The Orchid Shroud (32 page)

Suddenly Joseph grabbed his son’s arm. “There,” he cried hoarsely, pointing off to his right. Something, tall as a man, rose up out of the mist. “Shoot, for god’s sake. Kill the brute!” He himself let off a wild discharge.

André also fired, and the two began to run through the wet grass.

“Got the son of a bitch!” André, outdistancing his father, yelled. The racing form, barely visible against the background of the trees, seemed to shrink and fall to the ground. But it had only dropped to all fours and was running now with even greater speed toward the cover of the woods. André swore.

“Merde!”
Joseph gasped from the rear. “It’s getting away.” He paused to aim more carefully and fired. There was a howl of pain. The thing swerved sharply and vanished altogether.

“Putain!”
André’s anguished voice shrilled. “I’m hit!”

Joseph found André writhing on the ground. Blood poured down his face. The older man dropped his gun and nearly fainted. The dog could be heard barking frantically in the distance.

“You stupid old fool! You could have killed me,” screamed the son. He clutched the side of his head, where most of his ear had been blown away.

The father waved his arms. “I couldn’t see. Oh, god in heaven, how was I to know?”

“You always were a lousy shot.” Blood was oozing between André’s fingers.

“Me? What about you? You should have had it.” Joseph pulled off his jacket and attempted to staunch the bleeding with it.

The mutual recriminations continued for a moment, until both men realized that the dog had gone silent. Joseph helped his son up. The men found Voltaire a few moments later at the top of the field, warily nosing a dead lamb. In the strengthening light, they
could see that its throat had been torn out and its belly ripped open.

“Putain!”
This time it was Joseph who uttered the expletive. It was the second they’d lost in a month.

V
rac, startled by the barking of a dog, froze. Moments later, yelling and an explosion of gunfire caused him to drop to the ground. Raising his head cautiously, he made out hazy shapes at the bottom of the field running toward him. The first shot was followed by a second. That was enough for Vrac. He bolted, sprinting for the cover of the trees. He was surprisingly fast for his size, but he felt himself being overtaken. Something was running at his heels. A third shot boomed in the air. There was a piercing shriek. Vrac swung about in time to see a large gray form sheer off in another direction, leaving behind a feral stench such as Vrac, who was not one of God’s sweetest creatures, had never smelled before.

L
aurent Naudet hovered in the doorway. Adjudant Compagnon sensed the gendarme’s presence but did not look up. Instead, he growled, “What?” and went on initialing expense claims.

“Someone just phoned in with another incident, sir.”

“That makes seventeen, if we count missing dogs and cats. Where?”

“Tronac. Fellow named Joseph Chabanas. Said he and his son caught something worrying his sheep early this morning. Fired at it and thinks they may have wounded it, but it got away. It killed a lamb. It’s the second he’s lost this month. I told him to secure the carcass until we could come out and have a look.”

“Tronac,” Compagnon muttered thoughtfully. He swiveled about to squint at a map on the wall. Red pins marked the locations of verified “Beast” incidents; green, alleged sightings. “That’s thirty kilometers north of Sigoulane. The thing expands its
terri-toire
every day.”

“There’s something else, sir. Chabanas says he’s positive the creature went on two legs, like a man. He got a good look at it. But when they started shooting, it dropped to all fours and ran off.”

Compagnon threw his pen down in disgust. “Why is it no one would ever tell you to your face they believe in werewolves, and yet, given half a chance, they all want to make out it’s a
loup-garou
? On top of that, have you seen this?” He tossed a newspaper to the gendarme. The day’s headline read:
Save Our Wolves. Animal Rights Activists Protest
. “So now we have to deal with this lot. Speaking of which, what’s the situation with those damned self-styled vigilantes?”

Laurent grimaced. “Several loose groups continue to operate in and around Sigoulane. Others are being set up elsewhere. They seem to go out mostly on weekends. Wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t just an excuse for some of them to do a little illegal hunting.”

“Bordel,”
said the adjudant, weary down to his boots. “I don’t have enough officers to go on combing the forests, run a murder investigation, and keep a lid on those
maudit
hunters. To them it’s a game. Wind up potting each other before you know it.”

“I think they already have.” Laurent grinned. “I also got a report from the doctor on call in Buffevent. That’s just down the road from Tronac. She said Chabanas’s son called her out at six o’clock this morning. His ear was shot away. Wouldn’t say how, but I think we can guess.”

SATURDAY MORNING, 15 MAY

J
ulian came to with a pleasant memory of the night before. He and Mara had put the prickles of the past two weeks behind them and had engaged in lovemaking that had been slow and very satisfying. He rolled over, catching a welcome whiff of sandalwood on the pillowcase, in the sheets. It was a clean scent, with just enough complexity to be interesting. He reached out to enfold Mara. His arms closed on nothing. His eyes snapped open. Her side of the bed was cold and empty. He sat up. Then he heard movement in the kitchen. Mara was making tea. He sighed. Her tea, which she somehow never let steep long enough, came out as pale as gnat’s piss.

He got up, took a quick shower, and stood a moment examining himself in the blemished, steamy mirror over his bathroom counter. Thatch thinning a bit on top, facial hair in need of trimming, puffy eyes that hinted at last night’s excesses. They had taken a second bottle of Domaine de la Source to bed with them and finished it off there. Then he remembered the moment when, postcoital, she had poked him playfully in the stomach: “Getting a bit of a tummy, aren’t we?” A minor wound to his amour propre, one he would get over, but he wished she hadn’t said it.

Viewed front-on, his chest was lean, his arms long and wiry, ending in typical gardener’s hands, what he called pitchfork hands, large, work-worn, and permanently soiled around the nails. Turning sideways, he craned about to squint at the slight pear-shaped profile of a paunch and sucked his stomach in. The mirror cut him
off at the hips. Just as well. His naked legs, pale, skinny, and covered in dark hair, were not to his mind his best feature.

He scraped those parts of his face that required shaving, dressed, and wandered into the kitchen. Mara, also dressed, was seated at the table with a mug of tea. She traded pecks with him without looking up from the morning paper. A bag of fresh croissants was on the counter.

“Bless you,” he said with feeling.

When they overnighted at his house, it was usually his job to go down to Chez Nous for breakfast and the paper. Among its many functions, the bistro also served as the local
dépot de pain
. In the Dordogne, where villages were steadily dying off unless they were being bought up wholesale by the English, the provision of bread (or not, as it were) served as a rough indicator of the viability of a settlement. Places
avec boulangerie
had a claim to life, unlike those
sans boulangerie
, which were little more than moribund hamlets populated by octogenarians. Towns like Brames, with a whopping 2,507 residents, enjoyed not only the Méliès establishment, but a rival pastry specialist and a plain baker who also roasted and ground coffee
sur place
. Small villages like Grissac, with only a
dépot
, serviced in this case by a long, thin, silent bread-man named Lucien Peyrat, occupied a kind of middle ground. Julian bit into a flaky croissant—the first bite was always the best, to his mind—leaving a scattering of crumbs on his beard.

Mara, still deep in her paper, said, “The SPA is campaigning on behalf of the feral dog or rogue wolf or whatever it is. They want it humanely trapped. And the police are now looking for an unidentified man known to have employed Jean-Claude for genealogical research. That would be Christophe. About time.”

Julian stopped chewing. It was another way of saying that Christophe was now the focus of a manhunt. Where the hell was he? Had he made those phone calls to Mara? If he was a lycanthrope, as Mara seemed to believe, he was sick. He needed help.
Julian didn’t like the idea of his friend being run to earth like an animal. He poured himself a mug of weak tea, spooned in more sugar than he normally took, and added milk.

Mara’s voice cut across his thoughts. “You know, Julian, I’ve been thinking. About Cécile’s diary. Why don’t we read it together? I’m looking for evidence of lycanthropy. You’re looking for a lead on your orchid. Assuming Cécile did the embroidery, even if she doesn’t mention the orchid itself, she might have said something about where she rode. I still have the key to the house Christophe gave me when I started work on his
galérie
. We can divide the work between us. It would go much faster.”

Julian’s mug stopped halfway to his mouth. “That’s bloody brilliant.” Christophe was forgotten.

“Besides,” she added, “I want to talk to Didier. He told me Jean-Claude had been asking him questions. I want to know about what.”

“And I,” said Julian, “want to find out exactly what kind of Aconite he’s talking about.”

T
hey left the dogs at the cottage because of Didier’s aversion to them. The old man lived on the Aurillac grounds in a stone hut buried in the bushes. An adjacent
potager
, lovingly tended, suggested that Didier put more effort into his vegetables than he did into tending the estate. The
potager
was surrounded by a picket fence that was covered in blackened, gruesome, knobbly objects nailed to the wooden palings: the forefeet of
sangliers
that the gardener, also an enthusiastic hunter, had killed in his lifetime.

They knocked and stood a long time before Didier’s door, examining the blistering green paint. The branches overhanging the front were still dripping with last night’s rain. After walking around his clearing and calling his name, they gave up. The gardener was clearly not there.

“Maybe we should leave him a note,” Mara said. “I wouldn’t want him to come rushing in again with that shotgun of his.”

H
ere’s another one,” Mara said. They had divided the eleven folders of Cécile’s diary between them, Julian taking the even and Mara the odd years, so that they could proceed chronologically while staying more or less in tandem. She read aloud, translating into English from the folder marked 1867, when the writer was twenty-three:

The earlier years, 1861 to 1866, had offered similar accounts of movement on horseback. Julian added another tick next to “Rameau” on a list of place-names he was compiling. That made, he noted, the seventh mention of a ride in that vicinity. With a bit of digging, he was sure he could locate the property. It was even possible that it was still in the hands of Rameau’s descendants.

“And another,” Julian said a moment later. He held up a page from the 1868 folder:

Mara closed her eyes. “My god. She was as bloodthirsty as her brother.”

“Well, you said it runs in the family.” He read further:

He scratched his beard and leaned back in his chair, stretching his long legs out under the library table. “I wonder if she meant the
source
at the north end of the valley? Trouble is, there could be more than one spring. She had to be using a track or road of some sort. I don’t suppose it would be too hard to reconstruct her path.”

Mara closed the 1867 folder and reached for 1869. He took up 1870. It contained material that Mara had already told him about: Cécile’s account of the Paris visit and her army captain; her grief at his death; and the appended material of her sexual encounters with her stealthy visitor whose
“regard bleu”
had pierced her to the entrails. He was more interested in the writer’s accounts of daily activities at Aurillac, especially anything related to rides, canters, and gallopades within the environs of the valley. These were more numerous before the Paris visit. After her return from the capital, Cécile was too overcome by the loss of her captain to take much to the saddle. Or too caught up in family matters, for in the fall of 1870 Hugo brought Henriette, with no warning, as his bride to Aurillac: