Bennett Sisters Mystery, Volumes 1-2, page 52
They took her ID. Why not her phone? More incompetence. She looked up and down the empty hallway. Another beep. She scrambled through her backpack, searched the pockets of her pants, then her shirt. It was in a chest pocket, almost in plain sight. Why hadn’t they taken it? She pulled it out and stared at it.
Merle tried not to groan. How was she going to get to the hill? How was she going to turn over the dog? What was Francie doing? Was she okay?
She sat down on the cot again and willed herself to think. Calmez-vous, she told herself. She needed to buy some time. She texted:
When she looked up the less swagger-y gendarme, a young recruit by his fresh-faced looks, was standing outside the cell. She pushed the phone under her leg but there was no chance he hadn’t seen her texting. He said something complicated in French, with an unusual accent, and she shook her head.
“Je ne comprend pas.” She asked for a translator. It was nearly midnight. It would take some time to find one. He nodded and disappeared through the hall door.
Why hadn’t he taken her cell phone? It made another beep.
* * *
Then the battery died.
Merle closed her eyes. Hadn’t she plugged it in in the car? The dog got tangled in the cable. Unfortunate beast at the center of this mess. She lowered her head to her knees, trying to think how this might go, how to get Francie away from those criminals. How frantic her sister must be, how scared.
She must have dozed off. Sleep was often a defense mechanism for her. When the world gets too crazy, take a nap. The crack of the metal door in the hallway made her jerk awake. She dropped her phone to the cement floor. Cursing she snatched it up and hid her hand behind her back.
“Blackbird? Are you all right?”
The sight of Pascal sent a flood of relief through her. His black t-shirt and wrinkled jeans, his cowboy boots, his broad chest and tanned face: she’d missed them. Then she remembered he was the one who had her arrested. But the young gendarme had his keys out and was unlocking the cell door. Merle stood, her head still fuzzy with sleep. Pascal stepped inside and took her hand. “Come on now. We have to find Francie.”
In a back room, sitting around a table, he explained that he had her arrested so she didn’t go meet the kidnappers on her own. She opened her mouth to protest and he raised his hand. “I know you think you can handle everything yourself, Merle. Oh, I know.” He smiled wearily. She sat back. This wasn’t about her pride. This was about Francie. “We have a helicopter coming.” He looked at his watch. “In fifteen minutes.”
“They texted again,” she said. “I need to plug in my phone to show you.”
Pascal went to the door and called something to the gendarme. He turned back to her. “What did they say?”
“The third right turn off Camp Paillas. Go to the top of the hill where a lantern sits by the road.”
A gendarme arrived with a phone charger. Merle plugged it into the wall and her phone. Pascal said he’d be right back and disappeared, shutting the door. Merle checked her watch, waited three minutes, then turned on her phone.
There was one more text, sent fifteen minutes before.
Merle burst out of the room. One a.m. was only a half hour away. She opened the hallway door to the reception area and stopped short. The room was full of policemen with large guns, and a woman with a small beagle on a leash. The woman looked at her then looked at her own clothes, a black slacks, white blouse and dark jacket.
Pascal turned from a lecture he was giving to the officers. “Go back inside, Merle.”
She held up her phone. “There’s another text. I need to be at that hilltop with the dog at one.”
Everyone looked at their watches and shifted uncomfortably. “Wait in the room,” Pascal said. “Plug in your phone.”
“They said — or my sister dies.” She looked at Pascal. His cheek muscles clenched. Then her phone beeped again. She read the text. “And now they say— the priest dies with her.”
Pascal stood in front of her. “They’re bluffing, Merle. Francie and Father Cyril are their only cards to play. They’ll never get the dog if they harm them.”
“Maybe they’ve given up on the dog. Maybe they know you’ve got a bunch of cops ready to arrest them.”
“Then they wouldn’t be texting you, would they? They would just run.” He touched her arm. “They want the dog. Trust me.”
“So what’s the plan? Another switcheroo? Because that worked so well last time?” Merle glanced at the woman with the dog. She wore a wig, brown like Merle’s hair. She frowned at Merle as if she didn’t understand. “How is this person going to communicate with the kidnappers?”
Pascal asked the woman something about ‘parler anglais’: speaking English. She shook her head. “You will have to text for her, Merle.”
“How will that work? Am I going to be there? Hiding in the car? Dropping from a helicopter? On a walkie-talkie?” Pascal was not liking her tone. “And that dog? It looks nothing like Aurore. They’re going to see it in the headlights. They’ll know it’s not the right one.”
Merle stepped closer to him. “I can’t take another chance that it gets botched. I have to do what they say.” She looked at her watch. “And I only have minutes to get there.”
Outside the heavy chop of a helicopter cut the night. Merle looked around the room at the team of policemen in combat gear, weapons at their sides. The beagle whined then barked at the noise. Merle looked down at the dog then back at Pascal.
“I have an idea.”
Chapter Forty-Six
The third right turn off Camp Paillas was a fork in the road, easing uphill toward the wilder outskirts of Guzargues. The area was a wealthy suburb of Montpellier, it appeared, with lavish country houses behind gates. A new moon rose in the east, a slant of silver across the dirt road. Aurore rode shotgun, watching the dark trees go by.
“Which hill do you think they’re on?” Merle asked. Pascal was in the back seat with the beagle and the woman, a police dog handler named Giselle. They crouched low as she drove out of the village and into the dry hills dotted with scrub and a lot of stone.
“To the West probably. Get the dog from the passenger side.”
Merle gripped the steering wheel, driving as fast as she could around potholes on the narrow country road. It wound upward, past a compound of buildings, dim shapes against the night sky, a stand of pines, dry, empty ground, away from civilization. She rounded a bend and saw the lantern ahead, on the right, lighting a yellow circle on the ground. “There it is,” she told them, bouncing off the road onto hard dirt. Her heart began to flutter. Aurore pricked up her ears and whined.
“Leave the car running,” Pascal said.
The location was treeless and open, not even shrubs growing in the dry soil. To the west the hill dropped to a bottomless ravine, then another hill rose, barely visible in the moonlight. To the east no hills could be seen, just blackness and a smattering of stars. It looked like the perfect place to get hit by sniper fire.
“Allons-y,” she whispered to the dog. Let’s go. “Time to show ourselves to the bad men.”
The dog began to tremble again and struggled against the leash as Merle pulled her over to the driver’s side. She barked as Merle tucked her under her arm and shut the car door. Pascal whispered through his open window. “Can you hear me, blackbird?”
“Oui.”
“Check if there more messages.”
Merle got out her phone. It made a crazy amount of light when it lit up. She wondered if the criminals could see her face in its glow. She hoped so. Unless they had snipers.
“Nothing,” she whispered.
She set the dog down and held the leash tightly as they walked to the front of the car, into the bright stream of the headlights. She listened for the helicopter but the night was still. Not a breath of wind. Just the heat rising off the ground, releasing the stored sunshine. She tugged the leash and walked with Aurore out a little further so her entire body was lit by the beams.
It was 1:04.
Merle held her sides, dancing from foot to foot. The night wasn’t cold but she felt a chill anyway. Aurore leaned against her leg, shivering. She patted the dog’s head.
At 1:07 the text came.
Merle blinked, reading it again. She couldn’t believe it. There wasn’t going to be an exchange. This wasn’t right. She texted back.
Immediately, another text.
Back at the car Merle settled the dog in the seat and said to Pascal. “They aren’t going to exchange Francie. I have to tie up the dog at the first tree on the right.” She looked back, angry. “Can’t you do something? Can’t you tell where those texts are coming from?”
“Drive, Merle,” he said. “We are working on it.”
She cursed, loudly, and put the car in gear. This was going badly, very badly. Steering back onto the road she drove slowly, her high beams on, scanning the rocky hillside for a tree. Finally a lonely pine tree, long dead, came into view on a barren ridge. She stopped the car and put it in park.
“What about when they see it’s the beagle?” she asked. This had been her plan but now she wasn’t sure. How would they find Francie once the criminals were caught?
“We will have them by then, blackbird. Turn off the car.”
She switched off the ignition. The headlights went out. It was very dark, moonless. She waited a moment for her eyes to adjust then got out. Inside the car she heard yips and whining as the dogs were moved. She walked around to the passenger side.
“All set?”
“Oui,” came the answer from the back seat from Giselle. “A bientôt, Mignon. Soyez bon.”
Opening the door quickly Merle scooped up Mignon, the beagle, and shut the door quickly, dousing the overhead light. She set the dog on the ground and straightened, squinting in the dark for the tree. She wished she had a flashlight. The ground was strewn with rocks. That was out of the question; tonight the darkness was her cloak, her friend. She picked her way along, stumbling, until she reached the dead pine tree. She wrapped the long leash around a low branch and tied it securely. The walk back to the car seemed to take an eternity. The dog began to bark. Merle turned back, using the trainer’s command: “Silence, Mignon!”
Poor dog, she thought, crossing the last of the stones. She hoped nothing bad happened to Mignon. She got in the car. “Now what?”
“Turn around and drive back toward Guzargues.”
As she drove down the hillside, heart heavy, she saw two police cars hidden behind a stand of trees. Then another two, by a high wall. The kidnappers would be caught. Mignon would not be harmed. That gave her little consolation. Francie was still a captive.
The dog handler pulled off her wig as she got out of the car by the gendarmerie. She gathered up Aurore and disappeared into the building. “Come on,” Pascal said, taking Merle’s hand. They got in his BMW and headed back out of town.
“I’m going to text them again,” she said.
They passed the church and plunged into the dark hillside. “Anything?” he asked. She said no, holding her phone tightly.
Pascal got a call and began talking rapidly in French. He braked hard, jerked the steering wheel, and made a U-turn. “Enfin,” he said angrily. “The priest called the emergency number two minutes ago. Finally Paris gives approval to track his phone. They were worried about his privacy.” He swore in French. It sounded very dirty.
“Did he give directions?”
“He had no idea where he was. Paris will call when they get a location.”
As they pulled into the field on the edge of town where the helicopter sat parked, its rotors limp in the night air, Pascal’s phone rang again. He turned to Merle. “They need the GPS turned on the priest’s phone. He’s locked it. Call them.”
Shaking now, she punched her phone. Come on, Cyril. It rang five or six times. She was losing hope when suddenly Francie was there. “Merle?!”
“Francie, are you okay?” She gripped Pascal’s arm.
“Yes. Well, sort of. We’re locked in this room. I was tied to the bed and we got that off but we can’t get out the door. And the window is tiny.”
“Le GPS,” Pascal hissed.
“You need to turn on the GPS on this phone, on Cyril’s phone, so we can find you.”
“I think they’re gone. We saw some cars drive away. We’ve been yelling out the window but there’s nobody out there.”
“Listen to me, Francie. Turn on the GPS on the cell.”
“Ah, right. Just a sec.” She spoke to the priest, asking him how to work his phone. A minute passed, some discussion about buttons and functions and codes. Finally Francie came back on the line. “Okay, it’s on. He didn’t really know where it was but I think we got it.”
“Good, okay, now we can track the phone and —”
Pascal’s phone rang. He said, “Bon,” and got out of the car.
“Hang on, Francie. We’re on our way.”
“Merle? I smell smoke.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
The helicopter rose awkwardly, lifting into the night sky, sending dust and gravel flying on the ground. Merle clung to the seat, straining against the seat belt. Her first helicopter ride. She’d been given earphones for the noise but it came through anyway, a riot of tympany. Pascal, in front, was showing the pilot a map on his phone.
They didn’t need a map once they’d cleared the hill. Yellow flames lit the scene against the black landscape like a beacon. Merle felt her stomach turn over. They circled once then set down in a pasture. The building was engulfed, fire several stories high. The wind created by the helicopter didn’t help.
Merle had to wait for Pascal to open her door, then threw herself out. They ran toward the building, a large barn, flames licking the outer walls. The noise was like a thousand lions roaring. The heat was intense, keeping everyone back. She lost Pascal in the crowd of neighbors who arrived carrying shovels, axes, and hoses.
Where was this window? Merle moved to the left, around the blaze, her eyes stinging from smoke. She called out for her sister but her voice was nothing to the raging fire eating up old beams and boards. She ran to the back where two men were cutting back shrubs between the barn and the farmhouse, a two-story stucco manse with a red tile roof and blue shutters.
She approached a man wearing pajamas and a robe and asked if he’d seen a window on this side. He pointed to the opposite side of the barn. On the east and to the back the walls were whitewashed stone as if it was some ancient, original part of the structure. She rounded the corner and saw a tiny window about six or seven feet off the ground. Merle jumped but she was too short to see inside. “Francie! Are you there?”
A hand poked out, then Francie’s face emerged. “Merle? Thank God. Get us out of here. The smoke is getting really bad.”
“Are your walls made of stone?”
“But the ceiling is wood. We can hear it crackling. We’re afraid it will fall in on us.”
“Is Cyril okay?”
“I think he has asthma or something. Hurry!”
Pascal was helping throw water onto the edges of the barn to keep the fire contained. Without serious firefighting equipment the barn was a loss, that was easy to see. The roof was tile but the wooden structure of it burned like a tinder box.
Merle grabbed his arm. “They’re in the back.”
Pascal grabbed an axe and followed Merle. He swung the tool wildly at the window. Glass flew in every direction but the stone held. After a few whacks he told Merle he would have to go through the main door and ran back around to the front. Merle called to Francie, telling her they were going to come in through the door, then ran back to the front. Pascal borrowed gloves from a farmer then picked up the axe again and chopped through the outside door. It shattered, half burnt. A whoosh of air sent a plume of sparks up to the rafters, feeding the fire. The skin on Merle’s face felt dangerously warm. Her eyebrows might be melting.
Pascal disappeared into the smoke and flame. He shouted, his words lost in the chaos. The crack of the axe boomed. A cry went up as the west wall of the barn collapsed in on itself, sending everyone back. Merle called out to Pascal to watch out, her words evaporating. She felt so helpless. Fire was so unpredictable. She wanted to go in but knew it would just make things worse. Did the beams crush him? Would Francie burn to death? Had the smoke choked them? The scenarios ran through her head, the call to their parents, the trials for the kidnappers, the revenge she would extract, all hardening inside her.
No. It was too early for hate.
Around her the work went on, the dousing of small flames, the digging of trenches, the wet trickle from an ineffectual hose. She waited until she was sure she would burst. Time during a calamity took on an elastic quality, stretching until you’re sure it will break.
Finally figures materialized out of the smoke. Pascal was dragging a thin man dressed in black, his arm over Pascal’s shoulders. Father Cyril, his hair, face, and clothes gray with ash. Was he alive? They stepped over burning debris, stumbling out of the barn. Pascal laid him on the ground. Cyril was coughing. A woman cradled his head her lap and gave him sips of water.
Merle let out a sigh. He would live. She looked back into the gloom and yelled: “Francie!” Pascal turned to go back in then paused as they saw her. Francie, high-stepping over embers and beams, hair flying, arms batting smoke and sparks out of her path, screaming very bad words as she leaped and ran. She plunged out the broken door and into Merle’s arms.
