The Molly Sutton Mystery Series, books 1-3

Chapter 14

Chapter 14“I waited outside her place practically all day,” Perrault was telling Dufort. “No sign of her. I thought maybe she’d moved or something, but I checked with some friends, and they said Adèle definitely lives there. Apartment in a converted house on rue Tartine.

“I just asked you to talk to her, I didn’t mean for you to set up a stakeout,” said Dufort with a slight smile.

“You don’t think she’s a suspect? I was figuring anyone related to Desrosiers is on the list until we can cross them off. Who knows how much she might stand to inherit, right?”

“I applaud your persistence,” Dufort said. “Since Desrosiers had no children, there is no légitime, the portion that the law insists go to each child. Nevertheless, she would not have been able to leave every penny to whomever she wanted—the extended family will get something. Of course, we will have to find the will, if there is one.

“We will begin by addressing this puzzle from the other end, however. Not looking at motive first off, but opportunity, because the timing of her death is limiting, happily for us. Has the lab report come in yet?”

Perrault looked chastened and ran off to check. “Why in the world would they send it by snail mail?” she shouted from the other room, where Maron’s and her desks stood, and where the basket for the mail delivery was.

“Perhaps Monsieur Nagrand thought he had given me enough of a head’s up,” said Dufort. He tore open the envelope and scanned Florian’s note and then the lab report. “As I thought. Cyanide.” He was about to put the papers on his desk when the last bit caught his eye. “Well, this is interesting. The usual routes for cyanide poisoning are swallowing, or even more quickly fatal, breathing cyanide gas, as the Nazis well knew. I had already discounted gas as a possibility because there would be no way for Desrosiers alone to have breathed it in a crowded restaurant. I assumed her food had been doctored, either at La Métairie or sometime earlier in the day.

“But it appears that the coroner’s opinion is that the cyanide exposure was on her skin. Her face, actually.”

“Hmm,” said Perrault. “Did someone give her some face cream for her birthday?”

“Perrault, I believe you have the makings of a real detective,” said Dufort. “Face cream is an excellent place to start.”

Perrault beamed. She thought she was improving too, and it felt wonderful to hear her boss say it. “Would Nagrand be able to tell us how quickly cyanide in face cream would act? Could she have put it on before coming to the restaurant?”

“I will call him to discuss that very thing. Now where is Maron? I’m hoping he will have found something at the restaurant. Not residue on a glass, we’d never be so lucky to find something like that this many days later, not at a ship-shape place like La Métairie. But perhaps he will have found gift cards so we could find out who brought presents,” said Dufort, thinking out loud.

“If there were presents, I wonder what happened to them?” Perrault took a small pad from her back pocket and began to scribble notes of things to ask Adèle when she found her.

Dufort pulled out his cell to check the time. “Let’s get over to the Desrosiers house now. We need to take a look around before the family goes in there and wreaks havoc.”

They took their coats from the pegs and put them on while heading outside. Madame Desrosiers’s house was not far from the station, an easy walk, and Dufort was happy as always to stretch his legs. Now that the investigation was underway and cyanide was confirmed, he felt robust and optimistic, as though his feet were solidly under him again.

“It’s a little weird to kill someone that old,” said Perrault, as they headed down the street.

“Because you think she already had one foot in the grave? Spoken like a young person,” he said, affectionately. “Seventy two is old, yes, but not very old. There are people in Castillac decades older than that. Madame Gervais, who lives in that tiny house down by the shop that sells old lamps? She’s well over a hundred. Hundred and two, I believe.”

Perrault shook her head, unable to imagine lasting that long.

“What, so you like to think you’ll flame out at your peak, or some such romantic nonsense?” said Dufort, teasing.

“Nah. And I wasn’t talking so much about her being almost dead as that I usually think of old ladies as harmless. I mean, my grand-mère will have a fit if you don’t wash the lettuce properly—you’ll hear about it for weeks if she bites into a little sand. And I guess sometimes they tell the same story six hundred times a day. But obviously I have not been driven to the point of murder.”

“Perrault, as I have told you before, your life and experiences will be of value to you in your work, so I do not want to sound as though I am diminishing them. But at the same time, you must strive for some objectivity. Just because your grand-mère is a pleasant person does not mean that all women her age are. You cannot generalize from one specific example in that way.”

“Yes sir,” said Perrault, telling herself once again to think before she spoke.

They passed through the gate and arrived at the front door. “Quite a place,” said Dufort, gazing up at the huge mansion. “You know about Albert Desrosiers?”

“Everybody knows about Albert Desrosiers. He’s like the one semi-famous person ever born in all of Castillac.”

“Some kind of resistor, or transistor? I don’t know what was so special about it, science was never one of my strengths.”

“All of school wasn’t one of my strengths,” laughed Perrault. “So how can we get in?”

“Well, before you start breaking any windows, let’s try knocking. Possibly a housekeeper might be inside. You do that, and I’ll take a look around, see if there’s a gardener or anybody in the back garden.”

Perrault thought to herself that gardening must not be one of Dufort’s strengths either, since it was December and freezing, and gardeners were likely to be inside drinking something warm instead of hanging around an iced-over garden with nothing to do. She used the brass knocker several times and listened, but could hear no one inside the house. The windows were shuttered though it was afternoon, so if anybody was inside, they would have to put lights on to see. Perrault craned her neck trying to see if any light was coming from under the bottom of the shutters, but she could see nothing.

Dufort had better luck. As he came around the side of the house he thought he heard the sound of a door closing. He was just tall enough to see over the stone wall surrounding the garden, and a dark-haired woman leaving by the back door, carrying several large plastic bags.

In the afternoon, Molly left Frances alone at the piano where she hoped to write a lucrative new jingle. All Frances asked for was a glass of very tart lemonade and a stack of napkins, which she claimed were the best for writing down ideas and snatches of lyrics.

Molly told Frances she was heading into the village to get a few almond croissants (of course) as well as pick up a bottle of wine at the épicerie, and a steak at the butcher’s. And she did plan to do those things—along with as much snooping as she could fit in while Frances was occupied. It wasn’t that Frances disapproved of her nosiness, exactly; more that she wanted Molly’s attention for herself at the moment, and quickly got tired of having conversations with her friend during which Molly’s eyes would glaze over as she got distracted by thoughts of poison and motives and death.

Out on rue des Chênes, Molly pulled her coat collar up against the bitter wind. It wasn’t half as cold as it had been in Massachusetts, but she was acclimated to the Dordogne now, and her measurements for what was cold and what was comfortable had shifted considerably. At any rate, it was cold enough that villagers were mostly inside, except for a farmer going slowly past on a tractor. Molly could hear someone splitting wood in the distance, the easy rhythm as the axe lifted up and then came down with a mighty thwock into the log.

First question, she thought, getting her thoughts organized. Did the poisoner kill Desrosiers for her money, or for some other reason? It hadn’t been a happy birthday party, that was for sure. The tension and resentment had been palpable. She wondered if Dufort was going to question her. Surely he would want to know her impressions, wouldn’t he? Going around the table, place by place, Molly tried to remember everyone who had been there. She stopped and dug in her bag for her phone, and tapped in a few notes:

Desrosiers

Michel

dark-haired woman and her angry husband

Adèle’s mom

Adèle

another old lady, white bun

She could check with Frances to see if she remembered anyone else. Now all she had to do was find out something about each of the participants and figure out which one had done the deed. She did realize she was acting as though it was all nothing but an interesting puzzle to solve, when in fact a person had died. And the killer, unless the poison turned out to be a long-acting variety, had been in that dining room, sitting near Molly and Frances, on Thursday night.

That was no television show. It was no joke.

Molly had never thought of herself as having an especially strong sense of justice, at least no stronger than any other typical, law-abiding person. But perhaps she had been wrong about that. She felt a sort of outrage when she thought about a murderer sitting in the dove-gray dining room at La Métairie, deciding for her- or himself who should live and who should die. The arrogance was unspeakable. Molly wanted to see the smug expression on the murderer’s face fall as he or she was marched off to prison.

With a start, Molly realized she had gotten all the way to the épicerie without seeing where she was walking. She went in, grateful for the heat, and picked out a couple of bottles of red wine. She added a handful of caramels at the cash register, but did no conversing because the young woman at checkout had a funny accent and Molly couldn’t understand a word she said. Was it a speech impediment or a regional accent that made her sound as though her mouth was full of marshmallows?

What she wanted was a villager to talk to her about the guests at the party. But where would she find anyone on a cold Monday afternoon? All of Castillac was holed up someplace warm, out of sight. There was no market, no public gathering place in December. While she waited for an idea, Molly left the épicerie and headed, as though on a track, to Pâtisserie Bujold. It was toasty inside and it felt as though the heavenly aromas were almost solid, wrapping her up in a delicious vanilla blanket.

“Bonjour, monsieur,” she mumbled to the proprietor, who as usual stared delightedly at her chest instead of making eye contact.

“Madame Sutton! It makes me very happy to see you today. Would you like your usual?”

She wasn’t sure whether to be happy or sad that she had a “usual” at the pâtisserie. She did make a pig of herself, it was true. But these almond croissants, today—these were strictly medicinal. She had a murder to solve but no way to find anyone she needed to talk to. Surely an almond croissant would help.

Then, after so many rambling thoughts, Molly had a moment of clarity: it was Adèle Faure she needed to talk to.

But how to find her?