“Not too bad, was it?” Dauvin asked when I rejoined him in the hall outside the nurse’s station.
I shook my head as I held up my bandaged finger. Just one more little nick to add to the collection on my feet, hands and wrists from the night before.
Max was there waiting also, along with the old friend he had been staying with in Créances. The old friend, Patricia Dutoit, was a very attractive woman in her late sixties, about the same age as Max. It became obvious right away that she and Max had at one time been more than just friends, and that she wouldn’t mind rekindling the relationship.
Patricia’s title, she told me, was notaire, equivalent to a family lawyer in the U.S. or a solicitor in England. To round out her résumé, she was also a cousin of both the Bretons and the Foullards through separate parents, and had gone to local schools with Isabelle and Louise.
As we walked out of the clinic Dauvin asked me, “Shall I explain to you what I believe happened last night, madame?”
“May I take a stab at it?” I said. “Apologies for the bad pun.”
The joke didn’t translate, though Max did his best. Or, maybe it did translate and it just wasn’t funny. Dauvin, however, did smile a bit when he invited me to offer what I thought happened.
“Last night, when the house was quiet, someone came in through the kitchen,” I said, “went upstairs, closed Bébé’s door so he wouldn’t see anything if he woke up, continued to my room, pressed a pillow over my face to muffle any sound I might make—pushing hard enough that I bit my lip—and prepared to slit my throat in the same way the local women slit the throats of the estate’s last interlopers, German soldiers.
“But the pillow over my face and the sound of thunder wakened me in a panic. I bucked free, got a couple of knife cuts in the process, and ran outside screaming. Is that about right?”
“Fairly close,” Dauvin said, bowing slightly.
“My screams may have stirred Bébé from sleep enough so that when my attacker later left my room—with the pillow but not the knife, probably dropped in the struggle—Bébé heard him or her and got up to take a look.”
He nodded.
“So crazy panic saved my life this time,” I said, “though it nearly got me killed when I was two years old.”
Dauvin shrugged—who can say? “The important thing to remember is, you woke up, and you fought. Chances are, you would have fended off the attacker in any case.”
“Do you know who it was?” Max asked him, hanging on to my arm.
“Someone who was inside the compound before we started surveillance,” Dauvin said. “Someone familiar enough with the layout to walk around in the dark. That leaves a large number of people, of course, though I have managed to eliminate a few.” He tilted his head toward me. “Your uncle here, for example, and your stepfather are in the clear.”
Max guffawed. Was he relieved to be in the clear, or had it never occurred to him that he might be a suspect?
“You looked at the footprints in the kitchen,” I said. “What did they tell you?”
“That the intruder wore a rubber boot made in China that is sold at the local market, the feed store, and the gasoil station. It is nearly ubiquitous in the region.”
“Where is Sherlock when you need him?” I asked. “Don’t the footprints tell you height, weight, shoe size, country of origin and stomach contents?”
“They tell us the size of the boot, not the size of the person wearing it,” Dauvin said, almost giving away another smile. “What is more important to me at the moment is who was where at the time the mud was left in the kitchen.”
“Have you made a chart?”
“Of sorts.” His eyes were fixed on me. “You have some ideas of your own, I believe.”
I thought about the appropriate shrug to use here. An of course, with both palms up? A perhaps, a slight lift of one shoulder only? A not at all, both shoulders up, chin turned to one side with a moue, the little pouty frown? In the end, I just said, “Yes.”
“Yes?” An invitation to continue.
Instead of answering his question, I turned to Max and asked, “As I understand the tontine, the last survivor inherits everything. Right?”
He deferred the question to Patricia Dutoit, the expert on such things in France.
“Yes, exactly,” she said.
“If I had died before Isabelle, who would eventually inherit the patents from her?”
“Your children, and only your children,” Patricia Dutoit said. “In a tontine of this sort, arranged to protect the inheritance rights of people not related by blood—spouses for instance, or, in this case, paramours—children born to either party outside of their relationship would not be able to claim their réserve légale, the legal share all offspring in France are entitled to receive from their parents’ estates. So, in the case you mention, your daughter would have become co-owner of the tontine with Isabelle, and eventually the sole owner.”
I asked, “If Freddy can prove he is the biological child of both my father and Isabelle, does he have a claim on the tontine?”
She was nodding before I finished. “Of course. If he can prove he was born within their relationship, he cannot be excluded.”
Max dropped his head and let out a deep sigh. “Oh, dear God.”
“Inspector,” I said, “before we leave the clinic, maybe you should get a blood sample from my uncle.”
Three sets of eyebrows rose.
I patted Max’s shoulder. “I smell a paternity claim in the offing. You might as well offer up some Duchamps DNA now, before someone comes at you with a subpoena; you are the only male survivor in Dad’s bloodline, my dear Max. And as we know, in France inheritance follows blood.”
Dauvin frowned as he asked Max, “Have you told her about the letter?”
“What letter?” I asked.
Max said, “A letter dated shortly after your dad died, signed ‘Marguerite Duchamps MacGowen,’ directing Monsieur Hubert to deposit all patent earnings into Isabelle’s account, for starters.”
“How could I do that?” I demanded. “I knew nothing about the arrangement.”
“Exactly,” Max said. “Funds were siphoned into an offshore account; Isabelle, it seems, knew nothing about the scheme. Inspector Dauvin is looking into it.”
During the last four or five years, the patents had begun to bring in ever larger amounts of money; solar power applications, and maybe oil shale Hubert told me. We weren’t talking about orthodontia payments and college tuition anymore, but something significant enough to tempt someone to commit fraud. If Isabelle had managed to get in touch with me, the scheme could have unraveled in a hurry. And someone’s life with it.
* * *
“It’s about time you got here, Mom.” Casey held a soccer ball on her open palm, as she would a volleyball, ready to serve it over a fishing net rigged between two driftwood poles driven into the sand at Anneville-sur-Mer.
“Give me a minute to catch my breath,” I said, stowing my bag, the one Jean-Paul gave me, against the cottage wall.
Max and Patricia walked together behind me. Dauvin stood watch with some local gendarmes from the end of the beach road, camouflaged by heavy growth like gnomes in the woods.
The beach at Anneville was a beautiful long, broad expanse of golden sand. The tide was out, way out. Along the hard sand at water’s edge, cart drivers exercised their trotters, silhouetted black against the silvery water that made up the horizon. A couple of the drivers had ventured up to watch the game, horses tethered to a tree, the drivers lounging against their long, slender sulkies.
The family sat in low canvas beach chairs around a firepit ablaze with driftwood, wrapped in blankets and clutching hot drinks. The storm had blown out, and there were hints of blue sky in the distance, but it was still cold. I took out the digital camera Max had borrowed from Patricia and started snapping pictures of the place and the people, and the game being played on a makeshift court. They had been playing for maybe an hour before
we arrived and had mastered, in a rudimentary way, the basics of volleyball.
“Catch your breath, camera lady,” Casey said. “You rotate in after this side. We’re playing real women against hairy men.”
“What does that make me?” demanded Antoine’s son Chris, the fifth person on the team of Casey, Kelly, Lulu and Jemima.
“It makes you a real man,” said Kelly, “until Maggie gets in here to help the fair sex vanquish the hirsute.”
“What’s hirsute?” he asked.
“Manly,” Antoine answered, making a show of smelling his armpit. The rest of his team were David, Freddy and his sons, Robert and Philippe.
There was a lot of good-natured posturing and bantering back and forth until Casey’s serve was in the air, and then all were quiet, focused on the ball. The ball cleared the net with mere millimeters to spare, and when it was clear, sank immediately. David dove under it before it hit the sand, popped it up from underneath with clenched fists, set it for Freddy to smash back over the net.
Lulu crouched under the ball’s trajectory and drove straight up with spring-loaded legs and made a gorgeous head butt, sending the ball in a tight arc back over the net and dropping it perfectly into the sand between Robert and Philippe.
“No fair.” Philippe scooped up the ball. “Hands only, no head butts.”
“Says who?” Lulu demanded of her cousin, coming right up against the net with her hands pugnaciously planted on her narrow hips. “Casey said no feet. I didn’t hear no heads.”
“We need a decision from the peanut gallery.” Casey turned to the bystanders for a decision. The elders among the French cousins only shrugged at Casey’s question; volleyball was new to them.
Casey appealed to me: “Mom?”
I said, “That was such a beautiful head butt, I think it should be allowed. Men?”
“I agree,” Bébé said, reaching up from his chair to fist-bump me. “Head butts are now in. For both sides.”
The ruling: heads and hands were okay, feet still were not. A sort of hybrid volleyball-soccer.
As I passed behind him, Claude leaned back in his chair and reached his hand up to me. I took his hand, leaned forward and kissed the top of his head. There were some surprised looks, but it was Lena who reacted most. She seemed taken aback, but managed to smile up at me and wish me good morning. Her confusion was understandable, I thought. She had probably heard Claude rail against me for years, and here he was all of a sudden reaching out to me, the enemy. Confusing, indeed.
Uncle Gérard got up and offered his chair to Patricia, and fetched one for Max. Then he asked me if I would like for him to show me around. I said I would.
There were maybe a dozen small seasonal cottages along the shore and in the dense gorse beyond. The cottage immediately behind the game belonged to the family, though exactly what “family” meant I wasn’t sure. Martins, Bretons, Foullards, Cartiers and collateral cousins all apparently had access.
Gérard told me that Isabelle designed the building, replacing an earlier, primitive, summer beach shack with something more comfortable and more functional for family outings in any season.
It was simple cinderblock construction, basically one big room with a full kitchen and a bath, with a sleeping loft built above the far end. The furnishings were knock-about stuff, cast-offs probably from various of the family’s homes. The entire front wall of wood-framed glass panes could be folded open during warm weather to turn the space into an indoor-outdoor lanai. But on that cold day, only one of the windowed panels was open, and then only part-way.
“It’s wonderful here,” I said.
“You should see it in summer.” Gérard handed me a mug of coffee with milk and poured two more to take to Max and Patricia. “But I’m sure you will. Maman hopes you will come back and stay for a very long time. But I think it more likely that you will only visit from time to time. Am I wrong?”
“I have a job, a daughter to get through school, my mother.”
“Of course.” He put a hand under my elbow. “I remember her, Elizabeth. She is lovely.”
“So, you knew her? And my dad?”
“Yes, of course. Quite well. My wife Louise and I spent a good amount of time with him. During the year your family were here together, your mother took the children home to America for Christmas—I believe her father was ill—but your father had work to do and couldn’t go with them. So, naturally, we asked him to stay with us for a few weeks. We had a wonderful time; so intelligent and so gracious, what a wonderful guest he was.”
“And where was Isabelle?”
“With my parents of course.” He lowered his head and winked. “Next door to us.”
I had an aha moment, a little mystery solved. I didn’t know when l’Affaire Isabelle began for Dad, but I knew roughly when I was conceived: My namesake Ste-Eugénie’s feast day? Christmas. Mom was in the States with Mark and Emily, and Dad delivered a little present to Isabelle: me.
Isabelle obviously attached some significance to the date—ergo and to wit, my name—which made me wonder about the sequence of events that Claude laid out last night. Freddy, little present number two, was conceived at my second birthday, and announced to Dad just before the following Christmas, like a gift. Claude said Isabelle suffered from morning sickness, but that she was very happy during the fall. Then in December, when Dad wrote and turned down her suggestion that they ride off into the sunset with their little family, she went off the rails. Again.
When Gérard suggested that we go back and join the others, I put my hand on his arm to stop him. He looked over at me, brows up, expectant expression on his face.
“Uncle Gérard, tell me about Isabelle.”
“You’ve asked the others, I know. Is there something you think I can add?”
“You’re her big brother,” I said. “You knew her in a different way than the others. I’ve heard she was brilliant, eccentric, and absentminded. And volatile. What’s missing in the descriptions?”
He cast his eyes down, sighed; obviously a tough question for him to answer. Then he seemed to make a decision, and he brought his eyes back to mine.
“I will tell you something no one else wants to admit,” he said. “My little sister was every bit as mentally unbalanced as she was mentally gifted.”
When I nodded, he seemed surprised, seemed to have expected a different reaction, some disbelief, a protest. I said, “Please, tell me.”
He hesitated. “You have to understand, that for some people, traditional people, there is a greater stigma attached to mental illness than to, say, creating an illegitimate child.”
I waited for him to continue.
“Isabelle was far more than eccentric,” he said. “From the time she was a teenager, my sister rode an emotional roller coaster, up and down in cycles. Over time, the ups became wilder—more creative and more dangerous, as well—and the downs became profound. My wife, Louise, loved Isabelle very much. She tried to get her into the care of a proper doctor, a psychiatrist. My father, a good man, but...” He shrugged.
“But very traditional?” I interjected. “And maybe stubborn?”
He acknowledged both as understatement. “Papa wouldn’t hear of it. And Maman, a strong woman but an obedient wife, went along with his wishes. When Isabelle had breakdowns, do you know where they sent her?”
“To Ma Mère at the Convent of the Sacred Flower.”
“Exactement,” he exclaimed; we had touched an emotional nerve and apparently he was ready to talk about it. “After one of Isabelle’s breakdowns, my Louise persuaded Claude that he should take charge of his wife’s care and get her to a shrink.”
“And did he?”
“Yes. If he hadn’t, Louise would have. The diagnosis: bipolar disorder. There were good medications, not always pleasant for her, and Isabelle resisted them—she missed the creativity of her manic phase—but in time she was able to settle down into a calmer existence. For Freddy, that was essential.
“From tim
e to time, the medications didn’t work or she couldn’t tolerate the side effects or she forgot to take them, so there were episodes, periods of unpredictable acts, but never again so destructive. After she went through the change, life became smoother yet.”
“Thank you for telling me,” I said. “It explains a great deal.”
“I warn you,” he said, wagging a finger, “if you try to talk to Maman or Grand-mère Marie about this, they will deny there was ever anything more wrong with Isabelle than overwork. You see, the culprit was her career, far too taxing for a woman, in their estimation.”
Note to self: three things we don’t discuss with my grandmother; suicide, mental illness, equal rights for women. What else?
He looked at me closely before he asked, “How was she when you met her?”
“It wasn’t much of a meeting. The way Isabelle approached me, jumped out at me, I thought she was a crazy person. I called for Security to take her away.”
This was no surprise to him.
I said, “Why do you ask? What do you know?”
“She called me when she was in Malibu,” he said, palms up. “Some problem with her medication. I think that’s what made her go to California to talk to you, that damn emotional roller coaster. After she got there, she became afraid, knew she needed some help. She called her doctor in Paris, and he gave her a new prescription, but no local pharmacy in Los Angeles would honor it. She asked me if I could do something.”
“Could you?”
“Yes. I called my friend Jean-Paul Bernard—you said you met him—and he was able to get a physician he knew in Los Angeles to speak with Isabelle’s doctor so he could write the appropriate prescription. She had it filled. But my dear, those medications can take days if not weeks to become effective.
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