Sea Lovers (29 page)

His way in this case was a charge of first-degree murder, which no one believed he could make stick, considering who Octave was, the general antipathy toward Felix Kelly, and the lack of witnesses to the incident. But Cesar had investigated the scene of the shooting, interviewed various parties, and was convinced that Octave had a motive, and that the confrontation in the forest was not an accident, or even an impulsive act of violence, but a premeditated crime.

It struck Cesar as odd that Felix Kelly, who had lived and worked in a small town for several years and was by all accounts a frugal and industrious craftsman with no expensive habits and no one to support but himself, should leave so small an estate. There should have been, he reasoned, more money. Accordingly he requested an interview with Silas Bunkie, the head of the Savings Bank in Vacherie, the closest such institution to Villedeau. Silas revealed that Felix Kelly had indeed been a regular depositor, having opened an account shortly after he leased his shop, and over the years had amassed a considerable savings, a little over a thousand dollars, which amount he had withdrawn in its entirety one week before his fatal encounter with Octave Favrot.

Where was the money? Felix didn't have a cent on him when he died. His home and possessions had been thoroughly searched and dispersed. Why would he have taken out his entire savings and left town without it? It made no sense.

When the court official arrived with an order to search the house of Octave Favrot, Sheriff Petit expressed his outrage with some vehemence. His first impulse was to warn Odile that he would be obliged to carry out the order, but the official, calm in the face of resistance and sure of his duty to the court, insisted that the action must be performed without delay, and that he would accompany the search party and report the results to the prosecutor.

“What in God's name are we looking for?” exclaimed the indignant sheriff. “Are we to go through that poor lady's armoire, are we to rifle her linens and her dresses and her undergarments?”

“You are looking for one thousand dollars in gold coin,” retorted the messenger. “So I would think the armoire might be a very likely place to begin.”

Sheriff Petit rose ponderously from his desk, lumbered to the door of the prison room, and threw it open with more than necessary force. “Octave,” he shouted into the dim room beyond, “have you got a thousand dollars in gold at your place?”

“I do not,” came the offended reply.

The sheriff turned a glacial eye upon the court official. “There you are,” he said. “He don't have it.”

The official was not amused by the sheriff's complacency. A boy was sent out to call in three men to be deputized, and in the afternoon, accompanied by the court official, they set out for the Favrot house.

Though not grand, this was a comfortable, spacious cottage, with wide porches across the front and the back, the front giving on to a lane of old oaks, the back upon a wide green lawn ending at the sparkling blue of the bayou. A fanciful screened gazebo, with a domed roof and classical columns, appeared to float upon a cloud of pink azaleas near the water's edge. Odile's mother, a dignified lady in whose features the original stamp of her daughter's loveliness was still evident, greeted her visitors without suspicion, for she knew the deputies by their first names. The court official stepped forward, proffering the order to search the premises, while the townsmen hung back sheepishly, embarrassed by their mission. Madame Chopin studied the document, clearly mystified. “What does it mean?” she asked calmly.

“It means these men must come in now and search your house.”

“My daughter is ill,” she said coldly. “Surely this can wait until she has recovered.”

At this the deputies literally hung their heads, but the court official was firm. “I'm afraid not, ma'am,” he said. “The warrant must be carried out without notice.”

Madame Chopin gave the official, who was young enough to be her son, a long, searching look. Something she saw, perhaps his inherent obstinacy, piqued her interest. “Because you think we might take the opportunity to hide whatever it is you're looking for,” she observed.

“That's not for me to say, ma'am,” he replied. “The court is very clear on the procedure, and it's my duty to carry out the wishes of the court.”

“The wishes,” she repeated.

“The orders,” he corrected. “It's a court order you're holding.”

As she folded the paper and handed it back to the young man, the faintest of smiles played at the corners of her mouth. “I see,” she said. “My daughter is resting in the parlor. I don't want her needlessly disturbed. I'll bring her out and sit with her in the gazebo while you gentlemen”—she nodded at the miserable trio skulking on the steps—“go about your business here.”

As she turned to reenter her daughter's house, the young man stepped forward, his hand raised as if to make a salient point. “Excuse me, ma'am,” he said. “I'll have to accompany you.”

Her only reaction was a visible drawing up of the spine, a slight tilt of her chin in the direction of her unwelcome visitor. “Very well,” she said. “Come along.”

The three deputies retreated to the shade of an oak tree, scarcely speaking as they waited, each of them feeling in his own conscience the burden of this unsolicited employment. Rifling the personal possessions of a wealthy man upon whom adversity had fallen as surely as it falls on the indigent and the poor was not an honorable activity. If Octave had been a skinflint or a brute, there might be some pleasure in seeing him brought low, but he was a gentleman, a fair employer, a man whose sense of duty to his family had been sorely tested and proved sufficient to the test.

At last the screen door opened and Odile Favrot, supported by her mother and followed with ecclesiastical solemnity by the court official, stepped out. Odile was dressed in black, her pale face partially obscured by her dark hair, which fell loosely over her shoulders. She kept her eyes down, inclining her head toward her mother's ear and mumbling something the men couldn't make out. She was spectrally thin; the forearm that showed beyond the sleeve of her dress was nearly fleshless. Nervously she tapped her long, skeletal fingers against her mother's shoulder. The two women descended the steps and turned from the walk onto the worn path to the gazebo. It was a bright, clear, fresh fall day, but to the men following the melancholy passage of this wraith, whose beauty and vivacity had once entranced the town in a blissful spell, it was as if a cold, dark wave rose in her wake and smote the bright shore on which they wonderingly stood.

The official summoned the men to the house and directed them into various rooms, reminding them that the gold might not be all in one place, that they were to open every drawer and search under and behind all furniture, inside all sacks and casks in the kitchen. They glared at him as a group, but once separated, each set to work resolutely. Odile's arrangements were tidy, which made their job easier and inclined them to leave everything as they had found it. The official himself examined the baby's room, noting that to take the babe without alarming the household, the thief would have had to climb to the porch roof and slip in through the window. He knew it was the prosecutor's theory that Felix Kelly had never entered the house and that Octave had sold the child to him for a bag of gold. As he opened the chest of drawers, which was a fine oak piece with drawer pulls carved in the shape of leaves and an ebony inlay on the top, he wondered why a man so obviously as wealthy as Octave Favrot would take money from a man he must have despised.

In the chest he found folded linens scented by a lavender sachet, a drawer of neatly pressed baby clothes, and another containing soft toys, stuffed animals, and a smooth satin ball. The poor child, blind as he was, couldn't see the button eyes and sewed-on smile of the plush bear, but he could probably feel the shape and make some image in his mind. He was said to be a bright little boy, in spite of his affliction, who learned to speak early, loved music, and walked boldly with his hands out before him, unruffled when he fell, as he frequently did. His mother adored him.

The official turned to the child's bed. Surely there was nothing to be found there. Absently he lifted the pillow and stood looking down in surprise at a shiny coin. He picked it up. A five-dollar gold piece.

Perhaps the money was hidden coin by coin, throughout the house. He carried his find to the parlor, where a deputy was carefully returning a vase to the sideboard. “Did you look inside the vase?” asked the official.

“ 'Course I did,” replied the man.

“I found a gold piece,” the official said, holding out the coin. “Under the pillow in the child's bed.”

His colleague took the piece and turned it over in his hand. “What in this world was it doing there?” he said.

“There must be others,” the official insisted. “They must be hidden all over the house.”

But three hours later, when it was agreed that the search was ended, they had not found another coin of any kind.

Because of her illness, Odile had stopped visiting her husband, and it was now Madame Chopin who brought the daily meal to the sheriff's office. The day after the fruitless search she arrived in high dudgeon and made a fuss about the men searching through her daughter's possessions. Her son-in-law had admitted his offense, she reminded the sheriff. Why should his family be subjected to this indignity? “How dare those fools come lounging around the door and then drive us straight out of the house!” she exclaimed. Her daughter was so ill the doctor feared for her life; was the law not tempered by such mercy as you would show a wounded animal?

Sheriff Petit had the thought that the mercy she referred to generally came in the form of a bullet, but he kept that observation to himself. Madame Chopin was notoriously full of herself and indifferent to others. She was always willing and eager to express her low opinion of the town officials, whom she compared unfavorably to those in Vacherie, where she was from. Still, everyone knew she was devoted to her daughter, and doubtless she had suffered mightily of late, so he counseled himself to be charitable. “Seems Felix took a lot of money out of the bank right before he died,” he replied calmly. “Gold coin. And it disappeared. So they have to look for it.”

“Why would Octave Favrot have money belonging to that scoundrel, I ask you?” said Madame Chopin, raising her voice, as if, thought the sheriff, he was hard of hearing.

“I can't think of a reason,” agreed the sheriff. “But when money goes missing, it constitutes a motive.”

She narrowed her eyes. “A motive for what?”

“Well…” The sheriff paused. His sympathy for his interlocutress faded. She had called his men fools for doing their duty, and the dead man a scoundrel, which might have been true, the sheriff couldn't say, but Felix was dead and couldn't defend himself. So he decided to set Madame Chopin straight. “Murder,” he said.