The Girl Who Remembered the Snow (5 page)

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Authors: Charles Mathes

BOOK: The Girl Who Remembered the Snow
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“I may have mentioned something. He didn't bring it up, though. Like I said, we were strangers. Look, what's this all about?”
“And all you did on the ferry was talk? Nothing else?”
“He bought me some coffee and a doughnut. I drove him back to his hotel. Is that a crime? What's going on here, Detective? Why are you asking me all these questions about this guy? Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“He's dead. Murdered.”
Emma nearly dropped the phone. She was so stunned that she couldn't talk for a few moments. When she finally tried, she found herself breathless, her eyes full of tears, her heart pounding.
“Are you all right, Miz Passant?”
“Yes,” said Emma after a moment. “It's just the shock of it. Are you sure?”
“An acquaintance of his from a local auction house identified the body. Staff at the hotel knew him pretty well.”
“But he was … I was just …”
Emma suddenly found herself crying uncontrollably. What was the matter with her? Poteet waited a long time before speaking again.
“I know this is hard for you, Miz Passant, coming on the heels
of your grandfather's death and all,” he said quietly. “It sort of builds up, is my experience. I've seen it before in folks in your situation. You think you're all grieved out, but your nerves are all raw and anything's likely to trigger stuff you didn't know was left in there. I've seen people go to pieces 'cause a can of beans falls off a shelf. This thing with Caraignac's bound to get to you, so unexpected and all.”
“I didn't know him, you know,” said Emma, wiping her eyes, grateful for the time to pull herself together. “We just met, that was all there was to it. We were just passengers together on the same ferry.”
“I'm sure that's true.”
Why did he seem not to believe her? Emma wondered. How many people really fell apart at news of a stranger's death? For all his soft voice and good manners, Poteet was still a cop. But why should she feel guilty? She didn't have anything to do with this. She could see Henri-Pierre in her mind's eye, tall and smiling. The soft hair, the beautiful blue eyes. She could see him sweeping her into his arms and kissing the daylights out of her. Now he was cold and gray and dead in some shelf in the morgue. Just like Pépé had been.
“What happened?” Emma finally managed to whisper.
“The maid found Mr. Caraignac in his hotel room this morning. He'd been shot in the head at point-blank range.”
“Oh my God. Do you know who did it?”
“I'd very much like to find that out.”
“Was it a robbery?”
“Maybe a bungled robbery, yes. There was no money on the body or in the room, though Mr. Caraignac was known to be someone who carried considerable cash. He was wearing a mighty expensive watch, but a robber could conceivably have overlooked something like that in his haste to get out of there.”
“Why did you think to call me?” said Emma, suddenly frightened. How could the police have known that they had even met?
“We found your name and address written on a candy wrapper in his wallet.”
Of course. That's all there was to it. She still had Henri-Pierre's engraved business card in her own wallet. The late Henri-Pierre. It was still so hard to believe.
“We exchanged phone numbers,” Emma explained, her voice still dazed and quiet. “He said he wanted to take me out if I ever got to New York. I'm sorry I can't be more help, Detective, but like I said, I didn't really know him.”
“Like you said,” agreed Poteet. “It is some wild coincidence, though, don't you think?”
“Coincidence? What coincidence?”
“Oh, didn't I say?”
“Say what?”
“We ain't recovered the weapon yet, but according to ballistics, Mr. Caraignac was killed by the same gun that killed your grandfather.”
 
At a quarter to two in the morning, Emma finally gave up trying to fall asleep and turned on her bedside light. The storm was still blowing outside, but at least there was no more thunder and lightning now, only rain.
Emma put on her glasses and padded downstairs in her flannel pajamas and bare feet, wincing as she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror in the hallway.
“Maybe I can get a job as a lumberjack,” she muttered.
After fixing herself a cup of decaf—it would hardly do to have real coffee, though that was what she wanted—Emma fiddled with a crossword puzzle, watched a rerun of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” on television, and tried to understand what could have happened to Henri-Pierre Caraignac.
How could have it been a coincidence, she asked herself over and over, both Jacques Passant and Henri-Pierre being killed with the same gun?
Detective Poteet had said that, as unlikely as it seemed, coincidence probably was the explanation. A mugger shoots a man in the park, then shoots another man in a botched robbery in a hotel a week later.
“Your perpetrator is in the business of robbin' and killin', after all,” he had said. “Either that, or he was smart enough to throw the gun away after he used it on your grandfather. Then someone else found it and used it to kill Mr. Caraignac or sold it to the man who did.”
Emma still found it hard to believe, however.
She had spent another ten minutes with Poteet on the phone, trying to help him find some connection between the two victims, but other than their both being French, her grandfather and Henri-Pierre didn't seem to have anything in common.
To Emma's knowledge, Jacques Passant had never been to New York, and this was apparently Henri-Pierre's first trip to San Francisco. Jacques Passant was not someone who had any interest in antiques, and Henri-Pierre wouldn't seem likely to have needed the services of a carpenter—Emma's grandfather had retired from full-time work a few years before but still took odd jobs occasionally. The two men certainly hadn't moved in the same social or business circles. There was no evidence that they had ever met.
The policeman had promised to phone Emma if anything broke in either murder case, after extracting her pledge to call him if she should come across some connection between her grandfather and Henri-Pierre. But what connection could there be?
“This is getting me nowhere,” Emma finally muttered aloud.
She turned off the television, left her mug in the sink—she could clean up in the morning—and headed upstairs.
She got back into bed, took off her glasses and closed her eyes. Nothing happened. Nothing like sleep, at any rate.
After fifteen minutes of struggling unsuccessfully to black out, Emma put her glasses on and went into her grandfather's room.
Then she took the glasses back off, got into his big bed and pulled the covers up to her neck.
When she had been frightened in the night as a little girl, she would come in here, and her grandfather would let her into the bed with him. He had patted her hand and told her stories and sung her old French songs. She had not understood most of the words, but somehow they had always made her feel better, had made her feel safe. Or was it just the tone of his voice? She wished more than anything that she could hear that voice again.
“My poor Pépé,” she said quietly.
The rain tapped gently on the windowpanes. The furniture cast strange shadows on the wall. The house creaked the way old houses do.
Emma suddenly sat bolt upright. She reached over and turned on the lamp next to the bed, put on her glasses, and held her hand over her eyes until they got used to the light again. When she finally took her hands away and looked around, she knew she was not mistaken. Something was different about the room.
Emma tried to figure out what it was. Her grandfather had been entirely set in his ways and had resisted even the slightest change. Emma practically had to hit him over the head just to get him to throw out his frayed and faded old shirts after she had bought him new ones. He certainly wouldn't have started redecorating after all these years—nothing had changed in this room since Emma was a little girl.
But something
had
changed now. What was it?
Not the little blue-and-white bedside lamp or his old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock. Not the rocking chair by the window where Jacques Passant would sit and listen to a little transistor radio he would hold in his lap.
Emma's grandfather's tastes were simple. Aside from a half dozen or so of the primitive carvings that he liked on top of the dresser, there were few decorations. The only picture on the wall was an old framed photograph of Emma's mother when she was a
teenager, though there were photos of Emma on the bedside table and albums on the shelf below containing all the pictures he had taken of her growing up.
Emma looked at the dresser again. That was it.
She got out of bed and walked over to the dresser, where the heavy, dark wooden carvings stood guard—vague human shapes with deep eye sockets and elongated features. They ranged from eight inches to about two feet in height, and several of the squatting shapes had been carved with thick triangular blocks sticking out of their backs to counterbalance them. Between two of the largest figures there was a space where something else had been.
“The boat,” said Emma, pleased to have figured it out.
A carved wooden model of a boat had always sat there on the dresser. When had her grandfather removed it? she wondered. And why?
It was funny, Emma thought as she got back into bed and turned off the light. She had seen that model boat a million times, but she could barely remember what it looked like.
The vague image of white sides, mahogany decks and an open back flashed through her mind. It may have been an old-fashioned cabin cruiser or something. A name had been painted on the stern in gold letters. She couldn't even remember that. What was the boat's name?
Emma was still trying to remember when she finally fell asleep.
 
 
E
mma awoke with a start.
For a moment she didn't know where she was, but then the soft brown blur around her registered. Pépé's room.
Emma reached over and put on her glasses. Everything snapped back into focus. The sun was up and she could see the familiar things. Pépé's rocking chair. His old alarm clock, which now read eight o'clock. The portrait of her mother on the wall—so young, so defiant-looking. The dresser with the primitive carvings and the space where the model boat had always been.
The model boat!
Emma threw the covers off and stood up, looking around the room, remembering the horrible thought that had bubbled up in her unconscious mind and shocked her awake.
It made no sense that Pépé would have removed the boat. But what if it hadn't been Pépé? What if the model boat had been taken by someone else? Emma's grandfather's body had been found without his wallet. The murderer could have gotten the Passants' Potrero Hill address from the identification in that wallet.
How difficult would it have been for him to pick one of the house's ancient locks?
Emma rushed to the dresser, opened the top drawer and anxiously ruffled through Jacques Passant's socks and undershirts for the few things of value he had kept in the house. Here were his gold cuff links. Here was the little leather box of silver quarters and dimes that he had plucked out of his pocket change over the years. In the toe of the red-and-green socks that he wore only on Christmas Day was a crudely formed gold coin about the size of a dime that her grandfather had always said he had won in a poker game.
Emma took a deep breath. Everything seemed to be in order, but how could she be sure? Why did it feel as if someone had been here?
“I'm just imagining things,” she muttered.
The horrible feeling she had awoken with didn't go away, however. If someone had been here, surely he would have taken something besides an old model boat. Emma found herself rushing to her room and going through the drawers of her own dresser in mounting panic.
What little jewelry she owned—and which she rarely had occasion to wear—seemed undisturbed. The two hundred and fifty dollars in cash she kept stashed in a tin candy box for emergencies was still there. Nothing was missing as far as she could tell.
Emma looked around. The children in the etchings seemed like strangers suddenly. The Eastlake chair looked old and tatty. What had Henri-Pierre Caraignac really thought, Emma wondered, when she had bragged that it was more than a hundred years old? He was an important antique dealer. He had probably thought she was an idiot.
But Henri-Pierre Caraignac was dead.
Emma was suddenly digging into her dresser for jeans and a turtleneck. She dressed in a flash, finishing up with the fancy new
running shoes for which she had shelled out a hundred and ten dollars two weeks ago. She hadn't even worn them yet. “The shoes that cost as much as feet,” had been Pépé's outraged pronouncement upon learning the price.
Why would Jacques Passant's murderer have come in and stolen an old model boat but nothing else? Emma asked herself again, tying her shoelaces. He wouldn't. It made no sense. She was just being silly.
But the horrible feeling in her chest wasn't going away. It was growing stronger, in fact. Someone
had
been there. Emma was sure of it now. A stranger's hands had gone through her things.
Emma pulled her two suitcases from the back of her closet and rummaged through her drawers for everything she was likely to need in the near future. When the two suitcases were full, she went into Jacques Passant's room and packed his ancient leather two-suiter with the overflow, taking a moment to remove only her grandfather's cuff links from the dresser drawer and the little gold coin from his Christmas socks. She parked both safely in her pocket alongside the money she had removed from her emergency candy box.
Emma sat on Pépé's suitcase and closed the latches, surprised at how little space her life fit into. She had left her magician's getup hanging in the closet. There were no bookings on the horizon, and white tie and tails wouldn't exactly fit in on the unemployment line—not that she qualified for unemployment, anyway. She could have somebody else retrieve her books and paintings later. She was not coming back.
At the front door, Emma turned and gave one final glance at the only home she had ever known. Then she walked out and locked the door behind her—for all the good it would do. Whoever had taken the lives of Jacques Passant and Henri-Pierre Caraignac had already also taken what he had wanted from the house.
 
 
“Hello, anybody home?” said Emma, poking her head through the glass reception window of the law offices of Charlemagne Moussy, Esquire. “It's me.”
A tall, slender woman with lips the color of blood and nests of wrinkles around her eyes appeared from around the corner of the filing area. Her straight brown hair, cut in a pageboy, bounced. It was Charlemagne's secretary/receptionist/all-around gal Friday, the unfortunately named Jean Bean. Upon seeing Emma, she rushed to the window, nearly dropping the stack of manila folders she was holding.
“Oh, Miss Passant!” exclaimed Jean in a voice as rapid as the heartbeat of a hummingbird. “It's so nice to see you, we were all so sorry to hear about your grandfather, he was such a kind, sweet man, it's just terrible. How are you holding up? Is everything all right? Do you need anything?”
“I'm fine, thanks,” said Emma, relieved to be among friends again. Her hands had been shaking for the entire drive downtown to the old building on California Street where Charlemagne had his office. It was a little after nine A.M. now, and last night's rain had left San Francisco cold and wet.
“You know, your grandfather was the first client I met when I started working for Mr. Moussy,” said Jean Bean in a sympathetic voice, opening the inner door for Emma and helping her off with her coat.
“Yes, you've told me that before.”
“It must have been fifteen years ago,” Jean rattled on, “no, what am I saying? More like twenty. It was the same year that Mother came down with colitis, which certainly didn't make her any easier to live with, not that she's what anyone would call easy now, mind you, but at least we don't have to worry about the colitis anymore, thank God, though of course there are a million other things wrong with her, at least to hear her tell it, and she's probably not lying about all of them. But I'm sure you're not interested
in my mother and Lord knows I'd just as soon forget about the woman, if only I could! Coffee?”
“That would be great,” said Emma. Jacques Passant had always referred to Jean Bean as “she who speaks like the machine gun.” He had liked her, too.
“So you're all right?” said Jean, leading Emma to the little kitchenette off the filing area. “There's nothing you need, nothing we can do for you?”
“Actually, I was hoping I could see Charlemagne. Is he very busy this morning? I'll be happy to wait.”
“No, no, no, no,” said Jean, pouring coffee into a dainty porcelain cup with a gold rim and handing it to Emma on a matching saucer. “He doesn't have any appointments until eleven, and I'm sure he'll be delighted to see you. It will give him a perfect excuse to avoid catching up on his paperwork. He keeps promising me he'll do his paperwork, but somehow he never seems to get around to it. You take your coffee black, right?”
“Right,” said Emma, though she was only able to take one sip before Jean was marshaling her down the hall toward Charlemagne's office. “Look, if he needs to do paperwork, I can come back later.”
“Don't be silly, dear,” said Jean, knocking once on the door and pushing it open. “You've been through so much. Look who's here, Mr. Moussy! It's Emma, Emma Passant.”
The office they had entered was a high-ceiling space with wood-paneled walls and a worn Oriental rug. An old-fashioned sofa, upholstered in velvet hung with tassels, sat against one wall beneath an oil painting of a huge vase of flowers. A window overlooking San Francisco's financial district graced another wall, flanked by shelves full of books and knickknacks. Directly opposite the entrance door was a gigantic inlaid brass-mounted desk, its vast tooled-leather surface bare except for a silver letter opener, an appointment book, and a pink porcelain teacup full of tea. On the wall behind the desk was another large oil painting, this one
of a woman playing a cello. Seated at the desk was Charlemagne Moussy.
Jacques Passant's attorney and oldest friend was a small man of enormous dignity and meticulous personal habits. He stood precisely five feet four, wore an impeccably tailored navy-blue suit with an almost imperceptible pinstripe, a dove-gray shirt, and a crimson bow tie. His lapel, as always, featured a fresh white carnation. As always, three peaks of white silk handkerchief protruded from the breast pocket of his suit.
Charlemagne's hair was still jet-black, though he had to be in his seventies. Emma wouldn't be surprised to learn that the little lawyer dyed it, but then she wouldn't be surprised to learn that he didn't. Despite his age, there was something outrageously vital about Charlemagne, from the tips of his tiny pink ears to the pointed toes of his Italian leather shoes.
“Emma,
ma chère,”
said Charlemagne, rising to his feet. “What a delightful surprise for me. How very nice it is to have the pleasure of your visit.”
Emma hadn't seen Charlemagne since that first terrible day at the police station, though she had spoken with him several times over the week that followed. Now she rushed to his open arms and let them embrace her, nearly spilling her coffee in the process.
“Oh, Charlemagne,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
“I'll leave you two alone,” said Jean with a satisfied smile.
“Thank you, Miss Bean.”
The secretary left, closing the door behind her.
Charlemagne led Emma over to the couch, a double-caned canapé with a few needlepoint throw pillows and a single cushion about as thick as a waffle. In an instant all that had been happening poured out—how she and Henri-Pierre Caraignac had met; how Detective Poteet had called with the shocking news of his murder, committed with the same gun that had killed Jacques Passant; how the model boat had disappeared from her grandfather's
dresser, and why Emma was convinced that someone had been in the house.
Charlemagne listened attentively, reacting with a comforting mixture of amusement and solemn approval at the story of how Pépé's ashes had been deposited in San Francisco Bay, asking an occasional question to clarify just what it was that Emma had seen at the house. When she was finished, he clapped his hands on his thighs and nodded his head decisively.
“Ah,
oui,”
he declared. “I see why it is that you were afraid. We must not take the chances with our peace of mind. You were right to leave the house, of course. You must not return until the locks, they are changed.”
“I'm not going back at all,” said Emma, taking a final sip of her coffee. It was lukewarm now, but strong enough for Emma's taste, meaning that it probably could be used to remove paint.
“But it is your home.”
“Not anymore,” said Emma, setting her empty cup down on the French provincial end table and shifting position on the couch. “Not without Pépé.”
Charlemagne raised one of his eyebrows, thin black arcs so perfectly formed that Emma had always wondered if he plucked them into shape.
“I know you are upset, dear Emma,” said the lawyer in a gentle voice. “But from what you tell me, it does not seem reasonable that someone was really there. You say nothing was missing.”
“The model boat was missing.”
“But Jacques, he may have done something with it. Do you know for certain that he did not take it himself?”
“No.”
“And this invasive presence you seemed to feel, could it not have been just the sad events of the past weeks intruding into your mind?”
“Maybe I was imagining things,” said Emma, shifting position
on the couch again, unable to find a comfortable spot. “All I know is that I don't want to go back. Ever. Can we sell the house?”
“If you wish, yes,” said Charlemagne quietly. “Such a house will bring much more than your grandfather paid for it, of course. The mortgage, she is paid up, and the real estate prices in San Francisco, they are absurd. I would counsel you, however, to give this further consideration. It is never wise to act hastily in the aftermath of a death. It is
très difficile
for you to see clearly now,
n'est-ce pas?
You can always sell the house later. Things may look very differently to you a year from today.”
“I can't go back there,” said Emma.
“Once it is sold, it is gone forever.”
“I've made up my mind.”

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