Page 90 of Where the Snakes Sleep

“I know what fourteen hundred means.”

“Then why did you repeat it?”

“I don’t know.”

He takes another sip of coffee, which is Camille’s preferred response whenever he decides I’m being too ridiculous to deserve words.

That should probably annoy me.

Instead, I smile into my yogurt.

Three days.

I have been living in Camille’s house for three days, which is not the same thing as moving in, despite what the steadily increasing amount of my shit upstairs might suggest.

Temporary relocation is the phrase I’ve settled on. A.K.A. An emergency housing arrangement necessitated by the fact that some creepy bastard in a dark sedan apparently decided my cottage would make a fun place to case, then break into.

I am not living with Camille. I am staying with Camille.

There is an important distinction.

Granted, my distinction has become slightly less convincing now that my shampoo is sitting in his guest bathroom, my shoes kind of live at his front door, and yesterday I found one of my shirts folded in a basket of laundry that I absolutely did not wash myself.

The only problem is that three days into this supposedly temporary situation, we are no closer to knowing what the fuck somebody wanted from my cottage than we were when I first walked through the door and found everything just slightly wrong.

Well, that isn’t entirely true. We know more. A lot more, actually.

Enough that I’ve spent the last two nights lying awake thinking about illegal animal trafficking, missing researchers, suspicious snakebite deaths, my grandfather’s decades-long relationship with a possibly homicidal venom scientist, and the genuinely insane possibility that Alberte Legrand spent the last twenty-three years sitting on evidence capable of putting him—well, not anymore, R.I.P.—and his lover in prison for like a million things, or at least it seems like a million things.

That same afternoon, after Camille showed me the surveillance footage and old surveys, we went back to the cottage. He sent the footage of the creepy lurking car to the police and called a locksmith while I packed a few days’ worth of clothes, toiletries, etc.

Then we searched and found absolutely nothing.

The old window from the photograph would have been positioned along the rear portion of the kitchen wall, somewhere between the pantry cabinet and the section where the stone transitions into newer plaster from an old renovation. We measured. We knocked on things. We inspected the outside. Camille took photographs from approximately fourteen different angles because apparently one does not simply look at a wall when one possesses a scientific education; one documents the wall as though preparing it for peer review.

There was no door, no visible seam, no loose panel—nothing.

I used a screwdriver to pry up the cracked floor tile that I’d been hiding underneath the table, but all that was under it was stone. When Camille saw what I’d done, he sighed, helped me put the tile back into place without it looking too wonky, and scolded me for “going rogue and causing a mess.”

By late afternoon, the locksmith arrived, replaced the damaged lock, reinforced several points around the frame, and spoke to Camille in rapid French while periodically glancing at me in a manner I found vaguely insulting.

I asked Camille what he said, and he told me the man said my door was old. I am ninety percent certain that was not the entire conversation.

The following morning, we went back.

That search lasted almost five hours.

We moved furniture away from the kitchen wall, checked the pantry, measured the exterior again, and compared every interior dimension against the copies Camille had brought over.

At one point we ended up fucking against the wall outside after an argument about whether the original exterior stonework had been thick enough to explain part of the discrepancy.

I think that was the point when I started to notice Camille getting weird. And while I came twice as he held me against the rough stone and brutally pounded me over and over, I couldn’t ignore that it felt like he’d used sex to distract me from the search.

Every time we got closer to the part of the wall that didn’t make sense, his answers shortened, he’d zone out, or attempt to redirect my attention somewhere else.

I still can’t understand why. Why try to hinder the search when he was the one to tell me there was something to search for? Based on what I saw in his study, he obviously has had an obsession with what happened, like those people who get hyper-fixated on the Bermuda Triangle or the Zodiac Killer. Is he worried about actually finding the hidden evidence because that would mean the case he’s spent his life researching would be solved?

Whatever it is, I’m tired of it.