Deadly Slipper (12 page)

Hans stole a nervous glance at his companion, who had not left off staring at him in a way that made the young German increasingly uncomfortable. It was at this point that Hans realized that they had left the main highway and were bouncing crazily over a dirt road, headed in a westerly direction, trailing a plume of dust behind them.

“Hey, wait a minute,” he shouted in German. “Stop! Where are you going?”

If anything, the truck picked up speed. With difficulty, he stood up, steadying himself against the side rail, and worked his way forward. In order to
reach the cab, he had to step over the legs of his fellow passenger.

“Bitte,”
he said again and banged with his fist on the metal roof.
“Halt!”
The wind cut at his blond hair as he stood swaying with the side-to-side motion of the vehicle.
“Stopp! Stopp!”
The landscape of Black Périgord, which he had so recently been prepared to admire, flew past him, wild and unfriendly. Then the truck took a sudden turn that sent him sprawling over the other man, upsetting the crates, which, being loosely stacked, went spinning against the tailgate. The patch-eyed man, with intentional malevolence, seized the hapless German by the collar and shoved him backward with a force sufficient to land him winded against the opposite side of the bed.

“Hey!” shouted Hans, terrified but prepared to defend himself. “What did you do that for?”

For answer, Vrac gave only a hoarse, unpleasant laugh.

Hans took in the size of the man’s hands and the fact that they were now jolting through alien forest over a deeply rutted road. Tall trees rose up gloomily all around. Mutely, he sank to the floor of the truck bed.

After what seemed like an interminable time to the young German, the truck came to a rocking halt. The cab door slammed, and the driver got out and came to the back.

“Listen.” Hans rose to his feet and stopped. He
now perceived that the driver was not a man but a woman, but that did not improve his situation. Seen full-on, hat pushed back, her aspect, with its gargoyle features and a purple mark over one eye, was enough to make his mouth go dry.

“Wh-what do you want?”

“Cash.” La Binette held out a blackened hand as hard and horny as a hoof. She never took traveler’s checks or credit cards.

“Haven’t got any,” Hans squeaked, which was near enough to the truth.

“Your wallet,” la Binette demanded.

“I give you money, and then what?” he demanded spiritedly in his rudimentary French.

Again, Vrac gave a loud, braying laugh. “Give!” he roared, rising to his feet.

Frightened though he was, Hans was a quick thinker. Also a fast sprinter.

“All right,” he said and picked up his pack as if to comply. In one fluid motion, he leaped over the opposite side rail and was off through the trees, running like a hare.

Vrac gave a tardy bellow and lumbered forward.

“Leave it,” snarled the mother. The German was already lost to view. With a stoical grunt, la Binette climbed back into the cab, turned the truck around, and set off in the direction they had come. Vrac lay down again and resumed his nap. His mother drove until they rejoined the D703. She turned onto it and proceeded slowly west. At
this time of year there wasn’t much traffic, and fewer hitchhikers. From June on, she knew things would improve.

She stood still, her heart pounding. Once again she heard the sounds, a soft rustling in the undergrowth, the snap of a twig.

“Who’s there?” she called. And turned, staring wildly about her.

From the dark shadow of the forest there came only breathless silence.

Panicked, she groped for a stick, a rock, anything with which to defend herself. Then she glimpsed it moving behind the screen of trees. Slowly it broke into view, coming on her with an implacable tread. In horror, Mara saw for the first time the large, shapeless thing that had been behind her, the creature through whose hungry eyes she had watched her sister on the forest path. Desperate to buy escape for Bedie, Mara did the only thing she could do. Shouting an inarticulate challenge, she ran straight at it.

•

She awoke with a thundering in her head.
A dream
, she told herself.
It was only a dream.
Abruptly, she sat up in the darkness, breathing hard.

And then she froze in terror.
It had been no dream.
There was something in the room with her, a black, featureless form standing motionless at the foot of her bed. She opened her mouth to scream. Nothing
but a strangled whimper came out. As she cowered there helplessly, the thing raised its arms, and she saw in that awful moment that it had no head. In a rush it was on her, enveloping her in a sudden, suffocating wave of red.

Mara lay facedown, drenched in sweat, heart hammering in her chest. The blankets were twisted around her legs. Gradually, familiar sounds reached her. Jazz’s light snoring beside her on the bed. The early-morning sound of birds. She raised her head. Gray, misty dawn filled her window.

With a sob, she stumbled out into the cold, damp air, ran barefoot across the wet grass, fumbled with the latch of her studio door. Once inside, she switched on her computer with trembling fingers, dialed up and pounded out her electronic cry for help.

•

Patsy Reicher opened Mara’s e-mail hours later, at the start of her day by New York time. She ran her fingers through her crazy gray-red mop of hair. Thoughtfully, she moved a wad of gum from one side of her mouth to the other. The air in her office was stale. She got up from her desk, shoved open a window. The smell of the day, the grind of traffic, a sudden blare of car horns reached her from the street below. She returned
to her desk and tapped out a response:

She was at his door again, sweeping past in a rush of air, taking possession of his front room. “Julian, we need to make a start.”

“Eh? What are you talking about?”

It was nine o’clock on a Friday evening. Mara’s knock had jerked him out of an armchair doze, dog-tired as he was from a day of heavy labor. He had been assisted in this enterprise by his neighbor’s grandson, Bernard, whom he employed casually, partly because Madame Léon was a lovely old girl, partly because he valued fresh eggs, and partly because Bernard was the closest thing Julian had to a bulldozer. He really didn’t want to deal with Mara.

“Our search for the orchids. And the
pigeonnier.”
She was depositing an assortment of maps on his dining table.

Christ! There it was again, this coming at him blind-side. Julian shook himself awake. He needed to take control of the situation.

“Look here, Mara, you simply have no idea what you’re asking. Do you know how much area we’d have to cover? On foot and bending from the waist?”

She paused, clearly lacking the faintest notion of the enormity of her demand. “Why bending from the waist?”

“Because, dammit, terrestrial orchids aren’t that bloody easy to see! They grow in tall grass and among other plants. They’re widely scattered. Anyway, I already told you, you’re looking for a specific place that might never have existed, where a certain sequence of flora grew. Nearly twenty years ago. It could have been plowed up, grazed over, or wiped out by herbicides. Or simply buried under a meter of cement!”

She was taken aback by his vehemence. “But you agreed to help me. I can’t do it alone. You know the terrain. You’ve got the field notes.”

“Okay. Sure. But I’m telling you, it’s not that bleeding easy.”

“Right.” She raised her hands, palms forward. “That’s where I thought the
pigeonnier
would come in. I’ve worked out a system. We’ll look for it first, as our main point of reference, you see? Once we find it, we can use the orchids to work from there.”

“If we find it, don’t you mean? Don’t forget, Paul, Gaston and god knows who else have been looking. So have you, so have I—”

“Well, I’ve just figured out a way of making the job easier,” she announced, waving at the maps. “The Série bleue. I got one for every section of the
Dordogne and including the western part of Quercy. They show everything. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.”

Julian was fully familiar with the Série bleue maps. They were a necessity to someone like him, whose customers resided on isolated hilltops, in the hidden folds of valleys, and down unmarked lanes. The maps, on a scale of one centimeter to 250 meters, and based on National Geographical Institute surveys, depicted not only contour lines, geological features, land use, and types of vegetative cover, but every road, every footpath, every man-made structure on the landscape. He could, for example, pick out his own cottage—fifth dot on the right on the road going west out of Grissac. But it was difficult to say, unless you knew beforehand, what was what.

“Look,” he pointed out, “they show everything, sure, but these maps aren’t foolproof. Or what if the
pigeonnier we’re
looking for no longer exists? Besides, on paper, buildings show up only as black dots. Things aren’t labeled ‘house’ or ‘barn,’ you know. How will you be able to tell a dovecote from a—a pigsty or a
cabane
?”

“Simple. The
pigeonnier
we’re looking for is in the middle of a field, away from other buildings. All we have to do is look for isolated dots in the middle of open spaces.”

“All we have to do—? Mara, there must be thousands of isolated dots in the middle of open spaces all over the Dordogne. Are we going to check out every
one of them?”

“Listen,” she said, a flinty edge coming into her voice, “we had a deal. You got your photographs. Now help me find my sister. Or at least the path she walked before she disappeared.”

He gave in. In a perverse sort of way, he was even relieved that she had kick-started the process. He had been sitting on the fence for days, wondering how to deal with her, what to do about the Lady’s Slipper, wanting it but knowing it to be impossible. Now she had given him a possible means to resolve both issues. But he’d have to work fast. Orchids had a limited flowering season. It was already coming on to early May. It had been a hot, wet spring, with early flowering, meaning that many of the specimens captured in the film would not be much longer in evidence. Using the maps to identify possible
pigeonniers
made sense. At least it shortened the odds.

“All right,” he said. “Give me a couple of days. I’ll see what I can do.”

•

Thus, Julian found himself spending his Saturday afternoon after rugby (Grissac won for a change, twenty-three to fifteen, in their “friendly” game against La Grotte) at home, instead of celebrating at Chez Nous in the company of teammates. Forgoing Mado’s mouth-watering veal pie, he settled down at his kitchen table with the photographs and a solitary, sorry lunch of tinned cassoulet, washed down by quite a bit of wine.

The only way through an impossible task, he decided, was to be systematic. He got a pad of paper and lined off the top sheet into three columns. In the first column, he listed the orchids in the photographs by common rather than taxonomical name and in order of their appearance. There were fourteen different species in all. The first seven—Helleborines,
Limodorum
, Common Spotteds, Military Orchids, Bird’s-nest, Butterfly, and Pyramidal Orchids—were followed by the
pigeonnier.
Then another seven: Marsh, Bee, Lizard, Man, Lady, Tongue, and Fly Orchids. Finally, the Lady’s Slipper. Next to each, in the second column, he jotted down what he knew of the growing environment. Orchids were habitat-specific. Each required well-defined growing conditions: sun, dappled light, deep shade, varying degrees of dampness and soil conditions. Some proliferated on hilltops and open meadows; others grew shyly in woodlands and forests. Some occurred in conjunction with certain trees; some were transitional plants, occupying the edges of clearings; still others could only be found in wetlands.

When he had completed this task, he saw that the information, organized in this way, told more of a story than he had realized. In fact, he had created a specific progression of landscapes, like beads threaded on a string. However, the problem was locating where this particular combination of habitats was to be found. For the region in its entirety provided endless possibilities: pine and deciduous
forests, grasslands, fields, swamps, seepage zones, scree, scrubland, all characterized by the calcareous, alkaline soils on which most of the species he had listed thrived. Again, he was ominously aware of the immensity of the undertaking ahead of him.

His only recourse was to fall back on actual sightings. These were documented in field notes that he had made over the years, as well as hundreds of prints and slides, everything stored topsy-turvy in an old metal cabinet.

He began by pulling out anything related to the orchids captured on the film and entering known locations in the third column. For most, he had numerous sightings, and in some cases this proved more problematic than helpful. For example, the purple Pyramidal Orchid, an aggressive colonizer, grew everywhere. Next to it he simply wrote:
widespread, abundant.

Then it occurred to him that he really needed to focus on sightings dating from around the time of Bedie’s disappearance in 1984. Here he met a more serious roadblock. In those days he had not been particularly systematic in charting floral distributions, except for the notations he had done for his book, and even these were casual scribbles on the backs of envelopes and so forth.

“Merde!” he uttered, shoving his glasses up to the top of his head.

Inevitably, his thoughts drifted to the
Cypripedium.
He rose to stare in fascination at a blowup of the
print that he had pinned to his kitchen wall. There was now no doubt in his mind about the slipper-shaped labellum, although a more objective observer might have pointed out that the stain running across the print made identification iffy. A remarkable flower under any circumstances, magnified five times it seemed almost nightmarish. The deep-pink labellum looked swollen, veined, and slightly obscene, although some of these effects could have been owing to the graininess of the enlargement. Two wildly twisted lateral petals, springing stiffly away from the slipper, resembled fantastical, blackish-purple mustachios.