Mrs. John Doe

Chapter 14

The little ribbon of road wound up around the hillside, curving and zigzagging as it unspooled before them. The beams of the headlights revealed an ever-changing view: now a press of tall fir trees on both sides of the car, now the sudden arrival of open sky, with a stone-and-metal guardrail protecting them from a plunge of several hundred feet. Even Jacques, the speed demon, knew better than to zip around these treacherous turns. He slowed the car from time to time, inspecting the signposts at every turnoff, looking for the right one.

“Prie Dieu…Caprice de Coeur-the names these villages have!” he exclaimed at one point. Nora thought they sounded lovely. She could see the occasional settlement as they passed, groups of lights winking from the forest or perched in a hanging valley overlooking the Doubs, which flowed through the plains far below. Some of the landscape looked familiar, and when the car abruptly veered away from the valley and crossed a stone bridge over a stream, she knew they were close.

“It’s up here somewhere,” she said. “A road on the right, I think, leading into the forest. There was a sign, as I recall-There it is!”

The wooden plaque hung from a beam extending out from a post, swinging slightly in the breeze. Black Gothic lettering was burned into the lacquered blond surface: Pinède. Jacques slowed and prepared for the turn.

“Wait,” Nora said. “Stop the car. Park right here.”

As usual, he asked no questions. He immediately pulled the car over onto the shoulder in front of the sign and switched off the ignition. The headlights died, leaving them in darkness. She sat a moment, thinking, listening to the rustling of the wind in the pines and the soft ticking sounds as the engine cooled. The village was invisible from here, so she peered down the little paved lane, trying to remember the layout.

The lane disappeared into the forest, emerging after a hundred yards in a large clearing beside the stream they’d just crossed. She recalled that the road continued past the church to a cluster of some fifty cottages, a general store, a pub, stables and barns, and a big structure at the far end of town for tractors and woodcutting equipment. The population when she’d been here last was just over two hundred, and she doubted it had grown much in twenty-one years. The opposite, if anything: The new generation probably preferred the electronic liveliness of the modern cities far from these mountains.

One of the larger towns down the hill had a supermarket and a drugstore, one had a Gendarmerie Départementale station and a firehouse, a third had an infirmary, and a fourth, the schools for all the children in the district. Each town up here had its specialty, and Pinède’s contribution to the community was the church, Notre Dame des Montaignes. The handsome stone building with its bell tower and stained glass windows was the gathering place for worshipers from miles around. The priest and his retainers lived in the rectory beside it, and the iron-fenced field behind the two buildings was the local cemetery. The church stood on the left side of the lane at the entrance to the town, separated from the nearest houses by parking lots on both sides of the road, which were discreetly screened from view by green hedgerows.

It was 9:50; she had ten minutes. The last evening bell-evensong or compline, or whatever it was called-was rung at eight, Jeff had told her, and by nine everyone was in bed. She was walking to a shuttered church in a sleeping village. It seemed secure enough, but she couldn’t help thinking of her husband’s secrecy with the coded messages. Nora had no idea what was going on, but she knew Jeff was going to great lengths to keep it hush-hush. Why else would she be here, at this end of France, at this hour? And why else would Jeff have created the elaborate hoax that he was dead, a car crash and a corpse with his name and a grieving widow? Better safe than sorry.

“I’ll walk from here,” she said.

Jacques didn’t like that idea. “No, mademoiselle, I take you inside. The village is around a curve, no? There are no lights here but those streetlamps along the road down there, and they are not very bright-”

“You don’t understand, Jacques. I don’t want anyone in town to-to know that I’m here. Those streetlamps are enough to get me around the bend, and I’m only going as far as the first building there. I’ll be fine. You wait right here, with the car. We-I should be back very soon.”

He still didn’t like it, but he didn’t argue with her. “Very well, mademoiselle, but take this.” He handed her a small plastic flashlight.

“Thanks.” With a quick smile for him, she grabbed the roses and got out of the car. The chilly, damp night air struck her, so she rested the flowers on the hood and buttoned the London Fog raincoat, tying the belt and thrusting the flashlight in a pocket. She picked up the wrapped bouquet and began to walk.

A dull streak of lightning tore through the clouds, nearly invisible, and the subsequent low rumble of thunder was barely audible through the loud sighing of the wind in the trees. Nora set off down the paved road, passing under the first blue light and heading for the next one. These lampposts weren’t placed here for maximum illumination, merely to keep the occasional late vehicle on the road until it was safely in or out of the town. The crunch of her boots on the loose gravel beside the blacktop was swallowed by the wind. There was no sidewalk here; this turnoff was far from the next area of civilization, and the roads were steep, so walking outside the village itself wasn’t a good idea. In these hills, you drove or rode a horse to your destination.

As she walked along, her earlier self-assurance began to desert her. What on earth was she doing here in the middle of the night? Why was Jeff here, in Pinède of all places? Was he hiding? If so, from whom? Well, it was too late to change her mind. Whatever this was, Nora was part of it now, but she hoped they could leave here as soon as possible.

She came around the curve, and there was the village, spread out in the clearing before her, barely visible in the darkness. The church was just ahead on her left, up a wide flight of steps. A porch light above the big oak doors and a faint glow from the stained glass windows at the near side of the building were the only illumination she could see there now. The windows of the rectory beyond it were dark; the priest and his servants were presumably asleep. Farther down the road, past the hedgerows, a few tiny glimmers shone in cottage windows here and there. Otherwise, nothing.

The high wrought-iron fence began on this side of the church, with an arched gate facing the road near the steps. She was moving up the steps toward the gate when she heard a sound from the road behind her, a crunch, a small displacement of gravel. She froze, feeling a thrill of terror rise in her, straining to listen. The wind continued strong in the branches above her, but now there was no other sound. She turned around and peered into the dark behind her, back the way she’d come. The nearest pool of blue lamplight was empty, and she couldn’t see any movement along the lane. A squirrel, she thought, or a village dog out late, nothing more. She uttered a small giggle of relief and turned back to the gate.

It wasn’t locked; there probably wasn’t much need for locks around here. She pulled up the drop latch and pushed the big gate open. It creaked slightly, and the metal was freezing against her fingers. Leaving the gate ajar, she moved slowly forward, allowing her eyes to adapt to the gloom. After a moment she made out the walkways, which ringed and crisscrossed the lawn, and the nearest rows of headstones. There were probably some four hundred townspeople buried here, with stones of every shape and size, and four-no, five small buildings here and there among them: family mausoleums.

Beyond the fence on both sides, rows of cypresses had been planted, forming a sort of outer fence, and behind the rear fence the pine forest had been cleared for some fifty feet to make room for a grove of fruit trees. Apples, pears, lemons-she’d inspected them on her previous visit, delighted by the way their rich scents mingled with the overriding aroma of the forest around them. On this breezy summer night, before the rain, she could smell it all from where she stood just inside the gate. She inhaled deeply and moved forward.

The faint spill of light from the stained glass windows on her right showed her more rows of graves, and she could even read the name above the door of one distant structure: Vanel. She remembered the name; a Mme. Vanel had been Jeff’s great-aunt’s closest friend in the town. That small building was her family’s crypt. Nora shut her eyes, trying to remember the placement of Grand-oncle René and Grand-tante Jeanette’s white marble headstone.

Another noise behind her, a soft creaking sound. She whirled around, straining to see. No, nothing. She hadn’t latched the gate; that was all.

She followed the path down the row to the middle, to another walkway leading straight back, toward the fruit trees. Now she headed that way, peering down at the stones as she passed by them: perrault, robin, masson,…devereaux. Here they were, in the center of the churchyard, right next to the Vanels’ crypt. devereaux, rené et jeanette. Below their names and dates, Jeff had added an epitaph for them: À DEUX AUX CIEUX.

Together in heaven. Nora smiled at the sentiment. She stood at the grave, the flowers in her hands, looking around the shadowy cemetery. The church just behind her on her right, the little Vanel tomb beside her on her left, the rows of graves, the fence and the trees beyond, the windblown branches of the firs and cypresses. It was ten o’clock-a bit after ten, actually. Where was…?

“Jeff?” she called softly into the darkness. “Jeffrey? C’est moi. Où es tu?”

She heard the wind in the trees, and somewhere, off in the village, a dog barked once, a single cry cut off by a sharp command from a sleepy master. The sound of her own subdued voice in this empty place chilled her. She was once again aware of the remoteness of this town. Since leaving the autoroute to climb into these hills, she and Jacques had encountered exactly three vehicles, four people in all: a young man and a laughing girl in a speeding sports car, an old man in an ancient sedan, and a dozing farmer on an excruciatingly slow horse-drawn cart.

As for Pinède, well, everyone here was asleep. There was one gendarme in the town, she remembered, connected by phone to the Gendarmerie Départementale station in the bigger town down the hill, but he-she?-would probably be in bed as well. This churchyard felt vacant, forlorn. In that moment Nora knew, as one could only know after twenty-one years in the same marriage bed, that her husband was not anywhere nearby.

Dix roses pour Grand-tante J ce soir. Had she misunderstood the message after all? Was he waiting for her at his great-aunt’s house down the road? Did the ten mean something else entirely? For whatever reason, however it had come about, Nora was alone here, alone with the dead.

She had to get out of here. The thought entered her mind, forcing her into action. She knelt to place the roses on the mound before the gravestone, feeling around for a big rock to weigh them down in the wind. As she did so, her hand came upon a depression, a drop of some kind near the marble slab. Then her palm hit a wall of cold, smooth, flat metal. Some implement was sticking up out of the ground beside the drop. She leaned over on her knees, squinting in the dark, feeling up from the ground with her fingers. The flat wedge of metal ended, topped by a wooden pole extending three feet straight up into the air. A shovel. She thought, What on earth…?

She reached into the pocket of her trench coat, pulled out the flashlight, and switched it on. In the powerful beam she saw the drop next to the shovel very clearly: six feet long, three feet wide, four feet deep. A gaping rectangle in the ground by the Devereaux headstone.

A fresh grave. Empty. Waiting.

Oh God, she thought. Jeff!

Nora rose slowly to her feet, fighting for breath, for balance. Her legs barely accommodated her to a standing position. She stood, riveted, calculating the distance to the gate behind her, the length of the road back to the car. To Jacques Lanier, small and slight and in his sixties but better than nothing. She would run, run all the way back, just as soon as she could will herself to move.

She switched off the flashlight. In the sudden, utter darkness that followed, spots danced before her dazzled eyes, a million bursting stars. A particularly bright spot appeared on her shoulder and flickered there for a moment before fluttering down to land on her raincoat in the center of her chest. She blinked, clearing her vision, but the spot was still there. She thought it must be some kind of insect, and she absently raised the hand with the flashlight to brush it away. She looked more closely down at her chest and froze, transfixed, mesmerized by the dancing dot of light.

The bright red, dancing dot of light.

Nora stared. The flashlight fell from her hand, landing with a thump at her feet. The infrared dot came to a stop on her left breast, just above her heart.

Then her shoulders were seized from behind in a powerful grip, and for the second time in two days-the second time in her life-she was flung violently to the ground.