A Bouquet of Rue Read online

  “You have a passeport talent work visa,” she said, a statement, not a question, as she looked up from my passport.

  “I do. I’m a filmmaker. I have a contract to work with a French television company.”

  “A filmmaker,” she repeated, glancing at Lajoie with a sarcastic little sneer as she handed the passport back to me. “I had no idea that French television is in such a sorry state that we must import talent.”

  “Detective Lajoie,” I said, catching the partner’s eye. “Does she ever let you speak?”

  He chuckled. “I let her play bad cop until she gets her foot so far up someone’s ass that I need to step in.”

  In English I said, “She is certainly a pain in the ass.”

  She only shrugged, but he laughed again, letting me know that he understood some English; no clue about her. She wasn’t finished with me: “You saw Ahmad Nabi this afternoon?”

  “I did. He was in the backyard with Doctor Massarani at around four o’clock, just as Doctor Massarani said. He was gone when I left before six.”

  “Do you know Ophelia Fouchet or her family?”

  “I do not. I’m new here. I don’t know much of anyone.”

  The palm came up again, drawing in Jean-Paul and Dom. “But you do know the Fouchet family, yes?”

  “Yes.” Jean-Paul spoke for them both. “More precisely, we did once. My son and I were away for several years and lost contact with them.”

  “You were away?”

  “I was appointed to a consular post in Los Angeles. My son and I were there until this past fall.”

  “Ah, Los Angeles,” she said, glancing at me. “I see.”

  “I saw Ophelia in the village recently,” Dom volunteered. “But she didn’t look anything like the photo on the flyer. She has black hair now. Blacker than Nabi’s.”

  Again the detectives exchanged knowing looks as Delisle snapped her notebook shut.

  “Thank you for calling.” Lajoie handed out his card. “If you hear anything—”

  “Of course,” Jean-Paul said. Ari said nothing.

  When they were gone, we all stood silent, frozen for a moment, lost to our own thoughts. Dom was the first to speak.

  “I have some reading.” He said his good nights, grabbed his book bag from the bottom step where he dropped it when he arrived home, and went upstairs to his room. Ari, quiet, took his leave as well. I went to the kitchen and rinsed the wineglasses.

  Jean-Paul reached past me to get a towel to dry the glasses. “Welcome to Vaucresson, ma chère Maggie. A quiet little suburb where nothing ever happens.”

  “Fleur Delisle,” I said. “With a name like that she probably has to be tough. But, sheesh, such a hard ass.”

  “Cops,” he said, smooching the back of my neck. “The same all over, yes?”

  “That’s not a study I plan to make.” I dried my hands and hung the towel on its hook and nothing more was uttered all evening about cops or missing kids. We turned out the downstairs lights and arm in arm went up to get ready for bed.

  While I brushed my teeth, I watched Jean-Paul in the mirror as he stripped off the starched dress shirt he had put on that morning. He wadded the shirt and raised his arm to lob it into the laundry bag, a movement that puckered the red scar over his collarbone, a souvenir from a very bad day in February. I had seen the wound when it was still fresh and watched the skin mend over time. For some reason seeing the scar at that moment, all shiny and angry under the bathroom light, triggered a wave of memories that filled me with sudden dread.

  He came over and patted my back. “Something go down the wrong pipe?”

  I took a deep breath and nodded as I laid my hand over the scar. “Looks better.”

  “All better.” He took my hand and kissed the palm and very soon we were happily tucked up in our bed together between new sheets. I fell asleep knowing that at that moment, in that place, wrapped in each others’ embrace, I was home.

  ] Three

  Sometime before dawn, I woke to the racket of a trash truck rumbling down the street below. The clock on the bedside table said it was ten past six. There was no way I could get back to sleep, so I slid out of bed as quietly as I could, trying not to waken Jean-Paul. I pulled on a sweater over my T-shirt and pajama bottoms because the house was chilly and went downstairs to make coffee. After wrestling with the cafetière—grind the beans, pour in hot water, wait, press the plunger—I made a mental note to shop for an automatic coffeemaker like the one I left in California.

  Mug in hand, I went to the big windows in the salon to watch for the sun to come up over the garden wall. The morning was overcast, threatening rain again. I used that quiet moment to call my daughter, Casey, in Los Angeles, where it was still the night before. The nine-hour time difference made finding a good time to actually speak with her instead of texting difficult. Casey said everything was fine, she was in her dorm room studying. Now that the women’s volleyball season was over, she was able to make up for the light academic load she took in fall to accommodate practice and team travel. She was on track to graduate on time next year, good news for my aching bank account, but the heavy schedule didn’t leave her time for a social life. And by the way, could I send money? She’d bought new jeans for the summer when she would be working again at the fromagerie on Grand-mère’s farm in Normandy. As soon as we hung up I made a transfer from my account to hers.

  Slowly, as I watched through the window, the gray sky brightened then turned vivid rose. All seemed serene and orderly. Except, someone had left a coat or a blanket on one of the chaises longues on the far side of the pool. As the sky grew lighter, I could see that the dark lump was the protective cover that should have been stretched over the chaise. Had wind in the night blown it loose? Barefoot, I went out to put it back in place before the promised storm arrived.

  One tug and the cover heaved upward. Eyes like black holes, wiry hair gone wild, a specter rising through the long morning shadows.

  “Ahmad Nabi?” I said, dropping the cover.

  He looked around as if searching for an escape path.

  “You must be hungry,” I said, trying to sound calm though my heart jackhammered in my ears and I struggled to breathe. “Come inside. Let’s get you something to eat.”

  I turned and started for the house. Behind me there was silence at first, and then the gentle thump of the heavy chaise cover landing on the pool deck. Footsteps followed. I was pouring milk into a mug of coffee when Nabi made it as far as the kitchen door. Extending the mug toward him, I said, “Have a seat. I’ll make some eggs. Toast? There’s brioche from yesterday.”

  Reticent, clearly frightened, he sat on the edge of a kitchen chair. There was no reticence, however, about gulping down the hot coffee. I poured him a second cup, pushed the basket of fruit that sat in the middle of the table toward him, and set about scrambling eggs and making toast. Jean-Paul appeared at the door, surveyed the scene, and without comment, poured himself the last cup from the cafetière and refilled the kettle. He carried his mug over to the table, took two bananas out of the fruit basket, handed one to Nabi, and peeled one for himself.

  “Looks like you’ve had a rough night, young man,” he said, taking the chair opposite the youth. “I’ve roused Ari and asked him to come over. You have any objection to that?”

  Tears rose in the kid’s eyes. He struggled for composure but somehow managed to hang on. Until Ari appeared. He was out of his chair, sobbing into Ari’s neck, clinging to the man with the sort of desperation that he must have felt when he clung to whatever it was he had used to stay afloat after the boat under him and his family collapsed into the Mediterranean.

  Still standing in the doorway, Ari patted Nabi’s back, rocking him back and forth as all of us who have been parents once rocked children to calm them. Jean-Paul slid a box of tissues within arm’s reach for Ari, and in a few minutes Nabi was blowing his nose and wiping his face. When he was breathing more-or-less regularly again, I set a plate of eggs on the table
and Ari guided Nabi to sit in front of it. One last sniffle, and the boy had a fork in his hand and eggs disappeared, followed by toast with great slatherings of my grandmother’s homemade raspberry jam.

  Ari, cradling a cup of coffee with both hands, leaned against the counter, one ankle crossed over the other as if at ease, and spoke in a calm voice. “People have been looking for you since Friday night, Nabi. Where have you been?”

  After looking at each of us in turn, the boy said, “I don’t want to say.”

  “Where is Ophelia Fouchet?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Can’t or won’t say?” Ari asked.

  Nabi dropped his head. And said nothing more.

  Jean-Paul leaned back in his chair and studied the boy. “Nabi, you don’t have to talk to us. But we do have to call the police, and eventually you will absolutely have to tell them what you know. Before they get here, young man, we want to know what sort of trouble you might be in so that we’ll know how best to help you. Trust me, you don’t want the police version to be the only story that gets out. So, now will you answer Doctor Massarani’s questions? Where have you been, and what do you know about Ophelia?”

  Nabi checked with Ari. After he got the nod, he said, “I was working. That’s all. Just working. I don’t understand why people think I’m missing.”

  “It’s because no one has seen either you or Ophelia Fouchet since Friday when you left a school event together,” Jean-Paul said. “Have you seen her since Friday?”

  The boy shook his head. “No.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “At my job. I work for a guy over in Garches who makes halal sausage. Every weekend, we go around to farmers’ markets and sell them. He picks me up right after school on Friday and takes me home on Sunday night.”

  “But Friday you were at a school event, not at work,” Jean-Paul said.

  “Sure. But it wasn’t exactly an event. The school orchestra had a nighttime rehearsal for the big end of term concert. My boss, Marco, had to drive all the way to Arras and he wouldn’t wait for me because the market sets up early on Saturday. If he waited he wouldn’t get to bed until after midnight and he’d be too tired the next day; Marco is an old guy.”

  “How far away is Arras?” I asked.

  “Over a hundred miles,” Jean-Paul said, doing the conversion from kilometers to miles for me.

  “If you weren’t with this Marco on Friday—”Ari began.

  “But I was,” Nabi insisted. “Sort of. It was about two in the morning when I finally got to Arras.”

  Ari asked, “Was Ophelia with you?”

  After some thought, Nabi shook his head. “I promised not to say anything.”

  “Promised who?”

  “Ophelia.”

  “Young man,” Jean-Paul said. “Some promises are not worth keeping, even promises to people we love. We need to hear this: where is your girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know. And Ophelia is not my girlfriend. She tells everyone she is because she knows it will really piss off her parents if they think she’s with some refugee kid. A Muslim. But I’m not anybody’s boyfriend.”

  “You go along with her lie?” I asked.

  “She keeps me from getting beaten up all the time, so yeah.”

  “You haven’t told us how you got to Arras,” Ari said.

  “I went over by the expressway and caught a ride.”

  Ari didn’t like the answer. “With whom?”

  Blushing furiously, the boy said, “A truck driver. I don’t know his name. He said he was going to Amiens. He drove me as far as his turnoff and dropped me at a truck stop café. I had to wait with my thumb out for more than an hour before a Belgian trucker picked me up and took me the rest of the way.”

  “Have you any idea how dangerous that was?” Ari demanded.

  “Sure.” Nabi pulled a five-inch folding knife out of his pocket. “I was prepared. But I never had to show this.”

  Jean-Paul turned and looked up at me, dismay on his face.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I said. “Better call a lawyer.”

  “I did nothing,” Nabi protested, some heat behind his words.

  “Where did you get that, son?” Jean-Paul asked.

  “Ophelia gave it to me,” he said. “She said that if I just show it, no one will bother me. She carries one, too.”

  Ari held out his hand for the knife, but Jean-Paul stopped him, opened a kitchen drawer, and instructed Nabi to drop the weapon in, himself.

  “Was Ophelia with you?” I asked while this was going on.

  “No. Well, yes, some of the time. She asked me to walk her as far as the car park at the train station. We said good-bye, and that was it.”

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  He shrugged. “She said it was none of my business.”

  Jean-Paul folded his hands on the table and leaned forward. “I’m sure the police questioned your grandmother, Nabi. Wouldn’t she have told them that you were at work and not missing?”

  “Probably not. If she said anything at all, she would say she didn’t know where I was.”

  “She doesn’t trust the police?” Jean-Paul asked.

  “No, she doesn’t. But that’s not why,” he said. “I’m only fifteen, I can’t legally work. If anyone finds out, I’ll lose my job. If that happens, then you might as well just throw me into the sea and let me drown with the others.”

  Ari let out a soft chuckle. “Such drama, Nabi. Don’t tempt me or I might throw you into the pool to wake you up to the seriousness of your situation. You don’t go hungry, you have a roof over your head. So, what is so pressing that you have to work?”

  “To pay my violin teacher,” he said, looking at the floor.

  Ari seemed to think that made some sense. To me and Jean-Paul he said, “Nabi’s father was perhaps the finest violinist in Afghanistan, a teacher. He trained in Europe, and that’s what made him a target of the Taliban, and that’s why the family had to flee. Am I right?”

  Nabi nodded. “I promised my father that I would keep up my music study, no matter what. But it’s expensive.”

  “Okay,” I said. “How did no one see you between the time Marco took you home on Sunday and the time you showed up here Monday for your regular session with Doctor Massarani?”

  “Marco didn’t take me home Sunday. His old truck broke down on the way out of Arras and we had to wait for the garage to open on Monday to fix it. They didn’t have the right part, and—” He sat back, shaking his head as if reliving the frustration of the day. “I missed school yesterday. I barely made it back in time for my appointment with Doctor Massarani. Marco dropped me off in the haras by the bike path and I ran all the way.”

  “That explains the state you were in,” Ari said.

  A bit embarrassed, the boy agreed. “After I left here, that’s when everything really went to hell. That’s when I saw the posters about us being missing; they were pinned up all over the park. I thought it was a joke with that stupid picture of Ophelia on it. I mean, if they’re really trying to find her, why don’t they use a new picture so people will recognize her? Maybe, I thought, her parents want to find the girl she used to be, and not the girl she is now.”

  “Interesting thought,” I said, turning to Jean-Paul. He hadn’t said much for a while, just listened. His response to me was a barely perceptible lift of a single eyebrow, but I had a feeling the wheels were turning inside that handsome head.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” Nabi said. “All I could think was to hide, so I locked myself in a park restroom until I thought everyone was gone for the night.”

  “And then you came here and went to sleep on the terrace,” Ari said.

  “I didn’t know where else to go.”

  “Where is Ophelia?” Jean-Paul asked Nabi yet again.

  “I’m telling you the truth; I don’t know. All she said was, she had something to do.”

  “That’s all she said?” he asked, s
keptical.

  “Except, she wanted me to say I was with her if anyone asked. She told her parents the school orchestra was going out for pizza after the rehearsal, so they were letting her stay out until twelve.”

  “Was there a pizza party?” I asked.

  “No. She lied to her parents so they would let her stay out late. They are very strict about curfew. I had to get to Arras, so I walked her to the station and said good-bye.”

  “Was she meeting a boy?” Jean-Paul asked.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. She never talked about a boy.”

  After exchanging a glance with Ari, Jean-Paul again turned toward Nabi. “We have to call the police. I want you to say nothing to them except your name until we get a lawyer in to counsel you. Do you understand?”

  “But I didn’t do anything,” the boy protested.

  “You don’t know what sort of trouble you might be in,” Jean-Paul said. “I know Ophelia’s parents. It won’t matter to them that whatever is going on was Ophelia’s doing, they will blame you. And they will do their best to make your life miserable, Nabi. Trust me.”

  “Listen to Monsieur Bernard, Nabi,” Ari said. “We are strangers here, you and me. Let him be our guide through this mess. Yes?”

  After a profound sigh, Nabi held up his grubby hands. “May I wash?”

  Jean-Paul stood and looked under the table around Nabi’s feet. “Do you have a bag?”

  “I left it on the terrace.”

  “Sure, go wash. But leave the bag where it is.”

  While Ari chaperoned the washing up, Jean-Paul made two phone calls. The first was to a lawyer, and the second to the town Commisariat of Police.

  “The charming Detective Fleur Delisle is on her way,” he told me as he set his phone on the table. “I asked Éric Aubert to drop over. He’s a good man, a neighbor, a very experienced avocat. His kids are Nabi’s age, and I think that gives him some advantage in helping Nabi.”