Deadly Slipper (19 page)

At last Mara stirred. “This was not,” she said with conviction, “on the Série bleue.”

Julian was actively scanning the panorama of forested hills and valleys around them. Eventually, he pointed to his left. “My stand of Bird’s-nests can’t be more than three to five kilometers northwest of here.” He paused for Mara to take in his meaning. “Easily within walking distance. So we know which direction she came from.”

“And all we have to do,” Mara finished, “is work out where she went.”

They walked quickly down the hill. At the bottom, they passed an iron box placed on a small cairn of stones at the side of the road. Speculatively they paused before it. The name
BINETTE
was crudely lettered on the front. In several places the paint, once red, now weathered almost black, had run, so that the words had a ghastly, dripping look. At right angles to the road, an overgrown, rutted track led across a rough sheep pasture and down toward a heavily wooded combe. The tip of a chimney showing through the treetops indicated a house.

“At a guess,” said Julian, “I’d say the
pigeonnier
belongs to this farm.”

Something was moving on the track—a large man on a small bicycle, coming toward them not in haste but steadily. As the bicyclist approached, they could hear the faint rattling of the frame on the uneven ground and the soft, regular squeaking of the crank set with each revolution of the pedals.
Grinch. Grinch. Grinch.
The scene had such a dreamlike quality to it that Mara and Julian stood transfixed, watching it unfold. Now the bicyclist was nearing the point where the track met the road. The rider made the turn in their direction. As he drew even with them, he slowed but did not stop. Nor did he greet them, only fixed them with one bulging eye—the other was covered by a dark lens—craning his neck slowly around as he rode past to keep them, particularly Mara, in view as long as possible. Jazz gave a low growl. Mara retained a vision of pale, ragged hair standing on end and a large, misshapen face resembling an oversized, semi-cooked hunk of engorged goose liver.

“Dear Lord,” whispered Mara once she could find her voice, “what was that?”

•

“Eh bien,”
said Loulou La Pouge, “you have found a pigeon house.”

“The
pigeon house,” Mara said firmly. Once again they were in the ex-policeman’s parlor, perched on overstuffed chairs, being served Monbazillac and nuts. “So that’s proof, isn’t it?”

Loulou shrugged and threw up both hands. “Proof
of what? That it exists?
Soyez raisonable
, Mara, you still have not definitely connected the photographs to your sister, and until you can do that, what is your case?”

“But the photos were taken with her camera,” Mara cried impatiently. “Her initials are on the case. How much more do you want?”

“Ah.” The old fellow cocked his head at her with a knowing look. “Always we return to the initials. I’m afraid, mon amie, you did not help your own cause there.”

She paled. “What do you mean?”

“B.D.
Presumably for ‘Beatrice Dunn’?”

“Well of course!”

“But written
over
the accumulated deposit of dirt and mold. A more recent addition, don’t you think?”

Julian started. “A more recent addition? Are you saying someone added those initials at a later time?” He turned to stare unbelievingly at Mara, who flushed a deep red.

“You knew all along!” she burst out furiously at Loulou. “All right. You caught me out. I wrote them myself.” Unrepentantly, she glared at Julian, whose eyebrows were hovering near his hairline. “Don’t you see? It was the only way I could make the police take me seriously.”

“Au contraire,”
Loulou said gravely. “I can tell you that those of us, myself included, who still remember the case would have liked nothing better than to take you seriously. After all, we still have the unsolved
murder of the Tenhagen woman and several disappearances on the books. But we needed more than supposition and—
pardonnez-moi
—flimsy chicanery! It doesn’t do”—he wagged a fat forefinger in her face—“no, it doesn’t do at all to try to trick the police!”

“So you’re saying this camera could have belonged to someone else?” Julian asked.

“No, it did not,” Mara almost shouted. “Forget the initials. That camera was Bedie’s. I’d know it anywhere. Oh, why won’t anyone believe me?”

The two men regarded her in silence. She looked near to tears.

Julian drew a deep breath. “Okay.” He turned to Loulou. “It seems to me you do have proof of a sort. First, Mara recognized the camera as her sister’s, even if she did falsify the initials. That ought to count for something. Second, whoever took those photos knew orchids, how to identify and film them. According to Mara, Bedie was an experienced documenter of orchids. Taken together, I’d say these things argue strongly in favor of the camera’s provenance.”

Heartened, Mara persisted. “And there’s something else. We told you the pigeon house is on a farm called La Binette. What we didn’t tell you is that it’s also just up the road from the spot where the
facteur
, Gaston, had his accident. He was asking around about the
pigeonnier
, you know, showing the photocopy to everyone on his route. Don’t you find it odd that he crashed just there? Besides, we got a
look at the farmer. He’s …” She hesitated. How could she say that he was the embodiment of the nameless terror of her nightmares? “There’s something horrible about him—brutal, ugly. Maybe you won’t be convinced by gut feeling, but I tell you, I
know
he had something to do with my sister’s disappearance. Can’t you persuade the police at least to question him?”

Loulou shook his head, clicking his tongue softly against his teeth. “Mara, you must understand that your credibility with the lads in Périgueux is not—how shall we say—particularly famous. They see you as someone who has already tried to doctor evidence and who is quite capable of doing so again. Moreover, you bring me nothing more than highly circumstantial information, an argument based, as you put it, on a reaction of the viscera. A
pigeonnier
and an ugly farmer do not make a case. Supposing this man is questioned and denies all knowledge of your sister, as he most certainly will. What then?”

“Ask questions. Make people talk. The police can do that. Someone is bound to know something, to remember something.”

Loulou smiled indulgently. “For you it seems so simple. But you don’t understand how the rural mind works. Make people talk.
Ma foi!
The locals will simply close ranks. This man is one of them, and the tendency is always to cover for one’s own, regardless. Besides, what you need is something much more concrete than local gossip, Mara. A solid link tying
this man to your sister. That’s what you must establish, don’t you see?”

Mara rose, chin set firm. “Loulou, all I can see is that the only thing that will convince you is finding Bedie’s body on that farm. Well, if that’s what it takes, that’s what we’ll do!”

Julian, who found himself hurrying out the door after her, wished, not for the first time, that she would be more sparing in her use of the first person plural.

Gaston felt like his hero, Marshal Ney. Or, rather, what he imagined Marshal Ney must have felt like as he planned and directed the victorious battles of Friedland, Smolensk, and Borodino. The son of a barrel-maker from Saarlouis, Ney had risen to fame and glory in the days of the Empire. Gaston was also from a line of barrel-makers, from Bordeaux.

First, there was the triumphant moment when Mara had presented him with a check for one thousand euros. This had been in the recovery ward in the presence of his wife and daughters. Now that they understood the situation, they had forgiven him and embraced Mara enthusiastically. Even the once-disapproving doctor shook Mara’s hand. The other ward patients thought Gaston had won the lottery. Although his eyes were bruised and bloodshot, tubes still ran out of nearly every orifice, and most parts of his body, including his nose, were heavily bandaged, it had been the best day of his life.

Then followed a deeply gratifying conference with Mara and Julian, both of them hanging on his lips, as it were.

“So you see,” Mara appealed to him, “what we need is a way of getting information on those La Binette people without arousing suspicion.”

“It’s more than that,” said Julian. “We need to be able to get onto their land.”

“Hrrr,” Gaston spoke with difficulty around his tubes. “You ha’ to be ca’ful. I heard sub preddy fuddy stories aboud dem.”

Mara and Julian nodded. Their sighting of Vrac—the man on the bicycle could have been none other—made them alive to this advice.

In the end, Gaston advised them to talk with the people in the château on the hill, Monsieur and Madame de Sauvignac. He knew them personally, having delivered their mail for nearly thirty years. If there was anything to be gotten on those La Binette folk, the de Sauvignacs would have it. He then gave Mara and Julian a barely intelligible version of the history of the de Sauvignacs as he knew it: the early death of one son, the estrangement of the other, the mother gone right off her head. He finished by describing the present melancholy state of affairs in which the old couple lived out their days alone, rattling about in a great cave of a mansion.

The nurse came in to warn Julian and Mara not to tire her patient.

“Good lug,” Gaston gurgled happily after them as they departed. “Leb be doe wha’ habbens.” And he touched the side of his bandaged nose knowingly with his good hand.

•

When Mara telephoned Henri de Sauvignac, she mentioned only her interest in the
pigeonnier.
The
old gentleman was courteous but wary and surprisingly evasive. From this she judged that Gaston must have, at some previous time, given the de Sauvignacs his undoubtedly gruesome version of
la canadienne disparue.
To them, she was only a stranger with unpleasant questions to ask. Henri de Sauvignac made the excuse that his wife was not well, apologized, and said they could not possibly receive her at the moment. However, if she would be good enough to leave her number … She did so.

She was extremely surprised when, the following morning, Henri de Sauvignac telephoned and suggested that she come out to the château at four o’clock that afternoon.

•

Les Colombes stood high on its prominence, surveying a great sweep of rumpled hills and valleys. As Mara drove up the steep, winding approach, she could barely make out the dimensions of the château, so overgrown was it with shrubberies. Then she rounded a bend and found herself in an empty, dusty forecourt giving onto a broad, ivy-covered facade. Once grand, no doubt, Les Colombes now had a shabby, forlorn air. The roof looked in bad condition. Many of the tall upper-story windows were shuttered. The broad front of the château was dominated by a central portal above a balustraded terrace. A crumbling pair of Baroque staircases curved down from either end of the terrace.

Mara parked in the shade. Jazz looked hopeful
and then disappointed at being left. As usual, he hung his head out the window and moaned disapprovingly at Mara’s retreating back.

Henri de Sauvignac must have been watching for her, for as she climbed the weed-choked steps the great front door swung back. He stood in the opening, tall and gaunt.

“Madame Dunn?” His voice was suave, like old velvet, his deeply lined face still handsome. He wore a tired but well-made suit of an old-fashioned cut, a shirt of dubious whiteness, and a paisley cravat.

“Monsieur de Sauvignac?”

Gallantly, he stooped to brush the back of her hand with lips as dry as autumn leaves.

“How good of you to come at such short notice.” His practiced regard, wandering covertly over her body, revealed a libertine beneath the gentleman. “And how clever of you to find us. Rather out of the way, I’m afraid.”

“Your directions were excellent.”

Her host stepped back to admit her into an echoing vestibule. An impressive stone staircase rose at the back of it to the upper reaches of the house. Passing near him, Mara caught a whiff of eau de cologne, suggestive of a still-potent sexuality but underlain by a faint smell of decay that he seemed to share with the house itself. It was an odor that Mara recognized from her own work in restoring dank places long uninhabited.

“I think the library will be most comfortable.” He
ushered her through a pair of handsomely paneled doors opening off to the right. “Please. Sit down. May I offer you something? An apéritif?”

Mara preferred tea but accepted vermouth because she thought it would be easier for him. She somehow doubted that the de Sauvignacs kept domestic help. With a small bow, he withdrew.

She had been invited to sit, but Mara remained standing, glancing curiously about her. The library, he had called it. Certainly it contained books, but it looked more like a furniture warehouse—Louis XVI armchairs pushed against the walls, an antique armoire, a dainty Restoration console, an eighteenth-century ebony escritoire. There were little touches of domesticity, too, suggesting that the de Sauvignacs spent much of their time there: a pair of worn velvet settees drawn up to an oil heater; a small television on a scarred mahogany stand; a sewing basket full of scraps of material. The back of the room was entirely taken up by a baronial dining table, set about with sixteen chairs (Mara counted them). It was stacked with papers and bric-a-brac, but a telltale litter of crumbs at one end told her that this was where the couple took their meals.

The paneled doors creaked. Mara turned. It was not Henri de Sauvignac; instead, a tall elderly woman clad in a dress that hung unevenly at the hem, a voluminous green, fringed shawl, and dressy high-heeled shoes.

“Ah,” said the woman, fixing Mara with vague
kindliness before wobbling toward her in a clattering, jerky gait, like a marionette in the hands of an inexpert puppeteer.

“You must be Madame Dunn? I am Jeanne de Sauvignac. How very kind of you to call.” Her rusty voice was pleasant, and she spoke with almost childish pride, as if she had initiated the meeting. She extended her hand to touch Mara’s with formal courtesy. “Do sit down.” Up close, she emitted the same musty odor as her husband.