as I watch the tear making its way down my friend’s cheek. It squeezes out of the outside corner of her eye, it’s big and reflects the light from Evian’s flashlight. Slowly makes it way over Clothilde’s cheekbone, then accelerates down her cheek. On her jaw, it pauses for a moment.
Then it drops.
Fascinated, I watch it fall, wondering if it will disappear, if it’s still part of Clothilde.
It hits the floor. And vanishes.
But not before leaving a slight crater in the dust at our feet.
I snap back to reality, and to the fact that my friend of thirty years is crying. Badass Clothilde who never lets herself be affected by anything or anyone—including her mother when she came through our cemetery as a ghost—is moved to tears by her mother having kept all her things after she died.
“Your mother cared about you a lot, Clothilde,” I say. I keep my voice serious, but also light. I know she won’t want me to draw attention to her emotions.
Clothilde sighs. “Guess so.”
“That’s a lot of evidence to work my way through,” Evian comments from her spot crouched at the door. “But I believe what I want right now, is this.” She pulls one of the smaller boxes toward her. It has a lot less dust than the rest of them. And it has no label.
She brings it back to the sewing room, and slams the door shut behind her.
Awful pull and displacement, and Clothilde and I find ourselves on the other side of the door, too.
Clothilde rushes right up to Evian. “I need to go back. Open the—”
“Clothilde,” I gently interrupt her. “We’ll get to the other boxes later. She said that was a lot of evidence to work through, right? It means she plans to do it. But that.” I point at the box Evian is opening. “Is probably the stuff your uncle left here. It’s what we’re after today. For your uncle.”
I can tell Clothilde wants to go back to the other boxes, the ones with the memories of her life in them, but at the mention of her uncle, she nods. “For tonton Lucien.”
I smile at her. “Evian knows you’ll haunt her ass if she doesn’t look through your things, Clothilde. There’s no need to worry.”
The smile I get in return is wan, but it’s a smile.
Evian pulls three kraft envelopes out of the box. Two are sealed, one isn’t. The unsealed one doesn’t have anything written on it. One has the name of a lawyer and an address in the Toulouse city center.
The last has Evian’s name on it.
Evian starts with the unsealed one.
“It’s an autopsy report,” Evian says. It could be in explanation to Joséphine, who is leaning over Evian’s shoulder to see, or it could be for us. In any case, I’m grateful I don’t have to squeeze in—the space around Evian is crowded enough.
“It’s Clothilde’s autopsy report.”
Joséphine shakes her head. “I don’t remember anything about an autopsy. They don’t do that when there’s no suspicion of foul play, do they?”
“No, they don’t. And they certainly didn’t back then. And yet”—she flips to the second page—“here it is. Dated two days after her death. The field with the name of the person who requested the autopsy is blank. That should never happen. Same for the name of the person who performed the autopsy.”
“Would a document like this even have legal value?” Joséphine asks. “If there are no names?”
“No,” Evian replies. “But maybe that wasn’t the goal. And it certainly protects the involved parties. I guess it depends on—”
Turning the second page, she freezes, her eyes glued to the top of the page.
“What does it say?” I ask. “Clothilde, what is she looking at?”
Squinting and frowning at the page, Clothilde shakes her head. “I don’t know. It’s just a bunch of numbers and Latin names. I took a couple of years of Latin, but I don’t know any of these words.”
“What do all those numbers mean?” Joséphine asks.
Evian lets out a breath she must have been holding for a while. “It means Clothilde was drugged when she died. Heavily. A dose this strong on a young girl would be lethal.”
“But she died by slitting her wrists.”
Swallowing, Evian puts the autopsy report back into the envelope. “Her wrists were slit, yes. But if she hadn’t died of blood loss, she would have died of the poison. And she wasn’t the one to slit her wrists. Somebody else did that for her.”
Joséphine’s voice wobbles. “She was murdered twice? Overdose or poison and slit wrists?”
“There’s a good chance she was unconscious when they slit her wrists,” Evian says, her voice soft and compassionate. “That’s how they managed to lay her out like they wanted.”
“She’s right,” Clothilde says. She moves to stand face to face with her sister. “I didn’t feel anything once the drugs set in.”
Joséphine nods. Swallows. “Should we open the one for the lawyer?”
“I’d prefer to do that with the lawyer present,” Evian says. “But I will be there, too, when she opens it.” She pulls a pocketknife out of the pocket of her jeans and slits open the seal to the envelope with her name on it. “I will open this one, though.”
“He must have been here very recently,” I comment to Clothilde. “He hasn’t known Evian’s name for long.”
Clothilde shushes me as she leans over Evian, trying to read the documents.
“They’re logs,” Evian says. I hear both surprise and wonder in her voice. “Logs of every time those assholes contacted him or threatened him. Dates, times, transcriptions of what was said.” Her eyebrows shoot up. “Descriptions of the men when they came to him in person.”
She flips through the pages. “There must be hundreds of entries in 1988. Jesus, there are so many. Then they slow down, but there’s still one at least every six months, every single year up to the present.” She shakes her head. “And boy, do they pick up after Clothilde was exhumed.”
“They threatened to lock him inside his own house and then set it all on fire?” Joséphine’s shock seems to be morphing into outrage. “Why?”
“It’s never stated outright from what I can see,” Evian says. “But I’m guessing they knew he had that autopsy report and wanted it destroyed.” She flips another page. “Oh shit.”
“What?” Joséphine and two ghosts echo in concert.
“There’s a picture.”
I don’t care if it’s too crowded, I have to see. I levitate a little to look over Evian’s head at the picture glued to the last page of the report.
It’s from an outdoor café in Toulouse. I remember stopping there for a cup of coffee from time to time when I was alive. I don’t think it exists anymore though—we’ve walked past that spot several times with Evian.
The photograph is focused on four people seated at a table. I recognize the man from downstairs. Mathieu Redon with the greasy hair. Except when he was ten, it wasn’t greasy. It’s definitely him, though. I also recognize Laurent Lambert, the lawyer who is somehow at the center of all this, and involved in one way or another in all our deaths. The larger-than-life man on his right is Marius Hardouin, the man who was mayor of Toulouse for twenty years. And the last person, the woman…
“That’s Delphine Redon,” Joséphine says.
There’s nothing damning about the picture in and of itself. It’s three adults and a kid having a chat at a café. They’re all laughing, possibly at something the kid said.
But the fact that it’s in the report means it’s important.
They’re all linked to Clothilde’s death.
Somehow.