Chapter Text
By the time he walks away from the new Cabrera estate, Benoit Blanc knows he's not going to let Marta Cabrera slip out of his life. Meeting her, understanding her heart, has felt like meeting someone he is supposed to know. He has only to follow the arc of their few days together to see its terminus. It is gravity, truth — inevitable.
He's not so presumptuous as to assume he knows how she should fit in his life, nor how he might fit in hers, but he knows all the same.
Perhaps we deserve each other, he’d said, back when he hadn’t yet found the hole in the center of the donut hole, when none of it had sat quite right. Back when the kind heart of Marta Cabrera was about to be destroyed by that wicked family. Maybe now, though, it can mean something good.
Perhaps they can deserve each other.
So when Lieutenant Elliott calls him before Ransom’s first hearing, three weeks after the arrest, Benoit asks if he might tag along on some of their final work tying up loose ends. Elliott has done a lot of the forensic work needed to tie Ransom to the fire, but there is more investigation of poor Fran and her involvement.
And so he stands on the Cabrera porch once again.
The three weeks have made a big difference in the weather if nothing else, and the chilly fall air has broken out into snow flurries. Elliott and Wagner are both wearing scarves tucked in their coats, but he feels the cold prickle at the skin on his bare throat.
“You know you’re not needed as a witness until the actual trial.” Elliott isn’t annoyed, but it’s clear Blanc will need to be very careful not to step on the toes of the local constabulary. No problem, he thinks, since he only has one concern left in this case.
“I am very aware of your competence, my friend,” he says, hastening with his reassurances. “I assure you that the nature of my visit is more personal.”
“He wants to see Marta,” Trooper Wagner informs Elliott, a little too much excitement flashing across his features.
Elliott rolls his eyes, but with good humor.
"Just don't let your puppy love ruin my case."
Blanc feels the urge to protest, but his lips have barely parted and he can’t even think of what he means to say before the door opens a crack. He holds his breath in anticipation of seeing Marta's face again, but is instead greeted with that of an older woman who is obviously her mother.
She looks nervously at the two police officers, and without another thought, Blanc pushes himself to the front of the group.
"You must be Mrs. Cabrera. I am Benoit Blanc, and these —"
She opens the door fully at that, any trace of nerves gone.
“You are the detective who saved Marta,” she says, rather than asks, and he shakes his head reflexively.
“I merely helped her understand the full truth of the situation, Mrs. Cabrera. She didn’t need saving because she had done nothing wrong.”
That makes her smile, wide.
“And these are with you?” She looks back and forth between Elliott and Wagner.
Elliott raises an eyebrow at him, and the meaning is clear — You were supposed to stay out of the way. Blanc shrugs, all innocence. Well, mostly innocence. He wasn’t about to let them make Mrs. Cabrera nervous, after all.
“I’m merely here while Lieutenant Elliott and Trooper Wagner,” he points at each in turn, “ask a few questions.”
She nods and invites the three into the house — there’s some quick shouting, her up the stairs and someone back down, the Spanish too fast for his ears to follow, and then she's shepherding them in.
"Come in, come in." She takes their coats, moving quickly, but he thinks it's adamance rather than impatience. When she takes his coat, Benoit watches her frown at his lack of scarf.
"And how are you enjoying the new Cabrera Estate?"
She laughs, just a touch manic.
"None of us knows what to think," she says, shakes her head and looks around the room full of someone else’s knick knacks.
"I imagine it would be quite a lot to deal with without the legal battle on top of it all."
Whatever she might have said next is cut off by Marta’s footsteps creaking down the stairs. He looks up at her and can’t help but smile — she’s still overwhelmed by everything, that much is clear, but she looks better than she had in the brief days of their acquaintance.
“Detective Blanc,” she says, perhaps slightly breathless, or perhaps it is only that the sight of her makes him slightly breathless and he projects. “I wasn’t sure if I’d see you again.”
Elliott cuts in: “Benny asked if he could tag along while Trooper Wagner and I ask a few questions about Fran.”
“No problem,” Marta says, “I haven’t touched her room, if you want to —”
“That would be great,” Elliott agrees, and he and Wagner head off. “You two can catch up while we look around.”
Benoit is embarrassed for a moment that any ability to be more circumspect in his motives has been stolen from him, but Marta just smiles.
“Would you like to take a walk?” Marta asks the question, almost shy but not quite, her hand gesturing out at the grounds.
“He doesn’t have a scarf, mija,” Mrs. Cabrera says, disapproval evident.
“He can borrow one of mine, Mama.”
And that’s how he finds himself walking back out the front door in his coat, neck circled by dark, burnt-orange wool that smells of a light citrus fragrance and a pleasing musk that he thinks must be all Marta Cabrera.
“Sorry it’s not your color,” she says, a careful smile in his direction.
“I suppose it is not,” he pulls the fabric away from his neck to look at it, holds it to his face and poses briefly for her. “I have been told that I have a Spring complexion.” The words are light, teasing, and they have the intended effect of making her laugh. “However, it is warm, so I do thank you.”
She smiles easily, waves off thanks.
“My mother still complains that it is always so cold here,” Marta says, and though she sounds mildly exasperated with her mother, the way she rubs her arms indicates that she agrees.
“And how long has your family lived up here?”
“Twelve years? We moved up from Miami when I started college. Scholarship.” She shrugs her shoulders and he nods. “What about you? Where is your home?”
“I live on the coast of Mississippi, though I confess I travel so much I don’t spend half my time there.” She nods, and he can see her absorbing this information.
Quiet falls between them as they walk, as he wonders if more questions about her well-being would be too presumptuous.
They pause at the edge of a grove of trees that’s well out of view of the house. He hadn’t realized where she was leading them, out to a place where it seems they’re more alone, where the estate doesn’t eat up the environs.
“I’m okay,” she says finally, as though she read his mind but was waiting until she didn’t have to see the house to say it. As though perhaps not seeing the house makes it more true.
He takes the statement as permission — to ask more, to verify the full truth.
“I am glad,” he says. “It can’t be easy, though, to face the future of this estate and the trial while mourning a friend.”
There’s a small bench, wooden slats warmed by the sun enough that they can sit on it, very close together. He can feel the warmth that radiates from her, her knee pressing to the side of his leg when she shifts to look at him.
“No. It’s not.” She forces a smile, but he can see the wetness in her eyes, her arms wrapped around herself. "I thought I would have stopped crying about him by now." Her posture doesn’t invite the comfort of a touch, but he wants to give her something.
“You were so mired in guilt, and then the world was turned upside down before you had any chance to feel the full weight of your grief.”
Her eyes close for a moment, a few tracks of tears on her cheeks.
“It’s hard because sometimes I’m so angry at Harlan,” she says. “How he could...do this to me.”
“Yes, I do believe he might have handled the whole matter of his will with more care. As it is, he rather left you to the wolves.” He wonders if Harlan Thrombey just underestimated the vile machinations of his family, or if he could have somehow made this all right if there had been more time.
“I always used to tell him that he had trained his whole family to confuse love and money. He was trying, you know, to fix things with them. If he had lived, I think he could have. But this… Even if he meant to help, I was still a pawn in the games he was playing with the family. Wasn’t I?”
“If he really was trying to make things right, then perhaps you can just know that he didn’t intend for it to end like this,” he says.
The memory of witnessing Harlan Thrombey’s premature death clearly hits Marta across her face, and more tears slip down her cheeks.
He lets her cry for a while — minutes that seem much longer than they are as he holds back any offer of some kind of comfort. She’s still drawn into herself, after all, and he doesn’t want to push it. Finally, he touches her shoulder for just a moment, not even long enough to feel the warmth of her through her coat, just because he needs to.
“He’d have wanted you to be happy.” He says it with finality even though he can’t fully grapple with the choices made by the late Harlan Thrombey. Still, having met Miss Marta Cabrera, knowing that the man had loved her in some way, he thinks it’s logical to assume that much.
“Thank you,” she says, eyes closed. He watches as she draws two deep breaths before she opens her eyes and meets his. “My mother and Alice are worried about the house and the money, and Alan is worried about the publishing, and the police are here for the trial. I haven’t gotten to just...breathe.”
“You are most welcome,” he says because it’s true — if this is how he fits in her life, as the person who lets her breathe, he will be happy. “Would you like to sit out here for a while longer?”
“No, let’s go back. I’ll make some tea?”
He nods and falls into step with her back to the house, as she tells him some of the options they’re considering for the estate.
It shouldn’t surprise her, but somehow it still does, when the Thrombeys close ranks around Ransom. Maybe it’s the only thing Linda and Richard agree on at all. Even Meg, even Meg who hated Ransom and was friends with Fran, even Meg will testify for the defense.
The lawyers have warned her, so she knows it’s coming — maybe that makes it worse, the way the fear and the anger have time to fester.
But as she approaches the courthouse, all alone, she feels hollow.
Her mother is safe, now — Green Card, on the way to citizenship if she wants it — but she still hyperventilates at the idea of a courtroom. Alice finally left for school.
So she’s alone and hollow.
She’s been here a few times for jury duty, but it’s different now, as though the building somehow changed overnight, grew bigger and scarier and more unwelcoming. The march from the parking lot to the stone steps makes her feel like she might be the one on trial, like she’s walking to her death, and she finds herself scanning the wall around the courthouse hopefully, not sure of what she’s looking for until she sees him.
Detective Blanc has seen her first, though, because he’s already putting out his cigar and striding towards her, wearing his brown coat and a blue scarf her mother knit specifically to match his eyes.
(“He has very nice eyes,” her mother had said over knitting needles and late-night reruns.
“Mama!”
“Not for me.” Her innocent, somehow knowing shrug. “I’m just saying.”)
“Miss Cabrera,” he greets her, slightly formal in a way that he always is, but perhaps also more so than usual. Or maybe that’s just her.
“Detective Blanc.”
He pauses in front of her, eyes sliding over her face like he’s reading her.
“You look like you’re about to engage in some mistruthin,’” he says, his lips barely curved into a smile, and it makes her laugh.
Her hand slides over her stomach, which does keep heaving.
“I feel like it,” she admits.
Detective Blanc nods once, and then lays a gentle hand on her shoulder as he starts them towards their courtroom. It’s nice — to suddenly feel less alone, to feel supported as she goes to face down this awful family.
She’s surprised, though, when he pulls them into an alcove away from the courtroom. She’d sat out here once while waiting for voir dire, trying to think of what she would say if a lawyer asked a question about immigration, about whether she’d ever broken a law, about...
“Hey,” Detective Blanc pulls her attention from worrying about the past on top of the present. “No matter what happens today, you have done nothing wrong. That family treated you abysmally. They tried to break you, and they failed.”
“But they’ll all be in there, just...slandering me.”
The prosecuting attorneys have been fairly certain that questioning her character will be a key part of their case, even though it won’t change the facts of the trial. Even though her character has nothing to do with Ransom’s attempted murder, and murder, and arson charges.
“That’s probably true. But whatever lies they try to tell about you, I have plenty of evidence of their bad characters. And mine has the benefit of being true.”
She can’t help her smile, can’t believe how he can make her feel like things are okay.
“Come on, now.”
He sits beside her, warm and steady, and when Meg takes the stand to repeat the same pointless-but-hurtful accusations (boinking?), he grips her hand hard, just for a moment.