Beyond the Grave

by R. W. Wallace

  Madame Grand takes her time considering Emeline’s offer. Her face gives away nothing, except for a wince when it sounds like something broke in the kitchen. She stares at Emeline so intently Emeline feels like the woman must be seeing every single one of her buried secrets. She fights the urge to fidget and stares right back at the other woman.

  “You keep saying ‘Gisèle’s death,’” she says. “The others always said ‘Gisèle’s suicide.’ Always, without fail. As if saying it often enough would make it true.”

  Emeline starts nodding then catches herself. “I don’t know enough about the case or about your sister to have an opinion on that yet.” She holds up a hand when Madame Grand takes a breath to interrupt again. “You telling me over and over that it wasn’t suicide won’t have much effect either.”

  Madame Grand huffs a laugh at this and leans back in her chair. Looks like she’ll let Emeline talk.

  “The only thing I know right now is that your sister’s name popped up in a report regarding a different crime. Now, Gisèle’s name didn’t mean anything to me, but the name of the first officer on the scene did. His name was Robert Villemur.”

  Emeline leaves a pause, hoping the other woman will react to the name.

  Madame Grand frowns slightly as she tries to get the name to ring a bell. “I don’t…that’s not one of the officers we had to talk to when we asked them to look closer at the crime scene, the body, or the hotel.”

  Emeline’s breath catches. She also died in a hotel room? This seems to be a definite pattern. She glances at Malik, who is already bent over his phone.

  “I’m asking Nadine to add death location to the report.”

  Madame Grand is so lost in her own memories she doesn’t even seem to have caught the exchange between Emeline and Malik. “I have a cousin named Robert,” she says. “I’d have remembered that name.”

  Her eyes suddenly focus and she leans forward, pointing a finger at Emeline. “I do remember that name, but not in relation to Gisèle. Is that the officer who went missing?”

  Emeline freezes. She doesn’t want to give anything away by reacting too strongly but there’s a good chance she gives herself away by the lack of reaction instead.

  “An officer went missing?” she asks.

  Madame Grand nods. Her eyes dart between Emeline and Malik, clearly picking up every little clue they might let slip. “I don’t remember the exact date when the story hit the papers because we were otherwise occupied because of Gisèle. Nothing really registered right then. But it wasn’t long after her death. That’s why I remember it without really remembering it.” She nods firmly. “The officer who went missing was definitely named Robert. No clue about the last name, I’m afraid.”

  Malik is still bent over his phone, squinting at it while reading some text that was clearly not meant for such a small screen. He looks up at Emeline, his mouth slightly agape.

  “August thirteenth,” he says. He shakes himself as he realizes nobody understands what he’s talking about. “Robert Villemur was declared missing on August thirteenth 1988.”

  “Gisèle died on August eleventh,” Madame Grand whispers.

  Well, then. Looks like we have a clue.

  Twenty-Five

  I’m really liking those new telephones. I have yet to see anyone use it to actually call anyone—that all seems to have been replaced with sending off short, instant messages and getting replies within minutes. And now, Doubira used it to find thirty-year-old articles concerning my disappearance in mere moments.

  What I wouldn’t have given to have such a tool at my disposal when I was an active police officer.

  I hadn’t even thought about the possibility of my death or disappearance making the news. But it makes sense—even for a guy as unpopular as me. Not only did I disappear without a trace—I’m reading the article over Doubira’s shoulder—but I was, after all, a police officer. When one goes missing, it’s easy to assume that something nefarious has happened.

  And we don’t want the public to think that crimes against police officers will go unpunished.

  Clothilde is leaning over Doubira right next to me—it’s a good thing he’s not as sensitive as Evian or he’d be freaking out right now—but when he presses a button on the side and the screen goes black, she steps over to the table littered with toys and jumps up to sit in her signature way with her legs dangling. She has chosen to ignore the toys and lets them go through her slightly translucent body.

  “You don’t remember this girl at all?” she asks me.

  I shake my head. “I remember you. Seeing your dead body, writing the horribly incomplete report. But I don’t remember doing it a second time.”

  I purse my lips as I keep shaking my head. “Two so similar deaths so close together should have made alarm bells go off. Even to the guy I was back then.”

  Clothilde cocks her head and I can feel her gaze all the way to the bottom of my soul as she searches for answers. “I can’t wrap my mind around you being such a loser when you were alive. You were always so serious in the cemetery, taking care of everyone, making sure everybody found what they needed. How could you have been an incompetent idiot who followed the orders of bullies mere weeks before I first met you?”

  I step away from Doubira and Evian as their interview with Madame Grand continues. I don’t want our discussion to influence theirs, or to bring Evian too much confusion. She reacts every time we say something in her presence—I won’t let it get in the way of her investigation.

  “There was a time lapse between the police officer that I used to be and the ghost you know me as,” I say to Clothilde. “There’s a lapse for everyone, it’s just of a duration depending on the deceased.”

  “When you were screaming your head off in the casket?” She cracks half a smile, clearly enjoying making fun of my panic thirty years ago.

  I know her well enough to not be the least offended, though. This is Clothilde being playful.

  “Yes, when I was screaming. We all do. It’s natural. You wake up in a horribly enclosed space, doesn’t take long to conclude it’s a casket. You think you’ve been buried alive.” Actually, it’s more believing that you’re in the process of being buried alive. Most of the time, the ghosts wake up in the casket during the ceremony in church. So they’ll “feel” the casket being carried out of the church, across the cemetery, and lowered into the ground.

  Don’t get me started on the sound of dirt hitting the casket.

  Everybody screams in panic. The only difference is in the time it takes the deceased to come to terms with their new status. I have no clue how it works, but the ghost can only exit the casket and roam the cemetery once they’ve accepted that they’re ghosts.

  From what I’ve understood, Clothilde was rather quick. She arrived before me, so I only have her word for it. We once had a young girl who emerged from her urns mere minutes after arriving—but that was a very special case.

  Me, I needed something like ten days before accepting my fate. And it wasn’t only the whole ghost thing.

  When more than a day had gone by and I still wasn’t hungry, hadn’t needed to take a piss, didn’t feel tired—I did realize I was dead. The step from there to accepting you are a ghost isn’t terribly steep, especially when you realize you can see your own ghostly body in the dark, that it’s all black and white and slightly translucent, and that nothing actually hurts, no matter how hard you knock on that lid.

  But at least for me, acknowledging I was a ghost wasn’t enough to be set free. I also had to acknowledge why I was there.

  I couldn’t remember the exact details of how I died, couldn’t remember the last day or two of my life. But I could remember how horribly inadequate I’d been at everything, be it my job or my role as a son, a brother, a friend.

  When looking back at my life, I felt nothing but shame.

  And I had to co
me to terms with that, realize why that was, and want to fix it, before I was released from my wooden prison.

  So when Clothilde first met me, I was already a reformed man.

  A man with a mission.

  I made it my goal in life—death?—to help as many of our fellow ghosts as possible, by figuring out what they needed to move on to the afterlife. As it turns out, this means I ended up with a rather impressive number of murder cases on my hands and my police training came in handy.

  Solving cases while being restricted to the cemetery wasn’t easy, but we made do.

  “Those ten days in the ground changed me,” I say quietly to Clothilde. “They buried a loser but someone at least a little more worthy stepped out of the ground as a ghost.”

  Clothilde sighs and regards me with a softness I’ve never seen before. “You’re not a loser, Robert. You’ve done nothing but good since the day you stepped out of your grave. Stop beating yourself up about it. It won’t get you anywhere.”

  I’m about to discard what she says with a scoff but manage to catch myself just in time.

  Maybe I should try to listen instead.

  Clothilde might look like a teenager, and behave like a rebellious one very frequently, but she’s been around for as long as me. If she’d been allowed to live, she would have been fifty-one this year. Older than Evian. Her experiences might have been limited to the cemetery for a large portion of her existence, but it’s still experience.

  It has still given her maturity.

  And I sort of recognize the words as something I would have said to her had our roles been reversed.

  And so I nod. Slowly. “You’re probably right, Clothilde.”

  Her eyebrows shoot up and she almost falls through the table as she loses her focus.

  “Dwelling on the past won’t help me,” I say, firmly, mostly trying to convince myself. “I guess I’ve spent the last thirty years doing penance. Maybe that can be enough?”

  I glance at Evian and Doubira on the couch, both focused on what Madame Grand is telling them, Evian taking notes in a paper notebook and Doubira doing the same on his phone.

  “I’ll try to focus on the present,” I say. “We have a unique opportunity here, and I won’t be any good to the case if I’m obsessed with mistakes I made in the past. Besides, right now, the past and present seem to be mixing. Maybe I will finally get the chance to right some of my wrongs.”

  Clothilde smiles but she’s starting at me with that laser-look again. “All right, I’ll take it. As long as it keeps you from spiraling into depression or something. But don’t focus all your hopes on solving this case, you hear me? If we never catch the guys who were behind my death, or that of Gisèle or all the others, you can’t let that stop you from moving on. You can’t fix everything.”

  I acknowledge what she’s said with a nod but I don’t actually answer. I don’t think I can promise her that. Stop knocking myself over the head for past mistakes, yes. That, I can do. Really believing that I deserve to move on to the afterlife without righting my greatest wrongs? Sounds a lot more complicated.

  “What about you?” I ask her. “Will you accept to move on if they never catch your murderer?”

  “We weren’t talking about me, Robert.” That why-are-you-still-talking-to-me teenager is back. It’s her way of changing the subject.

  “Will you?” I insist.

  “No.”

  Twenty-Six

  With our little chat, we miss out on most of the interview with Madame Grand but I manage to get a glimpse of Doubira’s notes before he puts his phone away. At first, I attempted to read Evian’s notes but her handwriting might as well be hieroglyphs for all I know. Doubira’s phone offers highly readable text—thank you, technology.

  Seems like Gisèle Grand was found dead in a hotel room not far from the City Hall. She died of a heroin overdose sometime during the evening and was discovered by the cleaning lady the next day. Her parents never managed to get their hands on the autopsy report to check if anything other than heroin was detected in her blood. The girl had no history of drugs, hardly ever drank alcohol, and had never touched a cigarette.

  At the very bottom of the page, Doubira wrote three names: Gérard de Villenouvelle, Juliette Caju, and Pierre Montbleu.

  Doubira turns his phone off and I jump, but not because of the sudden movement.

  “I know that name,” I say, pointing stupidly at the phone. “Pierre Montbleu. He’s the one who sent me to your crime scene.”

  “Well, now. That’s certainly interesting.” Clothilde jumps down from her perch on the table and we both follow as Doubira and Evian move toward the door. Neither of us particularly wishes to be pulled after Evian every time a door closes behind her.

  “He can’t possibly still be alive, though,” I muse. “The man must have been at least fifty back then.”

  “So he’d be eighty now.” Clothilde shrugs. “He could still be alive. But he won’t be working anymore.”

  I shake my head as I slip out the front door and leave Evian and Doubira some space to say goodbye to Madame Grand. “That guy was so overweight he had to use a specially ordered chair in the office. Unless he somehow managed to change his eating habits, there’s just no way he’s still kicking at eighty.”

  Once the door is closed, Evian sets a brisk pace down the hallway and down the stairs. “We need to look into those police officers,” she says.

  “I already checked against Nadine’s list,” Doubira replies. “And none of them were ever the first officer on the scene. But we already know Gérard de Villenouvelle, of course.”

  “That we do. We can officially link Gisèle Grand’s death with the ongoing case against the man. Which means the girl certainly didn’t commit suicide.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her sister as much back there?” Doubira reaches the bottom landing before Evian and holds the door for her as she rushes through.

  “A day or week more or less won’t make a difference now. I’d much prefer to have something more definite and certain before getting her hopes up.”

  “Should we ask for an exhumation?”

  They’ve already reached the car and Evian has the door open but she stops to meet Doubira’s gaze over the roof of the small rental. “We need the family’s consent to do an exhumation. Which would mean telling Madame Grand everything we know. I don’t expect the body to tell us much—except possibly officially link Monsieur de Villenouvelle to the crime—so I vote we use the information we got from Madame Grand and explore all the other avenues first.”

  “Like looking into Madame Caju and Monsieur Montbleu?”

  “Yes, like that.” Evian taps the car roof twice with her palm then gets into the car.

  Clothilde and I are quick to get into the back seat. When Evian has slammed the door shut and starts the car, Clothilde leans forward and says straight into Evian’s ear, “You should start with Monsieur Montbleu. He’ll get you your link to Robert Villemur.”

  Evian backs out of her parking space and takes a right—straight into rush hour traffic. “I’d like to start with Pierre Montbleu,” she says.

  “Sure,” Doubira says lightly. “I’ll send the name to Nadine and ask her to look into it.”

  Clothilde leans back in her seat and we share a look.

  “That’s bloody impressive—and useful,” I say.

  Clothilde chuckles evilly. If she was an upset teenager in my home, I’d be worried. “We’re going to get these guys,” she says. “Just wait and see.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Nadine Tulle is clearly a miracle worker. When we walk into her tiny office an hour and a half later—that traffic was lethal—she has already done all the research Doubira asked her for.

  “I can’t stay long,” Tulle says in lieu of greeting. “I wanted to wait until you got back to do the handover, but in ten minute
s I’m on the metro on my way home.”

  “Of course,” Evian says, the most genuine smile I’ve seen from her yet gracing her otherwise rather stern features. “Give us the highlights and the files and you can be on your way.”

  A slight tension that I hadn’t even realized was there goes out of Tulle’s shoulders. She wants in on working with Evian but not at any price. Clearly, her personal life is important to her.

  “Last things first,” Tulle says and hands over a tiny stick-like thing to Doubira. “Pierre Montbleu was Robert Villemur’s boss. Sort of.”

  He was? Ironically, this is news to me. Because, yes, I was stupid enough to follow the orders of someone who—as far as I knew—wasn’t my boss.

  “Sort of?” Evian asks. She is leaning against the windowsill. Tulle has her own office but it’s tiny. There’s barely enough room for a desk and a chair so with the door closed and two extra people—not to mention two ghosts—the space feels very crowded. I get the feeling Evian prefers to be close to the window to get the impression of space.

  “Villemur worked for a woman named Durand, who worked for a man called Parayre, who had strong links with Montbleu.”

  “A bit far-fetched if we’re looking at corrupt cops,” Evian muses. “Too many middle men. But it is a link.”

  Tulle nods, making her blond braid jump against her chest. “Montbleu died almost twenty years ago—”

  “A shame he didn’t come through our cemetery,” Clothilde comments lightly.

  “—Durand is alive but in a nursing home and suffering from Alzheimer’s, and Parayre is still alive and kicking, working as a consultant for the police here in Toulouse.”

  I shake my head. “I’ve never heard of Parayre or Durand. I took my orders directly from Montbleu because he promised me an easy promotion. I’m only now realizing that he actually could do that. Not sure if that makes me any less stupid. Still.” I shake out of my irrelevant thoughts and turn to speak clearly to Evian. “There’s no point in looking into the elderly middle men.”