Swiss Vendetta (Agnes Luthi Mysteries #1)(45)
He looked around expectantly and Agnes glanced quickly from Julien Vallotton to Marie-Chantal, then the housekeeper. Her heart sank. No one had told Thomason his fiancée was dead. She asked him to accompany her out of the entrance hall, too many weapons there for this kind of news. He was at ease, turning to ask Madame Puguet if he could have a cup of tea.
“Now that I’m inside I can feel the cold, Earl Grey if you have it, with lemon, no sugar. Thank you.”
Madame Puguet walked very slowly from the room, as if reluctant to leave. Marie-Chantal and Vallotton stood near, too near, as if they were waiting to catch the young man when he collapsed.
Agnes delivered the news quickly and with little detail, realizing as she did that there was little to relate. His fiancée had been found the afternoon before, stabbed outside the chateau just after the storm struck. A brief end to a brief life.
Thomason shook his head slightly and looked at Agnes stupidly. She repeated the words, then said them again in English to make sure he understood. As she spoke, a pit formed in her stomach and she knew it was too soon, she should not be here dealing with death when it was so close to her own heart. She saw what Carnet had seen when he told her about George—Thomason’s eyes widened and his face froze, the expression blank. His skin was red from cold and wind, but beneath that he paled. Tears welled in his eyes and Agnes felt him remind himself to breathe. He swallowed, struggling to control emotions, then clenched his jaw. The others in the room did not speak or move.
Finally Thomason mastered himself and took the first step of many toward understanding. Even before he spoke, Agnes knew what he would ask, for they were a version of the same words she had used: where is she, can I see her, how did it happen? The words tumbled out, then there was nothing; he swayed. The perfect servant, Madame Puguet anticipated what he needed and moved fastest, leading him to a chair before he crumpled. Vallotton handed him a glass of something that Agnes assumed was alcohol.
“Impossible,” Thomason said. “She didn’t like the outdoors. Felicity would never be outdoors in a storm. You must be mistaken.” He drank what was given him in a gulp, sputtered, then nearly dropped the glass. Madame Puguet refilled it.
Petit walked in holding the ancient radio to his ear, yelling into it. When he saw the group he stopped. “My wife had a boy!” He turned in a big circle, eyeing each of them with a grin on his face. When he got to Thomason he stopped. “How’d he get here? You found a way for someone to come down and didn’t get me out?” Marie-Chantal pulled him away, whispering into his ear.
Thomason looked around wide-eyed as if accustomed to malicious pranks that could be righted through perseverance. Agnes wanted to congratulate Petit but didn’t move. She paced her breathing to Thomason’s, wondering if he would faint. She had.
His words didn’t string together in sentences, they were snippets of remembrances, of questions, and of denial. Finally Vallotton interrupted. Thomason seemed to believe a man’s voice more than a woman’s, although Agnes thought it might be the tone of the man’s voice, for she had recognized Thomason’s accent and clothing and manner and knew that he was at home among these people.
Madame Puguet interceded and escorted Thomason from the room before he succumbed to an exhausted emotional collapse.
“Finally, someone who really knew her,” Vallotton said quietly.
Agnes didn’t respond. She mumbled an excuse and left the room, knowing where she needed to go. Sitting again in the dead woman’s workroom, surrounded by paintings and little else, she wondered if it was possible for a room to feel emptier than empty. Only a half hour before, she had felt Felicity Cowell’s presence. It had spoken of her personality: orderly, efficient, and confident about her business. Someone who had worked to achieve everything she had. Now the room felt abandoned like a stage set with props not yet used. The woman was a kaleidoscope of fiction: lower-class dropout with a brilliant mind; a stripper with a posh fiancé. She was everything and nothing.
They had doused the candles earlier and Agnes didn’t want the light now. Blowing on her fingers to stimulate circulation, she flipped through the book of English manor houses. Despite everything she had learned, she wanted Felicity Cowell to be an innocent victim. A good girl, not from a wealthy family, but one who worked hard and made a life for herself with a loving fiancé. She wanted the murderer to have committed the crime, not in reaction to something Felicity had done, but in reaction to something in his or her own life. Agnes wanted her to be an innocent victim who would never have the chance to live in her English manor house.
Sitting in the dead woman’s desk chair, Agnes admitted the picture she painted was most likely fiction. She knew that except in rare cases of random violence the victim was usually involved, somehow. Not culpable, but involved: domestic violence, jealousy or rage between work colleagues, a party to a love triangle. In this one case she hoped for a difference; she didn’t want Felicity Cowell, outsider among the chateau’s inhabitants, to be linked to the cause of the violence.
Thomason would need time before she could question him. This she knew from her own experience. She closed her eyes and tried to picture her husband, but the image was difficult to conjure. He was a memory, not a corpus.
“Am I disturbing you?”
Agnes rose, startled to see the marquise in the door frame, a candle in her hand.
“No, I’m just—”