Deadly Slipper Read online

  “Julian, I need to know,” Mara said. “Am I asking the impossible?”

  He hesitated and then answered, “Yes. Apart from this”—he tapped the photo of the mystery Cypripedium—“most of these orchids are pretty widespread throughout the Dordogne. Even the Bird’s-nest could potentially grow in any forested glade. This makes pinning down an exact location pretty hard. Also, although you have the sequence of exposures, there’s no way of telling if your sister took all of these pictures within the space of a few hours—say, on a walk—or over several days. If she took them all in one go, that would simplify things because it would limit their range to a given area, whatever she could do on foot, assuming she was on foot. You could then try to find places where all of these flowers grow together and use the photos to create a sort of continuity—”

  Mara cut in eagerly, “That was exactly my idea. I thought, if somehow I could find a starting point, I could use the photos as a kind of—of map to retrace her steps.”

  “But what”—he had to point out the other possibility—“if they were taken at different times? That means they were also probably taken in different places. Look, the lighting in this photo of Beynac Castle is dull, the road and stonework look wet. But the flowers were shot in dry, sunny conditions. That suggests that these were taken at different times, on different days and possibly in different locations.”

  “Or that it rained in the morning and cleared up in the afternoon. The weather in these parts can be very changeable, everyone knows that.” She was not prepared to accept his complications. She fixed him with an obstinate regard accentuated by the set of her pointed chin.

  He shook his head. “You also have the problem of this.” He returned to the Lady’s Slipper. “If this really is a Cypripedium, it’s very doubtful it was taken anywhere around here at all.”

  “But Beynac Castle shows that the photos were taken locally.”

  “However, not necessarily the orchids, or at least not all the orchids. Your sister could have begun the roll in the Dordogne and finished off in—in the Gorges of the Tarn, for all I know.”

  “But I found the camera in Villeréal,” she objected. “That’s no more than thirty kilometers away.”

  Julian shrugged. “Junk travels.”

  Then he gave her the coup de grâce. “The real difficulty is that you’re hoping to follow your sister’s footsteps using floral landmarks of nineteen years ago. A lot could have happened in that time, Mara. Orchids are extremely vulnerable to changes in their environments. Their propagation patterns could have shifted. Their habitat could have been destroyed. You could be looking for something that no longer exists.”

  She was silent for a long moment, taking this in.

  “All right,” she said doggedly. “What about this?” She held up the photo they had so far ignored. The pigeon house. It was a distance shot, taken from an elevated point: a round stone tower, some fourteen meters high, with a rough, gray conical roof. It stood by itself, surrounded by poplars, at the bottom of a soggy-looking field. The specific features of the structure were hard to make out because of a large patch of speckling covering much of the print, but it appeared to have at least one window, a low door, and numerous holes for the entry and egress of birds.

  “True,” he had to admit. “In any case, a pigeonnier is a more permanent marker and a lot easier to spot than orchids. But, again, the Dordogne is full of these things. Every farm has some kind of a dovecote. Where do you start?”

  She stared at him unhappily. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you? Or maybe obsessed.” She gave him a small, tight smile. “You don’t have to be polite. I’ve heard it before. I have a friend—she used to live out here. She’s gone back to New York now, but we still stay in touch by e-mail. She says it has to do with our twin psyches. She says I have a misplaced sense of guilt. Why Bedie and not me, that kind of thing.”

  “Sounds like the stuff of psychoanalysis,” Julian grunted.

  Mara gave a dry laugh. “Pretty good. Patsy is a psychoanalyst. And she may be right. But I think it’s more than guilt. It’s—it’s something almost tangible, as if Bedie and I each had hold of a piece of string. Her end has gone slack, but I can’t drop mine because I’m afraid if I do I’ll lose her forever. So I have to keep hanging on. Sometimes I feel that if I could only follow the string out to its end I’d find my way to her …” She trailed off. “What I’m trying to say is, if I could only find out what happened, then we could all get on with our lives—Mum, Dad. And Scott. Because it’s been worse for him in many ways, living all this time in the shadow of guilt.”

  “And you?” Julian prompted.

  “I?” She paused and then said simply, “I could put an end to my nightmare.”

  “Ah,” he said, as if he understood, but he wasn’t sure if she were speaking literally or figuratively. This woman had an uncomfortable knack of knocking him slightly off balance.

  Mara sighed. “You see, Julian, I have a recurring dream. A nightmare. In it I see my sister walking along a forest path. I’m behind her. I can make out the details of her jacket and the green canvas backpack she carried, the barrettes she always wore. She’s walking very fast, and I’m hurrying after her because I have to warn her she’s in danger. I shout her name, but she doesn’t hear me. I start to run. Then, just as I’m about to catch up with her, she vanishes around a bend. I reach the bend, but she’s gone. Now I’m alone in the forest, and I’m very frightened because I suddenly realize that the person behind my sister all along wasn’t me but someone else. It’s like I’ve been seeing her through his eyes, and now he’s behind me. He walks very quietly, but I know he’s there, and I can sense him closing in. I grab a stick, or sometimes it’s a rock, to defend myself, and Bedie, too, because if I can stop him I can save both of us. I scream and swing around to face him. And then I wake up. I’ve had this dream dozens of times since Bedie disappeared. It’s always the same dream, and it always ends like that.”

  He studied her silently for some moments. “Nineteen years of it is a long time.”

  Mara nodded somberly. The fire crackled. Edith whimpered in her sleep.

  •

  The rain had stopped. A strong wind had driven the clouds before it, leaving a half-moon and a sprinkling of stars in command of a clear night sky that promised fine weather on the following day.

  Although her ankle was very stiff, Mara insisted on driving herself home. It was not far, half an hour at most. Julian walked her down the long path leading from his house to the road, shining his torch ahead of them on the wet cobblestones. When they reached her car, parked beneath the dripping branches of a chestnut tree, she touched his arm in a gesture of parting.

  “Thanks again, Julian. For everything. You’ve been really kind.”

  He shrugged. “Least I could do. But”—it seemed only natural for him to place his hand on her shoulder—“if you want my opinion, I’d say forget the photos. Leave your sister where she belongs. In the past. Move on.” Even through the impersonal fabric of her raincoat he felt the shape of her, alive and warm. The sensation was both exciting and deeply disturbing. Easy, boy, he warned himself. Take your time with this one.

  With unaccustomed gallantry, he reached out to open the driver’s-side door. A terrifying, feral snarl erupted from the darkness within. Julian gave a panicked yell and dropped the flashlight, which went out with a sound of breaking glass, as something big lunged out to clamp his forearm with bone-crushing force.

  Mara shouted, “Omigod! Jazz! No! No!”

  There was a confused struggle, ending with a deep grunt, before Julian was freed from an excruciating grip of teeth that stopped just short of breaking flesh.

  “Oh, Julian,” Mara cried. “I’m so sorry. I totally forgot he was in the car. Are you all right?”

  “Just a severed limb.” Julian was still recovering from his fright. “What in the name of hell was that?”

  “My dog,” she said sheepishly as a large, muscular body bounded fro
m the car, fortunately with no further display of hostility. With a brief flash of tail it raised a leg against the rear tire of the car and let loose an urgent, copious stream of urine. “He wouldn’t have bitten you.”

  “Thank you, the effect was just as good. You ought to do something about him,” Julian told her severely.

  “It’s just that he’s very territorial. A lot of dogs are protective about their space when they’re confined, and he gets very cranky if he’s left too long….”

  “Get him under control,” Julian declared angrily. “A dog like that’s a bloody liability.”

  “Touché!” she acknowledged, laughing softly.

  THREE

  April came on fitfully, with windy skies, bright patches, and sudden showers. Julian stood in the open doorway of his kitchen. The sun for the moment shone warmly. Wisteria bloomed on the crumbling stone wall between his land and the walnut plantation of Madame Léon, from whom he got his eggs. The cherry tree at the bottom of his garden was in full and glorious flower. A cuckoo rang out in the valley.

  He should have been feeling satisfied with life. The sale of two dozen herbarium frames to a hotel in Le Bugue had replenished his bank account. The prospect of a new landscaping client (referred by Mara Dunn, and rich from the sound of it) made his immediate financial situation look even better. But he was restless.

  First there was the Cypripedium. Its weird, beguiling beauty haunted him. Orchid fever, he had called it. Where tropical species were concerned, it drove a multibillion-dollar industry. Nice, ordinary people were compelled by a dark-side lust to possess these plants, to engage in the costly, competitive, and secret business of searching for and breeding them. For two centuries, European and American orchid hunters had trekked, at no little risk to their necks, into the jungles of the Amazon, Borneo, Sumatra in search of new, undiscovered species. Temperate-clime orchids commanded a less extravagant piece of this botanical market. All the same, the fanaticism of fanciers and collectors was no less acute. The possibility that a totally unknown species of Lady’s Slipper grew in some hidden corner right there in the Dordogne made Julian almost frantic with desire. If it still existed, he knew he had to find it. But where to begin?

  And then there was Mara Dunn. He recalled the flicker of firelight on her face, her dark eyes, the set of her chin. Not the kind of person, he sensed, to leave things as they were. He had been surprised and then relieved when several days had passed without a phone call from her. Nevertheless, he felt her looming ominously on his horizon. The thought brought on an unpleasant pressure behind his eyes, which always foreshadowed a headache.

  He had been toying with a plan, more out of self-defense than a desire to help her. Now seemed the time to put it into action. Except that he wasn’t sure if he should venture seeing Paul so soon. He hesitated, then made up his mind. Not bothering to lock his door—he rarely did—he set off down the road.

  It was a brisk, fifteen-minute walk from Julian’s cottage to the village of Grissac. Along the way, Edith loped up to join him. Pleased to have company, he gave a token scratch to her silky ears—much her best feature in his opinion. The vagabond bitch was exactly the kind of female that suited him: handsome, wayward (she came and went as she pleased), but constant (she always turned up at mealtimes); full of her own plans, yet often willing to give him the pleasure of her company for long rambles or drowsy winter evenings by the fire. Best of all, she was not his. Not his responsibility, not his blame.

  Grissac consisted of a few dozen houses built in the style typical of Périgord Noir: tall, two-storied structures of warm, honey-colored limestone, narrow windows flanked by heavy wooden shutters, and roofs steeply pitched to bear the immense weight of overlapping layers of lauzes, rough-hewn limestone slabs, the traditional roofing material. Its main features were an incomplete thirteenth-century central arcade surrounding a grassy square, which doubled as municipal parking lot and marketplace (Thursday mornings), an elementary school, and the Chez Nous bistro. It was Friday, past noon, and, apart from the voices of children behind the high playground wall, there was little sign of life.

  Chez Nous, a large, square building on a deep plot of land, was situated just off the place. Julian found his friend Paul Brieux at the front, washing winter’s grit from the windows.

  “Missed a bit there,” Julian observed, playing the jolly kibitzer. His French was good, although it bore remnant traces of his English background. At the moment he was unsure of his welcome. In last Saturday’s friendly rugby match (there had been nothing friendly about it), he had failed to stop a try in the final minute of play, which had put the dreaded team from Les Eyzies on top. It wasn’t good rugby—mostly middle-aged men, short of wind and gone to fat, who met in occasional inter-village matches organized by Paul—but the play was serious. Le rugby being one thing sure to rouse passion in the breast of the otherwise phlegmatic Périgourdin, Julian was not an especially popular man with his teammates at the moment.

  “I’m not talking to you,” snarled Paul, wringing a rag into a bucket of soapy water. A bull of a man, son of a farmer near Issigeac, he played right-hand prop to Julian’s fullback.

  “Come on, Paul,” Julian pleaded. “Christ, it wasn’t my fault. Those guys from Les Eyzies are out of the Stone Age. How would you like having le Trog pushing your face in?” The one they called le Troglodyte was Les Eyzies’s horrendous center, a brute with a forehead like a cliff and small, piggy eyes. “He nearly bit my ear off last year.”

  “You chickened out,” Paul accused in a seriously aggrieved voice.

  “I wanted to live!” Julian recalled his feeling of extreme vulnerability as le Trog advanced on him, head lowered, arm outstretched like a battering ram, fully intent on flattening Grissac’s last remaining line of defense: Julian. Why did they call it a “line” when it always boiled down to one lone man?

  “Anyway, why do I always get stuck with fullback?” He knew the answer: the position was his because no one else wanted it. Since their forward defense was not particularly good, he frequently found himself alone, deep in home territory, scrambling for the ball while a rush of attackers—loggers, farmers, abattoir workers—converged darkly on his field of vision. Admit it. He was getting too old for the game.

  “All right,” conceded Paul. “What do you want?”

  “Well, I just stopped by to say hello,” said Julian, feeling as wounded by Paul’s unfriendliness as by the pounding he had suffered. He still showed the bruises.

  “Go bother Mado.”

  “I intend to,” said Julian, relieved to see that he had been forgiven.

  “And leave that bloody thief outside,” Paul roared, meaning Julian’s canine companion, but Julian and Edith were already through the door.

  Chez Nous could just as well have been called Chez Paul, or Chez Madeleine, but when the couple had first set up the establishment, they could not agree on whose name should go on the sign. “Chez Nous” was the compromise. In fact, Chez Nous had evolved, through economic necessity, into more than a bistro. It served Grissac also as tabac, newsstand, post office, general store, and community hall. The Brieux lived above all of this and worked below in the various capacities implied. If Chez Nous had failed so far to rise to the height of culinary fame originally intended by the pair, in fact the cooking was very, very good. Julian ate there at least once a week, as much for the company, which he genuinely enjoyed, as for Mado’s confit of duck or Paul’s feuilleté au citron. Despite his bulk, Paul had the lightest hand with pastry in the region.

  There was no one in the front area, which served as the store. The bistro was through a bead curtain off to the side and consisted of a bar with stools, a dozen or so tables, and a mixed collection of chairs. Julian had a look in. The only person there was a morose type named Lucien Peyrat, who delivered bread to communities too small to have their own baker. The man was eating an early lunch. Julian gave him a perfunctory nod and wandered back to the kitchen. The appetizing odor of frying garlic filled
the air.

  “What’s cooking?” he asked in both senses of the word, sticking his head through the door. Edith stuck her head in, too.

  “Ah,” cried Mado, a statuesque redhead with tawny, leonine eyes, “c’est toi.” She was at the stove, pan-frying river sprats to a golden crispness, moving the fingerling fish about with swift, sure motions. She wore a loose knit jersey, which draped a magnificent bosom and left bare a pair of voluptuous arms.

  “So—we haven’t seen you for days,” she accused. “Gone off my cooking?”

  “I lust after your cooking and I was here last week,” Julian defended himself. He had purposely let six days elapse before venturing back to give Paul time to cool down.

  “For a miserable apéro,” snorted Mado. She cared little for le rugby but could be as cranky as Paul when the mood took her. Julian fancied her in an off-limits kind of way, largely because she gave him a taste of what it would be like to live dangerously with a woman driven by temperament and steaming sexuality.

  She jerked her chin in the direction of the bar. “Serve yourself. I’m busy. Tiens, bibiche,” she baby-talked the gourmand pointer, tossing out a tidbit which Edith snapped up midair. Mado adored all animals: dogs, cats, ferrets, donkeys, rabbits, although she had no qualms about gutting, skinning, and stewing the latter. She and Paul had no children.

  “Thanks, love,” Julian said, and wandered off to make himself a pastis at the bar.

  By one o’clock, the bistro was busy. Julian had the prix fixe of the day: a terrine of aubergine for starters, followed by the sprats, hot, crisp, and dressed in garlic and coarse salt. They were accompanied by potatoes and spring asparagus poached in butter. He ordered a pichet of local white.