by Michelle Wan
“Shh,” she warned. “He’s got something cornered.”
They found Jazz whining frantically at the base of a tall oak while an enraged marten hissed furiously from the safety of a branch. At that point, Julian forgot his headache and forgave the dog everything, even his rapidly swelling lower lip, for carpeting the forest floor around the tree was a splendid stand of Bird’s-nest Orchids, proof that, if left alone, nature went about its procreative business as it should.
“Amazing,” he marveled. The swarm of fleshy flowers was almost ghostly in the gloom. Each plant rose from an erect stem, the upper half of which bore an elongated cluster of brownish-yellow blooms. “This is it. This is really it. I thought this colony was a goner. It’s come back triple the size! And a lot denser. This is bloody magnificent!”
“Do you think it’s the same one Bedie photographed?” Mara, ever practical, asked.
“What? Oh, right.” Julian scratched his beard. “Well, it’s hard to say. She didn’t give us much of the surroundings. Otherwise I’d have been able to place it straightaway. And, of course, the stand as I originally saw it was a mere shadow of what she found and certainly bears no resemblance to what it is now. But is it the same?” He puffed out his cheeks. “Based on the law of probability, I’d say yes. Almost certainly yes. A stand this big is rare, Mara. Neottia propagate slowly. Something this extensive would have taken years to establish, and the chances of there being two like it are low.”
Carefully he paced out the immense length and breadth of the colony, shaking his head in disbelief. “Another one up on old Géraud.”
He took several close-ups, cursing the fading light, and more mid-to long-range shots to capture the extensiveness of the growth. In the last photograph, he positioned Mara in the foreground.
“Just to get a sense of the scale,” he said, managing to grin for the first time.
“Great,” she said dryly. “I’m a marker. Thank you very much.”
“Smile.”
She smiled for him, her left cheek dimpling. Framing her in his viewfinder, Julian had a momentary desire to fix her there indefinitely.
“Come on,” he cried, energized. “We’ve got our Neottia. Now all we need is a pigeonnier.”
There remained two isolated dots. Both were situated at the forest’s edge, adjacent to farmland. One proved to be a byre. As they drove toward the final dot, Mara was acutely aware that a match on the dovecote, combined with the Bird’s-nests, would give her proof that Bedie had come this way, that she was now treading the path that her sister had walked nineteen years ago. Julian’s thoughts were entirely on his Cypripedium.
They came upon it in the twilight, just as a light rain began to fall: a tall tower rising out of the shadows at the far side of a meadow. Wider at the base and tapering upward to a broken cupola, it leaned drunkenly to one side, as if the land on which it stood had shrugged. They both studied it carefully through Julian’s binoculars. But even with the naked eye, they could tell that it was all wrong.
ELEVEN
Edith was missing. Julian heard about it the following morning through Madame Léon when he went for his eggs.
Shortly after, old Hilaire himself, gnarled and weathered, turned up on Julian’s doorstep, belligerently demanding his dog back. His bald, wrinkled head always reminded Julian of a pickled walnut. He was missing most of his front teeth, and he smelled strongly of goat.
“But I don’t have your dog,” objected Julian. “I haven’t seen her for days.”
“Then you should have told me, monsieur,” said old Hilaire reproachfully and unreasonably, but somehow Julian knew what he meant. The farmer always addressed Julian as “monsieur,” just as Julian always referred to him as “old Hilaire.” Edith and cheese were the sole things they had in common, their only interaction being the exchange of money for excellent-quality fromage pur chèvre.
The long and the short of it was that Edith had not been seen for several days, not by any of the neighbors, including Julian, or by old Hilaire himself. The goat farmer was extremely worried.
“She’s a valuable animal, monsieur,” Hilaire whistled through the gap in his dentition. “There are thieves about who’d steal a good dog like that, use her in experiments. Besides,” he lowered his voice, “she’s in that way.”
That, to the old man, was the worst of it. She needed care, regular meals. In that way or not, Julian was not inclined to be overly anxious about the wayward bitch. She did occasionally go walk-about, and he knew she would eventually turn up. To placate his neighbor, however, he agreed to keep an eye out for Edith and to inform him if he saw her.
•
Julian told Paul and Mado about Edith, and they in turn told Gaston. The postman also promised to keep an eye open for the pointer on his rounds. That made two things he had to look for—the pigeonnier and Edith.
In fact, he was on his way now to Les Colombes to have a word with the de Sauvignacs about the dog. He had no mail for them and didn’t really expect them to have seen her. The château lay at the eastern end of his route. Little chance Edith would have wandered that far. But it was a hot day, the kind of weather that Gaston believed to be particularly trying for men of his physique. He saw himself as heavily built as opposed to fat, and it was people like him who suffered most from heat. He looked forward to the coup de blanc that Monsieur de Sauvignac would certainly offer him. It was a point of honor with such people. Real gentry, not like some.
His minivan had been giving him trouble again. The motor was dying for no reason. Gaston suspected it had something to do with the battery or maybe the alternator. He sighed. He would have to fill out yet another maintenance request at the end of the day. He bumped down the muddy lane past La Binette. As usual, there was nothing for them, either, especially (he was relieved) nothing requiring a signature. He began the rough, steep climb out of the valley bottom toward Les Colombes. He was about three-quarters of the way there when the engine coughed. He downshifted quickly. The engine died completely.
Merde! Why did these things always happen to him? He set the hand brake and considered his options. He was almost through his route, but this meant he’d have to call in to the depot for help. This would make the fourth time in a month, and his boss was giving him sour looks for running up maintenance costs and late deliveries. As if it were his fault. These tin-pot PTT vans, couldn’t hold up to the roads.
Well, he could walk up the rest of the way to the château and phone from there. He got out, glumly studying the steep incline before him. Really, it would be simplest to wheel the van around, get it pointed downhill the way he’d come, jump in, and kick-start it on the run. So much for his coup de blanc, but, provided he didn’t stall, he’d probably make it back to the main road, maybe even all the way to the depot.
He opened the driver’s-side door and was setting his shoulder to the frame when it occurred to him that before releasing the brake he’d better do something about preventing the car from rolling backward. He went to the opposite verge to gather some rocks. As he did, his eye caught something below him through the screen of trees. He walked farther up the road to get a better view. He was now looking down at a corner of La Binette, a perspective he normally did not have of the farm. It was a peaceful scene, a low, hummocky field dotted with grazing sheep, old poplars in a line, and a stream heavily overgrown with willow brush at the bottom. Gaston stood very still, a huge grin spreading over his features.
“C’est vachement fort, ça!” he exclaimed softly. Really, it was too rich. Luck landed in your very hand when you least expected it.
He hurried back to the van, maneuvered it around—it was infernally hard work because he had to push it uphill a bit first in order to turn it downhill—jumped in, and let it roll. The engine caught on the first kick, and he was away, joyfully bucketing at speed back down the steep, rocky lane, past trees and hedges, approaching the grassy track winding off to La Binette. It was a fairly straight run down, except for the curve at the bottom,
one he’d done thousands of times. As he entered the bend, he never really saw, much less had a chance of avoiding, the log lying in the middle of the road, only felt the tremendous shock as his front tires hit it. The van sailed through the air and came down on its side in a long, gouging slide of gravel, shattered glass, and grating metal. Gaston lay stupidly in its wreckage, bleeding profusely from the nose and mouth. His last view of the world, before the darkness gathered in, was of the day’s mail littering the grass like confetti and a swollen, one-eyed face hanging upside down above him like a bilious moon.
•
It was la canadienne that he called for, her name that he muttered insistently. When Mara arrived, the tall female doctor said disapprovingly that she could stay for a couple of minutes, no more. Gaston’s fat wife and seven daughters, huddled together like chickens at one end of the waiting room, glared at her with tear-filled, hating eyes. They now knew her to be the mistress whom slow, fat Gaston had cunningly concealed from them all these years. That’s what came of letting foreigners live among you. They included Mara’s companions, grouped at the other end of the room, in their outrage. Mado paced like a caged animal, smoking furiously despite a défense de fumer notice. Paul huddled massively in a plastic chair that threatened to give way beneath his weight. Julian sat next to Paul, long legs outstretched, gazing at the opposite wall.
Mara followed the doctor’s straight white back through the swinging doors and down the long pale-green corridor leading to the intensive-care ward. She returned shortly. Everyone’s eyes were on her.
“He’s in very bad shape,” she said unnecessarily. “He could barely talk. He’s full of tubes. I think—I think he was trying to tell me something about the pigeonnier.” And she burst out crying.
•
The village of Malpech perched atop a rise and consisted of two dozen dwellings. Mara and Julian approached it along a narrow, winding road. As they entered the village, the first thing they saw was an empty, dusty square flanked at one end by a small, mossy church and at the other by a newish community hall. It was noon, and there was no one about, not even, to Jazz’s disappointment, a dog. The houses had a hot, closed look. The only movement centered on a public notice board where badly tacked posters flapped lazily in the breeze.
Beyond Malpech, the road took them down into a leafy valley, over a humpbacked bridge spanning a stream and continued past a thin scattering of farms, with not a pigeon house in sight. Several kilometers farther on, they drew up at the bend in the road where they were told the accident had occurred. Julian braked the van. They got out. Apart from a few shards of glass and plastic, the rutted, gravel road showed no sign of violence.
From where they stood, they were in a kind of bowl with wooded hills rising up around them. The sound of cicadas, sawing drowsily, filled the air. A light, sere wind rustled the foliage, but otherwise the landscape was very still, as if everything were caught in a kind of hot, midday enchantment. Only Jazz was animated, following his nose avidly along the grassy verge. Back and forth he ran, tongue lolling, now loping ahead, now stopping to investigate a smell long and lovingly. Wordlessly, his human companions trudged after him, past a rough field grazed by a few sheep, the only sign of agricultural activity in the immediate vicinity, and past stacks of logs cut from fallen trees and left at the roadside by the work crew after the last windstorm. From there the road led straight up. Slowly they took the steep ascent.
“You don’t suppose Gaston was delirious, do you?” Julian hazarded. As far as they could see, an unbroken canopy of treetops spread away beneath them. The only visible man-made structure was much higher up, where the roofline and chimneystacks of an imposing house could barely be made out through a screen of greenery.
“I don’t know. He seemed to think he’d found something. He was very insistent, especially about the money.”
“Well, if he did, it wasn’t here. In fact, odds are it was somewhere else. His route takes him all over the place.”
Mara made no reply.
“It would be simple enough to check it out,” Julian offered a moment later. “His route, I mean.”
“I suppose we could,” she said without conviction. Since the facteur’s accident, she had little stomach for pursuing her quest. Gaston had suffered a concussion, a broken arm, four fractured ribs, a broken nose, internal injuries, and facial lacerations. His condition was serious, and he remained heavily drugged, lapsing in and out of consciousness. She had not been able to question him further. For the sake of the family, the doctor had ordered Mara to keep away. She, too, believed that Mara was Gaston’s secret companion of joy.
“I’m thinking of giving it up, Julian,” she told him finally.
He stopped short. “You’re not serious?”
“Very.” Her small face was pale, the dark, straight brows knit together.
“But why?”
“I feel responsible. It’s pretty obvious Gaston’s accident was somehow tied up with that damned pigeonnier.”
“Oh, come on, Mara, you’re not to blame for what happened.”
“All the same, he’s been badly injured, probably because of a thousand euros and my need to know. Bedie’s been missing for nineteen years, is probably dead. I think the time has come for me to let it go.”
She called for Jazz. “Well, we’ve been, we’ve looked, and now I’d like to go home.”
“Of course, it’s up to you,” Julian conceded as they turned back down the hill. Why did he feel so disappointed when really he should feel relieved? The search for Bedie Dunn was something he had entered into with the greatest reluctance. He was now free to continue looking for the Lady’s Slipper alone, without impediment, without the nagging worry of what Mara’s presence might mean in his life, of what ultimately he might have to do with her. Her and that dog of hers. But deep down he knew that her withdrawal took the heart out of the chase, and the chase, after all, was what had been driving them—him—from the beginning.
For her part, Mara was convinced of the rightness of her decision. The time really had come to say goodbye to Bedie. A sudden sense of lightness flooded her, as if, having put down the weight of her sister, she could now stand straighter, move without encumbrance. Savoring the relief of the moment, she raised her eyes and saw her surroundings clearly as if for the first time. A dusty country road, shimmering with heat. Below them a peaceful wooded valley. Through the trees, a meadow running down to a stream, thickly bordered by willows and poplars. Her eye rested there, picking out the occasional flash of the watercourse. Then she saw something that made her heart lurch.
“Julian,” she cried sharply.
“What?”
Dragging him back uphill to a point where they both could get a better view, she pointed frantically. There in the distance below them, rising from the meadow and still largely obscured by foliage, was a pigeonnier. Craning their necks and leaning this way and that, they put together enough glimpses of it to make it out: a tall, round tower built of local limestone with numerous entry holes for the birds. The steeply pitched roof, what they could see of it, was conical and covered in lauzes. From where they stood, part of a shuttered window and a door were visible. They stared at it wordlessly, as if by speaking they feared to dispel an illusion.
At last Mara stirred. “This was not,” she said with conviction, “on the Série bleue.”
Julian was actively scanning the panorama of forested hills and valleys around them. Eventually, he pointed to his left. “My stand of Bird’s-nests can’t be more than three to five kilometers northwest of here.” He paused for Mara to take in his meaning. “Easily within walking distance. So we know which direction she came from.”
“And all we have to do,” Mara finished, “is work out where she went.”
They walked quickly down the hill. At the bottom, they passed an iron box placed on a small cairn of stones at the side of the road. Speculatively they paused before it. The name BINETTE was crudely lettered on the front. In several pla
ces the paint, once red, now weathered almost black, had run, so that the words had a ghastly, dripping look. At right angles to the road, an overgrown, rutted track led across a rough sheep pasture and down toward a heavily wooded combe. The tip of a chimney showing through the treetops indicated a house.
“At a guess,” said Julian, “I’d say the pigeonnier belongs to this farm.”
Something was moving on the track—a large man on a small bicycle, coming toward them not in haste but steadily. As the bicyclist approached, they could hear the faint rattling of the frame on the uneven ground and the soft, regular squeaking of the crank set with each revolution of the pedals. Grinch. Grinch. Grinch. The scene had such a dreamlike quality to it that Mara and Julian stood transfixed, watching it unfold. Now the bicyclist was nearing the point where the track met the road. The rider made the turn in their direction. As he drew even with them, he slowed but did not stop. Nor did he greet them, only fixed them with one bulging eye—the other was covered by a dark lens—craning his neck slowly around as he rode past to keep them, particularly Mara, in view as long as possible. Jazz gave a low growl. Mara retained a vision of pale, ragged hair standing on end and a large, misshapen face resembling an oversized, semi-cooked hunk of engorged goose liver.
“Dear Lord,” whispered Mara once she could find her voice, “what was that?”
•
“Eh bien,” said Loulou La Pouge, “you have found a pigeon house.”
“The pigeon house,” Mara said firmly. Once again they were in the ex-policeman’s parlor, perched on overstuffed chairs, being served Monbazillac and nuts. “So that’s proof, isn’t it?”
Loulou shrugged and threw up both hands. “Proof of what? That it exists? Soyez raisonable, Mara, you still have not definitely connected the photographs to your sister, and until you can do that, what is your case?”