The Red Brick Cellars: A Tolosa Mystery (25 page)

She focused on Louis. “Do you remember what your father looked like, Louis? Do you remember all the wrinkles, the exact shape of his nose, the size of his hands?”

Considering her questions, Louis frowned. Of course he remembered what his father looked like. There was an increasing amount of wrinkles over the last years, but he couldn’t be expected to know them all, surely? The nose was easy since Louis had the same one. But his hands… No, he couldn’t remember any details about them. And that made him sad. Would he forget everything else about him, too?

Apparently reading the answer on his face, Marie-Pierre nodded. “I didn’t want that to happen with my parents. I wanted to remember everything about them. And what options do we have for our lost ones today? Burial or cremation? In one case, we can visit a tomb in the cemetery; in the other, it can be the tomb or possibly home.”

Louis didn’t think you were allowed to bring the ashes home, but that was beside the point.

“Neither of those solutions were acceptable to me.” Marie-Pierre leaned back and grabbed a chord that hung down from the roof. It appeared to be linked to the curtain on the opposite wall.

What is she hiding back there?

Marie-Pierre pulled the chord and the curtain opened.

The beginnings of a tunnel had been dug into the wall making a small niche. Inside, entwined in each other’s arms, sat two adults in their forties. He was the farthest in. She curled in his lap with both arms around his neck. Both had their eyes closed as if they were taking a nap.

“They tried to dig their way out using broken wine bottles,” Marie-Pierre whispered. “My only consolation is that at least they had each other until the very end.”

Louis consciously took a deep breath.

She hadn’t omitted the description of the smell of the rotting bodies to spare him.

They were still intact.

Thirty-One

The door leading out of the room where Catherine woke up was open, but the sturdy oak door she came to directly after was locked. In the opposite direction, she found tunnels. Pulling down the small light hanging on a hook on the central pillar, she decided to go exploring. It was better than nothing.

The first twenty meters or so had ragged, uneven walls with stones and broken roof tiles sticking out everywhere and the wooden supporting beams had a do-it-yourself feel. Someone else clearly took over the digging for the rest of the maze; the walls were smooth earth and the support beams were seamlessly set together.

Her mind’s fuzziness retreated little by little. On the upside, Catherine was able to move in a more coordinated manner and not stub her toe on every little stone in her path—and there were plenty of those. Downside: she felt every cut on her feet, every bruise on her legs, and the bump she acquired on her forehead when she’d run into a beam as the tunnel she fled down made an unexpected turn. A tunnel would go more or less straight, then run into a brick wall, turn ninety degrees, and tilt up, apparently to go around the ancient edifice. Since Catherine had only her dim light and a mere fraction of her normal faculties, she walked straight into those walls every time they appeared. When she touched a hand to her temple, it came away bloody. She must have hit that beam with more force than she thought.

After two rights and one left turn, Catherine arrived at a rickety wooden door. The tunnel continued into darkness. Could this possibly be a way out? Considering the quality of the door by the crypt, she doubted there would be such an easy exit, but what else was she to do? Who knew how far these tunnels went?

She pushed on the door. Hinges squealed making Catherine cringe in fear that her captor would hear. She waited a few seconds straining her ears, but heard nothing. She stepped through the door. The room she arrived in was even darker than the narrow tunnel. As her eyes adjusted and she directed the light across the room, Catherine could make out shapes on all sides, circular and tube-like. Catherine’s heart hammered in her chest. Her trek so far had been one great effort since she had to fight for her body to do as she wished. She had been breathing through her mouth for a while because her lungs weren’t cooperating very well. As her nose picked up on something, she sniffed to investigate. Old, decaying meat left to rot in the heat for a few weeks at the least. Catherine’s stomach already queasy from whatever had put her to sleep, rebelled. She bent in half and threw up on the floor.

Once the heaving stopped, her eyes focused on an object now partly covered in her puke. She couldn’t be entirely sure in the dim light, but thought it was a rather pallid-looking hand. And whoever it belonged to hadn’t said anything about being puked on. Not to mention the smell. Knowing she wouldn’t like what she saw, Catherine moved her light out along the arm attached to the hand. Staring blue dead eyes came into view. The skin was starting to fall off and a patch of blond hair was already missing.

Catherine stopped breathing. She tried to gather her thoughts to make sense of this and figure out what to do. Wanting to get away from the dead man, she straightened and turned toward the door. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark room now. Propped up next to the door with a chord around her torso to keep her in place was a body Catherine recognized.

Alima.

Catherine screamed, scrambling backward.

Thirty-Two

“I want to offer this peace to whoever wants it,” Marie-Pierre said to Louis.

Louis couldn’t take his eyes off the dead people in front of him. “Peace?” They might look like they were sleeping, but staying on display for years on end couldn’t possibly qualify as peaceful.

“It’s incredible the number of things you think of that you never had the chance to say to your loved ones while they lived. Now, whenever I think of something I want to discuss with either one of my parents, I can just come here. Don’t you find it much more personal than standing by a grave in a cemetery?”

Louis stayed perfectly immobile and concentrated on breathing evenly. She was crazy. And, more importantly, this was the link to his father’s death. The body of Geraldine Hérault had been perfectly preserved for twenty-nine years, like Marie-Pierre’s parents. If he focused on finding out what happened to his father, perhaps he could ignore the puppet-theater from Hell in front of him.

“How come they don’t rot?” he asked, finally managing to face Marie-Pierre on the couch next to him.

A muscled ticked at the corner of her eye—probably at the bluntness of his question—but she answered. “It’s due to the quality of the air and the dirt.” She nodded at the niche.

Louis nodded. “Like the crypt in the Cordeliers church?”

“Exactly!” Smiling, Marie-Pierre was clearly happy to discover he was familiar with that story. “Of course you know about that. You were always so interested in Toulouse and its history when you were a boy.”

“So the dirt here has the same properties?” How long was that poor couple down here before dying? Had the wine helped them hold on longer or had it made things worse?

“Yes. Though I’ve been worried that going through here often and letting in outside air could destabilize the quality of the air, so I installed the curtain. And I’ve recently acquired a second entryway.” As she talked, she studied the bodies of her parents. The worry shone in her eyes and her mouth was set in a severe line.

Confused, Louis asked, “A second entry? Into this cellar?”

Shaking out of her reverie, Marie-Pierre looked toward the wine racks. “No, into the rest of my research.”

Louis was down to whispering. “Research?” He hadn’t moved a muscle except to talk since the curtain was drawn. He was too worried his disgust would show or that he’d scare her off in some way. The “research” was apparently behind the wine racks.
Perhaps I can knock her down and go exploring?

The woman was bigger than him and, though it hurt his pride to admit it, with all the rowing she still did, she was probably stronger than him despite being twenty-five years his senior. Besides, where was Catherine in all this? Had she been taken or was she already home from an innocent night adventure?

Marie-Pierre’s fingers tapped a slow rhythm on her thigh as she studied Louis. “This is where we will see how much like your father you are, Louis. Will you be able to see beyond your own nose and recognize the potential of what I’m doing?”

Louis kept eye-contact through sheer force of will. He was proud to hear that his voice was steady when he answered. “You’ll have to tell me about your project so we can find out. But, as you so easily pinpointed earlier, I haven’t always agreed with my father. In fact, I quite frequently disagreed.” He just omitted to tell his father as much. And, obviously, that didn’t mean he’d ever wished for his father’s death.

“All right, Louis. But if I do give you all the details of my research, I will expect you to help me in turn. When I’m ready to expose it to the public, I want you to back me up with that popular name of yours.”

“Of course.” As in,
of course you want that
. Louis had a very surreal feeling of watching a horror movie where he knew something awful was coming, but didn’t have the details yet. He was waiting for something to jump out and say, “Boo.”

Marie-Pierre was apparently happy with his participation. “What I want,” she said, still holding Louis’s gaze, “is for everyone to have this.” She waved in the direction of her parents’ bodies. “For those who are not happy with burying—or God forbid, cremating—their loved ones, they can have them mummified and visit whenever they feel like it.”

Louis took a deep breath and focused on calming down his speeding heart. The thought of having his father stuck for all eternity in his final pose so his family could ogle him whenever they wanted made him want to go kick something.

He stayed seated.

“I have discovered the old Cordeliers crypt,” Marie-Pierre declared softly.

Louis’s eyebrows shot up. He didn’t have to feign interest. “You did?”

Smug with her success, Marie-Pierre explained. “I started digging a tunnel going out from this cellar. I knew the general direction to close in on the Cordeliers church. It took me months, but I finally bumped into the crypt. It was filled with debris and the entrance was sealed shut, so it took me even longer to clean the place up, but when I was done, I had the perfect setting for my research.”

Louis’s mind boggled at the thought of doing all that alone. No wonder she was still in such good shape. “What did you do with all the dirt you dug out?” he asked.

“I took it out with my car little by little and emptied it into nature around Toulouse.” She waved a dismissive hand toward the stairs. “So long as you’re not in a rush to get it all out in one go, nobody notices.”

“So why are your parents still here and not in the crypt?” The hairs on Louis’s neck were standing at attention over the sharing of a room with two dead bodies. No matter how long he sat there or how much he concentrated on what Marie-Pierre was saying, he couldn’t block out that death was so close.

With a fond look at her parents finally giving Louis some respite, allowing him to look elsewhere than into her green eyes, she sighed. “I didn’t want to risk them. I couldn’t be certain the crypt would work as well as this cellar, so I had to do some experiments before moving them. As it turns out, I quite like having them here, at home, and I’m using the crypt for other things.”

“Experiments?” The image of Geraldine Hérault’s body flashed through Louis’s mind.

“If I want to propose this solution to others, I must first make sure I can deliver.”

That made sense. If Louis were to perform such experiments, he would search for dead animals and see how they fared in the crypt, but somehow, he didn’t think that was what Marie-Pierre was referring to. “And how is that going?”

“Very well,” she replied, lost in thought gazing at the wine bottles. “Just like for the Cordeliers in the old days. The body must first be buried in dirt, which has to come from close to the church. I think there was something about the quantity of limestone in the dirt that was important. Then it is placed in the crypt and stays perfectly preserved. In fact, it went so well that I’ve decided to do one better.”

Louis couldn’t bring himself to ask what bodies she had used for these experiments. He didn’t really need to, anyway; it had worked fine for Geraldine Hérault. Scratching his head to have an excuse to break eye-contact for a while, he bought her hook. “What’s one better?”

“I’m actually not inventing anything new,” Marie-Pierre said. “Only seeking inspiration in what the crypt was used for back in the seventeenth century. I think the crypt would make an excellent tourist attraction.”

Louis didn’t manage more than a whisper. “Right.”

Marie-Pierre must think his lack of breath was due to awe because she delightfully continued, sounding like his niece Chloé recounting a trip to the zoo. “I’m very close to creating a second room with the same properties as the crypt. Once it’s ready, that can be used for the purpose I just explained. The crypt is then available for more profitable visits.”

“Oh,” Louis said, relieved to discover there was some sanity left in the woman. “You want to open the crypt so people can see where the bodies were stocked back then?”

“Yes, of course,” she replied. “And the bodies.”

“Which bodies?”

“The ones we’ll place in the crypt. I’ve got some excellent scenarios ready. I’ve finished one and am in the process of putting the final touches to the second.”

“Scenarios?” What does she have in mind? Having people relive the incident of the student who visited the crypt alone at night and got so scared he had a heart attack? It was a funny thing to read about in an article, but Louis wasn’t certain it would be much fun to live through. And which bodies was she talking about?

Marie-Pierre looked at him as if he was being obtuse. She decided to enlighten him. “Certain selected bodies will be used to set up scenes from the history of Toulouse. It would prove the natural mummification properties of the crypt and teach about our history.”