The Molly Sutton Mystery Series, books 1-3

Chapter 6

Chapter 6By that evening, just at dusk, Molly had more or less finished unpacking, and she wandered around the house at loose ends even though there were a million things she felt she should be doing. She went out to the garden and inhaled. A summer scent of mown grass with a hint of roses was still in the air, but the garden itself was so overgrown that it was overwhelming to contemplate how much work needed to be done. The orange cat sidled up and rubbed against her leg. Distracted by the garden, she reached down to stroke it and once again the cat bit her and ran under the hedge.

“Nasty beast!” she called after it, and then fled through the gate and into the village for a drink and some company, hoping to find at least one person who could speak English. It was Friday night and she hoped villagers would be out enjoying the nice weather and in a welcoming mood, tolerant of her subjunctive tense (which was utter rubbish).

Chez Papa looked promising. It was right on the main square with a large number of tables outdoors, and a small crowd seemed to be enjoying themselves, having apéritifs, drinking beer, and eating peanuts and potato chips from bowls on the bar. Three small dogs were underfoot. The place looked lively but not too intimidating. Molly made her way inside to the bar, and when the bartender gave her his attention, she pointed at the drink that belonged to the woman next to her and said, “Comme ça!” The bartender gave a short nod and took down a bottle.

Molly felt happily victorious for getting out a phrase and being understood.

“Let me guess—American, Massachusetts?” said an older man in probably the best-looking suit Molly had ever seen.

“Um, yeah?” she said, mystified.

“Lawrence Weebly,” he said, holding out a hand, then taking hers and kissing it. “I have a little hobby of guessing people’s accents. But I admit, yours was not much of a challenge.”

Molly laughed. “I’m Molly Sutton. But you only heard me speak two words of French! It’s not like I asked where I should pahk the cah or anything,” she said.

“That would be fish in a barrel. So thank you for providing the evening’s amusement by giving me only the two words, and not in English.”

“But seriously, how did you do that?”

Lawrence just smiled and sipped his bright red drink. “Now tell me, you are the new owner of La Baraque? How are you finding Castillac so far?”

Molly flinched. “It’s a little unsettling having everyone know who I am before I even meet them,” she said, managing a weak smile.

“That’s life in a village,” said Lawrence. “For better or worse. Even in the age of the internet, most of us find our neighbors make up a decent portion of our entertainment. We gossip, we pry, we want to stay informed of the latest. Another!” he said to the bartender, pointing at his empty glass.

“Well,” said Molly. “I may fit right in then.” She turned and surveyed the other customers with curiosity. “I’ve been called nosy. Once or twice,” she added in a lower voice.

“Here in Castillac we just consider that to be interest in humankind,” he said, taking a long swig of his fresh drink.

Molly nodded and smiled. She liked Lawrence Weebly. And it was really wonderful to speak English, face to face, after days of struggling to make herself understood or having only herself for company. Now that she had someone interesting to talk to, she could feel just how lonely she had gotten.

The bartender had placed her drink on the bar in front of her and she’d been too distracted to try it. She took a sip and nearly choked. The bartender grinned. “Cognac and Sprite,” he said in English, shrugging. “It is what you ordered.”

“But—” said Molly, pointing at the woman’s drink. “That’s what she’s having?”

“It is a fad,” said the bartender with a sigh. “Unfortunate, as most fads are.”

“Spoken like a true Frenchman, Nico,” said Lawrence. “And I couldn’t agree more.”

“You speak English like a professor,” said Molly to the bartender.

“I studied in America for three years,” Nico said, shrugging. “Your French will come along, now that you’re here. You’ll see.”

“Your lips to God’s ears,” said Molly. Then she turned to Lawrence. “What are you drinking?” asked Molly, looking at his red cocktail.

“Lawrence always, but always, drinks Negronis,” said a large man with an even larger belly who leaned over Molly’s shoulder to join the conversation, but in French.

“Bonsoir, Lapin,” said Lawrence.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a Negroni,” said Molly, pleased that she could make out the man’s French.

“Expensive way to get a buzz on, if you ask me,” said Lapin. And indeed, it looked as though Lapin liked to get a buzz on quite frequently, if his red-rimmed eyed and bloated face were any indication. “Hey, you’re la bombe who bought the big place down the rue des Chênes?”

“La bombe?” said Molly.

“His idea of a compliment,” said Lawrence. “Molly Sutton, meet Laurent Broussard, called Lapin for reasons unknown to me.”

Molly nodded to Lapin, and tried to move on her stool to keep him from leaning on her shoulder.

“Enchanté,” said Lapin, smiling, and he moved around to get in front of Molly, at which point the focus of his bloodshot eyes drifted south and stayed on her chest.

Molly tried to cross her arms but really there was no position that would camouflage her body enough to hide the fact that her bosom was quite large and extremely perky.

Lawrence watched Molly, then thoughtfully ate a handful of peanuts. “Hey Lapin, I saw a woman in the back, a tourist, just your type.” He motioned with his head towards a small back room which was furnished with comfortable chairs for customers to drink and socialize, or play some cards or chess if they felt like it.

Lapin’s eyes did not budge from Molly’s chest. She rolled her eyes and took a sip of drink, then scowled at it. Lawrence slid off his barstool and put his arm in Lapin’s and slowly pulled him towards the back, giving Molly a wink as he did so.

“Back in a minute,” he mouthed before stepping out of sight.

Molly tried to overhear the conversation going on behind her, but the couple was speaking French too rapidly and she was only getting bits and pieces that she couldn’t knit together into any sense. She narrowed her eyes at her drink and then took a long slurp of it, hating it but wanting to be done, making herself drink it instead of ordering something else as a kind of penance. Penance for what was not clear.

She saw Lawrence winding his way back through the crowd. Already he felt like a friend, and she felt unreasonably happy to see him.

“All right,” he said, settling himself back on his stool and interrupting himself long enough to sip his Negroni. “What’s the story?”

“Which story?”

“The girls. Not real, are they?”

Molly guffawed. “Hell no, they’re not real!”

“Then why have them? You don’t enjoy the attention. So what’s the point?”

“My ex.”

“I see.” He sipped his drink and reached for some chips. “I don’t think you need to say anything more, that spells it out rather neatly.”

“The real question,” said Molly, “is why people work so hard to try to save bad marriages. In retrospect, we’d have saved a lot of time—and these—if we’d quit five years earlier.” She looked down at her buxom self and laughed again, and Lawrence Weebly laughed with her.

The two of them sat at the bar for another few hours, drinking Negronis and talking about former loves, broken relationships, and Castillac, until finally Lawrence stood and took her arm.

“All right, this has been a lovely evening of overdoing it, now let’s get you home safely to sleep it off.”

Molly stood up unsteadily. It took some time and concentration to get her feet under her. After finishing the dreadful cognac and Sprite, she had tried a Negroni, and liked it so much she had another, and now was, well, s**t-faced. “I feel like singing,” she said, giggling.

“I’m sure you do. Come on outside, I’m sure Vincent is hanging around out here, you can take his taxi home.”

“I don’t need a taxchi,” said Molly.

“Taxchis are quite nice when one is blotto,” said Lawrence. He waved at Vincent who was leaning against the hood of his tiny taxi, chatting to someone. “Here we are.” He opened the door and poured Molly inside. “She lives at La Baraque,” he said to Vincent. “Just put the ride on my tab.”

“Bonne nuit, mon petit chou,” he said through the open window. “Nice meeting you. Next time, one Negroni only.”

Molly flopped her head back and laughed, even though some part of her noted that nothing was especially funny.

“Vincent,” she said, and laughed again.

He reached over the seat and patted her knee. “No worry, I’ll get you home safe,” he said. He took a look in the rear-view mirror and grinned at her, and pulled away from the curb and down the rue des Chênes, on the way to La Baraque.

Benjamin Dufort stood up when his officers came into his office, both of them carrying takeout coffee. “Bonjour Perrault, Maron. Thank you for coming in on a Saturday. At some point I will find a way to make up your day off.”

“Chief, that’s not our concern right now,” said Perrault. Maron nodded.

“Well, I thank you. All right, let’s get to it. As you know, Amy Bennett was last seen on Wednesday afternoon. That was nearly three days ago. I’m going to fill you in on what I’ve learned, which is next to nothing, and then I’d like to hear from you.” Dufort reached his arms up over his head and stretched from side to side, then twisted one way and then the other. His officers were patient, used to the way Dufort stretched while he paused to think.

“I spoke to Jack Draper, head of Degas. I’ll leave my personal judgment aside for the moment, and say only that he was not much help. On the surface, he made all the right remarks about how the school will do anything to help find Amy, but just under the surface, he hinted that she was possibly unstable, might be having an affair with a teacher—in short, that if anything has happened to her, it’s her own damn fault.

“Let me say this: it’s a common reaction, blaming the victim. It happens in the press, in the village, even in the court. Perhaps it’s simply a human reaction and there’s nothing anyone can do to put a stop to it. It can be subtle, but it is always poisonous, and we in the gendarmerie need to be vigilant against it. Whatever bad decisions a victim makes leading up to a crime being committed, he or she did not make the choice to be victim to assault, or abduction, or r**e, or anything else. And that is where the fault lies—with the person making that choice. Stupidity is not equivalent to criminality, or anywhere close.”

He looked up to see Thérèse's eyes open wide and Maron looking a little grim. “I’m sorry, I did not mean for that to take quite the tone of lecturing that it ended with. I am not accusing the two of you of this bias any more than I accuse myself. You understand?”

Perrault and Maron nodded.

“That’s it for Draper, for the moment. I plan to go back to Degas today and see if I can have a word with Monsieur Gallimard, one of her teachers. Also, I called the Bennetts. They did not express worry in words, but of course a phone call such as that stirs up quite a lot of anxiety. I expect to hear from them soon, if they have no luck contacting their daughter. Now, let me hear from you. Perrault?”

Thérèse sat up straight and scraped her teeth over her bottom lip. “I made the calls, Chief. Bergerac airport, Bordeaux airport, all the car rental agencies within seventy kilometers, same with hospitals. I got zero. Nobody has seen her, talked to her, nothing. So, I thought I would see if I could turn up any information in the village. I went around to the restaurants and bars—” she put up her hand to deflect the criticism she felt coming—“I know, it was premature without a photo or even a description. It was just casual conversation.”

“Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves,” said Dufort. “Of course when any young woman goes missing, the first thought is abduction and subsequent s*x crime. We would be looking for anyone who might have crossed paths with Amy after the time she was last seen.

“But I don’t want the previous unsolved cases to make us jump to any conclusions. There could be other motives leading to Amy’s disappearance.”

“Like what?” asked Thérèse, and then wanted to kick herself for asking a dumb question.

“Jealousy, for one,” said Dufort. “By all accounts, she was the top dog at Degas. An ambitious but less-talented classmate could want her out of the way.”

“There’s always love triangles,” said Maron quietly.

“Yes, something in that line, as well,” agreed Dufort. “Draper wanted to steer me in that direction at any rate.” He paused, noting that he resisted going where Draper was pointing, only because it was Draper doing the pointing.

“I know I keep harping on it, but remember we’re essentially doing this investigation off the books and not as gendarmes. We need to cut things a bit close to make sure I don’t get sanctioned, you understand?”

The officers nodded and took sips of their coffee in unison. Perrault grinned, happy to have something besides traffic violations to work on, and Maron, inscrutable as always, kept his feelings buried deep and out of sight.

“Just between us, I am calling this a murder investigation. Perrault, I know it’s your first. What we need to try to do is put ourselves in the mind of a person who would want to take this girl and hurt her. Of course we need to look for evidence and see if we can painstakingly account for her movements. We need to interview anyone we think might shed light on the case. But all that work will come to nothing if we do not use our imaginations to good effect.”

“Yes, Chief,” said Perrault, beaming.