The Orchid Shroud (26 page)

“That was Lamartine,” he told the sergeant grimly. “He says the fall broke Fournier’s neck all right, but that’s not what killed him. He didn’t spot it right away because the destruction of tissue and bone by whatever ate him was so massive. But something about the way the hyoid was fractured led him to examine the eyes more closely. He found petechiae in the conjunctiva. He thinks Fournier was strangled. Fournier’s throat was destroyed, but he found marks on the back of the neck that suggest a straplike object. Madame Dunn could still have done the pushing, but either she or someone else climbed down there afterward and finished the poor
bougre
off.”

Naudet took a deep breath. “The wolf belt, sir. Maybe that’s what was used to strangle him.”

The orange eyebrows leaped. “Get that Dunn woman down here, Naudet,” Compagnon bellowed. “I want a statement and an exact description of that belt. Then you and Batailler go back to Fournier’s place. Look for it. Search his closets and drawers. It might have been left in among his clothing, where it wouldn’t be noticed. Comb the ravine and the area around the house. And talk
to the neighbors again. I want a full report on anything that moved in the area Sunday night. Someone’s bound to have seen something. We need to make progress with this case. I’m getting rumblings from above, and I want the powers that be to know we have things firmly in hand.”

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, 12 MAY

I
’m off now,” said Thérèse. “Stéphanie is driving me.” The housekeeper stood in the doorway leading from the library into the adjacent grand salon. She carried her coat over one arm, a canvas valise in the other hand. She was going to her sister’s in Gourdon. She had heard the Wailing Ghost again the night before and refused to stay on any longer alone in the house.

Mara looked up from the library table where she was working her way through the de Bonfond archives. She was doing it methodically. First the family papers. Then Cécile’s diary.

“Thérèse, are you sure you don’t know where Christophe is?” Earlier she had spent an hour giving Laurent Naudet a description of the wolf belt and its history, and the rest of the morning convincing a twitchy
juge d’instruction
that she would hardly be likely to raise the matter of the belt if she had used it as a murder weapon. Christophe’s whereabouts was an increasingly pressing concern for her. The examining magistrate did not believe that she had gone to see Jean-Claude solely on de Bonfond business. He thought they had been lovers.

“I already told you. And I told the police. He never says where he goes, and it’s not my place to ask.”

“But he’s disappeared before?”

“When he’s in one of his moods.”

“Well, did he do it in April, around the fifth of the month?”

“I don’t keep track of him. I have my work to do.”

“Yes, but this is important, Thérèse. Please try to remember.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Just answer the question.”

The housekeeper looked sulky. “He might have. He was away for a few days around that time. Although what business it is of yours, I can’t see.” She shifted her grip on the valise. “Well, I can’t stand here wasting time. I’ll leave you to it. But if you plan on coming back here, you’d better let Didier know. He doesn’t like dogs”—she jabbed her chin at Jazz, sleeping beneath the table—“his eyesight’s not that good anymore, and”—an oblique look of many meanings—“he has his Babette.”

The woman was gone before Mara thought to ask who or what Babette was.

S
everal hours later, Mara came to the conclusion that, whatever she thought of Jean-Claude, the genealogist had known his stuff and had done his homework. He had undertaken an exhaustive search—verified births, marriages, and deaths against church and parish records; looked up cadastral plans and census and military records; checked facts with library and other archival sources; and searched newspaper files for relevant citations, photographs, and articles. Séverine’s family (Bonfonds without the “de”) were well-to-do Huguenots whose holdings in the Sigoulane Valley had waxed and waned with the Wars of Religion and the persecution of Protestants in the region. Aurillac, built in 1505, had been the family seat, and in this sense, Christophe was correct—the house had been in the family, at least Séverine’s side of it, for five hundred years. Early information on Xavier was scant. The village of Paulhac in Le Gévaudan was given as his birthplace, and there were mentions of a Xavier Lebrun who had worked in the area as an official for
la gabelle
, the infamous salt tax. In 1770, Xavier, le Baron de Bonfond, appeared in Sigoulane. After his marriage to his cousin Séverine, he proved himself to have been a man of ambition and ability, turning the tide of her family’s fortunes, then on
the brink of disaster, almost single-handedly. Séverine converted to Catholicism before she died of puerperal fever, and Aurillac slowly recovered its former prosperity. Everything was neatly filed by subject and date. There was nothing under werewolves.

One fat folder contained the minutiae of daily life at Aurillac over past centuries: a remedy for goiter; orders to the cook and to the washerwomen who came up from the village; lists of wages; bills of sale; notes of purchase of livestock; accounts of hunts (probably written in Hugo’s hand) itemizing the numbers of
sangliers
and
cerfs
killed; seating plans and menus for banquets, including one flagged by Jean-Claude as being the occasion of Hugo’s thirty-sixth birthday, the day he was thrown from his horse. According to his funerary notice, Hugo died seventeen days later.

Moving into more recent times, Mara leafed through photocopies of newspaper articles and rotogravures: Dieudonné and Léonie, née Boursicaut, in front of the Bordeaux
mairie
on their wedding day; Dieudonné in 1921 being feted at the Salle Municipale in Brames for his development of the revolutionary inking technique that Jean-Claude had mentioned and that had so advanced the de Bonfond fortunes.

Mara leaned back in her chair and let her focus drift to the middle distance. A livid sunset lit the western windows of the library. So far she had found nothing suspicious in the de Bonfond family archives. Certainly no accounts of howling at the moon or evidence of shape-shifting or uncontrolled growth of bodily hair. With a sigh, she returned to her task, taking up yellowed packets of documents tied with ribbon: notarial acts, for the notary was an integral part of French life then as now. She scanned wills, bequests, and land dispositions. One document related to Dominique de Bonfond’s provisions for Odile; another set out Hugo’s provisions for Henriette. The terms were similar: the wife, if she bore a surviving male heir, received an annuity and a life interest in the estate, but only on condition that she continued to live at Aurillac in a state of
pious widowhood. French succession law then as now was governed by bloodline, and it was only recently that a surviving spouse shared with children an entrenched right to a deceased person’s estate.

And finally, there were notes, written in Jean-Claude’s flowing script, of names, dates, places, and assertions that he had not been able to verify. They ran backward from 1730, the year of the false baron’s birth, and were undoubtedly the source of the genealogist’s conclusion that three-quarters of the de Bonfond family tree had been fabricated. She was amused to see the occasional strenuous objection: “Nothing listed in this regard!;” “Impossible! Facts are widely divergent!” It was almost as if the genealogist had taken a perverse satisfaction in finding no substantiation to the de Bonfond claims.

It was now growing dark. Outside, a wind was building up. Mara heard it gusting against the glass panes. She rose to turn on a standing lamp. It filled the library with a comfortable, rosy glow. Jazz moaned his hunger. Dinnertime had come and gone, according to his stomach, but she returned to her reading, too engrossed to care about food. Eventually, Jazz’s noises took on a new, more pressing note. She gave in.

“Okay, monster.” She stood up, pulled off her glasses, stretched, and let him out. The dog disappeared immediately into the garden. The wind, redolent of impending rain, ruffled her hair as she stood in the doorway that opened directly from the library onto the rear terrace. Below her, the stone dolphin, dribbling into its pool, was a dark, indistinct shape. She gave the dog sufficient time, then whistled him back. Jazz came reluctantly, looking reproachful.

Mara noted with surprise that it was nearly half past eight. She assembled Jean-Claude’s notes and replaced them in the cabinet with every intention of packing up for the night. She would come back another time to tackle Cécile’s diary. Yet she hesitated. There was one thing she wanted to check before she left.

“Fifteen more minutes,” she promised her dog and put her glasses on again.

Cécile’s diary was contained in eleven folders, dated by year, running from 1861 to 1871. Skimming through a few, she quickly saw what Jean-Claude had complained about. The diary was more a series of personal notes, with little sense of coherence or chronological order. The genealogist had organized the material as best he could, sequencing the unbound sheets according to the writer’s references to verifiable events, religious holidays, birthdays, and seasonal descriptions. As he had said, much of it was guesswork because most of the entries were undated. The handwriting was large and scrawling. “Unformed” was the word that came to Mara’s mind. Or “unfulfilled.”

In the 1870 folder, which Jean-Claude had shown her, Mara read through dull and unvarying accounts of daily life at Aurillac. The slaughter of a pig merited note as an important event. Mara got the sense of a clumsy, susceptible young woman, the object of perceived or real slights. Cécile had penned, somewhat pathetically:

The material also attested to Odile’s meanness:

Later entries contained what Mara had hoped to find: an account of the summer visit to Paris, undoubtedly a high point in Cécile’s life. Hugo and his father had been there since March. Odile, Cécile, and Eloïse had followed in June. “We went,” Cécile had written with naïve candor, “only because Maman heard of Papa and Hugo’s gaming, which she fears will bankrupt us, but for which I was glad, else I would not have seen Paris. Maman and Eloïse traveled up first-class. I went third with Marie, the maid, to oversee the luggage.” Mara cross-checked with the family tree and concluded that more than gaming had been going on. Hugo had married Henriette in August of that year.

Of greatest interest to her were entries on a certain Armand Vigier, one of Hugo’s friends and a captain in Napoleon III’s army. Cécile’s acquaintance with him had been struck while the women were driving in the Bois de Boulogne:

There were accounts of several meetings with the captain during the space of two months, all in public places and closely chaperoned by Odile or Eloïse. Nevertheless, the captain had managed to get his point across:

But Cécile’s romance was doomed from the start. Maman interceded once it became clear that the captain had no money, and the family, except for Hugo, returned to the Dordogne in July. In any case, the captain was mobilized that same month and died soon after fighting the Prussians at Sedan. A grief-stricken Cécile had mourned:

Except a swelling belly, Mara thought. Reason enough to enter a convent. For Mara had found the references to the “stealthy visits” that Jean-Claude had read out to her. They were undated, stand-alone pieces that the genealogist had filed with the pages on the Paris summer. Mara decided that the captain, while alive, must have been very resourceful or extremely determined. With all the close surveillance and so little time, it was a wonder that the pair had managed to get it on at all. In one vivid passage, Cécile described what Mara took to be her first, rather horrific sexual encounter with her mustachioed lover: