by Old Bones
There was one shower per floor, and while Ray, gorgeously draped in a royal blue chenille bedspread, stalked like an Indian chief through the dim hallways in search of it, Gideon and John, a couple of braves in plain gray blankets from the closet, sat in the room, nursed their bracing coffees, and talked.
"What do you think, John?" It was hardly necessary to say about what.
"I think Claire was right; tide tables don’t lie."
"That’s what I think. So why should Ben Butts want to do us in?"
"I don’t think he did, Doc. I think he wanted to do you in, and the rest of us just lucked out by being along."
"Me?" Gideon put his cup sharply down on the low table. "Why?" Before the words were out of his mouth he nodded at John. "Never mind, dumb question. I wonder why I have such a hard time getting used to the fact that someone’s trying to kill me." He picked up the cup again and took a fortifying swallow, then held it under his nose and savored the thick, sweet, pungent aroma of brandy.
"Ben," he mused. "Why Ben? What would he have against Claude? What would he have against Guillaume? Why kill them?"
"Guillaume?"
"The fake Guillaume, I mean; Mr. X. I don’t know what else to call him."
John poured the last of the coffee into their cups. "You don’t ever quit, do you?" he said, laughing. "You’re going to prove the poor guy was murdered whether he was or not."
"John, are you serious? If we didn’t learn anything else out there, at least we know how it was done now. Ben came damn near drowning all of us—" He downed the last warming slug of coffee. "—vital and nimble-witted though we are. Is it really so hard to believe he did the same thing to‘Guillaume’? Where do you suppose we’d be right now if we were sick, and old, and lame?"
John nodded slowly. Wrapped in the blanket, with his arms folded on his chest and his dark, flat, high-cheekboned face thoughtful, he really did look like a nineteenth-century Plains warrior sitting for his portrait by Catlin, remote and unfathomable.
"Doc, you got a point," he said fathomably.
"I just thought of another point. Ben’s a corporate lawyer for Southwest Electroplating."
John’s look suggested that if anybody was being unfathomable, it wasn’t him.
"Electroplating’s the same thing as silver-plating, isn’t it?" Gideon said. "Didn’t you tell me cyanide is used in silver-plating? Surely Ben wouldn’t have had any trouble making off with a little cyanide from his own firm without anybody knowing it."
"Yeah," John said, unconvinced, "only cyanide’s not that hard for anyone to get. But Iguess it’s something to think about." He shook his head. "Idon’t know, Doc. It’s hard to see Ben as the one behind it all. Does it feel right to you?"
No, Gideon admitted with a sigh, it didn’t. And the more he thought about it, the less right it felt. For one thing, he liked Ben too much to willingly accept him as a killer, but let that pass. There were too many other things that didn’t add up, too many downright absurdities. Surely Ben Butts was smart enough to think up a less whimsical plan than this for murder. How could he possibly know Gideon would show up at Mont St. Michel that particular day, and just in time to be hustled out into the incoming tide? And if he did somehow know, was he really the kind of monster who would sacrifice the others too? Say he was; how could he gamble they’d all be killed? Because if they weren’t, embarrassing questions would arise, such as the questions he and John were now asking. And how could Ben know that they would want to walk in the bay, anyway? What had he been doing, carrying around a tide table on the slim chance that he’d have an opportunity to play his droll little trick on them? It just wasn’t credible.
On the other hand, if not for that purpose, then why did he have a tide table with him? He certainly hadn’t planned to go out into the bay himself. And on the same hand, there was the one overwhelming, inarguable fact that overrode everything else: Ben had peered amicably into that tide table of his and calmly given them misinformation that was not merely a little bit off—the sort of error you’d make if you happened to read the wrong line in a tide table—but hugely and serendipitously off. The sort of error you’d make if you were trying to drown a few of your friends.
"I suppose," John said, "that what we ought to do is call Joly and tell him about this." He paused and lifted his eyebrows pensively. It wasn’t his first choice.
It wasn’t Gideon’s either. "I don’t know about you, John, but I’m tired of bugging Joly with every little thing. Why don’t we just go and have a little talk with Ben ourselves?"
"You’re on." John grinned and hugged the slipping blanket closer around his shoulders. "I can hardly wait to see what that mother says when we walk in the door."
TWENTY
WHAT Ben said was, "Hee, hee, hee."
On the surface this was not unreasonable. They had stopped at a Monoprix department store near Dinan to buy sweatshirts (their coats hadn’t dried) and sneakers to replace their lost or sopping shoes. The French are not particularly large people, especially in Brittany, and clothing in sizes to fit John and Gideon was not easy to come by. As a result, the two men emerged from the store in identical lurid violet sweatshirts, each with a plump and smiling escargot on the chest. On their feet they wore loose, slipper-like canvas shoes of a particuarly repulsive yellowish-green, with elastic side bands instead of laces; the sort of thing Quasi-modo might have worn to good effect.
Gideon had also bought a tide schedule, the cover of which was identical to Ben’s. While Ray and Claire shopped he had taken a few minutes to go through it with John. They were not surprised by what they found. The afternoon low tide for March 23 was not shown at 5:15, as
Ben had said, or anywhere near it. It was more than five hours later, at 11:33 p.m. But high tide was clearly shown as 4:43 p.m.—16:43, in the French system—when Ben had had every reason to think they’d still be in the bay. Gideon whistled softly at the height: 13.05 meters, with the previous low at 0.90 meters. A change of nearly fifty feet in a single tidal cycle! He breathed out a long sigh. They really had been lucky.
Every month was on a different page, one day per line. He scanned the entire page for March, seeking without much hope for some source of honest error on Ben’s part. But there weren’t any 5:15 low tides, a.m. or p.m. He thumbed through the rest of the booklet to see if there was a low tide at 5:15 on the twenty-third of any month, just in case Ben had gotten the right line but the wrong page. There wasn’t. There was no tide at precisely 5:15, morning or afternoon, high or low, on any day of the year.
It was impossible to get around it, then; whether it felt right or not, Ben Butts, in his smiling and easygoing way, had deliberately sent them out into a Mont St. Michel flood tide that even at that moment had already been rolling steadily towards them.
All of which made his whicker of laughter when they walked into the salon thoroughly surprising. He had been alone, apparently the first one down to await the call for pre-dinner cocktails, and he had been seated in one of the wingbacked chairs in front of the fire, his back to the door, seemingly absorbed in the sports section of the International Herald Tribune. On John’s firm suggestion, Ray and Claire had gone up to their rooms to change, having stoutly maintained their belief in his innocence during the drive.
"Hello, Ben," Gideon had said quietly from behind him, watching carefully for a giveaway sign when he turned— the sudden pallor of astonishment, perhaps, or the deep flush of rage. Instead, that high-pitched and convincing whinny of pleasure.
"That’s great!" he cried, taking in their violet sweatshirts and green shoes. "All you need are matching beanies. What are you going to do for your first number?"
It was hardly the snarl of a confounded murderer. Gideon’s doubts began to mount again.
As they regarded him silently, Ben’s grin rigidified. "All right, I give up. What are we playing?"
"Ben, you still got that tide table?" John asked, smiling.
"Sure, of course I do." He folded the newspaper neat
ly, stood up, and began patting his pockets. "At least I think I do. Ah." He produced it from the left hip pocket of his mohair jacket. John took it and handed it to Gideon.
"What’s going on?" Ben asked uncomfortably. "Why do I have the feeling everybody’s mad at me? Did I read the table wrong or something?" Abruptly, his face fell. "You’re kidding. I couldn’t have."
"Let’s just see," Gideon said. He turned quickly to the page for March, found the line for the current day, and moved his finger to the column headed basses mers—low tides. He stared, blinked, and stared again. Then he looked up at the others, thoroughly confused.
"According to this, low tide was at 5:15," he murmured.
"Well, of course," Ben said. "That’s what Isaid, isn’t it?"
Gideon took out the booklet he had bought at Mono-prix and compared it to Ben’s. The covers were the same, all right, and at first glance so were the contents. Sixty-four pages in all, mostly boating data and advertisements, and bound with a single hefty staple through the middle. The tidal information for March was on page 32, which was the left center page in each book, and the dates and days of the week in the two booklets matched. March 1 was shown as a Sunday, and so on. But the contents of the columns—the times and heights of the tides—were entirely different. As were the data, Gideon quickly ascertained, for the months on pages 31, 33, and 34, which were the other pages printed on the same folded sheet. The other pages seemed to be the same in each booklet.
"Ben, where did you get this thing?"
"From the car. It was in the door pocket. I wanted to see if we’d have a chance to watch a flood tide come in."
"The car? What car?"
"I told you; the one we picked up at Mont St. Michel. Guillaume’s car. The Citroën. How about telling me what’s going on?"
"Nothing, Ben," John said. "Just looking up some things."
"Don’t give me that, John. I may not be the brightest person in the world, but I sure know the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad." He laughed softly. "So my Aunt Gussie was wont to say."
They left him staring bemusedly after them and walked out into the hallway.
Gideon looked at John. "Well, I guess that answers that."
"What answers what? What’s the question?"
"The question is: Why did Guillaume go out into the bay without checking a tide table? And the answer is that he didn’t. He had this little gem right in the car with him; a perfectly nice little schedule, except for the small matter of a few pages in the middle. Which day did he die, do you remember? Last Sunday?"
"Monday. That would have been, uh—"
"The sixteenth." Gideon found the relevant row. "He went out in the morning, and with this to guide him, he wouldn’t have been expecting a high tide until early evening. Whereas, actually…" He closed the bogus tide table and opened the one from Monoprix. "…it crested at five minutes after ten. a.m. A nasty little surprise. The same sort of thing happened to us, you may recall."
John nodded grimly. "Okay, Doc, you win. I’m a believer. He was set up. So what do you think, Ben—"
"Not necessarily Ben. Any one of them could have doctored the thing for‘Guillaume’s’ benefit, and then Ben could have done just what he said he did: innocently picked up the table when he saw it in the car. I hope so."
"Me too." He shook his head. "Look, doesn’t it seem a little odd that a murderer would leave evidence like this just sitting around in the car for a week?"
"Not really. Whoever did it probably never dreamed that anyone would get suspicious about Guillaume’s death. I practically had to get us all drowned to convince you."
"That’s what I like about you. You never rub it in." He took the open booklets from Gideon and looked hard at them. "What did you mean,‘doctored’? You’re talking about a major production here. Look at the paper and the printing on the phony pages. They’re exactly the same as the real ones. That took work. It would have had to be set up way ahead of time, and whoever did it would have had to have a real tide schedule on hand, which means—"
Gideon was shaking his head. "No, I think it was simpler than that. If I could get into Guillaume’s files, I think I could show you."
"Guillaume’s files? They must be right here in his study, where Joly’s been doing most of his interviewing." He walked a few steps to a closed door and turned the handle. The door opened. "What’s stopping us?"
Gideon hesitated. "Don’t you feel a little awkward about snooping around other people’s homes without being invited?"
"Are you kidding me?"
"Well, I do."
"Doc," John said with a sigh, "you got to get over these over-fastidious sensitivities. That is, if you ever hope to operate anything like an honest-to-God detective."
"That’s the last thing I hope to do," Gideon muttered,
but in he went behind John. They left the door ajar as a salve to his conscience (it wasn’t really snooping if they did it openly) and flicked on the light.
The study was very different from the other rooms Gideon had seen, its contents reflecting the wintry personality of its dead user: functional, gray metal desk with nothing on it but a marble pen set with the two pens neatly inserted in their holders; two three-drawer file cabinets of matching blue steel (a grudging concession to cosmetic considerations?); a tripartite glass-fronted display case filled with tiny seashells meticulously arranged in long, dull, rows. Everything labeled, efficient, and ruthlessly neat, a private sanctuary of austerity in the lush manoir.
Gideon went to the right-hand file cabinet, to the drawer labeled "M-P." There, in a hanging folder under "Marées," he quickly found what he expected to find: Guillaume’s tide schedules, a set of blue booklets all looking just like the ones he had already seen, except for the years. There were eleven in all, arranged in order (naturally) from 1976 to 1986. The table for 1987 was not in its place. Presumably, that was the one he’d gotten from Ben, which he now put on the desk alongside the one he’d bought at the store.
He sat down and began going through the stack, starting with 1976, opening each one to the page for January, glancing briefly at it, and moving on to the next booklet.
"So what are we looking for?" John asked, leaning over his shoulder.
"We’re looking for a year where the dates—" But he had already found it. "Here," he said, "Nineteen-eighty-one. Look." He pointed to the entry under Jours for January 1. "‘J’," he said, "for jeudi. Thursday."
"Yeah," John said. "So?"
"So in 1981 January started on a Thursday, just the way it did this year, which means—" He flipped a few pages. "—that the days for March also must correspond."
"Unless 1981 was a leap year."
"It wasn’t."
"I bet anything there’s some point to this," John said.
"You better believe it. Look at the afternoon high tide for March 23, 1981." He put his finger on the place.
"Sixteen-forty-three," John said, still not comprehending. "Huh. The same time as it was today. That’s funny."
"It’s more than funny. If we match the rest of the times with the ones on the schedule from Monoprix, I think they’ll match too. But only on pages 31 to 34." He opened the Monoprix booklet to compare, and sighed with satisfaction. "See?"
Even the three-line advertisement at the bottom of page 32 matched. "Le Galle Frères, Opticiens," it proclaimed. "L’ ami de vos yeux." But the advertisement on page 32 of the one Ben had found in the car was for aluminum boats.
"Doc," John said, frowning over the booklets, "I still don’t—"
"John, look at the individual pages. Do you see any indication of the year? There isn’t any. Just "Mars," or "Avril," or whatever. They’re printed up in exactly the same format every year, and the only place you can find the date is on the cover. Just like the schedules we use to go clamming at Sequim Bay. It’d be the easiest thing in the world—"
"—to open up the staple and switch pages from one year to another!" John smacked the table. "Dam
n! As long as you used a year where the dates fell on the same days of the week you could get away with it!"
"At last, the light."
"Not bad," John said appreciatively. "Somebody hears the old guy say he’s going tidepooling the next morning, sneaks in here during the night, switches a few pages from 1981 to 1987—"
"And vice-versa, so there aren’t any missing pages in the 1981 schedule, just in case Guillaume happens to look."
John nodded slowly. "And goodbye, Guillaume."
"Right. Only of course it wasn’t really Guillaume."
"Oh, yeah." John tapped his temple with a forefinger. "It’s hard to keep these little details straight. Sometimes I start wondering who I am. Hey, we better cut Joly in on this right now, don’t you think? Most of these people aren’t going to be around after tomorrow."
Gideon used the telephone in the study to contact the inspector, reaching him at home. Joly listened without interruption to his account of the altered tide tables. He was impressed enough to dispense with his usual mordant observations on Gideon’s continuing contributions to the case, but not so much that he admitted to having been wrong about "Guillaume’s" murder.
"I thought I asked you to exercise reasonable prudence," was his comment. "I should have thought that would include keeping your distance from Rochebonne."
"I did, Lucien, but, uh, events intervened."
"I’m not sure I like the sound of that. Are there any other developments you should be telling me about?"
"Nothing important." It seemed a poor time to mention that the four of them had almost staged their own recreation of the drowning in the bay.
"Well," Joly said, "I think it would be best if I came there, and you might as well wait for me now, if you don’t mind. Is John there? Stay close to him. I don’t want anything happening to you."
"Right, right," Gideon grumbled.
"And keep the falsified schedules for me. Better yet, give them to John to keep."
"Lucien, it might surprise you, but I’m perfectly capable—"
"And do try not to handle them. There may very well be fingerprints."