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“Protection. I’m going to close the rest of the shutters upstairs. You do the ones down here.”
Up the stairs she went. I went into the other two rooms and shut the shutters against nothing, then put on my slicker.
“I found this too,” she said, running back down the stairs. It was a piece of heavy pipe, about a foot long, that looked like a section of something much larger. “If he comes near us, this will knock him out.”
My sister was surprisingly good with the improvised weaponry, especially for someone who couldn’t even handle a spider. If Gerard was watching, I prayed that he just avoided us.
The air tasted moist, and everything smelled deeply of earth and wet lavender. It was a strange sky, everything going soft and fuzzy in the greenish diffused light. The frogs were out in full froggy force, and we practically had to dance down the path to avoid them. Aside from the wildly chirping cicadas, there was no noise except our feet on the gravel. The trees and heavy air seemed to soak up and muffle all other noise.
We saw no one on our walk. Marylou had the pipe at the ready the entire time. It started to rain after the first mile or so. It came down hard, making a deafening racket on the hoods of the heavy slickers. The pits in the road filled with water and were impossible to see, so we kept tripping into them.
The rain had one advantage, though. It made visibility poor. When we got to Henri’s cottage, it was easy to block Marylou’s field of vision and keep her looking the other way so she couldn’t spot it through the trees. We got past it, about another quarter mile or so, before my illusions of safety were shattered. We found him standing in the road, staring at nothing. Henri raised a hand in distracted greeting. He didn’t seem to notice the pounding rain. A cigarette disintegrated in his hand.
“My dog,” he said loudly. “I cannot find my dog.”
There was nothing I could do. Marylou was instantly rambling our dilemma at Henri, who didn’t seem to understand a word of it, but he pointed back toward his house. Marylou followed. So I did too.
It was humid in the kitchen now. Henri had been cutting onions. Loads of them. They were piled on the counter, a dozen or so. The cutting board on the table was piled high with them, sliced and chopped, an overflowing bowl next to it as well.
“I am making soup,” he said tonelessly. “Onion soup.”
A small television and DVD player sat on the end of the table, and Mission: Impossible (in French of course) was on, and Tom Cruise was doing his little Tom Cruise run.
“We need to call the police,” Marylou said. “A guy came to our cottage today. What was his name? Ger…Gerald?”
I made no effort to correct her, but it was a small village and Henri knew who she meant.
“There is a Gerard,” he said.
“That’s him,” Marylou said, nodding. “Kind of tall? Dark curly hair?”
“That sounds like Gerard.”
Henri didn’t seem too concerned about all of this. He pulled a bulb of garlic from a rope hanging in the corner and sat down at his cutting board. He took a moment to put a fresh cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it. Then he picked up the enormous knife. I reached for Marylou to pull her back, but he merely gave the garlic a massive thwack with the side of the knife to break it into cloves.
“My mother would cook the onions for hours,” he said. “In two bottles of wine. She would add them slowly, drip by drip.”
Smack, smack, smack. He whacked each clove of garlic, shattering the papery skin and breaking it off with his fingers. Marylou looked at me sideways and tried again. The heat and humid stench of onions in the room took my breath away.
“A phone,” she said. “We need to call the police. He attacked Charlie.”
“He attacked you?” Henri asked, not sounding overly concerned. “This surprises me.”
“He did,” Marylou assured him, thus spreading my lie. “Well, he cannot hurt you here. Sit down. It will be fine here. You are safe here. My wife…but she is not here right now.”
There was a strange omission in the sentence.
“Do you know this movie?” he asked, pointing the onion-sticky knife at the screen. “It is very American, but I enjoy it. Watch.”
“The police,” Marylou said again.
Henri went right on chopping. I had to do something—look around for a phone, a computer, something. Marylou had stashed the pipe under her slicker. If anything went wrong, hopefully she would use it.
“The bathroom,” I said, falling back on my old excuse. “Could I…”
He waved the knife as permission.
In the dark, knowing what I knew now…nothing was more horrible than those dark steps, the dozen photos of Henri’s wife. I have never felt so frightened. So alone. So doomed.
