Disturbing the Dark

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Why me?” I asked my daughter.

  “What Jean-Paul said. It’s a mom thing. We all talked it over and decided that if Solange’s mom can’t be here, someone’s mom should do it for her.”

  “I could argue the logic of that, but never mind. I’ll do it. I hardly knew the girl, so I doubt I’ll faint. But it’s still a pretty tall request.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” She leaned in and kissed my cheek.

  “When would be a good time to do this?”

  “Tonight we’re all going down to the beach at Anneville-sur-Mer to play volleyball and have a barbecue and generally chill. No one will be in the camp.”

  “Good time to pack up the ghosts,” I said. “Now, beat it, you two, before I change my mind.”

  Jean-Paul needed to speak with Gaston, the mayor, to pass along a request that there be some decorum during the removal of the German remains from Grand-mère’s field. We found M. le maire near the fountain in front of the convent, scolding a vendor about having left a mess behind the week before. The offender was threatened with a fine or, worse, banishment from the Saturday market, if it happened again. The dear nuns had cleaned up after him last week, Gaston told him. Because the vendor had caused them such an inconvenience, Gaston suggested he should go right inside now, ask Ma Mère for forgiveness and drop a tithe of his day’s proceeds into the mission box as atonement. “D’accord?”

  “Oui, oui,” the man agreed with obvious resignation, pronouncing the affirmative “hway, hway,” and not “we, we,” as I’d been taught. As he slouched away into the maze of the convent, Gaston came toward us. I made the introductions, and Jean-Paul stated his case.

  “Dommage,” Gaston said with a deep shrug accompanied by raised palms. “It is finished. Too late for the marching band and twenty-one-gun salute, non? The remains are in the hands of the undertaker in Pérrier, awaiting instructions from the German Volksbund about where to plant them next.”

  “Will there be any attempts at identification?” I asked.

  The shrug again. “Except for one man, the remains were so badly charred that identification would be nearly impossible. And certainly it would be very costly and time-consuming. Whether the Germans choose to undertake such an onerous and probably fruitless task is up to them.”

  “What about that one set of remains?”

  “I have only one answer, my dear Maggie.” He leaned toward me. “I don’t give a damn.”

  I looked up at Jean-Paul. “Mission accomplished? Can you tell the angry German delegate at your meeting that you plighted his case?”

  He hesitated before he nodded. “If it continues to be an issue for the man, I’ll suggest that he propose that the European Union adopt a protocol for the handling of international remains found inside member nations.”

  “Bah!” Gaston groused. “Just what we need. Another way for the EU to interfere with local authorities.”

  “What do you suggest?” Jean-Paul asked.

  “Will your Boche friend be appeased if I ask the priest to say a prayer of forgiveness for those who trespass against us during mass tomorrow?”

  Jean-Paul smiled as he looped his hand around my elbow. “Yes. Perfect. Thank you.”

  We started taking our leave, but Gaston stopped us.

  “Maggie,” he said, “that woman you spoke with at the market this morning, who was she?”

  “Erika von Streicher Karl.”

  “I thought it might be,” he said with a scowl. “What, exactly, does she want?”

  I held up my palms. “I know what she says she wants, but I have to believe she’s looking for something more than merely finding out what happened to her father. Gaston, she told me about the beautiful life her family had until the war ended and the Russians came in. She said the Russians took away everything, so apparently they lived in the Eastern Sector somewhere. As she talked, I got the feeling that she expects to find something here that will give her back the comfortable life that she lost.”

  “She knows something?” Jean-Paul asked.

  “Or she’s just crazy. I don’t know. But she is certainly driven.”

  “Do you think she could be dangerous?” Gaston asked.

  “I think she should be more careful,” I said. “If not, someone is likely to take a crack at her.”

  “I’ll ask Pierre to keep an eye on her.”

  Gaston made me promise to bring Jean-Paul to dinner at his house very soon. We said our good-byes and set off to retrieve our bikes from the convent close.

  “Did you learn anything from Jacqueline Cartier at lunch?” I asked.

  “Enough that I gathered you don’t need to worry very much about charges against Guido,” he said. “He had a big contusion on his face when he was brought in that seemed to support the notion that there had been a struggle with the girl, Solange, before she died. Guido’s lawyer told Dauvin that he should ask the father of one of the fromagerie workers what he knows about how Guido got that contusion. The man, Monsieur Bontemps, has gone fishing. He will be brought in for questioning tonight when his boat comes in on the tide. If his story matches Guido’s, there will be only the problem of an alibi to deal with.”

  “Was there a struggle?” I asked as I kicked back my bike’s kickstand. I didn’t remember seeing anything other than the great gash in Solange’s head. But I hadn’t stayed to examine her.

  “Apparently,” he said. “Agent Cartier wouldn’t go into detail. She said they expect a medical report Monday or Tuesday.”

  “Guido can last that long,” I said.

  “What now?” Jean-Paul asked as we wheeled into the lane.

  “I’m taking you home for a nap,” I said.

  “To sleep?”

  “Eventually,” I said, kissing the underside of his chin. “Maybe we’ll get around to sleep.”

  12

  We could hear the drone of Freddy’s trench-digging equipment in the distance as soon as we turned off the byway onto the village road. Jean-Paul wanted to say hello and to see where all the fuss about the remains had been, so we bumped over the culvert at the end of the estate’s access road and made our way around the end of the orchard.

  Wisely, this time Freddy had left the operation of the excavator to its owner and was walking along beside the progressing sewer trench, giving instructions that it seemed to me were being mostly ignored. We could see the patch of fresh, packed black soil among the vast bright green of the carrots in the field where the grave had been excavated, and then filled in.

  Jean-Paul and I leaned the old bikes against the root-ball berm of the hedgerow and started across the road. Freddy met us halfway. After greetings were taken care of, he told us that Pierre had cleared him to continue digging his sewer line. He was several days behind schedule because of the inconvenient discovery of the skull, and its friends, but he was hopeful that if he and his crew worked through the weekend they would be ready when the plumbers came to lay the sewer pipes next week.

  “Surely you’re taking time off tomorrow for the baptism events,” I said.

  “Can’t escape them,” he said with a resigned lift of his shoulders. “But the crew can continue without me for a few hours.”

  The very good news he had to give me was that as soon as the sewer line was in and connected, Freddy would be ready to fill the year-round saltwater pool at the development’s community center. It would take a few days to condition the water, but very soon the pool would be ready to use. The day had grown very warm and the thought of plunging into a pool and swimming to exhaustion was enormously appealing to me.

  “Two weeks,” he said. “Three at the most. Right now the locker room facilities and the kitchen the students are using are on a temporary septic diversion that is giving me all sorts of grief. I’ll be relieved when the entire facility is finally connected to the sewer.”

  We listened while Freddy laid out his plans for getting his village ready to open for viewing by potential buyers. Indeed, the project had been a life saver for hi
m that summer, the season of his divorce, among other personal problems.

  The equipment operator summoned him, so we said our good-byes and went to collect our bikes. I was ready for that nap.

  “Maggie?” I heard my cousin Antoine call out from the other side of the hedgerow, somewhere out in the orchard. “Is that Jean-Paul with you?”

  We climbed the berm and found a gap amid the hawthorn that was wide enough to pass through without getting too badly scratched. Antoine was perched on the lower rungs of a ladder under an apple tree a few rows in, talking with a couple that, by their dress, open gestures, and relaxed posture had to be Americans. Antoine waved for us to join them.

  “Maggie, Jean-Paul,” he said as we approached. “Meet Henry and Paulette Matson, the Count and Countess of Rutland.”

  Jean-Paul’s eyebrow rose, meaning he was dubious. But what the heck? I offered my hand to the woman. I said, “I’ve never met a count and countess before.”

  She took my hand in both of hers and laughed a big, happy, open American laugh; the count had a playful sparkle in his eyes. They were an attractive pair. He was tall and sturdy-looking, with a crop of sandy curls atop his head. And she was petite, with sweet, delicate features. Her hair, at least at the moment, was in the red spectrum, short and perfectly cut to frame a heart-shaped face. They were in that wide zone the Americans call middle age, casually dressed in obviously high-end summer clothes.

  Jean-Paul said, “You’re American?”

  “I’m Canadian, originally,” Paulette, the countess, said. “But yes, we’re Yanks from California.”

  “Are you allowed titles in America?” he asked.

  “Oh, absolutely,” the count said. “It’s a capitalist nation. We paid good money for the title, so we’re going to use it. At least, for the duration of our vacation.”

  “Oh, Henry.” She put her hand on his arm and looked up into his face adoringly. “It is fun, isn’t it?”

  “You bought the title?” I asked.

  “I found it for sale online,” Count Henry said. “I’d asked ­Paulette what she wanted for our anniversary this year, and said she’d always wanted to be Lady Paulette. So I went looking, and found a posting by the Count of Rutland offering legal rights to the title. I thought, hell, if Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband, who started out as an auto mechanic or something, can lay out a little cash and become a prince, then why not us?”

  “Henry, tell them the John Wayne story.”

  He chuckled. “It seems that when John Wayne went to Harvard to collect a Hasty Pudding Award, one of the preppies looked at his hair and asked, ‘Is that your real hair?’ Or something close to that. The Duke said, ‘It sure is, kid. It’s real hair. I paid a lot of money for it, so now it’s mine.’ Our title is as real as his hair was.”

  Jean-Paul laughed. “Why not?”

  “What brings Your Grace to our humble orchard?” I asked.

  Paulette grew more serious. “When Henry bought the title, we had no idea where Rutland is. The only place we could find with that name is one of the tiniest counties in England. It does have a castle, but it’s the tiniest castle I think I’ve ever seen. We already had plans to come across to look for vine stock for our vineyard.”

  “And some goats,” Henry interjected. “Paulette wants to make goat cheese.”

  She patted his arm. “So we decided that since we were coming over we might as well stop in England for a few days and have a look at our county for ourselves, do a little research, just for the fun of it. Well, there was no record of any kind in England of the man we bought the title from. And there was no record of the Count, or Earl, of Rutland at all. It was about then that the investiture papers caught up with us.”

  “The papers were very elaborate, very ornate,” Henry said. “About what you would expect. Except, they were in German. So, I got back in touch with the old guy I bought the title from, the now former-count, and he told me that his Rutland is in Germany, near the Polish border. We thought, we’re already on this side of the pond so we might as well go take a look there, too. The old guy agreed to meet us, so we flew over to Dresden from London.”

  “Does he live in a castle?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what he lives in,” Henry said, propping a foot on Antoine’s ladder. “We met him in a beer hall.”

  “He was convincing,” Paulette said. “If you wanted him to be. He was straight and tall, and he wore a beautiful suit. Even if it was a bit frayed at the cuffs and shiny at the butt, it was perfectly tailored. And he had a monocle.”

  “The monocle would be enough for me,” I said.

  “I wish I’d thought so, and left it right there,” Paulette said. “But we asked some questions and he told us his big sad story. You can probably guess what it was. His family was very old and very la-di-da for centuries. And then the war came, and the Soviets came in afterward. The family was trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and all was lost.”

  “Except for his pride and pretensions,” Henry said. “For entertainment value alone, I thought we’d made a good buy. And Paulette is right, at that juncture we should have paid for the guy’s lunch and stopped asking questions.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “If you set out to buy a fantasy,” she said, “you have to be careful not to let reality intrude.”

  “I made the mistake of asking him why he was selling his title,” Henry said. “He told us that ever since the reunification of Germany twenty-some years ago, he’s been trying to reclaim the old family land. It’s come up for sale, but he’s just a bit short on cash.”

  “He tried to hit Henry up for a loan,” Paulette said.

  “Yeah. He said it would be a short-term thing, that he was just about to come into some real capital.”

  “Quelle surprise, eh?” Jean-Paul said with an ironic chuckle.

  Paulette answered him in Canadian-accented French: “No surprise at all.”

  “Do you think he is genuine?” I asked.

  “A genuine fraud or a genuine count?” Henry asked with a chuckle. “We asked about the ancestry we had just bought into. He didn’t have much to say, except that his sainted father went missing in action during the last war and nothing has been the same since.”

  Though I suspected I knew what the answer would be, I asked, “Did he tell you where his father went missing?”

  Paulette pointed to the soil under her feet. “Right here. When he told us his father was an officer in the German army stationed in Normandy, I looked him in the eye and asked him if his father was a Nazi. He denied it.”

  “If the man was among the Occupation forces stationed here,” I said, “he wore the swastika.”

  “Of course he did,” she said. She kept her eyes on me to the point that I became uncomfortable. “We have no illusions about the man. He said something to us that was so strange, that when Henry saw the news about the German remains found on a farm in this same village where the father went MIA, we got a car and drove over from Burgundy to see if we could find out anything about the count.”

  Antoine rose from his ladder perch. “The remains found here were charred beyond recognition. No one will ever know the identities of those men.”

  “That’s fine with us,” Henry said. “I have a feeling that the sins of the father who was posted here during the war have come to rest on the son. Maybe there is some karmic justice about that.”

  “What, you believe in karma now, Henry?” Paulette asked with a little chuckle. He grinned and kissed the top of her head.

  “What did he say that was so strange?” I asked.

  Paulette took a breath. “He told us that if he had the money, he would go to Normandy and search for his father’s remains, even if he had to use his bare hands to find him. He said that if he could locate his father’s grave, he knew his fortunes would turn around.”

  “Magical thinking?” Jean-Paul said.

  “Wonder what he meant?” I said.

  “It’s a puzzle.” Henry reached up
and plucked a ripe Binet Rouge apple from a branch over his head and took a bite. Immediately, he spit the bitter fruit into his hand. “What the hell?”

  “It’s a cider apple,” Antoine said. “Not meant for eating.”

  Paulette was still eyeing me. “You’re American, right?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “But you live here?”

  “This is my family’s estate. I’m just visiting.”

  “You know how sometimes when you’re traveling you see someone and you persuade yourself you know that person? Well I know I’ve met you.” She aimed a manicured fingernail at Jean-Paul. “I ­believe that you and I met at a fund-raiser for the Long Beach Symphony last year. Aren’t you the consul general for Los Angeles?”

  “For two more weeks, I am,” Jean-Paul said with a little bow. He was absolutely handsome, but he didn’t look very ambassadorial at the moment in his well-worn khaki shorts, T-shirt, and scuffed sneakers, his unshaven face glistening from the heat of the day.

  “I knew it.” She tilted her head and studied me again. “Has anyone told you that if you put on makeup and did your hair you’d look just like Maggie MacGowen? You know who she is, does those investigative film specials for television.”

  “I’ve heard people say that,” I said. Antoine and Jean-Paul were trying not to laugh, and mostly failing. I reached my hand toward her. “Hi, I’m Maggie MacGowen.”

  “Well, damn.” She laughed that big American laugh again. “What are you doing here?”

  “Visiting my family,” I said again.

  Henry was peering down his nose at me. “I read about this. You’re making a film about getting to know the family you only ­recently learned that you were part of.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “You haven’t run into our count, have you?” she asked with an airy laugh.

  “Not unless he was bones,” I said. “Does the Count of Rutland have a name?”

  “Von Streicher,” Henry said. “Horst von Streicher.”

  From our reactions, they knew something was terribly wrong.