“Too much, unfortunately.” He picked up the saucer and cup and took a drink, feeling it burn down the back of his throat. He missed coffee. It had a flavor, unlike tea or liquor. “I have an inkling about these recent deaths and the papers only corroborate my suspicions.”
“What are they?” Jacques asked.
“That we might have been right to cast Hugo as our villain,” Ben took another drink, and while it warmed him, it did nothing to chase away his growing distress. He remembered again the carved letters on his sister’s desk and her desperate need for money. If it was an ‘H’ she’d drawn beside her own initial, then it was Hugo who had pushed her—and it explained his new obsession. “Remi asked me one night if I thought the letters were tied to Leith.”
“And?”
Ben grimaced. “I didn’t give her an answer.”
“But now?” Jacques scratched at his chin.
“I’m still not sure,” he said.
“Sleep on it then.”
“I’ll be awake for hours now,” Ben said, indicating the coffee. “You go on. No need for both of us to be deprived of a few hours’ rest.”
Jacques dipped his chin. “Goodnight, then.”
Alone, Ben stoked the fire and rejoined his papers. He read them again, word for word, right down to the minute details. His eyes felt heavier, sleep impending as it weighed on him. The last thing he read before sleep took him was a letter to his father from Bernard. Inside the envelope was the wedding announcement, the same one that he’d received, and a handwritten note:
Dear Sir,
My family and I will not be in attendance. As this is merely a means to tie some unusual knots between your family and mine, I do not see the benefit in watching you marry the creature I have disposed of. That being said, you will receive the agreed upon sum one week prior to this engagement.
Signed,
Bernard Cuvilyé
It was a cruel note, and the last thing that he’d been conscious enough to read. When the darkness came for him, it was cold like the words in the letter. Without joy, without meaning, without love—a reminder that Remi had been passed from one member of her family to another, only to be bought by a man that Ben had once thought of as an immaculate scholar.
“I wanted to save her,” a voice in the darkness said. “To give her a home.”
“They paid you,” he mumbled, pushing through sleep to finally open his bleary eyes. The air was damp; the bed he found himself on was a table in the cellar. Ben sat up and looked about. Sheet-covered corpses covered every surface in the room. He clambered off the table and peeled back the sheet from the closest body. Beneath it was Lamotte, half-burned.
The voice spoke again. “She was alone.”
“So was I,” Ben replied, moving to the next table. Leith lay beneath the sheet, a rope fastened around his thin neck.
“I married her.”
“She was even more alone then!” Ben felt his frustration reaching a peak, but at the next table, it snuffed itself out.
“Forgive your father, mon coeur.” His mother’s dry lips moved, her decaying flesh peeling away from bone. She wasn’t anything like the portrait hanging above the mantelpiece, not anymore. Time had eaten away at her, though he knew she was ashes in their mausoleum.
A white sheet moved beside his mother and Soleil peeled it back to reveal herself—twisted and broken from her fall, covered in a thin layer of sand and slick from the water. She sang, “Yes. Papa meant well.”
Fear gripped him. “He was wrong! He made a mistake.”
A hand slid over his shoulder, a gentle squeeze. He turned to face his father—a moth like the display in his study clinging to his chest. There was blood caked around his ears and neck.
“Forgive me, Ben,” he rasped between blue lips. “I should have brought you home.”
Ben choked on a sob.
“I should have brought you home,” his father repeated, his hand tightening on his shoulder. “I should have brought you home.”
Red tears rolled from the corners of his white eyes and blood dribbled down his chin from where it spilled over his bottom lip. He sputtered, “Come home, Ben. Come home.”
He blinked, forced to the ground with his father on top of him. He fought, but he could not escape. His father’s weight pressed down on him, his blood raining on Ben’s face. Two more bodies crawled on top and held him down from either side—his mother and Soleil. They smiled. “Come home, Ben. Come home.”
The ground at his back shifted, suddenly sinking as it enveloped them. He gasped amid their chanting.
“Ben,” a distant voice shouted, “wake up.”
REMI
“The gens d’armes are here,” Remi said. Ben was covered in sweat and tangled on the floor among papers she’d only glanced at. He was shaking and hard to wake, which she prescribed to the tray of coffee on the side table nearby.
“The what?” he groaned.
“Les gens d’armes,” she hissed. “Inspector Marceau is here, asking for you.”
That got his attention. He woke with eyes as wide as she’d ever seen them, and the concern she felt worsened. “Where’s Jacques?”
“I don’t know.”
Ben scrambled to his knees, collecting the papers and stacking them neatly. “I’ll be down in a moment.”
