“Tell her, Jean-Paul.” Claire looked across the room at him. “You have seen me wrangle a reluctant fourteen-hundred-pound horse into and out of a trailer many times. Tell her that with a strong rope I could get that man into the pond alone.”
He held up his palms, maybe yes, maybe no. He said, “Yvan was hanged with good double-braided lead rope. Is that what you used on the man?”
She started to nod but stopped herself. “I didn’t notice the rope Yvan used.”
“Madame Fouchet,” Delisle said, reclaiming control. “Your daughter was in the car, waiting during all of this?”
Claire shook her head. “When I finished, she was gone.”
“Did you look for her?”
“I hoped she went home.”
“Did you hear from Ophelia at all after that night?”
After a long sigh, Claire said, “Ophelia left a note addressed to me and Yvan in her room. I didn’t find it until sometime late on Saturday. It’s a poem, I suppose you’d say. At the end of the poem Ophelia wrote a single word, ‘Enough.’ And then she signed her name. I showed it to Yvan and asked if he knew what it meant, but he did not. He said it looked like school work because the poem is in English and many of the words are unfamiliar. The passage was all about plants. My daughter and I had been getting along quite peacefully lately, so I thought maybe it was a gift to me because she knows how much pleasure the garden gives me. Later, I searched online and found that it comes from Shakespeare, Hamlet, and it’s about Ophelia, her namesake, running away from a cruel father and the prince, and that’s when I knew my girl ran away and would not come back until she was ready.”
I had to suck in some air to keep from popping her in the nose. “Is that what you want?”
“No,” she snapped. “I want this all to be over. I want my life back.”
Before I could say anything more, Delisle asked her, “Where’s the note?”
Claire pulled a folded sheet of lined notebook paper from her pocket, frayed at the edges from much handling. Gently, she opened it and handed it to Delisle. The detective read it, scowled, shrugged, and handed it to me to decipher. My heart sank when I realized what it was; I had read the passage just the day before. Hamlet, act 4, scene 7.
Delisle was watching me. She said, “And?”
Before answering her, I asked Claire, “Did you explain what this is to Yvan?”
In a cold, clear voice, she said, “Yvan had a very bad night last night. Full of guilt and self-loathing. This morning I sensed he was near the edge. I brought up the note again, yes. And what I thought it meant.”
“Madame MacGowen?” Delisle held out her hand for the worn bit of paper. “Tell me.”
“It’s a suicide note.”
] Thirteen
Watch your step.” Detective Delisle led me and Jean-Paul down a small grassy embankment below an overpass where a culvert ran under an equestrian trail in the haras. “The cadaver dogs were sent into the haras first thing this morning to search for her. They found her before noon. It looks like Ophelia climbed up inside there and finished what she started earlier.”
Ophelia’s body had been taken away hours earlier, but the sickly-sweet stench of death still hung in the air Monday afternoon. I held my breath and leaned over the edge of the culvert for a quick look inside. The culvert was the usual sort of concrete tube with an accumulation of leaves and grass and random detritus in the bottom. A trickle of muddy runoff water ran down the middle. Not a cozy place to die. There was barely room for Ophelia to sit upright, but the equestrian trail would be familiar to her, and it was out of the way. Exactly what Ophelia sought late on Friday before last.
Next to her body, the search team found an empty vial of Xylazine, a horse tranquilizer, and a used syringe. The Fouchets’ veterinarian confirmed that last fall he had written Yvan Fouchet a prescription for the powerful sedative to manage a skittish mare that fought being trailered for travel. The speculation was that Ophelia, who would know how to inject an animal, had found the vial and syringe kit in the bag of horse tack, where it was kept, when she got the rope from the car for her mother Friday night. She then took the kit to the culvert with her and injected herself. From the position of the body, she curled up, fell into a coma, stopped breathing, and died.
“Ophelia still had her mother’s scarf tied around the cuts on her wrist,” Detective Delisle said, leading us away from the mouth of the culvert. “The decomposition, as you can imagine, was advanced. But the wounds are visible. The doctor said the pattern is not consistent with defensive wounds. It is far more likely they are hesitation wounds.”
“She tried to slit her wrist?” I said.
Delisle nodded. “She seemed to persist in her effort, but it isn’t easy to kill oneself that way. I wonder if the poor man we found in the pond came upon her and tried to stop her but she fought him for control of the knife. Her mother assumed he was attacking her, and events transpired as they did. Another misunderstood Good Samaritan.”
“Has the man been identified?” Jean-Paul asked.
“Not yet. Maybe never. His pockets were empty, no identification of any kind.”
“I wonder,” I said. “Do you think Claire Fouchet had the presence of mind to empty his pockets before she put him in the water? If I were you, I’d take a look in her new rose bed.”
Delisle laughed, a sad little chuckle. “Nothing that woman might do would surprise me anymore. I know she used her daughter’s disappearance as an opportunity to torture her husband literally to the point of death. Whether he was a volunteer or not in the final act, he was her victim. She seems so normal. What sort of human would go to such extremes?”
I said, “Detective, a couple of days ago we watched a man drive a van down a crowded sidewalk before he blew himself up. Can you explain that?”
“You were near marché Mouffetard on Wednesday?”
“We were.”
“That’s a whole other level of crazy.” She took a deep breath. “What did the Fouchet woman gain from all this?”
“Schadenfreude,” Jean-Paul said, slipping his hand around my elbow. “The cold-blooded pleasure of watching someone get his just deserts.”
I asked, “Has anyone decided whether Yvan hanged himself, or did he have help?”
“We have to wait for the autopsy. But if Madame Fouchet could drag a man into a pond, she could throw a rope over a beam and pull a man off his feet.”
“Tragic,” Jean-Paul said.
Ari arrived, driving Jean-Paul’s car up a maintenance road toward us; the forensic science team had used the same road when they retrieved Ophelia’s remains earlier. Nabi was in the front seat beside Ari, with his head bowed. After Ari parked, they sat in the car for a few minutes and I wasn’t sure that Nabi would get out.
One stormy night Nabi thrust his life vest on his mother, took his grandmother’s hand and jumped with her into the Mediterranean. The two of them survived, the rest of their family disappeared. No remains. No marker. Just gone. He had insisted that he wanted to see where his friend had been found. He could not let Ophelia go until he saw for himself where she died.
The car doors opened, and Nabi and Ari emerged. Nabi carried a bouquet of spring flowers. With a last word from Ari, and a last nod from Nabi, they walked over to join us.
We folded protectively around the boy. With a little bow, he said, “May I have a moment alone?”
We stepped back and watched him walk over to the end of the culvert. Shyly at first, and then with more curiosity, he looked inside. Then he got down on his knees and laid the flowers inside where his friend had quietly left this life.
While we waited for him, Ari said, “Nabi heard at school today that he was admitted to the Paris conservatory. He’ll start in fall.”
I shot Jean-Paul an accusatory glance.
“Not me this time,” he protested. “I didn’t call anyone.”
Ari chuckled. “Credit his violin teacher. Jean-Paul is not the only man in France with in
fluence.”
Jean-Paul bumped his shoulder against mine. “Tu vois?”
I bumped him back. “Yes, I see. This time. And congratulations to Nabi. When he’s ready, we’ll have a party to celebrate.”
We were quiet on the drive home, Jean-Paul and I in front, Ari and Nabi in the rear. Nabi would need time to accept this new loss, but he had more support now to help him than he had when he first arrived. I thought about Nabi quoting a line from Hamlet to Ophelia, teasing her about the various meanings of rue. She had left her parents a beautiful and sad passage from the same play, a speech where Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, announces that young Ophelia is dead by her own hand. I thought about our Ophelia lying down on a bed of leaves and grass and cold muddy water to take her life. And I wept for her.
] [
There is a willow grows aslant a brook
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do “dead men’s fingers” call them.
There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like a while they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
—Hamlet, act 4, scene 7
About the Author
Edgar Award–winner Wendy Hornsby is the author of thirteen previous mysteries, eleven of them featuring documentary filmmaker Maggie MacGowen. Professor of History Emerita, Wendy lives in Northern California. She welcomes visitors and e-mail at www.wendyhornsby.com.
Mysteries by Wendy Hornsby
The Maggie MacGowen Mystery Series
Telling Lies
Midnight Baby
Bad Intent
77th Street Requiem
A Hard Light
In the Guise of Mercy
The Paramour’s Daughter
The Hanging
The Color of Light
Disturbing the Dark
Number 7, Rue Jacob
A Bouquet of Rue
Other Mysteries
No Harm
Half a Mind
Stories and Essays
Nine Sons
A Bouquet of Rue Page 25