by Nell Goddin
“Hi Rex, nice to meet you,” she said, by now almost used to strangers knowing who she was. “I’ll ask you what everyone always asks me—how did you end up in Castillac?”
“Ah, yes. I teach at Degas. Painting. I’ve been there many years now.”
Molly’s brow wrinkled and she nodded. “Did you….”
Ford smiled at her but his eyes were flat. “Are you asking about Amy? Everyone’s asking about Amy. No, I haven’t taught her. You see, as I said I’ve been teaching there for many years, but my focus is on the art and on my teaching, not on playing politics, you understand? So when the other professors are fighting over the students, trying to get the best ones for themselves—I don’t allow myself to get involved with that sort of thing.
“At any rate, no, I’m afraid Gallimard was Amy’s painting teacher. Anton Gallimard. You have heard of him?”
“I’ve heard his name. He’s here, I suppose?”
Rex Ford raised his eyebrows and jutted out his chin to point him out. Gallimard was on the dance floor, his face florid and his belly shaking, doing The Bump with a pretty student, both of them laughing.
“Ah,” said Molly, nodding and looking back at Ford. She saw hatred in his eyes as he looked at Gallimard. Saw how he couldn’t take his eyes off him, in fact. “So tell me about teaching at Degas. You’ve been there a long while, so you must like it there?”
Ford nodded. “Well, I like parts of it. I like living in France.”
Molly nodded enthusiastically.
“And art…art is my life,” he continued. “When I reached the point in my own career where I could see I would progress no further, teaching was the only possibility that made sense.”
“I understand,” said Molly. “That must have been a difficult moment.”
Ford was looking over Molly’s head, not at the crowd but still at Gallimard. “Yes,” he said.
Molly started trying to think of a graceful way to get away from Ford. She moved her hips, eager to be on the dance floor, then stopped because she didn’t want to get stuck dancing with Rex.
“It is never easy to have desires that cannot be fulfilled,” Ford pronounced, and then looked down at Molly with an expression of such tangled emotion she stepped backwards. “Take Gallimard, for example. He was supposed to be the next Pollock, the next Chagall. And now he’s nothing but a fat nobody. What do you think that might drive a person to do?” Ford asked, bending his head down and breathing in Molly’s face.
“Drink too much?” she said in a small voice. “And I don’t know. Who doesn’t have to confront failure in middle age? Almost nobody ends up being what they imagined they would be.”
Rex cocked his head and swiveled his attention to her. “Perhaps. Perhaps. But you see him out there, right now—do you think it’s an accident that he’s dancing with the best-looking girl in the school? Do you understand? He’s like a parasite, wanting to suck her youth right out of her nubile body.”
Ford licked his lips. Molly saw a bead of spittle in the corner of his mouth, and decided that maybe it was Rex Ford himself who wanted to suck on nubile bodies. His intensity was making her feel more than a little uncomfortable.
“They’ve got that junk dealer in jail,” Ford leaned in close and whispered in Molly’s ear. “But it’s a mistake. They’ve got the wrong guy.”
The fact that Molly agreed with him did not make the conversation any less awkward. Where had Lawrence disappeared to?
And Rémy? Not that she cared.
Really.
* * *
It was disgusting, thought Maribeth Donnelly. The way everyone just goes on as though nothing has happened. Amy disappears and it’s like she’s been dropped into the sea, without a single ripple. Maribeth had a quick image of a painting—the ocean, abstract and dark, a small figure lost—and then felt a little sick at having turned Amy into art, just like that, without meaning to.
Maribeth did not fault the police, who at least seemed to be making some effort to find her. At least they had somebody in custody, from what she’d heard. But L’Insitut Degas, that was another thing altogether. Bunch of old white men looking to line their pockets and their beds, was her assessment. She had already made arrangements with her family to go home after the semester was over, which was no small thing since she had begged to come to the school, and had had to admit she had been wrong about her choice.
But at the same time, confusingly, her work was better. Deeper, more accomplished technically. She had learned much from Gallimard and from the other students as well. But this…this gala, not two weeks after Amy was taken…it was more than she could stomach. She looked around hoping to see Officer Perrault, so she could thank her. But if she saw that Maron guy, she would avoid him. She did not like his vibe. Not one bit.
* * *
She felt so good in his arms, and it made Dufort happy the way he could feel her laughter ripple through her body as he held her. He wanted to pay attention to Marie-Claire, and only Marie-Claire, and leave all of the mess of L’Institut Degas and Amy Bennett behind. If only for a few hours.
But after one dance, Marie-Claire gave him a serious look and pulled him towards the door. “Something I need to tell you,” she said mysteriously in his ear. They threaded through the crowd, Ben nodding at various people along the way, until they got to a side door of the big room and let themselves out.
The night was cold and their breath made twin plumes, illuminated by the light of the party. Dufort stood up straight and breathed deeply, the air tickling the inside of his nose and smelling of pine. “Why are you intent on freezing me to death?” he asked Marie-Claire, smiling.
Neither wore a coat and they shivered in the cold. “I have to make sure no one hears what I’m about to say,” she said. She was not smiling. Ben looked at the way some of her hair had escaped her chignon and wreathed her head like a halo. “It’s about the school. Something I’ve found out. It’s probably nothing to do with your case, and I would be fired if Draper knew I was telling you this—”
Ben took her hands. He waited.
“—the thing is, I was poking around where I didn’t belong. I handle much of the school’s correspondence, emails to parents and that sort of thing, but a couple of things had happened that got me curious…anyway, to get to the nut of it: Degas is in serious financial trouble. I’m pretty sure Draper has been siphoning funds away for his own personal use. Maybe Gallimard as well.”
Ben looked into her face and thought how serious and lovely she was. He put the back of his hand on her cheek and she startled, his fingers were like ice. “And what do you think this might have to do with Amy?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, probably nothing. But I suppose I thought, well, here are some people pretending to be one thing—upstanding citizens, leaders of a prestigious school—when in actuality, they are nothing more than hustlers. Nothing more than thieves. And isn’t that true of whoever took Amy? If it’s someone we know, someone in the village? He’s a liar? A faker?”
“How did you find this out?”
Marie-Claire did not answer. She had managed to guess Draper’s password (people are so much more predictable than they think they are) and read his private emails. But what had seemed like a good idea at the time, in retrospect was a clear violation; she had even, she somehow did not realize until that moment, broken the law herself.
“Now that I’ve said it out loud, I can see I was being ridiculous,” she said, looking down at her feet in her favorite black ballerina flats. “Just because someone’s a thief doesn’t make him a killer.”
“It doesn’t,” said Dufort. “But you’ve done the right thing to tell me. We still don’t know if what happened to Amy has anything to do with the school. We don’t know if it was random or had something to do with who she was, her relationships and so forth. But without as much information as we can get, what hope do we have of finding out?”
When Marie-Claire realized he was not going to press her for how she fou
nd Draper out, she relaxed a little. “Smells like winter,” she said, lifting her face to the moon.
Dufort leaned in and kissed her on the neck, then on the lips. He wanted to be simply standing outside in the dark with Marie-Claire, kissing her. That was all.
All the rest of it could wait, at least for now.
30
Twenty-two year old Simone Guyanet was walking home alone from the gala, a little tipsy and ready for bed. Just that week she had finally moved out of her parents’ house and gotten her own place near the center of town. As she passed the Presse, something flashed to the side, a quick movement, a furtive shape in her peripheral vision.
She faltered.
Then she walked faster, looking forward to getting to the apartment that was all hers and climbing into her freshly-made bed. Out from the space between two buildings, a man stepped just after she went by. Silently he followed, and in a few strides had reached her, put his hand over her mouth, and tried to pull her into the darkness, down the alley next to a clothing shop.
Simone wrenched her body violently to one side and his grip loosened. She ran. She had always been the fastest runner in her class and she was in good shape despite her office job, and her attacker was quickly blocks behind, empty-handed.
* * *
“Well, I did have a good time, yes. But now, I don’t know, I’m sort of let down, now that it’s over,” said Molly, making sure she had her handbag as Lawrence was pulling into the driveway of La Baraque. “I see the Bennetts are asleep, or at least their lights are off.”
“I wonder if anyone invited them. Not that they’d have wanted to go, but it would be weird not to invite them, don’t you think?”
“I guess. I didn’t see them before I left. Where’s the protocol manual for handling parents with missing daughters?” They sat in the warm car, thinking about the Bennetts. Finally Molly spoke. “Want a nightcap?”
“Oh, you’re sweet. But maybe this once I’ll be good and go home and put myself to bed. I hope your let-down feeling doesn’t stick around too long.”
“I’ll be fine. It’s that—I had this feeling when I was getting ready that something was going to happen tonight, you know? That little tingle you get before something really dramatic happens?”
“Hmm, little tingles,” said Lawrence. He seemed about to say something teasing but changed his mind. The friends kissed cheeks and said goodnight. Molly walked down the flagstone path to the front door, pulling her coat tight around her against the cold. She turned to wave at Lawrence as he backed out and drove off.
And as she went to pull the latch on her front door, she felt fear come rumbling at her, slow and suffocating as an avalanche. Fear that someone—him—had come in through her unlocked door, and was waiting for her inside. Fear that whoever was taking young women wasn’t going to stop. Fear that she had been clinging to the idea that she was safe but had been terribly, horribly wrong.
I need a dog. Like now.
Molly slipped off her shoes and left them just inside the front door. She did not turn on the light, partly because she was afraid of what she might see. Walking as silently as possible, she headed for the end table in the living room with its one drawer, where she had put the mace.
She listened hard but what she heard was the coursing of her own blood through her ears.
Maybe it’s a little narcissistic to think the killer would come after me, right? I’m not so young, for one thing. And…
By the time she reached the side table Molly had worked out three rationalizations and was working on the fourth. She slid open the drawer and grasped the mace. Much better now. Without worrying about noise she turned on the table lamp and the spooky dark shapes instantly transformed into familiar pieces of furniture. She let out a long breath.
A crash behind her.
Molly whirled around, her right arm extended, thumb and finger on the trigger of the mace canister. The orange cat streaked over the back of the sofa and out the French doors to the terrace. Molly shook her head, trying to summon a laugh at herself, but she couldn’t quite manage it. She put the mace on the kitchen counter and poured herself a big glass of Perrier and drank it down. Then she put the lamp back on the side table, locked the French doors and the front door and the little door in the pantry that she never used, and went into the bathroom to wash her face before going to bed.
Castillac may have turned out to be a terrible choice, she thought to herself, wiping her face over and over with a hot washcloth. But I’m not ready to say that yet.
Not yet.
31
Simone kept running even though she heard no footsteps behind her. She was trying to get somewhere less solitary, somewhere with so many people she would be safe, and then she could call the police. But on the night of the gala at L’Institut Degas everything was closed. Everything. She ran past Chez Papa—dark. Same with the other bars and restaurants on the Place. It was nearing midnight and she could think of absolutely no place to go except back to the gala.
She stopped abruptly and looked behind her. The street and sidewalks were empty. The street dark, the pavement damp from a brief shower. The shapes of buildings deeply familiar as she had lived in Castillac all her life.
She waited until she had caught her breath. Still no one.
And then, because she didn’t know what else to do and now going alone to her new apartment was about a hundred times less appealing than it had been ten minutes earlier, she started running down rue des Chênes, back to Degas as fast as she could go.
* * *
The gendarmes of Castillac were at the station early Wednesday morning.
“I had my eyes and ears peeled last night,” Thérèse was saying to Dufort and Maron. “I was thinking most of the village was at the gala. So the chance of our perp being there was pretty decent.” She bowed her head. “But instead he was roaming the streets and almost got Simone.”
“I should have had you patrol since you weren’t going to be at the gala,” said Dufort to Maron.
Maron shrugged. “We can’t be everywhere at once. Did your friend give a description?” he asked Perrault.
“Unfortunately not,” answered Dufort. “It was dark, he grabbed her from behind. All she could say was that she was pretty sure it was a man, and that he was somewhat hefty.”
“What does ‘somewhat hefty’ mean?”
Dufort gave a brittle smile. “I asked that very question. Ms. Guyanet said only that the person was substantial, not slight. She would not hazard a guess about weight.”
Maron nodded. The three officers were quiet, all of them trying to have the breakthrough thought, the inspiration that would finally lead to some progress.
“You could say that Gallimard is ‘somewhat hefty,’” said Perrault. “Too bad he was at the gala, surrounded by a hundred witnesses.”
“Professor Ford spoke to me about him again,” said Dufort. “Definitely has a personal grudge against Gallimard. But maybe there is something to what he says.”
“Might be, if he didn’t have an alibi,” said Perrault.
Maron glared at her. “He could have slipped out and gotten back in ten minutes. You can’t prove every single minute was accounted for.”
“I’m going to talk to Ford again,” said Dufort.
Perrault glanced at Maron, and gave him some grudging credit for keeping his gaze steadily on the floor and not shooting her a glance of victory.
The feeling in the room was not one of optimism or energy. They wanted a lead, a clue, a body. And in the absence of all three, it felt as though they were going through the motions of investigation. Plodding along a treadmill, never advancing.
Lapin had been let go, since there was no legal pretext for keeping him, and of the three gendarmes, only Maron thought there was any chance he had anything to do with Amy’s disappearance. Perrault and Dufort had tried talking to him again but neither had succeeded in getting anything new out of him. Whatever he had held back, he was still holding bac
k.
They were at square one. Exactly two weeks since Amy went missing.
Dufort stood up and walked to the window. He pushed down a slat of the Venetian blind and looked out. “Somebody in this village knows something,” he said. He felt a hollowness growing in the pit of his stomach and knew it was time for a dose of his tincture. He closed his eyes and tried to take himself back to last night, to dancing with Marie-Claire, but stress had taken over and he got no relief from it.
“Maron, I’d like you to do some legwork on the financial picture for Degas. Find out what kind of endowment they have, if any. Find out how well tuition covers expenses. Find out—everything you can.”
Maron nodded and went to his computer. Perrault looked at Dufort expectantly.
“Thérèse,” he said quietly, “you and I will look for Amy’s body, and we will make no effort to disguise what we are doing. You take the north side of the village, I will take the south. Look in every backyard. Every shed, every barn, every garden. Start in the center of town and move farther out.”
“Yes, sir,” said Thérèse. “Too bad we don’t have a bloodhound.”
Dufort nodded. “Listen. The key to this whole thing is in the village, in our history,” he said. “I can sense that it’s right in front of us, and we just haven’t been able to see it.”
Thérèse waited to see if Dufort had more to say, but when he was quiet, she nodded and left to search, experiencing for the first time the deeply mixed emotions that come with wanting desperately to find a body so that the case could proceed, while at the same time, never wanting to give up on the hope that Amy was alive, somehow, somewhere.
32
The morning after the gala, Molly called Constance and asked her to come back and finish the job cleaning the cottage. No, she wasn’t fired. Yes, she did have to mop after vacuuming. Yes, it would be better if she came this morning. Then Molly walked over to ask the Bennetts if they would mind leaving the place for a few hours, but when she knocked, no one answered.