The Prisoner of Castillac

Chapter 3

Chapter ThreeThe first thing was a note, stuck with a bit of tape to the front door of the station. No envelope. The paper just a torn scrap of graph paper like that used by schoolchildren. Like a clichéd ransom note, the letters had been messily clipped from newspaper headlines and formed in a sentence: I saw VB.

That was it. No signature, of course, and no further elaboration.

Gilles Maron removed the paper from the door of the station with tweezers and sent it to the forensics lab along with the tape for fingerprinting. Others may have called him overly meticulous at times, but to Maron’s mind, there was really no such thing. The way you gathered enough evidence for arrests was by being careful at every opportunity, doing your very best not to let anything slip past—not a bit of thread, a hair, a phone tip, a fingerprint.

Perhaps he would have been tempted to be less meticulous in this instance if the initials had been something else. But “VB,” he immediately realized, could be Valerie Boutillier, a young woman who had disappeared before he came to Castillac and never been found. A stone cold case, and a cloud over the village that many had not forgotten.

“VB” could mean Valerie Boutillier, or something else altogether. The note could be insignificant, the initials just a random coincidence, a childish prank. Or it might be a mean sort of joke, someone trying to lure the gendarmes on the Castillac force into opening up the case only to waste resources on a case with no new evidence or leads.

Maron did not mention the note to Perrault, the other officer. He wanted to wait to see what the lab had to say first.

Maron was extremely pleased to have been promoted to Chief, even if it was only an interim appointment while the gendarmerie found someone to replace Benjamin Dufort, who had surprised everyone (except perhaps the herbalist who prescribed his anti-anxiety tinctures) by resigning his post just before Christmas. Unlike Dufort, Maron was not from Castillac. He was from the north of France and had not made many friends in the village. Which was how the gendarmerie liked it, believing officers did more objective work if they lacked deep ties to the people in their jurisdiction.

He was mostly skeptical about the note. It was very likely meaningless. But what if someone really had seen Valerie? Why not simply call the gendarmerie and report it? Did something about the circumstances—who she was with, or where she was seen—make the witness wary?

Or frightened?

Molly spent most of the day in the potager, weeding and turning over the soil in the raised beds. No one had lifted a finger there in some time, and it had taken days of clearing vines and even small bushes before the raised beds were clearly visible. Six of them, about half a foot high—or eight centimeters she should say, in an effort to practice the switch to metric—surrounded by deep blue porcelain tiles. The tiles were more for decoration than anything else, as they weren’t very stable and dirt spilled through the cracks onto the path. But Molly decided to keep them because she liked looking at them, and wondered about the former inhabitant of La Baraque who had put them there.

Growing vegetables wasn’t her favorite part of gardening. It was practical, yes, but for Molly practicality wasn’t at the top of her list. What she liked most was abundant, fragrant blooms, disorderly and lush, and her plan for this vegetable bed was to make it as ornamental as possible. So far she was thinking artichokes, so glorious with their grand thistly heads, and she had started five plants indoors under a light. It was time to get their home in the garden ready.

After all that labor, her back feeling it, she texted her friend Lawrence Weebly to see if he’d like to meet her for a drink, and when he immediately answered OF COURSE, she went inside, showered, and was on rue des Chênes on the way to Chez Papa in record time.

“Hello, my dear!” said Weebly in a posh English accent when she came in.

“Salut, old chap! Bonjour, Nico!” Molly kissed cheeks with Lawrence and Nico, the bartender, and settled herself on a stool at the bar. “I’m so happy to be here. My guests are out on a long hike—I haven’t seen them all day—and much as I love gardening, I was starting to talk to myself even more than usual.”

Lawrence smiled and sipped his Negroni. “I do love this time of year in Castillac. When winter is over, everyone in the village comes out of their burrows, blinking in the sun, ready to socialize again after a long winter huddled next to the woodstove.”

“Long winter, are you kidding me?” said Molly, who was from Boston and knew a thing or two about long winters. “It’s practically tropical here. But yes, I admit I did spend plenty of time in front of my woodstove over the last months. So good for a nap, aren’t they? But maybe I’d have had more fun if certain people hadn’t extended their holiday in Morocco for months and let me get bored and lonely!”

“Well, you did have Frances,” said Nico, almost shyly.

“Until you stole her!” said Molly. Her best friend from the States had come for a visit, but once Molly started having paying guests again, Frances happily moved in with Nico, never being one to resist romantic impulses.

“She should be showing up any minute. Then we can fight over her. She’ll like that.”

Molly laughed. “Wait. Lawrence, I’m not done telling you how forlorn I was without you. How could you end up staying in Morocco for three whole months?”

Lawrence smiled. “Ah Molly, you wouldn’t want to stand in the way of love, would you?”

She paused. “I have no idea what to say to that,” she said wryly. “Love is…not my area of expertise.”

“Oh poor poor you,” said Nico, walking along the bar as he wiped it down.

“I’m not feeling sorry for myself,” she said. “It’s just true. But so anyway…Lawrence, tell the story, please. You found love in Morocco? And if so, where is he now?”

“Well, you know how it is,” said Lawrence, and Molly thought she saw a fleeting expression of pain on Lawrence’s usually cheerful face. “I actually did fall in love, embarrassing as that is to admit. He was a little younger than me, but not much. Beautiful beyond words, and tremendously amusing.” Lawrence took a big swallow of his drink and did not continue.

Molly put her elbows on the bar and looked at her friend. “That’s the thing,” she said. “It’s all just impossible. You meet somebody, your heart says yes yes yes, but most of the time it turns out to be no no no.”

She waited to see if Lawrence wanted to talk any more about the man in Morocco. When she saw that he didn’t, Molly continued, “I’m sorry it didn’t work out.” There was a long silence as all three of them got lost in their own memories for a moment.

Molly said, “I’m not still messed up from my divorce—really, that’s the past and I’m over it. But I admit, I miss living with someone. I’m not a solitary kind of person and even though I appreciate the luxury of always being able to do exactly as I please and never having to compromise, living alone can be sort of sad sometimes, especially at night, you know? But I just don’t see romance working out for me, if that makes any sense.”

“It does not,” said Lawrence. “You talk about love as though it’s something you can schedule, or see coming down the track. But it’s not like that at all. I went to Morocco to get a little sun and avoid the dreary weather around here in winter, that was all. I had no idea I would go into a coffeehouse and Julio would be waiting for me.” Again Molly saw a quick pang cross her friend’s face. “Well, Molly, shall we eat a proper dinner for once? Nico, what’s good tonight?”

“Rémy brought in some early asparagus, and there’s a chicken in cream sauce with mushrooms that will make you cry from happiness.”

“Well then,” said Lawrence, mustering a smile. “Let’s have it! Molly?”

“Yes, that sounds perfect. And Lawrence, for what it’s worth, I’m very glad you’re back. You missed all the excitement with Josephine Desrosiers, and the village has been totally placid since then. We’ve needed you back here to liven things up a little.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” said Lawrence. “I’m sure something will come along for you to stick your nose into. It always seems to.”

Molly put her arm around him and gave him a squeeze. “No more murders are on the docket at least,” she said with a laugh, and Lawrence thought perhaps he could detect a slight air of disappointment in Molly’s tone.