Read Online Deadly Slipper by Michelle Wan - Free Book Online

the dark, they drew together, sharing a sagging double bed. Vrac had slept with his mother since his first day of life, when she had given him the breast, the only bounty he had ever received from her, and continued to do so unthinkingly into adulthood and middle age.
    In a region where places took the names of the inhabitants, the Rocher farm was simply referred to as La Binette. Its narrow fields lay between the forest and the road. The house, built over a byre, a style more typical of Quercy than Périgord, stood in a wooded combe.
    The byre, once used for stabling animals, served la Binette (the woman) as a cheese cellar and Vrac as a storehouse. There Vrac kept his fishing tackle, gutting knife, shotgun, and other items—a book (he could no more read than fly, but he liked the pictures of the flowers); a dog collar; a canvas backpack; old boots; a green bicycle bearing the stamp
Phoenix Made in China
, which he occasionally rode.
    For the most part, the mother was incurious about the son’s treasure hoard, her only interest being the possible value of a given object. However, one day many years ago, la Binette happened to notice that a camera had been added to the collection. She pickedit up and examined it because it looked to be expensive. Then she heard a noise behind her. Turning, she saw her son’s form, framed in the low doorway of the byre, blotting out the light.
    “No,” Vrac croaked hoarsely, hands dangling heavily at his sides. “Put.”
    Dropping the camera back onto the pile, la Binette pushed roughly past her son to the outside. Sometime after that, she saw that the camera had gone.
    •
    High on a prominence above La Binette (the farm) and at the top of a tortuous road, stood the grand but decrepit château of Les Colombes. It, too, was heavily screened by trees—from most angles, nothing more than its numerous chimneystacks could be seen. To the northwest, it looked across a broad valley to the village of Malpech. In all other directions, it was surrounded by forests and fields.
    At one time all of the land for leagues around, La Binette included, had been part of the Seigneurie of Les Colombes, owned by the powerful de Sauvignac family. However, over the course of ten generations, the Seigneurie had been so parceled, hacked, sold, and ceded that only the château, with its adjoining woodland, remained. Nevertheless, the fact that the estate was still in the hands of an unbroken line of de Sauvignacs was a matter of local pride.
    How la Binette’s father, a drunken day laborer with never two sous to rub together, had come toacquire a corner of Les Colombes was a mystery. “Silence is golden,” the more cynical locals said knowingly, tapping the sides of their noses, suggesting that the scoundrel Rocher had rooted out something about the family worth the price of a parcel of land. When Rocher died—“Fetched by the devil,” they said, for he had been found in a ditch one winter morning, frozen stiff, mouth wide open as if mid-shout—the farm had passed to his stony, antipathetic daughter and her son. And so things had continued over the years, with la Binette and Vrac tending their sheep and wresting their harvest of root crops from the wet, exhausted soil.
    •
    La Binette was on the big-nosed postman Gaston’s route. For years, his canary-yellow minivan had bucketed past the place, making only infrequent stops. There was rarely any mail for the residents, mostly circulars and bills that the
facteur
deposited in a rusty iron box set on a cairn of stones at the roadside. Never had he needed to negotiate the narrow track leading from the road to the farmhouse itself. Just as well, for Gaston, like others, preferred to stay well clear of mother and son.
    However, on this afternoon there was a delivery requiring a signature. From the Electricité de France, so it had to have something to do with the electricity. As he turned off onto the muddy, rutted lane, Gaston reflected that, in all the time