Bennett Sisters Mysteries Volume 5 & 6

by Lise McClendon

  Something moved off to the left by a copse of trees. How could the goats have gotten so far on their tether? They were full of mischief. She headed across the pasture and reached the trees. Shadows were deep here. She paused, peering into the dark.

  “Come here, my pets,” she cooed. “Time to go home.”

  A grunt came from behind a tree, followed by the rustling of leaves and a groan. She startled. “Who’s there?”

  “Aidez—“ A voice, male, whispered. “Aidez-moi.”

  Who needed help? Odette couldn’t see anyone. She stepped toward the voice. “Where are you?”

  “Ici. Here.”

  She almost stumbled over his leg, outstretched from behind a tree trunk. “Oh. Pardon.” She leaned down. He was slumped to one side, holding his other leg. “Are you injured?”

  “My leg,” he whispered.

  A cloth was wrapped around his thigh. His face was taut with pain. His long hair was tangled with leaves. How long had he been out here?

  “I’ll be back in a moment. Stay right here,” she said stupidly. He wasn’t going anywhere. She ran back to the barn, struggling to open the heavy door. She found the wheelbarrow tipped up in a corner, righted it, and pushed it outside.

  The old thing was heavy and clumsy to maneuver through the lumpy pasture. Finally, she was back at the copse. She left the wheelbarrow and stepped in to the darkness, hoping the man was still alive.

  “Allo? Monsieur?”

  “I am here.” His voice was very weak. “Can you help me? I need water.”

  “We must get you inside. I have the wheelbarrow if you can stand—“

  “Not inside. Too many questions.”

  Was he a criminal? How had he been injured? Where was he from?

  Those questions.

  She was able to reassure him that she would only take him to the barn. It was too cold to spend the night outside in his condition. She would bring him food and water to the barn and keep his presence a secret, if that was what he wanted. For some reason he believed her.

  With her help, he rose on his good leg and hopped to the wheelbarrow. He was tall and muscular, easily a foot taller than she was. It was awkward with him draped over her shoulders. She pushed him into the wheelbarrow. He moaned in pain but held on to the sides as she managed to get him back across the bumpy pasture, through the gate, and into a little-used fruit store that smelled of fermented plums. It was clean enough and she brought over some hay from the barn for him. Then she went back to the house, let herself in the kitchen and pumped water into a bucket and stuck a small piece of cheese in her skirt pocket.

  He was asleep, or unconscious, when she returned, his dark hair splayed across his face. It was a handsome face of a man not old but not young either. His hands were black with dirt, the way hers had looked while she walked south. Water was for drinking not washing. She set down the bucket and left the cheese wrapped in a handkerchief. If only she had a blanket, she thought. The nights were getting cold. But he was well-dressed in a wool coat and trousers. She straightened his coat to cover him better. His boots of good black leather looked much nicer than her walking shoes. She looked at his wound under his hand. Old blood stained the tourniquet around his thigh. Tomorrow, when he was rested, she would see about getting him help with that.

  “Merci, mademoiselle,” he croaked as she stood to go. “Beaucoup.”

  Nine

  Malcouziac

  The Dordogne sun shone bright and hot on the table where Merle sat sipping her second café au lait and re-reading what she’d written. She’d been back in the village for twenty-four hours and was still looking through her research notes from her productive day at the American University. And then there was Pascal.

  His call during the train home from Paris had put him in an odd mood. Another one. Was it Clarisse again? He wouldn’t say. If it wasn’t Clarisse wouldn’t he have said? She had never encountered this with Pascal before, this moodiness and secrecy. Of course, everyone had moods. Life gives a person moods. Smooth sailing life was not. But Pascal’s mood deepened on the train and when they arrived in Bergerac he announced abruptly that Merle must get a rental car and get herself home. He couldn’t take her after all. He had to work.

  And that, the suddenness of it, the quick goodbyes, had put Merle in a bit of a funk. The honeymoon period was over with her Frenchman. When they run off like a husband on a business trip, all preoccupied and brisk, ready to be gone, off into action in the world instead of being happy at home with you—? It pained her. This was an awkward patch in their relationship, she realized, maybe even a turning point where they could go forward or not. Seeing Clarisse had made that clear. He still had some feelings of responsibility toward her, maybe something more, even if she was trying to extort money out of him. And the boy had rattled him too.

  Was it a midlife crisis? She sighed. Male midlife crises were so predictable. He was probably the right age for one. Did Frenchmen have midlife crises, or just take a new lover and call it good? Did they buy red convertibles and grow snazzy beards? Was Merle his midlife lover? Was there someone else? What did that mean?

  There were too many questions without answers.

  Maybe she would go see Irene who owned the goats and get away from the questions in her head. Yes, she would call the goat farmer tonight and see when was a good time. But could she stay at Pascal’s like before? He hadn’t given her a key to his cottage. It was a dreamy little place on the top of a hill north of Toulouse, shabby, dusty, and isolated: there was nothing to dislike about it. Last May she’d zoned out in the garden, watching apple blossoms fall to earth. And learning about goats from Irene. That’s where she’d dreamed up Odette and her French revolutionary adventures. It would be an excellent place to work on the book.

  The waiter came by. He was young, new to the village, or at least not someone Merle recognized. With fewer than 500 residents she recognized many of the young ones; Malcouziac was nearly seventy-five percent elderly. This man was not 30, scrawny, with pimples and thin, mean lips. She caught his eye.

  “I think I’ll have some lunch,” she said. He brought her a menu. It was nearly lunch time and a few more tables filled with diners, enjoying the summer sunshine on the terrace of the café. The waiter got busy with the other people, bringing them menus and napkins and salt shakers, adjusting umbrellas, finding chairs. She laid her menu down to wait, having decided again on the salade de campagne, the country salad, a fabulous sort of chef’s salad with bacon and hardboiled eggs.

  She looked up at the man sitting two tables over, facing her, and startled. It was the man with the scar again. He was alone this time, perusing the plastic-covered menu. Merle looked away, uncomfortable to be so close again to him. Who was he? He had made his way into her story as the face of the Count. Her character couldn’t keep her eyes off the scar— and neither could she.

  How embarrassing. Maybe she should go home for lunch.

  The waiter arrived. “Madame?”

  She mumbled her way through her order, splurging on a glass of bubbly Gaillac Perlé. Pascal had introduced her to it. She kept her voice down and the waiter had to bend closer to hear her. For some reason she didn’t want the stranger to hear her American accent. When the waiter took away her menu she went back to her notebook, head down, eyes down. The classic pose of someone who doesn’t want to be interrupted.

  She picked her way through her salad, sipping the dry sparkling wine and looking at birds in the fountain nearby. For nearly an hour she sat curled over her work and her lunch, biding her time. She ordered another coffee. The man with the scar finished his meal and rose to leave. She watched him throw down some money and glance at her, then he wound through the tables. He rounded the corner on the plaza and disappeared.

  When the waiter returned with her coffee she asked him if he knew who the man was. He looked confused. She pointed at the now-empty table and made a quick gesture to indicate the scar. The waiter shook his head.

  “Désolé, m
adame. I am new here,” he said.

  “Je m’appelle Merle Bennett,” she said, introducing herself. She held out a hand. He looked embarrassed but took her hand limply. “I am American but will be living here on Rue de Poitiers for a few months. Until Christmas.”

  The waiter couldn’t have cared less about her residency in the village. He nodded politely and disappeared with her dirty dishes. Well, she tried. Maybe he’d make it through the summer and they’d meet again.

  Still, she wanted to know who that stranger was. She couldn’t say why exactly. He played some part in her story so maybe they were meant to meet. He didn’t look like a friendly person, not with those intense eyes and that sneer. He looked about sixty, with gray hair. He wore ordinary clothes, like a farmer would wear when he came into town, plain but serviceable. Was he a farmer? He must live around here.

  Her mind was on overdrive again. Something about that man made her imagination run. Her musings kept her mind off Pascal and Tristan, what they were up to, how they were doing, why didn’t they call, why didn’t they write. She didn’t want to be that sort of lover, or mother. She would give them space.

  In this room of her own, here in Malcouziac with time to burn, she could wonder about strangers. Make up imaginary lives for them, conjure up scary counts and goat herders and men with bad legs. A sinister-looking stranger in real life was almost as fascinating. How had he gotten that scar? Was he also in a duel? Maybe a knife fight. Where did these knife fights take place? She could see him in her imagination, crouched, snarling, throwing a long knife between his hands menacingly.

  Oh dear. Too much coffee?

  She pushed back her cup and gathered up her notebook and library print-outs. She’d copied out an article in an obscure library journal from the 1960s. The author made the case for the gothic novel, or gothic romance, as part of a long history of slightly-scary, mildly-romantic stories told around the campfire for millennia. One of the author’s points was the use of physical appearance as a ruse, a foil, either to distract the reader or lead her astray. To make the point that everything is not as it appears.

  Was the scar on the man— or the Count in her story— hiding something? Was he not really a bad person after all, but perceived that way because humans are so quick to judge by outward appearances? Was it his mask, in a way, like the Phantom of the Opera? Or his deformity like the Hunchback of Notre Dame? Did it keep the world at arms’ length, and did he want it that way? Was it up to the rest of the characters to learn how to see past the exterior and see the inner goodness?

  Was this the real meaning of the gothic novel? That people perceive what they want, see what they want to see, judge others on the wrong criteria, and are often wrong? Wasn’t Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice based on that? It had, after all, originally been titled ‘First Impressions.’

  Such a common, even dominant, trait in humans. We see people, and despite whatever opposing information we learn later, those first impressions take root. Then the gothic novel is a story of immaturity, or the fallacies of impressionable youth, that then must be taught the more adult way to live.

  She jotted that down, quite pleased with herself. She had no idea if it was right or wrong, but did it matter really? Every writer probably had some half-baked idea of what fiction was about. What humanity was about. She would make a large card with that theme on it, and hang it on her fireplace near her laptop.

  After she paid her bill, Merle went into the café to use the restroom, sauntering slowly through the small interior to see if she recognized anyone who might know the man with the scar. Her literary ramblings hadn’t diminished her curiosity. Behind the bakery counter was the young woman who often waited on her, a sweet-faced brunette with very blue eyes. After using the toilet, Merle passed her again, remembering that the girl’s English was nonexistent. It would be difficult to explain in French over the huge display case why she was so curious about a stranger.

  Back outside Merle decided to visit her neighbors. One of them must know who the stranger was. She’d hardly seen Albert since she’d been back, and hadn’t located Josephine yet. Her elderly neighbors made up her entire social circle in Malcouziac, at least when the chic Parisians next door weren’t around.

  Josephine’s small half-timbered house looked the same: shuttered and empty. Merle knocked hard on the door shutters and tried to peer through the crack. Still no answer. She looked around to nearby houses and picked the one to the left where a small tricycle sat abandoned on the front step.

  Children’s voices came from inside as she knocked on the freshly-painted red door. A young mother arrived, baby on her hip.

  “Bonjour, madame,” Merle said. “Je cherche Josephine Azamar.” I am looking for Josephine. She gestured to the old woman’s house.

  “Ah—“ The woman rattled off something very fast that sounded like Josephine had been gone for some time.

  “Pardon.” Merle shrugged helplessly. “Je suis Americaine. Parlez-vous anglais?” Do you speak English?

  The woman’s eyes rounded in surprise as the baby wiggled in her arms. “A little. Do you want me to repeat?” Merle sighed in relief. “Madame left in the springtime. To live with her sister in the Nîmes. Half-sister, I think. We were all so very happy for her as she was lonely and recently took a bad fall on the cobbles. And Nîmes is said to be very pretty.”

  “I’m sorry I missed her.” Merle frowned. “She had a key to my garden. I’m sorry, I’m Merle Bennett. The last house on Rue de Poitiers?”

  “Oh, le beau jardin— the beautiful garden. Josephine tells me this.”

  Now not so beau. “She was taking care of it. Did she perhaps give you the key?”

  “No, madame, I am sorry.” She turned and said something in French to another child who came to get the baby. “I do have access to her home though.”

  She led Merle through her happy, toy-strewn house and out the back. Her garden was simple, also full of children’s toys and tiny furniture. They went into the alley, then the woman unlocked Josephine’s garden gate. Her garden was small but breathtaking, full of roses and pots overflowing with pink and white geraniums.

  “I tend the garden for her until her return,” the woman explained. “Just watering. It is no trouble.”

  “She is a fabulous gardener.”

  “Ah, oui. Now where would your key be?”

  They spread out in the tiny garden, looking for a key hanging somewhere as the other one had in Merle’s yard. It only took minutes to determine it wasn’t there. The house was locked up tight and the woman didn’t have a key.

  At the door, Merle had a thought. “I am looking for someone to remove a cistern from my garden, and to build a small addition, and to renovate a laundry. Can you recommend anyone in the area?”

  The woman, Laure Thibaud, was pleased to say that her husband had a construction company. She gave Merle a business card and told her to call him, that he would be most happy to help.

  So it wasn’t a complete waste of time, Merle thought, pocketing the card as she rounded the corner to Albert’s house. The old priest came to the door looking as if he had been napping, all three hairs on his head wild, wiping his glasses on his shirt hem.

  “Ah, Merle, come in, come in.” He escorted her through his monk-like, tidy house to the kitchen where he made her sit and have tea and cookies which he called biscuits like the English. After all her coffee today she was floating away on hot drinks. They chatted about the weather and her trip to Paris, her research into the French Revolution. Albert told her a few things about Robespierre and the Committee for Public Safety that turned against him, sending him to the guillotine. Unlike Pascal, Albert, who had been a teacher at a private school, wasn’t squeamish about the period, giving her lots of juicy details about the Reign of Terror.

  “Do you remember a man sitting near us at dinner the other night, at Les Saveurs?” she asked after a lull in the conversation. Albert seemed more alert today, not like that night at the restaurant. He seem
ed distracted then and she’d been a little worried about his mental state. “He had a terrible scar on his face, down one cheek?”

  Albert set down his cup and frowned. “No, I am sorry.”

  “He was sitting near my end of the table. I was just wondering if you knew who he was. How he got that scar.”

  “Scar?”

  Didn’t he know the word? She raised her voice a little. “He has a scar, an injury, a line down his face.” She traced a line down from her eye. “Like this.”

  Albert said nothing, just shook his head.

  “You never saw him?”

  “No. As I said.” He looked over her shoulder at his plum tree. “There are many people with strange faces, are there not?”

  “Of course. I was just curious.” Which was a little weird, her morbid fascination with a stranger. Best to drop the subject. There were many people with scars and deformities, as he said. No reason to obsess about one.

  Unless you were writing a gothic novel that featured a man with a scar.

  Her long to-do list rose up in her mind, as it often did. On it was prominently placed: French lessons.

  “Albert? Would you tutor me in French? I can pay you of course.”

  The old priest blinked. “Me? No, I am too old for such things.” He touched his chin dramatically, the picture of the thinker. Then his eyes widened. “Ah, yes! You remember Madame Armansett?”

  Merle shook her head. “Does she live here?”

  “Yes, she helped you with translation. In the— the jail.”

  Merle had been held briefly for murder two years before. It was all a big mess, a fight over her house. The entire village seemed conspired against her. The translator, Madame Armansett, was an elegant older woman with upright bearing who looked like Catherine Deneuve.

  “Oh, yes. Is she tutoring?”

  “She teaches English here in the village. I will ask first then give her your telephone.”

  Merle thanked him. She wondered if she’d ever hear from Madame. She seemed a bit haughty to be lowering herself to tutoring. But a teacher would be good for learning the language.