The Luckiest Woman Ever: Molly Sutton Mystery 2

by Nell Goddin

  Michel noticed that they had turned down rue Simenon, going away from the station, but he didn’t want to ask why. He could see his aunt’s mansion looming up farther down the street, and felt a strong desire not to have to go inside, especially not with Dufort watching him like a hawk. Maybe a dull-witted hawk, Michel wasn’t sure about that, but in any case, he fervently wished he were in a bar somewhere with Adèle, having a drink and a laugh…or anywhere, really, anywhere but there.

  They stopped in front of the mansion. The violet-blue shutters were closed as they had been for years.

  “I do not want to go in,” said Michel, the words coming out before he could stop them.

  “Any particular reason?”

  “No. Well, yes.” Michel looked up at the house, his eyes moving over it. The slate roof was whitened with frost and he thought the mansion exuded a kind of chill that was way worse than the weather. “Don’t you feel it? Can’t you tell just standing out here that the place has some bad juju?” He ran his hand through his hair.

  “It’s a house,” said Dufort, shrugging. “Quite a nice house, perhaps the nicest in the village. Early nineteenth century, isn’t it? Can you describe the inside for me?”

  Michel rubbed his arms in a futile attempt to warm them. He desperately wanted to go someplace heated but was trying his best to seem amenable to whatever plan Dufort had. “Um, all right, I can do that, I suppose. It’s rather grand inside, with two salons facing the street and a wide foyer between them. Wide staircase with a wrought-iron baluster comes down to the foyer. The kitchen is quite large with an old wood-fired stove as well as a gas stove. I don’t think I was ever served a meal from that kitchen after my uncle died, back when Adèle and I were kids. There are several other rooms downstairs—a laundry, a pantry, and maybe more. I don’t really remember. I can’t tell you about upstairs because I never saw it.

  “My aunt was a bit reclusive. As far as I know, over the last five years or so, she never went out unless I took her. The housekeeper, Sabrina—she came every day, cleaned and cooked for her, although I don’t think my aunt ate very much. Anyway, I came to visit her because she didn’t have friends and the rest of the family avoided her as much as possible, and I felt sorry for her.”

  Dufort raised his eyebrows as if to say, “Do you really think me that gullible?”

  “Did she give you money?” Dufort asked, his tone friendly and conversational.

  Michel just smiled. “Oh, not usually. A five euro note if I was lucky. She did pay for dinner if we went out, but it’s not like we were dining at La Métairie all the time—just the once, actually. Usually she wanted me to get her a bowl of paella from the guy who sets up in the Place on Tuesday nights. Or she’d ask me to run over to the boulangerie and get her a fresh baguette, and some cheese from the épicerie. She wouldn’t eat it in front of me. I got the idea she would hide that food in her room and then refuse to eat what Sabrina was making for her. Aunt Josephine was like that: she spent all her time cooking up ways to make other people unhappy, from what I could see. ‘Drama queen’ was a term invented for her, but with a mean sort of twist, if you see what I mean?”

  “She doesn’t sound like a very pleasant person,” said Dufort, thinking that was the understatement of the week. “And did you have any sense that she was unhappy? That perhaps these acts of hers were an indication that she was tired of life, tired of…of whatever her existence had turned out to be? I don’t mean to suggest suicide, I am only wondering if it is possible that the person who killed her might have believed he was doing her a favor in a way.”

  “Doing the rest of the world a favor, I should say,” said Michel, laughing.

  Dufort ended the informal interview soon after, making an excuse that he had someone to see. He hurried off down the street and circled back to observe Michel surreptitiously. What Michel did was stand outside the mansion looking from shutter to shutter, stamping his feet from time to time, and then he turned away and did not look back, pulling out his phone and disappearing into the café across the street.

  Maybe yes, maybe no, thought Dufort. Now I want to find his sister, and see what she has to say for herself, and for her brother.

  24

  On rue Simenon, about two blocks from the Desrosiers mansion, Lucas Arbogast was getting ready to serve dinner to his elderly mother. She was seated at the table, freshly bathed and dressed, and on her plate he put four slices of duck breast, cut thin the way she liked it, and carried the plate to the table along with a basket of bread. Then he stopped. The bread basket dropped to the floor in his rush to put down the plate and see to his mother, who was suddenly gasping for breath and very agitated.

  “Maman!” shouted Lucas—who, luckily for Madame Arbogast, was a nurse at the local hospital. The old woman anxiously got up from the table, still gasping, moving with purpose as though she had somewhere to go that second. Then for a moment she stood up straight, her eyes blinking and unfocused.

  “Maman! What is the matter? Sit down and let me check your vitals,” said Lucas, trying to ease her back into her chair. He leaned down, for he was considerably taller, put an arm around her, and she collapsed, sinking into the chair like a rag-doll.

  Lucas was stunned, since he had just talked to his mother an hour before and she had been the picture of health. But his training helped him put his shock to one side as he pulled the chair away from the table and worked his arms under her, picking her up and settling her on the sofa. Her head rolled back; she was unconscious.

  Lucas bent his head down close to her face, and it was then that he got a whiff of the characteristic smell of bitter almonds, which he had smelled only once before, in the unit on poisons (which he had found to be one of the most interesting in all of nursing school).

  Immediately he pulled out his mobile and called the hospital. He made sure his mother was breathing and adjusted her legs to make her more comfortable. Then he ran upstairs to her room, looking for anything that could tell him whether he was correct about an exposure to cyanide.

  It couldn’t be gas, he reasoned, because she wouldn’t have made it downstairs. Cyanide gas kills quickly, he remembered that quite clearly. It couldn’t have been in food or drink, because his mother never, ever ate or drank anything outside of mealtimes, and besides, he himself was preparing the meals. In any case, she had not taken a single bite since lunch.

  Lucas found nothing out of order in her room. He checked under the bed, opened the drawers to her dressing table—everything looked the same as usual as far as he could tell. It felt important to know where the cyanide was coming from, but he didn’t have time for a proper search, not when his dear Maman was slipping into a coma.

  As he ran back downstairs to check on her, he thought, wait a minute. Hold on. How in the world is Maman getting cyanide poisoning when she has barely left the house all day, if at all? Is this even an accident?

  Lucas shook his head, unable to believe anyone in Castillac could possibly do such a thing, or have any reason for it either.

  Maman was still unconscious. Her gasping was very hard to witness. Her skin was turning a bright cherry-red, which for an instant he thought meant she was doing better before he remembered it was a symptom of cyanide poisoning. He bent his head to her again, and sniffed noisily. Yes—he flared his nostrils and breathed in again, catching the scent.

  His mother had a mild obsession with rejuvenating creams and lotions, demulcents and unguents of all types—perhaps the poison was on her skin, from a contaminated batch? If it was in a cream, then he could do something for her before the ambulance got there. And if it wasn’t, washing her face wasn’t going to cause any harm. He darted into the kitchen and got a bowl of water, a bar of soap, and a couple of rags, and then he kneeled beside her, dipping the rag in the soapy water and wiping her old, wrinkled, beloved face.

  “Maman,” he whispered hoarsely, “you’re going to be all right. I just need to get this stuff off your skin. I think it’s the cream, Maman, you kn
ow I’ve told you before, you don’t know what they put in that stuff—”

  Lucas was thorough. He wiped her down completely, then got a bowl of fresh water and new rags, and wiped her off again, going down to her collarbones. He repeated the process a third time. The gasping became less frequent. Her skin was reddened where he had been rubbing, but otherwise her color appeared to be returning to normal.

  Lucas was thirty eight years old and had never lived anywhere but home except for the three years when he had to go to a larger town to study nursing. He and his mother were very close. They liked the same sorts of television programs, the same food, the same books. Even though his mother was old, he had never really contemplated the fact that he was likely to lose her at some point in the future—obviously he was aware it would happen, but that reality had never penetrated his consciousness but rather skated along the surface, with no attention paid to it. This close call—impossible to ignore—rattled him so much he could barely speak.

  He stayed kneeling beside her, holding her hand and murmuring to her, and getting up to change the water in the bowl and get yet more clean rags to wipe her down, until at long last—where was that ambulance?—Madame Arbogast whispered to her son to cut it out before he wiped her face right off.

  The bell rang, and laughing and tremendously relieved, Lucas went to answer the door. He knew the driver and the medic, and quickly told them what had happened. Madame Arbogast was sitting up on the sofa now, asking for a glass of brandy, and was going to be fine.

  “I went ahead and called the police on the way over, Lucas. With a suspicious poisoning, that’s the protocol, as you know.”

  Lucas nodded. “I took a quick look around, trying to figure out where the stuff came from, but I had to stay with Maman so I didn’t take the time for a real search. I knew she hadn’t eaten anything I hadn’t prepared for her, so I was thinking it must be some kind of face cream or something. Sure enough, cleaning her up brought her around quickly.”

  “You did good,” said the medic, gesturing to Madame Arbogast who was feeling well enough to be flirting with the ambulance driver. “How’d you know it was cyanide?”

  “Smelled it,” said Lucas, laughing again and feeling a little giddy.

  “You’re lucky then. Not everybody can smell that smell—not even fifty per cent, if I remember right.”

  Lucas shook his head slowly and let out a long breath. “What a close one. She goes a little crazy with the face cream.” He paused. “But why in the world would her face cream have cyanide in it?”

  “Yeah, that’s the question right there,” said the ambulance driver, who usually wasn’t very interested in the patients he drove to see, but poison? Now that makes a good story for the folks at the bar after work.

  A firm rapping on the door, and Lucas let in Thérèse Perrault, who was the officer in charge that Saturday evening. “Hello, Lucas, Madame Arbogast,” said Thérèse, who knew them. “Suspected poisoning, that’s the word I got?”

  “Yes. She’s all right now, thank God. But it was a close thing. I was lucky and smelled that bitter almond scent when I got close to her face, so then I cleaned her up and she rallied. But wow, for a little while there, I thought I was gonna lose her.” He reached down and gave his Maman a pat on the shoulder. She poured herself another finger of brandy.

  “What do you mean, ‘cleaned her up’?”

  “When the poisoning exposure is to the skin, as this was, the best antidote is just to get it off,” said Lucas. “So I washed her face with soap and water a bunch of times, and she perked right up. She was unconscious for about ten minutes, I’d say. Had the cherry-red skin that’s symptomatic of cyanide exposure as well.”

  “Well, lucky for her you know your stuff,” said Perrault. “May I go upstairs and have a look in her bedroom?”

  “Of course,” said Lucas, making no move to leave his mother.

  The ambulance driver would have liked to go search for poison too, but knew he had no believable reason to join Perrault.

  It didn’t take her long to find something suspicious. She put on her gloves and picked up a jar of face cream, unmarked, no label at all. She called downstairs to ask for a cardboard box, and just to be thorough, put all of the lotions and creams from Madame Arbogast's dressing table in it, to take to the lab. A second old lady assailed by cyanide-laced face cream.

  Did Castillac have a serial killer on its hands?

  Thérèse felt a thrill run through her body, and chastised herself for feeling so happy when people were suffering and dying.

  25

  “I don’t care how cold it is,” said Frances. “I’ve been cooped up all day, I think I just wrote a jingle that every person in the United States is going to be cursing me for—massive earworm, haha—and so anyway, I’d like to look at something besides your sweet face.”

  “Nico or Pascal, I’m guessing you have in mind?” said Molly, putting away the last dishes from the dishwasher.

  “They are easy on the eyes,” said Frances, grinning. She was standing in front of the mirror in the foyer, trying to tie her scarf in that chic way Frenchwomen seemed to manage so effortlessly. “Holy smokes, Molls, how do they do it?” she said, frustrated, whipping the end over, under and around, and looking half-strangled.

  “I think it’s genetic,” said Molly. She stood next to her friend and swooped hers around her neck, up and through, and came out looking better, if a little cockeyed.

  “Sometimes when I look at you, I want to push Donnie out a window,” said Frances, looking sideways at Molly’s chest.

  “When you look at me?””

  “Those fake boobs he talked you into. And it’s not just Donnie I’m mad at. Also you, for agreeing to that nonsense.”

  Molly thought about what Frances said. “I guess I used to be mad at myself too. I know it was a really bad decision to have surgery just to make someone else happy. So dumb. Someday when I have some extra money, I’ll get rid of them. But you know, Frances? The whole thing was years ago now. I’ve let it go. So maybe you can let it go, too.”

  “Okay, but I’m still gonna push him out of a window if I ever get the chance.”

  “Understood,” said Molly cheerfully. “So, is Chez Papa okay with you? I’m sorry Lawrence has been out of town during your whole visit. He definitely brightens things up when he’s around.”

  “Yep, sure, anyplace is all right with me. Let me just…” she rummaged in a makeup bag and brought out a stubby pencil and made a smoky, smudgy line around her dark brown eyes. They looked enormous and faintly forbidding. Then she fished out a tiny bottle of perfume and spritzed into the air in front of her, and walked into the mist.

  “You’re irresistible,” Molly said drily.

  Putting on their heaviest coats and hats, the friends walked quickly into the village in search of company and kirs.

  “The Pales!” said Nico as they came inside with a whoosh of cold air.

  “Wha—?” said Frances, looking at Molly.

  Molly shrugged. “I was in here the other day while you were working. Nico was asking how we met and all that, and I may have told a few stories about our early years.”

  “And you went to the same college, too? I went to a university in America for two years,” said Nico. “I know all about the crazy stuff you college students do.” He winked at Frances, and she hopped on a barstool and smiled at him flirtatiously.

  “Gracious goodness, I was an angel,” she said, and Molly and Nico laughed.

  Just as Nico put kirs in front of them both, Molly’s phone went off, the text sound of a chirping robin. She pulled it out of her pocket and looked at the screen, her eyes wide.

  “It’s Lawrence…”

  “Hi Larry,” said Nico, waving at Molly’s phone.

  “This is unbelievable,” said Molly. She stared at the screen hard, as though she must have misread what was there.

  “Well?” said Frances, her eyes on Nico as he made a cup of espresso for a middle-aged
man at the other end of the bar.

  “He says there’s been another poisoning. A woman on Madame Desrosiers’s street. Cyanide again, but she survived.”

  “Good heavens! Is it someone you know?”

  “I’m…I’m having a hard time believing…maybe Lawrence is just messing with my head.”

  “Does he like doing that?”

  “Well…” Molly thought about it. He did like to tease, but this wasn’t exactly teasing. It would be an unfunny practical joke, if he were making it up. “I wish I could call Ben and ask him what’s going on.”

  “What’s up, my beauties?” said Nico, having served his coffee and sensing a good story.

  “Molly just heard there’s been another poisoning,” said Frances.

  “Larry told you?”

  “Yes. How in the world does he always know everything? And when he’s in Morocco?”

  Nico shrugged. “Who was it? Is she okay?”

  “How did you know it was a ‘she’?” said Molly, narrowing her eyes at him.

  “Don’t turn those detective eyes on me,” said Nico. “Look, I had a fifty percent chance, it was just a lucky guess.”

  “Call up Ben!” said Frances. “You know he’s sweet on you.”

  “Do you know that half your expressions come straight out of Gone With the Wind? We’re not getting ready to go to a barbeque with the Tarleton boys at Twelve Oaks.” Molly stood up. She took a sip of her kir. “This is serious. A second woman with cyanide poisoning within a week? Could we have a serial killer on our hands?”

  “Just call the cop,” said Frances. “You’re not going to be able to think of anything else until you know the deets, so just call him!”

  “I don’t think civilians can just call up gendarmes and ask for the latest gossip.”

  “It’s not gossip, Molly. You’re worried about your safety and the safety of your houseguest who is tremendously important to you. Right?”

  “Nico? What’s your vote?”