Doctor Death (26 page)

“Wonderful!” said my father, looking decidedly cheerful. “Wonderful, August!”

“And then I have a request,” said the professor.

“Ask away,” said my father.

“You see, today I have asked Madeleine if we might become engaged to be married.”

My father was caught by surprise—at least as much as I had been, I think. He was still sitting with
The Journal of Parasitology
in his hands, peering at us across the top of a page that announced a breakthrough in the treatment of intestinal worms in cows.

“Madeleine! Is it true?”

“She has
almost
said yes,” said the professor with a teasing smile.

“Dear friend! I . . . I must say . . .”

“So we have your permission—once I manage to convince Madeleine to give me a date?”

My father cleared his throat. “Dear August. Dear Madeleine. Nothing could make me happier.”

So far, so good. But would it also make me happy? I looked from one smiling man to the other, and I still had my doubts.

“I am afraid it really is Oblonski,” said my father as he sipped his Gewürztraminer. “They caught him near a hunting cabin where he had apparently been living for weeks. Perhaps that was also where Cecile Montaine stayed during the weeks she was gone.”

“And where is the proof in that?” I said, a more strident challenge than I had intended. It was after all supposed to be a celebratory evening, and I had no wish to appear like an officious harpy on the very first day of my peculiar engagement.

“The food sack was in the cabin,” said my father. “There is little doubt that he went to the convent to beg for provisions and then—for some reason known only to himself—turned on the one human being who was closest to him. He had even eaten some of the food. He still had traces of duck grease on his fingers.”

I looked down at the duck confit I was in the process of consuming myself. There was little risk that I would get grease on my fingers, the silverware was Minerva, and were it to happen anyway, I could always make use of one of the starched white damask napkins. The contrast to the battered and confused creature they had dragged home like some kind of hunting catch was suddenly nauseatingly huge.

“Did the tooth prints match?” I asked.

My father shook his head slightly, not so much a definite no as an indication of doubt.

“I would not be able to convict him on that basis,” he admitted. “And I have asked the inspector to make sure that a dentist takes a more precise print so we can get firmer evidence.”

“What you are saying is that it does not match.”

“No. I just said that the match is not sufficiently precise.”

Above our heads, the crystal chandeliers twinkled like captive stars, and all around us at the other tables dinner-jacketed
gentlemen conversed with ladies in elegant décolletage. I myself was wearing the only evening gown I owned, a midnight blue taffeta gown from Magasin Duvalier. Madame Duvalier was one of my father’s living patients, and she had let me have it cheaply. It was perhaps not this year’s fashion, but according to Madame Duvalier it “flatters your fair complexion,
chérie
, and your lovely blue eyes.” She had not mentioned my unbelievably ordinary middle-brown hair.

“Has he confessed?” I asked.

“No,” said my father. “In fact he still has not uttered a single word. The inspector is beginning to doubt that he
can
speak, but the nuns have assured us that he has the ability. Or had. Perhaps what has happened has robbed him of it again.”

“He was like a son to her,” I said. “And no one has ever accused him of being violent.
Why
would he suddenly ‘turn on her’?”

The professor looked from one to the other.

“Perhaps he is what Mr. Darwin calls an atavism,” the professor said. “A return to an earlier and more primitive stage of human development.”

“Are you a supporter of Darwin’s theories?” My father seized—with a certain gratitude, it seemed to me—this less personal topic.

“The arguments are convincing,” said the professor. “Scientifically speaking, creationism must be considered dead. Regardless of what theological consequences it may have . . .”

I let them change the subject. But though I definitely considered Darwin’s evolution theories fascinating and worthy of numerous discussions, my thoughts still continued to center on Emile Oblonski.

When we reached dessert, I tried again. “Where exactly is that hunting cabin? How far from the convent?”

“A few kilometers,” said my father. “It actually belongs to the
Vabonne family, but old Jacques Vabonne has sold off the hunting rights for that part of the forest and hasn’t used the place in years.”

“I would like to see it,” I said tentatively. “Is that possible?”

“Why?”

“Because we still do not know where or how Cecile Montaine fell ill.”

“I will ask the Commissioner,” said my father. “If you really believe it can help us solve that riddle.”

The professor escorted us home to Carmelite Street in a hansom cab and then continued on to his lodgings after a warm back-patting embrace of my father and a fairly modest peck on the cheek for me.

My father stood for a moment looking after the hansom cab that clip-clopped down the night-damp cobblestones and disappeared around the corner and onto Rue Perrault.

“That was a surprise, Maddie,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I value the man greatly.”

“I know.” Why was there, then, an unspoken “but” in the air?
Nothing could make me happier
, he had said. Had he not meant it?

Silence fell, but my father did not move and made no sign that he wanted to go inside.

“When . . . ?” he asked at last. “What is your plan? This fall, perhaps?”

Something had cracked in him, something that was no longer whole.

“Papa. No. It will be a long time. And I am not sure that we ever will be married; I have only promised to consider it.”

“Of course you will marry,” he said in a voice that sounded
as if he had just bit into a mealy apple. “That is the point of an engagement, after all.”

He turned abruptly and clumsily at the same time and unlocked the front door. He would not let me help but struggled up the stairs on his own. I did not know what to say or do.

The next morning he was carefully kind and cheerful, but to me the apparent good humor seemed forced.

I cannot leave him, I thought. I have to tell August (we had at least achieved that much in the course of the evening) that it is impossible. It is unfair to lead him on.

And yet, the second I came to that conclusion, I felt unreasonably angry. I stabbed the knife into my brioche as if it were an animal I wanted to gut, and forced Madame Vogler’s strawberry jam into it with furious force.

“What is wrong?” asked Papa.

“Nothing. Why should there be anything wrong?”

He did not have anyone else. I thought of the photograph on his bedside table. The little family—father, dead mother, and child. For ten years it had been the last thing he saw before he turned off his bedside lamp, and perhaps the first thing he looked at in the morning.

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“Would you ever consider . . . ?” I stopped. We never discussed this kind of thing. Never.

“What?”

“Getting . . . married again?”

He looked at me for a long time across the edge of the copy of
Médecine Aujourd’hui
that had arrived in the morning mail.

“I do not think so,” he said calmly.

Damn the man. The thought resounded in my head, and still I barely knew which one of them I was cursing. It was a relief when the Commissioner arrived shortly thereafter in a rented carriage to escort me to Jacques Vabonne’s old hunting cabin.

This part of the forest had once provided oak for ship planks and masts, but now only the most crooked and thus useless trees were left, and a new, younger forest had come up, a mixture of alder thicket and hornbeam and an occasional dark pine. The new forest was dense and impenetrable, and you could see why Emile had been able to hide here for so long without being discovered.

Vabonne’s gamekeeper pointed down a narrow path that was barely more than an animal track.

“You will have to make your way on foot,” he said. “It is about an hour’s walk. Or . . .” He glanced at me and was probably calculating how much my womanly weakness would slow us down. “Maybe two. Just continue until you get to the lake. If Monsieur Leblanc should appear, give him my regards and tell him you have my permission.”

“Monsieur Leblanc?”

“Yes. He has the hunting rights.” Leblanc. Like Imogene Leblanc?

“Does he have a daughter who teaches at the convent school?”

“No idea,” the gamekeeper grunted. “Don’t really know the man. He occasionally takes part in the hunts, but he never says much.”

The Commissioner considered the narrow path with skepticism.

“Dear Madeleine, are you sure this will do any good?”

“I am sure, at least, that we will feel negligent if we do
not
go,” I said.

He sighed. “Very well. Onward, onward, ho, ho, and away we go . . .”

It took us almost an hour and a half before there was finally a glimpse of water through the branches, and the path dipped sharply. The earth under our feet became blacker and more swampy, and it was necessary to climb across a couple of fallen trees. The Commissioner offered me his arm, and I needed it. My poor abused traveling suit would not survive this trip without harm, I noted with a certain sadness. The hem of the skirt was already dark with mud and lake water, and I had both felt and heard the seams rip under my left arm.

The sun glinted off the waters of the lake, but here in the shadows the mosquitoes were dancing. We followed the path along the slippery bank for another fifteen minutes. The Commissioner, who was not used to such physical challenges, was red faced and out of breath, but he did not suggest that we turn back. At heart, he was probably as stubborn as I was, and just as curious.

Now we could finally see the cabin. It rested on a rough platform that overhung the surface of the lake. The walls were built of black, tar-smeared logs, with faded silver-gray wooden shingles on the roof. This was not the sort of cabin meant for parties and drunken brotherhood; it was little more than a glorified duck blind, a primitive sanctuary and night shelter for a lone hunter who wished to catch the sunset from the worn wicker chair on the veranda and watch snipes come in to land in the reeds at dusk.