“Um … I’d rather not say.” He eyed her phone. “What are you doing? Who are you texting?”
He jumped when she pointed her phone at his face and took a picture.
“Hey! Stop that. I didn’t say you could take my picture.”
“And I didn’t say you could break in here after hours with a flashlight. I’m running your photo through my facial recognition software. I already have a pretty good idea who you are, but it will be nice to have a name to go with the face.” Her phone buzzed in her hand and she looked down. “I see I was right. Welcome to Sweet as Flowers, Mr. Etienne Hugo. Please consider yourself under citizen’s arrest until such time as the chief of police gets here and can arrest you formally. That’s who I was texting, by the way.”
“Oh, man!” He clutched his hair. “This is so dumb. How did you know who I was?”
“You look a lot like your father, who I interviewed yesterday. And you have the same accent. There aren’t that many Canadians on Prince William Island. I presume he knows you’re here?”
“Of course he …” He stopped himself and pressed his lips together hard. “It’s none of your business. I demand to see a lawyer.”
A blue flashing light appeared in the window and they heard the sound of a car door opening and closing.
“Right,” said Eulalie. “Here’s Chief Macgregor now. Perhaps you’ll agree that this is his business.”
Chief Macgregor had come alone as Eulalie had asked him to after assuring him that the suspect was very much subdued.
She saw an expression of awe cross Etienne Hugo’s face as Chief Macgregor walked into the restaurant, and realized for the first time what an intimidating figure he must present to the criminals of Queen’s Town. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a body he kept in peak condition because to do otherwise would have violated his code of logic. His face tended to be expressionless because he didn’t register emotion well, but it could easily have been interpreted as an expression of steely resolve. His hair was brown and thick, and he kept it cut so short that it made him look like a marine. His eyes were probably the most intimidating thing about him. They were deep-set and piercing, and surveyed the world with hawkish intensity.
Without speaking, Eulalie handed her phone to him, so he could see the results of the facial recognition software for himself.
“Mr. Hugo,” he said. “You are the son of Jean-Luc Hugo, the acting CEO of Faberge Industries. You are under arrest for breaking and entering while carrying a concealed weapon.”
Eulalie frowned at this. Then she spotted the subtle bulge in the front pocket of the young man’s jeans. It was a pistol of some sort, probably a .22. She was annoyed with herself for having missed it.
“I will now proceed to read you your rights in accordance with amendment 3.1 of the Prince William Island Criminal Code.” Detective Macgregor took a laminated card out of his jacket pocket and read off the rights of the suspect in point form. He then handed the card to the young man and asked him if he understood his rights.
Hugo gave a sulky nod. “You can’t arrest me. My father knows the governor.”
“That’s good because your father will shortly be under arrest too. Perhaps he can use his single phone call to telephone his friend the governor.”
From anyone else it would have been sarcasm, but Eulalie knew he meant it literally. He was perfectly happy for the Hugos to call in the governor if they wanted to. He wouldn’t let that affect how he did his job either way.
“Your father strikes me as a man who doesn’t like a lot of bad publicity,” said Eulalie. “The joint arrest of him and his son is going to make quite a splash. I bet Twitter will be humming with the news within the hour.”
Etienne Hugo groaned. He closed his eyes, apparently thinking things through. When he opened them again he seemed to have made up his mind.
“Okay, look, there’s no need for that. My father has done nothing wrong.”
Eulalie snorted. Detective Macgregor raised an eyebrow and invited the young man to continue.
“He is trying to clean up someone else’s mess. He wants to save Faberge Industries from embarrassment.”
Eulalie put a finger to her temple. “Let me consult my crystal ball. Before he died, Marcel Faberge ordered his tech wizards to hack Fleur du Toit’s devices. But that wasn’t enough for him, so he also ordered other forms of electronic surveillance. I’m guessing recording devices in the restaurant and maybe even a camera or two. Then Faberge turned up dead and your father sent you in to retrieve the little bugs his late boss set up in here. When I walked in, you looked as though you were searching for bits of old gum, but you were scanning for bugs, right?”
Hugo nodded. “I’ve been in here every night since Faberge died. Just when I think I’ve got all the recording devices, they check at headquarters and find there are still more active. No one knows who put the bugs in here originally or where he put them, so I come in here every night to look for more. It makes me feel like an idiot.”
“I agree with the idiot part,” said Eulalie.
“The point is, my father had nothing to do with bugging this place. He is just trying to get the bugs out before they cause any more embarrassment for Faberge Industries. He asked me to help him as part of my training. He wanted to show me that you have to be ready for anything in business. But I’m glad you caught me. This was getting boring as hell.”
Chief Macgregor turned to Eulalie. “Do you believe him?”
“I think it’s worth checking out. We’ll soon find out if he’s lying. I just find it cute the way he thinks he’s not in any more trouble now that he’s explained everything.”
“He certainly appears to have broken a number of laws,” said Chief Macgregor. “As does his father. The correct course of action would have been to inform Ms. Du Toit about what had been done on Marcel Faberge’s orders and to ask for permission to search her premises in order to locate and remove the surveillance equipment.”
“You sound like a robot, man,” said Etienne Hugo. “No one does business like that. You don’t go around admitting liability and trying to put things right. It’s just not the way it’s done.”
Chief Macgregor took Etienne Hugo to the police station to be booked. He ordered his deputies to pick up Jean-Luc Hugo too. Within an hour, a team of high-priced lawyers had mobilized to try to organize bail for the two men. Eulalie texted the bare bones of the story to Fleur.
The reply came back within minutes.
Fleur: Hacked! That makes perfect sense. But how creepy that they’ve been bugging me this whole time. I’m at Angel’s Place getting a reading done. Your gran is amazing! You should come and join us.
Every muscle in Eulalie’s body tensed. Why couldn’t Angel confine her hocus-pocus to the tourists? Why did she have to inflict it on Eulalie’s friends too?
All thoughts of the Hugo family left her mind as she hopped on her Vespa and drove to Angel’s Place, determined to wrest Fleur away by force if necessary.
“Oh, dear.” Gigi took one look at Eulalie’s face and sighed. “Someone’s in a mood. Your grandmother is in the back, but she’s busy with a reading right now.”
“Not for long.” Eulalie pushed the beaded curtain aside with a rattle.
Angel’s parlor was thick with smoke and incense. Angel and Fleur looked up at
Eulalie’s entrance, and immediately looked down again.
“What else do you see?”
“A handsome stranger,” Angel said in the dreamy voice she always used for readings. “He comes from across the sea. He wants to do business with you, but his feelings overwhelm him. He wishes to sweep you away.”
“Ooh, that sounds good. I could do with being swept away one of these days. And what about money? Will my business be successful?”
“The prosperity signs are strong,” said Angel. “Before the blue moon rises from the sea you will have an opportunity that cannot be passed up.”
“An opportunity.” Fleur made notes
on her phone. “Right. I’ll remember that. And what about my enemies? Will they prevail?”
“That’s exactly what I’m here to talk about,” said Eulalie. “Your enemies. I have news from the coffeeshop.”
Angel and Fleur both shushed her.
“In a minute, chérie.” Angel continued to stare into the swirling shapes of the tea leaves she was reading. “There will be a time during the middle of the month when it seems as though your enemies will prevail, but then the tide will turn, and they will be defeated.”
Eulalie’s foot began to tap. Angel had changed out of the chic little outfit she had been wearing that morning and put on her Madame Angelique clothes. Ever the showman, she was wearing flowing velvet and chiffon robes and a dramatic purple turban. It was a look that irritated Eulalie intensely.
“This is all nonsense,” she said. “You know that, right?”
Fleur just shook her head.
“I’ve never known Angel to be wrong yet.”
“It’s easy to be right when you stick to vague generalizations. ‘Your enemies will appear to prevail.’ I mean, give me a break. That could mean anything. You know my grandmother can’t actually see the future, right?”
“Why not?” said Fleur. “You can.”
Chapter 13
There was an awkward silence. The only person who seemed unaffected by the tension in the room was Angel. She sat at her ease with a half-smile on her face, watching the two younger women confront each other. Eulalie tried to let Fleur’s comment go, but couldn’t bring herself to.
“I can’t see the future,” she said. “I can’t. If I could, don’t you think I’d have won a lottery by now or something?”
Fleur folded her arms across her chest. “It’s not that kind of seeing the future. I’m talking about the warning you get when something bad is about to happen.”
“That’s just ... I don’t know … instinct, or something. Or intuition. I grew up in the forest. You have to have good reflexes to survive.”
“It’s more than that. You have dreams too. Dreams about things that you can’t possibly know about.”
Eulalie shook her head. “You really need to forget what I said ten years ago after a bunch of tequila shots.”
“So you say. But eighteen-year-old you was more honest back then than twenty-eight-year-old you is being now. Do you even remember what happened that night, Eulalie? And in the days that followed? It changed the course of your life, and mine too for that matter.”
Eulalie made a grumbling sound.
“This is how I see it,” said Fleur. “You’ve got these weird … abilities, right?”
“Wrong.”
“So, the question is, where did you get them from? Angel is your grandmother, which means you probably got them from her. That’s why I come to her, see? Because I trust you, which means that I trust her too. And, like I say, she has never steered me wrong. I know you don’t like it, Eulalie, but I’m going to keep coming to her. She’s better than any therapist.”
“And charges about the same too,” Eulalie grumbled.
Fleur picked up her handbag and slung it over her shoulder. “My money, my decision. Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I have to get down to the police station. The very yummy Chief Macgregor wants to talk to me about being hacked and surveilled.”
She left the room in a swirl of red hair and Chanel No. 5.
Angel watched her go with a smile. “I’ve always liked that girl. It was a good day when you met her.” Then she saw the look on Eulalie’s face. She stood up and opened her arms wide. “Come here, ma petite.”
Eulalie walked into her embrace and laid her cheek on her grandmother’s shoulder.
“I don’t want to be a freak, Grandmère … un monstre. You know they used to call me a monkey at school?”
Angel hugged her tighter. “I know.”
“You don’t get over something like that.”
“I know that too, but you do not permit it to define you. I often wondered whether I had done the right thing by taking you out of the deep forest and putting you into school. But you were such a bright little thing, so clever and quick, and I had taught you as much as I could. Besides, I never believed in the total isolationism that our people practice.”
“I’m very glad you did,” said Eulalie. “I have always loved to learn new things. But sometimes I don’t know where I belong. Am I of the town or of the village? And how can I accept the things that make me freakish, when I have spent my whole life trying not to be a freak?”
“You are gifted, ma petite. Only when you accept those gifts for what they are will you be truly comfortable in your own skin.”
Eulalie gave her grandmother a last squeeze and sat down at the table where Fleur had been sitting.
“I’m also worried about Bibi, the little boy who disappeared. The Council of Elders instructed me to hand the case over to the police, which I have done. And I know the police are investigating around the clock, but I keep feeling as though I should be doing something too. Days have passed, and nothing has happened.”
“You can’t do everything, Eulalie. Sometimes you have to let people do their jobs. I’ve heard from Virgil that the Council was impressed by Chief Macgregor. They have confidence that he and his department will do a good job. Right now, you are being paid to help your friend, so that is what you need to focus on.”
He was being held somewhere dark and cool. There was a mattress on the floor with some blankets. He slept there whenever his body wanted him to sleep. At first, he had slept very much - too much. They had given him a drink that made him sleepy and nauseous. There was a bucket with a lid that he could use for his toilet. It was not full yet, but he wondered what would happen when it became full.
How long had he been here? He didn’t know because there was just a slit of a window up near the ceiling. He thought that the light and dark had changed places three times since he had been brought here, but he couldn’t be sure. Perhaps it was four times. He had slept very much at the beginning.
He had been sure that they would come back for him after a while. That had been his greatest fear. He suspected that they wanted him for a purpose, and he was frightened of what that purpose might be. At first, after he had woken up, he had lived in dread of the steel door opening and the men coming back.
Now that had been replaced by an even greater fear – that the men would never come back, that he would stay here forever. His most urgent need was water. Thirst overwhelmed him, drowning out his hunger.
The walls of this place were permanently damp. That was what made it chilly. He had found where the water was coming from. He was good at finding things. There was a steady drip of wetness along the wall. It was coming from the sliver of window above. If he lined his hand up with the drip, enough water would collect in his cupped palm for him to drink. He did this over and over again, all day long.
There was one day when he could hear rain falling outside. The drip had increased to a small stream and he had been able to drink his fill. He didn’t like to think about what would happen if the drip stopped.
As his thirst abated, hunger reasserted itself. There was no food in the room. He had checked several times. In one corner there were wooden crates filled with hard, flat, square things. If he had been familiar with the words, he would have known that they were floor tiles. All he cared about was that they weren’t edible.
Occasionally, a rat or a mouse ventured into the room under the steel door. They sniffed around, looking for food, like him. He lay very still on the mattress and let them come to him, attracted by the smell of his sweat.
One day, when his hunger pangs were fierce enough, he waited until a fat rat had come right up to his face and was sniffing at his lips. Then he struck like a snake, pinning it to the mattress with his small, strong hand. It wriggled and tried to bite him, but he twisted its neck hard, and shuddered as it fell limp in his hand. He used his feet to smash one of the wooden crates to splinters. He took a
long, thin splinter and rolled it between the palms of his hands with the tip touching another piece of wood. It took a long time for a spark to form because of the prevailing damp, but he managed it at last.
He skinned the rat roughly with his fingers and roasted it on the end of a stick over the fire. The meat tasted strange and unwholesome, but it was food and it gave him energy. As soon as he was finished, he stamped out the fire until not one spark remained. It was tempting to keep it going for warmth, but every child from the deep forest knew that you did not keep a fire burning in an enclosed space or you would not wake up in the morning.
That night, he lay on the mattress and hugged his body under the blankets. The rats and mice would keep him going for a while, but soon they would get clever. They would associate this room with death and they would start to avoid it.
A tear ran down the side of his face and made his ear feel cold. He missed his parents. He missed his friends. He missed his home. He didn’t understand why this had happened. All he could do was survive until something changed.
Eulalie woke up with the feel of damp concrete under her feet and the smell of charred rat in her nose. It was as though she had been in that cold, dark room with him. No, it was as though she had been him. She had seen what he saw, tasted what he tasted, felt his loneliness and fear.
It was six-thirty in the morning. She phoned the police station, still trembling with fear, and was told that the detective in charge of the child abduction case was Wesley Wright and that he would come on duty at eight. She was also told that Chief Macgregor was currently off-island. He had gone to Antananarivo in Madagascar to follow a lead. He had left by plane the night before and was expected back sometime today.
Eulalie was almost twitching with impatience as the minutes ticked by and the time moved closer to eight. Every now and then, she would stop what she was doing and close her eyes, trying to recapture that feeling of being back in the dream. What could she hear? What could she see? What could she smell?
The Eulalie Park Mysteries Box Set 1 Page 12
