The Molly Sutton Mystery Series, books 1-3

Chapter 4

Chapter 4The Lawlers only stayed for two nights, and then Molly was back in the cottage for another round of dusting, scrubbing, and mopping. At least they weren’t slobs. And oh look, a tip for the maid!

Molly snatched up the five euro bill and shoved it in the pocket of her jeans. More bookings were coming in every day, but she needed to sit down and write a budget before running out to hire a cleaner. She went back to the house and got her phone and some earbuds, and listened to Otis Redding while she worked, singing along with “These Arms of Mine,” her voice cracking in a satisfying way. She hoped the neighbors couldn’t hear.

When she turned to leave, an orange cat was standing in the doorway looking at her.

“Hello, little puss!” Molly was happy for the company. “I’ll get you a little saucer of cream if you come with me.” The cat not only followed but wound itself in between Molly’s legs, nearly causing her to trip and split her head open on the slate walk. She put her cleaning stuff away in a closet and got together a saucer with a bit of cream and set it down. The orange cat looked at her, then walked slowly over to the saucer as if it didn’t really care one way or another, and took a lick. Then the tail went straight up but with a little kink at the end, and the cat polished off the cream in under a minute.

“Thought so.” Molly smiled and reached out her hand. The orange cat bit her on the finger and ran into the bushes. “Fiend!” she called after it.

The house was still unfamiliar and exciting, and she spent some time not accomplishing anything but wandering through its rooms, most of which had low ceilings with ancient beams. The original structure had been added onto several times so that the building was something of a hodgepodge, stuck together at odd angles. The staircase turned almost in a spiral, its treads worn, and Molly wondered at how many families had lived here, how many feet had trudged up to bed stepping just where she stepped.

She thought of walking around in the meadow behind the potager, but decided she had better get some more work done, so she spent the next hour at her desk, confirming bookings and emailing friends at home, sounding a little sunnier than she actually felt.

Back in Massachusetts, after the divorce, she usually ate lunch at the sink, or even just crammed in any old thing while standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open. But in her new French life, she was trying to change her habits, and pay more attention to the small ceremonies of the day. She took a butter lettuce out and washed a number of leaves, broke up some goat cheese she had gotten at the market that morning along with the lettuce, sliced some carrots, opened a can of sardines and crumbled those in along with a few little potatoes from last night’s dinner. For a dressing she chopped up plenty of garlic and whisked it together with lemon juice, an egg yolk, more mustard than seemed right, and lots of salt and pepper and olive oil.

She stepped out the kitchen door to the garden, searching for herbs, but there was nothing besides rosemary. How can a French garden have no tarragon? What sort of infidels used to live here, anyway?

After tossing the salad and pouring herself a glass of rosé, she went out to a terrace off the living room, pulled a rusty chair up to a rusty table, and had a long, luxurious, lonely lunch.

Jet lag had finished having its way with her, so she didn’t feel like a nap after eating. Instead she put her dishes in the old porcelain sink and went out to the garden. Just inside the garage was the crate she had sent from home, minus the kitchen equipment which was unpacked and put away. She selected a tool whose name escaped her. It had a sort of fork on one end and a pick on the other—great for weeding out the nastiest garden invaders. Molly knelt in the grass and got to work on a patch on the side of the house, more Otis Redding coming out through the window, the sun on her back. That sort of weeding can be a kind of meditation, and as the pile of ripped-out vines and grass grew, her thoughts quieted down until she wasn’t having any at all, nothing but the sound of Otis and the smell of plants and the feel of dirt on her hands.

“Bonjour Madame!”

Startled, Molly sprang to her feet and turned around. Standing at the stone wall that separated her property from the neighbor’s was, well, the neighbor. A small bird-like woman dressed in a housecoat, her white hair flying out from a bun.

“Bonjour Madame,” Molly answered, her hands becoming clammy at the prospect of a conversation in French. It had been too long since college, when she’d studied it last.

“I would like to say hello and welcome you to Castillac,” the neighbor said.

Okay, I actually understood that, Molly thought, feeling a little surge of optimism.“Thank you very much,” said Molly. “She pretty.”

The neighbor nodded vigorously and then spoke so quickly, and with a stutter, that Molly was hopelessly lost. “S’il vous plaît,” she said, “Speak slow?”

The two women worked hard for the next ten minutes, both of their brows beginning to glisten from the effort of communicating the simplest things, and by the time they said à tout à l’heure they at least had each other’s names, although Molly forgot the neighbor’s more or less instantly. What did stick in her mind was the mention for the second time that day of the girl, the art student, who was missing. The neighbor had looked solemn, and said it might be a good idea to lock her doors, living alone and all.

Molly was quite happy to be living alone, thank you very much, and she was not going to get frightened just because some young girl ran off with somebody else’s boyfriend. She stayed firm in her belief that her new country was much safer than her former one. Spitefully—although whom she was spiting was a little unclear—she left the French doors to the terrace not only unlocked but cracked open that night. The orange cat came in for a look around, but no other uninvited visitors crossed the threshold that night, unless you counted the spider and a couple of flies.

L’Institut Degas had either a sterling or an unsavory reputation, depending on whom you talked to. The school had been founded in the 1950s by an artist who had tried to ride the wave of Abstract Expressionism but found himself beached with not enough income to get by, and so turned to teaching. He was a much more gifted teacher than artist, and soon had more students than he had time for himself, so he brought on other teachers and L’Institut Degas was born. Over the years other talented teachers had come to the school, and some of their students had gone on to illustrious and sometimes very lucrative careers. This track record meant that applications were almost always steady, which meant the school could be choosy about the students it admitted and the tuition fees stayed hefty.

However, some of the teachers, including perhaps a few on the present faculty, had turned out to be capable enough as artists, and their classroom work was creditable, and yet, still, one might say that they were not precisely the best choices to mold young minds. That at least is what Jack Draper, head of the current administration, hinted to Dufort, when he was asked about the faculty and their relation to the students.

“It’s France, after all,” said Draper. “Some of the students, Americans in particular, they expect to have flirtations, maybe an affair or two. It’s part of the experience of studying abroad. You know how it is.”

Having an American remind him that they were in France might push a less seasoned officer right over the edge of annoyance, but Dufort merely gave a faint smile. It had not come naturally, but he had learned over the years to keep his feelings and reactions from showing in his expression; and, so without having to work at it, the urge to tell Draper he was a jackass passed without a trace.

“Are you saying, Monsieur le Directeur, that you believe Amy Bennett was romantically involved in some way with a faculty member? That there was a relationship beyond that of teacher and student?”

“Well, of course it’s possible. Here at Degas we do not follow those old rigid classroom models, where the teacher is all-powerful and the students are meek and never dare to express themselves. We are open. We make room for creativity—yes, for passion—to bloom.”

With some effort, Dufort kept his eyes from rolling.

“I am happy to hear that creativity is blooming here at L’Institut,” said Dufort. “Would you be so kind as to print out a list of Bennett’s classes, with the schedule and teachers’ names and cell numbers? I would be interested in talking with some of them, only for background, you understand.

“The most likely thing is that the girl has run off, for any of the reasons that young women find to do that. But at the same time, I wish to be thorough. You said that Bennett was a serious student, a conscientious one. That doesn’t quite fit with a flighty girl running off for romance, do you think?” Dufort’s expression was open and questioning, perhaps a bit slow-witted.

“Of course I will provide you with anything you ask for, anything at all,” said Draper. “As for flighty—who knows what lurks in these girls’ minds? Sometimes it is the most serious ones who have the biggest screw loose, am I right?”

“Are you suggesting Mademoiselle Bennett has a screw loose?”

“Not at all, not in the least. I’m only saying that girls that age, young women—they can be unpredictable. The students here are not studying to be bankers, Officer Dufort. They are creative spirits of a rather high order. And that means, yes, that we might see more, how to put it, instability of behavior and emotions than one would encounter at a school for, say, tax accounting. You understand?”

Dufort nodded. He understood that Monsieur le Directeur was saying that if Amy Bennett was missing, it was her own fault, not the school’s, and moreover, that her flightiness was just part of how very special she was. Dufort appreciated art as much as any Frenchman, and he also had a sensitive bullshit detector, which at the moment was letting off a piercing shriek.