Floats the Dark Shadow (45 page)

Michel glanced up at Averill now and again as he read the poems silently. Finally he walked over to stand face to face with him. Lifting a sheet of paper, he quoted, “
She invites you to explore death
. Is this your poem about Alicia?”

Averill shut his eyes. Opening them, they looked haunted. “That is a different poem. I’d thought to make them a pair. Aesthetic horror and true horror, if you will.” He smiled grimly. “But of course, you will not.”

“Will not?”

“Believe me.”

“I believe the evidence.” Michel held up the poem and read.

Tes doigts cherchent dans le doux abîme.

Des aveux furtifs qui t’entraînent,

En éveillant un plaisir impie!

Savoure cette obsession malsaine.

Your fingers search in the sweet abyss. Furtive revelations pull you in, awakening a blasphemous pleasure! Savor the corrupt obsession.
Theo forced herself to stand straighter, fighting the caving in her stomach.

“Do you often write of despoiling bodies, Monsieur Charron?” Michel asked.

“I write about death. What poet does not?”

“About Alicia?”

Averill hesitated. “I started to write a poem about Alicia…to exorcise the memory if I could.”

“To exorcise it or to dramatize it?” Michel asked.

“I chose the word I wanted, Inspecteur.” His voice was weary but adamant. “I destroyed the poem about Alicia because it distressed Theo.”

Michel looked at each of them in turn. “She asked you to destroy it?”

“I would never ask that!” Theo was horrified.

She could hear the clink of the metal handcuffs as Averill buried his hands in his hair. “It lives on in my mind. It still wants to be written.”

“Write it,” she urged him. Averill cared enough about her pain to have destroyed the poem. The killer would revel in watching her misery. Theo wanted to shout Averill’s innocence, but Michel would just say his delight was secret—the blasphemous delight of the poem. Instead, she struggled to think like a detective. “If Averill wrote this poem about Alicia, Inspecteur Devaux, then what about the others? Why just one of them? Wouldn’t a killer poet commemorate each victim?”

“Perhaps he has, and the poems are well hidden.”

“You found this one easily enough.”

“Because he was still writing it. The others may be buried with the bodies.”

She had no counter to that—but it didn’t matter. The poem was not about Alicia. “Averill told you the truth. The woman in that poem is not even real.”

“Not real?” Michel frowned at her.

Moving forward, Averill said, “No—she is wax.”

“Wax?”

“She is an anatomical Venus that my father owns.” Averill made a helpless gesture with his hands. “You can open her body to study the placement of the organs.”

“She belongs to your father?”

“His most extravagant and adored possession.” Averill smiled a challenge. “Perhaps he is your killer, Inspecteur Devaux. He is certainly a most monstrous murderer of souls.”

“He is also one of the few with a legitimate alibi for one of the kidnappings, being away for a week at a physician’s conference.”

“Another fabulous hope shattered on the crags of reality,” Averill said with bitter drama. But then he thought for a moment and said, “Vipèrine could have hidden the child and waited.”

“For a week?”

Averill looked ill at the thought. “I’d hope the child’s suffering ended more quickly.”

“I want to see this anatomical Venus.”

“That is easily done, she’s downstairs in my father’s library.” Averill gave a twist of a smile. “You would have stumbled over her eventually.”

Michel signaled his men to keep searching, then gathered up Averill’s papers. He read from the Venus poem again, his voice cold and taunting.

Des aveux furtifs t’entraînent

Là où t’attendent des énigmes menaçantes.

Savoure cette obsession malsaine :

Cette peau rosée cache des horreurs ondulantes.

Furtive revelations pull you in, where menacing enigmas await. Savor the corrupt obsession: This rosy skin hides twisting horrors.
Theo had to ball her hands into fists to stop herself snatching the poem from Michel’s hands.

The Inspecteur nodded toward the door. “Show me your corrupt obsession.”

They retraced their steps and Theo followed. She had to clutch the banister as memory again scorched her mind—Averill looking at her before he kissed Casimir—only a few hours after he’d embraced her with passion and desperation. When they walked along the hall to the library, she remembered the wrench of terror she’d felt when she saw the opened body of the anatomical Venus.

Once again, the room was in shadow. Michel lit the lamps. The wax sculpture was closed within her case like Snow White in her glass coffin, only far less chaste. Her nude body gleamed softly, her angelic face was turned toward them, watching their approach through half-closed eyes of blue glass.

“Her gaze is beseeching, don’t you think?” Averill asked Michel. “It’s as if she wants to be opened.”

Theo’s queasiness intensified. That was the same provoking tone Averill used to talk to his father. He was angry. When he was angry, he was reckless. She watched as Michel stared him down. Averill flushed and looked away.

She walked over to the glass case, nodded down at the figure. “You see, Inspecteur, Averill is not eviscerating people.”

Michel’s voice was flat. “This wax figure proves nothing for good or ill.”

“But she’s not real,” Theo protested. “She belongs to his father.”

“He chose her for the subject of his poem. She may long ago have inspired him to
explore death
.”

As they argued, U
rbain Charron marched through the door and stood in the middle of the room. He seemed to swell with outrage as he surveyed them one by one, then fixed on Inspecteur Devaux. “How dare you disturb my household!”

Michel’s response to the pompous exclamation was a slight narrowing of his eyes. “The juge d’instruction gave me permission to search. Your son is present. That is all that is required.”

Her uncle stared closely at Averill, then suddenly surged forward, grabbing the scarf and yanking it off to reveal the bruise circling his neck.
“You tried to kill yourself.” He scrutinized Averill, lips quivering with disgust. “It’s a pity you didn’t do a better job of it.”

Theo wanted to claw his eyes out.

“Is that what you think?” Averill asked.

“Have you committed these obscene crimes? If you have, you are mad. You carry the same taint as your mother and your—” He broke off suddenly, his eyes darting nervously

“And my sister?” Averill finished his sentence, his voice dripping venom.

“Be quiet!” his father cried, truly furious now. “Don’t speak of her.”

“You thought I wouldn’t find out—but I did! I found you’d shut her away in the asylum.” Averill was white with fury, but patches of red flushed his cheeks, lurid bloodstains under the skin. “This killer has your sort of madness. Your sadism. Your love of degradation.

“Silence!” his father roared.

Averill’s voice hardened. “My mother’s spirit is trampled. My sister is lunatic. It is all your doing. Your oppression crushes and deforms us.”

“Be quiet.” A hiss now. A vein quivered on his father’s forehead like a worm crawling under his skin.

Thoughts tangled inside Theo’s mind but she couldn’t pause to sort them out, not with the vicious family drama erupting in front of her. Michel was watching both men tensely, ready to intervene, but hoping some vital clue would tumble out.

“We are a degenerate family, a perfect case study. I will have to write a monograph about us, won’t I, Father?” Averill laughed and lifted his cuffed hands. “Rather difficult to do in manacles. Do you want them to keep them on? Do you want them to take off my head? Will you pickle it in a jar and keep it beside your anatomical Venus?”

Urbain backed away. He extended his arm dramatically, pointing at Averill. “You are mad! You are as mad as Jeanette. They will lock you away.”

Averill gave a choked cry and lunged at him, chained hands closing around his throat. His father pounded at him with his fists, but Averill’s rage gave him strength. Michel leaped forward and pulled Averill away, gripping him tightly until he stopped struggling. Her uncle looked terrified, his fingers pawing at his throat. Slowly, he regained his composure. Glaring at Averill, he proclaimed hoarsely, “Patricide!”

“Unfortunately not,” Averill sneered. He jerked away from Michel, who let him go. “What do you think, Inspecteur, have you found your killer—the degenerate son of degenerate stock? Perhaps the whole family is mad.”

“Perhaps.” He stood watching Averill and his father.

Averill face was stark with hatred. “Jeanette wasn’t mad before but she is now, isn’t she? That is your doing.”

His father moved closer, his voice low and intimate. “I know you tried to visit her. You will never find where I’ve moved her—your whore of a sister.”

Averill lunged for him again, but Michel seized him and pushed him down into a chair. Abruptly, Averill doubled over with a sob. The sound spurred Theo forward. She knelt beside the chair and laid her hand on his shoulder. At her touch, a shudder ran through him. She did not move, only waited, acutely aware of him and of Michel, weighing and measuring each movement, marking it in the innocent or guilty columns of his mind. Silently, Theo wished him to hell.

A long moment passed, then Averill lifted his head to face her. Tear tracks glistened on his cheeks but his gaze held a storm of fury as much as sorrow. His voice accused her. “I told you, there is too much darkness.”

“Averill,” she whispered his name, only wanting him to know she loved him.

He turned away from her. His manacled hands wrapped together, first a gesture of prayer, then a fist that he struck against his forehead. “A sea of darkness—inside and out. If I can go deep enough, submerge myself, I will find peace.”

Theo did not know what to say. Silence settled like a pall. Averill was wretched. His father glared at them, his face warping from triumph to fury to fear and back again. At last Michel spoke. “How long have you known your sister did not die in the accident?”

“Sometime after Christmas….”

When he began drinking absinthe with such fervor, Theo realized. When he began acquiescing to his father.

Urbain Charron glowered at him. “My efforts to prevent her shame from destroying us were futile. You have brought far worse scandal crashing down on us.”

“He is innocent!” Theo exclaimed.

“Is Averill innocent?” Her uncle asked Michel with a sneer.

Michel gave him a cold smile. “I have not totally discounted the possibility.”

But Theo did not believe him.