Cries of the Lost by Chris Knopf

Author:Chris Knopf
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781579623739
Publisher: The Permanent Press
Published: 2013-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

TWO DAYS later I was walking through the Provençale woods with my smartphone in my hand and pack on my back. I had a new pair of hiking boots and a light rip-resistant jacket designed for the exact purpose they were being put to. I had a compass and a second handheld GPS just in case the phone fell in a stream or had a sudden software glitch.

It was ten in the morning. Natsumi had texted me while I waited in the Opel that she and Christian were having a lovely late breakfast under the plane trees of the Cours Mirabeau. I left the car in a little glade accessed by an unpaved road I’d spotted on my first trip into the hills, and I was now within the confines of the Saint Sébastien estate, as shown by no-trespassing signs posted with great frequency.

The early autumn day was pleasingly on the cool side, though the sun, still close to the horizon, was bright and difficult to block with the rim of my baseball cap. The woods were thick, but frequently opened up on garrigue—treeless spaces filled with local varieties of bramble and dense shrubbery, like kermes oak, juniper and wild thyme. The ground was littered with the pale grey rocks, designed to twist ankles, that seemed ubiquitous around the Mediterranean region. Which meant I spent as much time looking down as I did staring at the smartphone or surveying the landscape around me.

It took about an hour of strenuous hiking before I came on the first man-made landmark, a stone structure enclosing an ancient well once used to water livestock. I fixed it on Google Earth and the smartphone, and created a waypoint on the GPS. The house was about twenty minutes away, assuming the same speed-overground. I pressed on.

The blue dot representing me came within theoretical eyeshot of the main house about the same time I actually did. It was a mostly stone dwelling made up of several buildings of different heights cobbled together in an orderly fashion, which I knew from the aerials was in the shape of a U.

There wasn’t much in the way of landscaping beyond a few pergolas buried under mounds of roses, honeysuckle and wisteria, and small patio seating areas furnished with heavy iron tables and chairs and teak chaise longues.

I moved through the aromatic air and searched the exterior of the house for a way in other than the front door. I found what I was looking for near the end of a perpendicular leg of the U. There were no little signs alerting the criminal class that this building was equipped with an alarm system, as there would be in America, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t.

I studied the door frame and those of nearby windows, but found no telltales, like brass contacts, blinking motion sensors or errant narrow gauge wires, not that these things were usually visible from the outside.

While thus engaged, I didn’t notice the actual domestic defense apparatus walk up and sniff the small of my back.

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