A glance at her mobile phone confirmed what she already knew: still no signal and the battery was slowly dying. She turned it off and wished the chateau had a generator; she would have traded the faulty two-way radio for a power source now that the indoor temperature had fallen close to that of outdoors. The fires at either end of the library were lit, but did little to warm more than a few feet beyond their hearths. Agnes wiggled her toes thankfully in the borrowed boots; she’d be frozen without them.
Moving near a fireplace she poured herself a cup of excellent coffee from a silver pot before walking the length of the library. Sixty paces. It would be impossible for anyone to say if the room was empty. The window niches were too deep and the upstairs walkway was completely obscured by shadow even in daylight. Perhaps Marie-José was wrong and Nick Graves was there most of the time, only stepping out for a few brief seconds as he claimed? Agnes studied the bookcases, swiftly calculating the number of volumes. Twenty thousand? Thirty? Each shelf was faced by finely worked metal covered with glass. She lifted a handle and had a soft leather volume in her hand when the door at the far end of the room opened. Frédéric Estanguet entered.
Earlier in the morning she had seen their Good Samaritan from a distance. Up close Estanguet’s face was tinged gray with fatigue. Evidently they had both slept poorly. Handing him a cup of coffee she thanked him again for helping Carnet and Blanchard down the hill. It would probably be the last time he offered to do the police a favor.
“I wish we had a way to get you home,” she said, knowing it was impossible.
“I can’t leave, not yet.”
Her face registered surprise and he shook his head. “I don’t know what I’ll find there. The damage will be the same everywhere. Roofs crushed by trees, water pipes frozen.” He shrugged, “And like here, I would have no electricity.”
Agnes pictured a small, dark, cold apartment. The chateau was cold but there were other amenities. She glanced at her hot coffee and the plate of pastries.
“And I live in Estavayer-le-Lac. It would be impossible to travel so far.”
“You don’t live in Ville-sur-Lac?”
Estanguet refilled his coffee cup. His color was improving. “I was in the village for a drink on my way home. It was wrong,” he continued. “She had her whole life in front of her. Dead where she didn’t belong. It’s all wrong. She shouldn’t have been out in the storm.”
Agnes was in agreement: Felicity Cowell deserved a chance at a long, productive future. She let Estanguet talk about the unfairness of life, her mind drifting to her own parents. She almost smiled. Her father would shrink from any mention of a violent death, while her mother would use it as an excuse to visit each of her friends. The story would guarantee she was the center of attention for a month. Agnes started to take a pastry from the tray then remembered the two she’d had earlier in the kitchen and checked the fit of her waistband. As a substitute she sipped her coffee, appreciating the warmth.
Finally Estanguet stopped talking, sat back in his chair, and sighed. Agnes reached over to pat his hand, hoping that he would one day forget the sight of the frozen body, although she knew she wouldn’t.
“You said that you don’t know the family but you do know the chateau. That’s curious.”
“I like the library, and they let people use it. A retirement project.”
“Were you a teacher?”
“Nothing of the sort. Started off as a guide. Hikes. Did some steep hills but not mountain climbing. That’s how I know we are stranded here. People think they can out-anger or out-think any obstacle but it’s not so. Mother Nature has a way of beating you down. She likes to fool you.”
Agnes remembered him staring at the bench earlier that morning. “Mademoiselle Cowell didn’t seem like a person to be outdoors in a storm. You said you didn’t know her?”
“I didn’t know her to recognize her, maybe I’d heard her name.”
“She’d been at the chateau for two weeks, and you are here often. I’m surprised. She used the library some.”
“I’ve been away for nearly a month myself. Vacation.”
Agnes had to smile at a vacation from retirement. “Not a good time to return, in the middle of a storm.”
“I’d picked my date and here I was. Didn’t think it would be a storm like what came. As I said, Mother Nature can be tricky. Saw your man, Carnet, and knew he wasn’t fit to walk down, not like he was planning to. People think they can sit and slide. They don’t realize that the ice will take you, hurl you off the edge. He needed something to hang on to, no different than mountain climbing. And crampons. Something to grip.”
“You got them down the hill safely.”
“She ought to have had more respect for the storm and stayed inside.”
“It must be a change to retire from an outdoor life and sit in a library and do research.”
“I left working as a guide long ago, when I was still nearly a boy. Met a man on one of my tours who liked what I could do with a needle. Fixed his tent and he talked me into apprenticing as a tailor. Took over from him when he passed and sewed my way through a lifetime.”