Chapter 53
For a few seconds Tiphaine enjoyed the echoing silence of the house after Sylvain and Milo’s departure. The sound of solitude, with fear her only companion—a fear she had never felt before, not even eight years earlier. Now the risk had turned from a threat to a nightmare.
She sat for a while staring at the front door, through which the two people she loved most in the world had just disappeared. The house creaked, making strange sounds, almost crystalline, as if she were in a palace. It was a warm evening, and she felt a film of sultry heat spreading over her, damp and slightly sticky, heady too, a faintly rank, cloying smell. She had a nasty taste in her mouth, like reflux.
And just above her head the shadow of a man swinging from the end of a cord.
How had she ever thought she could escape the demons of her conscience?
All of a sudden she stood up. She walked into the living room and over to the bookshelf with a determined step, and drew out Gérard Depardieu’s documents, which she had concealed in a row of books. The documents basically accused her and Sylvain of having been, if not the instigators, at the very least implicated in three deaths, one disguised as a heart attack and the other two as suicides. She went out into the entryway, absentmindedly caressing the documents’ smooth surface, and up the stairs to Milo’s bedroom, where she glanced around before eventually deciding on the bed.
She carefully placed the pile of documents on Milo’s pillow, in plain sight. She felt as if a vise gripping her throat had miraculously loosened, or a deep gulp of oxygen were being drawn into the lungs of a drowning man. It was like shuffling off a great weight that couldn’t be supported any longer. Tiphaine took a step back, then another, turned around and lost her balance from this strange lightness of being. She staggered out the door and into the hallway almost as though she were fleeing, and clung to the banister so as not to fall.
When she got downstairs she gave herself a few moments to pull herself together. This was not the time to fall apart. She focused all her attention on the next step, how events were going to unfold, the order in which everything needed to happen. The next step.
The telephone.
Tiphaine selected Nora’s name from her contacts and called the number. It rang five times before her neighbor answered. The first and second were the time it took Nora to locate her cell phone, the third to digest that it was Tiphaine who was calling, the fourth to hesitate, the fifth to decide to answer.
“Tiphaine?” Nora’s voice sounded crisp, hostile, assured.
“We need to talk.”
“I’m listening.”
“Not on the phone. We need to see each other. Face-to-face. We can’t live next door to each other in a permanent state of hostility. We need to talk things through once and for all.”
“What do you mean by ‘once and for all’?” Nora asked sarcastically.
Tiphaine sighed. “Listen, Nora...I don’t know what was going on in your husband’s mind, but what’s in those documents is a web of lies.”
Nora’s response was a skeptical silence.
“If you look closely, if you analyze everything he says, none of it holds up,” Tiphaine went on, sounding a little weary.
“And Maxime?”
This time it was Tiphaine who didn’t respond.
“That’s Sylvain’s and my business,” she said after a pause. “So, shall we get on with it?”
There was silence at the other end of the line. Nora seemed to be considering Tiphaine’s proposal. She weighed up the pros and cons, torn between the desire to deal with an untenable situation and her genuine fear of her neighbor.
“There’s no way you’re setting foot in my place.”
“I wasn’t planning to,” Tiphaine retorted. “You come to me.”
Nora couldn’t stop herself from a scornful exclamation. “Do you think I’d be dumb enough to go over to you on my own?”
“What are you afraid of, Nora? That I’ll kill you?” Tiphaine let out a wry laugh. “That’s absurd! If anything were to happen to you, don’t you think after our love scene the other night in front of the two cops I’d be the principal suspect?”
At the other end of the line, Nora’s dismay was palpable: the argument had hit home. Tiphaine said, “In fact, I’d better make damn sure nothing happens to you in the next few days.”
Another silence. Tiphaine was waiting. Savoring her victory, no doubt. Reveling in Nora’s hesitation and confusion.
“Sylvain isn’t here,” she said. “Nor Milo. We’ll be on our own.”
“I can’t come right away. I have to put Nassim to bed.”
