Chapter Twenty-Eight

When Rachel told Alan that Elisabeth had reappeared, he said, “Do you want to talk about it?” And when she shook her head, he made her a cup of tea, then went into his study. Rachel was grateful for both the tea and the silence, but they brought her no calm. Somehow the apartment continued to hold all the tension and excitement of the last few hours; she itched to get out of it and find peace. Finally, she shrugged into her coat. The Monoprix supermarket, a ten-minute walk away, was a monument to order, and at nine at night it was likely to be mostly empty. She would go there.

To reach the grocery section of the Monoprix, shoppers had to take an escalator down, then walk past a dim space flanked by shelves full of wine and liquor. This descent, coupled with the harnessing of so much potential chaos—so many different types of alcohol that might have been confused but were not, so many different-colored liquids that might have been mis-shelved but never were—always brought Rachel a sense of calm, and the feeling expanded as she encountered the uniform arrangements of fruits and vegetables in the produce section, peppers and apples and avocadoes all organized in cool serried piles. In a good supermarket, civilization reigned: it was always tidy, and no one knew who you were or what you had done.

She was humiliated; she admitted it to herself. She and Magda had made up a story, she now saw, and then called it the truth. Mathilde seemed like a villain—she cried out to be a villain—and they’d decided that that made her one. They’d taken an abandoned telephone, a few drops of blood, and some unpleasant remarks on a balcony, and whipped them into a wish-fulfillment scenario they had fully committed to without a backward glance.

Rachel knew that she didn’t have small emotions. Her happiness was always bliss, her sorrow always misery. It wasn’t really surprising, then, that her embarrassment should feel like complete debasement. Trying to comfort herself she rested a hand on a row of cantaloupes. Nobody looked. Nobody cared, she thought. Nobody here knew that she had got it wrong; that Alan had been right; that the police had been right; that her first foray into investigation had led to a murder victim who was, in fact, alive and well and on holiday in the South of France. In February.

With that thought, her rationality began to reassert itself, and after its brief retreat her good sense kicked in once more. It was true Elisabeth’s return made a significant emotional difference to how she thought about Edgar’s murder, but did it really make any difference to the actual possibility of that murder? She and Magda had built a case in which Elisabeth’s murder bolstered the existence of Edgar’s, and vice versa, but did it need to be that way? Now that Elisabeth had returned from the not-really-dead, did they have to admit that Edgar had, in fact, just keeled over at dinner, worn out by greed and … pilfering … with the favorite wine of whichever woman had been with him left on the table? For the first time since the day Magda had confronted her at Bistrot Vivienne, she questioned herself sternly. Did she still believe Edgar had been murdered?

She looked at the tomatoes. The intense red of their skins demanded similar concentration from her. She focused inward, groping for her animal instincts. Yes, she decided, she did still believe it. Elisabeth or no Elisabeth, the other scenario still felt wrong. Edgar had died at someone else’s hand.

She pushed herself harder. All right that was what she felt, but did she have any actual evidence? Not feelings or instincts, but actual, police-procedure-worthy proof?

She bit her thumbnail. Well, to start with, there was the fact that, although rosé had been found on the table, neither woman had said she was dining with Edgar. If someone died shortly after you’d had a meal with them, it was the sort of thing you’d mention—even to someone you didn’t know very well, even if only in passing. But both Mathilde and Elisabeth had said nothing on the subject. That meant that either neither of them had eaten with Edgar that night—which made the presence of rosé a mystery all over again—or one of them had been there but wasn’t admitting to it—which suggested that one of them had something to hide. In either case, something was off.

Ah, here she was back at “a thing is off.” But now there was more than one thing as evidence. There was also the soup. She remembered her mother once telling her that you could drown in two inches of water. The average soup bowl probably held about three inches when it was full. That meant that in order to drown in it, Edgar would have needed to be near the beginning of the meal. Suppose she accepted that Edgar had passed out into his bowl, very near the start of his evening meal. Again, the rosé was proof that he hadn’t been alone at that meal. And if someone slumped facedown into his bowl while you were beginning to eat with him, either you called an ambulance, or you tried to save him yourself, or you were his killer.

But this was evidence offered in light of the fact that she had suspects available. Occam’s razor, she reminded herself, Occam’s razor. Without the complication of specific suspects, was there evidence of murder?

She made herself think very slowly. Elisabeth and David, on separate occasions, had spontaneously mentioned that Edgar hated rosé. The bottle on the table could not, then, be explained away by a gustatory whim or a sudden urge. Someone else needed to be there if its presence was to be explained. This meant not only that someone had been with Edgar at dinner, but also that this person hadn’t come forward to admit to that—suspect behavior added to suspect circumstances. Then there was the fact that the Edgar who had been revealed to her by her recent experiences didn’t look so decent. He had been a tax cheat, had made and taken back fiscal promises, had coerced another person into committing fraud. Even a love of cats couldn’t save such a character. According to Fulke, he’d made his wife furious over money, and by Elisabeth’s own admission, he’d made her, his reluctant partner in fraud, terrified and miserable. Who knew how many people of lesser conscience he might have irritated?

Between the wine, the soup, and the facts, she could rationally say that yes, there was enough evidence to support a suspicion of murder, even by a person or persons unknown.

But really, she acknowledged, she didn’t believe it was by person or persons unknown. What about that heavy front door? What about the impossibility that Fulke would ever leave the back door unlocked? And even if you left all that aside, what about the fact that Edgar lived at one of the most exclusive addresses on one of the quietest streets in Paris? Could anyone seriously believe that a stranger could sneak unnoticed into that building, on that street? No, when she said “person or persons unknown,” what she really meant was a person Edgar knew, and when she said a person Edgar knew, what she really meant was Mathilde, with her pride and her need and her greed.

And speaking of greed …

She caught sight of her face in one of the mirrors used to help staff spot shoplifters, and she turned away. She didn’t have the courage to confront the next thought. She just couldn’t push herself to it. Then she turned back. There comes a time in every detective’s life, she reflected, when she must acknowledge fully the hitherto unacceptable, consider fully the previously inconceivable, taste fully the heretofore unpalatable—Stop! she said to herself. Just face it.

She began with the two men she’d met at the elevator outside Edgar’s apartment. If you can tell a man by the company he keeps, what did this company tell her about David? Not much, her worse angel whispered; nothing good, her better one responded. No one who dressed the way those men did was in any legal business: she was streetwise enough to know that. And then there was David sleeping on a friend’s couch rather than at his father’s place. Why had Edgar refused to house his son? It wasn’t as if there were no space, and there was a fold-up bed in the storage room. Had David been mixed up in something he hadn’t wanted to tell his father? But what kind of trouble could a nice boy from the first arrondissement get mixed up in? Or could it be that the two elevator men had known David even when Edgar was alive, had known Edgar was “the rich man whose fortune David takes over,” and had done away with him for their own reasons, unknown to David? If Catherine really had been a suicide, that hypothesis was plausible. But had she been a suicide? Was David a likely suspect? Or were his two dubious friends likelier ones? She confessed she liked that last possibility best, while also confessing that it was the least likely.

But then she needed to ask herself the most brutal question of all. Did she really want to search for the truth anymore? The fact that there was a mystery didn’t mean she had to solve it. Why—to make further discoveries that unpleasant people thought in unpleasant ways, and that pleasant people could turn out to be dishearteningly flawed? To try once more to find a guilty needle in an impenetrable haystack? To have to face off against a policeman who would never believe her, and to be the recipient of more eye rolls from an impatient husband?

The answer that came surprised her. Yes, she did want to keep going. Whatever unsavory acts he had committed, Edgar had also acknowledged those who had played important roles in his life and those to whom he had been grateful. In his will, he had at least tried to pay them back. If she stopped now, she would fail to show him the same respect. She had started her investigation to acknowledge his role in her making; that role still existed, so the investigation shouldn’t stop.

She would go back to the library. She didn’t have to try to concoct any hypotheses there: she could just go back and see what developed. She could observe, then make sure that any ideas that did occur to her were based on ratiocination—now there was a good old-fashioned detective’s word! She would ratiocinate. And after all, she pointed out to herself, she hadn’t finished the cataloguing. The cataloguing that Edgar had specifically asked her to do. She would return to the library with no expectations, and she would finish the job. Or rather—she corrected herself, giving an orange a satisfied squeeze—finish both jobs.