by Nell Goddin
“Maybe,” said Molly with a laugh. “A bad marriage was part of it. But mainly, I moved here because I love France so much. The first time I came I was a teenager, and it felt—I know this will sound corny—but it felt like I was coming home. Then for years I sort of buried that feeling, and went on with my American life. When that fell apart, and the marriage breaking up wasn’t the only thing, I was unsatisfied in my job too…well, it seemed like the moment to come home had finally arrived.”
Madame Barbeau and Josette looked at Molly with wide eyes.
“I know, I know, in France it is considered strange, perhaps impolite, to say so much when we’ve just met. But you did ask,” said Molly with a laugh, as she took the cup of coffee from Madame Barbeau. The cup was fine china, a chip on the rim, with a faded gilt pattern and a delicate hook.
“Please excuse me for asking,” said Madame Barbeau, drawing herself up. “I wish Josette had something to tell you about the events concering the mayor. Of course we would be happy to further the cause of justice if we were able. But unfortunately, as you may have heard from your friends at the gendarmerie, Josette woke up that morning with a bad headache, and did not go in to work that day. So she is not in a position to give any evidence whatsoever about who came into the house the morning of the mayor’s murder.”
“I guess that was lucky for you,” said Molly, with a small smile at Josette.
Josette relaxed a little. She pulled her hands out of her jeans pocket and smiled back. “Yeah, I’d rather be far away when murderers are on the prowl!”
“Will you give me a tour? Since you weren’t there on Monday, I don’t have a ton of questions, but I’d like to see where those delicious chickens are raised, if you don’t mind showing a city girl around?”
Madame Barbeau stood still, and Molly thought she looked something like an owl as she blinked her large gray eyes and swiveled her head around to face her daughter. “Go on, Josette,” she said. “I’m going to finish up in the kitchen and clean the upstairs. Then we need to sit down with Julien to talk about expanding the henhouse.”
“Yes, Maman,” said Josette, sighing.
“Is Julien around?” asked Molly as she and Josette left the house. “We’ve gotten to be friends, from meeting at the market week after week.”
“That’s what he told me,” said Josette. “You’re sort of famous, you know. Solving all those cases and all.”
“Eh,” said Molly, both pleased and embarrassed. They walked around the dilapidated barn and out of sight of the house. Molly felt relieved to be out in the open air, and away from the penetrating gaze of Madame Barbeau.
“Do you mind answering a few questions about Coulon—what sort of man he was, things like that? Maybe it will be easier without your mother listening? I know at your age, I wanted to be as far away from my mother as possible.”
Josette giggled. “Oh, I don’t know. That’s what the chief wanted to know too. Coulon was a boss, you know? Told me what to do and when to do it.”
“You wouldn’t say you got to be friends, over the years you worked for him?”
“No,” said Josette. She bent down and picked up a seed pod, nothing Molly recognized, and began to pick it apart. “What did the people in the mairie say? Were they his friends?”
“I haven’t spoken to them yet. I came to you first, because I was really hoping you had been there that morning, and maybe seen something.”
“Nope,” said Josette. “Don’t you think it was a robber or something?”
“Maybe,” said Molly. “You have any idea who might’ve been mad at Coulon for some reason? Did his ex-wife ever come over?”
“He didn’t talk to me about any of that. And he never had guests over. Kind of a waste, with that big house. Anyway, with me it was just ‘polish this’ and ‘vacuum that.’ That was about it.”
“Did you like him? As a person?”
Josette did not know how to answer, so she just shrugged.
They did not get as far as the pond. Josette let Molly into the henhouse, hoping she did not look into the rafters and see the plastic bag stuffed between the joists. And after a cursory look around and a peek inside the barn, Molly thanked Josette, said goodbye, and got back on her scooter.
* * *
The Vasilievs had eaten a leisurely breakfast in the pigeonnier—like all of Molly’s guests, they too had discovered Pâtisserie Bujold and were addicted to almond croissants—and were preparing to go out.
“Check to see if her scooter is there,” said Fedosia in Russian, styling her stiff platinum hair, and trying to make it curl around the brush.
“I already saw her leave about ten minutes ago. She went the other way, away from the village. Hopefully she’ll be away for some time.”
“Eh,” said Fedosia, throwing the brush on the dining room table with a flourish. “Miss Sutton makes me laugh. So she is a hot-shot detective in this backwater town, so what? She is the least of our problems.”
“I would like to see the two of you fight,” said Vasily, with a sudden grin.
“You want to see everyone fight.” Fedosia rolled her eyes. “Come on, let’s get over to the lab, we’ve got a lot of work to do to get everything set up.”
Vasily narrowed his eyes at her but said nothing. He picked up a large cardboard box and followed her through the door, banging it shut with his foot and hurrying to catch up to his wife.
“You know she left her husband. Divorced him. I know this is common, you could say it is an everyday thing nowadays, especially in America. But to me? To me it means you have no loyalty. No pride. No strength.” Fedosia was walking two steps ahead of her husband and did not see his expression of approval.
About a hundred yards down rue des Chênes, past La Baraque and a little ways back from the road, stood a small stone building. It was not clear what its original purpose had been; in recent years it had been used as a tool shed and a garage, after which it stood empty for several years. It was one-story with only one room, with a small window on each wall. The orange-tiled roof was in good order, though vines had grown up and were on the verge of infiltrating the tiles if they were not trimmed soon. The Vasilievs, working through Malcolm Barstow, had been able to negotiate a very favorable rent. And considering how much income they hoped to get from the products of their lab, they expected to be making a substantial, if illegal, profit in short order.
Early that morning several trucks had arrived, one from the port of Marseille and another from Lille. Directed and paid off by Fedosia, the drivers had deposited numerous boxes inside the small building; she told Vasily to get to work unpacking them. He opened boxes containing small glass vials with blue stoppers, and placed them neatly in rows to one side. Boxes of latex gloves, labels, and plastic bottles of benzyl alcohol and benzyl benzoate. A box of glass beakers. Large plastic jugs of grapeseed oil. And in a smaller box, envelopes of yellowish powder with labels in Chinese. Meticulously and with pleasure, Vasily arranged all of his new toys on the two tables Malcolm Barstow had brought from somewhere, while Fedosia swept the floor.
When they had done all they could, Vasily took Fedosia by the shoulders and pushed her up against the wall, and growled into her neck before kissing her.
“Not now,” she snapped. “We’ve got to get out of here before Sutton gets back.”
“I thought you weren’t worried about her. What happened to disloyal and weak, and I think you mentioned stupid?”
Fedosia waved him off. “Don’t take everything so literally, Vasily. Just because I don’t have a high opinion of her doesn’t mean we should be careless. She might get lucky, you know? Keep a close eye on Molly Sutton, darling,” she added, suddenly dropping her abrasive aspect and purring at her husband. “A very close eye. We’ve gone to far too much trouble to let the likes of her ruin everything.”
A dangerous light flickered in Vasily’s eyes, and he smiled a slow smile as he contemplated all the ways he could stop Molly Sutton from getting in their way.
Molly had given up on Frances, who found it impossible to pick a wedding date given her constant waffling on whether even to go through with the ceremony at all. Now that she and Ben had a case, she needed to know what the couple had decided, secretly hoping the wedding would be called off—but just until the killer was caught. Molly went into Chez Papa when she was sure Frances was home working on a jingle, to see if Nico would set a date.
“How about two weeks? Can you pull it together that soon?” he said, sweetly hopeful.
“Uh…”
Nico looked crestfallen, and Molly was so charmed by his fervor to wed her twice-divorced best pal that she readily agreed. “Okay, yes, of course I can pull it together. It’s just a wedding, right? Not the crowning of a monarch?”
“Your mind goes to strange places,” said Nico, grinning. “I’m sorry if I’m strong-arming you. But Frances…”
“I know. She’s skittery about the whole thing, let’s be honest. But Nico, you should know this: she is not skittery about you. It’s simply that she’s made mistakes before and doesn’t want to do anything that will mess up things between the two of you. Because she’s so happy.”
“Right. I do realize that. I think. And I’ll admit to you, Molls, that being in this position of wanting so desperately to get married? Never expected to be here. Never really gave it any thought at all, really.”
“Frances…”
“Yeah,” said Nico dreamily. “She’s one in a million, that’s for sure.”
“One tiny little hitch about the date—”
Nico’s eyebrows flew up and he stopped putting glasses away under the bar.
“Usually weddings are on Saturdays. But as you know, in the gîte business, Saturday is changeover day and in two weeks I’ll have some guests leaving, some new ones coming in, cleaning to do…it would be awkward to be putting on a wedding at the same time. Do you think we could do it Friday night instead?”
“We can do it Monday morning at 7 a.m. for all I care.”
“Excellent! All right then! I’ll get going right now. If you have any particular ideas, any thoughts on the party—the food, decoration, anything—just text me. I know Frances doesn’t want it all lacy and flowery so I’m just going with simple if that’s all right with you.”
They waved goodbye and Molly went back into the bright June day, mentally making a list—a long list—of everything she’d need to do that week to get prepared for her friends’ big day. And alongside that list was another one, rather more interesting in her opinion, of what needed to be done for the investigation of Coulon’s murder. Guiltily, she put the wedding aside, crossing over a few streets to rue Malbec, and knocked on the doors of the houses on either side of the mayor’s. An old woman lived in the house on the right. She apologized for not being able to help, explaining that her health wasn’t good and she spent most of her time asleep, and had seen or heard nothing on the day of the murder or on any other day, for that matter.
No answer at the house on the other side, and there was enough dust and dirt on the stoop that Molly correctly guessed that no one currently lived there.
The mairie was right down the street so she went to talk to some of the people who had worked for Coulon to see what they had to say about him and the people he knew.
The nineteenth-century building that held the mairie was impressive, with plenty of stately and ornate decoration on the outside. The day had heated up, but when Molly went inside, the rooms were pleasantly cool thanks to the thick walls. She went up to Annette, the receptionist, whom she had met on previous trips there for various purposes of research. She couldn’t help thinking fondly of her first real case, and how the telling clue to what had happened had been found among the dusty records there at the mairie. The place was beloved to her, privately, for that reason.
“Bonjour, Annette,” said Molly, hoping she wasn’t too busy to chat.
“Ah, bonjour, Molly. I’ve been expecting you.” Annette was small, compact, and alert, without a strand of hair out of place. Like a wren, thought Molly, picking a pencil out of a mug on the counter for something to fiddle with. She didn’t know Annette well and wasn’t sure how to encourage her to open up. Three women sat at desks, two facing each other and the third off to the side. Their eyes were glued to computer screens but Molly had the feeling they were listening as hard as they could.
“Do you have a little time to talk? Would it be better to meet after hours?”
“Oh no,” laughed Annette, “we’re not busy. Since the mayor…since…the last few days it’s been like a tomb in here…oh, dear, I didn’t mean…”
Molly reached across the counter and touched her arm lightly. “I understand, believe me. It must be a little frightening, having that kind of violence hit so close to home. No doubt you’re very interested in having the mayor’s killer brought to justice. Of course I don’t mean to imply anyone else is in danger, nothing like that.”
Annette nodded. Her expression was entirely neutral and Molly paused, chewing on her lip, thinking of what to ask.
“Can you give me, just generally, an idea of how things were here in the mairie, in the weeks before the mayor was killed?”
Annette shrugged. “Nothing out of the ordinary, really.”
“Just a lot of extra work,” said one of the women behind her. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help overhearing. I’m Claudine Brosset. Of course, paperwork is the lifeblood of the mairie! But last month we were absolutely swamped with permit applications. Who knew Castillac was stuffed with so many entrepreneurs looking to open businesses?”
Annette laughed, but the sound was brittle and humorless. “Thank you, Claudine,” she said, implying that Claudine should sit back down and keep quiet.
Molly followed this exchange with interest, remembering her days of office work and the onerous office politics that could be harder to manage than the job itself.
“I hope Castillac doesn’t get too busy,” she said. “I guess it’s not great for business, but I love that it’s a little sleepy.” She looked quickly at Annette and the others, hoping she hadn’t offended them.
“Most of the people applying for permits will never make any money, even if they open their shops,” said Annette.
“I do remember hearing about a high failure rate for small businesses, back in the States as well.”
“Nothing wrong with trying,” said Claudine, rising up from her seat again.
Annette shot her a look and she sat back down.
Molly tried to turn the conversation back toward the mayor, but her attempts did not succeed. The women at the mairie wanted to talk about the percentage of permit rejections, which had been abnormally high all year. They wanted to talk about the best place to go out for lunch. And most of all, they wanted to talk about André Lebeau and how they hoped he would be their new mayor.
All of them expressed sorrow at what had happened to Coulon, and agreed that he had been a decent man to work for, as he allowed them plenty of freedom and was not harsh when someone made an error. They appeared to be quite competent at running the mairie on their own, and more interested in their prospects for a new boss than finding out who killed Coulon, thought Molly as she headed home, the murder investigation having completely shoved Frances and Nico’s wedding out of her mind.
Was that just an act, and there was more going on that they weren’t admitting to?
And where was this André Lebeau, anyway? He seemed to have an intoxicating effect on the entire village, and it was time Molly found out what all the fuss was about.
31
She waited until Julien and Josette had gone off to a music festival in Bergerac, something Madame Barbeau would have enjoyed immensely in her youth but which now held little interest.
And besides, another, more powerful reason kept her home at the farm that day. Clearly Josette, lacking the most basic common sense, believed the Coulon matter was already far in the past and she had nothing to worry about. But her
mother had no such confidence. She, Josette, Julien—they were all suspects, being so closely tied to the mayor, and the next days and weeks were going to be very dangerous for the entire family.
The gendarmes themselves did not especially worry her—they were a pair of bumblers, anyone could see that. But Molly Sutton was another thing entirely. And Madame Barbeau was not going to sit back and do nothing while Sutton and Dufort dug around where they were not welcome, trying to buff up their reputation with yet another arrest.
Madame Barbeau could see the whole story playing out: how Sutton would target Josette because the American was envious of her daughter’s beauty, and then slowly piece together a case until she and Dufort could snap handcuffs on Josette’s pretty wrists…and Madame Barbeau had no idea what she could do to stop them. They could just as easily come up with pretexts for arresting Julien, or herself…they had to be stopped.
That was all—they had to be stopped.
Josette had run off that morning without even doing the morning chores, as though all responsibility had magically lifted from her shoulders just because she no longer had a job at the mayor’s. Grumbling, Madame Barbeau picked up a basket and went to collect the eggs. On the way to the henhouse, she stopped for a moment and looked around at the farm—dilapidated, strewn with manure from the donkey, a rooster strutting, a ragged crow coming from the woods. She pressed a hand into her lower back. The fury at her husband for bringing her to this place was always fresh, and she cursed him under her breath though he had been dead many years.
Her fingers hurt when she opened the clasp to the henhouse. The birds scurried up around her looking for grain, but she had brought nothing, no table scraps or corn, and soon they scurried away again. She breathed lightly through her mouth to avoid the sharp smell, as cleaning out the bedding was another chore Josette had put off. Eighty laying hens, give or take, a jumble of different breeds since Julien usually bought whatever they happened to have at the market when it was time to refresh the flock. Josette had been letting them out to forage, which Madame Barbeau had instructed her to do since it made for better quality eggs and lower feed costs, but she had slacked off on that job as well lately.
