The Orchid Shroud (19 page)

She forgot her own discomfort and regarded him with sympathy.

“We need help,” she said after a moment. “It’s more than two people can do.”

“What, organize a search team? I’ve thought of that, but then Géraud would hear of it. You know he’s already been over every nook and cranny of Les Colombes. What are my chances, what are the orchid’s chances, if he realizes I’ve switched my focus to Aurillac? Although,” he concluded darkly, “by the look of it, he already has.”

“Not a search team,” Mara said. “One person who knows the woods and valleys for kilometers around. Someone who prowls the forests like a bear.”

“Who?” Julian’s face showed his despair.

“Vrac,” said Mara.

T
hey first sought Vrac out at his grim farmhouse, situated below Les Colombes, but found no one there. So they drove up the steep, winding road to the château, where Jeanne de Sauvignac was living, according to Iris, under the dubious care of the Rochers.

Les Colombes was more dilapidated than either of them remembered it. Some of the shutters hung at crooked angles, and the windows looked grimy. Julian parked the van in the rear courtyard, where no attempt had been made to curb the weeds growing up between the flagstones. Mara thought with pity that Jeanne’s existence in the great house must now be like that of a poor ghost, twittering in shadows. The house looked so still, so abandoned, that they really did not expect anyone to answer their summons. They were startled when the door jerked open before they had even had a chance to knock. A large form stood before them in the dim opening.

“You,” growled la Binette. “What do you want?” Her face, with its disfiguring mulberry stain over one eye, was expressionless. The
straw-colored wig she wore, which gave rise to her nickname, was tipped slightly askew. She grunted as Jazz and Bismuth slipped past her into the cool depths of the great kitchen.

“Vrac,” said Mara.

“Not here.”

“Where is he?” Julian asked, hoping desperately that the halfwit had not gone walkabout, for Vrac often was away for days at a time, wandering the woods, sleeping rough, and eating whatever he could catch or steal.

“What business is it of yours?”

“Well, can you give him a message?”

“Maybe.”

“Tell him I want to see him.”

“Why?” said the mother as the son loomed out of the shadows behind her.

“Ah, Vrac,” Julian said, much relieved to see him and trying hard to sound sociable.

“What?” Vrac Rocher coughed out his harsh inquiry. He stepped up beside la Binette. As big as she, he had a large head, hair standing up in tufts, and a misshapen face covered in gray bristle. Although he played the village idiot when it suited him, Mara and Julian knew him to be surprisingly skilled at poaching livestock and beating defunct farm machinery into some kind of working order. He was in his fifties, his mother not much older, for she had borne him young. Together the two kept to themselves in their corner of the world, quietly doing their worst.

Julian held up Iris’s sketch.

“There’s a hundred euros in it for you if you can find this flower. It may be growing around Les Colombes or in the Sigoulane Valley or up on Aurillac Ridge. But I want you to look for it everywhere you go. And I want it living, mind. Don’t pick it, don’t step on it, don’t dig it up, don’t touch it at all. Just find it and lead me to it. And if you do find it, for god’s sake don’t tell anyone else.”

“Two hundred,” said la Binette.

“One fifty.”

“Two fifty.” The woman moved back into the kitchen to drive the dogs forward with a swipe of a booted foot.

“One seventy-five. It’s my final offer,” Julian said firmly.

“Three hundred or get stuffed,” said the woman.

Vrac laughed, a sound like cawing crows.

“All right, three hundred,” Julian conceded angrily as the dogs, flat-eared, came running past him. “But you have a damned funny way of bargaining.” Then he remembered. The Rochers never did play by the rules.

SUNDAY, 9 MAY

T
he following morning, Mara watched anxiously for Julian through her front window. She lived in a handsome stone house, one of a handful of dwellings making up the hamlet of Ecoute-la-Pluie (Listen-to-the-Rain, so named because of a mill, dependent on a rain-fed stream, that had once operated there). The room where she stood was her showcase. Literally. Every item in it, except an Aubusson rug of floral design, was potentially for sale, so that the clusters of period sofas, chairs and tables, mirrors and fireplace accessories never remained the same. The Dordogne was filling up with expatriate year-round and summer residents who bought up farmhouses, abandoned mills, fourteenth-century towers, and decaying châteaux. The renovation of some of these structures fell to Mara, who was gradually establishing a reputation as a creative designer and a reliable coordinator of work crews. Work was patchy, however, and necessity rather than inclination led her to the add-on business of procuring the furnishings to fill these residences.

Julian’s van pulled up with a groaning of brakes in front of the house. One leg followed the other as Julian himself climbed down. Mara hurried out to meet him.

“Julian, I tried to call you, but you’d already left. You really should get a cell phone. You and Christophe.”

“Hate the things. Playing silly tunes and going off all the time. Besides, you’re always losing yours.”

“Well, I wanted to tell you, we have a problem.”

“Problem?”

“Cécile, as it turns out”—her voice was full of implication—“was an avid horsewoman. In fact, apparently she got on better with horses than with people.”

He closed his eyes briefly and swore. He had pictured Cécile sticking to footpaths, at best hiking up her skirts and strolling through spring meadows when the grasses were low. On horseback, she could have ridden all over the valley. All over the region, for that matter. And seen the orchid anywhere.

He cursed again. “Couldn’t you have told me this before?”

“Well, I didn’t
know
before. And please don’t glare like that. Jean-Claude just called, and he happened to mention it.”

“I’m not glaring. But you realize this changes my entire search strategy. We need to revise.”

“Revise how? You don’t honestly expect us to continue, do you?”

“Oh?” he said, purposely stupid, but his eyes held a sharp disappointment.

“Julian, I know I said I’d help you, but this is hopeless.” She might have added that she had been charged by a
sanglier
, some kind of killer animal was on the loose, and her ankle hurt. “Be reasonable. You’ve searched the garden and the forests around Aurillac. We’ve searched around the meadows. This leaves what? The Sigoulane Valley? Most of it is planted over with vines. What hasn’t been is sheer rock face or forest. You honestly don’t expect us to find anything, do you?”

Unhappily, he took her point.

“So what else did Lover Boy have to say?” he inquired sourly.

“His name’s Jean-Claude. There’s no need to call him Lover Boy.”

“Sorry. I thought you said he tried to seduce you.”

She ignored this. “He wants to meet with me again.”

“You two seem to be having a lot of meetings lately.”

“He’s supposed to report daily,” she replied, exasperated. “He said he discovered something new. In fact, he sounded quite excited.”

Julian looked unimpressed.

“You just don’t care, do you,” she burst out angrily, offloading at last the grievance she had with him, “about what happened to Baby Blue. For you, he doesn’t exist except as something your shawl was wrapped around.”

He seemed taken aback. “Of course I care.”

“No, you don’t. Nothing matters to you but your orchid.”

“Oh, I get it. If that’s what’s bothering you, let me say I’m sorry as hell the kid was killed. But that was a long time ago, Mara. What am I supposed to do? Go into mourning?”

“Please don’t be sarcastic.”

“Well, please be reasonable. Has it occurred to you that you’re agonizing needlessly? You’re beating yourself up because you couldn’t prevent your sister’s death, so you’ve transferred your sense of guilt to Baby Blue, that sort of thing? There’s nothing you could have done to help either of them, you know.”

Her head snapped up. “I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. If you want to engage in psychoanalysis, Julian, look at yourself. A child was murdered, and all you can think about is your damned
Cypripedium
. Is that normal?”

They glared at each other.

“So where does that leave us?” Julian said finally. “This isn’t just about Baby Blue or the orchid, you know. We agreed we’d spend more time together. As in tonight.”

She looked him straight in the eye. “I’m sorry, Julian, I can’t.”

He waited for more. Her face assumed a mulish expression.

“I see,” he muttered finally, feeling another of his stress headaches coming on. “Well, in that case, I won’t take up any more of your time.”

He climbed back into his van, slammed the door with unnecessary violence, and drove off.

M
ara spent the rest of the day in her studio, a detached building behind her house, which, unlike her front room, revealed her more natural environment: a clutter of objects salvaged from wrecking sites, old bolts of cloth, client files and accounts stored in sagging cardboard boxes. She was becoming increasingly convinced that Christophe’s gallery was doomed to remain unfinished. As a means of forestalling bankruptcy, she had decided to bid on the renovation of an ugly farmhouse near Meyrals. The new project failed to stir her imagination. Or was it that Julian kept intruding on her concentration? After many hours, she stamped out of her studio and returned to the house. She picked up a message on her phone: the stonemason she thought she had lined up for Christophe could not take the job on after all.

“Merde,”
cried Mara to no one but Jazz, who butted her with his head to tell her it was dinnertime. He had a very hard head.

Dogs, she thought as she fed him, were easy compared with people. They were happy eating the same old thing every day. They were straightforward, took you as you came, and didn’t throw tantrums. Hadn’t someone once said, “The more I know people, the more I like dogs”?

A clock, an antique
pendule
obtained from a dealer in Monpazier, sounded six. Its harsh, brassy chime was bearable only because it, like everything else, was a temporary acquisition. She headed for the bathroom, where she turned the tub taps on full-bore, pouring in a generous dollop of a product called Bain de Mer that turned your bath an improbable blue. She returned to the kitchen, where she found half a bottle of muscat in the
frigo
. She carried it to the bathroom. She tuned her radio to the classical station, but they were playing a modern opera that made her teeth shiver. She found something that was easier listening. It was only
after she had stripped that she discovered she had forgotten a glass, so she made do with her tooth mug, filling it to the brim with cold, sweet wine. This in hand, she sank gratefully into the hot, bubbling ultramarine water.

Minutes later, to the strains of Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday,” she lay submerged to the neck, in a drifting state of mindlessness.

She awoke with a start. The cooling bath was no longer pleasant. It was ten to seven.

“Damn,” she cried, scrambling up, slipping, and splashing water everywhere. She dried off hastily, using her towel to mop up the floor. In the bedroom she grabbed a change of underwear and yanked clothing out of the closet. Not that. Or that. Briefly she considered a long batik sarong skirt and a low-cut russet silk top that complemented her strong coloring, but settled in the end for a tailored gray shirtwaist. Her wedge sandals were where she had kicked them, one under the dresser, the other in a corner of the room.

She made quick work of her still-damp hair. Luckily, it was short enough that it required little grooming. Jazz. She had to remember to let him in. The last time she’d left him outside, his barking had put the neighbors in a rage. She hurried to the rear door, where he was waiting for her. He trotted into the front room, toenails clicking like castanets on the highly polished walnut floor, and settled happily on the Aubusson. She galloped back to the bathroom to make up her face.

Moments later, she surveyed herself in the cheval glass, adjusted her collar, and twitched her hem straight. Then she searched about for her cell phone, which she eventually found in the kitchen, dropped it into her shoulder bag, and strode out of the house to keep her appointment with Jean-Claude Fournier.