I carried a little flashlight. When I heard cars coming I would aim its beam on the pavement at my feet so that I could be seen. At that hour of the day in a farm community lots of people were headed toward work, and I was certain that plenty of them were as sleepy when they left home as I had been.
As odds would have it, two cars approaching from different directions would pass just when they were abreast of me. There was no shoulder, so I stepped off into the sloping, grassy verge and walked until they passed, watching the ground to avoid rabbit holes. The cars passed and I went back up onto the pavement. Twenty yards up the road, the car on the far side, the one headed in the same direction I was, skidded into a U-turn, sped up and seemed to aim right at me. I raised my flashlight and aimed it at the driver’s face. All I saw was a wide grin in a field of white at the same time I dropped and rolled down the embankment, stopping just before I would land in a soggy ditch. Above me, the driver bumped back into his lane, made another U-turn, and sped off. As soon as he passed me, I was on my feet and running as hard as I could; he was headed toward Casey and David.
“Hey Mom,” Casey, with David close beside her, loped toward me. They had turned and met me as they headed home. “You okay? You look beat.”
I bent over and tried to breathe. I managed to ask, “Did you see that guy?”
“What guy?”
“Just some idiot.”
They walked beside me until I could breathe normally again. After a few minutes, we set off at an easy jog. We had left that morning through the compound gate, but returned by turning up the farm access road because Casey was curious to see where Grand-mère and I had been digging the night before. The sun was fully up by then.
We came around the corner at the end of the orchard, and stopped dead. The scene around the sewer trench looked as if the gates of hell had opened up and vomited out the charred remains of all those benighted souls my grandmother had buried so long ago. Bones lay everywhere, on the road, among the carrots, up on the hedgerow berm. Some were crushed as if a vehicle had run them over.
“Mom!” Casey was shaking. “Did you and Grand-mère do this?”
“Of course not.” I put my arm around her. Thinking about the driver of the car that had run me off the road a few minutes earlier, I said, “Someone came here after we left, looking for something. Wonder if they found it.”
David pulled out his phone and called Pierre Dauvin. And then he called his father. Immediately, we heard the motor of Jacques’s delivery van start up and come toward us from the direction of the fromagerie. David jogged down the road to meet him, to stop him before he would run over any of the bones. Jacques got out of his little truck and for a moment just stared at the macabre scene before he started walking to meet us.
Apparently, Casey had already told David that Grand-mère and I had been out there digging the night before, because David retold what I told her to his father. Jacques walked around a bit, stepping over a femur to look into the trench, thinking things through. After a brief conversation with David, Jacques came over to me.
“Maggie,” he said, “this worries me. It wasn’t here when I drove in this morning. Whoever was here can’t be far away. I want to drive you and Casey home now, before Pierre arrives. He can be very difficult to get along with until he’s had time to assess a situation. David and I will take care of him until he calms down.”
We protested, but he insisted. Pierre would get to us eventually, Jacques said. But later would be better.
When Jacques dropped us off in front of Grand-mère’s house, he told Casey he would understand if she needed some time off from work. She said, “Pierre, the cows won’t take the day off, so I won’t.” With that, she headed straight inside to shower and dress for work at the fromagerie.
Jacques asked me for more details about Grand-mère’s escapade the night before. There actually wasn’t very much to tell him, but I gave him all the dirty details. I also told him about the car incident that morning. The grave digging gave him pause, the car sent him reeling.
Jacques had a strong Norman accent so I couldn’t always understand him, especially when he spoke fast and used local slang, as he did when he fulminated about the idiot who forced me off the road. He kept pointing to my grass-stained knees as he told me, I think, that I was lucky I wasn’t crushed just like the bones in the road had been. Sometimes, he said, locals who aren’t quite sober find sport in forcing runners and bikers off the road. But—and here he tapped his wrist where a watch would be if a cheesemaker wore a watch—it was the close timing of the two events that worried him.
Casey came out of the house wearing her white coveralls, with her hair tucked up inside a white cap, ready for work. Jacques waved her into the truck, gave me some apparently pithy last words of advice, kissed me on both cheeks, got in and drove them off. To avoid the road that had become a bone yard, he took the back way out of the compound to the narrow old road that passed above the orchard and the cider house, turned along the far side of the pasture and ended at the milking barn. It would be a bumpy ride.
I watched until I couldn’t see them anymore, happy that Casey had not walked to work alone that morning. Worried about the trouble my grandmother and I were in, I collected Gaston’s shovel from Freddy’s trunk and cleaned it under a garden hose. The day was already warm, and I felt every mile I had run, trying to keep up with the kids. I leaned the shovel against the garden gate, took a drink from the hose, and headed for the house. As I went up the back steps, I nearly collided with a grim-faced Olivia on her way out after fetching the keys for the potting shed where she kept her tools from a rack of house keys inside the back door. Her only response to my greeting was a curt nod before she hurried on her way.
Grand-mère called to me as soon as she heard the door. I looked into the kitchen and found her at the big oak table that ran down the middle of the room, having croissants and coffee with Grand-mère Marie, Gaston, and Ma Mère, the abbess at the convent in the village, who wore her full black habit on that warm summer day. I wasn’t surprised to see the abbess and Marie at the kitchen table so early in the day, or Gaston for that matter. The three women had been friends forever, bonded in youth, companions during the Nazi Occupation. They were inveterate, or incorrigible, matchmakers and meddlers. They had paired up Marie’s daughter Louise and Grand-mère’s son, my Uncle Gérard, though the union had not been a happy one. After two sons, Antoine and Bébé, the couple split up, though they never divorced. One might expect that spectacular failure to have stopped the matchmakers, but it hadn’t, as I knew only too well.
From the way they were all looking at me, I thought they had been waiting for me. I steeled myself, and went into the kitchen to see what was up. I was a drippy, sweaty mess, so I didn’t actually touch cheeks with anyone during the exchange of greetings.
“Gaston,” I said, washing my hands at the kitchen sink and drying them on a paper towel. “Your shovel is outside. Let me know when you’re leaving and I’ll put it in your car.”
He and the three women exchanged a look full of meaning that I couldn’t read. I wasn’t going to say anything about the carnage on the access road until I knew what they were up to.
Ma Mère and Grand-mère seemed to be in fine fettle, color up, posture straight. But I thought that Grand-mère Marie seemed frail that morning, and it worried me. When she picked up her bowl of café au lait, her hands shook. I was sorry that I had missed their earlier conversation because something definitely was brewing among them. Whatever it was had upset Grand-mère Marie. I did not suspect that any of them had taken a shovel to the trench after Grand-mère and I left.
Grand-mère poured coffee and milk for me and set it at the place beside her, handing me the basket of croissants when I sat down. The croissants were still warm. As I reached for the butter and homemade preserves, Grand-mère Marie wrapped a wedge of fresh melon in a thin slice of French ham and set it on my plate. She had known me as a baby, and lost me when I was a toddler. The
way she spoke to me and fussed over me, it seemed that in her mind I was still that tyke.
After the meal Gaston fed us the night before, I thought I wouldn’t eat again for a week. But suddenly I was ravenous. After I washed down the first bite of croissant with coffee, I looked into each of the faces at the table, all of them still watching me with great intensity. I asked, “What’s up?”
Grand-mère slipped an envelope under the edge of my plate. “Antoine found this on our door this morning when he came with the croissants.”
The note inside was written on stationery from the village’s workmen’s hotel, the only hotel in town. The Gothic-looking script was an old-fashioned German hand, but the words were English. The author said that she was the daughter of a soldier who had been posted in the area during the war. While her father had not been allowed to divulge his exact location for security reasons, he had managed to send home photographs of the house where he was billeted. Sometime during the last year of the war, he went missing and the family never learned what happened to him.
A day ago, she wrote, she received a Google alert with a report that human remains, probably from World War II and probably German, had been found on a farm in Normandy, in the very area where her father had been. How happy she was when she recognized that the house in the background of the online images was the very same house that was in her father’s snapshots. Her father had been very fond of the place and she would very much like to be given permission to pay a call. Perhaps someone there might help her know what happened to the dear man. The letter was signed Erika Karl, born von Streicher.
I slipped the letter back into its envelope. “This is what you were afraid would happen, Grand-mère. A survivor has shown up. Did you know anyone by that name?”
The three women nodded in unison, one forward tip of the head each. Clearly, from the grim looks on their faces they had not been fond of Herr von Streicher.
“Will you talk to the daughter?” I asked.
“No.” Grand-mère cleared her throat. “Gaston believes it is time for me to talk to you about what happened here. With your cameras.”
“Wonderful,” I said. Concerned that she might change her mind, I said, “Today?”
She nodded.
“It will have to be this morning,” I said, “because I’m off to see Jean-Paul’s mother right after lunch.”
“All right.”
“Grand-mère Marie, Ma Mère,” I said. “Will you join us?”
No, no, Marie said, her English was too terrible for her to say anything for American television. Besides, her hair was a mess and she needed to finish putting up the plums. Anyway, what could she say that Élodie wouldn’t say better? No thank you, she wasn’t ready to be a movie star.
Ma Mère shook her head. She would need permission from the diocese to speak on camera, but she promised to ask for the bishop’s blessing in case I had questions for her later. As a caution to me, she said, “The Occupation is a painful topic for all of us who were forced to work for the men who not only took over our country, but our homes. Please remember that.”
I assured her that I would go gently. We did not need all of the grim details, I told her, but what happened to them was still a story that needed to be told by the people who suffered through it. It was important that there be a record. She agreed to that. I turned to Gaston and asked him, “Are you in?”
Grand-mère Marie laughed. “He was just a baby then. What could he know?”
Gaston seemed very relieved to have an out. Besides, he said, he had town business to deal with. An American motorcycle club was coming through on Saturday after visiting the D-Day beaches. Old people, he said, bike touring. Some of them were the children of men who fought on those beaches. As mayor, he wanted to make sure that signs were put up on the road from Pérrier to direct the group into the village center so they would come and see the memorial that had been erected after the war in honor of the American G.I. liberators of 1944. The café tabac would fly its American flag to welcome anyone in need of refreshment, and would be very happy to sell some souvenir postcards.
Grand-mère reminded him that the baptism party for Pierre Dauvin’s nephew would be on Sunday. She hoped the motorcyclists weren’t planning to camp out overnight at the regional park, as they had last year. She did not want a phalanx of motorcycles to come roaring down the beach road on Sunday and scare the children and foul up traffic. Marie, however, thought it might be nice to invite the bikers. “Wouldn’t the children love to see so many motorcycles? It would be like a parade. And maybe we knew some of their fathers.”
As mayor and therefore the village’s head cheerleader, Gaston liked the idea. My grandmother did not. “Let them spend their money at the café tabac,” she said. Ma Mère added, “It is a party to celebrate the baby, not to remember war.” And that was the end of it.
Guido came in through the back door just as that issue was settled. He looked a bit bedraggled; grizzled chin, rumpled clothes. When all eyes turned to him, he blushed.
“Good morning,” I said. “Coffee?”
“I had mine, thanks. Good morning all,” he said without venturing all the way into the kitchen from the mud room. The bruise on his jaw had turned several interesting shades of blue and purple. “I’m just going to grab a shower and get to work.” He offered a wave in lieu of saying good-bye and turned to go up the back stairs. He made it part-way up, then came down again. “Maggie, what’s the schedule for the day?”
“We’re going to film a conversation with Grand-mère. I like the morning light in the kitchen, so let’s set up in here, see how it looks.” I turned to my grandmother. “Ready in about an hour?”
She shrugged, that was fine. I turned back to Guido. “Okay with you?”
“Yep.”
“And don’t forget,” I said to his retreating back. “I’m leaving right after lunch, so you’re sprung for the afternoon.”
Marie giggled. “I think he’ll find a way to occupy himself.” Poor Guido hung his head and made a quick retreat.
If we were going to be filming in Grand-mère’s kitchen that morning, then lunch for the workers would have to be prepared at Antoine’s house, where Marie lived. Marie volunteered to supervise the women who came in to cook. The two grandmothers were working out lunch details when a thought occurred to me.
I asked, “What time did Antoine bring the croissants this morning?”
“It was just daybreak,” Grand-mère said. “Half past six?”
“We got in last night after midnight,” I said. “And there was no note on the door. So, when did Erika von Streicher Karl put her note on our front door?”
7
“Pull the exposure back a couple of stops,” I told Guido. “Let’s desaturate the color a bit.”
He did as I asked, then stepped back from his camera so that I could see the effect. Onscreen, I wanted my grandmother’s story to look something like faded snapshots in a family album, its hard edges softened by time. This was an old story, after all.
Grand-mère sat at the far end of the well-scrubbed oak table that ran down the center of the big farmhouse kitchen. The microwave oven and American-size refrigerator behind her were the wrong background for a film segment about events that took place over seventy years earlier. I asked her to move a little to her right so that the appliances were out of frame. The shift was enough so that when she settled back into her chair, late morning light streaming through the windows over the ancient stone sink now touched the top of her head and picked up gold highlights in her dark brown hair. I knew she dyed her hair to cover the gray, but she had a good hairdresser so it looked perfectly natural, even in sunlight. At ninety-two, Grand-mère was still elegant, slender and straight and graceful in the way that French women seem bred to be. She looked too genteel to be the mastermind of the murder of seventeen men.
“Guido,” I said, “will you sharpen the focus? The soft color makes Grand-mère look dreamy enough.”
He le
aned way back to better see his monitor. “Looks fine.”
“Where are your glasses?” I asked him.
As his hand came up to his breast pocket, where his glasses were, he looked across the room to see whether Taylor, one of our film interns, had noticed. We would be using two cameras in this segment, and Taylor was behind one of them. She was serious about her work, and as this was her first opportunity to participate in primary filming, she was focused entirely on the image in the monitor of her lens and not on whatever Guido might be up to. Besides, I thought that something was developing between her and Zach, one of the other film interns, a man closer to her own age and experience than my old friend Guido was. I also thought that Guido, fresh from an overnight visit with the district’s handsome procureur, and after getting a bit of a comeuppance the day before, ought to be more ready to think about something other than his next conquest.
“The focus?” I said, patting the glasses case in his pocket.
With another glance toward Taylor, he put on his glasses, made the focus adjustment, and glared at me.
Grand-mère busied her hands by picking through the colander of raspberries on the table in front of her, taking out twigs and leaves. She seemed deep in thought before she asked, “Maggie, dear, how does the settlement of your mother’s estate progress?”
“Slowly,” I said. “Isabelle’s estate is complicated.”
“You still call her Isabelle?” she asked. “You can’t call my daughter, Mother?”
“I never knew her, Grand-mère. To me, Mother is the woman who raised me. And Isabelle is Isabelle.”
The small lift of her left shoulder showed both acknowledgment of what was to her a sad truth and her resignation to it. “If money is a problem until the estate is settled—”
Disturbing the Dark Page 6
