by Nell Goddin
“Because she was scared to admit knowing a woman who was murdered? Maybe it was nothing more than a freakishly bad decision made out of fear.”
“But why—that makes no sense to me, and are you sticking up for her?”
“No. I’m trying to explain why—”
“I made the mistake of not taking her seriously and here you are doing the exact same thing. It’s no wonder the gendarmerie moves its officers around so often—it’s absolutely true that we don’t want to suspect our friends. Or girlfriends,” she added, knowing full well she was behaving badly but unable to stop herself.
“Oh, Molly.”
“Don’t ‘oh Molly’ me. I’m not accusing you of anything I haven’t done myself. We are failing at this case, Ben. Failing hard.” She walked to the door to the terrace. “I’m going to check on the renovation and take a walk to clear my head. In the meantime, figure out what the hell Levy’s up to, will you?” She tried for a smile but it came out a little strange looking, called for Bobo and set off for the broken-down barn, feeling sick to her stomach at the thought of what else she may have missed.
Ben took the time to finish his glass of cider without rushing, as he considered Molly and what she had said. He had dated Marie-Claire briefly—not for long, but it had been just before he and Molly had started seeing each other. It was not Molly’s jealousy that bothered him; he knew she’d snap out of it before long. It was Marie-Claire and her lie.
Did he know her the way he thought he did?
Did any of us really know each other at all?
Ben drained his glass and took it and his plate into the kitchen and put them in the dishwasher before setting out after Molly. He wished he had a tantalizing tidbit or two to dangle in front of her, something that would steer her attention in the direction Ben thought it belonged: Simon Valette. So far he had not managed to dig up anything even slightly dodgy about him, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
He could see Molly from a distance as she talked to one of the workmen at the old barn, her hands waving in the air and Bobo jumping up on the man excitedly.
She has a blind spot when it came to charming men, she’d shown this over and over, Ben thought. And now that her first horse in the race had pulled up lame, she was determined to avoid looking at Simon and instead go after Marie-Claire, who as far as Ben knew, was as harmless as a house cat.
“Chérie,” he called as he got closer, as Molly stood looking at a beautifully restored wall and the masons got back to work.
“She lied,” said Molly, shrugging her shoulders. “How about if you get the job of finding out why?”
“All right,” said Ben, trying to catch her eye. But Molly shook her head quickly, thanked the workman, and waved a hand in the air before heading back to the house. Mon Dieu, she can be stubborn, he thought as he followed behind.
“I’m going to see Paul-Henri,” he called out, loud enough for her to hear.
“Thought you did that already.” Molly paused to let him catch up to her.
“Got sidetracked. I’ll tell him about Camille’s alibi? Seems only fair to share any exculpatory—”
“Yes, of course. But leave out the business with Marie-Claire, will you? I’d like to figure out what’s going on first.”
Ben hesitated, then nodded. “If I had to guess, I think now that Lapin is out of the woods and Camille is off the list…the attention of the gendarmerie will be aimed at Simon. He is the most—”
But Molly was in no mood. “Let me know if he has anything,” she said, and walked quickly in the direction of the woods, Bobo bounding behind her.
43
Paul-Henri had just gotten back to the station after speaking with Merla, Ophélie, Edmond Nugent, and Nico, and was gratefully sinking into his chair, very pleased that he had the place to himself, when Ben strolled in.
“Ben,” he said, teeth gritted, though he did want to speak to the former chief.
“She’s not here?” asked Ben, gesturing to his former office.
“No. No idea where she is or how long she’ll be. You want to talk? I think we should go somewhere else. I don’t even want to think about what she would do if she saw us talking all cozy-like.”
“That’s fine. I have something for you this time. Don’t want you to feel like you’re doing all the giving.” He smiled, seeing fear flash Paul-Henri’s face. “Are…are things that bad?” he asked gently.
Paul-Henri shook his head. “Nothing I can’t handle,” he answered. “How about the alley off of rue Malbec? There’s an empty garage back that way…”
The men left the station and ducked down the alley and into the garage. It smelled musty and they could see dust hanging in the air.
“It’s about Camille,” said Ben. “Turns out she has an alibi. I know that was the suspect we were pushing the hardest, but Molly and I have had to let that go. She did not do it.”
Paul-Henri brushed the front of his uniform. “What sort of alibi?”
“I don’t like to say.”
“If you want to be helpful, you must say, Monsieur Dufort.”
“Please do keep this to yourself. I mean to the gendarmerie—I know you will have to tell the chief. Camille…she grabbed someone and kissed him, in the foyer, at the precise moment that Violette was being strangled.”
“Which someone?”
“Is it really necess—”
“Of course it is!” said Paul-Henri, nearly losing his temper. “Just give all the facts, if you please!”
“Pascal Longhale.”
Paul-Henri’s eyebrows flew up.
“She grabbed him,” said Ben. “And he is not a gossip, despite having grown up in Castillac, so he didn’t say anything at first. Molly pried it out of him.”
The two men stood for a moment, thinking.
“In light of this, I would bet a rather large sum of money that Charlot will go after Simon,” said Paul-Henri.
“I thought as much.”
Paul-Henri shrugged. “He makes her feel inferior. She is feeling the pressure of having no suspect while the village becomes restive. Perhaps she’s even thinking Simon has gone on quite the murderous spree, having also killed his father because he was inconvenient.”
“What? How can—”
“I didn’t say she has the slightest bit of evidence of any of it. But of all the things that the chief gets excited about, actual evidence does not seem to be on the list.”
“What do you think of Simon?”
Paul-Henri was momentarily taken aback by being asked for his opinion. “Well, I…it’s certainly possible, wouldn’t you agree? Maybe Camille discovered him and the nanny in a compromising position.”
“But why kill her? The cat would already be out of the bag.”
Paul-Henri opened his mouth to say something but stopped himself.
“Maybe she was blackmailing him,” said Ben.
“That’s what I meant to say.”
“I don’t think Simon did it.”
“Neither do I! He would’ve had to be very quick on his feet, for one thing, to get from the foyer around to the library. Unfortunately Merla and Ophélie can’t give him a solid alibi. They were not in the kitchen the entire evening, as one might have hoped. They stepped out for some fresh air even during the storm, saying the kitchen is poorly ventilated and got uncomfortably stuffy, and Ophélie says they also went into the large pantry from time to time—at any rate, there were opportunities for someone to cut through the kitchen and get to the library and Violette. Without having to go through the dining room at all.”
Ben nodded, trying to imagine it. It was so strange, having been present himself at the scene. Every time he tried to remember, all he could see was that terrible darkness, impenetrable as a shroud of the blackest velvet. “What were you saying about Raphael’s death?”
Paul-Henri rolled his eyes. “Well, on orders from the chief, I spoke to Florian Nagrand. He says it’s possible that the elder Valette was pushed from the b
alcony, but there’s no way to be sure. Chief Charlot interprets that as a decent possibility, and has a theory that the old man saw something—either the night of the murder or some other time—and that Simon needed him out of the way.”
“But Simon moved his family to Castillac partly to rescue his father from a nursing home. That makes no sense at all.”
“It does if you understand he’s playing the long game,” said Paul-Henri. “If you tell everyone you’re doing this selfless act of moving your mentally ill father into your home, nobody’s going to suspect you if the old fellow ends up with a broken neck.”
Ben took a long breath in through his nose and sneezed. He was thinking about Gisele and Chloë, and how badly things would go for them if their father were arrested.
The two men shook hands, promised to meet again if either one got hold of any new information, and set off in different directions.
Once the sun was down, the air was cooling quickly. Gisele and Chloë had been home from school for hours, playing in Gisele’s room. They left the door open because a closed door was one of their mother’s triggers, and they had long ago learned that closing a door was not worth a beating.
They were huddled over a board game, never Chloë’s favorite enterprise, but Gisele had prevailed. They startled at a knock on the open door and looked up to see their mother in the doorway.
“Bonsoir, Maman,” said Gisele.
Camille sighed. “Tell me truthfully,” she said. “Do you like your new home in Castillac? Do you think we should stay here, or move back to Paris?”
Chloë stiffened. She hated when her mother asked her questions like this, questions that to Chloë belonged to the parents, not to her. She shrugged, hoping her mother would accept that as an answer.
“I like it,” said Gisele. “But I miss my friends.”
“Of course you do,” Camille said, her voice kind. Then she drifted out of sight down the corridor, and the girls heard her heading downstairs.
The sudden and unpredictable kindness of her mother made Gisele angry. If she would just stay the same, the girl thought, then we could all work out what to do. But she shifts this way and that, changing so fast, it’s impossible.
“Chloë,” she said, picking up the dice and rolling them. “Would you like to go on an adventure?”
Chloë leapt up from the floor and knocked the pieces around on the board game. “Yes! Let’s leave this instant! Where are we going?”
“I think we’re old enough to be on our own, don’t you? Just for a little while?”
“Yes, of course I do! Are we going to New York?”
“I don’t think we have the money for plane tickets.”
“Well, Africa then?”
Gisele smiled. “How about we just get out of here, out of this house, and worry about our final destination later?”
“What about Papa?”
Gisele shrugged. “He’ll manage without us. He’ll just keep building that dumb wall.”
Chloë had rarely heard her sister speak with an edge of bitterness and she found it fascinating. “Let’s pack!” she said leaping about the room and flinging Gisele’s things up in the air.
It wasn’t a perfect solution, Gisele thought as she pulled a small duffel from under her bed. But there had been two deaths in less than two weeks, and if she could, she was not going to allow either of them to be next.
44
Chief Charlot drove quickly along the back road that wound from Bergerac to Castillac. She had spent the morning in meetings with the chief of the Bergerac gendarmerie, withstanding all manner of slights from a man she deemed not fit to polish her shoes. But Charlot wasn’t any more surprised by his incompetence than by his mere existence; it was the norm, sadly enough for the state of the country, she thought as she whipped around a tight curve and sped up on a straightaway.
By the time she reached Castillac, she had forgotten about the Bergerac chief entirely and was gearing herself up for a fight with Florian Nagrand’s lab. It was unconscionable, having to wait so long for a couple of simple tests. She was beginning to believe that she could count on nothing working in a satisfactory manner in this godforsaken backwater the gendarmerie had sent her to. Clenching her teeth, she parked neatly and climbed out of the police car, not admitting to herself that she quite relished the thought of a shouting match with someone at the lab.
“Paul-Henri!” she said upon entering the station. “I didn’t expect you to still be here. It’s quite late, after all.”
“I wanted to give you this in person,” he said, handing over an envelope.
“”Have they not heard of the internet around these parts?” she mumbled to herself. Tearing the envelope open, she narrowed her eyes while reading the results, leading Paul-Henri to wonder to himself how he had never noticed how much the chief resembled an angry rodent.
The angry rodent let out a stifled sound—was it a laugh, or a cough? Paul-Henri was not sure. “Well?” he said.
Charlot handed him the report. “Finally they give us something we can work with. Two DNA matches. Let’s go.”
“Go where? I don’t see—”
“No? Do you have an excuse for why his skin was under the fingernails of a young woman who was strangled?”
“Of course it bears more investigation. But I—”
“You drive.” She tossed him the keys and her eyes were glinting with pleasure at the thought of handcuffing one of the men on the list, who had looked down his nose at her from the very first.
With the excuse of a quick run to the toilet, Paul-Henri managed to text the news to Ben, though he felt no confidence it was going to help in the least.
45
Molly was having a kir after a long day of frustration and lack of progress. She sat at her desk, surfing the internet with a vengeance. Questions abounded: why had Violette chosen to apply to L’Institut Degas, of all places? Had being rejected been a terrible experience, worse than usual somehow, and did it have anything to do with her death? Was Marie-Claire involved? Molly read through pages of Violette’s Facebook posts, and though she was beginning to feel that she knew the young woman a little bit, she could find nothing about the art school or anything the least bit suspicious.
She leaned back in her chair and looked out the window. Maybe she should go back to running her gîte business and gardening, and give up this whole private investigator foolishness. Clearly, with those earlier cases she had just gotten lucky, and now that a murder was truly thorny, she was lost.
Ben came through the front door looking at his phone. “Text from Paul-Henri. DNA Lab report is in at long last.” He turned his phone so she could read Paul-Henri’s text.
“Simon did not do it,” said Molly quickly.
Ben’s eyebrows flew up.
“Well, they did live in the same house,” she said. “He could have scratched her while they were playing with the girls or something. It’s not freakishly weird to have someone else’s DNA on you when you share a house.”
Ben put his head to one side. “Really? That doesn’t make you wonder even a little? You’re that convinced of his innocence?”
“I am.” She felt like throwing something, breaking something. Now it wasn’t only that she hadn’t caught the murderer, but an innocent man was at risk for being arrested, because she couldn’t figure out what had happened. “Dammit, Ben! If I just knew where to look, but I’m…I’m as much in the dark as we all were the night of the murder!”
He came up behind her and rubbed her shoulders, which usually she loved but at that moment did not. She jumped up from her chair and paced the living room. “Charlot’s definitely going after Simon, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything more from Paul-Henri.”
“They’re probably pulling into the Valettes’ drive right now. She’s infuriating!”
“Want another kir?”
“Yes! I want five kirs! But I can’t, there’s not a moment to be lost, only—only
I have no idea where to go or what to do.”
“Molly, listen to me. If Simon is not guilty, then even if Charlot arrests him prematurely, it will come to nothing. DNA under Violette’s nails is evidence, let’s not pretend it isn’t. But it’s circumstantial. It’s not going to put him away, not unless Charlot has something else she hasn’t told anyone.”
Molly turned back to her computer, idly flipping from one website to the next. “Oh.” Molly looked stricken suddenly. “Oh!” And she grabbed her coat and was out the door before Ben had time to say another word.
46
She was missing half of what she needed to know, Molly was quite clear on that. All she had was a shred, a thread, a barely visible filament connecting the murderer to the victim.
But it was there. A whole lot better than nothing. And Molly was going to have to make it pay off somehow.
She rang the bell at Dr. Vernay’s office, and as usual, Robinette answered the door quickly.
“Bonjour, Molly! You look a bit agitated, may I get you a cup of tea?”
“I’m fine, Robinette. I’d like to speak to Gérard, please.”
“He’s with a patient at the moment.”
Molly came inside and the two women looked at each other for a moment before Molly’s attention sailed off and she was lost in thought.
After ten minutes, Robinette touched Molly on the elbow. “Molly?” she said, gently. “You’re a million miles away. I don’t think you even saw Gérard’s last patient leave. You can go in now.”
“Thank you.” Molly walked into Dr. Vernay’s office, struck as she was each time by how homey yet interesting it was: the portraits, the stuffed civet, the whole enterprise so unlike the visually sterile doctors’ offices back in the States.