by Nell Goddin
“I don’t know. He went from warm and interested to sort of avoiding me. It was a little weird. When I went over to thank him and say goodbye, he looked at me all sad. Like he’d lost his best friend.”
“So maybe he got some bad news. Everything’s not always about you, you know.”
“Really?” Patty said sarcastically. “I thought everything was actually all about you.”
“I think I should go check this Pascal out. If he’s as good-looking as you say, I’d hate for him to be going to waste in a place like Castillac.”
“Ash!”
“You just said he was avoiding you. Why shouldn’t I have a crack at him? Maybe he likes blondes.”
Patty gritted her teeth and said nothing, but her ears turned bright red and she squinted at the road with a dark expression.
The two friends were quiet. They were on an autoroute, and the driving was easy, and before long they were accelerating up a long hill to the parking lot at the very top, where the Ecopark was located. They parked and paid for tickets.
“Aren’t birds sort of filthy?” said Ashley. “I mean, they can be pretty and all, but don’t a lot of them carry diseases and whatnot?”
“Why do you talk when you have no idea what you’re talking about? You sound like a complete airhead.”
“Good thing I have other attributes,” said Ashley, fluffing up her hair and striking a pose.
Patty rolled her eyes. “Come on, I want to get good seats.”
But for the Ecopark show, there were no bad seats. On a bluff overlooking the valley, a few rows of seats ringed an open area, with the drop-off on one side. Handlers came in with gigantic raptors on their arms, and with whistles and treats thrown into the air, the show began. Enormous eagles flew out, wafting on air currents. Falcons dive-bombed for prey and returned to the padded forearms of their handlers. A man came around with a vulture and let it climb on members of the audience if they agreed to it.
“Oh my God,” breathed Patty, as the vulture stood on her head. “This is so cool!”
Ashley did not hide her distaste. “Is this going on much longer? I am so ready for lunch it’s not even funny. And I would like to see the church that’s hanging onto the side of the cliff down there.”
“Thank you,” said Patty to the man with the vulture, who nodded and winked at her. “Raptors are the best.”
“I thought you were all about puppies and kittens? Since when did you get interested in a bunch of smelly, flying killing machines?”
“They are not smelly. And just because I work with dogs and cats in my job, doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate other animals. I love all animals, Ashley. A lot more than some people,” she added under her breath.
When the show was over, they headed down the path to the tiny village, which clung to the side of a high cliff. It was breathtaking, and impossible not to wonder at the work that had made the place possible. How had they managed the engineering, or even getting the materials up so high? The accomplishment was not simply having constructed buildings in that most unimaginable location, it was that the buildings were so beautiful. Luminous in the sunshine, delicate and yet powerful.
Patty and Ashley wandered the narrow streets, bought postcards and ice cream, and eventually got to the church. Patty walked through quickly, hoping to have time for another quick visit to the Ecopark on their way out, but Ashley lit candles. Then she entered a pew, knelt on a dusty velvet kneeler and closed her eyes to pray.
Patty watched her. It occurred to her for the first time that her friend was sort of the human embodiment of a raptor: always hungry, always ready to snatch away anything it wanted from anyone.
Eventually Ashley got up and they made their way up the long stairs to the parking lot. It was already getting dark and the Ecopark was closing. Near the top was a landing where you could stop to catch your breath and admire the view, and Ashley, panting hard, went to the edge and leaned her hands on the low railing.
Patty stood behind her. She took in her friend’s gold sandals, the worst possible shoes for all the walking they had planned to do. She took in her teased hair, her habit of always posing, as though the world was always clamoring with cameras to capture everything she did. She thought of Pascal and his dazzling smile.
She came up behind her old friend, and put both palms on her back. Given Ashley’s position, she realized it would be easy to push her. So easy. And so, so satisfying.
26
1990
Patty had a plan. She was thrilled to have gotten her first invitation to a party with the popular kids in her class at Jackson Middle School, but there was no way on God’s green earth that her mother would allow her to go. It was not even worth asking. What Patty needed was a distraction, something to send her mother into a tizzy long enough for Patty to get away unnoticed.
Which is where her little brother Dwayne came in.
Dwayne, bless his heart, was not as clever as Patty—no one in the family was, to be sure—and she often used him for her own ends. He was sent to the store for candy they weren’t supposed to eat, cards they weren’t supposed to play, magazines they weren’t supposed to read. When the contraband was discovered (which it almost always was), it was Dwayne who suffered, because Patty had convinced him that there was no point in both of them being punished. So he was spanked and not allowed to watch cartoons and even shunned at the dinner table, and while he protested the injustice to Patty, he never tattled on her.
In her religious fervor, Mrs. McMahon believed that almost anything fun was the work of the devil, hence much of what an eighth-grader wanted to do was not allowed. No rock music, no unapproved television shows, no dancing, certainly no unsupervised fraternizing with boys…and what Patty McMahon wanted to do, with every fiber of her being, was fraternize with Bobby Selden, somewhere—anywhere—that was private.
“Look,” she whispered to Dwayne. “Just take the radio out of the garage and up to the attic. There’s a plug up there, I checked. No one’s going to hear it all the way up there.”
“If she does hear it, I’m dead.”
“She won’t! Plus the attic stairs are steep and narrow. If you hear her coming, just turn it off and shove it into one of those old trunks. By the time she gets up there, you can be lounging around, reading a comic book.”
“But that’ll get me in trouble! You know she hates comics.”
“Right, Dwayne,” said Patty, slowly. “That’s the whole idea. Give her something little to get mad about, and she’ll forget the bigger thing. See? She’ll shout about the comic but probably won’t even punish you. But the radio, hoo boy.”
“I know. She’d never let me leave the house again.”
“Yep. So don’t get caught. You’re smarter than she is, Dwayne!”
“You think so?” he asked hopefully.
“You betcha.”
The plan did work, after a fashion. Mrs. McMahon was screaming in the attic long enough to give Patty time to slip away with her knapsack full of borrowed, not-allowed clothing. She ran to the bus stop and rode into town, changing in the bathroom in the drugstore, and made it to the party with the popular kids.
As punishment, Dwayne had to spend two hours praying when he got home from school every day for a week, and wouldn’t talk to Patty for days. But she didn’t care. The party had been a big disappointment, and she had moved on to her next goal: get through high school with a high enough grade point average to get a scholarship to Auburn. Anything to get away from home.
27
“I’m so glad you’re feeling better. You look amazing, you know that?” Ben took Molly’s hand as they started down the path in the woods that branched off from the meadow at La Baraque.
“Flatterer. Keep talking.”
“And you really do feel better? You’re not just pretending, to keep people from nursing you to death?”
“Constance has been driving me crazy. At least now I know it’s not true that everyone in France is a good cook.”
“I thoug
ht Lawrence was in charge of food. Have you been starving while I was away?”
“Lawrence has arranged to have meals dropped off almost every day. But he’s got some business thing going on up in Brittany, so he’s been in and out of town. Honestly, everything feels so fragmented, with Franny and Nico still gone too. And you! Where have you disappeared to lately?”
“I hope you’re not feeling neglected. I’ve missed you.”
“I manage just fine,” Molly said, with a slight edge of defensiveness that made her wince. “But come on, tell me.”
“Maron’s been hitting some roadblocks with the embassy. You understand how it is—no one knows him there, so it’s understandable they’re nervous about an American getting murdered here, and the potential diplomatic fallout from that. Anyway, I know some people in Paris, some people in law enforcement, so I went up to meet with them in person. These days you have to be careful what you write in email or say over the phone, which meant my friends all wanted to talk in cafés or out walking, where it’s safer.”
“Jeez, you’ve gone all cloak and dagger on me!”
Ben laughed, and the sound made all the tension in Molly’s body drain away. “Hardly,” he said. “But they told me that Dedalus’s identity has been confirmed. He was a man named Jim Pyke, American, from Maryland.”
“Not Ohio, where Ryan Tuck is from?”
“No.”
“But they must have known each other, right? How else would Pyke…or I don’t know, maybe another person’s identity is something you can buy online these days, just like shoes?”
“You know about the dark web?”
“No. Is that like a black market?”
“Precisely. An online black market. And you can get pretty much anything you want on it, just like in the old-fashioned, in-person kind.”
They walked along, thinking this over.
“So did you find anything out about this Jim Pyke? Anything to link him to anybody we know?”
“Not so far.”
“How did they figure out his identity? It’s still so hard for me to grasp that the man I got to know—the man who threw sticks for Bobo!—was someone else altogether. I’m guessing he had a record?”
“Yes. Pyke was an embezzler, and not a very good one. He’d been gotten caught multiple times and served time twice. We’re lucky on that score, that he’d been in the American prison system—it meant they had fingerprints. Recently he had managed to get a job at a non-profit, some sort of education venture for poor children. Apparently Pyke bled it dry and then skipped town, after arranging first to impersonate Ryan Tuck, of course. No connection between the two men as far as anyone can tell, except neither one was anyone you’d want to be pals with.”
“Was it Nathaniel who said that Ryan—I mean Dedalus…wait, Pyke, Jim Pyke. I’m having the hardest time keeping the names straight! Remember, Pyke told Patty that he had done something wrong, something he was in trouble for.”
“Embezzling from a non-profit would fit, certainly.”
Molly nodded. “It’s weird. If you’d given me a list of qualities and asked me to check off which ones I thought Pyke had, I’d have checked ‘generosity’ without hesitation. Guess I had him all wrong.”
Wisely, Ben did not comment, but put his arm around Molly’s shoulders and pulled her closer. The woods weren’t showing any sign of spring yet and the sky was gray.
“It’s just around the next curve,” said Molly quietly.
“Where you found him?”
“Yup.”
They walked quickly to the spot. The area still looked disturbed: leaves were trampled, and a few small branches had broken off and lay on the ground.
“Which tree?” asked Ben, and Molly pointed.
“It would be easy to climb, with those thick lower branches,” she said. “I guess, after Pyke was strangled, the killer slipped the noose over his head, tossed the rope up over the branch, and yanked him up until his feet were off the ground.”
“And what did Nagrand say when he got here? Did he think Pyke had put the noose on himself, and then jumped off the branch?”
“I can’t say. The place was crawling with the forensics team and Maron was here. I couldn’t really ask a ton of questions without making a nuisance of myself.”
Ben nodded slowly. “Thanks for showing me the site. I can only hope that the discovery of the real victim helps move the case forward, because otherwise? We are knee-deep in mud.”
Molly dropped onto a log rather suddenly, trying and failing to push her hair out of her face.
“You okay?”
“No. I mean yes. Overall. I just forget that I have to take it sort of easy. Fatigue sneaks up on me and boom! I just want to be in bed, even though I felt okay two seconds ago.”
“That’s easy to fix,” he said, scooping her into his arms. She let her head fall against his broad chest and couldn’t help smiling as he trotted down the path toward home.
Ben got Molly tucked into bed with her tablet and a tall glass of apricot juice, and then went upstairs to his room to make a few calls, thinking that he really needed to spend more time around La Baraque. She was still fragile, and of course there was the matter of one of the guests being a potential danger. Though it was always possible that Paul-Henri’s mystery man was responsible for the murder after all.
He is such a thoroughly decent man, Molly was thinking as she opened a novel but did not start to read it. She felt so tired, and her thoughts pinged around her head, all helter-skelter again. Dr. Vernay had told her to expect this pattern of feeling worse just after taking the medication, then gradually a bit better, then drifting down again before the next dose was due. Over time, he had said, the bad phases will be less bad and shorter, and the good phases will get better and longer.
Please be right, Dr. Vernay, she murmured, letting her eyes close.
“Hey Molly?”
Her eyes snapped open. “Oh, hi Nathaniel. Here I am, in bed again. I guess I overdid it a little. But I hope after a nap I’ll be up again and available. Is everything all right?”
“Oh sure! I’m just sticking my head in to see if there’s anything you need.”
“I don’t think so. Well, if you could close those curtains, that would be terrific. My eyes are really sensitive to light at the moment.”
Nathaniel crossed the room and busied himself with the curtains while Molly watched. She wanted to ask him about the other guests, but could not find the energy to make the words come out.
“Okay, I’m off. Just give me a call if you need something.”
Molly nodded and Nathaniel left, closing the bedroom door quietly behind him.
I wish these guests would give me some peace, she thought. But Nathaniel’s a sweet kid. Losing his mother must have been just awful. And then, in a flash (the way good ideas often seem to come), she wondered if she could send Miranda a plane ticket so she could join him at La Baraque, as a way to thank Nathaniel for his kindness. Molly had definitely discovered her inner spendthrift after coming into her riches back in December; the idea of splurging on a plane ticket for a women she’d never met tickled her.
Her laptop was on a small table next to the window. Molly considered getting up and buying the ticket right then, but realized she would need Miranda’s last name and probably address and email as well. Her eyelids were getting heavier and heavier. She sat up and sipped the juice, trying to figure out a way to get those details without asking Nathaniel and giving the surprise away, but for the life of her, she couldn’t focus, and slowly slipped down under the heavy comforter and once again to sleep.
28
Maron and Monsour took the small police car to La Baraque. Maron had called ahead to ask Molly to gather the guests together once again so that he could announce the true identity of the murder victim.
“It does seem to me that merely observing their faces when we give them the news is not exactly an advanced tool of detection,” Paul-Henri said as they bumped over a part of
the road that needed repairing. “Can’t we simply bring them in and interrogate them?”
“We can bring them in, yes. But we don’t want to give them time to organize their thoughts and get their defenses up. I want to see them as a group, see who glances at who, who is startled by the news and who is not. This first reaction may tell us who to focus on. Law enforcement in Paris and in the States are working on finding the connection between Pyke and one of these tourists. It exists and it will be found. It’s only the lack of time that concerns me. Soon they will head back home, and legally, there’s not a thing I can do to stop them.”
“Presumably, even if they do return home, that does not mean the murderer goes free, yes? If we find the connection next month, or next year—the perpetrator can be picked up then, I suppose?”
“That’s a lot of time to go into hiding and start a new life somewhere else.”
“I would think that would be difficult these days, what with face-recognition technology and rampant spying by pretty much everyone.”
Maron sighed. “Look, Paul-Henri, just try to stay positive, all right? I understand there are many ways for this investigation to go wrong, but it doesn’t do anyone any good to dwell on them. At this meeting I will tell everyone about Pyke. You are to observe carefully. I am especially interested in the reactions of Ira and Darcy Bilson. I don’t know if you’ve heard the gossip, but Darcy apparently blew her top out at Lela Vidal’s farm the other day. She’s unstable and I want us to keep an eye on her.”
“And her husband?”
“Well, he’s big enough to have managed the physical difficulties of the murder without any trouble, for starters. And underneath that jolly exterior, I think he is an angry man. Angry at the world, and especially his wife.”
“I have seen him behaving quite gently toward her.”
“That’s called being a doormat, Paul-Henri. Others have reported that Darcy has wild mood swings, like I said, and he works double overtime trying to keep her from going off. Maybe this time, with his wife flirting with another man right under his nose, in front of everyone—maybe he’s the one who went off.”