A Twist of Orchids (8 page)

Rap-rap.
The noise is louder, its cadence faster now, and it has shifted to another window farther along the wall, and yet another, the one by the old walnut dresser, as if unknown hands are playing some kind of crazy game, flying from window to window, beating frantically on the panes.
RAP-RAP.
His breath catches in a hiccup of fear. He follows the progress of the noise with terrified eyes.
RAP-RAP-RAP.
The sound seems to fill the entire room, to rock the very house.

“Go away!” he finally manages, but the words come out as a croak. “Leave me alone!” And he waits paralyzed, knowing that at any moment the unnamed horror will burst in on him in an explosion of glass, making a reality of his nightmare.

The buzz of the alarm, sounding three, nearly makes him choke with fear. The sound goes on and on until at last, clumsily, he fumbles for the reset button, depresses it. In the silence that
follows, he realizes that the pounding has also stopped. Even the wind seems to have let up. Only the pulsing of his blood rings deafening in his ears. Confused, Joseph wonders if he has been having another nightmare. He is aware of the normalcy of things about him, the aureole of light cast by the wall lamp, the steady reshaping of time by the clock display, the familiar forms of furniture in their accustomed places.

The electricity goes out. This often happens in the countryside when there is a big wind or a rainstorm. Power and phone lines collapse to lie like tangles of black spaghetti across the roads. Joseph sits frozen in the darkness. Then his heart skids as he hears the grating of the back door over the kitchen flagstones. Someone—or something—has come into the house. Sobbing with terror, he wills his hands to move. They grope tremulously over the surface of the bedside table, upsetting the water tumbler, knocking away the flashlight that is always kept there for power outages such as this. It rolls and thuds to the floor. But it is the phone he wants. He finds it, his fingers wrapping gratefully around the familiar shape of the old-fashioned receiver. The phone, too, is dead.

“Who are you?” he calls out into the darkness. “What do you want?”

He hears only silence. After a long moment, the tiny, telltale squeak of a floorboard signals that the intruder has moved into the hallway outside his bedroom.

“Is he here?” The nurse’s face was wet with rain and pale with anxiety. She had been banging frantically on the front door and now stepped fully into the vestibule, leaving wet footprints on the tiled floor.

Julian, in his pajamas, his hair on end, moved aside to let her by. “Who?”

“Joseph, of course.” As always, Jacqueline Godet was breathless and a little impatient.

“No. Why should he be?”

“Because he’s gone. I can’t find him. It’s twenty past ten. He knows I always come at ten.” She frowned at Julian, at his purple-and-white striped sleepwear. Her look said he should not have been caught lying abed at this hour, he should have been up and dressed long ago.

Julian looked out at the cold, wet day and shut the door. “Um, wait here, will you?”

A moment later Mara appeared, pulling on her dressing gown. Her hair, too, was tousled.

“I looked everywhere,” Jacqueline explained without further preamble. “Inside, outside. He’s nowhere to be found.”

“But where could he be?”

“I thought you’d know. That’s why I’m here.”

Mara’s forehead crimped sharply in a frown. “Just give us a minute, will you?”

•

Joseph really seemed to have vanished. The Gaillards’ house was a rectangular, single-storied structure made of local limestone and roofed with flat tiles that had once been red but were now discolored and furry with lichen and moss. Owing to Joseph’s mobility problems, the day room off the kitchen had been made into a bedroom so as to be nearer the WC and bath. Mara and Julian saw that the bed was unmade. A plaid bathrobe hung over the back of a chair. A flashlight, a pillow, and one carpet slipper lay nearby on the floor. The second was near the armoire on the other side of the room.

Jacqueline informed them in a worried tone: “He hasn’t taken his 7 a.m. pills.” She indicated tablets scattered over the surface of the bedside table. The digital display of the clock was flashing on and off. She picked it up, consulted her watch, and reset the time.

The other rooms were tidy but less informative. Julian clattered down into the cellar, reappeared a moment later, and then went outside to look around, even though Jacqueline had said she had already done all that.

“And I checked up there as well,” she called out as Mara started to climb the steep, narrow stairway leading from the living area to the garret.

Mara went up anyway. The garret had once served as a drying area for tobacco and herbs. The wires, now rusted, were still in place. Long-forgotten pieces of furniture—a child’s bed, a girlish commode, a dresser, all that remained of the daughter Christine—stood draped in dirty plastic. The rest was dust, spiderwebs, and dark, comma-shaped droppings.
Rats
, she thought.

•

Outside, the rain was beginning to freeze, laying a gray, mushy coating on the ground. Soon everything—trees, bushes, stones—would be encased in ice. Julian pulled the hood of his down-filled parka farther forward and started down a muddy path that led
him past a forlorn vegetable garden, where barren tripods recalled last summer’s crop of runner beans, and beyond it a chicken house on stilts, its roof caved in, its wire fencing lying rusted on the ground.

The Gaillards, now just Joseph, owned 45 hectares that extended away from the road, most of it open meadow. The land had been put to many uses over the years—tobacco, maize, oats, wheat. Sheep, too, until Joseph had hurt his back. Julian passed a small fruit orchard and beyond it a little vineyard, the gnarled, dormant stumps bespeaking vines probably as old as Joseph himself, sufficient once for the family’s needs. The trees now stood unpruned; the vines had been left to run wild; the sheep had been sold long ago, the chickens killed and eaten. The vegetable garden was the only thing that had continued to receive attention, but with Amélie dead, that, too, would go to grass, like the fields. For the last ten years or so, the Gaillards had rented their land to other farmers for grazing cattle.

Julian was overcome with an uneasy feeling the instant he saw the stone well. It looked disused and was covered over with rotten boards. He approached it unwillingly, noting with an icy dread that the boards had been shifted partially aside. He tore them away. His relief was immense when he found that under the boards the well opening was closed off by an intact, if rusty, metal grating.

The path continued down to the end of the property. He crossed a stream, passing the ruin of an old mill that had once operated there, giving the hamlet its name. The mill depended on the rain-fed stream to operate, hence Ecoute-la-Pluie, Listen-to-the-Rain. The way was rough and slippery. How far could the tottery old fellow have got on his own? Julian continued walking, beating back the bushes on left and right.

•

The women stood in the living room, staring about in bafflement.

“
C’est bizarre
,” murmured Jacqueline.

“Maybe he went out with someone. One of the nephews?”

“In his pajamas? His pajamas aren’t there, you know. It means he’s still in them. I wonder if he had a bad turn in the night and had to be taken to hospital.”

Mara said, “One of the other neighbors might know if an ambulance came for him. We wouldn’t have seen anything.” The Gaillards’ was the last house on the left as you went down the lane that ran through the hamlet from the main road. Mara, the closest neighbor, was also at the end of the lane but on the other side and further down. She moved to a phone that stood on a stand. “I’ll call around, shall I?”

“You’d have thought someone would have let me know.”Jacqueline looked perplexed.

Julian came in through the front door, pushing back his hood and bringing cold, damp air with him. His shoes were wet and muddy, so he stood just inside the doorway. He shook his head. Nothing.

“
Merde
,” said Mara, dropping the receiver back in its cradle. “It’s dead.”

The nurse seemed to come out of a trance. “Oh. I forgot to tell you. The phone’s out. It was the first thing I tried. Then I tried to call on my
portable.
But wouldn’t you know, my card’s expired. That’s why I had to walk over to you.”

“I suppose that means everyone else’s line is out, too,” Mara said, predicting the worst.

“It was the windstorm last night. You should see the trees and wires down everywhere.”

Julian brightened. “Then that’s probably what happened. He needed to make a call and went out to use someone’s cellphone. In fact, I’ll bet he’s at Suzanne Portier’s right now. I’ll go check.”
Julian pulled his hood up and went out again, shutting the door behind him.

Jacqueline sat down heavily in an armchair. “Let’s hope that’s it.”

“Yes,” said Mara. She stood staring out the front window. “Although if he needed a phone, I wonder why he didn’t come to us. We’re closer.” After a few minutes, she saw Julian’s van go past. The neighboring houses were spaced far apart, so it made sense for him to drive up the lane. Mara walked across the room to stand at another window, this one giving onto the back of the property. The rain was coming down now as sleet.

The nurse groaned. “When the weather’s like this, I really feel it in my knees.”

The old house was dim and still, except for the ponderous ticking of a grandfather clock. Mara flicked a switch. It activated a couple of old-fashioned wall sconces shaped like flambeaux that gave faint illumination to an obscure matter.

Mara began to pace the floor. “Maybe we should call the police.”

The nurse shook her head. “He won’t like us involving the gendarmes.” She followed Mara with her eyes. “They would have been married fifty-two years come summer, you know. It’s hard … losing someone after so long. And he was always so dependent on her. Maybe because she was older than him. You knew she was married before? Her first husband was killed in the war. When she got Joseph, he was a brawny farm lad … pretty wet behind the ears. I expect”—the nurse laughed, recollecting something that she did not volunteer to share—“Amélie taught him a thing or two. Did I tell you he wants to restock with sheep?”

“What? How?” Mara looked appalled. She almost said,
He’s out of his mind.
Perhaps his mind
was
going.

“He’s not crazy, if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Jacqueline.

“Sheep! He’ll never manage.”

“Of course not. But you have to understand it’s his way of coping with loss. Joseph used to love his sheep, gave them all names, even if he did end up selling them for meat. I suppose he thinks if he can get sheep back on the land, he can get a lot of other things back as well. Best to let him believe it will happen.” She added with uncharacteristic gentleness, “We all need our dreams, even if the time for dreaming is over.”

“Listen,” Mara broke in sharply, turning back into the room.

“What?” With an effort the stout nurse pushed forward in her chair. “What is it?”

Mara waved her still. “I thought I heard something.” But the only sounds were the ticking of the clock, the wind in the chimney, the patter of sleet against the windowpanes. And then, a muffled thump that Jacqueline heard, too. Their eyes were drawn to a cupboard under the stairs at the far end of the living room. It was the only place they had not looked into. Mara flew to it and yanked the door open. At first, all she could make out was a clutter of broken shutters and fly screens standing on end and leaning against the interior wall. Then, further back, she saw him, folded up on himself, lying like a thing discarded in the darkness and the dust.

•

He looked dead. His skin was cold to the touch. His mouth gaped open, and his body was as rigid as the shutters they had to shift in order to reach him. Only his eyes gave sign of life.

They dragged him out and got him into bed by carrying him between them, Jacqueline hoisting him under the arms, Mara taking his feet. Despite his size, he was surprisingly light.
A shell of a man
, Mara thought. He was unable to swallow his tablets. Jacqueline rummaged in her bag and gave him a nasal spray of
apomorphine as a quick-onset therapy to kick-start his system. She laid him back against a stack of pillows and sat on the edge of the mattress, rubbing warmth into his chest, arms, and legs.

The front door banged. “No one’s home but Olivier Rafaillac,” Julian called. “They’re all off doing their marketing.” He came into the bedroom. “You found him! Where the hell was he?”

“Cupboard under the stairs,” said Mara in a low voice.

“Shouldn’t we call a doctor?”

Jacqueline shook her head. “No need. He’ll come round in a bit.”

Julian stood by, watching her ministrations. Mara went to fill a hot water bottle in the kitchen and brought it to Jacqueline.

“There,
mon vieux
,” said the nurse. “Get that on your feet. Like blocks of ice, they are.”

It took Joseph almost forty minutes to recover sufficiently to tell them what had happened. His voice came out in a barely audible croak.

“She was beating on the windows. Trying to get in. Then the lights went out. She came in through the back, right into the room.”

“She, who?” Mara looked askance at Jacqueline and Julian. “What’s he talking about? Was someone trying to break in?”

“Amélie.” Joseph’s voice broke into a quavering sob. “She was here. She stood over me, big and black, like a tree.” The corners of his mouth pulled down, the muscles of his throat working spasmodically. He might have been crying, but no tears came out. His eyes looked as dry, as red, as flayed as ever. “She said, ‘You have to die, Joseph.’ She wanted me to join her, you see. I told her, ‘I’m not ready to go.’ I said, ‘Leave me alone.’ Then”—his trembling fingers danced on top of the covers as he relived his terror—“she put a pillow over my face. I tried to fight her off. But she was too strong for me. And—and she had no head.
Mon Dieu
, only a big black hole!”