After Renaud had told her about the information he was collecting in his small book, Haidée had insisted on going back out the next morning to examine the wall bordering the observatory’s land and the neighboring farm.
“We didn’t find anything here last time,” he said as they stood about a yard away from the stone wall. Both of them were staring at it, but Haidée was scrutinizing it more closely. The marten had returned and was draped over her right shoulder, its pelt gleaming in the pale morning sunlight. It was sleeping. “If anything was here, the rain from the previous days would have washed it away.”
“Maybe it did wash it away,” she replied as she stepped closer to the stones. “But I just have this feeling that there’s something here.” After a decidedly nasty headache she had the previous night, she had seen a brief vision. Perhaps it had just been her imagination conjuring up a picture of what D’Aubigne must have looked like, dead on the wall when the farmer had found his body. But there was just something about it that jogged an idea in her head. She rarely ignored her intuition even if she didn’t want it.
“Well, if you think there’s something here, what do you think it might be?”
“I’m not sure.”
Haidée tugged off her left glove and put her hand on top of the wall. The stone felt a bit grainy and cold, but otherwise, there was nothing. “Where exactly did the farmer find D’Aubigne?”
“He didn’t say. But I do recall that he mentioned that he had spotted the body when he was trying to get a horse back into his stable.”
“Where’s the stable? Maybe if we look at the wall from that angle, there might be some obvious place where one could have spotted a body.”
Renaud looked skeptical at his idea, but he didn’t dismiss it. “We could give that angle a try. There’s a building up ahead.”
She looked past the wall and saw the building he was indicating, a squat structure beyond the apple trees. She remembered when she had first spotted Renaud investigating near the area and thought that he was doing something extremely suspicious. She had stolen one of the apples and eaten it for lunch. She shook her head. “I took a closer look at it before. It’s just an abandoned shed. Let’s walk further along this wall. Maybe there’s another building elsewhere.”
They followed the wall, heading in direction of the north edge of the island, overlooking part of the Atlantic Ocean and the channel that separated the continent from the northern island country, England. The day was as clear as before and the air was almost balmy. Breezes brought in the scent of the ocean—salty and slightly fishy.
The wall ended just as the farm property was cut off by the island edge. Haidée looked down the cliffs and watched the surf crashing into the sheer rock. For a moment, she felt a moment of vertigo and she reached out to the wall to steady herself.
When her fingers touched rock, a shock bolted up through her arm and she nearly fell to her knees.
“Haidée? What’s wrong?”
Her skin felt cold and clammy. Renaud held her shoulders, steadying her. She released her hold from the wall and grabbed his waist instead and tried to take a deep breath to clear her head. “It’s the wall,” she said.
He turned to look at the stone. “I don’t see anything.”
Haidée stepped back away from him to take a closer look at the wall. She kept her hands to herself. At first glance the gray stone itself did not look any different than the stone in the other parts of the wall. But she could almost feel, almost smell that there was something slightly off. She edged a bit closer and then the scratches on the stone became evident.
“There’s a sign here,” she finally said. “You can hardly see it. It’s as if someone had scratched the symbol onto the rock with a coin so that it’s there but hardly visible to the casual observer.”
“What sort of sign is it?”
She could make out the angles, the shapes, and the curves. It was at once beautiful and horrible. She wrapped her arms around herself yet she could hardly tear her eyes away from it. “It’s a modification of a very simple kind of sign,” she replied. “In itself, one wouldn’t suspect anything from the simple sign. But with the addition, it becomes more complicated.”
“You’re beginning to sound like an astronomer completely fixated by his numbers.”
A faint smile curved her lip. “Do I? Well, I suppose we all are experts on something. To be honest, I can’t really say exactly what the sign is for since I’ve never studied its like before, but I can say that it has very bad implications. The sign means give and take. It’s for sacrifices.”
“It’s death magic then.”
“Quite possibly. I think D’Aubigne’s body was found at this spot. However, this doesn’t prove that he was killed here.”
Renaud kept looking at the spot on the wall, pensive. “D’Aubigne did say that he was going out that day to meet with somebody. He didn’t say who he was meeting. It could have been any number of people. I suppose we could eliminate the people who stayed in the observatory during that time. Even though we didn’t know exactly where they were.”
“Monsieur Everard said that you were out with him trying to bring back some contraption to the observatory.”
“Yes, that’s right. We were out for only a moment though. And we didn’t see anything—the storm was too dark to see much beyond our faces, actually. So that would leave anyone else who wasn’t at the observatory.”
Haidée turned to look out at the sea. “Monsieur Davenport was supposedly at home since he did not come to the observatory to work at the library that day. There are also all the other villagers. Like the magistrate. And then there are the other vacationers.”
“Perhaps Davenport holds a grudge against the other astronomers that we don’t know about,” said Renaud. “He is, after all, just a librarian.”
“He told me once that he was treated nothing other than a glorified clerk,” Haidée replied. “But he didn’t sound bitter about it. To me, he sounded content about his occupation.”
“Some people are very good at hiding their discontent,” Renaud pointed out.
“They are very good actors, you mean,” she said coolly. “I know, I know. It is a very obvious observation that I should have already caught on by now. But I have this weakness for taking most people who are not actors at face value.”
“At least you are aware of your weaknesses.”
She looked over at the wall as it stretched back towards the interior of the island. A little ways away, she spotted an odd grayish speck on the other side of the wall that looked somewhat out of place. “What is that?”
“What is what?”
She briskly walked back a few paces and then hiked up her skirts to climb over the wall.
“Haidée…”
She was already on the ground and next to an abnormally large pile of gold and red leaves at the foot of a skinny elm tree when Renaud vaulted over the wall and came to stand beside her. She crouched down to brush the leaves away to reveal gray hair.
As more leaves came away, it became clear that the speck was a person.
Edouard Garnier lay partially on his side, his mouth open in a silent scream, his eyes glazed over in terrified death. The short astronomer’s body was nude except for the inked symbols written from the nape to the base of the spine.