On the sidewalk, she hesitated. There were no more errands to do in town and Jeannette would not be ready to head back to Reigny. She was restless and hesitant to abandon the town in which this crime had taken place without knowing more facts not gossip, however. She ducked into the bistro near the indoor farmers’ market and treated herself to a big bowl of onion soup and a glass of red wine. Warmed by both, she buttoned up her coat, scooped up her shopping bags, and went back onto the street. A blast of cold air seemed to push her in the direction of the museum. Yes, she would stop by and see how the old lady was doing, perhaps give her one of the boxes of candy. After all, there was daylight left and nothing special to do at home. The animals would all be sleeping, almost hibernating, and it would be quiet, too quiet.
As she hurried along the narrow sidewalk, she collided with the umbrella of a man who was passing. “Pardon,” she said, juggling her bags. He had been holding his umbrella down so it almost grazed his head, Katherine thought, so it was no wonder it hit her even though she was short. He lifted the umbrella briefly and glanced down at her, frowning to suggest—or so she thought—that it was her fault. He was good-looking, with dark blond, wavy hair and a bit of a cleft chin in an angular face.
“Rien,” he said half under his breath, and brushed past her, his jacket, with some sports logo on it, too short to keep his pants from being obviously damp. All the rain and chill was making people grouchy, she decided. Annoyed at his rudeness rather than her carelessness, she rang the museum’s bellpull at the same instant a gust of cold air blew stinging raindrops in her face. She was relieved when Madame’s daughter opened the door.
“We are closed, désolée,” the woman said, peering out, sounding not at all desolated, but impatient. When she looked harder at Katherine, she stepped back inside, and gestured for Katherine to follow her. “I didn’t recognize you, sorry,” she said, her voice friendlier. “You’re Mme Goff, from Reigny? You bring visitors to the museum sometimes?”
“Yes, on Mme Bellegarde’s behalf, as part of her tours. I wanted to find out how your mother is. You’re Josée, aren’t you, Madame’s daughter? Jeannette has told me about you. I am concerned about the shock your mother has had.”
“Thank you, Madame, I am coping.” The curator, looking older than she had a week ago, joined them, pushing aside the heavy velvet drapery over the doorway to her private apartment, the same type and vintage of the ones that covered the windows in all of the display rooms. She reached up to bestow polite kisses on Katherine’s cheeks. “It was a tragedy, absolutely, and I am not sure the museum will ever be the same to me.”
“I tried to rearrange the salon,” her daughter said, patting her mother’s hand before perching on one of the wooden chairs in the entry room, “but the gendarmes would not let us touch anything anywhere in the museum while they looked for clues, you understand.”
“Did they find anything?” Katherine said.
“Who knows?” Josée said. “They don’t say anything, they make a mess—”
“They leave the door unlocked,” her mother chimed in.
“Have they finished now? I wonder if I could see the room? It was so chaotic and I didn’t get much of an impression.” Katherine wasn’t sure how to explain why she wanted to go upstairs. She wasn’t even sure herself. But, somehow, it was important, not that the police would have missed something, but so that she would at least have a clear picture of the space in which Mme Sabine had been lying when the members of the tour group saw her. Mother and daughter didn’t seem to find her request strange.
“If you’ll permit me, I won’t join you,” the curator said. “I’m still fatigued and, truthfully, I don’t much like going to that salon. But Josée doesn’t mind, do you, dear?”
“Of course not. When I am here, I am Maman’s second set of hands,” Josée said, “and feet, on these steep stairs.” She sounded tired, Katherine thought. The two of them labored up the three flights of narrow stairs in the dim light. The velvet rope at the entry to the salon had been moved to one side, as had the mannequins, who were now clustered in a far corner staring vacantly at each other and the walls.
“It is still a mess, you can see. There are pieces of the décor that have been left on tables, under the chairs. I can’t imagine what they thought they would find, but unless it was an ant, I am sure they scooped it up,” Josée said. “The gendarme captain said he would come later today to talk to us, and after that Jeannette can help me clean the room and I may reconstruct the scene as my mother designed it. But Maman doesn’t want the chaise where the poor woman died to remain in the house, so I will have Jeannette and one of her schoolmates help me carry it down to the alley.”
Katherine asked her about the costume Mme Sabine was wearing and Josée said the gendarmes took it away.
“So often your creative mother also includes period shoes, patterned stockings, dress gloves, and other beautiful touches.”
“They took everything on the chaise or lying loose on the floor. You know the dead woman was not wearing any of that, though, only the dress, a beaded gown I myself found in a brocante in Nice years ago? Much too small for Madame. The poor thing began to unravel from being handled so carelessly.”
It took an instant for Katherine to realize the “poor thing” in question was the gown, not the dead woman.
“You heard about the mannequin being found in the Serein?” Katherine asked as they stood in the doorway of the salon staring in.
“They want me to come to the gendarmerie to identify it. Who else’s would it be? Of course it is ours, but I’m sure it is beyond repair.” She snorted. “This has all been so hard on my mother, and terrible for the museum she has given her life to.”
Seeing Pippa in her mind, Katherine had to ask the next question. “Was the mannequin’s wig in the mess?”
Josée shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. It wasn’t on the list of things they took, which I had to sign. At least, I don’t remember it. You understand, this whole business has been so upsetting. Nothing like it has ever happened at the museum.”
“I am so sorry,” Katherine said. “The ruined costume was on the mannequin before the, um, the incident, wasn’t it? I have always wondered where the costumes that aren’t on display at one time are kept.”
Josée said that as there were no closets in an eighteenth-century house the materials were stored in armoires in every room, and a specially built cedar storage room in the sous-sol, the basement. “One of the gendarmes whispered to me that he guessed Madame’s body was stored in an armoire for at least an hour or two before being outfitted and laid on the chaise, but I doubt it. The armoires all have horizontal shelves and the storage room is very small and filled with garment bags and shelves, also.”
“I wonder if that means she wasn’t killed here. I hadn’t thought of that.” Katherine filed away the information to share with Pippa, although it hardly solved the crime. Katherine was about to ask if there was anything she might do to comfort the curator when the unmistakable sound of the bell interrupted them.
“Excuse me a moment,” Josée said, “Mother doesn’t want to answer the door. I must go down.” She lowered her voice. “Do not tell Maman, but when I am on duty, I do not do up all the locks every time. Mon Dieu, it is too much.”
As the woman’s steps faded, Katherine argued with herself. The police were finished with their investigation of the room. How much could it hurt to walk in? It was testimony to the forcefulness of the curator’s personality that Katherine felt a frisson of guilt as she stepped into the salon and even looked quickly behind her in case Madame had decided to supervise her visitor. Immediately, she understood Josée’s disapproval of police tactics. A single black satin shoe lay on its side under the chaise, a pair of gray kidskin evening gloves, looking as soft as silk, were crumpled, tossed at the edge of a side table, and the drapes over the high window were pulled open crookedly, one side bunched at the bottom and the other still partially closed from midpoint to the top.
The chaise had been moved so it faced completely away from the doorway. It had to have been angled toward the doorway before or no one would have seen the figure sprawled on it. She noticed the massive armoire set against the window wall. It was open and its top-to-bottom shelves were stacked fully with folded evening clothing, set off by a row of charming feathered caps hung like laundry from a ribbon that stretched between the armoire’s interior walls. She itched to investigate. What she could do in a painting if she had even one of those frothy hats. But she was here to see if anything jumped out at her, some detail the police wouldn’t think to notice. For a moment, she wished Pippa were with her. For all her excess of imagination, the writer did have the kind of curiosity that would come in handy right now.
She crossed to the window and looked down. How had the killer gotten in and out again? Definitely not by the front door, or Mme Roussel would have seen her. Unless Madame had been in her apartment for some reason, the sound of locks would be muffled by those extraordinarily thick drapes. Jeannette had mentioned a half door through which she brought the trash and recycling outside. There was an alley that went all along the backs of the houses that she could see from up here, but there was no obvious way to reach it from the solid back wall of the museum’s tiny garden, now a dull mass of winter-frosted weeds. Did Jeannette carry the trash can around the block to the alley?
She fingered the drapery, old velvet, lined with something even heavier, fringed with long tassels and weighted further by a deep bottom hem. The sloppy way they had been left bothered her and she shook out one and straightened it from top to bottom, leaving some space for looking out. Katherine pulled the drape so that its folds were even and squatted down to straighten the hem. As she groped in the thick fabric, she felt something more fragile, a piece of paper.
She stood up, hearing someone climbing up the stairs and marching purposefully into the hallway behind her. A voice from across the room said, “Madame, what are you doing here?”
She turned and smiled at the florid face of the captain she had met the day Mme Sabine’s body was found. “It’s only me, Madame Goff, trying to make this place a little less disordered for when our dear Madame can bring herself to come up and begin to re-create her tableau.”
Katherine stood, the piece of paper instinctively crumpled in her fist, and her fist hidden at her side. Why, she didn’t know, but Pippa’s voice came to her: “A clue.” She had to get a grip or Michael would start scolding her for getting involved where she wasn’t needed. He wasn’t back yet, however, and as she made a space for the policeman to join her at the window, she smiled at him again to reassure him she was harmless. Depositing the scrap of paper in her pocket, she held out her hand. “I was the tour guide for the Americans that day.”
He stared at her, nodded abruptly, and said, “You aren’t here with another tour, I think?”
“No. The Bellegarde tours are over for the season and the museum is closed. I was helping because their normal driver is away on holiday. I’m a neighbor of theirs and I’m American so it was easy for me. Well, it would have been easy except for this.” She shuddered.
The policeman grunted and switched to English. “We do not have murders in our town. This ruthless killer will be caught, I assure you, Madame.”
It was touching, really, that at least some of the people of Avallon believed there could not be a terrible criminal residing alongside them. But the chocolatier’s gossip and the dentist assistant’s eagerness to add to the minority view was an alert that crime could happen anywhere and be committed by one’s neighbor.
“Are you able to share any news? I only ask because the people I’ve spoken to in some of the shops are nervous. What if it’s someone who might kill again?”
The policeman looked out the window, but didn’t say anything. As Katherine was about to give up and leave, he spoke. “We are looking at everyone who knew her. We are asking for information on any strangers who were here the few days before her death. We may not know who did this at this moment, but we will find the guilty person, definitely, bien sûr.”
Katherine opened her mouth to mention the stranger that the man in the candy store had told her about at the same moment he uttered an exclamation. Curious, she looked out the window. A garbage truck was backing slowly along the alley. It stopped at the building next to the museum, the two properties being separated by a stone wall, and a young man in a reflective vest came around the back of the truck to disappear through a gate into the next little yard, which was paved over. Seconds later, he was back with a small trash can that he put on a lift to be upended into the truck. He let the empty can bang on the concrete as he returned it, then he came over to the side wall of the museum and, to Katherine’s surprise and, apparently, the policeman’s, since he uttered another exclamation, ducked into a short door in the wall that Katherine hadn’t seen from the angle of the window and disappeared from their sight. A door banged and there he was with a different trash can, ducking back through the adjoining side wall and headed to the neighbor’s alley gate.
The policeman muttered, “Merde,” and hurried out of the salon. Katherine heard him crashing down the stairs and stayed where she was. Okay, this was important, but why? The truck was backing along the alley. Did that mean there was only one way to access it? But the gendarmes’ station was only a couple of streets away and surely they figured that out already. They already knew the trash was picked up by the municipal service. They had talked to Jeannette, who explained she put it out on Tuesday while she was cleaning up.
Filing the incident away to share with Pippa, who would undoubtedly seize on it and add some kind of outlandish interpretation, Katherine turned away from the window. She remembered the flimsy piece of paper she had jammed in her pocket, the one that was caught in the hem of the droopy velvet drape. Pulling it out, she smoothed it enough to read it. It had an unusual medieval-style cross underneath which was, she guessed, a prayer or a piece of scripture. The announcement of a “special Mass” with a time but not a date. Written in an elegant, swooping hand diagonally across the page was a message. “Dieu t’aime,” God loves you. Interesting, the “you” was the familiar “tu” form that made the message seem more personal. A religious tract, perhaps?
Katherine stuffed the paper back in her pocket, not sure it meant anything. What she needed right now was a warm café and a hot chocolate. Maybe she could persuade Madame to come with her. The dear woman badly needed some cheering up.