Page 12 of Where the Snakes Sleep

When she wasn’t writing about the doctor, snakes were the next best thing. She wrote about all of the different species in their glass enclosures and the way Voclain handled them with the calm reverence of someone who understood that danger and value were not opposites but twins. She described the extraction process in terms simple enough for a child to follow—the careful restraint, the fangs, and the pale gold venom collected from them drop by drop. It looks like honey, but it isn’t, she had written. It looks like something alive even after it’s left the body.

The letters stopped arriving during the summer of 2003.

My mother was reported missing alongside two other researchers from Le Mas Voclain. An eleven-week investigation produced forty-three pages of official documentation, twelve interviews with local residents, and exactly zero credible leads. The lead inspector, a man named Fournier from the Montpellier gendarmerie, died of a viper bite on a hiking trail above Ganges one month into the investigation.

Fournier’s death was ruled accidental by the prefecture. A tragic coincidence. The kind of thing that happens in this region, where snakes are numerous and trails are poorly marked.

The case was archived, and Le Mas Voclain was quietly sold to a development consortium from Lyon six months later. Voclain himself disappeared—no forwarding address, no publication record after 2003, no death certificate on file in any department I have been able to search.

And no one, in any official channel, found the sequence of events worth pursuing beyond the tidy conclusion already provided.

My father did.

Alain Moreau had never been a scientist.

He had no doctorate, no university position, no wealthy patrons or influential colleagues who answered his telephone calls. He had spent most of my childhood at home with me while my mother built the career she had dreamed about since before I was born. He cooked our meals, attended school meetings, washed my clothes, and remembered when I needed new shoes.

And when my mother left for Le Mas, it was my father who made her absence feel temporary, turning her letters into an event whenever they arrived and pinning the stamps she sent me to a corkboard above my bed.

They had arranged their marriage around my mother’s ambition without resentment, or at least without any resentment I ever witnessed.

He was so proud of her.

That pride made what followed particularly cruel.

For the first several weeks after her disappearance, my father was treated as the grieving husband. But as time went on, people were growing increasingly frustrated by the lack of someone to crucify for the crime.

The newspapers discovered that my mother had spent long stretches away from home. A neighbor remembered hearing raised voices coming from our apartment months earlier when Nadia had briefly returned home on holiday.

Ordinary things become suspicious when repeated often enough beneath a photograph of a missing woman.

So came the insinuations.

Perhaps Nadia had intended to leave him.

Perhaps Alain had resented her work.

Perhaps the husband who remained in Valence while his wife lived hundreds of kilometres away had finally decided he had been humiliated enough.

I was eight years old and did not understand why photographers occasionally waited outside our building and why my father always kept the curtains drawn.

Years later, I found records showing that at least one anonymous statement directing investigators toward Alain arrived through an intermediary with connections to Voclain.

I have never been able to prove Henri authored it, and yet, I have never needed proof to know.

The police questioned my father repeatedly. They searched the apartment. They examined his finances, his movements, his old pre-marriage flings.

The press did the rest.

Eventually, he was cleared of any meaningful suspicion—officially.

Unofficially, suspicion has a longer life.

My father spent the following two years trying to find my mother while simultaneously defending himself against the suggestion that he had made her disappear.

He wrote to investigators who stopped answering.

He contacted journalists.