Deadly Slipper (24 page)

“Have you made any further progress?” he asked as they tucked into a platter of steaks served very rare with frites.

Mara shook her head. “Things are rather at a standstill.”

“But you have your orchids. Or all but one of them, according to your friend.”

“The police, I’m afraid, weren’t sufficiently impressed. Circumstantial evidence, they called it.”

“I see. So they’re not pursuing the matter?”

“No.”

“Then what will you do?”

She looked at him lengthily. “That, I think, depends a lot on you.”

“Me?” he put down his fork with surprise. “How so?”

She had come prepared to challenge him. “There’s something you’re not telling me, Alain. Something that you know or suspect but don’t want me to know. I assume it has to do with your father … or Vrac.”

He toyed with his food for a moment before meeting her gaze. In the dimness of the restaurant, his pupils were very dark, reflecting no light. “I take the matter of your sister seriously, Mara,” he said at length. “I also lost my brother, Patrice, although at a much earlier age. So you see, in a way, we’re alike. Please believe me when I say that, if I could help you in this regard, I would.”

She urged, “Then tell me what your father is afraid of. What does he think I’m going to stir up?”

He shrugged. “It’s very simple, really. Papa believes you’re victimizing Vrac by accusing him unfairly. Despite appearances, Vrac is vulnerable, like a dumb beast. Papa feels obliged to stand between him and the forces you could, with your questions, unleash against him.”

He stopped. She waited, unconvinced, forcing him with her silence to continue. Reluctantly, he gave ground.

“Also, perhaps, in disturbing the waters, you could cause my father a certain amount of public discomfort, and he is a man who has much to feel uncomfortable about. Oh, nothing really serious, I assure you. It’s just that Papa has always been a man of, shall we say, appetite.” He shrugged. “Some men are made that way. From my earliest boyhood, I remember the locals making sly remarks, off-color jokes. Thing-in-his-pocket, they called him, the stallion
en rut.
Of course, it was only when I was older that I came to understand what those things meant. In short, my father’s excesses have caused my family much embarrassment … and expense. It’s also been a source of anger and bitterness between Papa and me, largely because of the pain it has caused my mother. So now you see, Mara, there is no great mystery to unravel. Merely a rather sorry story of seigniorial misconduct.”

Alain’s mouth went momentarily tight with distaste. “To be quite frank,” he resumed, “although Papa’s main concern is the de Sauvignac name, as far as I’m concerned, that’s his lookout. Old sins cast long shadows, as they say, and he’s sinned enough for five men. Let him take what’s coming to him. However, your questions, if they probe too deeply, could cause considerable unhappiness to Maman, who, quite frankly, doesn’t deserve to have old scandals raked up.”

They both fell silent.

At length, he spoke again. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to change the subject. I want to know about you.”
He reached across and took her hand, turning it palm up and studying the crisscrossed lines on its surface “You have,” he observed, “very delicate fingers. And”—he frowned slightly—“a very short life line.”

“I think that’s my heart line you’re looking at,” Mara corrected, but she allowed her hand, with its fingers, which she had never thought of as delicate, to continue resting where it was. “And it’s not short, just broken. Look, Alain, I’m grateful for your honesty. I’m sorry. I had no idea …”

“Then be candid with me in your turn,” he proposed with a smile.

“What?” She drew her hand back.

“Your friend Julian. Is he an important part of your life?”

“No,” Mara answered simply.

“Then let me ask you something else. How much do you trust him?”

“Julian?” She thought about it. “I don’t know. Why do you ask?”

“Because”—Alain was watching her closely, judging her reaction—“I’m starting to wonder if
he
wasn’t the person who was stalking you that day in the forest.”

Mara laughed. “But that’s crazy! It was Vrac. You said so yourself.”

Alain shook his head vigorously. “I said it could have been. I now realize that was impossible.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mara, on the afternoon you were in the woods,
Vrac was in Saint-Cyprien, picking up a new motor for a water pump. Our pump, in fact. I can show you the printed invoice for it, with date and time, together with Vrac’s scrawl. And he spent the rest of the day at the château installing it.”

“I don’t believe it,” Mara declared. But the words were scarcely out of her mouth when she was reliving her panicked flight, her encounter with Alain, and Julian
coming up behind
, crashing through the bushes only seconds later.

“But why?” she whispered, horrified. “Why would he do that?”

“To frighten you? To put you off the hunt? Mara, are you sure this Lady’s Slipper is Julian’s only reason for helping you?”

“Oh yes. He’s desperate to find it, of that I’m sure.”

Alain thought for a moment. “Look, let’s approach this logically. You believe that someone was responsible for your sister’s disappearance. You don’t know who this person is. Your only clue is a set of orchid photographs. But maybe the answer has been in front of your nose all along: Julian. He’s an orchidologist. Your sister was an orchid amateur. Supposing she met him by chance, went with him?” He paused, raking his fingers through his hair, leaving it pushed back and tousled.

Mara stared at him. Loulou had said something like that: Bedie would have been easily approachable by anyone who shared her interest. She would have gone trustingly with Julian into the forest.

“And you,” Alain went on, “you could have come as a nasty shock to him when you turned up, the spitting image of your sister, asking him to help you find a woman he might have killed nineteen years ago!”

Again, had not Loulou warned her of exactly the same thing?
Your face, Mara. Your face.
She recalled Julian’s look of shock when he had first opened his door to her.

And yet something did not fit.

“No. It doesn’t make sense,” she cried. “I swear Julian was genuinely amazed at the photo of the Lady’s Slipper. If he’d been with my sister at the time she took it, wouldn’t he have seen it, too? Why would he need her pictures to trace it? He’d already know its exact location.”

Alain frowned. “What if,” he said slowly, “she took the photos before she met him?”

“But even so, why would Julian try to help me? He’s known all along that the whole point of reconstructing my sister’s trail was to find out what had happened to her. Why would he want to lead me to himself?”

“Maybe,” Alain suggested grimly, “that’s part of the kick.”

Mara’s eyes widened. Her experiences in the forest and in the bog came rushing back to her. “Are you saying this is all part of some kind of sick game?”

“Maybe. Or perhaps,” Alain added after a moment’s reflection, “it’s simpler than that. You see, it really hangs on the camera. You’re convinced it
belonged to Bedie. But don’t you think her assailant—Julian—would have destroyed such a vital piece of evidence? Especially the film it contained? But he didn’t. So it really argues the case that the camera you found can’t have been your sister’s.
And the only person to know that would be Julian.
In which case, there would be absolutely no risk to him in searching for an interesting sequence of plants that some other, totally unrelated person had photographed. Particularly if it led to a rare orchid that he very much wanted to find.”

In fact, Mara realized, she’d virtually blackmailed Julian into it. No help, no photos. Those were her terms.

Then reason asserted itself. Julian had behaved oddly, even inexplicably, at times. She knew very little about him; he gave nothing away. He was every bit as irascible and botanically obsessive as Géraud. But none of this made him a psychopath or a killer.

“I don’t buy it,” she told Alain.

He said gently, “I’m sure what I’ve said comes as a bit of a shock, Mara. But I’d like you at least to consider it. You can’t afford to ignore the possibility that Julian may be the very person you’re looking for.”

She turned away, glancing through the restaurant window at the gathering darkness outside. “I don’t know what to think,” she murmured dully.

“Then don’t. For now, at least.” He took her hand again. This time he did not examine her palm, but
cradled it in his own. “Let me tell you instead,” he said quietly, “about dawn in the Cameroon highlands.”

•

Mara drove Alain back to Les Colombes. He let her take him all the way up the narrow lane leading to the rear courtyard. It was late, the old ones would be asleep, and there would be no risk of awkward questions from his father.

The dark mass of the château rose above them as she cut her headlights before pulling up. She keyed off the engine and turned to him.

“You know,” she said, “there’s no way of proving if your suspicions about Julian are true.”

“I agree. You need hard evidence.”

“Such as what?”

“Something tying him to your sister? Or any of the other women. If he’s responsible for their disappearances, maybe he kept something of theirs. I don’t imagine it will be easy to find. Julian seems to have covered his tracks well.” Alain sat facing her in the car. Moonlight glinted on his brow, the strong profile of his nose. The rest of his face was cast in shadow.

“Whatever you do, Mara, I don’t want you to take any stupid risks. Remember, I’m here if you need me.”

He leaned across, cupping her face in both his hands. “This is for luck,” he whispered. And he kissed her, long and hard.

Mara watched him slip away from her. His form was quickly swallowed in darkness. There had been
something of hunger in his kiss, almost of ferocity. The feeling of his mouth on hers stayed with her, his smell, a faint musky odor, filled her nostrils. In that kiss something indefinable had sprung up, a brief frisson, like electricity arcing momentarily between them. Mara was shaken to acknowledge the depth of attraction she felt for Alain de Sauvignac. It expressed itself in a lurch of the heart, a yearning she had not felt for years. In fact, not since Hal. The realization disturbed her. She put her car in gear and circled about, tires crunching quietly on gravel until they met the rough surface of the lane. A warning sounded in her brain. Hal had been a bastard.

Mara chose a morning when Prudence could confirm that Julian was working in her garden.

“He’s digging more of those trenches, he and that brawny helper of his,” Prudence informed her when she phoned. “Don’t ask for what. Why do you want me to call you on your cell phone if he leaves?”

“Too complicated to explain. Just do it the minute he goes, will you? And thanks, Prudence.”

“Whatever helps, sweetie.”

•

Julian’s front door was locked. His back door, as usual, was not. Mara opened it and stuck her head inside.

“Hello?” she called, just in case.

No response.

She made rapid work of the kitchen, ignoring the clutter of pots and pans, the dirty dishes in the sink. His shelves were stocked with cans of cassoulet and beef ragout, packets of dry soups, rice, sugar, instant coffee, a canister of tea. A lower shelf was taken up with large tins labeled
Borax, Silica Gel, Glycerine.
For drying plants, she assumed. What exactly she was looking for she did not know. Something to tie him to Bedie, Alain had suggested, or to any of the other women. A part of her was equally interested in any intimate information on Julian. Family photographs,
love letters, birthday cards, anything to give him a past, dimension. She was torn between wanting to condemn him and to prove Alain wrong, to find nothing more incriminating than the sundry silly, embarrassingly personal desiderata that clutter any normal person’s life. She would have been dissatisfied and yet relieved to walk away empty-handed, allowing Julian to continue undisturbed with his earthy if eccentric pursuits.

The scarred dining table at one end of the front room displayed the remains of past meals and a bilingual clutter of old newspapers:
La Presse, The Observer
, and the monthly
News
, serving the local English-speaking community. There was an old desk, its surface covered in bills. A glance informed her that Julian was none too prompt about paying his accounts. The drawers stuck. She pulled them out with difficulty: more bills, bank statements, string, a dried-out bottle of glue, paper clips, a hunk of beeswax, leaky pens, a broken watch, loose batteries, nursery catalogues, letters. This man was a hoarder. The letters were all business correspondence: queries from interested customers, confirmations of landscaping projects. One was a complaint regarding plants that had lifted the coping around a swimming pool. Mara wondered that there should be so little clue to Julian himself. Or perhaps that was how he wanted it.

The shelves sagged with books. Texts on wild-flowers, orchids, and plant physiology. She spotted a
field manual:
Wildflowers of the Dordogne/Fleurs sauvages de la Dordogne
, by Julian Wood. She pulled it out. It had been published in 1983 and bore the dedication: “To lovers of wildflowers everywhere.” The biographical information on the back cover described the author as an authority on local flora, living in Grissac, and showed a photograph of a younger Julian, smiling, with slightly fuller features and no facial hair. It made Mara realize that she rarely saw Julian smile.

Mara flipped through the book. It was filled with photographs of all kinds of wildflowers, taken, as Bedie had done, close up and at a distance and annotated with details on plant structure, habitat, and flowering season. Many were orchids that she recognized. Pyramidals, Bees, and Lizards. Lady and Man Orchids. She saw a portrait of a Bird’s-nest Orchid with an accompanying view of a thin scattering of the plants. There was no doubt that it was the same location she and Julian had found in the Bessède Forest. The oak in which Jazz had treed the marten was just visible in the background.
Neottia nidus-avis
was described as thick-stemmed, fleshy, yellowish-brown, with sepals and petals curving into a hood, and labellum pendant. It flowered between May and late June, liked shade, and was partial to beech and coniferous woodlands. These plants, Julian had noted, were possibly representative of a much larger stand, which, owing to several years of dry conditions, was either in decline or semi-dormant. Both
photographs were dated 1980.