“Inspector Lüthi will want to talk to me again.” Marie shivered.
Christine gripped Marie’s hands more tightly. “What could you possibly know that would help? She won’t ask about Father’s notebook. I took care of that. Don’t you understand? If we turn over this notebook, it will be placed into evidence and anyone could see it.”
Marie disentangled her hands and wrapped her arms around herself. “Are you sure that we found”—involuntarily she leaned toward Christine and lowered her voice—“that we found what we did?”
“Yes. I am sure. There hasn’t been an idea like this since people started carrying watches. When I think back to those days … Can you imagine what it meant to carry a timepiece on your person? To regulate your life according to minutes or hours and not rely on the sun or a city tower clock? It changed the world. Hundreds of years later we are still slaves to that mechanism strapped to our wrist. Father’s creation changes this.”
“I don’t know how you can be so sure when what we have is incomplete.”
“I’ve had two days and was up all last night researching the formulas, corroborating. It’s all there. Well, not all there. Not all of the precise calculations. Father had a knowledge of materials engineering and anatomy and physiology that I don’t have, and he took precautions to protect his invention.” Christine sat down opposite Marie. “Think of it like this. You write on one page of a notebook, then the next page is in another notebook. You need both to have the whole thing, but if you skim along with only one, you can see progress. It’s not haphazard ranting. It is the documentation of a complex development.”
“You’ve looked everywhere for the missing parts? For the rest of his work?”
“Yes. Everywhere I could think of.”
“What about in his workshop?”
Christine gave Marie a dark look. “I started there.”
Marie looked shocked. “The police said we couldn’t enter, they left tape on the doors.”
“I crawled in the bathroom window late last night. I know how to get in the cottage windows. It’s not difficult.”
Absently, Marie fiddled with her coffee. “I don’t know if we’re doing the right thing.”
In the next room a radio alarm turned on, blaring the morning news. Christine rose as if to turn it off, then changed her mind. “Do you want Father’s work to be lost? Or worse, to be claimed by someone else? No patents have been filed. There’s nothing to prove it’s ours until we have everything and can go about it carefully.” She knelt so her face was level with Marie’s. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime—no, once-in-a-century chance. This will secure Leo’s future. Don’t you want that? Isn’t that what Father would have wanted?”
“Yesterday Stephan asked me again if I’d found anything. I think he knows something.” Marie closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. “Have you seen Gianfranco recently?”
Christine looked surprised. “In passing at the show. Why? Has he contacted you?”
“Of course not, I only thought that—” Marie brushed her hand across her brow. “It doesn’t matter.”
Christine gripped Marie by the shoulders. “Think about it. If you truly believe that Antoine Mercier’s death is related to my father’s and if someone was willing to kill them for this, then they will stop at nothing. They would come after us next. We can’t tell anyone we have this notebook.”
“I can’t believe he actually created something important.” Marie rubbed her eyes so hard it hurt. “The police have seen everything in the workshop, the papers, all those sheets tacked to the walls. Won’t they know what he was working on?”
“That’s another reason I broke in. I wanted to see what was there. If you know what you’re looking for, then you see how his thought process evolved. Or at least where he started. But they don’t know. His idea is so fantastical that they would never guess, and so the calculations and notes look exactly like what they are: random formulas and problem solving. Like a man dabbling in his love of science and numbers. I think that what is there—particularly on the walls—are the oldest notes. Father was toying with notions. A warm-up, you might call it.”
“Why did someone break in if it’s such a secret?”
“He has to have told someone. Not about the entire idea, but enough to interest them or to ask about a manufacturing process.” Christine stood and placed another pod in the coffee machine.
Marie shook her head at the offer. She wondered if she had gotten an ulcer over the last two days. “Do you think he told Antoine Mercier? He didn’t like the man, I can’t see him as a confidant.”
“I can’t either. He hated Mercier. But Stephan,” Christine hesitated. “He might have talked to him.”
Marie sat silently, toying with her sleeve. “You heard what Stephan said. That Guy had hinted, but that was all.”
“And you believe him? Completely?”
Marie inhaled sharply. “What about Gianfranco?”
“Father disliked Gianfranco. Said he was the face of commercialization.” Christine gave a half smile.
“Your father disliked Gianfranco because he knew he would break your heart. And he was right.”
Christen looked startled. “That’s what you think? That he broke my heart?” She looked away. “Do you know why I left the company?”
“You said that we didn’t have a future.”
“I’d always wanted to go back to our roots. We can’t compete with companies like Omega, so why try? Instead, be different, be like before. Small, with incredible craftsmanship. Just me and Father, a few watches a year. I could have done it. But he couldn’t. He wanted the freedom to think and wander. The company was floundering and I left.”
Marie tried a smile. “You both loved the traditions.”
“But he didn’t.” Christine leaned against the kitchen cabinet. “I think he only said that he did. He loved the idea of the traditions, but that was really pride in a lineage. Deep down he wanted to innovate.”
“We always talked about his inventions.”
“Yes, but even in our wildest bragging we knew that it was incremental innovation, refinements. He meant it when he said big ideas. Father wanted to leave the past behind. He would have, if he’d lived.” Christine fingered her espresso cup. “I think that’s why he only hinted at what he was working on and wouldn’t say any more. He was afraid of what I’d say, that I’d ridicule him for abandoning our long history. He knew that I wanted to manufacture purely mechanical watches. I like the making of it.”
“It makes no sense that he wouldn’t tell you. You weren’t working in a small traditional workshop, you were with a large company.”
“Only because as my father’s daughter I couldn’t apprentice to someone like Dufour. They would have been too suspicious of my motives. I chose the middle ground. Father thought I’d taken a stand. He was afraid to tell me the direction he’d gone.”
“You think he told someone?”
“He couldn’t have manufactured it. We may be an old firm, but we’re small and have never dealt with this kind of technology.” Christine smiled. “Well, I guess no one has. Father would have had questions. He wouldn’t have wanted a repeat of the quartz debacle, when we had the technology in Switzerland but let the moment slip by and other countries made the real money. They got the market share that we should have kept. Father remembers this. Maybe he thought to partner with someone who already had a powerful manufacturing presence and would know how to make this leap?”
“He despised the large companies.”
“Like Omega?” Christine smiled.
Marie shrugged an apology.
“This wasn’t something he could do himself.” Christine tore off a piece of croissant and ate it slowly. “I think he spoke with someone. It depends on who that someone was. I know what’s it like to work for a large company. And we’re part of an even larger one. The notion of crushing the competition exists. Depending on who he talked to, once they knew, anything is possible.”
; “But murder? Who would kill for an idea?”
Christine laughed. “That’s all anyone does kill for. Wars are about ideas. Plenty of killing there. This is no different than fighting over physical territory. This is intellectual territory. The winner gets the spoils of war. The money. Let’s say whoever he told simply wanted it for themselves, or maybe they had a deal and changed their minds. Or maybe Father held out or maybe they are greedy. Who knows? What I do know is that my father was on the brink of unimaginable success and he died. And around that same time someone broke into his workshop. We have his notebook as proof of his ideas.”
“Not telling us, that would be like Guy. He liked to waltz in on a bed of glory.” Marie smiled weakly.
“He would have been so proud.”
The women sat silently for a moment.
“He didn’t need to die.” Marie heard herself. “The inspector would help us, you know. You were the one who contacted her in the first place. We could trust her.”
“It’s not about trusting Inspector Lüthi. It’s about everyone else. Give me more time. Once we tell the police, there will be talk. Think about La Chaux-de-Fonds. Everyone knows everyone else, and there are relatives in the police and in the watchmaking companies. All it would take is someone processing the paperwork or having a coffee with a friend and the secret leaks. If someone stole the other part of Father’s work, we don’t want them to know we don’t have a complete copy. Trust me, now that Mercier is dead, they will be paying attention. Listening and watching. If they think they can claim the work for themselves, they will. Right now, they’ll assume we have everything and could prove that they are the thieves.”
“I just don’t know.” Marie thought about Guy and his failures and how impossible this all sounded.
“Three more hours. Let me finish looking.”
“Life changing,” said Marie weakly.
“Revolutionary,” Christine reminded her.
Thirty-seven
Complaining to complain was what Agnes thought upon waking. It was what Petit had said about her boys at lunch the day before. It was what all young people did.
She’d planned a stop on the way to Baselworld, knowing Bardy had the investigation into Mercier’s death well in hand and didn’t need her there. She arrived at the Institute after breakfast and went straight to see Koulsy in the infirmary. He looked alert, and his injured ankle was less swollen, which Agnes suspected Madame Butty hesitated to admit since she was enjoying having a patient under her care.
“I let him have a visitor this morning,” the nurse said. “I thought Tommy deserved to see his friend, and I was right. He’s still shaky, poor boy. Seeing his friend get hurt was hard on him. They are more sensitive than they let on at that age. Maybe I should have kept him here yesterday.”
Reassured about Koulsy’s recovery, Agnes walked to the chalet. Absently, she reached into her handbag and fingered the junk she’d collected the day before. Why was fishing line tied to a pen?
Across the lawn, Tommy Scaglia emerged from a classroom building and walked around it to the other side. She had woken in the night, thinking about him, and his fright after the flower box fell. Now she was standing exactly where he had been when the rush of wood and earth descended from the sky. She looked around. There was an anomalous column. Maybe at some point the balcony had started to sag and the owner had added the support? It was carved with the same elements found elsewhere on the building: birds, circles, and darts. A few hooks and nails were in it, mostly worn down and no longer used. Ignored, but there.
Agnes stepped back and looked high overhead to the empty spot left by the flower box. It was directly above her. From her handbag, she retrieved the fishing line and pen. She tossed it gently, thinking, feeling the slight weight. It fell.
Suddenly she knew. Complaining to complain. And boys never picked up trash voluntarily. She headed across the lawn.
Tommy wasn’t behind the classroom building, but the tabby was slinking across the lawn in the direction of the farmhouse. She followed and slipped though the hedge. No one was in sight, which meant only one thing. She pulled the padlock key from her handbag. Standing in front of the shed she stopped to listen. An indistinct voice was audible through the thick door. She slid the key into the lock and turned it, silently thanking Hamel for keeping everything in such good working order. The padlock opened noiselessly. She slipped it off, then grasped the iron strap and, in one heave, opened the door.
Tommy gasped and leaped to his feet. She blocked the door in case he tried to run. His shoulders slumped. They were dusted with dirt where he’d crawled through the chicken door. He looked down as if considering a dive back through the small opening and Agnes imagined she could hear his heart race.
“Tommy, what made you do it?” she asked without preamble.
“Do what?”
“This.” She motioned toward the back wall and stump. “The notes, the arrow, the flower box. Everything.”
“I didn’t.” His voice was firm, but his hands shook. “I only came here because I wanted to see where all that blood was. I’d heard everyone talking about it and wanted to see it for myself.…” His voice trailed off.
“Who has been talking? Your classmates don’t know any details.”
“Somebody found out, I don’t know who. It’s no use asking me, I don’t remember. Just talk at lunch or dinner or something that I overheard.”
Agnes dropped the padlock into her handbag. “Did you hear this from the Fontenays? You hide behind the curtain on the window seat in their office, don’t you?”
He clenched his fists and at first she thought he was angry, then she realized he was afraid. “That’s how you know things, isn’t it? How you are able to warn the other students?”
She walked inside, no longer blocking the door; entering his space, but letting him know he could run out if he wanted. Light flooded the center of the room, and Tommy stepped deeper into the shadows. The cat walked through the small opening and made a circuit of the room. Disdainful of the smells.
“If they send me home, I’ll tell my dad the other stuff. What Monsieur Fontenay does when he’s not in class. I’ll tell Dad how much Madame Fontenay hates being here. How she hates us all.”
“Is that what you want, Tommy? To go home? Couldn’t you talk to your parents and tell them you’re not happy here?”
He hunched over as if he’d been hit.
“You’re a long way from California. It’s understandable.”
“You can’t expel me. I know too much.”
“What did you say the day we met? That you thought there were scary things happening and your father would take you home? I think that you really meant that you wanted your father to take you home. Is that why you started the notes targeting Koulsy? So that your parents would think the Institute was unsafe and remove you?”
“I would never do anything to hurt Koulsy.”
“I don’t think you intended to hurt him.” She took a few steps closer. “You picked Koulsy because he’s not afraid, right? He only started to care when Monsieur Chavanon died and he wondered if someone else might get hurt. You wouldn’t have done those things to scare someone.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“I know Monsieur Chavanon’s death wasn’t your fault. But the rest was.”
He was breathing rapidly, nearly hyperventilating. She moved toward him slowly. He didn’t react when she placed her hands gently on his shoulders. His breathing slowed. She waited.
“How’d you know?” he finally asked.
“Are you on the archery team?”
He shrugged. “No.”
“The hole made by the arrow was all wrong. It looked like someone had thrust it in by hand. The hole should have angled sharply. The arrow would have hit on an upward trajectory if shot from near the building or a downward trajectory if shot from farther away and striking on descent. You thrust it straight in.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out the length of fishing line
and the pen. “Yesterday evening you came outside to look for this. Monsieur Fontenay thought it was trash you had picked up.”
He reached for the bundle, then stopped himself and slipped his hand back in his pocket.
“You loosened the screws on the flower-box bracket, then looped this around it or around the bracket, and dropped the line off the balcony. You knew the box was heavy enough to not fall unless pushed or pulled. You tied the line to the pen for weight before you dropped it over the edge, then you attached it to one of the hooks on the column. The line is nearly invisible and the column is a natural place to wait. You made sure you were there when Koulsy walked back from his swim trial, and you took a few steps forward to greet him and pulled the line with you. The box dislodged and fell.”
“It nearly hit me, why would I do that?”
“The plan didn’t work exactly as expected, did it? You miscalculated. The box hit the lower balcony and twisted. You had to save Koulsy by pushing him aside.” She looked around the shed. “This is the only part that I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t mean for anyone to come in here.…” His voice trailed off, the energy gone from his face. “They’ll send me home, won’t they?”
She studied him carefully. He wasn’t hopeful, he was concerned. Complaining to complain. All kids did it, only Tommy Scaglia had created something to complain about.
“What made you orchestrate the mess in here? It was a chicken, right?”
“I saw it in a movie. There was a mob boss and he—”
Agnes held up a hand to stop him. “Maybe you should try your hand at writing movies.” She led him outside into the sunlight. “Your parents will have to be told.”
“Brenda’s not my mom. She’s my stepmom.”
“Your father then.” Agnes remembered Helene Fontenay’s remarks about the unwanted children. Perhaps Tommy had been sent far away to school, out of the way of his stepmother. Or perhaps that was simply in his imagination. Certainly Leo Chavanon wasn’t sent to the Institute as punishment. He was a cherished child and loved it here.
A Well-Timed Murder Page 25