Deadly Slipper (16 page)

He allowed her a brief pause and a swallow from his canteen.

Then he was off again. “Come on,” he called over his shoulder. “Chop-chop. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

“Look, I’m going as fast as I can.”

“Well, don’t complain. This was what you wanted.”

She was grateful when they plunged into shady woodland. Helleborines, each plant bearing clusters of delicately nodding white bells, embroidered the
shoulders of their path. Eventually, beech and pine gave way to a dense forest of oaks and chestnuts whose branches met overhead, creating a greenish net of light that shivered down through the leafy canopy. Here great vines hung like curtains, and ferns carpeted the forest floor. The air was fresh and cool, redolent of leaf mulch and growing things. Mara leaned against a tree, breathing hard. Julian drew up beside her.

“Forests,” he murmured softly near her left ear. “Mystery, creation, and evolution.” It was poetically, almost seductively said, and she turned to him in surprise. His eyes, brown flecked with gold, held hers for a moment. He placed his hands on her shoulders. Her heart gave a leap.

“Look,” he whispered, turning her about, and pointed out purple spears of
Limodorum abortivum
, rising from the litter of the forest floor. “You see how they follow the root system of this old beech tree? One up on old Géraud.”

•

Their chief difficulty lay in finding Géraud’s landmark oak. There were so many, all clotted with balls of parasitic mistletoe, but not a
Neottia
in sight. An hour of off-trail searches into likely growing areas produced nothing more interesting than a giant bracket fungus adorning a tree like a huge, fleshy lip.

“We’re not going to find it, are we?” Mara said, seating herself wearily on a rock. Jazz flopped down panting beside her.

“Wouldn’t put it past the old fox to have purposely misled me,” Julian fumed.

They abandoned the search and ate their sandwiches. It was a bizarre kind of investigation they were conducting, Mara thought, taking in her leafy surroundings. One in which the sole witnesses to Bedie’s disappearance were silent and ephemeral, their only evidence the existence of a
pigeonnier
and a certain pattern of plants. How, she wondered in bemusement, do you question a flower?

“Do you suppose,” Mara mused aloud after a long silence, “that what Maurice said is really true?”

“What?” Julian, deep in his own reflections, surfaced.

“That people commit violence over orchids?”

He replied cautiously, “It’s been known to happen. I’ve heard worse stories than Maurice’s—double-dealing, even murder—but mainly to do with tropicals, the showy ones that collectors go mad over. Avid fanciers can get pretty unbalanced. Why?”

“Well, supposing it wasn’t a serial predator that Bedie met but an orchid fanatic. Supposing this person never really meant her any harm. Only she did something, accidentally, to an orchid that he was trying to protect…”

“What, stepped on it?” Julian was incredulous.

“Or say Bedie found a rare species, like the
Cypripedium
, that this person wanted to keep secret. Bedie might not have been exactly cooperative if she thought the world should know about it. This
person could have seen red, struck out blindly—”

“You mean Géraud?” Julian looked interested. “Admittedly, he’s bloody obsessive about his favorite stands …” He trailed off, frowning, then shook his head. “I don’t see it,” he concluded regretfully. “Géraud’s a right prick, but not even he would go to that extent. Anyway, what you’re saying puts every amateur orchidologist in the region under suspicion. In fact, every bloody member of Société Jeannette—I can give you the subscription list—to say nothing of Maurice’s Vigilants lot.”

“Well, there is something else. Iris says she leaves him periodically.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“The four-to-five-year cycle. Adverse life changes. Her departures could set him off.”

“What are you saying, every time she walks out he goes on a rampage?” Julian gave a sharp bark of laughter. “Oh, he’s impossible to live with, I’ll give you that. In fact, I don’t know how Iris puts up with him. But that doesn’t make him a serial killer. And anyway, you keep saying ‘he.’ It could just as easily have been a woman. Females can be pretty violent, too.”

Mara sighed and took off her shoe to examine a developing blister.

“It was just a thought,” she said.

Julian opened the map and took a bearing with his compass, orienting them toward their final dot.

“Rather than go all the way back to the main trail, what say we save time by angling through the
woods and picking it up farther ahead? It’ll mean some crashing through the bush, if you think you’re up to it.”

“Sure,” Mara agreed, although she was quite certain she wouldn’t enjoy the crashing part.

Farther on, as they plunged deeper and deeper into forest, Julian remarked, “You know, peasants used to give this area wide berth. It’s full of swamps and once had a bad reputation as the hideout of brigands and wolves. Even werewolves.”

“Brrr.”

“Of course, that was a hundred years ago. Still”—he paused to glance back at her—“even today you wouldn’t want to get lost here.”

“No. I would not.”

But she did get lost. It was after Julian had led them over a ridge and down into an extensive bog. Dragonflies hovered thickly in the air. The earth was spongy and full of standing water. As usual, he strode ahead of her. Soon he had vanished behind a gray-green wall of willow bushes. Jazz, off on business of his own, was nowhere to be seen. Mara found herself struggling through high swamp brush that obscured her view, cursing the ankle-deep, sucking mud, and falling farther and farther behind.

It was an eerie, claustrophobic place full of rustling vegetation. A frog erupted suddenly in front of her, landing on her foot. She choked back a yell of alarm as she shook it off. Not, of course, that Julian would have heard her. Where was he? She fought her
way forward. Quite unexpectedly and with a feeling of immense relief, she broke through into an open water meadow.

“Julian?” she called, shading her eyes to look around her. “Jazz!”

The meadow grasses rippled in the wind. She was utterly alone.

“Julian,” she shouted, louder this time. She stood still to listen. Silence. A slight feeling of unease gripped her. On the far side of the meadow, a dense wood rose up. A gap in the trees revealed a path.
Dammit
, she thought,
he could have waited.
Furious, she made for the trailhead.

“Julian?” she called doubtfully, peering into a tunnel of greenery that led uninvitingly into a twilight world.

“Bastard,” she muttered and started unwillingly down it. Suddenly a brownish blur exploded in front of her. She screamed and ducked. The thing passed so close to her head that she felt a great rush of air lift her hair. She had an impression of rapidly beating wings, an open beak, cruel, bright eyes. Seconds later, she realized that she had startled a buzzard from its perch. She saw it now, through a gap in the trees, lofting powerfully, angling sharply against the sky. Shaken, she stumbled back out into the sunshine.

“Shit!” It was as much an exclamation of fear as of real anger with herself for being afraid. Anyway, it was ridiculous to think she was lost. Somewhere along the way, Julian would find her. In fact, he was
probably looking for her at that moment. And if he didn’t, well, screw him, all she had to do was to return the way she had come until she found the path they’d taken when they branched off in their search for the Bird’s-nest Orchids. Working back through the swamp, as much as she disliked the hissing world of towering reeds, would be easy. She could simply follow the swath broken by her original passage. But finding her way through the uncharted forest to rejoin the signposted main trail might not be so simple. She had not paid particular attention to the way they had come, merely followed Julian as he pushed through the understory of the trees.

“Shit,” she cried again and recrossed the water meadow.

She almost stumbled on him, crouching behind a thicket of willows.

“Julian,” she cried out, half in relief, half in exasperation. “Where were you?”

He peered up at her. “What do you mean, where was I? I was here.”

“Well,
I
was lost. Didn’t you hear me shouting for you? You—you left me behind!”

“I did no such thing.” He sounded indignant, but she thought he looked a little guilty. “And no, I didn’t hear you. Or, if I did, how was I to know you were lost? I mean, how could you get lost? All you had to do was follow me. Anyway, look what I’ve found.” He pointed triumphantly to a pair of tiny, green spires rising bravely out of a saturated patch of moss.

“Hammarbya paludosa,”
he said with satisfaction as he uncapped his camera lens. “Bog Orchids. Very early on. Won’t flower for another month or so. This species is special because the edges of the leaves put out tiny bulblets that eventually grow into new plants. It’s an unusual form of vegetative propagation. Bog Orchids are rare. I’ve only ever seen them once before, around Le Bugue.”

At that point, Jazz trotted up, muddy and looking pleased with himself.

“I don’t get it,” Mara mused wearily as Julian knelt to photograph his find.

“Get what? Look, Mara, d’you mind moving? You’re throwing a shadow.”

She stepped aside. “People like you. Bedie. This—this
thing
with plant life.” Her tone, she knew, was brittle.

He edged around crabwise for a close-up from another angle. She took in his avid, soiled presence and turned away.

“What thing? Anyway,” he said blandly, moving back for a final shot, “without ‘people like me’ you wouldn’t have a hope of tracking your sister. Do you have any idea how many hours of collective field observation—mine and Géraud’s, not that he’s been much bloody use—you’re drawing on?”

He stood up and took a reading on his compass. Then he dug into his rucksack for a notebook, in which he recorded his find, its precise location, and the date. “I’ll come back in a few weeks to check on
how they’re doing,” he said. “I’ll be able to get them in flower then.” He seemed to expect her to be as cheered as himself at the prospect.

“Speaking of your sister,” Julian said as he packed his notebook away. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. How did she get going? On wild orchids, I mean?”

“Oh,” said Mara, ruefully aware that Julian had yet to show as much curiosity about her. So much for Prudence’s speculations. “It started one summer when she got a job with the Ontario Ministry of the Environment. They sent her up to map orchids on the Bruce Peninsula.”

“Ah.” He looked interested. “Did you know that you have something like five species of Lady’s Slipper in Ontario?”

“Whatever. Anyway, Bedie spent three months wandering around in the woods, sleeping in a tent, and living on peanut butter. She got eaten alive by blackflies and lost some of her gear to a bear—our woods aren’t as tame as here—but she came out with fifty rolls of film and happier than a tick in an armpit.”

He studied her critically for a moment. “Different from you.”

True, Mara acknowledged. For the first time in her life, she had an inkling of her sister’s mind, the passion that ruled true amateurs, motivating them to spend countless hours bending at the waist, as Julian had said, all for the sake of discovering and documenting the existence of a single flower or the
breeding ground of a particular species. There was an avaricious, competitive side to it, too, she decided, remembering Géraud’s possessiveness as well as Julian’s recent expression of gloating, which caused them to hoard, like gold, the sighting of a rare plant.

“We only look alike,” she replied dryly, and it occurred to her how much more Julian would have had in common with Bedie than with her. Together they could have tramped the length and breadth of the Dordogne, delighting over the discovery of a
Platanthera
this or an Ophrys that. As Patsy had put it in one of their e-mail exchanges,
Whaddya have to do to make it with this guy? Speak Latin?
Unreasonably, Mara was suddenly made uneasy by a stab of jealousy directed at her missing but darkly present twin.

“I see,” Julian said, and applied himself to capping his camera. They walked on in silence.

•

The remaining dot proved to be a disappointing pile of rubble. Mara looked at it briefly, taking in the dimensions of the foundations, and shook her head. Julian concurred.

It was past four by the time they returned to the road where they had left the van. Julian was pleased with his find of Bog Orchids. Mara was footsore, filthy, and stumbling with exhaustion.

•

Patsy e-mailed back:

The following day, Mara had business in Bergerac, so Julian offered to go alone to Doissat to check out the first of his own Bird’s-nest sightings, dating from 1988. Secretly, Mara was relieved. It was her hunt, she knew, but she had blisters on both heels, and her experience in the swamp had deflated her enthusiasm considerably.

He called her that evening to report.

“Well, it’s no longer there.”

Admittedly, the stand as he remembered it had been patchy. Now he expressed his dismay that not only the
Neottia
but also much of the shady woodland that had once bordered a little watercourse no longer existed.

“The trees have all been cut down,” he told her, sounding seriously aggrieved. “There’s nothing left but rotting stumps and soggy fields full of cows and flies. And the dots you circled as
pigeonniers
were a cottage and a ruined shed.”