The Twenty-Year Death (8 page)

“The newspapers don’t mean anything.”

“The missing girl.”

“You can worry if you think it’ll make a difference.”

“I guess it never does.”

“Where’s your man from the front desk?”

“Martin? I sent him to Malniveau. Your questions about how much we knew about the prison got me thinking. We need to have somebody on site if this whole thing started there...I told him to demand to see the files, any files, to dig up what he could.”

Pelleter nodded his approval, some of his own concern fading from his face. “Good. Very good.”

“He left this for you,” Letreau said, handing across a paper. “It’s not much help, unfortunately.”

It was the paper that listed Meranger’s known associates. Martin had systematically gone through the entire list, and marked it “up to show the present location of all of the people on the list. He had even included a key at the bottom: a cross-out meant the person was dead, a circle meant prison, otherwise he had
penciled in their address. Nobody was near Verargent. None of the prisoners were at Malniveau.

“Good,” Pelleter said, reading over it. “This is good work.”

“It leaves us just where we were before. Knowing nothing.”

“Maybe.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

There was a knock on the opened door and an officer stood at attention just inside the office.

“What is it?” Letreau said, his frustration spilling over onto the man.

“Sir. Marion is still waiting for you...”

“Oh, I know Marion is waiting for me. Doesn’t she know I’m busy here!” He stood, banging his thighs on the underside of his desk. “God damn it!”

He leaned his hands against his thighs, turning his head to the side, a sour expression on his face, biting back the pain.

Pelleter watched his friend. This murder was too much for him.

“And...” the officer started.

“What!”

The young man lowered his voice almost by half, cowed. “We just received a call from a farmer outside of town. It seems that he has found a box in his field.”

“So,” Letreau said sharply, standing to his full height with a deep intake of breath.

“Well, he said that it seems to him like it may be a coffin. He wants us to come have a look.”

Letreau turned to Pelleter, shaking his head. “See, it just keeps getting worse.” He turned back to the officer. “Well, go ahead.”

“Right, sir,” the officer said.

Letreau continued, “I’ve got to see what Marion wants. She’s been waiting all morning.”

“Wait.” Pelleter stood up, stopping the officer as he turned in the doorway. “Where is this box?”

“On the eastern highway, about ten miles out of town.”

Pelleter looked at Letreau. “And about ten miles from the prison.” He turned back to the officer. “I think I’ll go with you.”

By the time Pelleter and the officers arrived at the farm, the farmer and his son had uncovered the whole length of the so-called coffin.

The excavation site was no more than ten feet from the road, halfway between the town and the prison. The officers parked just off of the pavement behind a rusty truck and another automobile already there.

A group of four men and a boy stood around the open grave watching the inspector and the officers approach. The pile of dark brown dirt beside them was like a sixth waiting figure. The mid-afternoon sun had burned away the morning cool, and it was hot in the unshaded field.

“It’s a coffin, all right,” one of the officers said when they reached the spot. The box was unfinished pine, imperfectly crafted.

“The rain did the first part of the digging for us,” the farmer said. He was a mustachioed man of about forty. “My son saw the wood sticking up while he was plowing, and then he came back and got me.”

“So you don’t know anything about this?” Pelleter said.

“The family plot’s back up near the house...This is good soil here. Why would I bury a body where I wanted to plant?”

“And so shallow,” one of the other men said.

Pelleter looked at him.

“I’m a neighbor. I was just passing by with my truck. I’ll help take it back into town if you need.”

Pelleter didn’t respond. Instead he looked at the two officers and said, “Open it up.”

They looked at him without comprehension, their expressions lost. They had let Pelleter take charge, and did not expect to be called upon.

“Open it,” Pelleter said again, throwing up his hands. “We need to know if there’s even a body inside, and what it’s wearing.”

“What it’s wearing?” somebody said.

The officers stepped forward, but it was the farmer and his neighbor who each picked up a shovel, and fitted the ends of the blades into the space between the lid of the coffin and its body.

Pelleter stepped away, pacing the ground to the side of the coffin, looking at the dirt as he went.

The sound of wood creaking cut the air, somebody said, “Easy,” and then there was a snap.

A car passed on the road heading towards town, slowing as it approached the site where the men’s vehicles were parked, and then resuming speed.

“Oh, my god.”

Pelleter turned back, and the men parted so he could see.

There was a body in the coffin. It must have been there for several weeks, because the face had softened, distorting the features into a ghost mask, and the body appeared caved in. A large patch of blood stained the man’s shirt over his stomach. But the important thing was what the body was wearing: Malniveau Prison grays.

A sweet moldy smell caused more than one man to gag.

Pelleter squatted beside the grave, and pulled the man’s shirt taut to reveal the number above the breast. He pulled out his oilcloth notebook and jotted the number down, then he stood and waved a hand towards the body. “Close it back up and get it out of there. This gentleman will take it back to town.” And he nodded at the man who had offered his truck.

The officers, embarrassed now over their delay in moving to open the coffin, stepped forward, taking the lid from the farmer. “We’ve got that. Let the police handle this.”

Pelleter began to walk along to the side again, watching the ground. It was clear that he was looking for something by the careful way he stepped, examining each inch of dirt before moving forward.

He called to the boy, who came over at a jog.

“What did you see when you found the box?” he said.

“Just a bit of white, sir. It was the corner sticking up from the ground.”

“Look again now. See if you can find anything. You do that side.”

The boy ran off to the other side of the grave, and then he also began to pace the ground step by step. The farmer and his neighbors saw what was happening, and they too began to spread out, looking down.

The officers were awkwardly extracting the coffin from its shallow grave.

“Here! Here!”

Everyone looked up. It was one of the men who must have come from the car. He was only a few feet to the west of the grave and several paces closer to the road, looking at Pelleter, waving him over. He knelt.

The whole crowd approached, and the man indicated what
he had seen. There was an impossibly straight line in the dirt as though the ground had sunk into a crack. The man was digging with his hand, and he quickly revealed what appeared to be the edge of another coffin.

The group went into action without Pelleter saying anything. The two shovels were brought over, and the farmer and the man who had made the discovery began to dig. Meanwhile, the truck owner helped the officers load the coffin into the bed of his truck, while Pelleter had the boy and the fourth man continue to scan the ground.

The seven-man team fell into a rhythm as will any group of men who have a large physical task before them, and they worked silently and efficiently, as the sun traversed the sky overhead. Pelleter took his turn with the shovel when it came, but he soon appeared overtaxed, and the men relieved him of the task. He smoked a full cigar, and walked far afield, determined to not leave any of the coffins undiscovered. One was revealed almost twenty feet away.

Cars and trucks passed in both directions on the road, but no one else stopped.

When the fifth box was found, the owner of the truck said, “I hope this is the last of them. My truck can take only one more.”

Pelleter had the officers begin to fill in the holes that had been made, while he and the boy went around thrusting the shovel in at random points on the off chance that they would strike wood.

The sun was nearing the horizon, and the weather had once again turned cool. The two men who had come in the car said their goodbyes and left. The officers loaded the last coffin on top of the others in the truck bed.

Pelleter had five numbers written one under the other in
his notebook, but one of them he didn’t need. He recognized Glamieux at once. As Mahossier had said, his throat had been cut.

“Come on, that’s enough,” he called.

The boy turned a few feet ahead of him, his spade sticking upright from the earth. The men near where the holes were being filled in looked up as well.

“Fill in the holes, and we’re going home. There’s no point in working in the dark.”

The farmer came up to him nervously. “But what if there are more down there, and we go over them with the plow? You see? I wouldn’t want to desecrate the dead.”

“You won’t.”

“But if we uncover one...”

“You let the police know, just like last time. But I think we got them all. We’ll know soon enough anyway.”

“How?”

“Because we’ll be able to ask somebody who knows.”

Pelleter walked off before the farmer could ask anything else.

The man with the truck was already on his way back to town.

The graves had been mostly filled in, at least enough to satisfy the farmer whose son would be plowing over them the next day anyway.

“You let us know,” Pelleter said again, as he got into the police car. The officer who was driving started the automobile and turned on the lights, which lit the few feet of road just ahead of the car.

Verargent’s town square was almost unrecognizable. It was as though it had been an empty stage waiting for its players. A subdued crowd of serious men had gathered around the base of the war monument, spilling into the roadway and blocking traffic.
Flickering lights from kerosene lamps and open torches dotted the crowd, casting moving shadows that made the mass of people seem like one large anonymous organism. This was Verargent. With its population spread out over the houses and outlying farms the town could feel abandoned. But brought together, the group was large enough to raise alarm.

The officer driving Pelleter inched the car forward through the throng, forced to let out the clutch again and again. He repeatedly sounded the horn to no effect. The men in the square were unconcerned with allowing the police car through.

The truck carrying the coffins was only just ahead even though it had left the farm a good deal before Pelleter and the young gendarme.

“What is this?” the officer said.

Pelleter caught sight of Letreau huddled with Martin and the mustachioed officer beside the war monument. Letreau had his hands in his overcoat pockets and his shoulders hunched against the brisk April evening.

The car jerked again, the gears groaning.

“Let me out here,” Pelleter said, and he released the door. The cool night air rushed into the closed space of the car.

The crackle of the open flames sounded over the murmur of people. Some of the men carried electric torches as well. Pelleter began to push his way towards Letreau.

“Some week to visit Verargent,” a man said close at Pelleter’s side.

It was Servières. His expression was overjoyed.

“If things keep up like this, we’ll have to make the
Vérité
a daily.”

“You would like that.”

They were almost to Letreau now, but Letreau and his men were breaking apart.

Pelleter would not ask the reporter what had happened. He would know soon enough.

“Have you seen this evening’s edition?” Servières said, and then a copy was floating in front of Pelleter. The headline, which took up almost all of the space above the fold read:

ESCAPED CONVICT MURDERED IN THE STREET

Pelleter did not reach for the paper, but Servières forced it on him. “Please. Please take it.”

Pelleter folded the paper and stuffed it into his coat pocket. They were through the crowd to where Letreau had been standing, but Letreau was now atop the bottom step of the monument’s base calling over the crowd.

“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!”

The mass of noise dropped, but it was tentative, the crowd unsure if they had been called to order.

“Gentlemen!”

The silence spread then in a ripple from the spot where Letreau was standing, out to the back of the group where the square started once again. All eyes turned to the chief of police.

“I want to thank all of you for coming out like this.”

There was a renewed murmur, and Letreau held up his hand.

“I know we would each want the same if it was our children.”

Children? So this did not have to do with Meranger?

“As you have all heard, Marion Perreaux’s two little boys Georges and Albert have gone missing. They were last seen Tuesday afternoon at Monsieur Marque’s sweet shop here in
town, and they were to walk back to the Perreaux farm in time for supper.”

Letreau spoke with calm and command, so different than in his office earlier. Organizing a search party was in his purview, a murder investigation was beyond him.

“Everyone should split into three-man teams and search from here outward. If you locate the boys and can bring them back here, do so at once. If they are injured, two men stay with the boys and the third man should come here to get help. Everyone should return to report at sunrise regardless of what they have found. Are there any questions?”

There was a moment’s pause in which a murmur began.

“Okay, let’s get to it.”

The crowd began to split, talking and shouting in an indecipherable cacophony.

Pelleter pushed his way to where Letreau was stepping down from the monument by leaning on the shoulder of one of his men. Servières stayed close to Pelleter’s side, but Pelleter paid him no attention.