by Nell Goddin
“Go on,” said Lawrence, coming over with two plates laden with pastry. “The coffee will take a minute. So what did you find? Is that where he was shot?”
“Yes. Big nasty bloodstain on the rug. You’d think they’d throw the rug out, wouldn’t you?”
“Maybe Maron, or Nagrand, told them to wait for some reason.”
Molly shrugged. “So…here’s what I want to hear your take on.” She bit into an almond croissant, the buttery soft layers inside contrasting with the crackly exterior, a sensation she never tired of. “There were framed photographs in the salon. You know, you can tell a lot from photographs, sometimes. They show things people don’t include when they talk about stuff.”
Lawrence nodded, becoming frustrated with Molly’s dragging out what she wanted to say.
“It’s Nico. There’s a photograph there of Nico. It’s faded, he’s maybe ten years old. Looks like it was taken on a vacation or something—he’s standing on a rock with water behind him.”
“You’re sure—”
“It’s him. No question.”
Lawrence jumped up to get coffee and Molly ate more of her croissant. “Thing is, he’s never once mentioned having any sort of association with the Fleurays. Which might be no big deal, something understandable, him simply not bragging about his fancy connections. Except, once Marcel was murdered? How does he continue to keep that secret when the whole village is talking about the family and wondering what happened?”
“And what is the connection? Maybe his parents and the Fleurays were friends, they were on vacation together, it was years ago, nothing he even thinks about anymore.”
“But if that were so, Marcel would not be featuring his photograph. It was not a group shot—Nico was alone in the picture. Very clearly he meant something to the Baron. Something powerful.”
“But what?”
“You know Nico is notoriously guarded about his history.”
“I don’t especially like giving people my own resumé, so I have no problem with that.”
“We’re not talking casual acquaintances, Lawrence. You’ve told me things about your past.”
“But that’s you, my dear.”
“Exactly. Nico is not talking to Frances about any of this. Yet he wants her to marry him.”
“Excuse me for being slow-witted here, Molly. Do you think you know what the connection is?”
“I don’t. But I have…suspicions. Start with the photograph. There are only three, all in silver frames. These are not random photos but obviously have deep meaning for Marcel.”
“I love how you’re on a first-name basis with him.”
“We’re tight. And we’ll be even tighter once I figure out who killed him. So listen. One photo was, I’m pretty sure, his sister, who from all accounts he loved quite dearly. La Sfortuna belonged to her. The next photo was after a hunt, with a dead boar and maybe Hubert, the gamekeeper—whom his wife says he’s very close to, plus hunting was like the main thing in his life, the thing he cared about over everything. Then there’s Nico.”
“What about Antoinette? No photos of her or his sons?”
“I wondered about that. But they were still around, he could see them whenever he liked. I don’t know about you but I’m not that interested in keeping photos out of people I can see any old time, even including people who mean a great deal to me.”
“Have you got a picture of Ben anywhere?”
“Stop changing the subject! Look, I have no idea what Nico is doing in a silver frame in the Baron’s salon. But I intend to find out. And I’m hoping you will enlist your super-secret information network to find out what they know as well.”
“This network is a figment of your fantasy, my dear.”
“How do you always know the instant anyone dies in Castillac?”
“If I drink any more coffee I may have a heart attack,” said Lawrence. “But let’s finish up these pastries, shall we? They won’t be any good tomorrow.”
Molly sighed and picked up a mini-éclair with mocha frosting. She was going to have to tell Frances about the photo. But she winced at the explosion she expected as a reaction.
23
Maron was home in bed asleep when he got the call. Someone breaking into the Baskerville’s house, newly renovated, out on route de Canard. He threw on some clothes, jumped on his scooter, and got to the house in a matter of minutes. Shining his flashlight around the yard, he saw no sign of anyone.
“Officer Maron!” a man called out, after opening the door a crack.
Maron trotted up the steps and pushed his way inside. Mr. Henry Baskerville, formerly of London, was standing in the foyer in his pajamas, holding the arm of a teenaged boy twisted behind his back. The boy had an innocent face, young and open—and frightened.
“What’s this about?” said Maron gruffly.
“Found him trying to jimmy open a window. Car was parked around back, guess he figured no one was home. That it, kid?” asked Baskerville, giving the boy’s arm a wrench.
“Ow!” cried the boy.
“All right,” said Maron, “let him go. You’re not going to run off, are you? I didn’t think so. Thinking you’d get into Monsieur Baskerville’s house and see if any valuables were lying about? Shouldn’t you be home in bed on a school night?”
The boy looked down at the floor and did not answer.
“What’s your name?” asked Maron.
“Malcolm.”
“Malcolm what?”
“Barstow.”
“You part of that Barstow family out on route de Fallon? Your father been in jail recently?”
Malcolm nodded.
Maron sighed. “All right, Mr. Baskerville, I’ll take him in. Look around and make sure nothing’s been taken, and give me a call in the morning if so.”
“I appreciate your coming so quickly,” said Baskerville, suddenly feeling embarrassed to be standing there in his pajamas.
Maron gripped Malcolm’s upper arm and walked him outside, regretting that he’d brought the scooter. “You’re going to have to ride behind me,” he said. “No funny business, hear me?”
Malcolm nodded glumly and got on behind Maron but did not deign to put his hands on Maron’s hips, holding on to the edge of the seat instead. Maron sped down route de Canard to the station. It was 3:30 a.m.
Just before stopping, Maron reached around to hold Malcolm’s wrist tightly. Maron was strong and fit, and Malcolm undernourished and young—both of them knew escape was not really an option.
“All right then,” Maron said with a sigh, as once they were inside, Malcolm dropped into a chair. “Why don’t you tell me what you were thinking, breaking into that house? You’re too young for that foolishness, Malcolm.”
“We don’t have enough to eat,” Malcolm said quietly. He flicked his eyes up to Maron to see if he bit.
“Who do you live with?”
“My parents and my little sister. But my father’s been…away…and my mother….”
Maron waited for the kid to finish. Castillac wasn’t tiny, so it was possible he didn’t know if a family was enduring particular hardship, but nevertheless, so far he wasn’t buying Malcolm’s story. “You’re saying you broke into the Baskerville’s because you and your little sister are starving? That’s your story?”
Malcolm could see it wasn’t going well, so he nimbly changed tactics. “That’s all true, sir. But I’ll admit, I’ve gone into some people’s homes just because it gives me a thrill.” He shrugged and smiled, and Maron felt himself almost smile in response.
“Is going to jail worth it for a thrill?”
“Naw, I don’t want to go to jail, you’re right about that, Chief Maron. Maybe we could make a trade? I’ll promise not to break into any more houses if you’ll let me go. And I have something I think you might be interested in, that I’ll give you absolutely free of charge.”
Maron laughed. “What, you’re trying to horse trade?”
“You’ve got a murdered Baro
n on your hands, am I right?”
Maron narrowed his eyes at the boy.
“Well, I happen to have a pretty good idea who plugged him. And not only that, I have evidence. Rock solid evidence you can hold in your hand.”
“Pfft,” said Maron, looking away. “You’re nothing but talk.”
“No sir! Drive me home and I’ll show you exactly what I’m talking about. As long as you let me go,” he added.
“It’s the middle of the night, Malcolm, and I’m not in the mood for a wild goose chase. Why don’t you tell me what it is you think you’ve got that’s so important, and then I’ll decide whether to take you downstairs to a cell or not.”
“It would have more of an impact if you saw it in person. But okay, it was like this. I was…I found myself inside Château Marainte one day, by chance—”
Maron couldn’t help snickering.
“—and I happened to be in the salon where I believe the Baron got shot. If the bloodstain on the rug is any sort of clue. And in that salon, in between the pages of a book, I found a letter…”
“People don’t write letters anymore.”
“Well then what do you think, a ghost wrote this one? An alien? Come on, Officer Maron! I’m telling you I found a letter, written by Esmé Ridding to the Baron. Her handwriting is nothing so great, I’ll tell you that much. Or maybe it’s just that she was so angry when she wrote the letter that it made her hand jump all over the place. Anyway—she goes on and on about how mad she is at him, how betrayed she feels, blah blah blah, and at the end, she promises to kill him. Her actual words were ‘I’m going to shoot your blankety-blank head off!’ She wrote out the curse words but I know cursing in front of an adult is rude so I’m not saying what those words were.” Malcolm looked at Maron, his freckled face the picture of virtue.
“You are some piece of work,” said Maron, shaking his head.
But of course he would not be doing his job if he did not follow up on a potential piece of evidence as explosive as Malcolm claimed, though he decided a night in the rarely-used jail might have an overall positive effect on Malcolm, and that they would fetch the supposed letter once the sun came up.
24
Friday was a more typical late October day, with a light rain off and on and sweater rather than coat weather. Constance sped down rue des Chênes on her bicycle, feeling a little proud that Molly had given her the job of welcoming the first guest at La Baraque in weeks.
“Molls!” she said, her cheeks flushed, when Molly opened the door. “Have you written down all my instructions? I don’t want to mess this up!”
“You won’t, don’t worry,” said Molly, suddenly filled with anxiety at all the things that could go wrong. It was Constance, after all. “There’s really not much to do. It’s a couple coming in from New York. They’re renting a car so they’ll be getting here that way and won’t need picking up at the station or anything. They’ve got directions and probably a GPS in the car. All you have to do is wait for their text that they’re almost here, come over and greet them when they arrive, show them around a little, give them the key, and that’s it.”
“But what if they don’t speak any French?”
“I’m trying to remember…I don’t know if they do or not. Probably best to assume no. But really, Constance, it doesn’t make any difference! Just smile a lot and make sure they see the bottle of wine I put on their dining room table. I left a note explaining that I had to make an urgent trip to Paris and would be back in a few days.”
“Urgent, huh?” Constance looked skeptical.
“Actually, it is urgent. In a way. As you know, Antoinette hired me to find the jewel, and a logical place for me to look is the Baron’s apartment in Paris.”
“You just want to get in there and look for clues to his murder.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Uh, yeah, Molls. But only to anyone who knows you.”
“Well, too bad. I’m going. I haven’t been to Paris in forever so I’ll probably do a little sight-seeing while I’m there. Check out the Louvre and the Luxembourg Gardens.”
“No you won’t.”
“Huh?”
“When you’re sniffing around a case, that’s pretty much all you do. Can’t really picture you strolling through museums soaking up culture when there’s a murderer on the loose.”
“I can do two things at the same time, you know.”
Constance shrugged, grinning, clearly not agreeing. “Do you want me to do any cleaning before the guests come? What are their names, anyway?”
“If you’d look around and spot-clean, that’d be excellent. The place is in pretty good shape but I might have missed something. They’ll be staying in the cottage. Ervin and Sissy Chubb.”
“What?”
“I’ll write it down for you.” Molly tore a sheet off a pad of paper sitting on the kitchen counter and wrote out the guests’ names. “I know you can handle this, Constance. And if there’s any trouble at all, just text me. If you have to tell me a long story call me. I’m expecting to be by myself for the whole trip so there’s no bad time to call.”
“No secret lover waiting for you in a glamorous bar?”
“Hardly.”
It was not until she was enjoying the comfortable seat on the TGV that it occurred to Molly that she might not be the only person thinking that La Sfortuna might be in Marcel’s apartment. But she reassured herself with the fact that she was the only one to whom Antoinette had given a key.
Right?
At long last, after endless procrastination and only about twenty minutes of actual work, the jingle was written. All Frances had to do was sit down at Molly’s piano and play it through a few times to make sure—sometimes the things just sprouted up whole, and didn’t need a lot of tweaking. She very much hoped this was one of those times. Because…Nico.
She slid out of bed, giving a long look to her beloved, fast asleep on his side with his sensuous mouth slightly open, his olive skin still dark even months after summer had ended. “So beautiful,” she murmured to herself, and then quickly put on a pair of emerald green leggings and a tunic that had a large Egyptian eye over her chest. She brushed her hair until it shone, falling stick-straight and black, in bangs and now grown to her shoulders.
Since Chez Papa was only a few blocks away and Nico could get to work on foot, Frances borrowed Nico’s car for the drive to Molly’s. Molly had been acting a little weird lately and Frances wanted to ask her what was going on. Did she miss Ben but not want to talk about it, or was it just that the Fleuray case was taking up all her attention?
As she started the car and turned around, insidious little thoughts about Nico tried to rise up to consciousness, but she swept them away, forcing herself to run through her jingle a few more times, singing out loud.
Frances had always like singing in the car. Of course cars didn’t have the acoustics of showers, but still, something about being alone in a car always made her start belting out songs. She sang along with Aretha Franklin belting out R-E-S-P-E-C-T as she drove out of the village on the way to Molly’s, and that felt so good that she drove right past Molly’s driveway and into the country, going from Aretha to hymns she had learned when her grandmother took her to church, and then snatches of a Rossini aria she halfway knew.
Way way deep down, Frances knew she was singing and driving because there was something going on she did not want to face. She didn’t know exactly what it was, and did not want to know. It was an amorphous fear that she could keep away for an indefinite time, and hopefully, eventually, whatever it was would simply fade away without harm. Her plan for the rest of the day was beginning to solidify: keep singing, keep driving, and at some point stop for some wine and maybe some chocolate. And then repeat.
The TGV got Molly to Paris in only a few hours. She had brought only a light shoulder bag, easy enough to carry, and thought she would walk around the city and then eat a leisurely dinner, in no hurry to get to Marcel’s apartment. If
the emerald was there, it would wait.
Ah, Paris.
Molly had only visited there in warm weather, and she found Paris in October to be even more wonderful—more intimate, without floods of tourists around every corner. More neighborly somehow, which was surprising for one of the major cities of the world. She was proud that she was able to chat with shopkeepers easily now, comfortably and without nervousness, instead of dealing with the constant misunderstandings and confusions that come with having a fragile purchase on another language.
Instead of looking for recommendations on the internet, she felt like choosing a restaurant the old fashioned way, by reading the menu out front and deciding whether she liked the feel of the place. In the 6th arrondissement, she found a small bistro tucked in between two big apartment buildings. It had no name but an elaborate sculpture of a blue pig over the door.
Inside, the restaurant was old-fashioned in the best sort of way. The tablecloths were a dazzling white, and places were set with more flatware than Molly was used to. The place seemed full, but with a wink the aged maitre d’ found a tiny table for Molly next to the kitchen. She didn’t mind. The flow of waiters in and out of the swinging kitchen door gave her something to pay attention to and she did her best to eavesdrop on their gossiping, though she could only catch a few words when the door was open.
But even the hubbub of a Paris restaurant was not enough to keep Molly from thinking about the latest developments in the Baron’s case. She kept going over and over that photograph…surely Nico was merely a friend of the family, not anyone currently significant in the Fleuray’s lives, and the photograph nothing more than an artifact from an earlier time that the Baron hadn’t bothered to remove. It’s not as though a hunting man like Marcel was likely very involved in room decoration, she thought. It’s probably nothing.