Disturbing the Dark

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Your count was here,” I said. “Major von Streicher had command of a German platoon that was billeted at my grandparents’ home. He may have been dear to his family, but he was detested by the people here.”

  “Jeez, Henry, you’d expect a count to be at least a general. But a lowly major?”

  Antoine said, “His daughter says he was a schoolmaster.”

  “Daughter?” Paulette took a step toward Antoine. “The count has a sister? You know this person?”

  “We’ve run into her,” Jean-Paul said. “She’s been lurking around, trying to find out what she can about her father’s tenure here.”

  I asked, “Is there any chance your count will find the funds to actually come looking for his papa?”

  Henry laughed. “It’s high season along this coast right now. Good luck to him finding a place to stay, and paying for it. We lucked out last minute and found a room in a private home because of a cancellation. It’s pretty cute, but it’s costing us almost as much as the George Cinq in Paris would. If the count is dependent on the money we gave him for those fancy investiture papers, he’ll have to sleep rough. Don’t tell my beautiful wife, but the title came cheap.”

  “Maybe he’s already sold the title to three other people since we saw him,” Paulette said. “Wouldn’t put it past him.”

  Jean-Paul wrapped his arm around me and I leaned my head against his shoulder. I was sorry that the great joy these people had been having as the ersatz Count and Countess of Rutland, even if only for a summer, had been burst. Paulette was right, if you buy into a fantasy you have to be careful about letting reality intrude. Both of the von Streicher siblings seemed to be living out a fantasy of another sort. I could tell them with some certainty that their father’s remains had been unearthed. And I could tell them how he died. But I had a feeling that the bones were only part of what they were after. What was the rest?

  Paulette was telling Antoine about the room they had found in the village.

  “It’s in a darling old stone house. And the owners are the sweetest couple. They have a brand new baby and a toddler. The husband told us that normally they serve breakfast to their guests, but right now they have their hands full. And we don’t mind at all, do we, Henry?”

  He shook his head, but his attention had wandered off toward the cows crossing the far pasture, on their way to the milking barn. The conversation turned to cheese making, one of Paulette’s passions; she wanted to make goat cheese at their Hawaiian ranch. Antoine suggested a tour of the fromagerie, which they eagerly accepted. Jean-Paul and I excused ourselves, said the polite good-byes, fetched our bikes, and rode home. For a lovely long nap. And it was lovely.

  The sky had turned gray, threatening rain, by the time we left the house again that evening, headed for the student camp to pack up Solange’s personal effects. This time we borrowed Grand-mère’s big Range Rover and drove the short distance up the village road to the still-unpaved road into Freddy’s housing development.

  Along the western coast of the Cotentin Peninsula, because of the tidal patterns, land accretes, or builds up over time. Three centuries ago, the village road had run along the shoreline. Now it is at least three-fifths of a mile inland. The original, and still legal, deed to my family’s estate defined the western extent of their land as the mean high tide line. What that meant for us, and particularly for Freddy, was that the wide strip of accreted land on the far side of the village road was ours, a gift from the sea. If that land were drained and further saltwater intrusion stopped, then the soil could be sufficiently amended to become fertile farmland. But the process would be expensive and the family had no need for more arable land. So it had been left alone, a long, wide barren tidal plain. Until Freddy decided that he could build an ocean-view community on it.

  The engineering of Freddy’s development was complicated and innovative. Already the eco-friendly infrastructure, architecture, and use of natural elements in the landscaping had drawn attention. The idea of a planned community for seniors who would bring their pension incomes into an area of under-employment and de-population, and that would integrate their needs with services already existing, and under-utilized, with a traditional village had been embraced in the form of public subsidies, environmental advisors, and tax breaks that made it possible for Freddy to begin construction a full year earlier than he had hoped. It wasn’t a large-scale project, but it was, still, an enormous undertaking for a man whose background was in finance, and not development. Freddy did have the considerable experience and support of our Uncle Gérard, who was a builder, and Gérard’s English second wife, whose expertise was marketing. And a significant amount of capital from my share of Isabelle’s estate when it was finally settled. But overall, the project was Freddy’s baby.

  We parked near the future tennis courts, where the student tents were lined up in rows separated by alleyways that the students had named: Atlantic Coast Highway, Rue de Carotte, and Way Off Broadway. I gave Jean-Paul a quick tour of the development, from the cluster of home sites built around a wide and winding parkland, to the community center that was, actually, near the center of the development. When it was completed, the center would have a year-round pool, a gym and fitness studio, locker rooms, meeting rooms, a wide covered veranda for outdoor dining and events, and a commercial-grade kitchen. At the moment, the facility had bare concrete floors and unpainted sheetrock walls, but it had been set up to ­accommodate the students for the duration of their summer courses. The plumbing in the locker rooms worked, there were dining tables and chairs, sofas and easy chairs and a wide-screen television set up in the larger of the meeting rooms. The kitchen was fully functional. Their housekeeping was a bit spotty, but altogether the students had made good use of the place.

  Solange’s tent was in the middle of the camp’s three rows, at the end nearest the locker rooms. After they finished their search, the gendarmes had sealed the tent entrance, a flimsy wood panel, with blue police tape and a warning note. I had called Pierre Dauvin to make sure that it was all right for us to go inside, and he had given us formal permission with the caveat that if we found anything that he had missed during his search, we were to let him know immediately.

  The tent, like the others, had a wood floor, wooden sides halfway up, and canvas above. When we first went inside, the closed-up space was hot and stuffy. We propped open the door and tied up the canvas window flaps to let in the evening breeze off the ocean. And then we stopped to take a look around. There were a narrow iron-frame bed, a small dresser, a coat rack, a desk, and a chair all crammed into twelve-feet square. The only light was provided by two reading lamps and a bare fluorescent bulb hanging by its cord from the center support beam. We had brought some green plastic trash bags and a few boxes, but set them aside when we found a carry-on suitcase and a large canvas duffel under the bed. Jean-Paul took the duffel and ­began to unpack the desk, and I started on the dresser.

  I found the sorts of clothing one would expect a young woman to have brought for a summer of archeological work. In the top drawer of the dresser there was a week’s worth of utilitarian white cotton underwear and socks that had taken on the particular dinginess that I would call college-dorm gray. The camp had no public laundry facility because the houses under construction would each have their own laundry hookups. So I suspected that Solange had hand-washed her clothes, probably with shampoo or hand soap, rather than using the coin laundromat in the village. The second drawer of the dresser held T-shirts, shorts, and jeans, a swimsuit, and a couple of sweaters. A cotton skirt and blouse for dressy events like dates and dinners out hung from pegs on the coat rack.

  After the clothes were packed, there was still plenty of room in the suitcase. I found a muslin laundry bag hanging from a nail driven into a wooden side support. Thinking that the few clothes inside should be laundered before they were sent to the parents, I lifted the bag off the nail to take home. The bag felt oddly heavy, and when I set it atop the dresser, there was a metallic clan
k. I opened it, and dumped it. Dirty Ts, underwear, a muddy pair of shorts. And a filthy white sock with a bulge in the toe. I reached into the sock.

  “Look at this, Jean-Paul.” On my palm, I held a beautiful gold pocket watch I had pulled out of the sock. It was covered with dirt, but I could still see the elaborately etched filigree on the cover, swirls of twining leaves and flowers embellished with gemstones. The watch looked very old. And it looked very expensive. I used a cleaner sock to wipe off the layer of grit embedded in the etched grooves until it shone. Jean-Paul took the watch from my hand for a closer look.

  “My grandfather had one of these big old watches,” he said. “He wore it hanging from a jeweled fob on the outside of his vest. A symbol, I think, of a man’s status. Or a gift from a father with high expectations for a son.”

  He pressed the winding stem and the lid popped up to show the jeweled clock face. There was engraving inside the lid. Jean-Paul handed the watch back to me so that I could see what had been written there.

  Something, probably a name, had been crudely scratched off and another name, equally crudely, scratched under the first. I couldn’t read the original, but the second was abundantly clear: h. von streicher.

  “Where the hell did Solange get this?” I said, turning the watch over, looking for markings. “And where the hell did von Streicher get it?”

  “The count?” Jean-Paul asked with a wry grin. “Obviously, he stole it. To the victor belongs the spoils, yes?”

  He took out his phone and snapped a picture of the watch. Then he turned it over and took a second picture of the jeweler’s mark embossed in the watch body near the hinge. He copied the engraved number inside the back cover into a text line, and sent it off into the ether with the photos.

  “Who did you send that to?” I asked.

  He shrugged and gave me the sort of enigmatic answer I had come to expect from him. “A friend.”

  Jean-Paul had gone to one of France’s elite grandes-écoles where, it seemed, he became friends with a very tight circle of men who were now the core of the upper echelons of the French bureaucracy. Whatever the situation he ran up against, he always had a friend he could call for information, advice, or a bail-out. He was certainly handy to have around whenever I found myself in a pickle.

  He took another clean sock out of the bag, put the watch into it, and gave it back to me. I dropped it into the front pocket of my linen shorts, feeling it drag down the light fabric. There was no ­mystery about how Major von Streicher acquired it. As Jean-Paul said, he stole it. But as we continued packing the tent, with every step I felt the weight of the watch against my leg, setting off a new round of speculation about how the thing happened to land in Solange’s laundry bag.

  In a corner, behind the coat rack, I found a bucket of tools marked as the property of the department of antiquities research, l’école du Louvre. I set them beside the door to return to Olivia. Jean-Paul put a stack of books that belonged to the university library next to the tools. On top of the stack was a library-bound monograph by Olivia Boulez with the word Viducasses in the title. There was a sticky note on the cover with my name written on it.

  “What is that?” Jean-Paul asked when he glanced over and saw me thumbing through the slender volume.

  “Solange was going to lend me an article about the early Celts in the area.” I set the book back onto the stack.

  “What about this?” He handed me the notebook that Solange always carried with her. Inside, I saw her meticulous sketches and notes, some of which I had seen when she was trying to persuade Pierre Dauvin that she could be useful to his investigation. The question was, did the notebook belong to the university project she was working on? Or was it personal property that should go to her family?

  I propped the notebook against the bucket of tools. “I’ll ask ­Olivia, her professor, and Raffi, who is one of the other graduate students.”

  Personal books, shoes, and toiletries filled the rest of the case. I zipped it up and set it beside the door. Jean-Paul pulled a wafer-thin laptop out of the top desk drawer, along with the usual accumulation of pens and paperclips and rubber bands that people dump into desk drawers. I spotted a new flash drive, still in its packaging, among the clutter. I opened the computer, woke it from sleep mode, took the flash drive out of its wrappings and put it into one of the computer’s drive ports. A few clicks, and the computer files were downloading to the removable drive.

  Jean-Paul looked over my shoulder. All he said was “Oui?”

  “I don’t know what it is yet,” I said, “but I’m sure I have a very good reason to take a look at Solange’s files.”

  He chuckled. “Elementary spycraft; never hand over information until you know what it is.”

  I cupped his chin in my hand and looked into his deep brown eyes. “And what, exactly, do you know about spycraft?”

  “As I have said before—”

  “I know, if you told me you’d have to kill me.”

  He kissed me. Things were just getting interesting when his ­mobile phone rang. He stepped back and took the call, said, “Bon” and “merci,” affirmed to the caller that his son, Dominic, was fine and yes, Dom was beginning his university preparation studies in September, and how happy he was that the caller’s wife had recovered from whatever ailed her. Lunch next week would be grand, and good-bye.

  “So?” I said.

  “The watch was made at the Paris workshop of Breguet in 1935. It was ordered by a national association of cheesemakers and engraved for presentation to one Giles Martin.”

  “My great-grandfather,” I said.

  “So it would seem that this von Streicher stole or appropriated your great-grandfather’s watch for his own use.”

  “The bastard,” I said.

  “Peut-être,” he said, maybe so. “But how did it come into the possession of this young woman?”

  “I just may have an answer,” I said. I had puzzled my way through that same question until a possibility came to me. “But first I need to talk to my grandmother.”

  A shadow crossed the door and we looked over. Two of my ­interns, Taylor and Zach, were hovering there, peeking in through the open door. I introduced them to Jean-Paul, and said, “I thought you’d be at the beach with the others.”

  “We were,” Zach said. “But Raffi—you know who he is?—Raffi got there late. He told us that he’d waited in the camp until you ­arrived because he wanted to make sure someone was here, looking after things. He said he saw that old woman who’s been hanging around the estate for the last few days walking around the construction site. You know, we all have stuff like cameras and tools and ­computers in our tents. The doors lock, but they aren’t really secure. Still, we never had to worry about anyone messing with our stuff until all those people showed up after the bones were found. We didn’t know how long you would be here, so Taylor and I came back to make sure someone was around in case that woman, or anyone else, came into the camp.”

  “Has anything gone missing?” Jean-Paul asked.

  Taylor held up her palms. “A couple of the kids thought that someone had gone through their things. And that woman makes people worry. She’s seriously weird. She walked right up to Raffi when he was at his dig site out in the pasture and wanted to know what he’d found. Solange had said she did the same thing to her.”

  I said, “Then it’s a good idea to keep an eye out. I’ll talk to Freddy and Antoine and see if we can set up some security here.”

  Taylor and Zach exchanged a telling look.

  I looked from one to the other, and said, “Yes?”

  Zach pointed to the tops of the temporary light poles Freddy had erected at the ends of the alleys between tents. There were video surveillance cameras atop every pole.

  “When did you put those in?” I asked.

  “Thursday,” Zach said. “That’s when someone went into Raffi’s tent. We pooled our money and bought the system at an electronics store in Pérrier.”

  �
��Who monitors the cameras?”

  Taylor held up her mobile phone. “Anyone who wants to. Zach set it up so that the cameras feed to a Cloud account. All of us have access to it. You know, we didn’t want anyone to think Big Brother was watching them.”

  I heard Jean-Paul chuckle softly as he put an arm around me. I looked up at him and said, “Talk about spycraft.”

  “Does Pierre Dauvin know about the cameras?” Jean-Paul asked.

  Again, Zach and Taylor checked with each other before either spoke. She said, “Why would he?”

  “Solange,” I said.

  She thought about that for a moment. “I guess that because ­Solange didn’t die here in camp, we just didn’t think there was anything to say. Is that wrong?”

  “I don’t know, Taylor,” I said. “But I would love to see what you captured on Thursday night into Friday morning. And the gendarmes probably would, too.”

  “Just go here.” Zach took a pencil out of Solange’s collection, and a note pad. He wrote down the access information for the Cloud account and handed it to me. “It’s a fairly primitive system; cheap. The images aren’t very sharp, and we set the cameras to capture only fifteen frames a minute. But the images are date- and time-stamped so you can scroll through and find what you want to see.”

  “You amaze me,” I said, patting him on the back. “You endlessly amaze me.”

  “Film is my life.” He shrugged. And then he asked, with a hopeful gleam in his eye, “If you find something on the tape, think it could be used in the documentary?”

  “Possibly,” I said. “Let’s get a look at it first.”

  The two youths sat on the edge of the cot while we finished packing, chatting amiably with Jean-Paul about their ambitions as filmmakers. He asked questions that were both pointed and supportive, and I was impressed by how well, and how realistically, they understood what they faced. The film industry is a tough business. It chews up and spits out legions of talented people every year. But there are always more waiting, hoping to replace their soon-forgotten predecessors.