The Luckiest Woman Ever: Molly Sutton Mystery 2

by Nell Goddin

  It had gotten colder again and the sky had that dirty gray, heavy look of snow. Christmas was the following week and she realized she had made no plan except for ordering the bûche de noël, had bought no presents, had no tree. She felt as though she was disconnected from the calendar somehow, as though she had too many other things to think about.

  Ben Dufort, for one….

  As Molly reached the cemetery, she slowed down. Then stopped. Wait. Maybe there was a grave for the Desrosiers baby! Walking quickly, she went through the gate and under the ‘Priez pour vos morts’ inscription, looking for Josephine’s grave. The cemetery was neat and orderly, with no sign of any disturbance. An old man was kneeling in front of a grave that was decorated with vases of artificial flowers. Molly could hear him talking.

  She found Desrosiers’s grave easily enough. The headstone was simple and the inscription said Josephine Faure Desrosiers. 1933-2005. On one side of her was the grave of Albert Desrosiers; his marble headstone was larger than hers and had a high polish. On her other side was a Franck Desrosiers who had died in 1958. Molly looked all down the row, and while she found several graves of children, she found none with the name of Desrosiers.

  The small graves of the other children stabbed her in the heart, and she tried as she had many times before to tell herself that not having children had saved her the possibility of terrific, undying pain. It was a convincing argument, and yet she was not convinced.

  She checked other rows, eventually covering the entire small cemetery, but there were no other Desrosiers graves, and the children she found all seemed clearly to belong to other families. Dead end.

  But Molly did not give up so easily. Perhaps the baby had been cremated, or for some other reason hadn’t been buried with his or her parents. Maybe she could track down the doctor who attended the birth? How about looking for a death certificate at the town hall or some other official building?

  First to Pâtisserie Bujold, and then to the town hall, called the mairie. No doubt someone there could at least tell her where to search next.

  Adèle Faure woke on that Tuesday morning, a week before Christmas, in a cold sweat. The days were ticking by, short and dark, and if village gossip was anything to go by—and Adèle rather thought it was—Michel was in serious trouble. That stupid Dufort had got it in his head that Aunt Josephine’s will pointed inevitably to her brother’s guilt, as though he couldn’t imagine anyone having a motive for murder but not acting on it. As though all of us were not in that exact position a million times over the course of our lives, even if the motive was simply to remove the annoying person working in the next cubicle.

  She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up, massaging her bad foot, which ached in the cold. It was time for someone to act, she thought, before this nonsense goes any further. She brushed her hair and teeth, got dressed with less care than usual, and prepared to set off for the bank. It was dark on that morning, one of the shortest days of the year, and the village itself felt dark in its heart to Adèle, as though all of its inhabitants had betrayed her and her beloved brother.

  Back in collège, when they had been thirteen or fourteen, their schoolmates had teased them, saying the brother and sister loved each other too much and wanted to kiss each other. And the truth was that Adèle had wanted to kiss Michel. She had wanted to give herself to him in any way he would take her, and a few times, was on the point of telling him so…but she had held back in the end, fearing rejection. She had been tough as a child because she’d had to be, and she could stand teasing and her disability and any manner of difficult and painful problems—but not Michel’s rejection. Not that.

  Of course it would have been quite a scandal if she and Michel had had a romantic attachment, in public; but Adèle could brush that off, since Michel was adopted and they were not blood relatives—and who cared what other people thought anyway? It was true that they had grown up together, but that had only meant that they knew each other intimately and cared for each other profoundly, and in Adele’s opinion, that was the best basis for romance anyone could hope for.

  All such thoughts and hopes were long buried in the past for the most part, and Adèle had been resigned to her single life and a close friendship with Michel. For his part, there had not been many girlfriends, and Adèle had never asked why, preferring to hold on to the belief that his deep love for her prevented anyone else from getting very close.

  And now the love of her life was in trouble. She was sophisticated enough to know that his innocence wouldn’t necessarily protect him—innocent people get sent to prison all the time, as Adèle and anyone who read the papers well knew. The question was…what was she going to do to stop it?

  It is time to act.

  Adèle wrapped a wool scarf over her head and around her neck so that everything but her face was covered up, and left the chill of her apartment for the cold of the street. Rue Tartine was empty that early in the morning, and the uneven clopping of her heels reverberated off the walls of the houses. Six blocks to get to the bank, two long and four medium. She had chosen her apartment because six blocks was comfortable for her to walk, but that morning her whole body was tense and her bad foot throbbed worse than usual, slowing her down.

  This whole plan is probably idiotic, she thought, and stopped in the street. If I had done this before the murder, then maybe it would’ve worked.

  She was too late and she knew it, but pressed on because no other ideas had come to her. Suddenly starving, Adèle wished she had made herself an omelette and coffee before leaving home. She wondered if hunger went hand in hand with breaking the law and smiled ironically, thinking that once she was in prison herself for obstructing justice or whatever they called what she was about to do—she would be able to ask the other inmates in person. She imagined them standing out in the prison yard, blowing long plumes of breath in the freezing air, telling each other about all the dishes they had craved just before the commission of their crimes.

  She could picture that omelette so vividly, how it glistened with butter, with a handful of bright green chives tumbling off it.

  Thinking of food, Adèle picked up her pace no matter how it made her foot hurt, reached the bank before anyone else, and let herself in. She flicked on the lights. It was not strange to be the first one to arrive; she was generally an early riser and a dedicated employee, and before she was made an officer of the bank, she had come in early many times to make sure she could accomplish her work as perfectly as possible.

  Her office was small but it had a window. Adèle sat at her desk and thought about how to accomplish what she wanted to do without leaving any sort of trail. She hoped, naively, that it wouldn’t matter if someone eventually found out that she had transferred so much money into Michel’s account—almost all of her money, everything but what she needed to live on this month and buy presents for Michel and her mother for Christmas. Adèle was not especially frugal, and spent far more on clothes and handbags than she should, so the sum was hardly exorbitant.

  But she prayed that it would be enough to dissuade Dufort. That he would see, once he started poking around in Michel’s affairs, that Michel was taken care of, that he was not remotely desperate for money, and in no hurry at all to get what Aunt Josephine ultimately intended for him to have anyway.

  32

  Over-caffeinated and with a mustache of powdered sugar on her upper lip, Molly left Pâtisserie Bujold with a white waxed bag filled with four beignets: two custard-filled and two plain. If she arrived back at La Baraque empty-handed, she feared for what Frances might do, since she’d had never forgiven Molly for showing up from a trip to the market with nothing but eggplants. As Molly headed towards the mairie, she realized that she had been so busy thinking about the Desrosiers baby that she hadn’t even noticed Monsieur Nugent and his usual attentions.

  The mairie was the center of all things administrative in Castillac. She got a little nervous going in because the stately building made her feel her i
gnorance acutely—so many rules and regulations, and she was probably not following half of them since she still, after not quite four months, had plenty left to learn.

  She stuttered and garbled her French, feeling a blush creep up her neck—won’t they wonder why in the world I am interested in death records, when I’ve barely just arrived? Maybe she should have invented a cover story.

  But the pleasant woman behind the counter was more than happy to help, showing Molly to a room in the back that contained a series of tall wooden filing cabinets.

  “Here is death,” the woman said, pointing to three cabinets along one wall. “And here is birth,” she said. “Alpha and omega, we have it all here at the mairie!”

  Molly smiled, loving how the people of Castillac launched into philosophy at the drop of a hat. She went straight to the first cabinet along the wall and opened it up. Inside were folders by year, in numerical order, and documents of that year’s deaths within each folder. The drawer she had opened contained 1899-1930. The drawer above it was 1931-1967. In a village of Castillac’s size, there were deaths every year, but not so many that she wouldn’t be able to find what she was looking for.

  Hmm. Molly wasn’t sure how old Josephine had been when she married so didn’t know where to begin. At least she knew she had been seventy-two on the day she died, so that narrowed things down a bit. As intent as she was on finding evidence, the death records were so interesting she found herself getting distracted. The causes of death were particularly interesting. Such variety, and what stories they hinted at! Tuberculosis, cancer, and falling off a ladder. A drowning, more cancer, pneumonia. She couldn’t help stopping at each document, reading the name and wondering what kind of life the person had, and whether she was missed.

  She took so long that eventually she dipped into the waxed bag and ate one of the beignets. The custard burst into her mouth with such an amazing explosion of vanilla that she had to close her eyes and try not to moan out loud. And then back to work, plugging away through 1963, 1964, 1965….years before she was born, her main associations being Twiggy and the Beatles.

  Up through 1967, and still no mention of any Desrosiers or any Faure. Maybe France does not keep records of stillbirths? But from what she could tell, France kept records about everything. She kept looking.

  1968, 1969, 1970. She ate another beignet. By the end of the 70s, Molly was sure there was no death certificate for a Desrosiers baby in the filing cabinet, having gone through every single page in every folder for all the years when it would have been physically possible for Josephine to have been pregnant. She stood up, not sure what to do next.

  Pulling her cell phone out of her bag, she gave Frances a call, but got sent to voice mail. She texted Lawrence asking him if he had any other tidbits to toss her way, though she figured if he did, she’d have heard from him already. Then she thought, well, hold on a minute. If the baby didn’t die, there obviously wouldn’t be a death certificate—I should switch over to looking at the birth records.

  Stowing her bag away, she opened the first cabinet holding the birth records, leafing through the thick folders of Extrait du Registre des Naissance. Like the death forms, they were typed, which to Molly seemed wonderfully quaint. The letters did not align the way they automatically do on a computer, there were ink smudges and letters that made an impression on the paper but did not leave much of a mark otherwise. The occupations of the parents were listed: factory worker, farmer, shop owner, clerk.

  With a sudden hoot, she saw ADÈLE with the last name of FAURE, and smiling, pulled it out of the folder to see it better. The paper was a little bent and not entirely clean. Adèle was thirty-nine, a year older than Molly. There was no father listed. Molly looked more closely. She almost didn’t see it, but right over the space for the father’s name was a stripe of discoloration. An edge was sticking up just barely, and had caught dust or dirt and so was lightly browned. A narrow strip of paper had been glued over the space where the father’s name should have been typed.

  With a glance behind her to make sure the woman in the other room was occupied, Molly picked at the edge with her fingernail.

  It took a minute to come loose. The glue was old and brittle but hung on. Molly began to tremble, a sense of foreboding suffusing her body. Finally she was able to pull the strip off completely, going very slowly, gently tugging it loose.

  On the official birth form, Albert Desrosiers was listed as Adèle Faure’s father.

  Molly stared, unable to understand what that meant.

  Her uncle was her father? Did that mean Murielle had had an affair with Josephine’s husband? With her brother-in law? Molly sat down on the floor, unable to take her eyes off the piece of paper. Did Adèle know about this? And who had tampered with the form, trying to cover it up?

  Without realizing she was doing it, Molly ate the last beignet. She looked at the paper once more, going over it from top to bottom and holding it up to the winter light coming in through a window above her. She saw that there was another narrow strip over the line for the mother—on which ‘Murielle Faure’ was typed—but it was glued more securely and harder to detect. It had no edge popping up either, but Molly had one decent fingernail and she kept pushing it along the edge as she bent the paper, hoping it would snag along the strip and pull it up just enough to start separating it from the form.

  A noise in the other room nearly gave her a heart attack, but it was only the door banging behind someone who was asking the woman at the desk about some parking tickets. Molly turned her back to the door so that if anyone came in, they wouldn’t see that she was busy tampering with government records. She was nothing if not persistent, and eventually the top edge separated from the form just enough for her to get her little fingernail under it, and the strip popped right off.

  Under the strip, listed as the mother of Adèle Faure…was Josephine Desrosiers.

  “I’ve been saying all along that families are nuts,” said Frances, after Molly had told her what she found at the mairie. “And who eats four beignets, anyway?”

  “Apparently I do,” said Molly, unrepentant. “Now come on, Franny, help me puzzle this out. Is it possible that the form went from incorrect to correct—that those strips were put there by someone official, because a mistake had been made?”

  “If it were something like the date, then maybe. But who puts the wrong sister on a form like that? I don’t think so.”

  “So Adèle is really Josephine’s daughter, not Murielle’s? That is huge. Huge! For one thing, Michel can no longer be the prime suspect, because a child supersedes everyone else in French inheritance laws. Adèle will get most of that fortune, not Michel.”

  “That just means suspicion shifts over to her, right?”

  Molly sat down on the sofa with a thud. “Oh jeez, I hadn’t even thought of that. I was so busy celebrating about Michel that it didn’t occur to me this might go badly for Adèle. But wait—she would have to know, right? If she doesn’t know who her real mother is, she’d have no reason to kill her.”

  “But if no one knows, then Michel could have killed her out of ignorance, you see? And what about Michel’s parentage? Did you see him in the files?”

  “I was halfway down the block on my way home when I thought of that. I scrambled back to the mairie and went in to look for him—I’m sure the woman who works there thinks I’m a complete loon—anyway, yes, I found him. His form looked original and not tampered with, and his parents were…I don’t remember their names but I made a note on my phone…anyway, nobody I’d ever heard of. He appears to be adopted just as he says.”

  Molly got up to check if her paintbrushes and roller were dry. “I just don’t get this at all. I know back when the world was more conservative, sometimes a married couple or a grandmother might have taken in a child born out of wedlock and pretended it was theirs—but this is sort of the opposite of that. A married couple giving up their child to a sister who’s single. Explain please.”

  “Maybe if
I had a beignet, my mind would be clearer,” said Frances.

  “You’re like a dog with a bone.”

  “And that bone is not pillowy soft and filled with vanilla custard.”

  Molly laughed. “Okay, I’m going to go see how Pierre is doing with the pigeonnier, and then try to finish up this paint job. I need to decide what in hell to do with this information I’ve got, and so far, I have no idea.”

  “You mean whether to talk to Adèle about it? Or Ben?”

  At Ben’s name, Molly blushed furiously. “Both. So wait. I’ve been so gobsmacked about this news that I haven’t asked about last night. How was it with Nico?”

  Frances made a little peep and smiled, not making eye contact.

  “That’s it? Just mhmm? What did you guys do?”

  “Okay Molly, I’m going to put in a few more hours of work and see if I can get this jingle in good enough shape to send to the client. And then maybe I’ll wander into the village and see if I can find a morsel to eat before I starve to death.”

  Molly smirked, knowing a brick wall when she hit one. At least Frances’s usual black cloud of drama seemed to have stayed on the other side of the ocean.

  She went outside without putting on a coat. It was cold and the air felt moist—all her years in Boston had taught her to recognize when snow was coming, and she guessed it was coming soon. She walked quickly out to the pigeonnier and called to Pierre Gault, who was on top of a ladder leaning against the half-finished building.

  “Salut! How is it going?”

  “Better than expected,” said Pierre, climbing down. “All those stones that were hidden in the tall grass turned out to be in good shape, and even the part of the wall that was falling down is shaping up to be more easily repaired than I first thought. I should be done with the exterior in a few days, before Christmas at any rate.”