Fortune's Deadly Descent (12 page)

The man takes the offered tea, thanks Seraphina, who now busies herself at the sink.

My earlier anger has returned. I want to ask why the hell he’s in here drinking tea and refusing to write down what we say. But what I’m
really
angry about is why he’s not out looking for Benny.

“What happened to your hand?” he asks.

I don’t answer.

He turns to Seraphina and asks her something in French.

Her reply causes him to sneer. “How did the glass get into your hand?” he asks me, and I understand immediately that he thinks I broke into my own car. Oliver opens his mouth but I touch his shoulder.

“I want to speak to Inspector Moreau,” I say.

I feel Seraphina spin around at the sink.

Moreau is out of town, the gendarme informs us.

“Then I want to speak to Madame Moreau.”

The no longer complacent policeman lowers his mug. He shifts in his wet leather boots, which squeak.

Seraphina comes forward and stares at me with a look of confusion. Apparently, she’s understood what I’ve said.

“
Wie kennen Sie Frau Moreau?
” she asks.

Before I have the chance to tell her how I know of Mrs. Moreau, a thin, scratchy voice calls out to Seraphina from the rear of the house.

“
Moment
,” Seraphina says to me, and heads down the hall.

Oliver eyes me with a look that says he’s more than ready to get out of there.

I turn and edge forward in my chair. “Shouldn’t you be writing down the information about our car?” I ask the man, who hasn’t offered his name, which doesn’t appear on the front of his rain jacket either, though I have no doubt he’s the same man who
sat in the interrogation room while Moreau questioned me last week. Hard to forget a mustache like that. There is no way he could have forgotten me.

Down the hall, the sound of a dresser drawer opens and closes. A door creaks and snaps, a wardrobe, I assume, and then female voices conversing in French.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the gendarme says.

I swallow my tea and tilt my head to the side. “A thief is running loose in your village. Not to mention a child snatcher. I believe you’re the one who shouldn’t be hanging around, sipping tea in doorways.”

The disdain is palpable through his half grin.

Seraphina is suddenly at the table, her sight volleying between the gendarme’s face and mine. The air temperature seems to rise, the scent of dust blooms in the heat.

“Mom,” Oliver says.

I set my cup on the table.

“Thank you for your help,” I say to the gendarme. “What did you say your name was?”

Just when I’m convinced he won’t tell me, he says, “Petit,” though his lips barely move.

“Ah. Petit,” I say. “Like small. Like undersized.” I form a space of two inches between my finger and thumb. “Got it.”

After buying a few replacement clothes and toiletries in Aix, we return to Saint-Corbenay and rent rooms at a modest pension on the edge of town. Its spareness is a comfort, the simple linens and singular pillow, the disinterested but friendly woman at the reception, a relief.

The first thing Oliver does is check his camera for the panoramic footage he took of the market. He plugs it into his computer and we study each photograph intensely before moving on to the next. Shortly before the final one, we see the silhouette of the trench coat as, apparently, the man converses with the woman selling him what looks like persimmons and melons. In the next one, he’s waving good-bye when he leaves as if they’re friendly, though it’s hard to say with our frustratingly partial view of him. After that, he’s gone.

Surely she’d remember him if asked.

“Should we tell Moreau’s guy, Petit?” Oliver asks.

“That guy thinks we broke into our own car. Like it’s an insurance scam or something. Do they even
have
insurance scams in France?” I rub my eyes. “I can’t think straight.”

“Me neither,” Oliver says. After a moment, he adds, “Tomorrow’s Sunday, the market’s not open. The next chance we’ll have is Wednesday.”

“Maybe if we ask around town someone can ID the vendor for us,” I say.

“I think I agree with Isak. We can’t go asking questions without putting Benny in more danger.”

“But we don’t know if that’s
true
, Oliver. Suppose doing
nothing
is worse.”

He frowns, looking as stymied as I feel.

“Let me have your phone,” I say.

He fishes it out of his jacket.

I dial Moreau. No answer. “If you need to reach me for anything,” I tell his voice mail, “call me back at the number I’m calling on.”

I rise, kiss Oliver on the forehead, and go to my room to ready myself for another night of misery.

My own screams wake me. For all my numbness during the day, every cell of me is painfully alert while I sleep. This time I’m not on the train. Neither is Benny. I’m looking through the mottled glass window of a stone house where I see him crouched in a dark corner. He appears to be crying. I bang the glass but he doesn’t look up. I run to open the door and someone shoves me against the house, so hard I can’t breathe. I catch sight of Benny through the crack in the door. He’s pointing and laughing at me. Not crying after all.

I no longer reach for Benicio—that’s something. I throw off the woolen blanket, and in the bathroom wipe my neck and forehead with a damp cloth. It’s 2:18 a.m., but I’m done sleeping for the night. I settle into a cushioned rattan chair, and look out through the French doors of the balcony. I make myself try to
list exactly what’s on the stolen computer—family photos from vacations, others taken in the house, plenty of Pinto and Benny playing or sleeping by the fire. One file contains photographs of Benny’s dishes, including the ones from the
Food and Wine
magazine article I wrote. What else? Bookmarked links to writerly websites, articles on parenting, and so many other topics that would certainly be useless to a thief. There are links to Oliver’s articles as well, but those could just as easily be found doing an Internet search. What was the man hoping to find? My new novel is no longer there, but scraps of notes for other projects are. But who, other than me, could understand what they mean? Are there facts about our private life that appear nowhere else? My financial records? I have no idea. Such a miscellany of files is scattered all over the place that it’s impossible for me to reconstruct. I have no idea if my passwords are exposed, popping up automatically when opened. I’m so bad at that sort of thing. What is there, specifically, about
Benny
?

It seems I’ve broken out in another sweat. After gulping down a cold glass of water, I return to the rattan chair, and am thinking now of Seraphina—young, single, her future wide open in front of her in a way mine will never be again. I remember exactly how that feels—to wake with freedom and discovery surging through my veins, the not knowing what lay ahead fueling the excitement, unlike the fear of the unknown that now renders me somewhat useless, sitting as I am, alone in the middle of the night with no clue of what to do next. And Oliver…it’s hard to see him as a man, someone other than my son, my boy, but surely he has that same sense of young independence and possibility. And yet, how different might he be if the tragedy of our past had never happened? I’ve never stopped worrying about what Jonathon stole from him—not his innocence, which we all lose sooner or later, but
the knowledge that there are certain places in the world, certain people, including close loved ones, that Oliver shouldn’t have to think twice about trusting without fear, without constant reevaluation.

And Benny? What burden might he carry? What cruelty might never be completely wrung from his spirit? I can’t know this—not now, maybe not ever. And I won’t make it to morning if I don’t let these thoughts rest, so I will my mind back to the sunnier picture of Oliver and Seraphina and their bright futures, and for a while this actually works. I recall how shortly after Monsieur Petit had made his swift exit from Seraphina’s house, I felt more protective of Oliver than ever, which somehow translated into me asking Seraphina what she did for a living.

“Nothing yet, really,” she said. “I’m still a student. At the University of Berlin.”

Oliver asked what she was studying.

German, she told him. “My father was a professor of European history. I want to teach literature.”

Oliver looked as though he’d just drawn the lucky ticket. He gave me the eye:
Tell her who you are!
But I was in no mood to say,
Oh, yes, you probably know my novel, it was on the best-seller list for months
…Instead, I asked what had brought her to Saint-Corbenay.

“My aunt. This is hers,” Seraphina said, with a tiny wave at our surroundings. “She’s my only family, and she hasn’t long to live.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, and I was. The thought of her alone in the world gave me a pang—I was her age when I lost my mother, the last of
my
family. Or so I’d believed at the time. It would be years before I discovered teams of cousins, aunts, and uncles. Switzerland is a small country that sometimes feels more like a small town. Practically everyone is related in one way or another.

Seraphina nodded thoughtfully.

In the street three floors below my room, a car door closes with a quick, solid thud. Then another. A motor starts, the car speeds off. I open the balcony door and slip into the predawn. The car is already out of sight, leaving behind a quiet filled only by cicadas. A light inside a cooler in the
Imbiss
across the street glows behind posters of ice cream and coffee taped in the windows. The smell of pinewoods blows down from the hills, dry and cool. All of this seems so ordinary, so harmless. Nothing noteworthy in the picture except the nightgowned woman on the balcony, praying for the safe return of her child, for one small clue that could change everything.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone. I barely register the presence of my own body. I remember the gutted feeling in my core when Oliver was on the run from Jonathon. What I feel now is different. For one thing, I knew where Oliver was, I could reach him if I needed to—he was only lost from Jonathon’s point of view. And he was much older than Benny. Big enough to put up a fight.

I open my eyes to a sound I don’t recognize, a murmur coming from above. Braced against the railing, I look up to see a gigantic flock of small dark birds, starlings by the thousands undulating above my head, so close that the air around me thrums with their power. My nightgown swooshes through my legs from the breeze. I am spellbound as they stream past, shifting shapes like a school of fish swirling in a great, wide ocean.

Benny, Benny, Benny.

Without telling me, Oliver heads out early to retrieve Moreau’s address from Seraphina. Or so he says. I don’t even know he’s gone until he raps on my door when he returns. I look at the piece of paper with Seraphina’s writing on it. “Watch yourself” is what comes out of my mouth. “You don’t know this woman.”

I’ve apparently surprised him. “Mom. I think we can trust her,” he offers.

“Of course you do.”

“What does that mean?”

I’m not up to the complexity of that conversation this morning. I pocket the address, and say, “We need to get going.”

Shortly after 10:00 a.m., the bright blue sky is filling with patches of dark swollen clouds that suffocate the air with a steamy pressure. I open my jacket and wipe my throat while Oliver rings the buzzer at Moreau’s gate. The house sits on a lavender- and thyme-filled hillside on the south side of town, not far from our pension or the ancient baths of supposed healing warm springs. A tall stucco wall obscures everything about the house except its terra-cotta tiled roof. Is this all Mrs. Moreau’s doing? How else could they afford such a place?

A woman’s voice through the intercom, “
Bonjour?
”

“
Bonjour
,” Oliver says. “
Parlez-vous anglais?
”

“Who is this?” she says, haltingly.

“We’re looking for Inspector Moreau,” Oliver says. A pause.

“He has an office at the center of town. If you please. You may visit him there.”

“Has he returned yet from Zurich?” I lean in and ask.

“
Pardon?
”

“My name is Celia Hagen. He came to see me in Zurich, and I was hoping—”

The wide iron gate buzzes, and then opens with a moaning racket.

Oliver and I share a look.

The gate clangs and locks behind us as we head in.

The driveway is steep, made of cobblestones set in a series of arched patterns. Plane trees shade both sides. I’m quickly winded.

As I catch my breath, Oliver says, “I stayed up reading through the police notes before bed. There’s something there. I feel it. I just can’t see it yet.”

I so want to believe he’s right, but I’ve thought this myself all week and my faith is thinning.

A quiet moment passes between us.

“I called Benicio this morning,” Oliver says.

“Did you?”

“Yes. Benny’s been gone a week. Today.”

“I know.” I feel my hands balling up inside my pockets. “Let me guess. No call for ransom, no call of any kind?”

Oliver shakes his head. “I said I’d give him updates every few hours. He’s worried sick about you.”

“Yes. Well.”

Oliver shakes his head at the ground.

The Moreau estate rises up before us. I’m guessing seventeenth, maybe eighteenth century. Clean white stucco, a dozen white-paned windows winged by green shutters. A fountain in the center of the lawn dribbles water from a seal’s upturned face. The tip of his nose is gone.

The double doors swing open and out comes a tall, lean woman. Richly brown shoulder-length hair, long bangs, bright blue eyes that catch the light in the same way the house does. Her outfit is simple, elegant—white blouse and capri jeans, a sheer, silvery blue scarf wound loosely at her neck. I immediately understand that I’m in the presence of someone extraordinary, a woman of fierce intensity.

“Please come in,” she says, her accent lovely, her English sharp. She stands back as we pass through the entryway—an open room with a parquet floor and bright white walls filled with paintings of all sizes in all kinds of frames, and some left frameless: Provence hillsides, terra-cotta-roofed houses, vineyards, portraits, most somewhat abstract. Her students’ efforts? Could one be by the young lover Moreau told us about? One thing I’d bet on: none are hers.