A Twist of Orchids (15 page)

Mara hunched back into the pillows. It was not unheard of for bad blood between neighbors to fester quietly beneath the skin of everyday appearances for a long time until some event—Amélie’s death?—caused the rot to erupt like a suppurating boil.
She was checked by Julian’s reminder that Joseph’s grasp of reality was unreliable and the fact that she really couldn’t see anyone wishing him harm. Perhaps Joseph was having more trouble adjusting to the loss of Amélie than any of them realized. Perhaps he was making things up to get attention. Either way, he needed help. She made a decision: the daughter, Christine, had to be found.

Mara thought that Christine was more of a missing person than Kazim. She had dropped out of sight and stayed that way for far longer than the Ismets’ son. Mara was more than a little resentful, therefore, when Julian laughed dismissively at her intention to trace the Gaillards’ daughter. They were having breakfast.

“Good luck,” he said in a way that struck Mara as irritatingly know-it-all. “I think you’ll find it’s not as easy as it sounds.”

“Who said it would be easy? She might be living in Timbuktu for all I know. I just think Joseph needs his family around him. Whatever happened in the past, she’s still his daughter. Someone’s got to make the effort.”

“And that someone is you? Maybe you should find out how Joseph feels about it first before you launch Project Christine.”

Her head snapped up. “What about Project Kazim?”

“Kazim is a runaway kid who has his parents very worried.”

“Christine is also a runaway who’s made her parents unhappy for a lot longer.”

“Betul and Osman asked me to find their son.” “You haven’t done a very good job of it, have you?” “Give me strength! I’m only trying to tell you it’s not that simple finding someone who doesn’t want to be found.” Then he said it: the F word.

Mara swung around on him, eyes blazing. “For your information,
to ferret
means to search out diligently. I looked it up. And
a ferret is a smart, active animal with a hell of a lot more energy and initiative than you seem to show.”

Julian avoided another fight by jumping up and declaring that he had things to do.

•

For the rest of the morning Mara stewed over Julian’s condescension toward her “project.” However, she did decide to take his advice about asking Joseph first. She opened the subject obliquely that evening when she brought the old man his dinner. It was an adaptation of her mother’s meatloaf recipe. Mara’s last attempt at it had come out dry and rubbery, according to Julian. This time, she did not try to prepare it as a loaf. Instead, she simply scrambled all of the ingredients together in a kind of hash. It turned out rather well, she thought, nicely browned and bubbling in its own juices. Joseph received the offering doubtfully. He belonged to a generation of people who were accustomed to eating solid cuts of meat, who associated ground beef with dog food.

“Joseph,” Mara said, sitting down beside him at the kitchen table while he ate. “These nightmares you’ve been having.”

“They’re not nightmares,” he said stubbornly. He frowned and poked his fork into the unformed mass on his plate.

“You think the thing without a head was real?”

“It’s what I’ve been saying.”

“Then it can only mean that somebody is coming in dressed up as a monster to try to frighten you.” She hoped to force him to come to grips with the reality of the situation.

He looked puzzled, not making the connection. “Who’d want to do that?”

“You tell me. Look, has there ever been any trouble between you and any of the neighbors? Say, a dispute or some kind of quarrel that was never settled?”

Joseph took his time, pushing food onto his fork with his
thumb, moving the fork in a wobbling trajectory to his mouth, chewing, swallowing. He had to swallow several times, with visible effort, before the food went down. The mask of his face registered neither pleasure nor displeasure. Eventually he said, “Old Rafaillac didn’t like it much when I told him he looked like one of his own artichokes.” He cackled softly. “The choke part. That was before he lost his hair.”

“I mean, something serious enough for a person to play nasty tricks on you as a way of getting back?”

The fork resumed its exploration of the hash. “What is this, anyway?”

Mara stifled her frustration and became more direct. “Listen, Joseph, the fact is I’m worried about you. I’m afraid you’re not managing very well by yourself.”

“I’ll be all right soon as I get a home helper. I’m trying to get someone to live in full-time.” The old man added ungraciously, “You lot won’t have to bring me my meals anymore.”

“You also have a daughter. Christine, isn’t it?”

He was silent for a moment. Then: “She didn’t come to the funeral.”

“Maybe she didn’t know. I’d like to think she’d be concerned if she realized you’re living here on your own.”

Joseph made a noise in his throat that could have been a comment or a swallow.

“When is the last time you were in contact with Christine, Joseph?”

The old man took in another load of hash.

“Do you know where she is?”

He rolled the food around in his mouth. “It needs more salt.”

Mara knew that her questions had registered with him and that they had upset him. His right hand descended in a shaky arc and came to rest with an accelerated trembling that made the
fork rattle noisily against the rim of his plate. She decided not to press the matter.
Find out the background and the psychology of the case
, Loulou had said.
Ask around.
That should have been her first step.

•

In a hamlet such as Ecoute-la-Pluie, everyone knew everyone else’s business. They knew the state of their neighbor’s health like the weather. They knew if someone had a drinking problem; if a husband beat his wife; if a wife made her husband’s life a misery; if a cow was sick. Any major expenditure—repairs to the roof, a new car or piece of farming equipment—was immediately remarked upon, discussed as to value for money, and generally pronounced to be daylight robbery. The history of a place was archived in the collective memory of its residents.

So the neighbor women were Mara’s other line of inquiry. She thought at first to bring them all together over coffee and cake (since she didn’t bake, she would buy something at the fancy
pâtisserie
in Belvès). That way she could sound them out on her idea and hopefully enlist their help. She could also explore—delicately, of course—the possibility that someone was acting out an old grudge against Joseph. Then it occurred to her that talking to each individually might produce franker disclosures. She was quite pleased with her decision. Julian should not be allowed to flatter himself that he was the only sleuth on the street.

She tackled Francine Boyer first. Louis Boyer had been one of Amélie’s pallbearers. The Boyers had held the funeral reception. That had to count for something.

As she sat in the Boyers’ dim, unheated salon, Mara reflected that the reception was the only other time she had been in their house. Then, the space had been filled with people. Now, Mara saw it for what it was: a long, severe room filled with dark upright furniture squarely placed. It matched Francine, a tall, no-nonsense
woman with bushy, iron-gray hair. A former teacher, Francine still had something of the schoolmistress about her.

“Bad blood between the Gaillards and one of the neighbors? You won’t find any of that here,” she answered stiffly, making Mara sorry she had asked. “Joseph’s monster, as you call it, is in his head. On Tuesday night I took him his meal, and I went back the next morning to clean up and collect my dishes. I’m quite sure”—she drew herself up—“I never tracked a leaf into his house. As for Christine, yes, I knew her. She was a disciplinary problem at school, but then her life wasn’t easy. I don’t know why you’re asking questions about her, but I think you’ll find people here don’t like raking up old matters. You’re a newcomer, so perhaps you see things differently. However, if I were you, I’d leave Christine where she belongs: in the past.”

Mara went away feeling very much that she had been put in her place and told firmly to let the matter drop.

•

Huguette Roche, pink and plump as a pillow, was more forthcoming. She served Mara coffee in the parlor and knitted while they talked. A wood stove gave off a blast of heat. It was funny, Mara reflected as she pulled off her coat, then her cardigan, how people’s environments matched the people themselves. Francine’s house had been cold and forbidding. Huguette’s house was stifling and filled with overstuffed chairs, crocheted antimacassars, and lamps with beaded shades. A budgerigar hopped about in a cage by the window. Like her bird, Huguette fluttered when she spoke.

“But the Gaillards have always gotten along well with their neighbors. Except”—Huguette paused to think—“maybe Olivier Rafaillac. He and Joseph rowed over silly things. Olivier’s dog, and then there was some problem over the sale of a tractor. Of course,” she added coyly, “I always thought Olivier was rather
sweet on Amélie and hoped to marry her after her first husband was killed. She came with quite a bit of land, after all. But then she married Joseph, who didn’t bring a bean with him. In any case, Olivier might hold a grudge, but—
grand Dieu!
—he’s not one to play nasty jokes on people. You surely can’t be thinking that?”

Mara’s questions about Christine elicited a bosomy heave.

“That poor, unfortunate child.” Huguette said it as if Christine, who must be in her fifties by now, had never grown up. Perhaps for Huguette she had not.

Mara put her coffee cup down. “Unfortunate? How?”

“She was so unhappy, you see.” Huguette stopped knitting and leaned forward, unintentionally hiking her skirt up to expose a stout thigh above a woolen stocking that ended at the knee. “She ran off young with a man. The relationship ended badly, as these things always do, and it started her on the wrong track. I always suspected there’d been a baby, although Amélie and Joseph kept very tight-lipped about the matter. They brought her home, but she made life very difficult for them. She kept running off, you see. They couldn’t control her. One day she simply stayed away for good.”

“But why was she so unhappy?” Mara asked. “Surely Amélie and Joseph were good and loving parents?”

“Oh.” Huguette exclaimed softly. “I thought you knew. She—she was terribly deformed. She had a harelip.”

Mara sat back, surprised. “Couldn’t they operate?”

“Well, yes. They did. But it was badly done, and it gave her a complex. In my opinion, that’s been the root of all her problems.”

“Listen, Huguette,” Mara said, taking the plunge. “Maybe it’s none of my business, but Joseph needs help. Whatever happened in the past, I think it’s time Christine was reunited with her father. Do you have any idea how to get in touch with her?”

Huguette went quite pale. “Oh dear.” She fidgeted. “Get in touch? No, I don’t. And I—I don’t think that’s such a good idea.
Not a good idea at all.” She stood up, clutching her knitting to her like a woolly shield. “And now, if you don’t mind, I really don’t think I ought to say any more about the matter.”

•

It was down to Suzanne Portier. Mara sat in her spacious kitchen. The big woman, sweater sleeves pushed up to the elbows, was making bread at a table in the middle of the room. Suzanne believed in bread, the kind of bread with body that lasted a full week, not those degenerate baguettes that went stale as soon as you got them home. She was often heard to say that the pap being turned out by today’s
boulangeries
heralded the downfall of France, the French people, French culture. Mara watched in fascination as Suzanne turned the dough out onto a floured board where it sat like a fat body, lightly blistered over its entire surface. She began to knead it, leaning her weight into it, pressing down with the heels of her hands, turning and folding the heavy mass. Suzanne’s bare forearms were powerful, like a man’s.

“There’s no one around here who would even think of trying to frighten Joseph, if that’s what you’ve come about,” she said sharply, letting Mara know that the news of her visits with Francine and Huguette had run ahead of her. “As for your idea of reuniting Joseph with Christine, have you asked him how he feels about it?”

“Ye-es.” Mara took a deep breath. “I honestly think it’s worth a try. I don’t suppose you know where I can find her?”

“What if she doesn’t want to be found?” Suzanne’s hands continued to work swiftly, as if they were somehow more intimately bound to the shiny, elastic mass they were kneading than to herself.

“She might if she knew how much her father needs her. These hallucinations of his. They’re getting serious. And after all, how many years have passed? People change, you know.”

“Then why hasn’t she come forward? She could have turned up at her mother’s funeral.”

It was what Joseph had said.

“Maybe she didn’t know.”

“Oh, she knew all right.”

Mara caught her breath. It was the first real break in the mystery that surrounded Christine Gaillard. She waited for the other woman to say more. Suzanne lifted the dough, placed it in a large bowl, and left it to rise under a cloth. She went to the sink to wash her hands. With her back still to her visitor, she said in an almost resigned tone: “Look, before you go stirring things up, you should know that it might be for the best for everyone if Christine didn’t come back.”

“But why?”

Suzanne turned around, holding her wet hands before her. “Christine had her own ideas about things, and she had a violent temper. It’s something no one here likes to talk about. When she was a kid, she stabbed a schoolmate in the back with a pair of scissors. Created an awful fuss, although the other child wasn’t badly hurt. And then”—Suzanne dried her hands on her apron—“she tried to kill her mother.”

Mara started. “Tried to kill Amélie?”

Suzanne’s eyes glinted.
Got you there
, they seemed to say. “She pushed her down the garret stairs.”

Mara sat speechless, thinking of the dark, narrow stairway leading up to the Gaillards’ dusty attic. She recalled the looks exchanged at Amélie’s funeral, Joseph’s unanswered question (
Why was she up there?
), and understood the conspiracy of silence that only Suzanne was bold enough to break. Amélie’s death had been caused by a fall down another flight of stairs. Had the Gaillards’ daughter tried again and succeeded?