Katherine found herself almost an hour early for her dentist appointment the next day. Driving into the center of town and deciding at the last instant to swerve into the parking lot that might once have been an urban park before cars were so common, she had squeezed into a narrow, angled spot under the bare branches of one of the trees that still adorned the space. The veterinarian’s office was across the street in a line of old stone town houses. She and Michael had brought Gracey in only last month when she stepped on some broken glass in the overgrown lot behind Reigny’s common garbage collection spot. The vet’s assistant had suggested with a straight face that they carry the dog into the examining room at the top of the stairs, unfazed by Gracey’s similarity to a brown bear.
She walked in the opposite direction to the main shopping street, waving to a white-coated pharmacist who was holding the door open for an elderly woman. “Bonjour, Luc, comment ça va?”
The young man waved back, and Katherine thought how handsome he looked in his perennial shirt and tie, his raven-black hair slicked back over a high forehead. When she needed shampoo or toothpaste, he or one of the women who worked there with him treated her purchase as serious business and were unfailingly solicitous, a far cry from the vast, understaffed drugstores of her past in Los Angeles. It made her sad to see the supermarchés taking away some of the business of the traditional French pharmacies. Progress wasn’t, always.
She was walking in the direction of the shop that sold wool hats and scarves when she realized that the gendarmerie, the police headquarters, was off to the left, across the street and on one roughly parallel to the main street. There were white and blue police cars pulled up on the narrow sidewalk in front of the building. Pippa’s plea for information came back to her and, she had to admit, her own curiosity with it. She angled across the cobblestone pavement, inhaling to give herself courage, and walked into the building. Finding herself boxed in by interior walls and closed doors, she almost turned and left. But a voice stopped her. “Oui, Madame, avez-vous besoin d’aide?”
Did she need help? Was it enough to be curious? Was that mere nosiness? Could she say no and back out the door? You got yourself into this, she scolded herself, now deal with it.
“Are you here to see someone?” the voice continued in French. Katherine turned to find the source of the speaker and there he was, visible inside a window that was only open at its bottom half. Since he was apparently either seated or extremely short, she had to bend down to look at him straight on. Pippa would have had to get on her knees.
From this awkward position, which didn’t seem unusual to the gray-haired gendarme, Katherine tried to explain that she was hoping there had been some resolution of the murder of poor Mme Sabine. “I was there at the time so the shock was intense. I’d like to know the killer has been captured.” Even to her it sounded thin. To the policeman, it was clearly none of her business.
“I have no information,” or that’s what she thought he said. She wasn’t sure how to prolong the conversation.
“You would know if someone had been arrested, a suspect?” Her French was rapidly deserting her. She was much better ordering sausages or tomatoes, or asking if it was the correct train. The vocabulary words around killing and suspects went beyond what she had learned in classes and by immersion in Reigny’s daily life.
“Désolé,” was his only reply, and then the outer door opened and two young women wrapped to the ears in printed scarves came in chattering and laughing, and made further delicate probing impossible. Their laughter followed her onto the street, where the sun was losing its battle to incoming clouds and the temperature was dropping.
She needed to buy small gifts of candy for her neighbors and some for Michael. Well, for herself too. But maybe after, not before, her time in the dentist’s chair. It would hardly do to show up with a bag full of candy. The dentist, a charming woman who lived above her clinic, would give her a stern lecture, and Katherine hated to be lectured to.
As she settled into a plastic chair in the dentist’s reception room to wait her turn, Katherine realized the assistant was talking with the patient who was leaving. “Poor man. Did they have money troubles?” the woman asked, leaning forward over her desk.
“Hardly. He talked altogether too much about the place … retired, somewhere in Provence, not here.”
Katherine caught only part of the conversation as she pretended to be reading Le Monde.
“Pricey, isn’t it? But they were … so long ago.”
“Yes, and … every penny. Certainly, their sausages are too expensive, although I will say they are the best unless you go to Beaune, and no one … for a sausage.”
The assistant smiled. “Certainly not, at least not for sausages, eh? Mme Sabine … What will happen to the business, I wonder?”
“… a shame, and right before Christmas,” the client said, winding a bright green knitted scarf around her neck. “She went away every week? Well, we shall never know.… I’m sure she will go to the sky.”
The sky? Just when she thought she was making progress in the language, Katherine was brought up short by the lapses in her vocabulary or in her ability to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations in rapid French. What was this about Provence, about Beaune, about money?
Twenty minutes later, as the dentist, a brisk woman in her early forties wearing a formfitting wool dress, gold hoop earrings, and knee-high boots, began to examine her teeth, Katherine realized all was not lost. Docteur Lafarge hardly waited for Katherine to settle into the reclining chair before she pulled a white cotton coat over her dress and began to dissect the mystery. Katherine had only to raise her eyebrows or make an inarticulate questioning sound to keep a steady flow of fact, speculation, and civic concern coming. Fortunately, the dentist spoke excellent English, having spent a year in New York City as a nanny before coming back to France to begin her baccalaureate studies.
“I heard, my dear Mme Goff, that it was you who found the body?”
“Urghhh.”
“Ah yes, I understand, not you alone. Poor old Madame had to see it, and see it in her exquisite salon, such a blow for someone so old and frail. The butcher is devastated, you know? Taken to his bed, I hear, and unable to speak. And the police, merciful heaven, are looking at him as a suspect. Spit please.”
“But why would they suspect him?” Katherine managed before being instructed to open wide again.
“Scandalous, I agree. The Sabines were as close to turtledoves as one could imagine, always together at the store, smiling and joking back and forth. They were both patients of mine, you understand? He talked always about the little house in the south that they would buy when they retired, ideal for two older people in a tidy village near Aix. He had pictures. It belonged to a friend who had agreed to sell it to him in a few years. Can you imagine the sorrow?”
Given a chance to speak as one tool was removed from her mouth and before the next one was inserted, Katherine said, “Do the police have any evidence to suspect him?”
“Open, if you will. Nothing other than that one assumes some kind of crime of passion between spouses, although if you ask me they are too old for that. Comprenez?” The dentist winked.
Katherine understood. “What do you think?” she said.
“Me, I suspect some nasty piece of work from outside the area. There are no murderers here. Why?” she said as Katherine signaled the question with her eyebrows. “Perhaps a robbery gone wrong although I must admit I don’t see that the musée has much that would sell on the black market. Old jewelry, perhaps? Or perhaps the villain violated the woman. God forbid.” She stopped to cross herself. “The gendarmes must do more to protect us all instead of standing around outside their headquarters smoking, n’est-ce pas?”
Having gargled, been declared cavity-free, and released from the chair, Katherine asked if the dentist had any theories as to why the victim might have been in the museum.
“Ah,” she said as she ushered Katherine out into the waiting room, where a young man with a pained expression and a swollen cheek sat reading the same Le Monde Katherine had abandoned thirty minutes before, “that is easy because I was there also. Yes,” she said as Katherine made a noise of surprise, “two days before they found her. It was the annual gathering of the ladies of the church group. We take care of the altar and make arrangements for the priest to do baptisms and funerals when he visits us on his rounds. Once a year we do something special together as a little reward. This year, it was lunch at the musée and a tour of the new exhibit. My husband and M. Sabine even stopped by for dessert and coffee. No, it was nothing, ce n’était rien,” she added as Katherine gasped. “The gendarmes already know about it. My husband had to open his office and M. Sabine must have left even before that. The exhibit was wonderful, as it always is. Madame has a gift. It was late when the rest of us left.”
Katherine would have liked to ask her more—this was a new piece of information—but the young man jumped up, clutching his jaw. The dentist glanced at him and gave her American patient a farewell wave that morphed into beckoning the suffering man into her examining room, and the door closed with a firm click. As she fished out euros to pay her bill, Katherine wondered how these new pieces fit into the puzzle. She also wondered if the dentist had shared everything with the police?
“My boss, she is too kind,” the assistant said with a snort as she handed Katherine the receipt. She was young, and had a sharp nose that seemed to twitch in anticipation of scandal.
Katherine was startled at the open admission the receptionist had been eavesdropping. “Why do you say that?”
“She and Mme Sabine were both involved in the church group, so she does not like to think badly of her.” The woman looked up at Katherine with an indignant expression. She spoke in French and English combined, and seemed prepared to say more as there were no other patients in the waiting room.
“You think there’s something else to consider?” Katherine said, feeling her way.
“Think about this, Mme Goff. Every Thursday, Mme Sabine took the train and spent all day away from the shop. Yes, ask anyone, she dressed nicely, drove to the station and left. Must have come home after the shops closed because no one saw her. The next day, there she would be in her apron, smiling and acting normal, you know, and her husband none the wiser.”
“But what’s so strange about that? I’m sure he knew she had gone somewhere. Perhaps she went shopping, or tended to an old relative.…” Katherine let her sentence die away seeing the almost scornful look on the young woman’s face.
“Ask my sister, who works at the chocolatier across the street from them. She heard it the other day from someone. Madame was having an affair. Someone in Lyon, perhaps, or Beaune. Dressing up? Every Thursday? No wonder her husband was seized with passion and strangled her.” She finished on a note of triumph.
Katherine didn’t know what to say. It sounded ludicrous. “Do they have family? I heard he is grieving deeply. Will anyone be coming to help the widower run the shop?”
The assistant shrugged. “I think she has a brother somewhere, although maybe it’s he who has a brother, and I know she has a sister, although she lives in Belgium and has health problems. I expect my boss’s lady friends from the church group will lend a hand. But you watch.” She gave Katherine a meaningful nod as the door opened and a woman entered, half-dragging a boy of six or seven, who was wailing.
She wasn’t sure who she felt sorriest for, the scared little boy or the dentist who would have the job of reassuring him that the long arm with the point on the end of it wasn’t a tool of torture but of salvation.