When she opened her eyes, the smell of coffee was strong. Michael, already dressed, was standing in the doorway with two steaming cups. “Ready to face the world?”
“I guess so,” she said, smiling sheepishly as she held out her hand. “Did I make a fool of myself?”
“Compared to when you insisted on tap dancing on Richard and Mickey’s coffee table at the party in L.A.? Not so much.” He grinned, but she noticed the dark circles under his eyes.
“I’m sorry if I scared you.”
“Don’t be. If the butcher hadn’t been eaten up by guilt and confessed everything when the police brought him in, they wouldn’t have known about the brother, and he’d be on the loose. Then, you would have been Miss Marple, saving the day.” He grinned and sat on the bed to kiss her.
“I’m nowhere near as old as Miss Marple, thank you. But I’m confused. Didn’t his brother do it? Please, what actually happened?”
“They didn’t tell me, sweetheart, only that both men are locked up tight. I called the clinic and managed to make myself clear enough that they put me through to Pippa. She says to tell you she’s really sorry she scared you, and that Philippe will bring her home later today.”
“She has nothing to be sorry about. She could have been killed, for heaven’s sake. You know, Michael, I really like her. She hasn’t got the sense of a toddler at times, but she’s good-hearted and, who knows, maybe this mystery writing will take off? She’s determined when something excites her.”
“As are you. Which reminds me, you had a caller earlier. The local witch came to find out how you were and to tell you that the young couple, well, the wife anyway, is in labor.”
Katherine threw off the covers. “Marie’s having the baby? I need to get dressed and go down to their house.”
“Why? She’s going to have that baby even if you’re not there. Besides, I think the old dragon said she’s in the hospital. You need to start slowly, Kay. Look at your face. You look like you’ve been through a war.”
Katherine wondered if, given his description, she wanted to see herself, so she sat on the edge of her bed, drank her café crème, and made a plan for the day. Cold water compresses for her eyes first. Then, she’d call the gendarmerie and ask to speak with Philippe. Since she didn’t know his last name, that might be hard. Perhaps his partner then, Marianne. There couldn’t be too many Mariannes at the police station in Avallon.
She had to struggle for a moment to remember what day it was. Wednesday. Jeannette would be in school, so talking with her would have to wait. The two boys would be also, which meant Jean might be out making a living in a way she wouldn’t look at closely unless Michael’s new wheelbarrow went missing.
She’d leave a message for Pippa to call her when she got home, probably after checking on her cats. She felt guilty for not pulling herself together last night. She could have done something for the poor, frightened creatures. That reminded her. “Sweetheart,” she called. “Have you gotten our car back yet?”
“I thought I’d walk down there now and check. You stay here. You need to rest, Kay, and I don’t want to see you getting all lathered up for a while.”
“Check under the car and under the hood before you start it up.” She had to raise her voice to be sure he heard her downstairs.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She heard the sharp knock at the front door, but not more than some murmuring until Michael’s voice said, “Wait there and I’ll ask her.” He bounded up the stairs, his cowboy boots hitting the steps in a rapid beat. “It’s against my better judgment, but there’s a reporter outside who wants to talk to you about what happened.”
“How could that be? I was just a weeping wreck off to the sidelines. Who could have sent him here?”
“Her, and she told me. In English, by the way. I’ll give the French this. They’re a lot better at learning my language than I am at learning theirs. It was your biggest fan, the queen of the village, Mme Pompadour, who sent the newspaper person your way.”
“Mme Pomfort? How on earth…?”
“She who knows everything. Want me to send the reporter away?”
“Yes, I think you’d better. The police need to be the ones talking about the crime. Pippa and I weren’t exactly official.” She looked up and smiled. “Okay, we were being nosy. But I’m not going to let the reporter see that. Please tell her I can’t help her.”
In the end, she didn’t have to call the police station. Pippa knocked on the door not long after she had made the best of her face, using more makeup than usual to take attention away from her red-rimmed eyes, and come downstairs. Michael had checked to see that she was okay being on her own for a few minutes, then left to pick up the car and had bumped into Pippa and Philippe on their way up to the Goffs’.
Pippa’s mouth was bruised and she kept rubbing her chafed wrists, but she swore she was all right. “I was scared at first, but I could see he was in worse shape than me. I think the stupid bloke hadn’t thought anything out before he agreed to his brother’s demands.”
“Demands? Can you say anything?” Katherine had turned to Philippe after giving them coffee.
He blushed and said, “I should not share police information, but since you have been so involved…” His voice trailed off and he looked earnest, and somewhat conflicted, Katherine thought. “But Pippa already knows some of it from Marcel.”
“We never could have guessed,” Pippa said. “Philippe says Mme Sabine had been giving away the money they had saved for retirement—”
“—the little house in Provence. I remember hearing how passionately he looked forward to it,” Katherine said.
“Yes, I guess that was it. Anyway, there was this priest in Beaune who convinced her to keep giving more and more for his work in—”
“—Africa. Oh, why didn’t I pay more attention?” Katherine said, jumping up and handing Philippe the piece of paper she had put in a drawer in Michael’s desk for safekeeping.
“What’s this?” he said, then read it carefully. “Where did you find it? Is it related to this case?”
“In the salon where it happened, but long after the gendarmes had finished their searches. Yes, I think so, although I wasn’t sure how. I’ll explain later, but first, please tell me what you can.”
Pippa gave her a look. “Maybe you should finish,” she said.
“No, no, please. It’s only now that you’re describing what happened that it’s dawning on me that all the pieces were there. Please, tell me.” Katherine sat back down and leaned forward.
“Well, Marcel—that’s the brother’s name—was pacing back and forth, after he had gagged me so I couldn’t ask him to let the cats in even if he didn’t want to feed them—”
This time, she was interrupted by a gargling sound from Philippe.
“I say, I don’t have to continue if neither of you wants to hear from the person who spoke directly to the accomplice.” Pippa’s cheeks were bright, and her eyes were glistening with tears.
“I do, I do,” Katherine said, reaching out and pressing the young woman’s hand. “Accomplice, not the person who actually did it?”
Haltingly, awkwardly, occasionally interrupting each other or both going silent at the same time, Philippe and Pippa filled in the details they knew. M. Sabine had found out that his wife was “a saint” for her charity from someone else during the church ladies’ party at the museum. After the others left, he had cornered his wife in the salon and demanded to know what she had done. She had told him how much more important God—or maybe it was Africa—was than his fantasy about living in Provence. To his shock, she had admitted their retirement savings account was mostly gone.
Marcel told the police what he had probably confessed to Pippa in his panic, that his half brother had strangled Mme Sabine in a blind rage when she admitted what she had done, and, afterward, enlisted Marcel’s help covering it up.
“He told me he didn’t do it,” Pippa said. “He said it in English. He was falling apart. He seemed like a weak man, to tell you the truth, and I wonder if he got bossed around by his older brother.”
“Me, I think M. Sabine thought no one would ever suspect his brother, since he lived in Beaune and had a different last name, so it was all right to have Marcel working to cover his brother’s tracks. No one here knew Marcel, or even knew he existed,” Philippe said.
“Except Josephine Lacrois,” Katherine said. “She dated him in Beaune, but she didn’t realize the man paying such flattering attention to her was related to the woman she knew only from her trips down to the church there.”
“She may have known,” Philippe said. “We will talk with her, to be sure.”
“If she had known,” Pippa said, “she might not have wanted a boyfriend whose brother was a butcher. She seemed a right snob to me.”
“So many small things and that is how we usually catch our villains,” Philippe said. Katherine noticed he was sitting closer to Pippa than the chaise longue they were sharing required. “What we didn’t understand until Marianne interviewed Jeannette and Mme Roussel a second time the other day was that whoever committed the crime made use of the empty house next to the museum. My boss realized how possible it was when he saw the man from the poubelle using the neighbor’s gate and realized he was emptying a trash can from that spot even though no one was resident there.”
“Aha, so that’s what excited the captain that day, when we both stood at the window,” Katherine said. “Why didn’t I figure that out?”
“Yes,” Philippe said, “that is the container the victim’s clothes were stashed in and where Marcel took the mannequin until he could get it away. He now says he thought it had his brother’s fingerprints on it, which is why he dumped it in the river a few kilometers above where it washed up.”
“Do you know why they dressed poor Madame like that and left her there?”
“I am guessing that the butcher realized he had to get out of the museum quickly and there was no place to hide Madame’s body. We will find out more as the interviews progress.”
“But how did he get out? Dear Mme Roussel is a tiger with those locks of hers,” Katherine said.
“Pippa knows,” Philippe said and looked at her with pride. “She told us last night at the hospital when the boss went in to see if she understood any of Marcel’s ravings.”
Pippa squirmed. “I meant to tell you, Katherine, but we kept getting interrupted by other things. The time her daughter took me upstairs, she told me her mother’s arrangement was so clumsy, having to do and undo all the locks, and wasn’t really necessary. Her mother’s hearing isn’t great, so if she went into the apartment to use the loo, or to warm her hands at the heater, Josée would sometimes only close one deadbolt, the easiest one.”
“He went out the door, as simple as that?”
“Sometimes the simplest answer is the right one, n’est-ce pas?” Philippe said. “We learned that in training.”
Pippa looked at him with what Katherine could only call adoration, forgetting that she had a cup of coffee in her hands. As it tipped and coffee spilled onto her lap, Philippe made a sound, and righted it for her. Pippa stammered, tried to stand, and almost tripped over the small white dog that had been listening from under the table, or appeared to be listening, his head swiveling from one speaker to another. Philippe handed her a towel, or what he thought was a towel but was really a scrap of fabric Katherine had wanted to use for a pillow, then grinned at Katherine and rolled his eyes.
“See, it is nothing,” he said, bending toward the young woman and patting her hand. “Anyone could do that. Your mind, it is on the bigger things, yes?” Pippa turned scarlet.
“And the wig in Pippa’s car?” Katherine said, determined to hear the entire mystery explained even at the sacrifice of this unusual courtship.
Pippa sat up straight. “I thought he said something about it. ‘Toupee’ is wig, right? He seemed to be apologizing, by his gesture. But…” Pippa lifted her hands in confusion.
Philippe kept his eyes on her hand and on the cup and when he seemed satisfied nothing was about to move, he spoke. “The boss interviewed him last night and I was present to take notes. Marcel said he found it in his car after dumping the mannequin and didn’t know what to do with it. Later, he decided to put it in your car to implicate you. But that was a stupid mistake. He brushed it with his coat sleeve and left so many fibers that he would have been better off depositing it in the trash anywhere in Avallon.”
“But I still don’t understand how you came to suspect him enough to make those coat fibers useful.”
“Oh, we suspected the husband from the start. A crime of passion, mais oui? It is traditional.”
So French, Katherine thought.
“His alibi was only a friend with whom he played cards, yes? He named this man, but never said he was related to him. In any case, that meant we had to suspect that person as well. We watched them, and soon we realized they were not casual friends. They did not share the same surname, but it was not difficult to discover Marcel’s blood connection to the murderer when we checked his background, and so we collected the evidence, bit by bit. We will continue until the case is proven beyond any doubt, je vous assure.”
“Then why did you investigate me?” Pippa said, saying precisely what Katherine wanted to ask.
Philippe looked sheepish. “My boss thought you might be having the affair with the butcher. I did not, but there you were, wherever something was happening. Marianne was suspicious at first, but she decided you were only a silly foreigner. I agreed—not that you were silly—,” he added after catching her look, “but that you had nothing to do with it. After all, you told us from the start you composed la littérature de gare, the crime fiction.”
“Well, I guess that’s something,” Pippa said a little uncertainly.
“Oui, oui, I read mysteries all the time. Maigret, Fred Vargas, Japrisot. I am impressed to meet a British author.” He beamed at her. She beamed at him. They were both blushing now.
“I’ll make more coffee,” Katherine said, looking from one to the other, “and then you can tell me the rest.”
The rest was simple except that the gendarmes watching him lost Marcel. A car crash on the A6 diverted the team following him long enough for Marcel to come back to Pippa’s house, which he had scouted before. The plan was to keep her from sharing anything she knew with the police, then anonymously frighten Jeannette into silence before the butcher and his brother vanished to Belgium, where they had relatives. M. Sabine was captured as he loaded his suitcase into his car and crumbled within minutes at the station.
Marcel had been hanging around the bus stop in Avallon, planning to slip a threatening note into Jeannette’s backpack, when he saw four gendarmes banging on the door to the apartment and fled, landing without too much thought at Pippa’s house to complete his job of silencing her long enough to flee the country.
“After a bit, I didn’t think he would kill me. He was almost as frightened as I was,” Pippa said. “But it was scary anyway.”
“They were amateurs,” Philippe said, with the naïve disdain of a rookie cop, which made Katherine smile inwardly. “When Marcel went back dressed as a garbage collector to retrieve the things in the vacant house can, he realized the girl probably saw him. She will be an important witness,” Philippe said.
“Will she be in any danger?” Katherine said.
“No, the two men are the only criminals who were involved and they cannot escape the law, not with the butcher’s confession and what Marcel told Pip—” He gulped and reached for his coffee cup.
“It’s all right to call me by my first name, you know,” she said, the pink spots returning to her cheeks. “Anyway, they were eaten up by guilt, wouldn’t you say? Strong stuff to remember for my mystery stories.”
“Too real for me,” Katherine said. “I thought they had killed you too. I was sick with fear. Mme Sabine came alive for me, ironically, because I felt the fact of her death deeply in that moment.”
“I didn’t help her though. I missed all the clues,” Pippa said.
“Not really. You always said you suspected M. Sabine. You knew the missing wig would be important. Oh,” Katherine said, “what about the c—”
Pippa made a face again. “It’s okay. I told Philippe about the cross last night. Another stupid mistake on my part.”
Katherine looked from one to the other.
“It had no bearing,” Philippe said. “Mme Sabine’s religious jewelry was still on her dresser in a little box. We called the mairie in L’Isle-sur-Serein and a resident there had posted a note saying she lost it.”
“Last summer,” Pippa said, sighing.
“The good news is, unlike me, you weren’t holding back evidence. Philippe, I apologize. I kept meaning to turn that paper over but the longer I held on to it, the more embarrassed I was.”
He looked at her with a stern expression he had probably practiced as a police cadet. “Any fingerprints are compromised. What is done is done and we have our man, or men, I should say.”
“And well done, you,” Pippa said to Katherine. “You came to find me and figured out something was wrong.”
“The cats,” Katherine said with a shrug. “I knew you wouldn’t leave them out after dark.”
* * *
No more, she thought as she buttered a piece of bread after the two had left. No more of this. I’m a painter, a middle-aged woman who wants nothing more than to lead a quiet life in a small town in Burgundy with my dear husband to take care of me. When the phone rang, she hesitated in case it was the reporter again, but picked it up on the third ring. “Bonjour, Madame Goff ici.”
“Madame Goff, huh? Wife of the famous Mike Goff, the man of the year?”
It couldn’t be. The voice shocked her. It was the same, but bolder if that was possible, as though he expected an audience was listening. She cleared her throat. “Eric?”
“Well, sure, baby, who else? How are you? As beautiful as ever, I’ll bet. Mike is one lucky guy. Listen, I’d talk, but I’m meeting people in ten minutes. Is the man around?”
She had to work to keep her tone cool. “Eric. I’m sorry, he’s out but he’ll be back soon. Can he call you?”
“Milkin’ the cows?” His laugh rattled over the distance and through the cell towers from one continent to the other.
“We don’t have cows.” She didn’t think it would be a great idea to tell him about the murder first thing after not talking to him for how many years was it?
“No? Well, I do, believe it or not. Small ranch in Idaho, beautiful spot I never get to see. Look, tell him to give me a buzz on the cell. I just want him to know my guys signed the contract and if he does, we’re on, baby, for a helluva tour. Kisses to you, honey. See you next year.”
* * *
She was sitting there, bread in one hand, phone in the other, when Michael came in and tossed the car keys on the top of the shelf. “That’s that. Only one cop car there and they had no problem with me taking ours. Cats all accounted for, fed and back at their posts.” He stopped. “Kay, what’s up? Nothing new is wrong, is it?”
She shook herself, smiled weakly, and said, “Looks like you’re in business. Eric called to say they’ve signed the contract. The tour’s on.”