Aaron Elkins: Old Bones

"No," Sophie said, almost to herself, "how could that be? I was here. If there was shouting in the kitchen I would have heard it from my room."

"No, my dear, you’re forgetting. You were hysterical. Guillaume made you take a sleeping pill at dinnertime. You were only ten, you know."

"Was I only ten? Yes, that’s right," Sophie said slowly, remembering. "But Rene?" She looked at him. "You didn’t hear?"

"I can sleep through anything," he said. "I always could."

"Go on, Mathilde," Ben said.

Mathilde sipped minutely at the vermouth. "Guillaume came into the kitchen after us. He threw Alain against the wall, he knocked him down, he-I truly believe he would have killed him if Alain hadn’t…" For the first time she faltered.

"…stabbed him with one of the kitchen knives," Gideon said.

"Oh, no," Claire said, her fingers at her mouth. There were more gasps.

"Yes," Mathilde said. "Guillaume had raised a fist over his head like some patriarch in the Bible-he was using it like a club-and Alain, to save himself, snatched up a huge knife from the counter and stabbed him. Once only, before I could move." Her lids flickered momentarily. "Guillaume looked so terribly surprised."

Gideon caught John’s eye and nodded. It jibed perfectly with what they’d learned from the skeleton: the upraised arm, the heavy kitchen knife, the single thrust.

"And that’s the story," Mathilde said with a shrug. "Guillaume was dead, and Alain ran off, half out of his mind with remorse. I had no idea what to do. I told everyone Guillaume had gone to join the Resistance. I didn’t mention Alain at all."

"You said Alain ran off?" Sophie said dazedly. "Where?"

"He did join the Resistance; in the north. He was very brave," Mathilde said defiantly. "He wasn’t a coward, and he was no traitor." She had finished the vermouth and Marcel stepped forward with another. Mathilde shook her head and handed him the empty glass. "The next time I saw him he was in the hospital in Saint Servan. I walked into a room and there in the bed, all-all crumpled, like a-"

And suddenly the whole starchy edifice came tumbling down. Her lips trembled, her fingers jerked on the pearls, and a single, hoarse, manlike sob was wrenched painfully out of her.

And no wonder, Gideon thought. What must it have been like when it dawned on that nineteen-year-old girl with skin like rose petals that the maimed, twisted horror lying in a crushed heap on the bed was her handsome, athletic lover?

Rene stood up, his arms outstretched. "My dear Mathilde-"

She sent him back into his chair with a peremptory wave. From somewhere she produced a little handkerchief and dabbed at her nose. The red splotches that had sprung out on her cheeks were already almost gone. The entire emotional outburst had consisted of the one tearless sob.

"Alain had no idea that Guillaume’s death was still a secret," she said, the handkerchief disappearing into wherever it had come from. "We decided the best thing was for him to pretend to be Guillaume. He didn’t think he could carry it off, but I knew he could. They were so similar in physique to begin with, and with his body so broken, who could say for sure that he wasn’t Guillaume?" She stared coolly around her, completely in control of herself again. "And of course he did carry it off. For forty-five years."

"But why? " Ray asked. "Everyone believed Guillaume was off fighting. Couldn’t you have let it go at that and just let people assume he’d been killed somewhere?"

"Yes," Ben said. "Why the pretense?"

"Well." Mathilde fingered her pearls and pursed her lips. It was a critical question, and Gideon could feel a fabrication in the making.

So did John. He made his first contribution, and it showed that he was doing fine. "Because you knew that under Guillaume’s old will Claude Fougeray would inherit everything."

Leona Fougeray, whose grasp of English was not as good as some of the others’, sat up at her husband’s name and shot a series of staccato questions at her daughter in French.

Mathilde waited until Claire’s brief, embarrassed explanations were done, then answered John. "Yes, you’re quite right. It was Alain’s idea, actually."

Leona snorted her disbelief.

"No, really, it was. It was important to him that the domaine stay with the du Rochers. The thought that it might go to Claude was horrible to him. I agreed with him." She looked at Claire. "I’m sorry, my dear. I’m sure you understand."

Claire didn’t look as if she understood, but Leona did. "Sure you agreed," she said in her Italian-accented French, her voice rising shrilly. "You knew everything would come to you one day!"

"That," Mathilde scoffed unconvincingly, "is patently ridiculous."

In the thoughtful, evaluative quiet that followed this, Rene leaned toward Jules, who sat alone on a plump little sofa beginning on his third martini, served to him with three stuffed olives on a toothpick, as he had trained Marcel to do.

"Did you know all this?" Rene asked him.

Jules seemed about to deny it, then lifted his shoulder in a nonchalant shrug. "Yes, I knew."

" I didn’t know it," Rene said without rancor.

Jules looked pityingly at him and sucked the first of the olives from the toothpick.

"Let’s go back a little, Mathilde," Ben said. "You buried Guillaume in the cellar? That’s his skeleton they found?"

"Yes, of course," Mathilde said crossly. "How many skeletons do you suppose are down there?"

Ray stared at her, his face gray. "But it was-it was dismembered !"

"Yes," Mathilde said after a pause. "That’s right. Marcel, I would like another vermouth after all." When it was brought she swallowed some, drew herself more erect, and set her gaze on the middle distance. "We didn’t know what to do with him," she said expressionlessly, as if reading from a script in a language she didn’t understand. "With the body. We couldn’t believe it had really happened. We put him in the big stone sink in the kitchen and I helped Alain to-to begin dismembering him. Do you know the cleaver is still there? I was looking at it a few days ago."

The hand that lifted the glass to her mouth wavered slightly; not enough to spill the vermouth. "Beatrice used it for the carbonnade flamande, I believe."

"Oh, sweet Jesus Christ," Ben breathed, the only sound in an otherwise electrified silence.

"We were going to burn him, you see, and we knew he wouldn’t all burn at once," Mathilde went grimly on, determined to finish. "We made a fire in the kitchen fireplace. But when we-" A tic jerked in the flesh below her eye and was brought firmly under control. "-placed a hand in the fire, there was a terrible smell, and it would hardly burn, and it-it sizzled, you see."

"Mathilde, please stop," Sophie said unsteadily. "It’s enough."

But Mathilde plowed ahead, eyes fixed stonily on nothing. "I said we should boil the-the pieces first to get rid of the fat, but Alain simply couldn’t face it; he was at the end of his strength. So we wrapped them-the pieces-in packages we could lift, and took them down to the cellar…"

She was winding down, beginning to sag, a millimeter at a time, against the back of the chair. "And then we buried the packages under the stones," she said, winding down. "It took us until dawn. Then Alain ran off and I went home."

John had slid along the table to join Gideon while Mathilde had been talking. "Where the hell is Joly? She’s ready to admit everything."

Gideon nodded doubtfully. True, the mystery of the bones in the cellar was satisfactorily wrapped up, but he wasn’t so sure how much progress had been made on what had been going on this past week: Alain’s belated death in the bay, Claude’s poisoning, his own near-murder. But a few ideas about those were beginning to work their way to the surface too. That lumber in the courtyard had set him thinking. Had he been barking up the wrong tree? Or the wrong branch of the right tree? He looked thoughtfully around the room.