A Bouquet of Rue

by Wendy Hornsby

  “I’ll walk you out,” I said. On the way I asked, “Did you see the footage I sent you this afternoon?”

  “I did, thank you, but I’d already seen it. We do have resources, you know. I saw nothing that looked like an abduction, did you?”

  “What I saw were potential witnesses slowly driving by, as well as the general direction Ophelia was headed.”

  “Witnesses to what, exactly, Madame MacGowen? A girl running away, perhaps to earn a few euros playing cello in the Métro? To hide at a friend’s house? Meet a boy?” She raised her palms—Who knows? “I’m confident Ophelia will turn up. My concern is for the condition she’ll be in when she does. In the meantime, she is a case for Paris police in the juvenile section, a runaway. At this moment I am working on the assault of a student at our local school, one Ahmad Nabi. So, unless you have further questions, I will thank you for feeding me and for taking in our displaced family, and I’ll get back to my job.”

  “One question,” I said. “What time is this school meeting tomorrow?”

  “Two o’clock, immediately after lunch. Why?”

  “I want to be there,” I said.

  A little shoulder lift as she thought that over. “Not my call. Talk to the directeur.”

  I opened the door for her. “Maybe I’ll see you there.”

  Jean-Paul had been eavesdropping from the end of the short entry hall. I went over and kissed him. “You are one of the good guys, you know?”

  He wrapped me in his arms. “How does that song go, the one from that American musical? Oh yes, ‘I’m just a guy who cain’t say no.’”

  “From Oklahoma!, and it’s a girl who cain’t say no, but you do a pretty decent cornball country accent. Any time you want to sing in my ear, you just go right ahead.”

  “I’ll remember you said that.” He kissed my neck and released me. “You really want to go to that meeting tomorrow?”

  “What I really want to do is go in with cameras.”

  “Good luck getting permission.”

  “I have a friend, a trained diplomat with contacts. I could appeal to him. I could also go to this giant television network that drops a paycheck into my bank account and ask them to send over a news team. But I’ll have to think about it before I call on either. The situation at the school is already flammable. I wonder if having a camera crew show up will set something off. Or would it put the kids on their best behavior?”

  “Could go either way.”

  “Could,” I said. “Now what?”

  “I’m going to the hospital with Ari, Diba, and Nabi. Will you get the guest room ready for Diba?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll call if we’ll be late.”

  “I’ll keep the home fires burning.”

  The house felt oddly empty when they were gone. Dom, as usual, had retreated to his room to study as soon as we had the dishes into the dishwasher and the counters wiped down. I put fresh sheets on the guest room bed and a set of towels on the chair next to the dresser. There were water glasses in the bathroom. After that, I wandered back downstairs to my office, looking for something to keep me busy until Jean-Paul returned. I was still unnerved by what we had seen that afternoon. And now Nabi. Without the violin, and without Diba and Ari, and probably Ophelia, who might Nabi become?

  Feeling restless, powerless, I looked for something to do, a distraction. There was film research I could do, but first I needed to set up my home office. Marian’s furniture had been hauled away that morning, leaving the room bare except for the mass of unopened boxes full of office things I had ordered. The long work table came in a flat pack and was too heavy for me to easily assemble alone, so I left it until I could recruit some help. Without it, I set up the new computer on the floor. I began downloading files Zed dropped into the cloud but stopped to take another look at the various clips of CCTV footage he had left there for me.

  When we saw Nabi and Ophelia walk into the train station off the street, I had asked Zed to run the tape in slow motion as the kids came toward the camera placement. I ran that clip twice because on the first go my eye went past the kids to the street. After nine o’clock, there was very little traffic on the street beyond the driveway. A large dark car came into frame and seemed to slow before it moved out of camera range. I opened the same sequence in real time just to make sure, and could see that the driver had, indeed, slowed significantly as he, or she, passed the driveway apron, as if he was watching the two kids. Before the end of the clip, the same or a very similar car, traveling from the opposite direction, passed the driveway and slowed again. Had the driver made a U-turn and come back for a second look? Or was this a different car altogether? I couldn’t identify the make.

  Curious, I pulled up the footage from the street behind the station and paid attention to the cars on the street instead of to Ophelia. The first sequence picked up Ophelia after she turned onto the street from the alley that led from the car park. She was walking away from the camera, toward the intersection with the street that fronted the train station. All I could see of the intersection in the distance was the headlight beams from cross-traffic as they creased the dark. One car—one set of beams, as I saw it—drove into the intersection, stopped suddenly, reversed, and inscribed an arc in the gloom as it made a U-turn and went back the way it had come. Was this, Oops, I forgot something? Or something else?

  The next clip, captured by the camera over the far intersection on the opposite side of the street, picked up Ophelia approaching out of the dark. I lost her whenever cars passed by. And then the thing I was looking for appeared: a set of headlights slowly approached behind her. The front of the car came into range enough for me to see that it was black or maybe dark green or blue, before it parked at the curb, lights out. When Ophelia crossed at the intersection, the headlights snapped on again and the car slowly pulled away from the curb. I captured the last frame and saved it.

  I went onto the Net and pulled up photos of full-size late-model cars. The front ends of most of them were no more different than cookies baked from the same batch of dough. A little longer here, rounded or angular there, but altogether, similar cookies. The Audi was among them.

  In case he was asleep, I texted Dom upstairs in his room. He saw the text and came right to the head of the stairs.

  “Maggie?’

  “How many Audis do you think there are in Vaucresson?” I asked.

  “Hundreds.” He laughed and started down the stairs. “That’s what you wanted to ask me?”

  “No. May I borrow your scooter?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just a little drive,” I said. “Do you know where the Fouchets live?”

  “Ouais. We took Ophelia home after riding workout a couple of times. Why?”

  I motioned for him to come into my office and pointed to the image frozen on my computer screen. “Can you tell what model car that is?”

  “You want to know if it’s an Audi?”

  “I want to know what it is.”

  Dom squatted down for a closer look. “It’s a fairly new model whatever it is. Could be a Lexus or a Mercedes or Audi. Maybe a Peugeot 508; they all want to look like Teslas right now. The way the streetlight reflects on the hood I can’t really see the profile of the headlights well enough to tell.”

  I closed the computer and tucked it into my bag; I might need the captured image for comparison. “Dom, may I borrow your scooter?”

  “À chez Fouchet? No. I’ll drive, you ride on the back.”

  The Fouchets lived in a pretentious pile of fresh stucco and faux stone on the far side of boulevard de la République, a main street through town. I hadn’t intended to go calling, but I was ready with an excuse if anyone saw us cruising the place and had questions. All I wanted was another look at Yvan Fouchet’s Audi. Typical of homes in the region, the garage was around back. I couldn’t see a car in the driveway, but the downstairs lights were on and through the large front windows I saw someone moving around insid
e. It was after nine, late to knock on a stranger’s door, but I asked Dom to pull into the drive anyway. Intrusive? I’m afraid so.

  The front door opened before Dom or I could ring the bell. The woman standing under the light looked as if she were dressed to go out for the evening: skirt, heels, pearls, polished hair and makeup. She also held a highball glass with about three fingers of amber liquid in it.

  “Dom Bernard, is that you?” the woman of the house said, stepping outside when she recognized him. “Look how tall you are.”

  “Madame Fouchet, I want you to meet Maggie MacGowen, Papa’s fiancée.”

  “Oh, yes?” she said, as if suddenly noticing I was there. She offered me her hand. When I took it, saying the usual sorts of things, lovely to meet you, sorry for the circumstance, she was studying me with such a laser focus that she didn’t seem to hear me. Her scrutiny made me want to reach up and fluff my helmet-flattened hair. Looking at me still, she asked, “How is Jean-Paul? We haven’t seen him for ages. Not since Marian’s funeral, I think.”

  “Jean-Paul is well,” I said, mystified. If my daughter were missing and a stranger came to my door at night, wouldn’t the first, or maybe second question be, Have you news about my girl? But then, there was that drink in her hand and who knows what she might have swallowed earlier, in either liquid or pill form. Was she inordinately self-contained, or simply numb? I plunged forward. “Madame Fouchet, I’m sure your husband told you that we retrieved a bit of security camera footage that shows some of your daughter’s movements Friday. Monsieur Fouchet came by last night to see it.”

  “Did he?” she said, a frown pulling her perfectly arched eyebrows into a furrow. “He didn’t mention it. But then, I’ve hardly seen him since—”

  Finally, a flicker of something like emotion.

  “I thought you might like to have a look at what we found,” I said.

  “Of course,” she said, moving aside a step to usher us in. “Forgive me for keeping you standing outside. I apologize, I’m not at my best.”

  “No apology needed.” On my way past her, I caught a whiff of scotch. From her skin, not the glass.

  Dom, bless his heart, stopped and gave her a hug. She seemed to cling for a moment before pulling in a breath and breaking away. She patted his cheek. “I can’t get over how grown up you are, mon chèr.” Taking his arm, she led us into her very formally furnished salon. “Are you still riding?”

  “No time for anything but books,” he said.

  “You sound like my Ophelia. No time for horses anymore. Just school and music, school and music. Too bad. She looked so pretty up on her big stallion.”

  We declined her offer of drinks. While she refreshed her own at a bar cart at the far end of the long room, I opened my laptop on an imitation Louis Quinze table and pulled up the footage from the train station.

  “I saw you on the Jimmy show, you know,” she said, recorking the scotch bottle and crossing the room toward us. “I record it every night in case he has someone interesting on. Who told me you would be a guest? Oh, I don’t remember. Now, what is it you have to show me?”

  She leaned forward to peer at the computer screen. I touched play and Ophelia appeared beside Nabi.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, leaning closer. “Where is this?”

  “The train station car park Friday night.” I pointed to the time stamp in the top corner.

  “They were supposed to be going for pizza after rehearsal. What was she doing at the train station? More to the point, what was she doing with that boy? We forbade her.”

  “Looks like he’s carrying her cello,” I said.

  She watched Nabi hand the cello to her daughter, the chaste good-bye exchange, and their separate exits. “The woman from the police told me the boy has nothing to do with whatever Ophelia is up to. Now I can believe her.” She turned to me. “Is there more?”

  “Not very much.” I showed her the next sequence, freezing the last frame after Ophelia, alone on the street, walked on into the dark beyond the camera’s range. I said, “Your husband didn’t mention seeing this?”

  She shook her head as answer.

  “Is he home?”

  “Probably not. I’m sure he’s out patrolling the streets the way he does, looking for Ophelia.”

  “The way he does?”

  She lowered her chin and looked me in the eye. “This isn’t the first time my daughter hasn’t come home, you know. One time she went into the haras to sleep and whatever she saw there frightened her enough that she scuttled back home to the nest. Since then, when she disappears Yvan gets into his car and goes looking for her in case she gets frightened. I think she knows he will. I wonder sometimes if it’s a game they play. Hide and seek; he never finds her, and she comes home when she’s cooled off.”

  “You’re expecting her to come home, then?”

  “I have no idea anymore.” She sipped her scotch. “This time is different from the others. She wasn’t angry when she left. We gave her permission to stay out late because we’d been getting along quite well lately. Or, at least, I thought we were. So why did she go? Not that it matters now. She’s never been gone this long before.”

  All I could think to say was, “I’m sorry for what you are going through.”

  She nodded and drained her glass.

  Dom cleared his throat; it was time for us to go.

  I closed the computer and tucked it into my bag. “Again, I’m sorry for interrupting your evening, Madame Fouchet. But so many people have already seen the video from Friday, and there’s been so much talk that I wanted to make sure you saw it for yourself.”

  “Yes, so much talk. Too much talk.”

  “Then we’ll wish you all the best and say good night.”

  “Oh, so soon? But wouldn’t you like to stay for a drink? Dom, you’re old enough now.”

  He smiled, shook his head. “I’m driving. If I crash my scooter with Maggie on board Papa will never forgive me.”

  “No, you’re right. Some things are beyond forgiveness, aren’t they?”

  Madame Fouchet stood in the open door watching us walk to Dom’s scooter. I wondered if she would call us back, but she closed the door as we fastened our helmets. Dom’s face in deep shadows under the streetlights was unreadable.

  “That conversation was somewhat disturbing,” I said. “You okay?”

  “Sure,” he said, taking his seat and steadying the bike for me to climb on behind. “Why not?”

  “She seemed, I don’t know, flirty with you. Is that normal for her?”

  He chuckled. “I don’t know her all that well—I’m a kid, she’s a parent—so I don’t know what’s normal for her. I’m surprised she remembered my name. I think she had a lot to drink, yes?”

  “Definitely.” I chastised myself for being judgmental. The woman had to be going through hell. I doubted we had enough in common to ever be good friends, but this was no time to be critical. If she drank to cope, so what?

  We were two houses away when a dark Audi passed us. I shifted around enough to see if it would turn into the Fouchets’ driveway. When it did, I straightened back and tapped Dom’s shoulder. “So?”

  He shrugged. “Possibly, yes.”

  ] Six

  Broken ribs hurt like hell,” I said. “And there’s nothing you can do except wait until they heal. Poor Nabi.”

  Jean-Paul opened the side gate and led me out onto the foot path. I took some deep breaths as we waited for other early-morning runners to pass before we fell into line, setting off at an easy jog until we warmed up—the morning was surprisingly chilly in the hour after dawn—keeping to the left to let faster runners and bikers pass on the right.

  “There is more concern about the bruised kidney,” Jean-Paul said, holding back to stay beside me; he was a far better runner. I was asleep when they all got back from the hospital last night and he was filling me in on Nabi’s examination. “The beating poor Nabi got was absolutely brutal. I hope those kids are taken into custo
dy.”

  “Taking bets on that?”

  “Odds are they get counseling, sensitivity sessions, assignment to community work, maybe. They’ll be off the hook before the summer holiday. Before Nabi’s injuries heal, anyway.”

  “No permanent damage, though?”

  “Not to the body,” he said. “But damage to the heart and soul, who can say?”

  In February, outside a refugee camp in Greece, Jean-Paul was badly injured by a bomb. After that, sometimes he cried out in his sleep. Last night, he cried out again.

  “How are you today?” I asked.

  He took some time before answering. “All things considered, I’m all right. And you?”

  “What you said.”

  We picked up the pace and ran in silence, both of us lost to our own thoughts as we turned off the path that ran behind the house, away from the crowd of bikers and more earnest morning runners, and into the open trails of the haras. We were far from alone, however. There were other runners and clusters of chatty walkers all over the park. Twice I spotted homeless men emerge from the dense copse that surrounded the vast central meadow; Ophelia told Nabi that scary people come out at night. I was still surprised that there could be homeless people in a socialist system. It was explained to me that while refugees admitted to France for humane reasons, like Nabi and Diba, were immediately eligible for benefits like health care and housing assistance, documented immigrants, like me, had a waiting period before social benefits kicked in; I was paying for international health insurance. Undocumented immigrants were eligible for rien, zip, because they were no more welcome in France than they were in the United States. Was that who these men were, undocumented aliens?

  We heard a chorus of shouts ahead on the right where one of the clusters of women walkers seemed to be having an argument with a bearded man. Two of the women, both gray-haired, began to tussle with him, trying to keep him in place when it was clear that he wanted to go. Jean-Paul and several other men turned on their jets and sprinted across the lawn toward them, me in their wake. When I arrived, the long-beard was on the ground with one panting male runner sitting on his legs and two others pinning his arms. Off to the side, a woman, wide-eyed and flushed, held a beautiful cello by its neck.