Read Chapter 11: Aftermath of a Disappearance

Luc moved through the room like a man who had searched a hundred hotel rooms before, his fingers ghosting over the duvet, the pillowcases, the empty wardrobe. Élodie stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, watching him work. The morning light through the shuttered window cast stripes across the stripped bed, and the air still held a faint trace of Lefevre’s cologne—something sharp and expensive that felt like an insult now that she knew what he had done.

“He didn’t leave anything obvious,” Luc said, kneeling to peer under the bed. “No toiletries in the bathroom. No stray receipts. The staff confirmed he didn’t take breakfast or request any services.”

“He was here to steal from me and leave,” Élodie said. “He didn’t need room service.”

Luc straightened and turned in a slow circle. His eyes caught on the small writing desk by the window, and he crossed to it, pulling the chair out and running a hand beneath the lip of the desk. Nothing. He crouched, ran his palm along the underside of the drawer.

“Capitaine,” Élodie said, a note of impatience creeping into her voice. “You already found his passport was false. What else is there to find?”

“People who travel under false identities tend to carry more than one set of secrets,” Luc said. He stood and moved to the suitcase that remained open on the luggage stand. He had already gone through it once, she remembered—methodical, gloved, careful. But now he picked it up by the handle, tilted it, and shook it lightly. Something shifted inside the lining with a soft, papery sound.

Élodie stepped closer. “What was that?”

Luc set the suitcase down on the bed and unzipped the main compartment again, but this time his fingers explored the interior walls rather than the contents. He pressed along the fabric, and near the bottom corner, his fingers found a seam that gave. He peeled it back to reveal a hidden pocket stitched into the lining.

Élodie held her breath.

Luc reached in and withdrew a folded piece of paper, yellowed at the edges like something that had been handled many times. He unfolded it carefully and spread it flat on the bed. Élodie moved to his side to look.

It was a map. Hand-drawn, but precise, the kind of map someone makes when they want to remember a place exactly. She recognized the outline of her château grounds immediately—the main building, the long driveway, the curve of the hedgerow, the orchard. The river was a thin blue line along the eastern edge. And in the northwest corner of the property, near a small circle labeled *puits*, there was a bold black X.

“The old well,” Élodie said.

Luc looked up at her. “You know this spot?”

“It’s been sealed for decades. My grandfather—my mother’s father, the man I called grandfather—he had it capped when I was a child. Said it was a liability, that someone could fall in.” She paused. “I don’t remember it ever being used. There’s an older well closer to the house that the gardens draw from.”

Luc studied the map again. “This isn’t recent. Look at the handwriting, the paper quality. This could be thirty, forty, even fifty years old.”

“Lefevre had a map of my property that’s older than I am,” Élodie said slowly. “Why would he have that? Why would anyone have that?”

Luc folded the map carefully along its existing creases and slid it into his jacket pocket. “I’ll have this examined for prints, see if we can lift anything off the paper itself.”

“And the X? What do you think is there?”

Luc was quiet for a long moment. “I think it’s what he came to find. And I think he didn’t find it, because he was here twice and left both times without visiting that part of the grounds. We have the grounds on camera. He never went near the well.”

“So he was looking for something he couldn’t locate,” Élodie said. “Or he was waiting for the right moment.”

“Or he was looking for something that required a key he didn’t have yet.”

The words hung in the air between them. Élodie thought of the tin box, still sitting in Luc’s office with its letters unread. She thought of the photograph he had stolen, of her grandmother and André Moreau. She thought of the pendant that had started all of this, the one her grandmother had left her, the one she wore even now beneath her shirt.

“He knew where the photograph was,” she said. “In my office. Behind a locked door. He knew exactly where to go.”

Luc nodded slowly. “That’s what bothers me most. He had to have either scouted the château before checking in, or been given information by someone who did.”

“You mean someone on the inside.”

Luc didn’t answer, but the silence was answer enough.

Élodie walked to the window and stared out at the grounds. From this room, she could see the edge of the orchard and, beyond it, the distant shape of the old well, half-hidden by overgrown brambles and elderflower. It had been part of the landscape her whole life, a feature she had walked past without a second thought. Now it looked different. Charged. Like a wound that had never closed.

“I have six guests arriving tomorrow,” she said. “Three rooms booked over the weekend. I can’t cancel on them.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“And I can’t have police crawling around the property while they’re here. It’s a bed-and-breakfast, Capitaine. Word travels. One bad review and I’m finished before I’ve even started.”

Luc came to stand beside her at the window. He was close enough that she caught the faint smell of coffee on his breath, the wool of his coat. “I’m not proposing a police presence. I’m proposing that we look at that well ourselves. Quietly. Tomorrow, before your guests arrive.”

Élodie turned to face him. “You’re asking me to dig up my own property.”

“I’m asking you to let me help you uncover something that someone has gone to extreme lengths to keep buried. The question you should be asking yourself is whether you want to know what it is.”

She searched his face for a hint of condescension, for the practiced patience of an officer managing a civilian. But his expression was open, and there was something in his eyes—curiosity, maybe, or a shared hunger for the truth. She had spent two weeks feeling like she was stumbling through a maze in the dark, and here was someone offering to walk the path with her.

“Fine,” she said. “But I want to know everything you find out. No more holding back.”

Luc’s eyes flickered, just for a moment. It was there and gone before she could name it, but she caught it. A hesitation. A shadow.

“Of course,” he said.

“I mean it, Capitaine. The fraud records. The man who used André Moreau’s name. If you find anything, you tell me first.”

“I will.”

Something in the flatness of his voice gave her pause. She thought of the way he had been when he first responded to her call about the Dubois—efficient, professional, but with an eagerness that had seemed almost out of proportion to the situation. She thought of how quickly he had taken the tin box off her hands, how he had offered to keep the letters safe without her asking.

“Am I missing something?” she asked. “Is there something about this case that you already know?”

Luc looked at her for a long moment. The morning light caught the lines around his eyes, and for the first time she saw how tired he looked. “I know that Domaine Chevalier has been on our radar for years. Long before you reopened this château. There have been questions about their business practices, their acquisitions, the way they’ve expanded so rapidly in a region where vineyards rarely change hands.”

“And you didn’t think to mention this before?”

“There was nothing to connect them to you until recently. Now there is.” He paused. “I also know that my predecessor, the captain who held this post before me, closed a case twenty years ago that involved a complaint filed against Domaine Chevalier. The complainant withdrew before it went anywhere.”

“Who was the complainant?”

Luc shook his head. “The file is sealed. I’ve requested access, but it requires a judge’s order. These things take time.”

“Time I don’t have,” Élodie said. “I have a stolen photograph, a map to a sealed well, and an unknown man who has been in my home twice under a false name. Every day I wait feels like another day closer to something I don’t understand.”

Luc reached out and touched her arm, a brief gesture that surprised them both. “You’re not alone in this, Élodie. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you have resources. You have me.”

She looked at his hand on her arm, then up at his face. “Do I?”

The question lingered longer than she intended it to. Luc withdrew his hand and stepped back, his professional mask sliding into place. “You do,” he said. “Whatever I find, you’ll know.”

She wanted to believe him. That was the trouble. Some part of her, tired and frightened and desperate for an ally, wanted to believe him completely. But she had spent years reading people in her event-planning career, learning to spot the small tells that revealed when someone was negotiating from a position of hidden knowledge. And right now, Capitaine Luc Roussel was holding something back.

She let it go. For now. She let him leave the room with the map in his pocket and a promise to return at dawn. She stood alone in the stripped guest room and tried not to think about the way her grandmother’s secrets were multiplying like vines through the walls of her home, strangling everything they touched.

The old well waited in the brambles, patient and dark, holding whatever her family had buried there.