Death and Transfiguration

Chapter 24

Somewhere along the Avenue du Maine, as Moreau, Léa, and I headed toward the jail where Sylvestre was awaiting his trial, I bumped into Louise Pascal once again. "Miss Brackenborough," she said somewhat bitterly. "Aren't you supposed to be at work?"

"How do you know my schedule?" I asked.

"I have my methods," Miss Pascal said. "Now what are you doing running around the city with these two good-for-nothings?"

"I take offense to that!" Léa exclaimed. "Meet me at the fencing hall, Miss Pascal, and I'll show you exactly what I'm good for."

Pascal seemed rather alarmed. "I don't want to fight you, Miss Valencourt," she said hastily.

"What?" Léa said. "Are you too scared?"

"Yes!" Pascal exclaimed. "I barely know how to fence - I won't be talked into dueling the master swordswoman of Paris." Léa smirked, while Pascal turned to me. "I take back what I said earlier, but Miss Brackenborough, you still haven't answered my question."

"We're...uhh...going to the district jail to visit Mr. Sylvestre," I said.

"We're going to break him out!" Léa exclaimed, but I quickly covered her mouth, hoping that Miss Pascal hadn't heard our plan, as vague and ill-conceived as it was.

Pascal wrote something down in her notebook, and all of a sudden, I had an idea. "Could I see your notebook?" I asked.

Pascal was silent for a while, looking rather nervous as she flipped through the notebook, but after several moments had passed, she tore out a few pages and then handed the notebook to me. "There's some confidential information in there, but most of the details pertaining to Bergmann and Lajoie murder should be safe for you to peruse at your leisure," she explained as she stuffed the pages that she'd torn out into her purse.

I opened up the book, and I soon found some interesting information in Miss Pascal's pages upon pages of reports.

I spoke to Bertrand Sylvestre's next-door neighbor, Marie-Rose Pernot, at four in the afternoon today. She was thankfully willing to discuss the events of the night of Lajoie's murder with me, and she disclosed several useful details. She was playing cards during the afternoon with her grown son, who had come over to visit, and after he left around five o'clock, she went outside to water her garden. While she was outside, she watched Bertrand and Sophie Sylvestre come outside with croquet mallets, and they proceeded to play a game of croquet. Madame Pernot tended to her garden for a long time, going inside around 6:30 to eat dinner with her husband, and according to Pernot, at this point, the Sylvestres were still playing croquet. She paid less attention to her neighbors in the evening, but she mentioned that "those damn neighbors" had just gone inside when she went to bed at ten o'clock. According to those who were in the rehearsal room, they heard gunshots sometime between 6:10 and 6:15 PM, and Lajoie's body was discovered in the corridor shortly afterwards - since Mr. Sylvestre was seen playing croquet with his daughter at this time, there is little to no possibility that he could have killed Mr. Lajoie.

"Have you shown this to the police?" I asked Miss Pascal.

"They don't listen to people like you and I, Miss Brackenborough."

"It's worth a try," I said.

Pascal sighed. "If you want, you can take the pages about Sylvestre to the police station," she said. "Don't get your hopes up though. They've never trusted me, and I doubt you'll fare any better."

"Thank you, Miss Pascal!" I exclaimed as I tore a few pages out of the notebook and then ran off with Léa and a rather exhausted Moreau. Pascal shrugged and headed off in the opposite direction, but with these pages in my hands, I felt like I knew what I was doing for once. Not only could we break Sylvestre out of jail, but we could prove his innocence too.