Deadly Slipper (9 page)

“Time to move on, don’t you think?” suggested Prudence.

“When I’m ready,” said Mara, ending the conversation.

•

Spring was Julian’s favorite time of year. The lilacs were just finishing, but the locust trees, coming into bloom, gave a heady sweetness to the air. The hillsides were burnished with golden
genêt
, the local variety of broom, and poppies brightened the fields of newly planted wheat. Edith, Julian noted, was beginning to take on a sleek, self-satisfied look.

Spring was also Julian’s peak time for gardening. He had a dozen or so properties that he maintained regularly. Throwing in Prudence Chang’s courtyard, which was requiring a lot of work, he found himself hard at it from dawn to dusk. Not that he didn’t welcome the business. He knew that things would die down for him later, when it got too hot to do more than nurse seedlings along. Business would pick up slightly in September and October, with fall plantings and beddings down, before dropping off entirely for the winter.

When he had time to think about anything else, his mind was taken up almost entirely with the
Cypripedium.
Almost, because it was hard not to think about Mara, too, given that she was so tightly bound up with this botanical puzzle. He felt a little sorry for her. But also resentful because her position amounted to nothing short of blackmail. Much good it would do her. He knew his chances of tracking down the Lady’s Slipper were close to nil, which was exactly the odds he gave Mara’s hopeless search for her missing twin. The thought filled him with a certain spiteful satisfaction.

•

More than a week had passed since Mara had distributed the photocopies. She knew that Julian would have phoned if the
pigeonnier
had been located, so she assumed he had no news. On the other hand, if he had been asking questions about her, as Prudence had said, she wondered that he hadn’t found another reason for calling. She thought things over and decided to take matters in hand.

•

He was just pouring himself a late-morning mug of tea when the phone rang.

“Julian? It’s Mara. Are you busy?”

It was Sunday morning, Julian’s day of rest.

“Er—no,” he said and wondered what he was letting himself in for.

“Well, I was hoping to invite you to lunch.”

He was pleasantly surprised. “In that case, entirely at your disposal.”

“Great. I’ll pick you up at noon. And by the way, I hope you don’t mind, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

“Oh?” He was wary once more. Whom did she mean? A boyfriend?

“Look, I’ve got to run now. Tell you about it when I see you.
A bientôt.”
She rang off.

Julian put the receiver down. What the hell was she up to? It was something he really disliked about her, always tipping him off balance, speaking fluent French, albeit with peculiar vowel sounds, having a
dog that lunged out of the dark to take off your arm, turning nasty over the photos. And now inviting him to lunch so she could introduce him to somebody else. Still, she was paying. He showered and put on a clean pair of slacks—well, they had a couple of not-too-visible splotches on the knee (Mado’s crab mousse?)—and a freshly laundered shirt.

He waited for her at the roadside to save her the walk to his front door. She pulled up, and he got in. She looked glamorous in dark glasses and an orange short-sleeved dress. Her arms were slim, her neck graceful. Had she done something to her hair? It was shorter than he recalled, sleeker.

Jazz was in the back seat of her Renault, but no one else. So where was this person she wanted him to meet? He risked the French cheek-to-cheek greeting, keeping an eye out for any sign of jealousy from Jazz, but the dog only favored him with a careful exploration of the back of his neck with a cold, wet nose.

“So—where are we going? Or am I allowed to know?”

“Bergerac. There’s a restaurant there I’m dying to try. And then Duras. Didn’t I say?”

“No, you didn’t.” Bergerac first and then Duras? That would take the rest of the day. Really, Julian thought, feeling a little put out by her easy assumptions regarding himself. To make matters worse, her dog was now resting his heavy head on Julian’s left shoulder.

“Sorry.” She executed a three-point turn. “It’s just
that the person I want you to meet lives in Duras. Louis—although he prefers to be called Loulou—”

The boyfriend, Julian confirmed with irritation and shoved the head away. It returned with a gust of malodorous breath. Why on earth invite him to lunch and drag him to Duras just to introduce him to a clown named Loulou?

“—La Pouge,” she finished. “The retired policeman I told you about. The one who put me on to you.”

“Ah.” The one who had referred to him as—what was it?—a local authority. That was all right. Mollified, he reached back absentmindedly to scratch Jazz’s neck.

“I phoned him yesterday. He wants to meet you.” She braked before turning onto the main road. “I figured we could swing by Duras on our way back from Bergerac. It’s not much out of the way. He’s the one who was involved in investigating Bedie’s disappearance. I told him about your idea of handing out copies of the
pigeonnier
photo, by the way. He said it was a very clever strategy.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t heard anything from Paul or Gaston,” Julian had to admit.

“It’s early days yet, Julian.” She turned to him with a smile. The dark glasses flashed. Her voice had a huskiness that got him in the base of his spine. “Anything could happen.”

Anything could, he thought, and warmed to the possibility. Suddenly he felt quite happy to be rocketing
—she drove too fast—across the countryside with her. Glad about lunch in Bergerac, glad about Duras and Loulou.

•

Cyrano de Bergerac had nothing to do with Bergerac. Still, this did not prevent the Bergeracois from embracing Rostand’s romantic hero as their own, even raising a statue to him, nose and all.

When Julian and Mara arrived in the old part of the town, they saw that the area around Cyrano’s statue had been torn up. Consequently, parking was impossible, even on a Sunday. They had to leave the car below the Ancien Port and walk back up along the quai where in times past
gabarres
, the workhorses of the Dordogne, had discharged lumber from upcountry for making barrels and taken on casks of Bergerac wine. Nowadays it seemed the boats were mostly used to shunt tourists about.

Their destination was in the old town, a small restaurant called, with a grammarian play on words, Le Plus-que-Parfait, the Pluperfect. An elderly waiter waved them in and seated them at a shady table on the terrace at the rear. With a dignified tread, he brought Jazz a bowl of water on a tray before even considering Julian and Mara’s needs. The French were like that. Nutty about dogs.

The lunch, living up to the restaurant’s name, was more than perfect. Julian started with grilled foie gras of duck topped with thin parings of summer truffles and went on to a fish dish of
merluchon
baked in
cream. Mara had oysters, followed by quail in a delicate pastry basket. She chose the wine, a crackling dry white Bordeaux. Cheese was roundels of
cabécou
, lightly grilled, dessert fresh Garriguette strawberries dipped in dark chocolate and topped with crème anglaise. Julian took the opportunity to point out that the strawberry, unlike most fruit, wore its seeds on the outside.

“The red pulpy bit that we think of as the strawberry is actually what’s called the pseudocarp.”

“No kidding,” Mara commented with her mouth full.

Jazz sampled everything except the oysters, which Mara said made him sick. Mara liked the way Julian let her handle the wine, deferring to her choice. So many men she knew seemed to need to take charge of the wine, as if it were some kind of male preserve.

Their conversation throughout the meal was relaxed, verging at times on intimate as they disclosed to each other selected details of their lives.

“My people? Oh, your garden-variety Brits.” Julian leaned back with a pleasant feeling of repletion. “I grew up in Essex, oldest of five. Did a degree in horticulture at Wye. In those lighter, swifter days of my youth,” he sighed with exaggerated but perhaps not mock regret, “I played wing forward for my college rugby team.”

Had he ever been married? Well, yes, he had. At the age of twenty-three, he had fallen hard for a
stunning French au pair and moved with her to the Dordogne. It was the seventies, life was easy, and theirs the romance of the century. Unfortunately, like so many relationships, it hadn’t worked out. Véronique had developed other interests. By then, however, he had taken root in French soil. He had been gardening in the Dordogne ever since. If Julian neatly glossed over how deeply the au pair’s defection had hurt him, the chaos it had made of his life, and the anger he had experienced, still felt sometimes, he did so because that had been twenty-five years ago, and, where Véronique was concerned, the less said the better.

Mara described her background. Grew up in Montreal. Crazy hybrid family, Scottish father, French-Canadian mother who came from a tiny place in Quebec with the unlikely name of Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! She explained that the “Ha! Ha!” (complete with exclamation marks) had nothing to do with laughter but was an old French word for “dead end.” Many archaic terms no longer used in France still survived in Quebec.

“Mum’s
pure laine
, one-hundred-percent
québécoise
,” she informed Julian, “and a staunch separatist. Wants Quebec out of Canada. Dad says, Dream on, it’ll never happen. They argue endlessly about it. It’s their way—” She paused and drew breath ”—of not talking about Bedie.” She turned her wineglass about slowly, concentrating on the shifting level of the liquid.

“You know,” she said, “when we were kids, Bedie and I hated being twins. We fought a lot, and we were horribly competitive. If I beat her at tennis, she had to beat me in skiing. We were always trying to put distance between us.”

“Isn’t that typical?” offered Julian. “I mean, with twins?”

She shrugged. “I suppose. Anyway, I left home in the seventies, did a couple of years at the Ontario College of Art, got a job with a design firm in Toronto. Bedie stayed on and did a degree in wildlife biology at McGill. After a few years apart, I think we realized, like it or not, we were joined. It was only then that we began to be friends.”

After Bedie’s disappearance, Mara had drifted, freelancing in Ottawa, Vancouver, and Montreal. She touched briefly on her failed marriage to Hal. Like Julian, she felt the less said the better. Bedie continued to haunt her dreams. Cutting ties in Canada to come to the Dordogne had not been easy, especially since it meant she had to start up anew in a place where she was unknown and where she knew no one. However, timing had been in her favor. With the boom in holiday cottages and the influx of expats, her line of work was now very much in demand.

“I have something for you,” Mara said over coffee. Ceremoniously, she presented Julian with a duplicate set of the photographs.

“Ah,” he said. “Thanks.”

Tucking them in his shirt pocket, he had to
acknowledge that she had come through with her end of the bargain. Now he would have to make some sort of effort, even if halfhearted, to do his part. A deal was a deal.

They reached Duras around four in the afternoon. The buildings of the town ambled pleasantly along a breezy escarpment above the broad, green valley of the Dropt. Vineyards stretched away below them. Mara parked in front of a narrow stone-faced house just off the main road. They left Jazz in the car, head thrust disapprovingly through the open window. Julian sincerely hoped no one would pass within lunging distance of the vehicle.

“So, madame, we meet again!” Loulou La Pouge swept Mara an exaggerated bow. He pumped Julian’s hand, greeting him in rapid, voluble French. He was a tubby, energetic man, pushing seventy, with remnant strands of hair plastered across a speckled scalp and a round face creased from smiling. Julian thought that he looked less like a retired cop than a superannuated cherub.

“Entrez. Entrez.”
He led them into a narrow parlor crowded with furniture. An upright piano stood at one end of the room. Family photographs took up every available horizontal surface. There were more photographs on the walls. “Sit down. Sit down.”

Julian and Mara perched stiffly on small overstuffed chairs while their host brought out a chilled Monbazillac.

“You know this wine?” Loulou held the bottle aloft. “Pure nectar. A specialty of the region. Gets its sweetness from a fungus, what we call
la pourriture noble
, the noble rot. It makes the grapes split open and shrivel up, a horrible sight, but it creates a very high sugar content. Did you know the harvest is done grape by grape, with special clippers?” He trotted away and came back with little glass dishes of shelled pistachios.

“Santé!”
Loulou plumped his sizable haunches onto a plush-covered sofa and raised his glass. “Now we have our little chat, eh?” He poked a forefinger at Julian. “You must, of course, wonder how I got on to you in the first place. Well, I saw your slide show, eight, maybe nine years ago. In Bergerac. The wife talked me into going. She was keen on flowers. When she was alive. You gave a talk at the public library. Something about orchids. Unforgettable.”

“Ah.” Julian was gratified but unremembering.

“You tripped on the cord—ha-ha! The carousel went on the floor. Slides flew everywhere.” The cherub gestured expansively.

“Ah,” repeated Julian, placing the event.

“Everything was out of order. You kept saying, Sorry, sorry. All the same, when Mara looked me up, I remembered you. Thought maybe you’d be able to spot something in those photos. Couldn’t recall your name, of course, but a fellow at the library was helpful. Still, I expect you’ll have a time trying to trace those flowers.”

Mara cut in, “Julian’s very knowledgeable about orchids.”

Loulou chuckled, as if she had just told a mildly funny joke. “Of course. However, as I already told you, your first problem is establishing that the camera really was your sister’s in the first place.”