by Ann Benson
In the course of this careful passage along the muddy banks of the stream, we came upon a strange arrangement of rocks, a cairn that looked so deliberate that it could not have been laid down by nature’s hand.
We tethered our beasts to a low tree and stepped to the edge of the water, and almost immediately our feet were dragged down into the muck. I had hold of a strong branch and managed to extricate myself, and thereafter I pulled Mère back to the safety of a firmer footing. But neither of us had or would put a foot upon that cairn by the water’s edge, for there could be no doubt that it was a grave.
“Madame,” I heard Guillaume say. The words floated through the air but sounded as if they had come from under the waters of the distant stream by which they had found the remains. “Madame—shall I cease the telling?”
I managed to reach the surface somehow. “No,” I said. So contained and taut was my grief that I could barely speak. “For the love of all that is sacred,” I whispered, “no. Tell me all of it.”
Suddenly the age from which he had previously looked so immune seemed to settle upon him with great weight, and I saw before me an old man who had carried a burden on his soul for many years.
Again we were careful, but once we had established ourselves in firm footing, we began to remove the rocks from the top of the cairn. Soon there appeared the shape of arms and legs and a torso and, as we worked our way outward, a head. And by its size and shape we knew it to be a young man or a boy. By then the larger stones had given way to pebbles; whoever laid your son to rest had first covered him with sand and smallish stones and then layered over it the more substantial rocks. We proceeded with great care, so as not to disturb his rest, and at one point I said to Mère, let us just uncover the face, that we might know who it is.
She agreed that it must be done, so we worked around the head, scooping away the compacted sand until our fingers finally met the flesh. It felt spongy and tough at the same time under my fingers, and though nature had had her way somewhat with the lad’s face, enough of the features remained that we knew it was Michel. A sash of cloth was tied about his neck.
We rested for a moment, and then my mother began to pray—aloud, an act of rarity for her. She was always very private in her devotions, very sure that God would listen to her and therefore unconcerned with creating an impression of piety. She prayed to God and the Virgin for the repose of your son’s soul. And when she had finished her prayers, she sat quietly for a moment. Then she turned to me and said that God had given her a notion that the boy ought to be absolved of his sins, and that if it were done, the boy would be received in heaven as was merited by his sweetness in life.
When I protested that this must be done by a priest, she laughed. I have seen the Black Death, she reminded me, and in those times there was not a priest to be had for any price, for the pest would gallop through a monastery as if conveyed by the fastest steed. There were not enough living to bury the dead, and we had to make do with what we had. Many a time the last of the living would be the only one left to see to the souls of those who had perished before him. And though the last of the living might be writhing in death’s cold hand, he would see to the absolution of those who went before him. Surely you cannot say that all those souls entered Satan’s minions for lack of God’s grace.
Te absolve, she said over your son. And I have always believed that those words had the needed effect.
She had been such a good woman, so pure in spirit and good in her heart. I had to believe that her words effected salvation for Michel.
“Well,” I said as the tears poured out of me, “I am comforted to know that he did not remain unshriven. But I cannot rest until . . . I simply must know . . . how in God’s name did he meet his death?”
Let us uncover more of him, she said.
But we must not do this, I told her. We must let him rest in peace.
No, she insisted, there is a mystery to be solved here. A boy does not lay down on the ground and then bury himself so exquisitely in preparation for a death he knows will surely come. He was yet three score of years from his natural end.
So we removed all the sand and silt from his corpse, and through the layer of grit that remained we saw the wound that must have taken him down. For his shirt was torn up the center and his entrails had been drawn out.
Tears poured down my cheeks and onto the breast of my habit, and from there onto my lap. All spirit had deserted me, and through my blood vessels ran not my own dear blood but harsh and poisonous quicksilver, which chilled me to the very core of my soul. He had died in pain, then.
We sat back for a moment and regarded what we had uncovered. Mère swore a vile oath under her breath and then bade me uncover the rest of his arms. She always carried a knife in her stocking—a habit she says was formed at the insistence of Grandpère—and so many times it was an expedient thing to have. She used it to cut away the front of the boy’s shirt, which she then folded carefully and tucked into her apron pocket.
The better to see the wound, she said. I would not have it obscured just now.
We regarded the gash in the abdomen more closely. She touched it carefully with her fingertips and moved bits of the entrails around to see the place from which they had been pulled. And then she swore again. We shall have to do something now, she told me. He cannot be left here.
It is blasphemy to unearth the dead, I told her. ’Twas the cause of all your father’s troubles, was it not? We shall surely be hanged if we are caught.
We shall surely rot in hell if we do nothing, she insisted. This wound was not the work of a boar. It will be upon our souls for all eternity if we do nothing. There is quite enough on my soul already.
All my protests and admonitions went unheeded. But I did manage to bring her to some accord, that being that we should go back to our home, therein to take rest and to consider the proper course of action without undue duress. This having been decided, we began to recover the body. By this time Mère was quite stiff, for she had been upon her knees a good stretch of time, and her knees were not those of a young woman; she was, I believe, well past seventy by then. I bade her stand to ease the pain in her joints while I finished the covering myself. When fully erect she turned about to look behind us. I heard her gasp and looked up in the direction of her stare. Up on the crest of the hill I saw a figure on horseback. It was the grandfather, Jean de Craon.
She had rarely spoken of her family, and then it was only to say that her père had been a master physician. He had served kings and princes alike and had studied under the greatest of teachers, from whom he had benefited sublimely. But in the course of his studies and subsequent practice of cyrurgerie, he had exhumed and dissected dead bodies, which was strictly forbidden by the church. But the man was long dead, well out of punishment’s reach.
“Did Jean de Craon know about her father’s history?”
“Enough of it, I suppose.”
“But there was nothing he could do to harm her then; her father’s crimes were not her own.”
“Milord Jean would probably disagree with that.”
“He is free to do so from his perch in hell, but I cannot understand how any judge would hold the daughter responsible for the sins of the father.”
“God holds us all accountable for the sins of our fathers.”
“Yes, yes,” I said impatiently, “but this is an entirely different matter—the sins with which we come into this world, not the sins we undertake to create on our own.”
“My mother had sins of her own to answer for,” he said quietly. “Milord Jean had the means to silence her. There were secrets she had to keep about herself. Otherwise, I assure you, she would have come forward with what she thought to be the truth in the matter of your son.”
I was almost afraid to press him. But I had come this far and saw no gain in retreating—there was difficulty in any direction I chose.
“I would know this truth.”
“Je regrette, Madame, it will not be easy to
hear.”
“Speak.”
“Very well, then. My mother was of the opinion that your son’s belly was opened not by the tusk of a boar, but by a knife. Whoever did it, she said later, was clever enough to try to make the wound look as if it were beast-made, with the dirt and some ripping. But he must have thought better of his efforts and buried Michel in the end. Even so, had someone else found him, what she noticed might have been missed.”
I was silent, staring at my folded hands, which lay in my lap, clutching my mother’s mouchoir with desperate fierceness. I could not even recall having taken it out of my sleeve. But there it was, contorted into a mass of wrinkles—the object of all my contained rage.
My thoughts, which ought to have been focused on what Guillaume Karle had just revealed, drifted instead to Madame Catherine and her father. In view of her bastardy, it was a delicate subject on which to query her son, but something in her past had kept her from revealing what she had known of my son’s fate, and I felt compelled to know what it was that had delayed the passage of that knowledge to me. Above all, I did not want to provoke this man into deeper silence on the matter by assaulting him with discomfiting demands for revelations. I finally settled on a question that seemed safe enough. “Do you remember your mother’s father well?”
“Oh, very well,” he told me. “As if he were my own. By the time I was born, my own father had already died. And Grandpère took care of me when I was separated from Maman.”
“Perhaps, Monsieur, you will favor me with a history of your remarkable family.”
He smiled, but would not answer directly. “It would take a good amount of time.” He pointed toward the window, through which the light outside was visibly dimmer. “Now the sun descends, and you need to reach Nantes. But I would be honored if you would accept a quick refreshment before you depart. Some wine, a bit of cheese and bread. And I have some fine apples, if you like.”
I glanced at Frère Demien, who nodded his acceptance of the offer. “How very kind of you to share your board with us,” I said. “But I myself have no stomach for food at the moment.”
“Ah, Madame,” he said, “then your company shall suffice.”
As he rose up from his chair, there was a brief moment when he seemed a bit unsteady, perhaps owing to the stiffness that follows sitting still in those of venerable age. I wanted to reach out to lend him a hand for balance, but refrained, and he managed on his own.
“You have given me much to think about, Monsieur,” I told him as we mounted our beasts a short while later. “I am grateful for your candor.”
He touched my hand with true warmth. “Such things are not pleasant matter for thought.”
“But must be considered, nevertheless.”
His eyes said what his lips would not speak: that some things are best left alone, and that these were dangerous woods I was about to enter.
But enter I would. Let the wolves of Paris and the boars of Champtocé come for me. I would be ready to greet them.
chapter 24
I’d guessed right—Wilbur Durand wasn’t out of the country. He was so close that if I reached out far enough with my arm, I’d be able to touch him. He breathed in and out, as did I and everyone else in the room; I could see his chest rise and fall as he stood there on the other side of the reception desk. Otherwise, he was like a statue, completely motionless in monochrome.
I stepped aside to draw him out of the cover of the countertop so I could get a better view of him. He didn’t move from the spot, only changed his angle slightly to follow me. I couldn’t help but stare for a moment. Oh please please please, I silently beseeched this dark demon, do something stupid—pull out a knife or lunge at me suddenly so I can yank out my piece and put a bullet right into that twisted brain.
But he would have had to go through security to get up here, including a trip through the metal detector, so he would be weapon-free. Still, he was not unarmed, not by a long shot—if he took off the dark glasses that covered his eyes and prevented me from reading him, laser beams would fire up and burn a hole right through my forehead.
“Mr. Durand,” I said stupidly, “I’m Detective Lany Dunbar.”
What an idiot I am—he knew who I was. He sniffed in disdain and ignored my extended hand.
“Thank you for coming in,” I said, bumbling out each word.
I felt freeze-dried and crystalline; one quick move and I would shatter into a million jagged pieces, never to be repaired. My senses hadn’t completely deserted me, though; I took him in, burned his image into my forebrain like a photograph, measured him in every way I could. Durand was of average height, very slightly built, pasty white where his skin was even visible. He dressed entirely in black, as in the few photos I had been able to find of him. He had dark straight hair on the longish side, very neatly cut. Heavy dark glasses shielded his eyes from view. His posture was ramrod stiff, his spine rigid. Before me was a walking caricature, but of precisely what I couldn’t be sure.
Despite all that affectation, he was terribly nondescript—I would have had a hard time picking him out in a crowd. Durand was the type of person who could easily make himself look small and unimportant. He could probably make himself look like just about anything. But when he suddenly spoke, he scared the hell out of me.
“Give me back my studio.”
Not “how do you do” or some other standard greeting. His voice surprised me; I expected it to have a spellbinding quality, along the lines of Vincent Price or Will Lyman. But instead of the rich, commanding voice I anticipated, he put out a series of high-pitched utterances that coalesced, against all odds, into a demand.
An alto, if he was a singer—not a man’s voice at all, but not really a woman’s either. If he’d called me on the phone, I wouldn’t have been able to tell what sex he was. His voice almost had a fake quality to it, as if he were speaking through some distortion device or from underwater; every word felt like metal scraped on metal. He didn’t say, Hello, I’m Wilbur Durand, I understand that you are interested in speaking with me. He spoke just one command: Give me back my studio.
That studio was his weakness.
It was jarring to realize how poorly my phantom image of Wilbur Durand jibed with the reality. I was expecting a bigger voice, a bigger body, a more substantial presence. He was so innocuous that under different circumstances, I wouldn’t have given him a second look. But I knew what I knew and it made me shake to be in the same room with him, this cat killer, this child stealer, this probable murderer. I was praying that he wouldn’t notice it. But of course, he did.
When the desk sergeant had told me who was waiting, I flipped down the picture of my kids that I kept on my desk, so he wouldn’t see it if I managed to get him back into the division room for a chat. I didn’t want him to touch any part of my private life.
It would have been reasonable for someone like Durand to have an entourage of goons, but he was alone. One insane question kept running through my brain: What kind of balls does it take to show up at the police station when there’s good reason to think you’re a suspect in a capital crime, perhaps several? There had to be one of two blatantly antithetical psychological conditions at work in him: fearless confidence in the acceptance of the surrounding world when one pushes the envelope, or a sociopathic state where the limits of advisable behavior are unrecognized and consequently ignored. Maybe both; in any event, he managed to unnerve me, and I’m sure he knew it.
He gave me an icy sneer that said, Gotcha. And he had—I was pretty much speechless as a challenging little smile spread onto his face.
By then Spence was at my side. He remembered how mouths work long before I did. “Your studio is under legal subpoena, Mr. Durand. We won’t be releasing it back to you until we finish our inventory of the potential evidence we found there.”
Durand ignored Spence completely and addressed his response to me. “I have not committed a crime. Therefore, there can be no evidence.” The corners of his lips twitched almo
st imperceptibly, while every other muscle on his face remained still. “Whatever you think is real evidence in there is merely an illusion of evidence.”
My voice returned, but it must have sounded shaky. “Mr. Durand,” I said, “we will determine the evidentiary value of what we find as soon as we can. We won’t inconvenience you any longer than absolutely necessary. But in the meantime, there are serious liability issues regarding your possessions—we have to be very certain that we do everything right, both for our protection and yours. Because of the possible historical and fine art value of the things you have in there, our legal counsel has advised us to exercise extreme care with them.”
He knew what it all really meant, that we would be in there until we were kicked out by legal maneuvering. I sucked up all my courage and pushed him even further. “If you have a few moments, I wonder if you’d come with me to one of the interview rooms. We could speak more privately.”
“No.”
That was all he said. He could have started in about what his lawyer was going to do to us, but he didn’t; he could have ranted and raved and cursed at me, but he remained silent. He wouldn’t engage with me at all. No back and forth, no negotiation where I say something and then he says something and we come to a conclusion, with or without agreement. He made no threats, either vague or specific. He simply stood there, frowned, and then turned around to depart.
The reception area was dead silent as the door Wilbur Durand walked through finally whooshed to a close. I looked around the room; every face was drained of color. When the air conditioner kicked in with a sudden thrum, we all jumped.
“Jeez, Louise,” the desk sergeant finally said, “what the hell was that?”
“I don’t know,” I breathed. “I think scientists are working on it.”
“Good luck to them,” Spence said.
