by Nell Goddin
Molly grinned. “You do have good information,” she said. “Very impressive. Well, I’m all ears if you have any other ideas besides Pierre. You know I have the highest respect for your opinion.” Molly had guessed the first time she met Madame Tessier that she was susceptible to flattery, and she was not wrong.
“I wonder if perhaps you are jumping to that conclusion simply because there are so many bad husbands in the world,” Madame Tessier said. “My Albert, he is nothing at all like that. Gentle as a lamb, and very loving too,” she said, with a waggle of her neatly-plucked eyebrows.
Molly laughed. “You are lucky. Well, I’ve no doubt that Maron and the new gendarme, Monsour I believe he’s called, are taking statements and interviewing witnesses, and maybe that will sort out the possibilities further. I hear Pierre’s alibi is a little shaky.”
“Ben tells you everything? Yes, of course I know Pierre hired him,” she said, throwing her head back and cackling. “Molly! I know everything that goes on in this village!”
“So then tell me—who killed Iris?”
Madame Tessier looked irritated. “I’m not going to say. It’s early yet. I’ll say this, however: if it turns out to have been Pierre, I will be very surprised indeed.”
Molly thanked her for the chat and said goodbye, turning left on rue des Anges in search of the Séverin’s house.
And just then the skies opened, all at once, and Molly turned around and ran for the shelter of Pâtisserie Bujold. Well, there are worse places to wait out a rainstorm, she thought, already anticipating sipping a hot espresso and lingering over the display case, trying to decide what to have with it.
Maybe Edmond will tell me who gave him the information on Séverin, she thought. And maybe…maybe in this case, it would turn out that who told him will be more important that what he was told.
25
On Monday morning Ben and Molly headed over to the school, wanting to confront the principal directly about his affair with Iris and see what he had to say for himself. “That’s Séverin’s car, right?” asked Molly, pointing at a blue Citroën in the school parking area.
“I think so.” Ben swerved over and peered inside. “Untidy,” he said.
“I want to come look but I don’t want him to see us. He lives in the village, right? Why would he drive, in weather this nice?”
Dufort shrugged. “Ask him.”
They passed the school office window and could see Caroline and Séverin inside at their desks. Dufort had a momentary pang of wishing he were still chief gendarme, in possession of the deference and authority that came with the position.
“Excuse me,” he said to them, knocking on the opened door to the office. “I’m sorry to interrupt. Do you have a moment to talk to us?”
“I’m afraid there is a deadline looming just ahead, and Monsieur Séverin is in danger of missing it. Perhaps another time—”
“Oh, Caroline, I’m sure we’ll make it, not to worry. Come on in, Madame Sutton, Ben. Have a seat! We hardly have anything to do during vacation, as you might imagine. Really we just twiddle our thumbs until the children come back and this place comes alive again,” he said, gesturing to the playground. “All right then, what’s on your minds?” He leaned back comfortably in his chair and put his hands behind his head.
“As you know, we’re investigating Iris Gault’s death. And there are some discrepancies we’d like to clear up, just a few little things to help us get a clearer picture of what happened,” said Ben.
“I’m going to step out for a moment, Monsieur Séverin,” said Caroline. “We’ve run out of—”
“Mademoiselle Dubois,” interrupted Dufort, “I would ask that you stay. I am no longer an officer, as you know, so I cannot force you. But I ask for that small favor, on Iris’s behalf.”
Caroline sank slowly back to her seat.
Everyone waited for Dufort to continue, but he felt a little off balance in his new capacity as a private investigator. He recognized that his role was different but he hadn’t quite found his voice and wasn’t sure how to proceed.
Molly blurted out, “Well, you’ll understand that if we’re trying to figure out who killed Iris, we need to know what was going on with her before she died. How she spent her time, the state of her marriage, that sort of thing.” She paused, glanced at Dufort, and jumped the rest of the way. “We’re asking you to confirm that you were in a romantic relationship with Iris, Monsieur Séverin.”
Séverin sighed. “With Iris? Who in the world told you that?”
“You know how it is in the village,” said Dufort. “People keep an eye out. They talk.”
A silence, while Molly and Ben waited to see if either of them would be forthcoming. They were not.
“And…there’s the matter of this poem,” said Molly, holding the slip of paper out so they could see what it was.
Caroline let out a strangled sob and then she was up out of her chair, pacing in front of the window. Ben and Molly watched her, their eyes wide.
“Where did you get that?” she said, with an angry glance at Séverin. “Is there no privacy anymore? People are allowed to just take whatever they want and pass it around? There are no rules?”
Séverin bowed his head and then looked at Caroline tenderly.
“It’s my poem,” said Caroline. “I wrote it, though I never intended for Iris—or anyone—to read it. Obviously it’s…it’s very private.” There were tears glittering in the corners of her eyes but she was defiant. “But listen. I’m not ashamed to say…if you’ve read it, you already know—I loved her. Along with half the village. Yes, I loved Iris Gault with all my heart. Which as far as I know is no one else’s business and certainly no crime.”
Ben and Molly were stunned.
“You wrote it?” Molly finally said, wonderingly.
“You were friends with Iris?” Dufort asked gently.
“Yes, we were friends, of course we were friends. She worked here in the cantine, as you very well know. I saw her every single school day for three years. I ate lunch with her, took breaks with her, had coffee every afternoon with her. She was beautiful, that was the most obvious thing about her, no one could miss that. But she was far more than just beautiful. She was interested in so many things. So warm. Complicated. She was….” Caroline put her face in her hands.
“But you were the one sleeping with her,” said Molly to Séverin with her Yankee directness.
He shook his head, then raised his palms and shrugged. “I sent her some flowers, that’s all,” he admitted. “She was crazy for flowers.”
“But more than that—you were in a romantic and sexual relationship with her, isn’t that right?” Molly followed up, feeling a bit like a reporter for a tabloid.
“Please,” said Séverin, glancing at his distraught assistant. “Haven’t we had enough for one morning? Iris was my friend. My good friend. And Caroline and I are both mourning her very deeply.”
Dufort ran his tongue over his teeth, considering. “Molly, any more questions right now?”
Molly shook her head.
“If you have nothing more for me, I’d like to go to the bathroom, if I may,” said Caroline.
“Go ahead,” said Dufort. He noticed that her face was splotchy and her eyes puffy, and wondered if she had been crying before he and Molly arrived.
Molly and Ben thanked Séverin and made their way outside. They held hands, gripping tightly to communicate silently to each other their surprise at what they had heard. When they had gotten three long blocks away, Molly burst out, “Wow! Caroline wrote that poem? And you know, I felt so dumb once she said it. It had to have been written by a woman. It’s perfectly obvious once that possibility is an option. I just assumed…and assuming is the very thing I keep telling myself to stop doing.
“Things are looking a little better for your guy,” added Molly. “Even if Tristan and Iris were just friends, which I’m not necessarily convinced was the case—how about Caroline? Some very powerful emotions
there. I don’t like to admit it, but the suspect field has gotten a little more crowded.”
Ben slipped his arm around and pulled her in for a kiss, right there on the street in the middle of the day.
26
He didn’t want to do it. Maron stood in his office at the station, staring at his phone as though he expected it would suddenly begin talking, and tell him what he should do next.
Pull yourself together, man.
He tapped Dufort’s number.
“Bonjour, Ben,” he said, managing to sound confident. “I’m wondering if you have some time this morning for a quick consultation. It’s the Gault case. Thought we were right on top of it—just about to make an arrest. But it turns out our prime suspect has an alibi, a tight one.”
Ben had anticipated that Maron would call eventually, if the case didn’t resolve quickly. The man had little patience, and Ben was not fooled by his swaggering tone—he knew perfectly well that being acting chief had thrown Maron for a major loop, and he had not regained his footing even months later.
“I’d be happy to talk things over. Shall I come right now?”
Molly had started the walk home alone, mulling over the interview with Caroline and Tristan. With some regret, she believed Caroline had written the poem, even though she hadn’t seen it coming. But still, something didn’t sit right about the whole thing. Had Nugent been wrong about Iris and Tristan? And if so, where had he gotten his bad information?
And what about Pierre? Did he realize the village gossip lines were humming with talk about his wife and the school principal, even if it wasn’t true?
Molly wound her way through an alley. Idly she picked up a stick and tapped it on things as she walked along. Bang on a garbage can. Whap on a picket fence. Thump on the side of a garage.
The village was preternaturally quiet, as though gathering itself up in silence for some kind of explosion, or earthquake. She heard no conversation, no movement, not so much as a dog scratching.
Then footsteps, someone running behind her.
“Tristan?” she said, seeing him hurry towards her.
“Madame Sutton!” he said. He stopped when he reached her, panting lightly. “I may call you Molly?”
She nodded, curious.
“Well, I…I’m glad I caught up with you. I’m…would you mind if I walked a little way with you? I have some things to add to what we were talking about before.”
“Of course.”
“It’s, well…” Tristan laughed nervously. “It’s embarrassing, is what it is. I felt—well, a wide assortment of things, actually, but mainly I did not want to hurt Caroline anymore than she already has been, if you understand.”
Molly stopped. “Yes?”
“Unrequited love can be so terribly painful, you know. I’ve been there—I suspect we all have.”
Molly nodded, curious.
“So—I apologize for not being forthcoming, it was like something grabbed me by the throat and would not allow me to speak.”
Molly waited. The only sound was a cicada buzzing in a nearby tree.
“The truth is…I was seeing Iris. Romantically, I mean. It’s…well, let me tell you how it was. Iris and I spent so much time together over the years. Lunch every school day, consulting on the management of the cantine… naturally, a bond develops, you understand. My own marriage, well, I try to do right by my wife, I honestly do, but…oh, I can’t excuse what I’ve done. I make no excuses. It was just that one day, suddenly—do you know the term coup de foudre, Molly? Literally, in English it is ‘thunderbolt’. A term for what you call ‘love at first sight’. It was not like that for Iris and me— what we had developed slowly, over years—but it was a lightning bolt all the same. Out of nowhere it seemed. Impossible to resist.”
Molly smiled ruefully, remembering a coup de foudre of her own many years ago. “And you’re saying you kept back this information out of concern for Caroline?”
“Partly. In the moment I wanted to spare her that extra bit of pain. But if I am completely honest, I was surprised by the question and just blurted out ‘no’ without thinking. Used to hiding it, you see, out of respect for our spouses. But I have no wish to do anything that might get in the way of your investigation, so after a moment’s reflection, I chased you down in this alleyway to set the record straight.” He smiled and shrugged. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you for your honesty. I assume I can pass this on to Ben?”
“Of course! You know we have a different attitude toward affairs here in France. It’s not necessarily—not always—a thing to get in a moral outrage over, the way I believe it is in the States. Am I correct about that?”
“Depends.”
“No doubt. Well, I don’t claim to be…I just…Molly, she was so very beautiful, inside and out. I am just grateful to have had that time with her. I’m not sure I’ll ever get over her loss.”
They exchanged a few sentences about grief and then about the weather, and Tristan retraced his steps back to the school as Molly turned onto rue des Chênes. She stopped to text Ben to tell him of Séverin’s confession, and then headed for home.
I knew it. Since when has Lawrence’s information ever been wrong?
Ben didn’t think Maron would allow Molly to sit in on the meeting—it was humiliating enough to have to ask Ben for help, much less a civilian. He wasted no time getting to the station, where he found Maron alone. Skipping any preliminaries, Maron got straight to it. “Let me lay it out for you,” said Maron, half-sitting on Monsour’s desk. “The husband, Pierre—he’s the obvious suspect, right? He found the body. His alibi does cover much of the time frame Nagrand gives us, but this is not a time-consuming murder, all he needs is a few seconds to shove her downstairs. An alibi is no good at all as long as there’s a big enough sliver of time when the crime could have been committed.”
Dufort nodded patiently.
“Sorry for thinking out loud, I know none of what I’m saying is news to you,” said Maron. “I assume Pierre’s told you about the insurance money? It’s not an insubstantial sum, Dufort. We’ve been unable to find anyone who will tell us anything about the state of their marital relationship, but the money is incriminating. Easily a good enough motive for Pierre to have killed her.”
“So it’s Pierre you were about to charge?”
“No, no. My reasoning is that if you were going to murder your wife for an insurance payout, that’s a premeditated sort of crime, right? Not a situation where the perpetrator gets carried away in the heat of the moment, a murder of passion. And so if you’ve got time to think about it, wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to take steps to hide your guilt? For one thing, a push down the stairs could very well not be fatal. With better luck, she might have jumped up with nothing more than a bruise or two—and called us and had him taken in for battery.
“In addition, Pierre is alone in the house with the corpse when Monsour shows up. There’s no evidence that anyone else had been there. He said he called the ambulance but the phone records don’t back him up. All the circumstances point to Pierre being the one with motive, means, and opportunity. If you’re devising a way to get an insurance payout, that would be the most ill-conceived plan ever devised.” Maron narrowed his eyes at Dufort while waiting for his reaction, hoping very much that he would nod and agree.
“All right, said Dufort slowly. “Let me see if I understand you. In effect, you’re saying that you don’t think it was Pierre, because Pierre looks so guilty?”
To his horror Maron felt a blush creeping up his neck. “Not precisely, sir. Let me continue. Without ruling out Pierre for all the reasons stated, we’ve been looking at someone else, someone who might very well have had a more, shall we say, ardent relationship with the deceased, and for whom a momentary loss of control would be more understandable, psychologically speaking.”
Dufort felt like rolling his eyes even though what Maron said had at least a whisper of merit. He was happy to hear any line of thought that
helped to keep Pierre on the sidelines of the investigation.
Just then, his phone vibrated and he drew it out and glanced at the screen.
tristan ran after me. changed story. yes to affair after all
Dufort was surprised, but more by Tristan’s admission than the fact of the affair.
Maron continued, “We believe that Iris Gault was having an affair with Tristan Séverin. You know him, of course?”
Dufort nodded, saying nothing about the text. “Not well. But yes, we’re acquaintances.”
“We were postulating that Iris had broken it off with him, and in reaction, he got violent. You have something going on with the most desirable woman in the village, you’re not going to want to let go, right? I know, I know—he works with children, for God’s sake. But since when does having a respectable, peaceful sort of job mean that a man can’t have passions, even passions that turn homicidal?”
“His assistant says there was no affair,” said Dufort, toying with him a little.
“What? I don’t see how that’s proof of anything.”
“Assistants always know that sort of thing. People, generally, are bad at keeping secrets. I would guess Séverin especially, given how much he likes to talk. He’s just a centimeter short of being a windbag, is my experience with him. Amiable, I grant you. But a talker.”
Maron looked down at the floor, pressing his lips together.
“And like you say—if he was sleeping with the famous Iris Gault, the woman every man wanted—don’t you think he’d wish everyone knew about it? Such a badge of macho honor.”
Maron stood up and flexed his shoulders. Dufort could see he had been working out, including lifting weights; Maron’s uniform was straining across his biceps and he looked very lean and strong.
“How did you hear about the affair?” asked Dufort, feeling a bit remorseful for torturing poor Maron.
“Tessier.”
“Ah. Well, I’ve never known her to steer me wrong. So it’s Séverin in your crosshairs now?”