Swiss Vendetta (Agnes Luthi Mysteries #1)(82)

“No.” He paused. “I’m a widower. My wife died in a car accident a year ago.”

Agnes looked at him carefully, searching for a lie. Something invented to placate Thomason, but his eyes had the look of truth.

Thomason turned to him; their knees touched they were so close. “You do understand.”

“Yes, I do.”

“How did you meet your wife?”

Agnes expected Vallotton to brush the question aside, but he didn’t.

“Meet Amélie? We didn’t meet; we were born knowing each other. My family doesn’t meet people, we just see those whom we know, acquaintances renewed, strengthened, let go. It was always a matter of finding the link, the brother or mother or common distant cousin. I had … lost someone dear to me, someone I thought to form a life with, and Amélie dared me to marry her, saying who else would tolerate all of my relatives. She didn’t need me, didn’t need anyone, and was funny and beautiful and swept me off my feet. She was the most daring woman I’d ever known.”

Agnes suddenly wished she’d taken that drink.

“Felicity was afraid I would leave her if I met her family,” Thomason said. “She lied because she didn’t trust me enough to tell the truth.”

Agnes felt the anxiety of a young woman running through the chateau, hiding her past, unable to confide in anyone. About to be exposed. Pushed outdoors into a killing cold.

“But you now know the truth,” said Vallotton, “and that’s the truth she would have learned if she lived. You wouldn’t have cared about her family. That’s what you have to take away with you. Your truth.” Vallotton started to stand, but Thomason gripped his knee.

“But I think I would have cared.”





DAY FOUR





Thirty

She was tired and cold. She had waited and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark, but they hadn’t. It was pitch-black. Her stomach grumbled and that made her angry. She had nothing to eat or drink. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes and she squeezed them shut. Crying wouldn’t help; it never did. She thought of Monsieur Arsov and what he would do. He wouldn’t cry.

He would do something; he would find a way out. She pushed her lips together and concentrated on stopping the tears, but it was difficult. She had never been alone like this; even when she hid there were always people around, walking by but not noticing, looking, calling her name. When she hid she was in control.

She bit her lip. Monsieur Arsov. What would he do? She remembered the stories he told her about when he was young and first came to Switzerland, and earlier, when he lived in France. In the stories he was always hungry and there was mud and loud noises, but in the end he always made it home safely. Not luck he would say, but per-something. She sounded the word out: “perseverance.”

She lay curled into a ball with her hands over her face. Slowly she moved, stretching out her legs, then her arms. The floor beneath her was hard, cold, and slightly damp. Like rock. She rubbed it and realized that it was exactly like rock. She was in a cave. Bats! she nearly screamed.

Mimi sat up and wrapped her arms around her bent knees. It took several minutes to stop shaking, she was so frightened, but she drew a few deep breaths and decided to try another experiment. She spoke out loud. Nothing. She called out again, this time louder. Her voice echoed, but it wasn’t a long echo. She remembered an outing with Madame Puguet. They drove into the mountains. There they had picnicked and walked into a cave that had gone on and on. When they were so far away they couldn’t see the entrance, they had called out and their voices echoed back and forth and back again. This was different. This place didn’t sound very big.

Her stomach growled and tears overflowed her eyes and fell onto her cheeks. If only she had Elie. She gulped and strained to see, but there was nothing. It was black, black, black. What would Monsieur Arsov do? Something. That’s what he said, that he never gave up and he always did something. Keep moving forward, he said. She inched forward, sliding on the rock. Nothing changed and she moved a little more. There was a scuttling noise nearby and she froze, then she understood what it was and started to cry in earnest.





Thirty-one

Agnes stopped at the door to a room she had not seen before, as surprised by its interior as she was to see Doctor Blanchard hunched over a microscope in the middle of the night. A row of oil lamps cast overlapping shadows across the table in front of him.

“Couldn’t sleep thinking about the girl,” he said when she entered. “Settled for this.” He waved a hand over the instruments.

“I agree.” Agnes had the same problem sleeping. She was exhausted, but couldn’t rest thinking of Mimi not in her bed. She suspected others were wandering the corridors of the chateau, unable to sleep, waiting for daybreak so they could continue to look for the girl. After they officially called off the search for the night she had asked Petit to radio up the hill and alert the gendarmerie. The transmission was an admission that there was real cause for concern. At the same time, Agnes knew that alerting the village police was giving false hope to everyone around her. Mimi hadn’t climbed the cliff. Perhaps it would be better if she had.

Madame Puguet had whispered the idea to her: could Mimi have wandered out to the edge of the lake and fallen through? The frozen edge was deceiving. Even if Mimi knew that there was no land under the far end of the cliff she might have been tempted to edge her way onto the seemingly solid surface. Every winter otherwise intelligent adults fell through ice-coated lakes and ponds and died. A full day after Mimi disappeared there was no chance she would have survived a plunge into the lake. This would be a search for her remains.