Disturbing the Dark

by Wendy Hornsby

  I think that we all needed that little break. When she was ready to resume, Grand-mère sat up taller in her chair.

  I said, “You invited the soldiers to a celebration.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It was nonsense, of course. They had been there for three previous winters and there had been no such celebration. But a party is a party, yes? We told them that all the women of the village would come that night for a feast in the cider house. There would be good food and plenty to drink. Of course, we never gave them food, so they got very drunk, indeed, on empty bellies. Through it all, there was a gramophone playing, men shouting and singing; lots of noise. As we knew they would, the cochons went after the women. When a soldier made advances, the object of his intentions would invite him into a dark corner, and then out would come her knife. As Henri promised, it was quick, and it was quiet.”

  “None of the men put up a fight?”

  “Oui,” she said with a little shrug. “But there was always a second girl standing watch in case her friend needed help. Don’t forget the work we had been doing. The women were very strong, and the Germans underestimated us; that was our advantage.”

  “You participated in this?”

  “Bien sûr, of course. It was my job to bring the knives. I hid them in a basket under some bread and cheese.”

  “You’re telling me that a handful of women killed all seventeen of the men?”

  “I think there were eight of us that night, so we were outnumbered by the Boche,” she said. “But we did not need to slit every throat. Some of the men got, how shall I say? Dead drunk. We left them where they fell. On a signal, a fanfare was played on the gramophone and the men who were still standing were told that the feast was coming. We herded them to tables set up a back corner, separated from the doors by racks of brandy barrels. When they were seated, devouring bread and cheese, we ceremonially removed the bungs from some brandy barrels, the lights went out, the barrels were tipped over to spill, and the women escaped through the coal chute. Henri and our wounded pilot had barred the cider house doors by then. Once the women were safe, Henri—” She searched for the right words. “Henri flambéed the Germans.”

  “Using brandy as fuel, he set the cider house on fire?” I said. “And the men inside perished.”

  “Exactly. We helped them get accustomed to the fires of hell right away, yes?”

  “An entire platoon went missing,” I said. “Someone in the German command must have come looking for them.”

  “Bien sûr,” Grand-mère said. “An arrogant bastard named ­Klemm, Oberst Klemm, the colonel, arrived with some men from Cherbourg about a week later; remember that the communication lines were down. By the time they arrived the burned ruins of the cider house were gone, replaced by a hay mow. And the men were in the field under the winter turnips. We were questioned, of course. But to the Germans, we were a bunch of ignorant milkmaids and farm girls. What did we know? Only that the soldiers said they had been given orders. They packed their things and left.”

  “And that satisfied Klemm?” I asked.

  “Germany was under siege, and there was a lot of chaos. Many soldiers were going AWOL by then.” She shrugged. “Klemm looked around a little bit, but there was nothing to find except for some very old brandy von Streicher had been hoarding in his room. Klemm took that and left.”

  I leaned closer to her. “What did you do with the soldiers’ personal effects?”

  “Everything was handed over to the Résistance. You can imagine how valuable it was for them to have authentic German ­uniforms, ­papers, even underwear and toiletries, when they sent agents to ­infiltrate German lines. And, of course, the weapons were very ­welcome.”

  She started to say something else, but looked from Guido to Taylor and asked me to have them turn off their cameras. I made the signal for them to cut, and when the red lights above their lenses went dark, I turned to her.

  “Are you tired, Grand-mère?”

  “Yes, a little. But I want to tell you something that I do not want to say in front of the cameras.”

  “Do you want me and Taylor to leave?” Guido asked.

  “That isn’t necessary. It’s just this: I believe that the skull Freddy dug up belonged to von Streicher. He was the only man who was not inside the cider house when it was set on fire.”

  “Where was he?” I asked.

  “He never left the house,” she said. “When I took the knives to the cider house I was told that von Streicher was still up here, with the child he forced into his bed every night. He kept a hoard of food and drink in his room, so he was having his own little feast.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I found him in the salon, and I dispatched him.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Oui. And then I went back to the cider house to help my friends.”

  When I remembered to breathe, I said to Guido, “That’s enough for now. Let’s pack up.”

  Grand-mère watched Guido and Taylor put away the cameras and sound recorder, turn off the key lights, and fold the reflectors.

  “Lordy, Grand-mère,” I said, rising to kiss her cheek.

  She caught my hand; she looked tired. “Fini?”

  “With this segment, I think so. If there’s anything you want us to cut out, or if there’s something you want to add, we can do that later. It’s an amazing story. Terrible, but amazing.”

  “Well then.” She pushed her chair back and rose from the table. “I’ll just go see how Marie is getting along with lunch.”

  On her way out, she turned to me and said, “When you go for tea with Veronique Bernard this afternoon, I hope you consider wearing that lovely mauve dress. It will travel well. And the color suits you. In case you agree, I had it pressed, and your ecru sandals cleaned. They are in your room.”

  With that, she went out the door. I still had not told her that someone else had gone digging in the enemy’s grave. She would learn about it soon enough.

  Guido, Taylor and I took the equipment out to our little studio to put away. Right off, I wanted to get a first look at what we had captured. Even as Grand-mère spoke to me, I was mentally editing the piece, as I usually do. I knew we had something interesting.

  Our little studio was, indeed, little. There was just room for Guido, Taylor and me to squeeze in. When we opened the door and found the other three interns, Zachary, Devon, and Miller, lounging about, I sent two of them off with cameras to check on activity at the trench and to film whatever they could get away with. Pierre Dauvin was out there, and by now he knew that someone had been digging around. He had yet to come to the house asking questions, but I knew he would get to it. Soon. So, before he did, I asked the third intern, Miller, to please wash Freddy’s car, making sure to vacuum the mud left by the shovel out of the trunk.

  While Guido stowed cords and cameras and plugged battery packs into chargers, Taylor took care of the intern’s primary duty: she tossed out the cold coffee dregs in the cafetière and started water heating for a new pot. I downloaded the morning’s footage onto a digital editor and pulled up the footage from the day before. For the first look, I split the images on the monitor into six screens and ran the indoor and outdoor footage simultaneously. Among us, we had captured the skull’s tumble off the scoop from four angles. Grand-mère we filmed from two.

  “Take a look, you guys,” I said, pushing my stool back so that they could see what we had. “I like the visual contrast between the soft light of Grand-mère’s narrative this morning with the footage taken at the trench yesterday in bright sun. What do you think?”

  We talked about various directions we might take the film, but I was too distracted to give the conversation much brain power. I kept looking at the time. There was still about an hour before lunch, when everything would come to a halt. Immediately after lunch, I was heading out to Villerville to meet Jean-Paul’s mother and I probably wouldn’t be back until after dinner. That was too long to go without knowing what Pierre Dauvin wa
s up to. Or how much trouble Grand-mère and I might be in.

  I told Guido and Taylor about the bones on the road. They were intrigued. When I said, “Let’s close up and go outside,” Guido immediately grabbed a couple of small video cameras and headed for the door. Taylor asked if it would be all right if she stayed behind to catalogue the footage from the last couple of days, and of course it was.

  Guido and I took a couple of bicycles from the collection beside the potting shed and rode off down the graveled farm road. After a few bone-jarring minutes, I said, “You and Renée Ferraro seemed to hit it off last night.”

  He smiled. “She’s interesting. We’re going to some sort of community concert this weekend.”

  “You mean, like a date?”

  “Don’t tease me,” he said. “But, yeah, like a date.”

  “Good for you.” I reached across and patted his shoulder.

  “She’s a cougar,” he said. “She’s years older than me.”

  “Enjoy it. She might teach you something new.”

  He chuckled to himself. “Trust me, she already has.”

  Pierre Dauvin wouldn’t let any of us near the dig site. Zachary, trying for an aerial shot, had borrowed a twelve-foot ladder from the orchard, lugged it up onto the three-foot-high root-ball of the hedgerow along the road, and had somehow wedged the ladder in among the prickly hawthorn. He sat perched atop the ladder while little Devon, who stood maybe five-one and weighed all of ninety-five pounds, tried to steady this precarious installation so that Zach could shoot over the heads of the gendarmes milling around the road near the trench.

  “What are you getting?” I asked Zach, leaning my bike against the rise of the hedgerow.

  “Come up and see,” he said.

  “No thanks. You’re young, you’ll heal faster than I would. But don’t fall, okay?”

  He laughed, and Devon told him not to shake the ladder.

  “Seriously,” I said, “what do you see?”

  “There are cops and guys in blue jumpsuits. And bones everywhere. They take pictures of the bones in situ, then they scoop them up and dump them onto a tarp.”

  “Have they found anything?”

  “Other than bones?” he asked. “Not much that I can see. Except they made a couple of plaster casts of tire tracks or footprints or something.”

  “You’re getting good footage?”

  “Can we just say I’m getting footage?”

  I complimented my interns on their resourcefulness and after asking Zach again not to fall off his perch, I left them to it. Giving Dauvin and his men a wide berth, I climbed over the hedgerow and down into the orchard. I walked to the end and climbed back over onto the access road. The night before, at just that spot where the road turned, I thought that the headlights of Freddy’s car had bounced off something shiny. I scanned the carrot field, trying to figure out where that something might have been, if there had been anything at all.

  A week before harvest, the feathery tops of the carrots stood nearly two feet tall. The furrows between rows were maybe eight inches deep. Even a good-sized person could crouch down or lie down and hide himself out there, especially at night. Walking between rows, I headed off toward that ephemeral sighting.

  The tide was out. A stiff breeze off the Channel whipped the carrot tops, first one way, and then the other, brushing them against my bare legs. I pushed a stray strand of windblown hair behind my ear, and when I looked back in the direction I had come, I could see Pierre Dauvin up on the road, watching me. I waved, he waved back. When I turned again to continue forward, out of the corner of my eye I saw a bit of pale blue among the vastness of deep green crop. The wind shifted and that bit of blue was gone again, but I headed in the direction I had seen it. Again I stopped to get my bearings, and there it was, no more than six feet further along and one furrow over. Blue jeans. Faded blue jeans left in a heap in the middle of a furrow, in the middle of a carrot field. It seemed odd.

  I pushed my way toward the jeans out of curiosity. But as I drew closer, my view less obstructed, I saw not only jeans, but also a T-shirt and a spill of long blond hair, and I knew who was lying there. I called out to her, “Solange!” There was no response.

  Her tee shirt rose and fell with the breeze, and maybe as she breathed, though from the angle of her head and the red mass at her temple, I doubted that she did. Afraid to move her, I knelt, felt for a pulse, found none, saw pupils fixed and dilated. Saw a triangle-shaped wound on her temple and the congealed blood that had flowed out into the soil. Worst of all, the day was warm and already the stench of death hovered around her.

  8

  “How did you know where to look for the girl?” Dauvin loomed over me as I sat in the middle of the field with my head between my knees.

  “I wasn’t looking for Solange,” I said, risking to sit upright without keeling over again. “We wanted a better camera angle on what you were doing.”

  “Pffh, c’est des conneries.”

  His words were unfamiliar to me, but from his tone I understood what they meant. He knew I was lying. Dauvin squatted ­beside me, took my chin in his hand and looked into my eyes with genuine concern. “Ça va?”

  “Yes, I’m okay,” I said. “It was just, she’s so young, Pierre. What happened to her?”

  He shrugged. “We’ll wait for the doctor to tell us. Now, how did you know she was here?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “That is, I didn’t know that anyone was out here. But I was looking for something. Before I tell you why, though, I need to remind you that whatever you discover in the process could involve not only my grandmother, but yours.”

  “Oh là.” He shook his head. “Those women; what can we do about those old women?”

  “Love them?” I said.

  He smiled an upside down French smile and offered a hand to help me to my feet. “Can you walk on your own?”

  “Of course,” I said, sounding more certain than I felt. Seeing that beautiful young woman getting zipped into a body bag and lifted onto a stretcher had knocked my legs right out from under me. Solange was only a few years older than my Casey, and in that ­moment I could imagine the pain I would feel if she were my own dear girl being taken away. I asked, “Who calls the parents?”

  “Someone will go to their home as soon as we have an address. Who here would know that?”

  I told him that Solange’s professor, Olivia, could probably help him, and that Olivia was staying at Freddy’s house. No scandal, I told him, just a matter of convenience. As far as I knew, anyway.

  There was no way I could avoid telling Pierre what Grand-mère and I had done the night before. And so I did, from finding ­little spade marks in the dirt made by someone who had been in the trench before me to using a borrowed shovel and digging up skeletal remains. I had no answer to his big question: Why? Because I did not know.

  “When we drove up last night,” I told him, “I thought I saw something out in the field. Just a quick flash in the car lights.”

  “You think it was the girl?” he asked.

  “I didn’t know what it was. I still don’t. But I was curious, so I came out here for a look.”

  “Curious,” he said, nodding toward the road. “Like them?”

  They were all there, the two grandmothers, my cousin Antoine and my brother Freddy, Jacques and his wife Julie, the various students, estate workers, people from the village. All of them waiting for news. It was a small town. Everything that happened was everyone’s business. Or so they thought.

  I stopped walking toward the group and reached for Pierre’s arm. He turned and looked at me expectantly. I said, “Last night, when I saw that someone had been digging before we arrived, I wondered if the light I had seen came from out in the field. Had we scared someone off? Were we being watched? It worried me that someone might go back there after we left.”

  “You admit you came here last night with a shovel, but you claim that this mess was not your doing?”

  I took out
my phone, opened the picture file, pulled up an ­image, and handed it to him. “I took this last night after we finished, in case anyone had questions.”

  He was good at keeping a cop’s poker face, but I saw his eyebrows go up. After studying the picture, he forwarded it, and then he pocketed my phone. “Were you in the trench again after you took the picture?”

  “No. We got into the car and left.”

  “Is the time stamp on your phone correct?”

  “It is. The time is set by satellite.”

  “You drove your grandmother back to the house,” he said. “Can you be certain that she did not come back later?”

  I shrugged. “She was exhausted when we got home. She went straight to her room. I heard her shower—the old house has noisy pipes—and I assumed she went right to bed after.”

  “And you?”

  “Same. Shower, and straight to bed. Grave digging is hard, dirty work, Pierre.”

  “Can anyone corroborate the time you returned home?”

  “Antoine, and my daughter.”

  “Family, so reliable as witnesses.” He managed a little smile. “There will be more questions. But for now, as your police say, don’t leave Dodge.”

  “Oh, hell.” I had forgotten for the moment about tea in Viller­ville that afternoon. I checked my watch. There was just time to clean up, grab a bite, and make the drive, but in the circumstance I could not imagine being charming over jam and crumpets, or whatever the French serve at tea. Surely Jean-Paul’s mother would understand. “Pierre, I need to borrow my phone to make a call.”

  He took my elbow and we started walking again. “Your grandmother carries a phone. I’m sure she’ll let you use it.”

  When I explained to Grand-mère why I wanted to borrow her phone, she said, “Absolutely not. Veronique Bernard is expecting you. You’ll go, as arranged.”

  “Pierre,” I said, catching his eye. “I am leaving Dodge, but I’ll be back tonight.”

  He shook his head. But Grand-mère shook a finger at him. She had worked too hard setting things up to allow the death of a young stranger to interfere with her plans for me. Clearly, Dauvin understood what he was up against, and with some caveats, he relented and agreed that I could travel as far as Villerville as long as I would return by evening.