“But, surely… after Fauve disappeared, you must have told Angel that Sapphyra might know where she was?” Eulalie spoke tentatively. This man was both her uncle and the head of the Council of Elders. She didn’t want to appear disrespectful.
Virgil sighed. It was a sad sound. “You must understand how it was, Eulalie. We all thought Fauve had gone off for a few days to clear her head. Maman was sure of it. I didn’t want to betray Sapphyra to the adults. I knew Fauve would see it as disloyalty when she came back. Then days passed, and she didn’t return. I went to speak to Sapphyra myself. She was also worried. She told me everything she knew – how she had helped arrange meetings between your father and mother, and how she knew your mother was restless and unhappy. But she had no idea where Fauve had gone or why. As time passed, we became frantic. Maman went to Queen’s Town to see if she could pick up a trace of her, but with no success. Then, after a couple of years had passed, Maman told us that Fauve was dead. She didn’t know when it had happened, but she knew she was gone. Sapphyra took it hard.”
“I’m sure it was hard on everyone.”
“The only reason I mention her now is because she might know more than she thinks. You have a way of asking questions, Eulalie, that makes people remember things they might have thought were not important. I don’t believe that Sapphyra deliberately held anything back, but something she says might be useful to you.”
Virgil rose to his feet, so Eulalie stood too. The interview was over.
“She will be brought back here when the time is right, to rest among her ancestors,” he said. It was a statement rather than a question.
“Yes,” said Eulalie. “That is what Angel and I both want. Her body will be released to us and we will bring her home.”
They rejoined the family for dinner.
The best time to visit someone in the evening was straight after the evening meal. Too early and you would disturb the family at their dinner – too late and you would disturb the person as they were preparing for bed. It was a small window of opportunity, and Eulalie was determined to take it.
This was a community that worked and slept with the rising and setting sun. At night, light was provided by slow-burning lamps that were fueled by a kind of peat found abundantly in the forest. But nobody’s lamps burned late into the night. People rose with the rising sun and used the hours of darkness to sleep.
“Her name is Sapphyra,” Eulalie explained to Chief Macgregor. “She is the same age as my father, so about forty-five. She is a grandmother now, but I believe she was a wild one in her youth. She might know more than she thinks, but she might also feel a measure of guilt about what happened.”
“And guilty people can be defensive,” said Chief Macgregor. “Even I know that. You take the lead in the questioning. I’ll cut in if something occurs to me.”
When they got to Sapphyra’s house and greeted her and her husband, Eulalie saw that there were tearstains on the woman’s cheeks. News travelled fast. Eulalie saw it as a good sign that she was willing to talk to them about Fauve.
“It was the madness of youth,” she said as they sat down to begin. “We thought we knew it all. We thought the adults were overprotective. They were trying to crush our youthful spirits. I believed that the love between Lucien and Fauve was the most romantic thing I could imagine. I saw myself as a matchmaker to the oppressed lovers. I thought my role was so important – the go-between. All three of us were in love with our own cleverness in deceiving the adults. Angel was the one that was hardest to trick. She was the biggest challenge. But as Fauve always pointed out, it was no more than Angel had done herself at the age of fourteen when she became pregnant with your mother. We felt that she didn’t have a leg to stand on.”
Eulalie nodded. Angel had explained it to her in the same way. She had been determined that Eulalie would be the first of the De la Cour women to escape the cycle of early motherhood.
“It all started to go wrong when Lucien left. When Fauve found out she was expecting you, the three of us celebrated. Or pretended to. This was the culmination of the great love affair. Lucien and Fauve would be happy together forever. Of course, looking back, I know they didn’t really feel like that. They were dismayed and panicky, as well as excited. But it was only after Lucien left without a word that Fauve started to realize what her life would be like from now on. If he had stayed, she could have handled it better.”
“Did she ever talk about escaping in those months after my father left?”
“Yes, she did. But then she always had. She believed that she was destined for great things – that the village was too small to contain the significant life she was going to have. She had talked like that for years. Virgil must have told you.”
“He did, but he didn’t know whether she had specific plans. Did she know where she would go or what she would do when she left?”
“I’ve spent nearly thirty years thinking about that. Trying to come up with an answer.”
“Angel has always had contacts in Queen’s Town,” said Eulalie. “Did my mother mention anyone she could go to who would give her money or help?”
“Not to me. I know she resented the fact that Angel kept the Queen’s Town side of her life away from her children. She took Virgil there once for medical treatment. He would have died without it. But that was all. As far as I know, Fauve never knew any of Angel’s city friends – not even their names. It was a sore point with her.”
Chief Macgregor cleared his throat.
“Excuse me.” He spoke in broken French. “But do you know how Fauve was planning to get around the town when she reached Queen’s Town? In the time that I have been in the village, I haven’t seen so much as a bicycle. Was she planning to walk everywhere?”
Eulalie saw that Sapphyra had an arrested look in her eyes.
“What is it?” she said. “What are you thinking about?”
Sapphyra shook her head. “I’m sure it’s nothing important. I just remembered that Fauve used to talk about that. She showed me a picture book Angel had brought back from Queen’s Town for her when she was little. It had pictures of motorcars in it. Fauve used to say that she had heard you could put out your hand and one of those motorcars would stop to pick you up and give you a ride. We used to practice it together when we were younger. We would pretend that the river was a road and we would put out our hands to stop cars.” She gave a short laugh. “I haven’t thought of that in years.”
Chief Macgregor looked at Eulalie.
“Was she talking about hailing a cab? That’s how your grandmother gets around Queen’s Town. But she would have needed money. She must have been aware of that.”
“Maybe not a cab…” Eulalie thought for a moment. “Sapphyra, can you show us how you used to practice stopping the cars?”
“Of course.”
She stood up and stretched her arm in front of her. Her fist was clenched, and her thumb stuck out at an angle.
“Hitchhiking!” said Eulalie. “That’s it. That’s how she planned to get around.”
“She used to say that it worked especially well when you were a girl and the driver of the car was a man,” said Sapphyra.
Eulalie’s heart began to thump in her chest. “A man?”
“That’s what she said. She said a man would always stop to pick up a pretty girl and take her wherever she wanted to go, so that’s what she would do if she ever got to Queen’s Town.” Sapphyra looked from Eulalie’s face to Chief Macgregor’s, and back again. “You think that someone who picked her up in his motorcar is the person who killed her?”
She sat down heavily and pressed a hand to her mouth.
“This is a good thing,” Eulalie reassured her. “It’s is the only lead we have so far. This information could help us find the man who hurt her.”
“If only I had remembered it earlier.” Tears leaked from her eyes. “If only I had remembered it when people asked me about her all those years ago.”
“She was probably already d
ead then. The doctors think she might have been killed on the very first day she arrived in Queen’s Town. She was still wearing her robe and sandals.”
“I just remembered something else. She always said that the first thing she would do when she got to Queen’s Town was to change her clothes. She wanted to wear a modern outfit.”
“That’s very helpful, Sapphyra. Thank you. That’s another piece of information we didn’t have before. By the time the village woke up that morning and realized she was missing, she might already have been dead. It wasn’t anyone’s fault except for the person who murdered her. And what Lucien and Fauve did together was their choice and their responsibility, not yours. The fact that you helped them is beside the point. They would have found a way to be together even without you. Besides, I am the result of that. I don’t regret my existence, and nobody else should either.”
Sapphyra dried her eyes with a piece of handkerchief. “You’re right. I have been carrying this guilt around with me for so long, it is not easy to let go of it. I will try to learn to do so.”
“Who else was she friendly with in those days?”
“Let me think. There was Collette who passed away in childbirth about ten years ago. There was Sylvie who is expecting her first grandchild at any moment. And I suppose she was also friendly with Francine Leroi, the one who never married. Fauve let a lot of her friendships lapse when she met Lucien. They were so wrapped up in each other. They had no time for anyone else. She was still on good terms with those three, but I can’t think of anyone else she would have confided in.”
They thanked her and left her in peace to get ready for bed.
“Only three leads, and one of them has passed away,” said Eulalie. “Sylvie and Francine are people my grandmother has already mentioned. She questioned them extensively about where Fauve might have gone.”
“And we’ll speak to them again in the morning,” said the chief. “Maybe we’ll think of a question nobody has asked before.”
“Like your question about transport,” said Eulalie. She held up a hand for a high five. When he just looked at her, she picked up his arm with her other hand and forced him to give her a high five.
“That was a stroke of genius that totally justifies your insistence on coming along.”
“And you figured out that she meant hitchhiking rather than hailing a cab.” He gave one of his almost-smiles. “We make a good team.”
“I guess we do.”
They retired for the night – Chief Macgregor to the bachelor quarters where single men who chose not to live in their parents’ houses stayed, and Eulalie to her uncle’s house. As she lay on a spare bed in a room with her female cousins, Eulalie felt the darkness pressing down on her eyes. Once the lamp had been extinguished, the darkness seemed absolute. There was a new moon, and the stars were obliterated by cloud. It was only when she spent the night here in the forest that she realized how much ambient light there was in town. She drifted off to sleep, lulled by the soft breathing of her cousins.
Towards morning, as she moved into a lighter sleep state, Eulalie began to dream.
It was an ordinary dream – one sparked by her subconscious trying to remind her of something. It was the kind of dream anyone might have when a memory was trying to reassert itself.
She was twelve years old again and walking along Finger Alley, reveling in the freedom of being out and about without her grandmother. If anyone came near her, she repelled them with the magic words – I am the granddaughter of Angel de la Cour. It was like a talisman. Everyone in Finger Alley knew what it meant, and they left her alone.
Then a man appeared who didn’t seem to know what the words meant. He seemed to find them laughable. He said something to her about her mother. Even in the dream, Eulalie couldn’t remember what he had said. Something about him frightened her.
She turned away and ran as fast as she could.
Then the dream faded, and she slept on. It was only when the light crept into the room and reddened her eyelids that she finally awoke. Her mind grasped at the dream, but the more she tried to remember it, the more it slipped away.
She was left with the conviction that her mind was trying to tell her something important, but she wasn’t sure what it was. She had a feeling that Angel would remember better than she did.
She lay still and watched the light creeping into the room. Her cousins weren’t awake yet. A dawn chorus of birds was in full throat outside.
Eulalie could hear other soft sounds indicating that the village was stirring into life. In a moment, she would get up and help her aunt with the early morning food preparation.
Just as one didn’t go visiting too long after dinner, one also didn’t visit before breakfast. It was too early, and people were too busy. She and Chief Macgregor would go and see Sylvie and Francine a little later.
She wasn’t particularly hopeful about those interviews, but they needed to be done. If she could get them finished quickly there was a chance they could leave as early as that morning. They would get back to Queen’s Town after dark, but that was fine. Eulalie was itching to follow up on the leads she had been given.
A couple of hours later, Eulalie knew that she had been right. Her mother’s erstwhile friends had very little information to add. They both felt as though they had been sidelined when Fauve had started seeing Lucien. She had neglected her friendships, with the result that she was even more lonely and isolated after Lucien left. Francine remembered Fauve saying that she wanted to track Lucien down and force him to accept his responsibilities as a father. Sylvie remembered her mentioning Majestic Towers – the apartment block in Finger Alley where a community of ex-villagers lived. They were people who had left the village in disgrace and weren’t welcome to return.
These exiles loudly proclaimed their relief at being free of the village, but clustered together as a community that kept many of the old traditions alive. Eulalie knew better than most how hard it was to leave the village. She couldn’t imagine the heartbreak of not being allowed to return.
It was an interesting lead, but not one she could get excited about. The first place Angel had enquired about Fauve was at Majestic Towers. At the time, the residents managed to convince her that they had neither seen nor heard from her. Angel wasn’t an easy person to fool. She could sniff out a lie at a hundred paces.
Eulalie would follow up on the lead, but it seemed likely that Fauve had been killed before she’d had the opportunity to contact anyone.
It made sense that she would have wanted to contact Lucien. But Lucien had looked Eulalie in the eye a couple of weeks earlier and sworn that he had not laid eyes on Fauve after he left the village when Eulalie was a baby. He had been in the habit of visiting her secretly during the first few weeks of her life. Then he had left. When he returned a year later, he had been shocked to find that Fauve was missing.
He hadn’t questioned for a moment his conviction that she would stay and care for their baby. It had been an unpleasant surprise to discover that she had fled, just like him. Only the knowledge that Angel had taken over the rearing of the baby enabled him to carry out his original plan of leaving and not coming back.
Eulalie would be the first to admit that she didn’t know her father well enough to tell when he was lying, but her instinct had persuaded her that he was telling the truth about that.
She wondered if he was still on the island. He was the kind of man who could keep himself hidden indefinitely. She wondered if he knew about this new development – that Fauve had been found after all these years. She wondered how it made him feel.
Eulalie was glad to get back to Queen’s Town later that evening. It was time to take her investigation to the next level.
Chapter 6
After a full day of hiking, it was the climb back up the cliff that was the killer.
Chief Macgregor’s arm muscles trembled and burned as he pulled himself up the vertical pitch. He hoped the last cable car of the night would not have gone by the
time he reached the top.
Eulalie had gone ahead to try to catch the cable car operator and ask him to wait. It was depressing how easy she made the climb look. It was as though she were running up a flight of stairs, rather than freeclimbing a granite rock face, using tiny cracks in the rock for foot and handholds. Her strength to bodyweight ratio was remarkable.
When he got to the top, he collapsed on a bench and sucked in air.
Eulalie bounced up to him on her rubber-soled shoes.
“Rise and shine, Chief. They held the last cable car especially for us, but now they want to go.”
He stood up with a groan. His legs felt like rubber, but he made himself walk to the cable car and get in. Eulalie sat shoulder to shoulder with him, threading her fingers through his.
“Will you come with me to Angel’s Place when we get back?” she asked.
“For dinner? Won’t it be a bit late?”
“What’s today? Tuesday? The kitchen might be closed, but they’ll rustle up something for us. I want to ask Angel a question. If she can fill in the gaps in my memory, we might have a new lead.”
Chief Macgregor felt life returning to his limbs. The promise of a new lead was always invigorating.
“What about the train?” he asked. “Won’t the last train have left?”
“It’s too early. The train keeps going until midnight. And besides, the train always waits for the cable car and vice versa. Don’t worry, Chief. You’ll sleep in your own bed tonight.”
He turned his head to look at her. “Not in yours?”
That dry Scottish voice combined with the hawkish look in his eyes gave her tingles. She laughed and said, “We’ll see.”
It was nearly eleven by the time they got to downtown Queen’s Town. Angel’s Place was a hive of activity, but the kitchen had indeed closed. Only bar snacks were being served.
The Eulalie Park Mysteries Box Set 2 Page 26