In the Shadows (The Outsiders Book 1) (10 page)

“It’s not
so bad,” Maurelle said. “Your eyes will adjust quickly.”

“I forgot that you’re accustomed to
caves,” Dave said. He drew a circle in the tufa dust on the floor and then found a suitable rock to sit on while he chose his next words carefully. “I’m drawn to you, Maurelle. I can’t say that I entirely understand it, but there’s something about you that makes me want to know more. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not exactly hitting on you. I just need to understand what’s going on with you.”

Sh
e sat next to him quietly atop her own rock, hugging her knees to her, with her long skirt draped over her legs, nearly touching her feet. He could barely see her face in the shadowy darkness, but he thought he detected a tremble in her body; from cold or from fear he couldn’t tell.

After a moment, Dave took a deep breath and exhaled
. In the softest voice he could manage, he asked, “What happened to you, Maurelle? What are you running from?”

She was silent for a while. Finally, she whispered,
“Murder. I am wanted for murder.”

The chatter of
natterjack toads outside the cave grew louder, filling the sudden silence that had fallen between Dave and Maurelle with a muffled hammering sound. Dave used to love listening to them in the early evening when he was a kid. Tonight, their chattering grated on his nerves. He and Maurelle were sitting near the cave entrance, with only a trace of moonlight peeking through. She was closer to the entrance than he was. But he had the advantage since he faced the weak light filtering through the cave opening and could see her silhouette—her face turned slightly toward the exit, her chin quivering.

“
Murder,” Dave said, finally.

Her skirt rustled as she squirmed and tried to stand up. Dave half rose, leaned forward, and pulled her back down.

“I’m not here to judge you. Please talk to me. I’ll help you if I can.”

“You can’t help.” She pushed his hand away.

“I know that people get themselves into trouble. It doesn’t mean they’re bad people. Let me help, whatever the problem is.”

“No. I really
must leave now.”

Dave took hold of both her hands and held them tightly together. “Look, I wanted to help you even though I guessed you
were on the run. You ran away the other day when the gendarmes arrived in Reynier. Should I call them or take you to the Gendarmerie and let you answer their questions instead of mine? Is that what you want?”

“You’re threatening me?” She tried to pull her hands from his grasp, but he held
fast.

“I’m no longer a cop, but that doesn’t mean I can sit back and do nothing. You’re hiding from gendarmes and were living in a cave. Now you tell me you’re wanted for murder. I need to know
a lot more about what’s going on. Tell me, or tell the gendarmes.”

He heard a sharp intake of breath, then felt her body
slump down in defeat.

“I don’t really know where to begin,” she said
, her body trembling. Dave let go of one of her hands and placed his arm around her shoulder.

“Is it too cold in here?” he asked. “We can go somewhere else if you want.”

“No, it’s all right.” She sighed, and pushed her side-sweeping bangs out of her eyes. “I just don’t know where to begin,” she repeated.

Dave wished
now that he’d picked somewhere else to talk, somewhere warmer and with enough light that he could see her face and body language better. Perhaps he should have picked the old church on the hilltop. It wasn’t cold outside and with the church’s roof gone, the moonlight would have provided enough light. Too late now.

“I had been living with my boyfriend for a
lmost a year,” she began, “until I found him in bed with another woman. I had to move out of our flat. The lease was in his name because he lived there long before I moved in with him. Having no family left, and no really close friends, I had nowhere to go, so I checked into a hotel near my job. It was very expensive. I tried everything to find another flat, but nothing affordable was available in the area. During lunch one day, one of my colleagues, a friend in the English Department, told me her sister, Elizabeth Raybourne, who was recently divorced and in need of another source of income, was looking for a boarder.” Maurelle paused a moment, the air again growing quiet except for the sound of the toads and crickets outside and a mouse scurrying around further into the cave.

“Go on
.”

“At first it seemed fine. But she had a teenage son, Jared, who was a pupil at the school where I worked. He wasn’t one of my pupils and I didn’t
really know him.” She hesitated, taking a deep breath. “He seemed bright but he told me his grades in maths and science were slipping. He asked me for help, and though they weren’t my subjects, I began tutoring him at the house. A couple of months later, I heard teachers talking about him in the common room. They said that his grades were slipping in all subjects, and he wasn’t trying.”

Dave shifted, and stretched out his legs which were beginning to cramp. “What’s a common room?”

“Oh, that’s where teachers meet, take their breaks, and eat lunch.”

“Ah. We call that a faculty lounge or staff room in the U.S. Okay, go on.”

“I spoke to his aunt, my friend, about what I’d heard and she confirmed it. When I confronted him, he said he loved me. That’s when it hit me that he’d used the tutoring as a way to get closer to me. Of course I told him I didn’t share those feelings. I told him we couldn’t become involved romantically. But he refused to accept it.”

She was silent again.

“What happened then?”

“I stopped tutoring, of course. I avoided him
altogether. But he wouldn’t leave me alone. I watched the ads for flats constantly after that, and I finally moved out a couple of weeks later, when I found a suitable flat.”

“I’ve heard similar stories back in the U.S.” He didn’t add that usually the teacher had actually been sexually involved
with the student. She hadn’t actually said she wasn’t, but . . . . He shook his head slightly; it was hard to stop thinking like a detective.

Maurelle sighed. “Probably not like this case. Three weeks after I moved out, his mother found him dead in his bedroom. Someone had murdered him.”

Dave was glad now for the darkness that shielded the surprise that must be written on his face, but he remained silent.

“It was all over the news,” she said. “The police came to my flat while I was
out shopping, one of the neighbors in my building informed me. From the very beginning, they were seeing me as a suspect, without even having talked to me. Then a former neighbor, an elderly man who lives across the street from the family, called. He suggested I should get away – he’d heard they were about to arrest me.”

“Why did they think you did it?”

“There had been whispers at school, whispers of an affair. The school’s governing board found out and suspended me from work until they could investigate. They suspended Jared from school also. The thing is, I had a key to the house while I lived there, but I gave back the key when I moved out.”

“And you could have made a duplicate
.”

“Yes.”

“Did you do it?” he asked abruptly. He wasn’t expecting a confession, but he needed to spark a reaction.

“The police assumed I did.” She showed almost no emotion.

“What kind of evidence did they have?”

“I have no idea. All I know for sure is that I didn’t do it.”

He rubbed his face and sighed. “If that’s true, why did you run?”

“
I got scared. I’ve heard too many stories of innocent people being convicted on circumstantial evidence and lies.”

“But running away was a huge mistake.”

“I know that now,” she said. “I’ve even thought about going back and turning myself in, but do you know how scary that is?” She shrugged. “It was stupid, instinctive. If they were already thinking, from the start of the investigation, that I’d killed him, what must they think after I ran away? Wouldn’t they automatically convict me?”

He moved away from her, feeling suddenly sick. He wanted to believe she was innocent. He knew she was a terrible liar.
But he wasn’t the best judge anymore. Once, he had believed he could always tell—plenty of officers got that way, sure they knew who was guilty and who was innocent. He’d found out the hard way that he didn’t always know, and it had cost him his job. The silence that developed between them was like a dense fog, enveloping everything in its path and making him feel like he was drowning.

Angry at himself but unable to maintain control, he blurted,
“I should have known. Grand-mère and Simone warned me about you. I’m a trained detective.”

Maurelle didn’t
respond.

“My only explanation is that I tricked myself into believing I knew you.” He chuckled dryly, without humor. “I don’t even know your name. It’s not Maurelle,” he said, “that’s for damn sure.” He pushed his hand through his hair. “I knew you were in some kind of trouble, but I convinced myself that it wasn’t anything serious.”
He stood abruptly, cracking his head with a loud thunk on the low ceiling for the second time in two days. “Ow, damn it!” He clapped his hand to his head, rubbing it. Pulling his hand back, he bent forward, turned slightly to his left, and carefully edged his way around Maurelle until he reached the cave opening. He ducked out and left, leaving her alone with her anguish.

Ten minutes later he entered his grandmother’s house, stormed up the stairs, and walked straight into Maurelle’s room. He grabbed her bags and carried them away.

“What’s going on?”

Dave swung around. His grandmother stood outside her own bedroom, watching him. He sighed and felt some of his anger slip away. Instead of taking the bags to his room, he had another idea.

“Let me put these away, first, and then we can talk.”

Grief threatened to
overwhelm Maurelle, but she bit her lip and suppressed it, closing her eyes and steeling herself. She sat alone, unable to move or even make a decision about what to do. The conversation had gone wrong like everything else she’d ever done. She’d shamed her mother, blown it with her boyfriend, messed up her job, messed up her life. She closed her eyes and pictured Jared—his long legs, slender body, blue eyes and blonde hair. Young enough to look innocent, old enough to get into trouble—and to drag her with him. The head teacher had questioned her about the relationship, having heard the rumors—who hadn’t by then? She knew she had to stop it all, otherwise her life would be ruined. After the murder, she had to escape. What choice did she have? Ha. Her life was ruined anyway.

Her tears, unbidden and unwelcome, flowed
freely until eventually worn out, she slipped into a fitful slumber.

She awoke
lying on the hard cave floor, her face caked with white limestone dust that had formed a paste-like mask that itched. At first wiping at the mask half-heartedly with one hand, she soon gave up and focused instead on her situation. The mouse that had been rummaging around earlier, startled her momentarily as it darted past her into a crevice. Maurelle shook her head.
I’m just like that mouse.

E
arlier in the day when she had sat in the hospital with Dave, and later at the café, chatting about normal things, movies and music and books, she had almost felt light-hearted and optimistic, having lulled herself into thinking her troubles were disappearing and that maybe, just maybe, she could stay in Reynier.

Her
naiveté had once again caused her to let down her guard. She would never be free, let alone carefree and happy. Her only option now was to go back to Fabienne’s, somehow sneak in, and grab her duffel bag. After that she would vanish, change her name again, and change everything about her appearance. This time she would cut her hair, change the color, rent a flat, and work out of her home where she wouldn’t have to deal with the public. Maybe she could teach English somewhere, private tutoring. Oh right! Scratch that.

She forced herself to get up and clean her face as best she could.

Peeking out of the cave, she was relieved to see no gendarmes waiting to cart her away. She slowly made her way back into the village and to Fabienne’s house.

She stood facing the front door and wondered what time it was. Had they gone to bed? The streets were deserted, and most of the windows of the houses were dark, including this one. Placing her ear up to the door she listened, hoping the dog wasn’t there to betray her. Not hearing anything, she carefully turned the doorknob
, pushed the door inward as quietly as possible, and glanced around. Silently, she stepped through the threshold, leaving the door slightly ajar to expedite her escape. Although the living room was dark, light fanned out of the kitchen, making her stiffen. She held her breath and moved slowly toward the stairs, placing her left hand on the baluster. She froze when a male voice, Dave’s, drifted out of the kitchen. She heard her name, which produced in her an overwhelming need to know what Dave was saying.

She
quietly edged closer to the kitchen entrance, almost knocking over a vase with an umbrella in it in the process.

“How could I have been so stupid? I convinced myself that I was drawn to her because she needed my help, but that wasn’t entirely true. I needed to prove something to myself.”

“Why is this crime important to you? Do you think she killed that boy?” Fabienne asked.

“Damned if I know. But I don’t want any part of it. I’m done with helping women like her. I’m done with helping people hide from justice. And I’m done with the judicial system
that half the time doesn’t work. People getting off on technicalities, while others get convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Dirty cops, bosses controlled by politicians, money speaks louder than truth, I’m really sick of it all.”

“It isn’t always that way, surely,” Fabienne said.

“Enough of the time.”

“What has that got to do with Maurelle?”

“Everything.”

Confirming her fears,
Maurelle wheeled around and tiptoed up the stairs to the bedroom she’d stayed in.