As soon as she stepped outside, she realized it was earlier than she’d thought. There was only one cooking fire going, and it was coming from the house of Phillippe and Rosa, the parents of Bibi. She saw Rosa sitting at the front door kneading dough that she would soon put into the clay over that smoked next to the house.
She looked up and smiled as Eulalie approached.
“You’re up early.”
“So are you.”
“I always get up early on baking mornings. What’s your excuse?”
“I have a lot to get through. Angel wants to leave early tomorrow morning. I want to speak to everyone I possibly can about this ugly business.”
Rosa pulled a face. “It has unsettled everyone. Even the children feel it. The thought that something like that could have happened so close to us – well, it’s just unbelievable. And the thought that it might have been one of us…” She broke off and shuddered.
“How have things been in the village since I was last here? Any tensions? Any dramas?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary. Two of the men worked on a canoe together, and then argued over who it belonged to. They took it to the council and a ruling was made that they should use it on alternate days. Then someone complained because little Eugene was keeping a live snake as a pet. People thought it was an axe-mouthed tree snake, and you know how poisonous those are.”
“Sure.”
“He was made to produce the animal, and it turned out to be a harmless grass snake, so he was allowed to keep it. I believe it escaped a few days ago. That’s it. That’s all the drama I have for you.”
She passed Eulalie half the dough, and together they began to shape it into the traditional twisted loaves that were eaten at breakfast time.
“What about individuals?” Eulalie was surprised to find how well her hands remembered the skill. “Has anyone been restless or unhappy? Any aggression or disgruntled feelings?”
“There is always aggression among the young men, but they go out hunting, or dung-collecting to burn it off. Sometimes there will be a fistfight. You remember what it was like.”
Eulalie did. The villagers were no calmer or more virtuous than anyone else in the world, but their energies were directed into productive outlets, which usually meant that the community remained on an even keel.
“Has anyone noticed strangers around here? Besides the dead guy, I mean.”
Rosa covered the tray of loaves they had created with a soft cloth and put it into a patch of warm sunlight to prove for twenty minutes before she put it in the oven.
“I haven’t heard anything. You know how rare it is for an outsider to come here. We usually know about it in advance when we are getting a visitor. There hasn’t been a stranger here since…” She thought for a minute. “Since you brought Bibi back and that policeman accompanied you.”
“You mean Chief Macgregor.”
“I do.” Rosa met her eye and smiled. “He seemed nice. Do you still see him?”
The corners of Eulalie’s mouth tugged upwards. “He’s okay. We work together sometimes.”
“He has a gentle manner and is pleasing to look at. I think he is better than okay.”
“I’ll tell Phillipe you have your eye on the chief of police.”
Rose smiled and shook her head.
It was time to get this conversation back on track.
“One of the children told me yesterday that she had seen two strangers near the dried-up riverbed. She made me promise not to tell anyone, so I can’t say who she was. She was too young to remember it clearly. She couldn’t even tell me exactly when it happened. It could have been the day of the murder, or it could have been weeks earlier. It might have been all in her imagination. But it got me wondering whether any of the other kids know anything.”
“We always had secrets from the grownups, remember?”
Eulalie laughed. “I certainly did, but you were such a good girl, Rosa. Bossy too.”
“I was older, so it was my job to be bossy. But I do think the children sometimes know things that the adults don’t. It would be worth speaking to them. Just remember that they often can’t separate fact from fiction in their own minds, and especially not when adults start questioning them about something exciting like strangers.”
“True enough. Bibi tells me he’s having fewer nightmares.”
“Also true - thanks to you. I wish I could say the same. I keep waking up in the night, convinced that he has been taken again. I dream of him being trapped in that room, with me beating on the door and trying to get to him.” Her eyes were full of the horrors of what might have been. Then she lifted the cloth to check on the loaves and popped them into the oven.
“Sometimes I feel as though everything is going wrong here,” said Rosa. “Two ugly things have come into the forest in a short space of time. First Bibi’s kidnapping, and then this poor man’s death. It feels as though things are changing in the forest – as though our way of life is not going to be possible for much longer.”
“What are…” It almost choked Eulalie to ask, but she had to know. “What are the Guides saying?”
“They are worried. I know they don’t want to cause a panic by saying too much, but they are certainly worried. I am sure your grandmother will meet with them today and hear more. After all, she is a Guide herself.”
She laughed as Eulalie shifted in her seat.
“You would have been a Guide too if you had stayed here. You have the sight.”
Eulalie glared at her. “I was going to make arrows, not stupid predictions.”
Rosa patted her knee. “You could have done that too. Being a Guide is not a full-time occupation, merely a calling.” She stood up and went inside.
Later that morning, Eulalie invited her old friend Rael to go for a walk with her up to the dried-out riverbed. Now married and the father of two hopeful children, Rael was a fisherman by profession. He was heading upstream anyway, so it didn’t disturb his day to accompany her.
“Remember when we came up here as kids?” she said as a widening of the river told her that the old ox-bow lake was close by.
“That time we found the tusk? How could I forget?”
“Whatever happened to it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it in years. One of the adults must have done something with it. Remember how amazed we were to hear that it had once belonged to an animal that roamed this island thousands of years ago?”
Eulalie smiled as she recalled their pride in bringing the treasure back home to the village. Everyone had been astounded by the size of it.
“Did anyone ever find another one like that after I left?”
Rael shook his head. “Not that I heard.”
“But you must have found other cool things in there over the years. The best thing I ever found was a preserved bat. I kept that thing for ages. What did other people find?”
“You really don’t know what happened?” Rael slowed his pace and turned to look at her.
“No. About what? I didn’t hear anything.”
“A child almost drowned in the mud. Little Lila who was three years old at the time. She stepped into one of the soft patches, and the children who were with her couldn’t get her out. They had to run back to the village for help. The more she struggled, the more the mud sucked her down. Eventually they managed to get her out by laying logs of wood across the mud and tying a knotted rope around her body. She was in it up to her chin at the end. Her parents were hysterical. She’s fine now, as you know, but it gave the adults a big fright.
“I can imagine.”
“We were banned from going anywhere near the old riverbed. To tell you the truth, we didn’t even want to. The sight of Lila buried up to her neck was one we would never forget. Those of us who had tried to pull her out had felt the fearsome power of the mud. We knew it was stronger than we were and had no desire to test it again.”
“And now? Do people still stay away?”
“As far as
I know, no one goes there.”
They were almost there now. They stepped out of the trees and onto a large muddy plain shaped rather like a human ear. It was bigger than Eulalie remembered, which was odd because most things that one remembered from childhood seemed to shrink as one got older.
Rael stepped onto the mud and hesitated. “Can you still do it? Can you still see where the soft patches are?”
Eulalie’s instinct was to deny it, but there was no point. “Yes,” she said. “I can still do it.”
Rael nodded and stepped further onto the firm mud.
“It is strange being back here, is it not?”
“I was just thinking the same thing.”
“Why did you want to come here? What was it that you wanted to see?”
“One of the kids told me she saw strangers here one day.”
“What? Which child? They mustn’t come here. It is not safe.”
“I promised I wouldn’t say, but I will tell you that it wasn’t one of yours.”
“That’s the problem – there’s a new generation of children being born who don’t remember seeing Lila almost get sucked under here. No matter what we tell them, they’re going to think it is a game to come out here. I need to take this to the council. We can’t afford to endanger another child.”
It amused Eulalie to see her old playmate all grown up and responsible. They might have been the same age in years, but in their stages of life they were far apart. Rael had been a father for seven years. Eulalie had only just taken on the responsibility of a cat.
“You realize the child was probably imagining things?” he said. “The only stranger we’ve had around here is the dead man.”
“I know, but in my line of work you have to follow every lead. Most of them end up in dead-ends, but you have to follow them anyway.”
“I understand that, but there is no way there could have been anyone so close to the village without one of us noticing. It is just not …”
He broke off as they saw it.
“You were saying?”
“I don’t believe this. It is not possible.”
They quickened their pace. At the far end of the mud plain, there were signs of digging. Mud had been piled up on either side of a big hole that was half-full of water.
As they got closer, Eulalie stopped and shot out a hand to grab Rael’s arm.
“Stop! There’s a soft patch here. We must go around it.”
She led him in a wide circle and then doubled back to reach the hole.
Rael’s expression of astonishment was almost comical as they stood and stared at it.
“Is there any way that this could have been dug by one of the villagers?”
“We can ask,” said Rael. “But I don’t think so. No one comes here anymore. Even the animals avoid it because it’s so treacherous. We don’t even come here to hunt.”
Eulalie circled the hole, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. It seemed to have been dug with a spade, rather than with machinery. Did the person bring tools with them each time, or did they leave them somewhere in the vicinity?
She noticed Rael looking around in the forest and realized he’d had the same thought.
“This wasn’t done in a day.”
“No,” he agreed. “Even if there were two or three of them, this is several days’ work.”
“What could they be doing? It’s not so much a hole as a trench. It looks like the start of a channel.” In a few more weeks, one could imagine it bisecting the whole river bed.
“We should fill it up,” said Rael. “I should get a group of men from the village to come and help me fill it up. I can’t see them starting again if we do that.”
“That’s a good idea.” Eulalie was in favor of anything that caused trouble for these people. “This has to be connected to the dead man, don’t you agree?”
“I do. Normally, we can go for years without seeing a strange face and now suddenly we have a dead man and a muddy trench within days of each other. They must be connected.”
“We should go back and report this. They might have taken their tools away, but you can clearly see where they’ve been.”
She pointed to the area around the hole and about ten feet deep into the forest. Rael nodded. There were tracks everywhere. Someone in thick-soled hiking boots had crossed and re-crossed the area many times over.
“How many pairs of footprints do you see?”
“At least two.” He walked with his head bent low to the ground. “I’m trying to see if there are more than that.”
“I also see two. They were formed over several days, which makes it confusing.”
“The dead man and his killer?”
Eulalie raised her eyes to meet his. “Maybe. Yes, maybe.”
She took out her cellphone to record the scene as meticulously as possible. She picked two of the clearest footprints and photographed them. Then she took pictures of the trench from every angle. She photographed the flattened undergrowth in the forest at the edge of the trench. Finally, she took some establishing shots of the mud plain and the surrounding forest.
Rael watched her patiently, but without much interest. It wasn’t that the villagers were unaware of technology, it was just that they chose to ignore it. Most had been to Queen’s Town at least once in their lives and knew what cars, airplanes, and computers looked like. They simply chose to live without them.
“We can go back now.”
They fell into step on the way back to the village, skirting the edge of the mud plain to avoid the deadly soft spots.
“Ever since they found that man, I’ve been thinking about who might have killed him,” said Rael. “I’ve tried to be honest with myself. I’ve tried to put aside my loyalty to the village and to think about who might be capable of it. And the thing is – I can’t come up with a single name. Not one. I can think of a few who used to live here and left, but no one who still lives here.”
“I can also think of a few ex-villagers and I’ll be paying them a visit shortly. Angel and I can’t think of anyone who might have done this either. Unless it was an accident.”
Rael made a disbelieving sound. “You don’t accidently point a bow with that kind of draw weight at somebody. Whatever this was, it wasn’t an accident.”
Eulalie agreed. This was cold-blooded murder. Or possibly hot-blooded murder - it was hard to tell.
Back at the village their story about the trench was greeted with skepticism and then dismay. Eulalie couldn’t see anyone who seemed to know about it already. The trouble was that she was looking in the wrong place. If she had turned her head to the south west, she might have spotted someone watching her from the top of a very tall tree – someone who knew all about the murder and about the trench.
Chapter 6
“Chief Macgregor had dinner with Stephanie Autry last night.”
Angel’s eyebrows rose. “Did he, indeed?”
Eulalie wasn’t sure why she had waited until now to blurt this out, or why she had mentioned it at all. It wasn’t a big deal, after all.
“And the reason for this dinner?” asked Angel.
“She invited him. She said it was a business meeting on how to strengthen relations between their two departments.”
“Hmm.”
“That’s exactly what I said.”
“What was the venue of this business meeting?”
“La Colombe. I know, I know!” She held up her hands when she saw the expression on Angel’s face. “It’s not very businesslike.”
“It is a place for romantic trysts and secret assignations. Does the good doctor have her eye on Chief Macgregor?”
“I’m not sure, but I think she does. They are both such contained, emotionally controlled people. They like order and routine. They are efficient and good at their jobs. She has probably decided they are a perfect match.”
There was silence for a moment. Eulalie stared out the window of the cable car. Her forest home had disappeared behind he
r, hidden by the cliff face that separated Queen’s Town from the western part of the island. Already, her thoughts were turned to her other life – her town life.
“And what does Chief Macgregor think?” asked Angel.
“I told you about the skin thing? About how he knows we are supposed to be together because his skin recognizes mine?” Angel nodded, so she went on. “He says his skin doesn’t recognize Dr. Autry’s, so she is not even a possibility for him.”
“Then you have nothing to worry about.”
“I’m not worried. I refuse to be clingy and insecure. Why would I want to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with me? He is free to have dinner with as many beautiful Harvard graduates as he likes.”
“Of course, ma petite, but the human heart is a funny thing. Everything you say is true, and I have no doubt you will behave well in this situation. But that doesn’t mean that you are not allowed to feel. It is okay to be churned up and worried and upset. Those are natural emotions. Allow yourself to feel them and soon you will smooth out again.”
Eulalie rested her head on her grandmother’s shoulder as they pulled into the station. “Thanks for being so wise.” Angel patted her hand as they stepped out of the cable car and boarded the train that would take them down to Cliff Road.
As they entered the train carriage, Angel was greeted by a woman who lived in one of the cliff houses near the station. She was going into town to meet a friend for dinner. She and Angel sat together and chatted, leaving Eulalie free to plan her next move.
The day was almost over, but she wanted to accomplish at least one thing before she went home for the night. She looked at her phone and saw that she had signal for the first time in forty-eight hours. She sent a text to Mrs. Belfast.
Eulalie: Nearly back in Queen’s Town. Please contact the police station and find out who I should speak to about getting access to the evidence lock-up. I don’t want to go over someone’s head by asking Chief Macgregor for it.
The reply came a moment later.
Lorelei Belfast: The chief isn’t here. He has gone to Madagascar. Back in the morning. I’ll speak to Manny. He has the seniority to open the evidence vault for you. Paddy missed you, by the way.
The Complete H-Series of The Eulalie Park Mysteries Page 80