure that he wasn’t Guillaume?" She stared coolly around her, completely in control of herself again. "And of course he did carry it off. For forty-five years."

  "But why?" Ray asked. "Everyone believed Guillaume was off fighting. Couldn’t you have let it go at that and just let people assume he’d been killed somewhere?"

  "Yes," Ben said. "Why the pretense?"

  "Well." Mathilde fingered her pearls and pursed her lips. It was a critical question, and Gideon could feel a fabrication in the making.

  So did John. He made his first contribution, and it showed that he was doing fine. "Because you knew that under Guillaume’s old will Claude Fougeray would inherit everything."

  Leona Fougeray, whose grasp of English was not as good as some of the others’, sat up at her husband’s name and shot a series of staccato questions at her daughter in French.

  Mathilde waited until Claire’s brief, embarrassed explanations were done, then answered John. "Yes, you’re quite right. It was Alain’s idea, actually."

  Leona snorted her disbelief.

  "No, really, it was. It was important to him that the domaine stay with the du Rochers. The thought that it might go to Claude was horrible to him. I agreed with him." She looked at Claire. "I’m sorry, my dear. I’m sure you understand."

  Claire didn’t look as if she understood, but Leona did. "Sure you agreed," she said in her Italian-accented French, her voice rising shrilly. "You knew everything would come to you one day!"

  "That," Mathilde scoffed unconvincingly, "is patently ridiculous."

  In the thoughtful, evaluative quiet that followed this, René leaned toward Jules, who sat alone on a plump little sofa beginning on his third martini, served to him with three stuffed olives on a toothpick, as he had trained Marcel to do.

  "Did you know all this?" René asked him.

  Jules seemed about to deny it, then lifted his shoulder in a nonchalant shrug. "Yes, I knew."

  "I didn’t know it," René said without rancor.

  Jules looked pityingly at him and sucked the first of the olives from the toothpick.

  "Let’s go back a little, Mathilde," Ben said. "You buried Guillaume in the cellar? That’s his skeleton they found?"

  "Yes, of course," Mathilde said crossly. "How many skeletons do you suppose are down there?"

  Ray stared at her, his face gray. "But it was—it was dismembered!"

  "Yes," Mathilde said after a pause. "That’s right. Marcel, I would like another vermouth after al
l." When it was brought she swallowed some, drew herself more erect, and set her gaze on the middle distance. "We didn’t know what to do with him," she said expressionlessly, as if reading

  from a script in a language she didn’t understand. "With the body. We couldn’t believe it had really happened. We put him in the big stone sink in the kitchen and I helped Alain to—to begin dismembering him. Do you know the cleaver is still there? I was looking at it a few days ago."

  The hand that lifted the glass to her mouth wavered slightly; not enough to spill the vermouth. "Beatrice used it for the carbonnade flamande, I believe."

  "Oh, sweet Jesus Christ," Ben breathed, the only sound in an otherwise electrified silence.

  "We were going to burn him, you see, and we knew he wouldn’t all burn at once," Mathilde went grimly on, determined to finish. "We made a fire in the kitchen fireplace. But when we—" A tic jerked in the flesh below her eye and was brought firmly under control. "—placed a hand in the fire, there was a terrible smell, and it would hardly burn, and it—it sizzled, you see."

  "Mathilde, please stop," Sophie said unsteadily. "It’s enough."

  But Mathilde plowed ahead, eyes fixed stonily on nothing. "I said we should boil the—the pieces first to get rid of the fat, but Alain simply couldn’t face it; he was at the end of his strength. So we wrapped them—the pieces—in packages we could lift, and took them down to the cellar…"

  She was winding down, beginning to sag, a millimeter at a time, against the back of the chair. "And then we buried the packages under the stones," she said, winding down. "It took us until dawn. Then Alain ran off and I went home."

  John had slid along the table to join Gideon while Mathilde had been talking. "Where the hell is Joly? She’s ready to admit everything."

  Gideon nodded doubtfully. True, the mystery of the bones in the cellar was satisfactorily wrapped up, but he wasn’t so sure how much progress had been made on what had been going on this past week: Alain’s belated death in the bay, Claude’s poisoning, his own near-murder. But a few ideas about those were beginning to work their way to the surface too. That lumber in the courtyard had set him thinking. Had he been barking up the wrong tree? Or the wrong branch of the right tree? He looked thoughtfully around the room.

  Beatrice and Marcel, their English almost non-existent, were watching Mathilde impassively. Most of the others stared at her, half-fascinated, half-horrified, the way people at a zoo peer through the glass at a monstrous snake.

  "Madame…" Claire said in her gentle voice. "Aunt Mathilde… did you kill my father?" Not an easy thing to say inoffensively, but from Claire it was not so much an accusation as a timid inquiry.

  It was, however, enough to straighten up Mathilde’s spine. She looked condescendingly at Claire. "My dear child, what an extraordinary idea!"

  "Oh, yeah?" Leona said, this time resorting to her coarse and shaky English. Gideon’s well-trained ear told him she had learned it in Naples; probably the streets of Naples. "Maybe you was afraid of what he would find out—Claude." She was quite matter-of-fact now, he noticed. The idea that Mathilde might have murdered her husband didn’t seem to bother her nearly as much as the thought that she might have bilked him (and by extension, her) out of the Domaine de Rochebonne. If anything, her estimation of Mathilde appeared to have increased.

  "Find out?" Mathilde replied after a moment of convincingly astonished silence.

  "Yeah, when he goes down there in the cellar—Maybe he sees something, finds out something…" Leona’s English or her imagination failed her. "Who knows?" she finished lamely, and fell back against her chair.

  Mathilde glanced around the room, then appealed to Gideon. "I have no idea what the woman’s talking about."

  "Did Claude go down into the cellar?" René asked mildly. "I didn’t know that."

  "He was going to go," Leona said, resorting again to French. "To watch what he was doing." She indicated Gideon by extending her fluorescent orange lips towards him.

  Jules put down his glass with a peevish thump. "I must say, I don’t see why we should have to sit here and listen to this," he said querulously, his soft, babyish cheeks streaked with sullen red. "I mean, here’s this woman, a guest in our house, and she has the, the…"

  Gideon had stopped listening. A few more of the last remaining odd-shaped pieces that had been rattling disconnectedly around his mind had just dropped into their slots.

  "…have to sit here and listen to this," Jules concluded sulkily, back where he’d begun.

  Gideon, thoughtful, looked towards the doorway. "Marcel?"

  The servant started. "Monsieur?"

  "On the day Claude Fougeray died, did you tell him that he could come down to the cellar at ten o’clock to watch me at work?"

  Gideon winced, feeling silly. The ponderous question had reverberated like a line out of an old Perry Mason show. The others, John included, stared uncertainly at him. So did Marcel. He spread his hands and shook his head to show he didn’t understand. A quick darting of his eyes at Beatrice, however, indicated that Claude’s name had registered well enough.

  Gideon repeated the question in French, trying to make it a little less turgid.

  No, Marcel replied defensively, he hadn’t told that to Monsieur Fougeray. Why should he? There was an uneasy, aggressive shifting of his wiry shoulders, another darty glance at Beatrice. He did not like being questioned about Claude Fougeray.

  But Gideon had other game in mind. "Jules, didn’t you tell Marcel to give that information to Claude?"

  There was a pause while Jules vacuumed up the last of the olives with his lips. "What information?"

  "The night before Claude died," Gideon said patiently, "Joly asked you to tell Claude to come down to the cellar the next morning. You said you’d tell Marcel to pass it on."

  With his tongue Jules tucked the olive into one cheek, presumably for future attention. "I did tell him."

  "He doesn’t seem to remember."

  Jules glanced pettishly at Gideon. "Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t have a chance to mention it. There wasn’t much point after Claude died, and he did die awfully early the next morning—ridiculously early, if I may say so." He crossed one leg over the other, looking pleased with this grotesque attempt at humor.

  "Yes," Gideon said, deciding that if there was ever a moment for a denouement, this was it. "You killed him."

  The reactions were varied. Predictably, Claire gasped and Ray looked dumbfounded.

  Leona examined Jules with frank new interest.

  Mathilde slowly opened her mouth. "Jules?" she whispered.

  "No really?" René murmured to Sophie, sitting nearby. "Do you think that’s true?"

  At Gideon’s side John murmured: "I love this part."

  Gideon waited for Jules to speak for himself. The young man took the olive from his mouth and placed it in an ashtray, uncrossing his plump thighs to lean forward.

  "That’s stupid. Why would I do that?"

  "Because at the reading of the will he’d said he didn’t believe Guillaume had really written it. You knew he’d studied to be a doctor, and you were afraid that if he saw the skeleton he’d recognize the rickets and realize that was Guillaume."

  Jules laughed. "So what? Why should I care? I didn’t kill Guillaume, did I?" He glanced with unmistakable meaning at his mother, then held up his empty glass to Marcel.

  "You’ve had enough, Jules," Mathilde said icily. Jules glared at her but put down the glass.

  "No, you didn’t care about that," Gideon said, "but you cared one hell of a lot about the inheritance. And if anyone found out the guy who wrote that will wasn’t who he said he was, that would have been the end of it. No fabulous inheritance for your parents—or for you not too far down the line. And that was something you weren’t about to let happen."

  "Dr. Oliver," Mathilde announced in her most imperious contralto, "I cannot have you—"

  "Be quiet, Mathilde," Sophie interrupted curtly. "Let’s get it sorted
out once and for all, for God’s sake."

  Gideon could almost see the tiny gears whizzing behind Jules’ little eyes. "I see your point," he said with strained reasonableness, "but why pick on me? I’m not the only one here who knew about the fraud, am I?" He permitted his gaze to rest once again on his mother. A dew of sweat had formed on his upper lip.

  "What a miserable little shit," John muttered out of the side of his mouth.

  Gideon agreed. Whatever discomfort he’d felt about brow-beating the slug-like Jules was rapidly disappearing.

  "That’s right," he said. "Two people knew; you and your mother. But only one person knew Claude was going to see the bones the next day. And that’s you."

  "You’re out of your mind. That inspector told me about it while we were all having drinks. Anybody could have heard."

  "No, the rest had gone in to dinner. There were just you, me, and John."

  Jules licked his lips, beginning to look concerned. He’d already as much as accused his mother. Was he going to accuse John now?

  "I must have mentioned it to—to someone else. I’m sure I told Marcel. Marcel, didn’t—"

  "And of course that’s why you tried to kill me too; to keep me from figuring out it was Guillaume down there."

  More gasps. He’d forgotten that none of them knew about the letter-bomb. This was turning into quite an evening for them all.

  "This is ridiculous!" Jules said with abrupt heat. The red streaks had reappeared in his downy, round cheeks. "I’m not going to sit here—"

  "And Alain as well. That’s why you saw to it he drowned in the bay."

  Jules’ slack-jawed blink of amazement was so transparently sincere that for a moment Gideon thought he might have it wrong, but he realized that what he was seeing was simply Jules’ astonishment that anyone had even caught on to the fact that the murder had occurred. And it had been a clever thing; for that much Gideon gave him credit, if you could call it credit. It had been sheer luck, nothing else, that had uncovered it.

  Jules shut his mouth so hard his puppy’s teeth clicked. "I’m not going to sit here and take this—this abuse—from someone who—who wasn’t even invited …"