by Amy Stewart
You should know that Fleurette has proven herself to be an able investigator. She’s made a discovery that changes the course of our work. Mr. Bielaski wanted to rush right in with the police, but I told him I’d rather take just a little longer to watch and learn. If the woman we’re following is up to anything at all, I suspect she can lead us to the next link in the chain, and the one after that. Someone is giving her orders—or she’s giving someone else orders. We’re going to stay on the job until we find out.
Yours,
Constance
Constance to Aggie (enclosed)
October 20, 1918
Dear Aggie,
Just before I posted my letter to Norma, a batch of letters arrived telling us more about the alarming accusations against you. I only wish I’d had them earlier and could’ve dashed off some advice.
I hope your troubles are solved by now. But please know that if the unthinkable were to happen, you would not be returning friendless to the United States. Bessie, Fleurette, and I would be here to meet you, and to help you get on your feet again.
If everything isn’t resolved yet, let me just say this: Norma is absolutely right that we must all look out for ourselves and not depend upon anyone else to come along and rescue us. If you can point to the culprit, you’ve solved your own case, and what could be better than that?
My sister, as you might’ve learned, is indefatigable once she’s set herself upon a particular course. If she’s decided that a thief is afoot and that catching him is the only way to clear your good name, then she won’t stop until it’s done. This sort of brute force is, after all, exactly how she managed to get herself and her pigeons to France. She was relentless about it. (I should know! I lived through years of militaristic pigeon campaigns, mounted from my sitting-room, begun practically the day the Archduke was assassinated.)
Please remember that only in novels do investigations run smoothly, with a new clue turning up in each chapter until the whole is finally revealed. In fact, the usual progress of an investigation is something more like this:
Day One: Nothing out of the ordinary.
Day Two: Nothing out of the ordinary.
Day Three: An idea! The idea is pursued, but leads nowhere.
Day Four: A witness is interviewed, but they know nothing.
Day Five: Nothing.
And on it goes, until one day, you find the answer. And the reason you find it is that you’ve been looking.
I promise you that discouragement, boredom, and the questioning of one’s own sanity are the workaday characteristics of any investigation. You might feel, as I often do, that you have nothing to offer—no insight, no clever ideas about where to go and who to ask, and no special genius for ferreting out the odd and obscure detail that will lead to the truth. But you do have something to offer, and that is your perseverance. It’s the one quality that you and you alone can bring to this matter.
No one else is looking for the thief. But you’re looking—every day. Perseverance alone counts for a great deal. In fact, it’s everything.
Yours,
Constance
Norma
Langres, France
Norma to Constance
September 12, 1918
Dear Constance,
Aggie’s case has been quite firmly stuck—until yesterday. Believe it or not, a clue has been delivered to us by the town drunk.
Our village is in possession of exactly three town drunks. As unlikely as it may seem, they’ve provided our first and only hint in the matter of Aggie and the missing supplies.
Our billet is situated just off the town square. The village’s main avenue begins there and runs right down to the old gate leading out of town. Along this avenue are the sorts of shops you’d expect: druggist, butcher, tailor, baker, tobacconist, and so on.
This square is where the drunks spend their days, so they won’t miss anything. Every afternoon, except on the coldest winter days (when they huddle in a church basement), these three station themselves under an enormous acacia tree, directly between a statue of historical significance (that I shall not name because ours is the only village with such a statue), and the office of the village newspaper. The editor sits in the window, overlooking the square, so that he, too, won’t miss anything. Town drunks and newspaper editors have a number of habits in common, including loitering, drinking, dishevelment, and keen powers of observation.
I’m surprised they (the drunks, not the newspaper men) sit out every day in sight of all the American soldiers, who have no tolerance for inebriants. Idle, unemployed men back home would either be conscripted into the Army or locked up. Here they are not only tolerated but viewed by the French as a necessary part of village life, like the mortar that holds the cobblestones together.
The eldest of the three drunks, Julien (you will learn in a minute how it is that I came to know his name), is a gaunt and grizzled old man with enormous red ears and a nose that grows continuously, more in length than width, like that of Pinocchio. He wears a battered straw hat, even in winter, and offers a toothless grin and salutation to everyone who passes by.
I’ve never stopped to speak to him as I’ve no reason to do so, but he seems to be quite a story-teller. He speaks incessantly to his companion, a young man of about twenty-five who by all rights should be hunkered down in a trench along the Argonne, except that he’s so jumpy and prone to hallucinations that no soldier would tolerate him in close quarters. He’d be sent out as a misdirection, to draw German fire, and he’d be dead in a minute. Although he has no redeeming qualities and contributes nothing to village life, he has nonetheless been spared this fate.
The third is a person of indeterminate sex—even long-time villagers can’t be sure—who wears chin-length stringy hair, speaks in a high but not feminine voice, and mostly addresses ghosts, spirits, and other apparitions. He—or she—goes around wrapped in shapeless blankets and robes, has nothing to say to the other two, but is prone to screaming and thrashing about if addressed directly.
The three are always seen together, the first talking incessantly to the second, and the third saying nothing at all except for the occasional round of incoherent shouting.
There—you have the picture. Yesterday, Aggie was walking along the main avenue and stopped to linger at the window to the bakery with which you are now familiar. With your most recent package lost and a few other food shortages of the type that occur often but not always simultaneously as they are now, we’ve all grown tired of potato soup, dark bread, and, for a Sunday treat, what they call gâteau de guerre, which does nothing to earn the name gâteau as it is made only of grated potatoes, eggs, and a pinch of sugar.
The bakery has very little on offer either, but Aggie tortures herself by going to look anyway. I tell her that it’s best never to think of home, or treats, or small luxuries, or good meals, but she does it anyway and makes herself miserable as a result.
At just that moment—while she was looking in the bakery window—Julien approached with a little bundle of something in a nasty old handkerchief. He held it out to Aggie as if presenting a gift.
She naturally withdrew. She’s polite to a fault, thinks she owes the world a smile, and doesn’t know how to be stern as you and I do, so merely said merci and inched away.
But the man did not take this as a refusal—how could he, when she didn’t refuse?—and persisted, holding out his hand and unwrapping the handkerchief to reveal its contents. One wouldn’t want to guess at what sort of horror he was preparing to unveil, but Aggie looked anyway.
Inside the handkerchief were three aspirin bottles, all full and unopened. They were labeled with Aggie’s own inventory numbers.
What on earth gave him the idea to offer them to Aggie? She was in her uniform, of course, but so were a dozen others walking up and down the street. She’d never been on speaking terms with him and assures me that they’d not so much as exchanged a word of greeting. Why would he choose that moment to approach her?
She believes it to be divine intervention. I call it suspicious behavior on the part of an untrustworthy individual.
She tried, in her broken French, to extract from him some explanation of where he found the bottles. She couldn’t understand a word he said, but she took the bottles nonetheless and presented them to me that night as her first official bit of evidence.
I went out the next day and interrogated him myself, which was how I came to know his name. I could, of course, understand his French, but what he said was mostly nonsense. After much stern questioning, he claimed first to have picked the bottles up in the street moments before handing them to Aggie, thinking she’d dropped them. Then he said that he found them on a rubbish-heap near the engineering school. Finally he told me that he unearthed them while digging an improvised latrine for himself.
The third explanation made me very much want to sanitize the bottles, but we are trying to preserve evidence. If you happen to have a packet of finger-print powder at hand, send it along, but the bottles are so dirty and appear to have been handled so much that I don’t think a print could be found. Even a perfect print would only be of use if we could match it against the culprit’s own hand, and we as yet have no way of doing that.
Nonetheless, Mrs. Clayton accepts the vials as evidence that we’re making headway. She has, for the moment, withdrawn her threats to send Aggie away, though she doesn’t want to admit it. Regardless, Aggie remains on orderly duty as we endeavor to clear her good name.
Julien is, at this moment, our only suspect. He might not be a suspect at all but merely a witness. It is nonetheless our duty to keep a much closer eye on him. I consider it wholly unpleasant to trail around town after an unsavory character, but that is, of course, the very definition of detective work.
Of my own work I will say only that things have picked up lately.
As ever,
Norma
Aggie to Constance
September 20, 1918
Dear Constance,
I promised I’d write if we had any news in the case of the missing medical supplies (it sounds like one of those Sunday serials, doesn’t it?)—and we do!
You have (I hope) a letter from Norma about a villager, Julien, who approached me on the street and handed me three bottles of aspirin, which appeared to have been taken from our hospital. Although we still don’t know how they came to be in Julien’s possession, finding those three stolen bottles did buy me a little time. Mrs. Clayton understands that something is amiss, and is allowing me the opportunity to work it out.
Now we have another clue. Here’s what happened: Just last night, Norma and I were gathered in our room along with Betty, the Signal Corps operator who was instrumental in—well, this terribly heroic act that your sister insists mustn’t be discussed through the mails. Suffice it to say that we’ve become fast friends and were gathered to celebrate Betty’s birthday.
For the occasion, she’d managed to put her hands on a dusty bottle of piquette so raisiny that we suspect it was spoiled, but we drank it anyway. Norma jumped up at the last minute, declaring that we needed something sweet to go with our farmhouse wine. She went around the corner to the Patisserie Confiserie. Our little village has been awfully low on sugar and butter lately, but Madame Bertrand had delivered a tray of the most beautiful little tarts to an officers’ dinner party just a few days ago, so we believe she’s put her hands on some ingredients.
Norma found the bakery closed but not locked. She could see through the window that Madame Bertrand was not upstairs in her apartment but only just in the back, baking. Norma walked right in. When Madame Bertrand didn’t come out from the kitchen to greet her, she simply went behind the counter.
In this way she startled Madame Bertrand, who jumped when she heard Norma behind her and dropped the cake pan she was in the middle of greasing. Norma picked it up and looked it over—your sister is nothing if not observant—and asked her what sort of cake goes in a pan like that. It was round, with a mold in the center (like an upside-down coffee can, if you can picture that) so that the middle of the cake would be hollow.
Norma was suspicious from the beginning, but she only asked very calmly what sort of filling went in the center. Madame Bertrand was so flustered that she couldn’t summon an answer and instead told Norma that the bakery was closed and there would be no slices on offer tonight.
Norma kept hold of the pan, turning it over and examining it from all sides. She told me that it looked to have been made by hand and hammered together, not made in a factory. It was, in other words, irregular.
“Cream? Jam?” Norma suggested, trying to help Madame Bertrand give a plausible answer.
“Yes,” Madame Bertrand said hastily. “Just so. Strawberry jam and cream filling.”
Norma handed the cake pan back. “What’s the name of that cake?” she asked next. Every sort of pastry and bread loaf has a name in France.
Madame Bertrand rolled her eyes and muttered, “Angels in heaven.”
“Anges du paradis,” Norma repeated. “That’s a strange name for a cake. I’ll order one someday.”
“Go on, now” was all Madame Bertrand had to say to that. “I closed hours ago.”
“But there’s half a clafoutis on the rack,” Norma said. Without waiting for Madame Bertrand to argue, Norma cut a slice for each of us and left a few coins in payment. I never would’ve had the nerve, but Norma has a way of walking into a place as if she owns it. No one stops her, not even a formidable baker.
That cake pan with the hollow center made Norma suspicious. While we ate our clafoutis (if you’ve never had one, it’s a custard with fruit baked inside. Madame Bertrand had to substitute rice flour for wheat, but at least the eggs were fresh), Norma laid out the whole story as she saw it: Madame Bertrand with her bread carts rolling back and forth to the hospital each day, the trips to the post office to ship cakes to a sister in Belgium that no one had heard about before, and poor old Julien, right in front of the bakery, producing three stolen bottles of aspirin that might well have fallen off the bread cart or out of a pocket.
Could it be? Is Madame Bertrand snatching up supplies to send to her sister in Belgium?
You can’t imagine how intrigued we became, all at once, about the sister in Belgium! Fortunately, we knew exactly who to ask—Madame Angevine, the proprietress of the hotel, who had known Madame Bertrand’s brother for decades, and bought desserts from him. She was herself responsible for reviving him once or twice when he went into one of his diabetic spells.
The three of us traipsed downstairs at once—unable to wait even until morning—and found Madame Angevine in her little parlor, bent over her ledger-books. She doesn’t like an interruption, but we went with an offering: a bit of clafoutis, and the last dollop of that rose-scented hand cream Fleurette sent. It was a terrible sacrifice but it had to be done, as Madame Angevine is a business-woman. If you want something from her, you’d better not come empty-handed.
And she did have something for us! As she tells it, Monsieur Bertrand arrived in the village as a young man in about 1884, took a job in the bakery, and assumed ownership of it when the previous owner became too frail to run it any longer. For nearly thirty years, Monsieur Bertrand was at the very center of village life, baking wedding and birthday cakes, pouring chocolate eggs at Easter, and creating Galette des Rois for every Epiphany dinner in town. He knew absolutely everyone, which is not difficult in a village of only a few thousand inhabitants. He and his helper, Fernand Luverne, were always quick with a joke and had a treat on offer for every child who came in with his mother. In addition to Fernand, he kept company with a good crowd of men about his age: other shop proprietors, landlords, and so forth. They would gather in a café in the evening for a drink, a smoke, and a game of crapette.
What Madame Angevine did not recall was any mention of Monsieur Bertrand’s family. It’s not that he refused to speak of them, only that he was such a part of village life that it never occurred to anyone that he mig
ht belong to someone else. She suggested that we talk to Fernand, or to some of the other men he used to meet in the evenings. Perhaps they would’ve heard about a letter from a sister in Belgium or Toulouse, or any mention at all of his relations. She named a few people we might ask, and I wrote them down.
Norma, of course, was the only one who could think of a question, and it was an important one.
“If he never mentioned his family,” she said, “how did anyone know to write to Madame Bertrand in Toulouse after he died?”
Madame Angevine looked puzzled at that. “You’re right. Someone must’ve known. The constable, perhaps, or the coroner.”
As you can see, we have our lines of inquiry!
Norma says that I should have the pleasure of catching Madame Bertrand myself. If she’s stealing, it’s a matter of following her into the hospital kitchen during her bread delivery, and following her out again, without being detected. Betty is of course thrilled to be involved and will keep an eye out herself. Neither one of us can be away from our stations for long, but we will do what we can, and I’ll solicit the help of a few other nurses as well. (Carefully chosen nurses, Norma warns. Your sister doesn’t like the idea of too many investigators tripping over each other in the pursuit of a likely suspect.)
To have a plan—to have any idea at all of what I might do next—is a tremendous relief. I might not have conveyed, in my previous letters, the depths of my fear and worry over these accusations. I try to keep my spirits up and to sound cheerful when I write to you. To be honest, we all put on a smile when we write home. A letter filled with worry and gloom does nothing for our families, who can only worry and feel gloomy in return. And my troubles are nothing if you put them alongside the widows, the orphans, the soldiers blinded, the villages bombed to ruins. My only difficulty is a false accusation from an auditor. If I’m sent home over it—well, the war will go on, with or without me. But the fact is that I’m terribly ashamed to have been accused of a crime and to wake up every day knowing that my name has not been cleared. I feel sullied by it.