Page 11 of Where the Snakes Sleep

The thought sends a familiar pang through my chest—the feeling of being out of place, of being the thing that doesn’t fit. I’ve carried that feeling my entire life, and apparently it follows you across oceans.

I force myself to look away from the estate and focus on the path ahead. As I get closer to the cottage, it becomes little more than a dirt track. My suitcase wheels are useless here, catching on every rock and root. I end up carrying it, which makes my arms burn and my back protest. The backpack shifts uncomfortably on my shoulders, and I wonder for the hundredth time why I thought this was a good idea.

I begin to see details emerge with every step or stumble. The roof tiles are cracked in places, and one window has a broken pane. The wooden door is weathered to a silvery gray, with iron fittings that have rusted to a deep orange. The stone steps leading to the entrance are uneven and worn smooth.

I set my suitcase down on the porch and just stare. This is mine. This crumbling, isolated piece of French countryside belongs to me now. The realization doesn’t feel real. It’s like I’m watching someone else’s life unfold.

The key Maître Aubert sent me feels heavy in my pocket. I pull it out, turning it over in my palm. It’s old-fashioned brass, with intricate scrollwork on the head. The kind of key that belongs in a museum or a fairy tale, not in the hand of a traumatized American kid running from his past.

I climb the steps slowly, testing each one before putting my full weight on it. At the top, I hesitate, key hovering before the lock.

This is it, Ryan, I tell myself. This is how you take back your life.

The key slides into the lock.

Click.

And the door groans open.

3

Camille

I stand at the upstairs window, one hand braced against the frame, and watch the lane. The afternoon light is flat and ungenerous, the kind that turns the drought-yellowed cypresses into rows of burnt matches. Beyond them, the drystone wall that divides my property from the Legrand place catches the sun along its upper edge, a thin line of white heat.

At the far end of the lane, there is a small, dark-haired figure moving with the uneven rhythm of someone pulling luggage over a road surface never meant for small wheels.

After struggling along for a few minutes, he stops at the rusted iron gate of the Legrand property. I can see him clearly now, and if I hadn’t already been aware of his impending arrival, I would never have guessed his relation.

He is slender, with narrow shoulders and perhaps the smallest waist I’ve ever seen on a man. Dark, glossy hair falls just past his collarbones and lifts slightly in the faint breeze. It’s been drawn half-up in a ponytail, keeping most of the straight strands off his face, except for a few loose strays that sway in the breeze.

If I hadn’t been specifically told that the boy is Legrand’s grandson, I’m not sure I would be so hasty in assigning him a gender in my thoughts. He appears more like an androgynous woodland nymph than a person simply referred to as a man or woman.

Alberte Legrand was attractive in his prime, with a tall, lightly muscled frame, light brown hair cut cleanly, and the most curious, inquisitive green eyes set behind a pair of wire-frame glasses.

This boy, this Ryan Smith, appears to share nothing with his late grandfather other than the pale color of their skin and the distinct feeling that he’s running from something.

I continue to watch as Ryan unlocks the cottage door, disappearing inside with his bags. One by one, lights flicker on inside the cottage, and that’s when I turn to stride over to the desk.

The folder sits where I left it this morning, closed under the smooth piece of limestone I brought back from the quarry above Saint-Martin-de-Londres three years ago. It is the size and weight of a small cat, cool to the touch even in summer heat, and it holds the folder flat against the desk’s warped surface.

I lift it, then place it carefully to the left of the folder.

The contents are familiar in the way that old wounds are familiar—not comforting, but known. I spread them across the desk with the flat of my hand, aligning the edges out of habit. The original blueprints of the Legrand cottage, pulled from the village land registry after two months of decreasingly polite requests, one formal complaint to the prefecture, and a bottle of twelve-year Armagnac delivered to the right clerk’s doorstep. The paper is yellowed at the creases, the ink faded to a watery sepia. Room dimensions, wall thicknesses, the location of the original well—all of it rendered in the precise, unhurried hand of a draftsman who died before I was born.

Beside it, the 1987 agricultural survey map. Hand-drawn on graph paper, annotated in three different inks, showing the property’s outbuildings, such as the stone shed behind the cottage, the collapsed pigeonnier at its northern boundary, and the overgrown track that once connected to the main road before the lane was cut.

And then there’s the picture—grainy, slightly overexposed, with the contrast so blown out at the edges that the garden wall behind the two men appears to dissolve into white nothing. Alberte Legrand stands on the left, his shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled to the elbows, one hand resting on the cottage’s garden wall. On the right, Dr. Henri Voclain. Thinner, several years older than his colleague, with a narrow face that the camera has caught mid-expression—one hand raised, fingers splayed, as if he has just made a point he considers unassailable. Both men are smiling. Not the stiff, performative smile of a formal portrait, but something looser, more genuine. They look like men who have shared a good bottle and an even better conversation. The photograph is dated the summer of 2002. One year before my mother disappeared.

Nadia Moreau was a doctoral student in ethnobotany at the Université Paul-Valéry, her thesis on the medicinal applications of Mediterranean plant compounds already drawing quiet attention from journals that mattered. She was recruited in the spring of 1996 as a research assistant to Voclain, whose work on venom-derived pharmacological compounds had—according to the few published papers I have been able to locate—shown promise in the treatment of certain vascular disorders. The kind of promise that draws pharmaceutical investors.

The kind of promise that, I now believe, also draws the attention of parties who would prefer certain findings remain unpublished.

I was young when she first left me in the care of my father. At first, it was difficult for me to understand why she wasn’t by my side, but the letters helped.

Envelopes decorated with stamps she collected from the lab’s incoming mail arrived at our home in Valence like clockwork every few weeks.

The handwriting was always slanted forward, eager and excited, each sentence running into the next as if she could not write quickly enough to capture everything she wanted to tell me about the lab, their research, and the man at the center of it all, Dr. Voclain. One would have to be both blind and dumb to miss her idolization of him. She wrote about how brilliant he was, how he spoke five languages fluently and kept his notes in a cipher of his own invention, and how he treated his research team with a fierce, exacting loyalty that she found intoxicating after the competitive pettiness of academia.