by Nell Goddin
“Maybe if my unemployment allotment were more generous, I wouldn’t have given it a thought. But the amount of support is based, as you both no doubt know, on how much one contributes to the system over the course of one’s working life. But my work has been, well…do you think I could have a glass of water?”
Perrault jumped up to get him one. Dufort stayed casual, leaning back in his chair with an expression of affability, as though he and Michel were just relaxing in his living room before watching a soccer game on television together. When Perrault returned with the water, he kept silent.
“So what was I saying? All right. This is embarrassing for me so I’ll just come out with it. The fact of the matter is that I was hungry. I knew about Mme LaGreffe’s milk on Wednesdays. And every so often I made sure to be walking along rue Saterne just after the delivery so I could steal it. I didn’t know anyone even got milk delivered anymore, but this milk is so fresh and delicious—it’s indescribably good. I’ve never drunk glasses of milk in my life until I started taking Mme LaGreffe’s, but you understand, when you’re hungry, you tend to try new things. The milk was especially good when it was very cold, as it was on Wednesday.
“So yes, I fully and shamefully admit—I took the milk. Here I am, thirty-four years old, stealing an old lady’s milk! I’m well aware, Chief Dufort, that this is reprehensible behavior. I didn’t steal it every week, not by a longshot. And I tried, whenever I did steal it, to leave her something as recompense. This last time, I brought her a bag of pine cones I’d collected. I know, it’s hardly anything valuable, but you can use them to start fires or they make a nice rustic decoration for the table.” Michel shrugged again. “How I managed to choose the same day poor Mme LaGreffe was poisoned—” He shook his head with a wry half-smile.
All three looked around to see Murielle Faure walk into the room. “What sort of ridiculous goings-on is this?” she demanded of Dufort. Her graying hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail and she was wearing a corduroy skirt that went to her shins. Perrault, who was not exactly fashion-minded, winced at that skirt, wondering how in the world Adèle and Murielle came from the same family, considering how opposite their approach to clothing was.
“Bonjour, Mme Faure,” said Dufort. “We are having a talk with Michel because he was seen leaving a bag on Mme LaGreffe’s doorstop the day she was poisoned with cyanide. The same poison that killed your sister.” Dufort kept his voice even, almost nonchalant.
“Well, I don’t know anything about poison or any Mme LaGreffe, but I can tell you that of all people, Michel had absolutely nothing to do with anything illegal!”
“Can you say how you are so sure of that?” asked Perrault.
“Michel is my son. I know him deep down, like mothers know their children. Michel is a kind-hearted boy, always has been. He is the last person on earth who would hurt anyone.”
Dufort leaned his head to the side, and waited to see if Murielle would keep talking.
“Maman, I might as well tell you, since I’ve just told the Chief—I’d been stealing Mme LaGreffe’s milk sometimes. I know, it’s very embarrassing. Mortifying, really. It would have been much better if I’d come up with a more glamorous way to break the law, something that would at least make a better story.”
“Oh, Michel,” said Murielle, going to him and kissing him on the head. “Don’t you know that you can always come home for a meal if things get tight? Always.” Murielle looked to Dufort. “So you see? Of course if he must pay a fine or something, I am more than happy to take care of that. But his crime is petty theft, not murder.”
Dufort nodded. “And Mme Faure, since you’re here, perhaps I can ask you—who do you think murdered your sister, if it was not Michel, who is the main beneficiary in her will?”
Murielle gasped. “I was unaware that Josephine had made a provision for him.” She kissed Michel on the head again. “It’s lovely for her to have done that, especially since she and I weren’t very close. But I know she was very fond of Michel and I’m so pleased that she showed her affection in that way.”
“But you see the trouble, Mme Faure? That the inheritance endows your son with the only motive for killing her that we’ve been able to find?”
“Chief Dufort! Michel—he is not capable of doing anything!”
“Maybe I did do something. For once,” Michel muttered, almost inaudibly, but Perrault caught it.
“Are you arresting him? Because if not, I would like to take my boy home and cook him a good dinner. As far as I can see that is the solution to any crime committed by Michel. It’s nothing a square meal won’t fix.”
“No, we’re not holding him,” said Dufort reluctantly. “He’s free to go. But Michel, I would listen to your mother. If you don’t have enough to eat, take her up on her offer and leave the residents of Castillac alone, comprenez?”
The Faures left, arm in arm, though Michel did not look vindicated. He gave a backward glance to Perrault and she smiled at him.
“So what do you think?” Dufort asked her.
“She treats him like a child.”
“Yes. A mixture of adoration and contempt, isn’t it?”
Perrault nodded. Then she told Dufort about hearing Michel mumble something about having “done something, for once”. The two gendarmes puzzled over it, but the meaning remained obscure.
36
On Friday morning, Molly and Frances took their coffee cups to warm their hands, and walked around the frosty garden. The snow had half-melted but it still lingered where the sun hadn’t struck it, and Molly could easily see how much shade everything got—good to know when planning what to plant, though that morning she was too distracted to pay much attention.
“I’ve decided to tell Ben,” she said, stopping by an oak tree that hadn’t yet let go of its brown leaves.
“I don’t know,” said Frances. “Shouldn’t he have to find out stuff like that on his own? Why do you have to do all the leg-work?”
“You say that like it’s drudgery. I like finding stuff out. And besides, I want whoever killed those two women brought to justice as much as anyone! Don’t you?”
“Well, you’re not going to get me to argue the side of the murderer,” Frances laughed. “I guess I’m just not clear on why who Adele’s mother is or isn’t would make any difference to the case.”
“I don’t know either,” said Molly. “Not if it was this big secret that neither Adèle nor Michel even knew about.”
“Maybe you just want an excuse to consult with the foxy policeman,” said Frances.
Molly leaned down and put her coffee cup on the ground, then picked up a handful of wet snow and hurled it at her, hitting her right on the back of the neck so that the snow dripped down her shirt.
“You’re going to pay for that, Molly Sutton!” yelled Frances, running for a good patch of snow.
Molly shrieked and ran inside. She and Frances loved occasionally acting like eight-year-olds. She refilled her coffee and went to get dressed. It was a little bit true; she liked seeing Ben and working with him on a case. But it was also true that the business of lying about whose baby was whose—it begged for more investigation, and the more she thought about it, the less doubt she had that Ben ought to know about it.
It was perhaps a betrayal of her friend. But the truth was the truth, and Adèle was going to have to come to terms with it one way or another. Molly’s continuing to keep the secret wasn’t going to protect her from that.
“Molly! Bonjour,” said Dufort, standing up from his desk.
“Bonjour, Ben. I was wondering if you had a moment?”
“Of course.” Dufort ushered her into his office and went around to close the door. “What’s on your mind?”
“Probably nothing. But I found something out that I thought you should know.” She sat down.
Dufort moved next to Molly and half-sat on the front of the desk. He admired how her red hair was flying out from under her hat in a wind-blown tangle. “Yes?”
Dufort shook his head. “This would have been…in the sixties or seventies?”
Molly nodded. “It was in 1966, to be exact. So I thought, well, I’ve heard about how different the inheritance laws in France are from in the States. See, Americans can leave anything to anybody—or not. They can will a fortune to their unpleasant cat and leave the children out in the cold, if they want to.”
“Not so in France. The children are protected under the law.”
“That’s what I understood. So I thought: what if Josephine’s baby wasn’t stillborn? If he or she was alive, then the biggest share of the Desrosiers money would go to that child, no matter what Josephine might have wanted, right?”
“I believe so, yes,” said Dufort, looking at Molly carefully. “Is this about trying to take suspicion off Michel Faure?”
“No. I mean, yes, sort of. I did start down this path thinking that if he didn’t inherit, his motive disappears. But then I realized that as long as Michel believed he was the beneficiary, the truth about Desrosiers’s child didn’t really matter. As far as motive, I mean. I followed the lead anyway, because I was curious.”
“And what did you find, Molly?”
She told him.
Yet again, Benjamin Dufort found himself utterly baffled by the things people did. He and Molly spent several minutes agreeing that it made no sense at all; they wondered whether the strips of paper over the names were actually correcting a mistake; and in the end, they decided that there was a reason the Desrosierses had given their baby to Josephine’s sister and then covered it up—they just had no idea what it was.
“I will tell you, I’m no less inclined to think Michel is involved in the murder. Maybe he and his sister planned it together? We brought him in for a chat this morning, and he admitted that he left a bag on LaGreffe’s doorstep on the day she died. He was seen doing so by Madame Tessier who lives two doors down on rue Saterne, so there was little point in denying it. Had a preposterous story about leaving her some pine cones.” Dufort shook his head. “I know Josephine Desrosiers was not a well-liked woman. But in a case like this, family is where to look for the murderer, Molly. Family is where the emotions are deepest, and the pain sometimes intolerable.”
“I didn’t know you had such a rosy view of home life,” said Molly.
“Heh. Well, let me misquote Tolstoy—happy families are all well and good, but when families get unhappy, that’s when the gendarmes might get involved.”
Molly hooted, and then she got serious. “But Ben, there are other possibilities. Have you really been able to make absolutely sure it was not Sabrina, for instance? I heard Desrosiers treated her horribly. And how abut Sabrina’s boyfriend, that hot-head political dude? He could have killed her for ideological reasons alone, not to mention how she treated his girlfriend.”
Dufort shrugged. “Are you convinced either one of them did it?” he asked gently.
She paused before continuing. “But Michel and Adèle—I just…I just don’t want them to have done this! And you’re saying they also killed Madame LaGreffe, to cover up the first murder? That’s so much worse, isn’t it? When is it going to end?”
“When I have the evidence to stop them,” said Dufort.
They both looked down at the floor, wondering how—and when—and if—that was going to happen.
37
Adèle was so undone by Molly’s revelation that she did not return to the bank. After standing outside in the cold trying to calm down and figure out what to do next, she walked all the way to her mother’s house. Probably the best thing would be to wait, think things over, maybe go to the mairie herself to look at the records. But sometimes the best thing is not the most pressing thing, and what Adèle needed to do as soon as possible was look her mother in the face and ask her if it was true.
Had her real mother been Josephine? And if yes, why had Josephine given her up? And why in the world was her sister the one to take her?
It made no sense. No matter from which direction Adèle tried to approach it—it made no sense. She wanted to run to Michel, but what could he do? The only thing was to confront her mother and see her reaction, and then hope she was willing to explain everything.
In the meantime, Adèle felt as though her world had tilted dangerously, like her balance was lost and she was sliding one way, barely hanging on, only to pitch the other way; her thoughts tumbled around in her head, incoherent, and her heart raced.
She wanted to go home to talk to her mother, and also to be back in the familiar surroundings of her childhood. Home was still home, almost unchanged; the smells and sounds the same, the pattern on the wallpaper and the appliances and the creaky spot on the stair…all the same. She had uncountable happy memories of the three of them—her mother, Michel, and herself—laughing at her mother’s latest culinary disaster, or making ant farms, or, less happily, working in the garden under her mother’s strict guidance.
Adèle loved Castillac and had never had any desire to live anywhere else, but at the same time, she had felt separate from the village as long as she could remember. In school, she was the girl who limped. But at home, with Maman and Michel, she was just Adèle, and their closeness made any of her difficulties always easier to bear.
When she reached the house she looked at it with different eyes. It looked rundown and dingy. The windows were dirty and a pile of boxes crowded the small entry-porch. Adèle went around to the back where she fished a key from under a rock, and let herself into the back door, into the kitchen.
“Maman!” she called, though she knew it was too early for her mother to be home from the lycée. Nevertheless, the silence felt sad, not peaceful. “Michel!” she called, knowing he was not there; he never came to Maman’s unless Adèle was going to be there too.
As she had done so many times before, Adèle wandered through the house, trailing her fingertips over familiar things: stacks of books, an old vase, a lopsided pottery bowl she had made for her mother back in primaire, a stack of dishtowels printed with pears. The only sound was her footsteps on the wooden floor. It was so quiet she became conscious of her own breathing, a little noisy thanks to a minor cold, and never had she wished more for a dog in that house—something she had begged for but never succeeded in convincing her mother to get.
She drifted into her mother’s bedroom. It was sparse-looking: a plain single bed with an iron frame, a cheap armoire with a smudged mirror on one of its doors. Adèle looked at herself. She brought a hand up to her face and touched the lines that were just starting to appear at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She saw that she looked tired and older than she expected herself to look, and that her makeup had not lasted through the afternoon.
Who am I now?
She couldn’t stop herself from wondering about Josephine’s bedroom, and had a sharp and sudden desire to go to the mansion on rue Simenon and see for herself.
Adèle sat down on her mother’s bed—or her aunt’s bed, she wasn’t completely sure—and wept. She put her face in her hands and let herself be taken over by her sorrow and confusion, her body shaking, her breath heaving. And then the gust was over, and she stood up and went looking for a handkerchief or a tissue to wipe off her face.
She couldn’t have said why she went to her mother’s desk to look, because if she had thought about it, it wasn’t the place to find tissues. But sniffling, she sat at her mother’s desk, where Murielle had made her lesson plans through the years of Adele’s childhood. It felt a little strange to sit in Maman’s place and she half expected her to walk in and demand what she was doing. Adèle realized that the desk had had a sort of spell cast over it, an unspoken boundary which she and Michel were not to cross.
Adèle opened the top drawer and found a couple of test tubes and some felt tipped markers. There was only one other drawer. It was stuffed with papers of various kinds; Adèle riffled through them a
nd saw bank records, utilities bills, and so forth, all ordered by date. Under the household papers sat a stack of letters, and Adèle paused only a moment before taking the first one out of its envelope and reading.
Ma belle, it began. Adele’s eyes widened. Had her mother had a lover, a boyfriend? If so, she had never heard a word of it.
* * *
Ma belle,
I know that there are no words powerful enough to express my regret, and no words magical enough to wipe away the pain I have caused. Or maybe there are and I am too inept to find them. Please know that you are dearest to me and will remain so forever.
* * *
The letter was unsigned. Adèle read the others, and they all said more or less the same thing, pleading forgiveness for some unmentioned act. The last letter was in a blank envelope, and as she unfolded it, she recognized her mother’s handwriting.
* * *
Albert,
You call me pretty things, you say ‘ma belle’, but your actions are not pretty at all. I would have said that my sister did not deserve you, but now that I see your character more clearly I think perhaps I was wrong.
I do not wish to seem obdurate but all I can say is that you made the choice you made, and now it is your challenge to live with it. I would be sad but I fear your conduct has turned my heart to stone.
M.
* * *
Adèle sat with the the letter in her lap for a long time. The house was cold and she was shivering. It felt to her as though she had lifted a lid and all kinds of horrors had flown out, truly a Pandora’s Box—she still couldn’t see them clearly, still didn’t really understand—but she knew for certain that everything was changed now, and it was not a change for the good.