Pierre and Jacqueline seemed to be in no hurry to get back out on duty. So, I poured myself a third glass of wine and sat back in my chair feeling thoroughly content and a little buzzed, enjoying the lovely breeze ruffling through the climbing roses overhead. During the short time I had been at Grand-mère’s, I had come to love the place, its people, and all that it represented. I would be sad when the filming was finished and I had to go home.
Growing up in California, my notion of family was a nuclear model: me, Mom, Dad, my brother and sister, an uncle. As soon as my siblings and I finished school, we scattered to the winds and began lives largely independent of each other and of our parents. The Martins, in contrast, were a collection of intertwined family lines and enterprises, all having the estate in Normandy at their center. Though most of them had homes and careers elsewhere, everyone remained closely connected to the land and to each other in ways I had never experienced before. Their notion of family was a revelation to me.
Labelling the family home an estate makes it sound grander than it was. And to say that it belonged to Grand-mère was not quite correct, either. Ten years ago, when my grandfather, Henri Martin, died my grandmother, Élodie, his widow, became the lifetime guardian of the large farm property that had been in the Martin family since some time in the fourteenth century, before the Hundred Years’ War. Grand-mère could legally profit from the estate, make improvements to it, had the privilege of paying taxes on it. But, according to the arcane French inheritance laws, because Grand-mère was not of Henri’s direct bloodline she could not sell the property or any part of it unless all of the potential heirs for the next two generations approved.
One day, after Grand-mère slips off this earthly coil, primary ownership or guardianship of the place will pass to me and my half brother Freddy, as the heirs of Isabelle, and to our Uncle Gérard. The strange part of that is, I did not know my biological mother, Isabelle. I did not know that she, or Grand-mère, or Freddy, or this place existed until after Isabelle died. Indeed, it was because she died that I learned about this part of my family at all. Sometimes I felt like an interloper. A well-fed and currently quite content interloper, but an interloper nonetheless. Everyone there was generous and kind to me, but I did not know what resentments they might hide in their hearts.
The procureur interrupted this quiet moment when she phoned to say she was on her way from St-Lô and would meet us at the site in an hour. My interns were at the beach, so I headed off alone toward our little temporary studio to gather up Guido and the equipment we would need for filming that afternoon.
The building was in a corner of the compound, behind the house that Isabelle built for her and Freddy when she was working on a project nearby. As I was coming around the side, headed toward the single door, I nearly collided with the young fromagerie worker Guido had been so attentive to at lunch. Her cheeks were already flushed, but when she saw me, her face flamed red. She ducked her head and ran past.
I felt my own face flush; with chagrin, yes, but also with dismay and anger when I recognized what the rosy cheeks and glassy eyes meant.
Guido was on a stool in front of a digital editor when I walked inside. I couldn’t see the image on the monitor until I shut the door, blocking the glare. I expected to see something lewd, but it was only a close-up of the skull. When Guido turned to greet me he didn’t try to hide the self-satisfied little grin on his handsome, chiseled, aging face.
“We had a talk before we left L.A.,” I said as I pulled camera battery packs off their chargers. “You promised.”
“What?” All innocence.
“I saw young Delphine from the fromagerie on my way in.”
“Nice kid, huh?” He swiveled on the stool, following my movements as I gathered necessary equipment. “So, what are we doing now, Mag?”
“I don’t know, Guido.” I dumped the battery packs into a duffel and added four remote recorder hook-ups. “What the hell are you doing?”
“You mean Delphine? For crap’s sake, Maggie, she’s an adult. I’m an adult. The rest is nobody’s business.”
“It is my business, Guido.” I hoisted a video camera onto my shoulder. “I don’t want your inability to manage your zipper to get us into trouble again. Not here, and not with these people. When we finish this project, you can ride off into the sunset and disappear, but I can’t. My situation here is already strange enough without you complicating things for me with the locals.”
“What the hell? Nothing happened.”
“Nothing happened, yet,” I said. “The look I saw on that kid’s face I’ve seen often enough that I know what comes next, Guido.”
He shrugged: so what?
“When we first worked together,” I said, “watching you chase eighteen- and nineteen-year-old girls was just annoying. But that was twenty years ago. Now that you’re old enough to be their father, your pursuit of the same eighteen- and nineteen-year-old girls has become, frankly, icky.”
“You should talk,” he said. “You’re going with an older man.”
“Yep, same thing,” I said. “Jean-Paul is fifty, and I’m forty-three, the same age as you.”
He tried again. “If you hadn’t noticed, Miz MacGowen, we’re in France. People here aren’t as provincial about sex as Americans are.”
“If you hadn’t noticed, sir, we’re in provincial France.”
“To hell with you, Maggie.” He hopped off the stool and stormed out the door. I was at least as steamed as he was, but I finished packing up and went outside, locking the door behind me.
I came around to the front of the building in time to see a burly, middle-aged man I recognized as part of the fromagerie’s milking crew raise a giant ham of a fist and deck Guido with a practiced right cross. Though I didn’t understand some of the man’s vocabulary, his meaning was clear enough: Stay away from my daughter, you lecherous old bastard.
After the man, clearly young Delphine’s father, stomped off, Guido just stayed on the ground where he’d landed. I let my partner rub his jaw and collect himself for a moment before I went over to him.
“You going to lie around all day?” I asked. “Or are you coming to work?”
He moaned, but he got to his feet and followed me across the compound. Grand-mère and Freddy were waiting for us beside her RTV. They had seen the entire bout and though wicked little smiles passed between them, they said nothing as Guido, still rubbing his jaw, loaded our gear into the backseat of the cart and climbed in beside it.
With the film gear taking up space, there wasn’t room for four people in the four-seater cart. Freddy volunteered to walk, and I offered to walk with him. Guido needed a little space to cool off, and I was happy for the opportunity to be alone with Freddy. Since my arrival, there were times I thought my half brother was avoiding me. Indeed, it seemed that he was avoiding being alone with any of us. Embarrassment over the implosion of his personal life, resentment about my presence or about having to share our mother’s inheritance with a veritable stranger—me—or just the stresses of divorce and sudden single fatherhood along with the management of a large construction project? Maybe all or none of the above. Whatever was on his mind, he was keeping it to himself.
Freddy and I walked out through a side gate in the compound wall, across the bottom of the summer kitchen garden, past the berry bramble, and came out on the farm road between the apple orchard and the cow pasture behind the fromagerie. I waited for Freddy to speak first.
“I hear you’ve been summoned,” he said, looping his hand around my elbow.
“I have,” I said, leaning in to him. “Jean-Paul’s mother has invited me to come for tea tomorrow.”
He chuckled. “Does she want to know what your intentions are for her son?”
“Apparently. Are there local customs I should be aware of? Do I need to bake her a cake or something?”
“Leave that to Grand-mère. I overheard her and Grand-mère Marie discussing what they should put into the gift basket they’ll
send with you. They also discussed which car you should drive, Grand-mère’s Range Rover, or my Jaguar.”
I laughed, visualizing the two grandmothers at their matchmaking. Grand-mère hoped I would marry Jean-Paul and live happily ever after with him in France so that I would be near her. That might be lovely. And though love might conquer all, so far I—we—had not figured out how love might conquer geography.
When we met, Jean-Paul was the French consul general to Los Angeles, where I live. But recently, he was recalled home to France, marking the end of his appointment. I hated that there would be six thousand miles between us, but following him seemed impossible. My work was in California, where my daughter would be in college for at least two more years and where my eighty-year-old mom, meaning the woman who raised me, not Isabelle, was increasingly dependent on my help. Then there was that other little problem: Jean-Paul and I had not discussed the possibility of happily ever after.
I said, “Antoine said I could borrow his Mini for the drive. It gets good gas mileage.”
“Where are you meeting Madame Bernard?” Freddy asked, taking out his telephone and opening a map app. I gave him the address of the Bernard family’s summer cottage in Villerville, which I was told was on the coast near Honfleur.
Freddy let out a low whistle as he showed me a highlighted route across the Cotentin Peninsula then over toward the estuary where the Seine meets the English Channel.
“She’s making you work for it,” he said. “Villerville is over a hundred and sixty kilometers from here. You’ll make good time on A84, but with summer traffic along Route du Littoral, the beach road where you turn off, the trip will take about two hours. Be happy that she invited you for tea instead of breakfast.”
“Maybe I’ll come down with a cold tonight and postpone the visit until the weekend when Jean-Paul can join me.”
“Don’t be a coward,” he said putting away his phone. “Do take my Jag. It’s more fun to drive, and Antoine’s Mini doesn’t have GPS aboard.”
When we made the turn past the hedgerow that separated the apple orchard from the access road, we could see the village road on the far side of the carrot field. I was relieved that the morning crowd had decamped, though I had expected that they would. Early on, I learned that in rural France lunch was served between noon and two o’clock. If you missed that time window to eat, you were just out of luck until dinner at seven. And forget hitting the drive-through, because there wasn’t one. Lunch, then, I surmised, had been more compelling to the curious than old bones were, and everyone had gone home to eat.
There was, however, a little cluster of people and cars on the access road next to Freddy’s trench where the discovery du jour had been made. Parked in a line, there were Grand-mère’s little RTV and Pierre Dauvin’s official blue-and-white Renault Mégane, two bicycles, and a dark Honda Fit. I cringed to see that Olivia was there with her student Solange, but when I saw that Guido was staying clear of them, busy with camera setup, I relaxed a bit. Pierre and three of his gendarmes sort of milled about, keeping their eye on things.
I bent my head toward Freddy and gave a nod toward the one person I did not recognize. He whispered, “Madame le procureur, Renée Ferraro.”
The procureur was a willowy woman maybe in her fifties, elegant in an immaculate blue cotton sun dress and black rubber muck boots as she stood in the middle of the sewer trench, studying the place where the skull had emerged that morning. Olivia, dressed in the style of Indiana Jones, knelt on the gravel road beside the trench and with broad arm gestures explained to Ferraro about the primitive state of World War II archeology and, therefore, the necessity for an academic like herself to be present for further excavation at the site so that nothing was destroyed for future study. Young Solange, fair hair pulled back into a ponytail, cheeks sunburned, nose already peeling, stood beside her professor and offered up her sketches of the skull to show how useful they could be.
As she listened, Mme le Procureur nodded or shrugged from time to time, but remained noncommittal. On the other hand, when Grand-mère introduced Guido and me to her, and explained that we were making a film, Ferraro shook our hands firmly, offered pleasantries and asked questions about our work. As she shook Guido’s hand, she touched her jaw at the place where Guido now had a shiny red-and-blue lump emerging on his. She said, “Ça va?”
“He met the father,” I answered for him. Smiling, she clucked her tongue and turned back to the business at hand. And so did Guido. He clipped a cigarette-pack-sized remote recorder unit to Grand-mère’s belt and attached the tiny microphone to her collar. The procureur agreed to hold a recorder because there was no place on her dress to attach it. She seemed amused as Guido clipped the microphone to the top of her dress. Pierre, with a little shrug, allowed a third recorder to be attached to his utility belt, with the mic on his shirt placket. Guido handed me the fourth recorder to hook up to myself. When everyone was wired to record, Guido connected the external recorder to the camera, checked that sound and video speed were in sync, raised the camera to his shoulder and began filming.
A sleek black Mercedes of a certain age turned off the village road onto the farm access road, a great pillar of dust swirling behind.
“Ah, bon,” Grand-mère said as she watched the big car approach. “Gaston is here.”
I had met Gaston Carnôt, the village’s elected mayor, during my previous visit. His job involved managing public facilities, overseeing festivals, advising the appointed village police chief, and generally making certain that his constituents were orderly and happy, as they generally seemed to be. He was an old family friend, my grandfather Henri Martin’s first cousin twice removed, an aging roué with a great appreciation for the finer things in life. Grand-mère adored him, and though he was twenty years younger than she, I wondered if once there had been something between the two of them. Maybe there still was. No argument, he was charming. But the first time I met Gaston, I learned not to turn my back to him.
“Madame Martin,” the procureur said gently when the technical preliminaries were finished, “will you please show us where the German soldiers were interred in 1944?”
Grand-mère looked around for a moment, apparently getting her bearings. She turned and studied the hedgerow. Then she walked about three yards down the road, looked again at the hedgerow, went to the edge of the carrot field and dug a divot with the heel of her shoe into the soft soil in the first planted row.
“From here,” Grand-mère said. She stayed where she was until one of the gendarmes had driven in a post to mark the spot. After giving him a nod of approval, she paced back toward us, past the marker where the skull had been, and then made another divot in the soil about ten feet farther along. “To about here.”
Pierre looked from one end of the area she defined to the other, and asked, “How wide?”
“One meter,” she said pointing into the field. “More or less.”
He seemed skeptical. “And how deep, madame?”
“So high.” Grand-mère stood up straight and drew a line across her chest with the side of her hand. “Of course, the soil has built up over the years with composting and so on.”
“But you say there are seventeen men buried here. How is that possible in such a small space?”
“Well,” she said, raising her palms. “How much space would you expect a pile of charred bones to take up?”
Renée Ferraro let out an involuntary little “Merde.”
“I saw no evidence of charring on the skull found here this morning,” Dauvin said, watching Grand-mère through narrowed eyes.
She paled. “Yes, one man was not in the cider house when Henri set it on fire. We put that one into the hole last.”
The procureur surveyed the area, looking for something. “Where is the cider house from here?”
“At the time, it was inside the compound wall,” Grand-mère said. “My son Gérard later built a house on the site. You know my grandson, Antoine. He lives there now with his fam
ily.”
Seeming dubious, the procureur asked, “You transported the remains of those men all the way from the compound to here? Quite a distance, yes?”
“It was winter,” Grand-mère said, sounding as if she thought the answer should be obvious. “The ground was very hard. Except here. The field had been plowed for turnips, and so here we could dig.”
“If the men died in the fire,” the procureur said, “why not simply leave the remains in place for the Nazis to deal with?”
“Because the men didn’t die in the fire.” Grand-mère ran a finger across her neck. “We slit their throats first. There would have been reprisals.”
“Ah,” was all that the procureur managed to say, nodding as she considered what she was hearing. After a glance at Dauvin, perhaps to record his reaction, she stepped up out of the trench. “Monsieur le capitaine, I believe that it is safe to expect that after a fire and some seventy years in the ground, it will be unlikely that any of the remains can be identified. Except, of course, for the one that escaped the fire, and even then—” A little Gallic shrug finished the sentence. “It is clear to me that no crime was committed here, so there is no reason to delay popping these remains out of the carrots, d’accord?”
“D’accord,” Pierre said, agreeing with her. I thought he seemed relieved, perhaps because his own grandmother had been an active participant in putting them into the ground. “When you have a signed order, please send me a copy. Will you notify the Volksbund?”
“Gaston?” she said, turning to the mayor. “I believe that is within your purview, yes?”
He nodded. “Yes, I will call the Boche. And I can tell you what the Volksbund will say. They will request that in the process of disinterment we set aside any items we find that might lead to an identification. Dog tags, wallets, photos, and so on. I doubt anything useful has survived, still—”
“You’ve done this before?” I asked.
The mayor nodded. “Not as often anymore, but yes, from time to time war remains are still found.”
Disturbing the Dark Page 3
