Deadly Slipper (32 page)

“Caught him trespassing,” said la Binette.

With an effort, Julian heaved himself up on his elbows. He said with all the aplomb he could muster, “Which undoubtedly gives you the right to order me from your grounds. Call these two off”—he jerked his head in the direction of la Binette and Vrac—“and I’ll go quietly.”

De Sauvignac studied Julian’s crumpled form suspiciously. “Who are you? What were you doing on my land?”

“Nosing around, he was,” Vrac said gutturally. “They came together the other time. Saw them. Him and her.”

Julian took in the tall, stooping man. Alain resembled his father, he thought. “Your son knows about my interest in orchids,” he lied. “He said his mother and grandfather had planted some unusual species around the estate and told me to have a look around anytime I liked. So I’m not here uninvited.”

“He was with her, you say?” Henri asked.

Vrac confirmed this with a growl.

“I see.” Henri considered the man on the ground with an expression of distaste. “Vrac, m’boy,” he said at last, “help me take care of him, will you?”

Once again Julian was hoisted roughly to his feet.

“And Binette, get rid of that cur.”

The woman did so by the mere expediency of looping
her finger through Jazz’s collar and leading him off in the direction they had come. If Julian had been hoping for some display of canine heroics, he was disappointed. Except for a strong territoriality with respect to cars, Jazz was a remarkably easygoing dog.

•

Mara came to with a start. Jeanne de Sauvignac was hovering over her.

“Ah,” murmured the old woman. “You’re awake. I looked in several times, but you were always sleeping.” She lifted Mara to a sitting position, propping her against the wall.

Once more Mara was aware of Jeanne’s strength. This time she noticed how large the woman’s hands were.

“I brought you some medicine, my dear.”

Mara glared suspiciously at a glass of murky liquid. Was this it? Were they planning to drug and dispose of her while she lay senseless?
Dear Lord
, she prayed,
don’t let them bury me alive. They’re both crazy enough to do it.
Henri’s last words came back to her, setting off a deafening internal alarm.
What exactly had happened when Jeanne de Sauvignac met Bedie in the woods?
Mara clenched her jaws and turned her head away.

The other looked disappointed. “It’s not really medicine,” she admitted. She sat down on the edge of the bed and put the glass on the floor beside her. “Only sugared water. I used to give it to her. The other one. It was a game we played. I would say, Now,
poupoule
, drink this, it will make you well again. She liked sugar, you see. Sometimes I gave her lumps of sugar soaked in brandy. She loved that. It made her smile. Your smile, my dear, is just like hers.”

Mara was stunned and sickened by the woman’s maudlin need to nurture coupled with her total disregard of the larger issues of good and evil. She had lost a son. Was she like some demented beast, driven endlessly to find substitutes for her dead child? Between the husband and the wife, Mara did not know whose guilt was greater. But here at least was a weakness that she thought she could exploit.

“You nursed her well, madame.”

The rumpled face brightened. “Like my own child.”

“And yet you let her die.”

The brightness faded.

“There was another death, too, wasn’t there? Patrice,” Mara drove the name at her cruelly. “Your little boy. My sister. And now me. I’ll be dead, too, if you try to keep me here, you know. This house doesn’t have a very good track record, does it? One way or the other, people die here. Do you want that? Do you really want another death?”

“Oh, my dear.” Jeanne’s hands flew up about her face in a characteristic fluttering.

“You know your husband intends to kill me.”

“Don’t be silly.” Jeanne’s head came up sharply. “Henri would never do such a thing.”

“He will. He has to. Don’t you see? He can’t afford
to let Alain find me here.”

The other stared at her, stricken.

Mara whispered urgently, “Untie me. All you have to do is let me get away from here without your husband knowing.”

The ragged head swung from side to side. “I can’t. Henri wouldn’t like it.”

“Damn Henri,” Mara nearly shrieked. “Can’t you understand?
He’s going to kill me.
Madame, you have to help me, or be an accomplice to murder!”

The faded blue eyes fixed on Mara with a look of vague unease. For a second, Mara hoped as she felt the light touch of fingers on her arm. Then hope died. Jeanne’s expression crystallized into a smile of almost cloying indulgence.

“It’s impossible,” Jeanne laughed softly. “You’re far too ill to leave here, my dear. You need to rest. I’m afraid you’ll be staying with me for a very long time.”

There were noises on the stairs. Mara could have wept with desperation. The garret door flew open. Henri entered first, Vrac followed, hunched and burdened with something large that he threw roughly to the floor. A body. Julian’s body.

Grissac lost to Le Buisson five to zero on Saturday. It was a hotly contested match, for revenge hung in the balance, Le Buisson having beaten Grissac badly the year before. Paul and the entire team were furious. Not only had Julian not turned up, he had not even bothered to let them know he wasn’t coming. The
anglais
wasn’t the most brilliant fullback, but at least he offered a damned sight more body than that weed of a José whom they’d had to drag in at the last minute. Paul swore violently all the way back to Chez Nous, where Mado, for once sympathetic to his rugby woes, made soothing noises while massaging his shoulders with a penetrating salve.

“We could have beaten that canaille if that calf’s head had bothered to show up.”

“Hmmm. Still, it’s not like Julian. You don’t suppose he’s sick?”

“He’ll be sicker when I squeeze his neck.”

“No. I mean really sick. Too ill to call.”

Paul craned around to squint up at her through a wave of mentholated fumes. The kneading of his muscles was having a relaxing effect. “How d’you mean? Dying?”

She chewed a provocative lower lip and bent forward, showing deep cleavage. “At least you could
check up on him.”

Paul rolled himself over on the bed, displaying a vast expanse of hairy chest and formidable-looking nether parts. He pulled Mado to him. “First things first,” he growled.

Later he did drive round to Julian’s cottage. The back door, as usual, was not locked. Paul stuck his head inside and bellowed, “D’you know you cost us a loss, you
voyou!”
There was no answer, not even a scuttling sound that might have told him that Julian was trying to hide. He left, slamming the door.

However, when Madame Léon, whom he happened to encounter in the lane, mentioned that Julian had not been by for his weekly dozen eggs, Paul began to wonder. Back at Chez Nous, he rang Mara, only to get her
répondeur.

“That’ll be it,” he told Mado. “The two of them have done a bolt. Probably having it away in Spain.”

•

“You two have created quite a problem for me.” De Sauvignac stood alone in the center of the garret, cradling his shotgun over his arm. He had dismissed his wife. Vrac, after trussing Julian up by the simple expedient of slipping a noose over his head, jerking it tight, and winding the long end around his ankles and the remaining length around his wrists, had also gone.

“You’ve done that for yourself,” said Mara. She turned a pale face to Julian. “He attacked my sister and left her brain-damaged. He and Jeanne kept
Bedie in this garret for fourteen years. They claim they found her dead one morning, but I think they simply finished her off when she became too inconvenient to explain.”

“That explains the skeleton I found,” said Julian. At Mara’s startled exclamation, he went on to describe his gruesome discovery in the
edze.
He turned back to their captor. “That’s where you dumped her body, isn’t it. In the
edze.
Is that what you plan to do with us?”

Henri inclined his head slightly. “That of course is the question. What to do with you. No doubt you would like your freedom. On the other hand, to let you go would create considerable trouble for me. You must understand that I feel compelled to protect my interests. A dilemma, don’t you agree?”

He raised the gun. Mara and Julian braced themselves. Henri noted their reaction with a bitter twisting of the lips. To their astonishment, he merely broke the barrel and tucked the weapon under his arm.

“Don’t worry,” he assured them cynically. “It won’t be anything as crude as that.” Over his shoulder, he gave them a mocking smile, “You see, at heart I am not a sufficiently evil man.”

He left, locking the door behind him.

•

Mara told Julian about her stakeout of Les Colombes and its consequences; her conclusions about Vrac’s parentage; and her fear that Henri would be forced to dispose of them before Alain’s return.

“When does he get back?” Julian asked.

“Sunday. What’s today? I’ve lost track of time.”

“Saturday. I think.”

“If we could just hang on until tomorrow.”

“That assumes Alain will help us. Henri is his father, after all.”

“I don’t think he’d stand by and watch us be murdered,” Mara countered. She added less optimistically, “Provided he knew.”

“I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could toss him,” Julian muttered.

Julian described his encounter with Vrac and his ordeal in the edze. When he got to the point where Jazz had dragged him out of the pit, Mara cried,

“Jazz? Here? What’s happened to him?”

“La Binette took him away, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, Mara. I shouldn’t have brought him. I never thought anything like this would happen.”

“Poor Jazz,” she moaned, and closed her eyes.

They fell silent—Julian because he was occupied trying to work his wrists free, Mara because the revelation of Henri’s guilt now made her suspicions of Julian acutely embarrassing.

“Julian, I … I have something to confess,” she said at last.

He swiveled around on the floor to peer up at her. “What’s that?”

“I …”Where to begin? “I searched your house.”

“Oh. That. I know.”

“You know?”

“Well, I guessed. For Christ’s sake, Mara, what the hell did you think you were playing at?”

“I wasn’t playing,” she began indignantly, and then stopped, sure that if she told him the full extent of her suspicions he would never speak to her again. “It’s just that certain things made me think … Why, even the newspaper on your kitchen table …” She trailed off lamely.

“What newspaper?”

“The one headlining le Mur’s death. You see, there was no way you could have gotten a copy of that edition if you’d really been in the woods looking for orchids at La Binette that day. It made me think you’d faked the search.”

“Faked the search?” Julian was deeply offended. He propped himself up awkwardly on an elbow and said, with all the dignity he could muster from his position on the floor, “Mara, I would
never
fake an orchid search.”

A moment later he said, “It was probably Madame Léon.”

“Madame Léon?”

“She always wraps my eggs in newspaper.”

“Oh,” Mara said faintly and decided she had made enough damning admissions for the time being.

•

“That chamber pot,” cried Julian with sudden inspiration.

Mara blinked at him. “What about it?”

“Break it. We’ll use the shards to cut ourselves free.”

It was a beautiful piece, eighteenth-century, in flawless condition, with a blue-and-green acanthus motif on a cream ground. Mara’s clients would have paid good money for it. Probably use it as a planter, she thought ironically. Nevertheless, she slid off the bed and seized it between her feet, bringing it down hard on the wooden floor. It took three tries, but the pot eventually shattered into several pieces. She chose the one with the best cutting edge and scooted across to Julian. Positioning herself back to back with him, she sawed away at the rope binding his wrists. It was slow work, but once his hands were loose, Julian was able to free himself and Mara in minutes.

Their next concern was a means of escape.

“It’s too bad the post won’t come around again until Monday,” Mara said, rubbing feeling back into her arms. “That dormer looks out on the back of the house. If there’s mail, the van will drive right into the rear courtyard. We could smash the window and yell down. Except we probably won’t be alive by then.”

Julian rose rather shakily to his feet and looked around him. “What are the odds of breaking through that door?”

“Not good. It’s as thick as a brick and fitted out with a dead bolt.”

“Well, then, Jeanne. Do you think we can persuade her to help us?”

Mara shook her head. “I’ve tried. Although she acts as nutty as a fruit bar, she’s been covering for
Henri all these years. And, Julian, I found out it was she who met my sister in the woods.”

“Jeanne?” Julian broke off his inspection of the garret to turn back to her. “What are you saying? You don’t think
she
hit your sister?”

“I don’t know. I really can’t make her out.” Mara paused, troubled. After a moment, she said, “There’s only one possibility. Until Henri decides how to dispose of us, she’ll probably keep on bringing us food. That might be our chance. We could jump her as soon as she comes in with her tray.”

“Speaking of food,” Julian murmured, “I could do with some.” When was the last time he had eaten? Two days ago? “Does she come alone?”

“So far. Although I have a feeling he’s never far away. With his gun.”

•

Henri stood on the top step of the scullery stoop, surveying the empty courtyard of the château. Above him rose the bulk of Les Colombes, where generations of de Sauvignacs had come into the world, lived, and died. Clouds scudded across a darkening afternoon sky. There would be no sunset. A storm was building up, the song of its approach strong on the wind.

A moment later, Jeanne joined him on the stoop. The wind whipped her shawls about her so that it seemed she would really fly away.