In the Shadows (The Outsiders Book 1) (2 page)

Life in a
small French village is certainly different, Dave Martin mused as he gazed out the front window of his date’s apartment above her café. Reynier, a village of approximately six hundred residents, didn’t exactly have a bustling nightlife—not like back home in Chicago. But there weren’t shootings every day either. No graffiti, no gangs, no corruption—only gossip and meddling. After only ten days here, he’d already gotten an earful of that. As a kid, he’d loved coming here for summer-long visits with his grandparents. As an adult who’d outgrown his interest in the area’s caves, and who didn’t care for gossip, it was often boring.

His days were split between tending to
his seventy-seven-year-old maternal grandmother, Fabienne Laurent, working on his novel, hanging out at the local café, and going on occasional dates with Simone Charbonneau. He was in Reynier because Fabienne had called him and more or less told him she was dying. She’d begged him to come to stay with her until the end. Although he’d dreaded the emotional pain he knew he’d have to face, he couldn’t say no. Not when he was Grand-mère’s only remaining family—if you didn’t count his mother, who hadn’t spoken to her in thirty-four years.

In spite of everything, he was mostly enjoying his stay.
This evening, though, after a phone call had interrupted his date with Simone, he was finding it difficult to hide his impatience. He tried to focus on the scenery outside while Simone gabbed with her own grandmother, Jeannette Devlin, Fabienne’s oldest and closest friend.

The view from this hillside vantage point
halfway up the hill on the main side of town included a black-roofed Romanesque church peeking through the trees and extending its spire upwards, and right in front of it, the Trizay River, a dark ribbon shimmering in the moonlight at the base of the hill, or at least what he could see of the river since the businesses on the main street partially hid it. The river separated the hilly side of Reynier from the flat side. Sometimes, it seemed to Dave that the village had tumbled down the hill, jumped over the river, and spilled out. It could have continued that way, because the land on the other side of the river was wide-open, but the nearby town of Belvidere, with its alluring traditional town square, dozens of shops, and ample parking had taken over the growth spurt, leaving only one business street and five residential streets in Reynier’s newer section. The rest of the valley, for as far as the eye could see, consisted of farms, vineyards, woods, and unused meadows. The village and valley were by day a brilliant green, and peaceful—starkly different from Chicago’s tangle of high-rise buildings of glass, metal, and concrete. Even Reynier’s chalky limestone hillside on the north bank of the river, though barren during winter, was now shrouded by leafy bowers of trees, vines, and shrubs that made the creamy-gold bluff and white tufa houses and cave entrances all but vanish if you looked at them from the south bank.

Dave
impatiently glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes on the phone.

Simone, standing in the kitchen, covered the phone’s mouthpiece
. “I’ll try to keep this call short. Why don’t you pour yourself a glass of wine?”

Short? It was a
bit late for that. She seemed more interested in her phone conversation than in spending time with him.

He
poured wine into both of the wineglasses on the coffee table and handed one to Simone. He carried the other with him, and went back to staring out the window, watching kids kicking a ball in the moonlit street. The lamppost in front of the café provided them with additional lighting, though occasionally the ball flew into shadowy areas, causing the boys to hesitate before going after it. After a time Dave checked his watch again. Twenty minutes. He glanced over his shoulder and tried to make eye contact, but Simone was too absorbed in her conversation.

“A dinner party? Oh, that sounds like fun. Who’s going to be there? Of course Dave and I will come.”

Tuning out the rest of the conversation, he studied the rooftops in the distance. He hoped he was wrong, but he suspected he’d have to replace the roof on his house when he returned to Chicago. He’d already replaced the heater two months earlier. Before that, it was the air conditioner. It was always something.

A young couple strolled by, arm-in-arm. They made the partial
U-turn onto rue Corneille, which would take them downhill to the main street that ran alongside the river. So peaceful they looked. He and his ex-wife had strolled together like that on their visit here six years ago—before the divorce. He’d bumped into her and her new family at a Chicago mall two months ago. Seeing her holding her baby and watching as her husband and three-year-old son sat on a carousel, waving at her and laughing in delight, had reopened old wounds. 

He
drew his attention back to the phone call. Simone’s grandmother, Jeannette, could talk anyone’s ear off as her often prolonged calls to his grandmother attested. At first, he hadn’t thought much about it, but recently he’d noticed how long
Grand-mère gabbed and laughed, without showing any signs of pain or fatigue. Grandma Ellen, his paternal grandmother, hadn’t felt good enough to sit around talking and laughing when she had been terminally ill with cancer.

Simone’s burst of laughter
drew his attention back to the present. Her back was turned to him, and she was talking excitedly about some funny incident. A couple of minutes later, she finally hung up the phone. Holding out her arms to him, she said, “I’m sorry about that. Shall we go back to the living room?”

They
sat together on the sofa, and Simone said, “This is wonderful. I wish we’d met years ago. If I’d moved to Reynier after I finished school instead of remaining in Paris—”

His kiss stopped her from talking.

THE NEXT DAY, back at his grandmother’s house, Dave walked downstairs after his shower and heard music playing on the radio. He followed the sound into the kitchen and found his white-haired grandmother smiling and swaying to the music as she folded laundry on the countertop. He moved toward her, intending to take over the chore, but as he neared, she must have sensed his presence because she jumped.

“Oh, I didn’t know you were still here,” she said, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. “I
—I was just about to go upstairs and lie down. I’m exhausted.”

Dave frowned. Not only was she working on laundry, but she’d apparently been baking. The smell of bread emanated from a loosely covered pan on top of the oven, evidently set there to cool. The rolling pin was still lying on the counter next to the stove.

As she hung up a dish towel, Fabienne yawned, and then said, “I need to lie down for my nap, dear boy. I should have done it an hour ago. You should go visit with friends. Now that she has an assistant at the café, Simone will likely have time to chat.”

She sto
od by, waiting for him to leave, but he hesitated.

“I think I’ll stay here today. I need to work on my new book. Can’t keep neglecting my writing.”

She shrugged, then nodded and left the room. She trudged up the stairs, making enough noise to awaken the dead.

Dave opened his laptop computer
, which was on the dining table, then brought up his book file so he could work on the outline for his new mystery novel. The characters and setting were easy, but he still wasn’t sure about some of the plot. Searching through his notes, he began making progress. Footsteps in the other room pulled him out of his thoughts. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Only three-quarters of an hour had elapsed.

Peering around the corner into the living room, he watched his grandmother put on scarf and shoes.
“Where are you going, Grand-mère?”

She swung
around. “Oh, dear, you startled me again! I’m going over to Jeannette’s house. She invited me for an early lunch.”

He kept his face blank, and nodded. After she closed the door, he pulled the front curtain aside and watched her walk up the street. As soon as she was out of sight, he strode up the stairs and into her bedroom.

He recalled the conversation with her when she’d called him in Chicago. She’d told him she had ovarian cancer, the same illness that had claimed Grandma Ellen. He’d asked if she was undergoing treatment, if there was any possibility of recovery. She said ‘yes’ to the first question and ‘probably not’ to the second, though the treatments might buy her a few months.

Dave glanced at her tidy bed with its pale green cover. Just as he’d thought. Not a single wrinkle or indentation. She’d probably
paced her room until she thought she could sneak out of the house. He sighed. Time to get to work. He had plenty of experience, but this was different from the usual police search he used to do; this time he didn't want anyone to know he'd been there. He opened drawer after drawer. She must have prescription medications somewhere. Grandma Ellen’s bathroom had been full of them. He hadn’t seen any pill bottles in either of the bathrooms here. Finally, he found her appointment calendar underneath a book on her bedside table. He thumbed through it from January until today, the ninth of June. She’d scribbled dinner parties, meetings with friends, hair appointments—but not a single doctor appointment. No hospital tests. No radiation or chemo treatments. He set the calendar back where he’d found it and continued searching for her prescription pain killers. Coming up empty-handed but for a small commercially available packet of aspirin, he finally went downstairs to wait for her return.

NINETY MINUTES
later,
Dave looked up from his chair in the living room as the front door opened. Fabienne set her handbag and scarf on the table next to the door, and smiled.

He
smiled back briefly, then said, “We need to talk, Grand-mère.”

“Of course, dear boy. What did you want to t
alk about?” She sat on the sofa across from him and folded her hands in her lap.

Dave shook his head. She still thought of him as a boy. He was thirty-five. He closed his eyes for a second and took a deep breath. Questioning a suspect was second-nature to him, but when the suspect was a famil
y member . . . .

“I don’t want to have to say this, but you don’t have any of the symptoms Grandma Ellen had and, well, you’re energetic for someone dying of cancer. There have been no doctor or hospital
appointments since I arrived. That got me wondering.”

She averted her eyes, and fussed with a button on her cardigan.

The grandfather clock behind Dave ticked loudly and he tried to tune it out. Leaning forward, he said, “Are you really ill?”

“Oh, at my age, you know
—”

“Are you really dying?”

Silence.

“Are you in some other kind of trouble? You can tell me. I’m here to help.”

Still refusing to look at him, she focused on the button, twisting it back and forth until it came off. She let out a soft gasp, then stuck the button in a pocket of her cardigan.

He sat back and tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Should I go back home?”

She shot him a look. “No! Don’t go. I’ll talk.” She hesitated, then whispered, “It wasn’t entirely my idea.”

Dave’s mouth twitched. Jeannette. He should have known.

“We just wanted you to spend the summer the way you did when you were young.” She paused. “I wanted to see you, and, well, you’re all alone, I thought it might do you good. Jeannette said you would probably enjoy the break, and I . . . well, I get lonely, too.”

Dave leaned forward again and stared at her. “Explain to me why Jeannette cares if I come here.”

She didn’t answer.

He stood, his shoulders tensing, and closed his eyes as the question he needed to ask hung in the air, unspoken. Finally, he said, “So you aren’t ill?”

She shook her head rapidly, while biting her lower lip.

“You lied about dying? I don’t understand. Why would you do that?”
He took a deep breath, let it out, and tried again. “It doesn’t make sense for you to lie to me. All you needed to do was ask me to visit. I would have come. Why the pretense?”

“You wouldn’t have stayed for months. What good would it do for you to come for a week or two?” She suddenly looked truculent. “You are enjoying yourself, aren’t you? You always loved it here, and it seems like you and Simone are getting on well
.”

“Simone?” Almost under his breath, he said, “You and Jeannette wanted to play matchmaker?”

She looked away.

He stood and glanced at her, intending to say something, then closed his mouth
and walked out the front door. Down the narrow hillside street he strode. Past several shops, past the hotel, straight to Café Charbonneau on the corner. He yanked open the door and the bells attached to it clanged so loudly that everyone turned to stare. He ignored them and walked straight over to Simone, who was standing behind the counter and holding a full coffee pot. “Can you get away for a few minutes?”

She raised an eyebrow, then looked around for her assistant, Isabelle Lambert. She motioned to her, set down the coffee pot, took off her apron, and then led Dave upstairs to
the first floor of her apartment. After she closed the door behind them, Simone looked him in the eyes. “You seem angry. What’s wrong?”