A Bouquet of Rue

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Oui. That’s her.” His heavy book bag hit the floor at his feet with a dull thunk. “Not the best photo. Where was it taken?”

  “At the train station Friday night,” I said.

  “Huh,” was his only comment before picking up the bag again and excusing himself to go wash for dinner.

  After dinner, while Dom and I were clearing away in the kitchen, Jean-Paul called Ari and asked if he wanted to see the CCTV footage. Ari said he did and would be right over. He was still crossing the lawn when both my phone and Dom’s rang like doorbells. I startled at the sound; my phone had never chimed like that before.

  “Front door,” Dom said, reaching for his phone.

  Dom had downloaded the home video security system into my phone over the weekend. This was the first time I had seen, or heard, it work. I pulled out the phone and there was Fabienne Simon, standing on our front porch.

  Fabienne seemed quite agitated; she had come with a request. “Maggie, forgive me for interrupting your evening, but, well, if you don’t mind, would you come with me? Some of the parents have gone over to Éric Aubert’s house to challenge him about representing the little Arab—” She coughed to cover what she realized was a gaffe and started again. “The boy, Ahmad Nabi. I thought that what you said about him today at the bakery was something they should hear.”

  “Of course,” I said, drawing her into the salon where Jean-Paul and Ari had their heads bent close over my computer’s screen. “Jean-Paul, you know Fabienne. Fabienne, have you met Doctor Massarani?”

  “Doctor Massarani?” she said, eyebrows raised as she extended her hand toward him. He dipped his head as acknowledgment, rose and gave her hand a quick press.

  “Ari, Jean-Paul,” I said. “Fabienne tells me some of the parents in the neighborhood have concerns about Nabi and have descended on Éric. She’s asked me to go over to defend him, but I think Ari is the better person for that.”

  “Me? But—” Whatever Ari started to say, he held back. After a deep breath, he tried again. “If these people are upset, I’m afraid that my presence might only inflame them more. Nabi tells me he is regularly taunted for being a Muslim and being a refugee. Who am I, except the same?”

  “Fabienne,” I said, “Is Ari right?”

  “I hate to think he is, but there are people—” A shrug filled in the words she did not or maybe would not say. For a moment, she seemed to study him, looking for what? He was tall, well-groomed, handsome, genteel in his manner, dressed in jeans and a cotton pullover, perhaps not the stereotype for a Muslim refugee she had in mind. Fabienne put her shoulders back and said, “To hell with them. Doctor Massarani, please come as well.”

  Jean-Paul put a reassuring hand on Ari’s shoulder. “They should see Maggie’s CCTV tape from the train station and get some good answers before they haul out their pitchforks, yes? Maybe you can answer some of their questions.”

  Ari looked at me. I raised my palms and shrugged; how could we say no? He smiled, did the same, and said, “Bien sûr. Of course.”

  “I’ll text Éric that we’re coming.” Jean-Paul tucked my laptop under his arm, I smoothed my shirt, and we all followed Fabienne out the door.

  The Auberts lived at the far end of our street in an older, more traditional house than most of its neighbors. There was a formal grace about the salon we were shown into by Éric’s wife, a room that easily accommodated the eight or ten people who were there ahead of us. Ari and I were clearly objects of their curiosity when Éric introduced us. Fabienne made a point of introducing me to her husband and a few of the others, and Jean-Paul in turn introduced Ari, who was as much a stranger to them as I, another foreigner, even though he had been their neighbor for nearly two years. I found the politesse with which we were received to be excruciating. Though I would have liked for Jean-Paul to stay at my side as a sort of shield from the general scrutiny Ari and I were under, he went about the room greeting people, speaking with them quietly. I knew that there was a strategy in what he was doing so I stayed beside Ari until Éric asked me to bring the laptop and come with him. He wanted to see what I had found before sharing it with the others.

  We stood in a little alcove off to one side of the room—a vignette, a decorator would call the space, a set with a pretty chair, a table, a lamp and no apparent purpose except to be pretty—where Éric viewed the clips, running through them a couple of times. I could hear snippets of the others’ conversations in the larger room and felt uncomfortable. What I actually felt was defensive and angry as people who clearly had never met Ahmad Nabi and knew little or nothing about his history expressed concerns about his suitability to get an education among their own precious offspring. What really pissed me off was that I could have heard a very near version of that same heedless cruelty just about anywhere in the world. Certainly, I had heard similar narrow opinions about The Other, whoever that might be at the moment, expressed by the parents of my daughter’s classmates in California. Why had I expected something better, more noble here? And worse, had I ever participated in conversations like this one about someone who was perceived as a potential threat before I knew enough to earn an opinion? Was I judging these people as unfairly as they seemed to be judging Nabi? Was I a version of them?

  The doorbell rang and Detective Delisle was ushered in, a welcome diversion. She looked exhausted, all of her starchy trimmings abandoned. No tight bun, no tailored suit. Instead, she wore jeans and an untucked T-shirt with her hair falling loosely around her shoulders. Éric summoned her over and asked me to replay the footage for her. As she leaned in close beside me, I smelled alcohol on her breath, something a lot stronger than dinner wine.

  “Where’s your partner?” I asked.

  “He’s an old man. He needs a nap now and then.” When she saw what was on the laptop, she looked up sharply at Éric. “This is CCTV footage. Where did you get it?”

  He nodded at me. With a weary exhalation, she gave me a side-eye glance. “TV girl. Of course.”

  “You’ve probably seen this already,” I said.

  But she shook her head. “We haven’t had a chance to get to it. We’re the only two detectives assigned to this case. Believe it or not, a runaway teenager isn’t our only concern.”

  “You’re sure Ophelia Fouchet is a runaway?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure of anything. But what I’ve seen here looks a hell of a lot more like a girl running away than anything sinister. I’m glad I saw it. I’ll be very happy when these concerned citizens see it so they’ll get off my back about the boy and let me do my work.”

  “With your permission,” Éric said to me, holding out his hands for my laptop, “we’ll show the others.”

  An antique cabinet in a corner of the salon hid a large flat-screen television. While Éric and a couple of the men struggled to establish a Wi-Fi connection between the TV and the computer, I edged nearer Ari, mother-hen-like, to eavesdrop on the conversation he was having with one of the women. He listened to her with full attention, arms folded across his chest, eyes cast toward the polished floor, nodding from time to time. When she finished, he said, “Now, remember that I am not licensed to practice medicine in France. Legally I can only give you my suspicions as an informed layman. But from what you have described, I wonder if your son has a simple case of contact dermatitis. Common enough in spring when the kids are playing outdoors. As a parent, I would try an over the counter two-percent cortisone cream on the rash area until you can get him in to see your family physician.”

  Another mother joined the conversation. I couldn’t hear her question, but Ari’s answer was, “Yes, except for his grandmother, all of his family perished when their boat went down.” I heard murmurs of sympathy and edged away to leave Ari to charm and reassure the mothers, and went over to stand near Detective Delisle, who was leaning against a wall for support, so that I could keep an eye on the room.

  Fabienne came over and, with the pretense that she was bringing the two of us glasses of claret, leaned i
n close to me to say, “Your Doctor Massarani seems to have charmed the ladies. Good idea to bring him along.” She left us and crossed the room to join the clutch of women hovering around Ari.

  After some more fiddling, the Wi-Fi connection was made and the computer’s home page graphic flashed up on the TV screen. Before he hit play, Éric asked the group to pay attention to the date and time stamp in the upper right corner of the screen. When the grainy images of Ophelia and Nabi appeared, there was a gasp and then a susurrus of whispered conversation as the assembled recognized the kids. Afterward, no one had an answer to the first question asked: “Where did Ophelia go after that?”

  Jean-Paul, who had come to stand beside me, spoke up. “All of us are concerned about the well-being of Ophelia. We showed you this security footage from the train station because we wanted to reassure you that young Ahmad Nabi had no role in Ophelia’s disappearance other than to carry her cello for her the short distance between the school, where they had a concert rehearsal Friday night, and the train station. You saw Nabi give Ophelia her cello, say good-bye as friends do, and walk away. That ended his contact with her. Am I correct, Detective Delisle?”

  “Oui,” she said, managing with effort to push herself away from the wall to stand upright when she addressed the room. “You saw the two kids go off in separate directions. Ahmad Nabi told us where he went after he left Mademoiselle Fouchet at the train station, and his story checked out. He was in Arras with a sausage vendor until Monday noon. The girl was not with him. For Nabi, c’est tout, the end of his involvement with Ophelia. And I don’t want to hear of anyone taking any action or saying anything that interferes with his well-being, understood?”

  After looking at every face in the room, she went on. “I spent considerable time with young Ahmad Nabi this morning. He expressed two fears to me. The first, of course, to repeat what Monsieur Bernard said, was for the safety of Ophelia. The second was for his own safety. Without Ophelia to protect him, he told me he expects to be the target of schoolyard bullies, as he was before he met her.”

  “Pfft,” a well-upholstered man sitting across the room uttered in the direction of the man next to him.

  “What was that you said, Monsieur Roussel?”

  “What is this kid? Some kind of a poof, he can’t protect himself?” Roussel said, pushing out his chest. “I was a military brat, moved around a lot. Every time I started at a new school I knew a good beating or two was part of the initiation. The kid just needs to toughen up.”

  “Initiation, you say?” Delisle was at full attention now, a quiet fierceness about her tone. “I promise you that there are stiff laws against moral harassment, the legal term for le harcèlement—bullying. This includes verbal insults, racial or ethnic slurs, physical threats or action. Conviction carries from one to six years in prison and a very heavy fine.”

  There was a low murmuring in the room. After a pause, never taking her eyes off Roussel, Delisle went on. “I have had more than one occasion to meet your son, Louis, Monsieur. He is of an age now where he can be tried as an adult. I want you to consider what his initiation into a prison population would consist of, a young and attractive boy like Louis. Now, I hope you go home and counsel him accordingly. Vous me comprenez, Monsieur? Does anyone here not understand what I said?”

  Roussel crossed his arms and glared at her, but he nodded.

  She returned his nod and again addressed the room. “If you learn something of substance I want to hear about it before you discuss it with all of your neighbors. Let us not be party to spreading groundless rumors. Right now, I suggest you go home and speak with your school-age children about the village’s zero-tolerance policy for le harcèlement and the consequences. I also hope you ask them if they have any information of substance that might help us locate Ophelia.”

  Among the mutterings that followed as people rose from their seats and gathered their belongings, I heard several iterations of “Prison for bullying, is that true?” and “How far could Ophelia carry that big cello?”

  Good questions.

  As everyone filed out, Ari went over to Detective Delisle. “Thank you for that caution about interfering with Nabi. He went to school today, but it was very difficult.”

  “I’ll speak with la directeur,” she said. “She’s new. She should know the situation.”

  He looked less than reassured.

  The detective turned to me. “Tell me, Madame, how easy is it for you to access CCTV?”

  “Beyond what you saw, I don’t know. Today was my first experience with it.”

  “How long did it take to find this?”

  “Not long. I gave the video engineer a date, a location, and a fairly narrow time frame based on what Nabi told us. With that he pulled what you saw out of archived footage very easily.”

  “Maybe you can help me,” she said. “Besides having no time, I don’t have a video engineer to give me a hand, and I don’t necessarily have a narrow date and time frame. Where did Ophelia go after that? Hell, I don’t know where to begin finding out. Do you?”

  “Want to take a walk?”

  She scowled. “Now?”

  “Just a short one. Have a flashlight?”

  A wary and reluctant, “Ouais,” the French equivalent of yeah, was the answer. So, yeah, she did, but she wasn’t enthusiastic about admitting so.

  We drove to the train station in her official little blue-and-white Peugeot, Jean-Paul and Ari scrunched into the backseat, and me fairly comfortable riding shotgun; it was a short trip. At a quarter to ten on Tuesday night the parking lot was almost empty. I asked Delisle to stand with me beside the pole closest to the lot’s entrance to the platform, below a CCTV camera. With my telephone’s camera turned on and focused toward the street exit, as the camera above was, I asked Jean-Paul and Ari to re-enact the movements of Nabi and Ophelia on Friday night. Together, they walked in from the street, stopped near us, then parted. Ari turned around and walked back to the street and out of view just as Nabi had. Jean-Paul followed Ophelia’s route toward the left until he, too, disappeared from the little monitor screen in my hand. At that point he was only a few yards from the gap in the hedge I had walked through that afternoon. After calling Ari back, we went through the hedge, down the alley, and out onto the street beyond, retracing my earlier route. The shops were closed. There was very little traffic, no one else was on the sidewalk.

  “I saw only two CCTV installations on this block,” I said to Delisle. “And only at the intersections. How many shops have security cameras?”

  With a weary sigh, she said, “I suppose I’m about to find out. Thank you, though. If Ophelia came this way, and there’s a very good possibility that she did, we now have a time frame and a place to start looking, yes? You have saved me some effort.”

  Ari looked down the street both ways. “Maybe she was picked up. If not, how far could a petite girl carrying a cello go without help?”

  “Not far.” Delisle had her phone in her hand, tapping keys until she announced, “A cello in a hard protective cover like the one we saw on the tape weighs thirty-five to forty pounds. The girl can’t weigh more than a hundred-five, a hundred-ten. If she got a ride, she could be anywhere. I’ll work the shops tomorrow when I can. Maybe we’ll get lucky and see something. But my commandant has already reported the girl as a runaway delinquent and handed her case to the Préfecture of Police in Paris, so I won’t be able to spend much time looking.”

  “Delinquent?” I said. “That’s harsh.”

  “There is some history,” she said, an offhand remark before nailing me with a hard glare. “Now, Inspector Maigret, if we are finished playing detective, I will take you all home.”

  I thought we were finished for the night, but no. There was a car in our driveway, a black Audi. As Detective Delisle turned into our driveway behind it, the headlights of her little car hit Yvan Fouchet, pacing on the front walkway, lying in wait. He was even more disheveled than when I saw him the day before. No surprise
there. I would be approaching apoplexy if my daughter had been missing for four days.

  “Merde,” Delisle muttered, bringing the car to a stop maybe ten feet from him. Fouchet rushed toward the car as Jean-Paul and Ari unfolded themselves from the cramped backseat. “Can’t the man just go home and get some sleep?”

  “Jean-Paul,” Fouchet said, holding the car door as if that could hurry Jean-Paul’s exit. “I knew you would find something, but why didn’t you call me? I am so frantic for information.”

  “What are you doing out here, Yvan?” Jean-Paul asked, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder.

  “I heard everyone was chez Aubert, but they were already gone when I arrived. So I came here. Dom told me you would be back soon; I waited. Tell me what you know about Ophelia.”

  “I’m sorry you weren’t called,” Jean-Paul said, taking the laptop from under my arm and opening it. “And I’m sorry that whatever you heard got your hopes up. What we have clears Ophelia’s friend, but it doesn’t tell us where she went Friday night. Here, take a look for yourself.”

  When the first image appeared, the still shot of the two kids, Fouchet choked on a sob and reached his hand toward the screen as if he could pull Ophelia out to him. Weeping, he said, “My girl.”

  Twice he watched the CCTV footage, and became only more dejected when, twice, Ophelia walked away into the dark of night. And disappeared.

  Monsieur Fouchet was in no condition to drive himself home. Jean-Paul took his keys from him and got him buckled into the passenger seat. Ari was enlisted to follow in our car to bring Jean-Paul home. After they left, I went inside, curled up in a big chair in the salon with my laptop and Google-stalked the Fouchet family.

  Yvan Fouchet was an executive with a large international manufacturer of construction machinery, big stuff like cranes and earthmovers. His picture was on the company webpage. He was on the board of the local equestrian club and a national polo club. Now and then he still played a chukker or two of polo, and sometimes, according to photos in the online version of the polo club’s newsletter, got knocked off his horse and came up smiling. His wife, Claire, was the secretary of the garden club, past president of the Peony Society, a member of the equestrian center, and was listed as a speaker at a meeting called by the Ministry of Education to discuss the issue of inequality in the national school system. There was no reference to what she had to say on the topic. In all, there wasn’t much to be found. Except for one little nugget: Monsieur Fouchet sued the editors of a women’s magazine for invasion of privacy and was awarded one euro. The details of the case, of course, were not revealed lest they invade the man’s privacy doing so.