Free Crime Fraiche by Alexander Campion Page B

the weekend and finish the piece there. I could take the train on Friday. I still have four more interviews to finish, not to mention a restaurant to review on Thursday.” Alexandre smiled and kissed her on the forehead. “Besides, a few nights out with the copains —my dear old buddies—would do me a world of good.”
    The fact that Alexandre had been so quick to let her go off by herself tipped the scale back away from another week in the country. But as she remembered the glow of affection for her family that the week at Maulévrier had rekindled, it teetered back the other way. It was going to take more than irritation with Alexandre to get her to renege on familial duty, particularly as that piece of the puzzle of her life seemed to be fitting itself so nicely back into its slot.
    “You deserve some time off with your playmates,” she said. “I’ll go, but you have to promise to come on Friday evening and to behave while I’m gone.” When Alexandre kissed her forehead again, she felt her face flush.

CHAPTER 11
    “I t’s very unwise not to bring me mushrooms before taking them home. Very. Everyone in the village should know that,” Homais said as he methodically probed the basket with a surgical forceps. “You say you found these in the kitchen. That poor Odile has lost all her good sense.” He dumped the mushrooms on his worktable and began examining them one by one.
    Capucine felt a twinge of embarrassment at the primitiveness of her investigative technique, but this was les provinces after all. “Yes,” she said, “Odile was going to do something with them for dinner, but I thought it would be prudent to ask someone of your expertise to look them over first.”
    “ Someone of my expertise? Please. There’s no one with anything close to my knowledge of mycology between here and Rouen,” Homais said with utter seriousness. “Well, so far so good,” he said, continuing his examination. “These are all oyster pleurottes . A bit early for the season but sure to be very tasty.”
    “While I’m here, Monsieur Homais, I thought I’d ask you about that poor man who was killed accidentally at my uncle’s shoot. They brought the body here, didn’t they?”
    “Yes, they did. As you know, we don’t have a doctor in Saint-Nicolas, so I am often the resource of last resort, as it were. In fact, as you have seen, even though I don’t have a medical degree, I’m probably more skilled at dealing with bird-shot wounds than most doctors. But in that particular case there was nothing I could do. The poor man was dead long before he made it to this table.” Homais picked up a mushroom and held it high between index and thumb with the reverence of the curé elevating the host at mass.
    “Now, this one is what we scholars call a Cortinarius praestens ,” Homais said in what he imagined was the dusty tone of the university lecture hall. “What the paysans call the cortinaire remarquable . You have only a handful of them, but they are quite rare and exceptionally tasty. They’re already beginning to dry out, so I’d suggest you get the good Odile to make an omelet with them for your breakfast tomorrow morning.”
    To Capucine the cortinaire in question looked more shriveled and nasty than remarkable. No matter how rare it was, it certainly was not going to be gracing her breakfast table in the morning.
    “So the poor man was DOA,” Capucine said, fanning the embers of Homais’ description of the body.
    “Dead a good deal before OA,” Homais said with a dry laugh. “He took almost the full charge of shot in the chest. Now, you might not know this, but the physiological effect of shotgun shot is entirely different from solid bullets. Imagine we are shooting a pheasant. No single pellet is lethal, and, in fact, the pellets rarely go into vital organs, but once you reach the critical mass of four pellets, the bird is rendered unconscious. Six pellets and it’s dead. It’s what we medical men call