The Secrets of the Bastide Blanche

around toward La Riviera’s door, and Paulik lunged forward, tackling him to the ground. Sophie pulled her gun from the back of her shorts and pointed it at Pioger’s head. “Don’t move.” She could hear one of her colleagues yell, “To the ground, now!” and she breathed a sigh of relief. Sophie quickly thought about her neighbor, a hairdresser with whom she loved having a glass of wine sometimes after work, while their kids played together. What could she tell her of her workday? Nothing, only the vaguest of details, more often having to do with her fellow officers—how Jules had made her laugh while they were driving, how another officer was getting married the next weekend—than with their operations. Her neighbor had the opposite problem: her clients spilled out their most personal hopes and fears while she cut their hair. She couldn’t tell Sophie what kind of conversations went on, only the very light ones. But she could talk about her work: the haircuts, the dyes, the blow-drying.

“Finally!” a voice hollered from inside the shack.

“You can take him off our hands!” Hervé Pioger yelled at Paulik, his head pressed sideways against the ground in front of the door.

Sophie and Paulik exchanged looks as a man in his late thirties or early forties walked out the door, accompanied by one of the officers, who held his arm. “I’m perfectly fine!” he said, shrugging off the officer’s hand. “I’d like to press charges—”

“Shut up!” Hervé Pioger hollered.

“We’ll deal with that, M Le Flahec,” Paulik said. Another officer came out of the shack with Didier Pioger, handcuffed, while Sophie got Hervé upright and handcuffed him. Paulik said, “We need to take you to the hospital for a checkup—”

“I said I was all right,” Erwan insisted.

“A doctor will verify that,” Paulik said. “You were held against your will.” He looked at Erwan Le Flahec, trying to read his expression. Paulik still wasn’t sure if the kidnapping had been set up by Le Flahec himself.

Sophie called Jules and told him to bring one of the cars, and two of the other officers had already left, running back to get the remaining two cars. She turned to Erwan and said, “We’ll take you to the clinic, and then you can go home and get cleaned up and sleep, before you come in for questioning tomorrow.”

“If you say so,” Erwan slowly replied. His eyes closed and his body swayed before he slumped forward, Sophie catching him in her arms.

Chapter Twenty-five

New York City,

September 22, 2010

Much to my relief, Sandrine wasn’t at La Riviera with the Pioger cousins, and Erwan said that she had never been there,” Valère explained. “I believed him. Bruno Paulik called me right away, as soon as they found Erwan, and Erwan arrived at the house a few hours after his hospital visit. He looked exhausted, and was irritable, but that’s understandable. I felt lost without Sandrine, now that I had two guests in the house, and I was worried about her.”

“But where was Sandrine?” Justin asked.

“I tried to call Matton in Paris, but there was no answer, so I hung up without leaving a message. I didn’t want to worry Guillaume unnecessarily. Luckily, the village market was that morning, and Hélène and Léa offered to go shopping for me.”

Justin shifted in his chair, frowning.

“Do you mind not fidgeting?” Valère asked. “The details are important.”

“Sorry. Go on.”

I pulled out Agathe’s dog-eared Ali-Bab cookbook and got to work making a soup; we could have it with fresh bread and goat’s cheese. When Léa returned from the market, she sat at the kitchen table, doing puzzles in some kind of activity book, while I cooked. Michèle was down by the pool, yelling into her cell phone at her Japanese publisher or a film rights lawyer in Los Angeles, and Erwan was upstairs sleeping. “I wonder what the blind lady is having for dinner,” Léa said as she watched me cutting leeks. “Maman and I saw her today, near the market, walking down the sidewalk, guided by her white cane.”

“Blind people get used to doing all sorts of things that we can’t imagine they can do,” I replied. “I’m sure she’s cooking something healthy and good to eat.”

“I hope Erwan is going to be all right,” she continued.

I had forgotten how kids could change topics so easily. I said, “He just needs about fourteen hours’ sleep.”

“My papa once slept fourteen hours,” Léa said. “He stayed up two entire nights all night because of work.”

“Âllo!” came a voice from the front hall. It was Bruno Paulik, who had come to pick up Léa.

“Come in, Bruno,” I answered. “We’re in the kitchen.”

Paulik walked in and bent down to give Léa a kiss. “Time to come home, Léa,” he said.

“Léa has been very good company this afternoon,” I said.

“Glad to hear it. We like her company too,” Paulik said, winking at his daughter.

“On your way through the garden, would you mind telling Michèle that dinner will soon be ready?” I asked.

“No problem,” Paulik answered. “Does she always yell into the phone like that?”

“Yep.”

“We could hear her from our place.”

“Sorry about that,” I said.

“Any news from Sandrine?” Paulik asked, stopping at the kitchen door on his way out.

“Nothing,” I answered. “That reminds me—I’m going to try calling her uncle in Paris again. I’ve been having trouble getting through to his cell phone.”

“Let me know what you find out,” Paulik said. There was no antagonism in his voice, but I knew that the commissioner suspected Sandrine of setting up Erwan’s kidnapping and pushing Michèle down the stairs. I had to agree that it didn’t look good. It was a total surprise to me that Sandrine had dated, and still felt something for, Hervé P. Is that why she came to work for me? To be close to him? And now she had disappeared.

“Is Sandrine okay?” Léa asked, looking up at her father. “I