Disturbing the Dark

by Wendy Hornsby

  Glancing back toward the church courtyard, Jean-Paul said, “The name Betz caused quite a stir this morning, Ma Mère.”

  She leaned into his shoulder. With a sigh, she said, “Will we ever get past that terrible time?”

  “The war?” I asked.

  She nodded, and changed the subject. “So, have you made a film star of your grandmother? She told me you powdered her nose and lit her up like an angel for the cameras.”

  I chuckled. “I would never call her an angel, but Grand-mère certainly has star quality. I’m sure viewers will sit up and take notice.”

  “Be careful, chérie, or she’ll get a swelled head.”

  “Are you ready to get your nose powdered and sit down in front of my cameras for a little chat?”

  “The bishop gave permission,” she said. “But I’m sure I have nothing to add to what Élodie has already told you.”

  “I think you do.” When she held up her palms as a gesture of doubt, I asked, “Who was Betz?”

  “Ah, yes, Betz.” Her smile was gone. “The child who was killed shared that name, yes?”

  “Solange, yes.”

  She canted her head to look at me. “What do you know about her family?”

  “Virtually nothing,” I said. “Solange told both me and her professor that her family had roots here, and that they had all moved away. And that’s all.”

  The abbess looked off into the distance as her hands disappeared into the capacious sleeves of her habit, as if she were retreating into a safe place. She sighed, “Oh my.”

  “Ma Mère?” Jean-Paul laid a hand on her shoulder. “Ça va?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine.” She took a deep breath. “You want to know who Betz was, yes?”

  “Please,” I said.

  She thought for a moment, looked from me to Jean-Paul, and seemed to come to a decision. “My dears,” she said, “Élodie told you how it was when a platoon of Nazi soldiers commandeered the Martin home and conscripted some of us village girls as farm laborers. In that situation, the line between victor and vanquished was clear; they were the master, we were their servants. But it also happened, frequently happened in fact, that only one or two soldiers would be billeted in a private home. The Nazis would live side by side with the residents, sharing the same table, passing in the hallways. I believe that most French people in that situation did as they were instructed by the occupiers, but at the same time they did their best to ­ignore the soldiers living among them, as if the occupiers were ghosts, ­annoying entities that were not going away.”

  After a moment, she continued. “Sometimes friendships emerged. And sometimes something more. To gain favors, for love, who can say? Anyway, Betz was a German soldier. And he fell in love with a young woman in the home where he was billeted.”

  “What happened to them?” I asked.

  “D-Day happened,” she said. “The Germans lost the war. He was taken prisoner by the Allies.”

  “What about his lover?” Jean-Paul asked. “Women who collaborated with the Germans were generally treated very harshly by their neighbors.”

  “Very harshly, indeed. And the woman was. Her head was shaved in public, she was covered in ashes, and shunned. She was also expecting his child.”

  “Dear God,” I said. “What did she do?”

  “The old abbess took her in until the baby was born, and gave her charity afterward so that they didn’t starve. Her own family turned her out. But it wasn’t very long after, maybe only a year, when, to the surprise of everyone, Betz, the soldier, the father, came for her and the child. He took them away, and they never came back.”

  “I suppose that explains why Solange’s family wouldn’t come here to collect her belongings,” I said.

  “I could not say, my dear.” We had reached the side entrance to the convent. The abbess took me by the shoulders and kissed my cheeks, and Jean-Paul’s, as well. Before I let her go, I had one more question.

  “Ma Mère,” I said. “My grandmother told me that you women rescued an English pilot. Tell me about him.”

  “Tony?” She smiled, thinking. “He was a lovely man. Tall and fair, with the deepest blue eyes.”

  “Tony?”

  “Tony.” Still smiling, she opened the door.

  “What happened to him?”

  The smile turned wistful. “He died, shot down over Dieppe in the summer of 1944. A great loss.”

  “Anthony Dauvin was his son?”

  “His beautiful son. The tragedy is, he did not live to meet his boy.” With a little bow, she stepped inside, closing the door behind her.

  Jean-Paul wrapped an arm around my shoulders as we walked back toward the car park. “You look sad, my dear.”

  “I was just thinking,” I said. “Two mothers from the same area, two soldiers from opposing sides, two babies. One woman was reviled and shunned by the community, the other is cherished to this day. Strange circumstance, yes?”

  “Very,” he said. “I can imagine how bitter that circumstance could make the one who was shunned.”

  “Bitter, angry, resentful, vengeful?” I said.

  “Murderous?” he said with a soft laugh. “Sounds very Old Testament, doesn’t it?”

  I suppose it did. We stopped in at the gendarme barracks to check on Guido. Once again, he was in the day room instead of locked away in a cell. He was lounging on the cot against the back wall, reading a Mickey Spillane paperback in English that I found at a brocante—a flea market—in Cherbourg the week before.

  Nodding at the book in his hands, I asked, “Learning anything useful?”

  “Tons.” He set the book down and got to his feet. “I’m planning to blast out of this pop stand tonight. Meet me around back at midnight, and bring your gat.”

  “If you can wait until tomorrow morning, we’ll just walk out the front door,” I said. “In the meantime, it doesn’t look like you’re being mistreated.”

  He laughed. “I could walk out the front door right now, go buy some bonbons, and walk right back in and no one would send out the storm troopers. The worst part of this whole thing is the boredom. It wasn’t too bad last night because there was another guy in here to talk to. But he was sprung this morning.”

  “What was he in for?” I asked.

  “Drunk in public. When he was hauled in, from the way he was behaving I thought he was wasted. The flics gave him a breath test and put him in a cell to sober up. But right away he seemed fine. Talkative bastard, full of questions. It was nice to have someone who could speak in complete English sentences for a change, but I had to roll over and put a pillow over my head to get any sleep.”

  “American, British?” I asked.

  “German,” he said.

  Jean-Paul’s brows shot up. “How old was he?”

  Guido shrugged. “Mid-thirties I’d guess.”

  “Was his name Dieter Schwarz?”

  “Something like that,” Guido said at the same time I asked, “Who the hell is Dieter Schwarz?”

  “Reporter for a right-wing online news agency out of Berlin,” Jean-Paul said. “Drives a certain green Toyota.”

  “When did you find that out?” I wanted to know.

  “During mass,” Jean-Paul said. “A text came through during the Our Father. I bowed my head and sneaked a look.”

  “I should have guessed he was a reporter, all the questions he asked,” Guido said. “How do you know him?”

  “He seems to be tailing us,” I said. “What sorts of questions did he ask?”

  “Mostly about the German remains we found. He asked what was going to happen to the remains, but he really seemed to be most interested to know about any artifacts that were found, guns and so on. But there wasn’t anything much I could tell him other than that there were a lot of charred bones.”

  “Did you tell him how the bones happened to get charred?” I asked.

  “I know better than to volunteer details from a work in progress, Mag. I’ve been at this game as long as you h
ave.” He patted my cheek. “I told him that he’d have to wait for our film to be broadcast.”

  “Did that satisfy him?”

  “I didn’t care if it did or not,” he said. “But it kind of ticked him off. He told me he was a writer doing research, but he couldn’t talk about it. I didn’t know if he was being snarky because I wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to know about our stuff, or if maybe he wasn’t a writer at all. I never really bought the drunk routine so I generally dismissed him as a bullshitter. If anything, I thought that maybe he just needed a place to sleep for the night; rooms are hard to come by around here.”

  The conversation moved on to the hearing scheduled for the morning. Guido’s lawyer had told him not to worry. There were insufficient grounds to file charges against him, and unless charges were filed he couldn’t be held beyond the forty-eight hours allowed under garde à vu. The last piece the police had been looking into, evidence that Guido had been in a fight, disappeared when Delphine’s father affirmed that it was he who punched Guido in the jaw. Guido still did not have an alibi for the night Solange was murdered, but that in itself was not evidence.

  “If they give me back my passport,” Guido asked me, “are you sending me home?”

  “Is that what you want?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I’ve never abandoned you mid-project. I don’t want to start now.”

  “You won’t be abandoning me,” I said. “There’s plenty you can do from the studio in L.A. More than you could in a French jail.”

  “Talk it over with your lawyer before you decide,” Jean-Paul ­advised. “But in the meantime, I’ll check the airline schedules.”

  16

  Antoine called when we were on our way to the car park. I thought he’d be asking why we were AWOL from the beach party, and was surprised when he seemed relieved that we hadn’t even started out yet. Grand-mère was still at home, he said, and because the rest of the family had been among the first to arrive at the beach ­pavilion all their cars were now hemmed in by later arrivals. There was no way they could get out until everyone left. The abbess discovered her ride was stuck in traffic, or something, so would we please stop at the convent to pick her up before we left the village to go get Grand-mère? By the way, parking near the beach was abysmal, so he advised that we ditch our car wherever there was space to pull in.

  Ma Mère was waiting for us next to the stone fountain in front of the convent, shading herself from the glare of midday sun under a pink flowered parasol. She had changed out of her heavy black habit into a mid-calf-length navy skirt and a white blouse, with a shorter black coif on her head and sandals on her feet.

  “Ma Mère,” I said as I held the front passenger door for her to get in next to Jean-Paul. “You have legs.”

  “Have you never seen a nun in beach togs before?” she said with a little giggle and a curtsy. She declined to get in front, though, saying she preferred to sit in back and be chauffeured when a handsome man was driving.

  When we pulled into the compound gate, Grand-mère must have heard the car approach across the gravel courtyard. She opened her front door and came out just as we pulled up. Like the abbess, she, too, had changed into clothes that would be more comfortable at the beach than the trim summer-weight suit she had worn to mass. She looked very jaunty in lightweight slacks and a long-sleeved linen shirt. A broad-brimmed straw hat hung from her wrist by its chin strap; there was a stack of folding canvas chairs against the wall.

  “I am so sorry for the inconvenience,” Grand-mère said as we got out of the car.

  “No inconvenience at all,” Jean-Paul said. He popped his car trunk and loaded in the chairs. “In truth, you’ve done us a favor. Your granddaughter was saying that she wanted to swim, but without a suit I’m afraid she’d scandalize the village. So, if you’ll excuse us, we’ll run upstairs and change.”

  The two women followed us inside, where it was cooler, to wait. As we hurried up the stairs Jean-Paul and I were laughing about the villagers’ reactions if we did go swimming au naturel. We weren’t on the Riviera, but it was not uncommon for both sexes among the summer crowd to stroll along the local beaches wearing nothing except a skimpy bottom, to the amusement or horror of more conservative year-around residents. I had my hand on our bedroom doorknob when Jean-Paul pulled me into a very lovely, passionate embrace. He said, “Alone at last.”

  “I’m yours,” I said, opening the door and pulling him through. “For all of ten minutes.”

  “Only ten?” he said before he froze, looking over my shoulder. I turned to see what he saw behind me.

  Erika von Streicher Karl stood in the middle of our bedroom. Before we had a chance to challenge her for being in a place where she had absolutely no business being, she began to sputter, trying to articulate an explanation I supposed. The room seemed to be ­exactly as we left it, so if she had rummaged around she had been tidy about it. Jean-Paul was asking her what the hell she was doing there. It didn’t matter to me what she was after, I only wanted for her to disappear out of our lives. I pulled out my mobile and called the ­gendarme barracks; I’d had the number on speed dial since Friday when Guido was taken in. At about the time someone picked up the call, Erika managed to utter an actual word: “Scheiße.”

  “This is Maggie MacGowen,” I said into the phone. “Chez Martin. We discovered an intruder in the house. Please send someone right away.”

  I handed the phone to Jean-Paul to deal with the follow-up questions because I thought he would do a better job of answering them. And anyway, before the gendarmes arrived I had some questions for the woman standing in front of me, sweating like the forward on a basketball team. My first question was to the point:

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  She looked around as if to make sure she knew where she was before she managed to say, “I thought you would all be at that party.”

  “Wrong answer,” I said. “Try again.”

  “This was my father’s bedroom,” was the best she could come up with. Until that moment, if I had given it any thought at all I would have assumed that von Streicher had commandeered the larger room at the end of the hall, my grandparents’ room, for himself. But as I thought it through, it made sense that my grandparents would not want to use the same room he’d inhabited. Sometime after the war, I knew, they had done a major modernization of the house, adding central heat and more bathrooms, and had enlarged the master bedroom where my grandmother still slept.

  “You say this is your father’s room?” I opened the armoire and made a show of looking inside. “He doesn’t seem to be here now. What did you hope to find?”

  “You have to understand.…”

  “I’m afraid I do,” I said. “Only too well.”

  Jean-Paul said good-bye to the police, and handed me my phone as he took Erika by the elbow. He said, “We’ll wait outside.”

  When they heard us on the stairs, Grand-mère and the abbess came into the salon from the kitchen. Seeing the Nazi’s daughter ­being impelled down the stairs shocked and confused them.

  “Maggie?” Grand-mère said, backing up as we reached the bottom step. “What the hell?”

  “She was in our room. We’ve called the gendarmes and they’re on their way to pick her up.”

  Grand-mère nailed Erika with a withering, narrow-eyed glare. “What is it you are hoping to find, madame?”

  “My father was so happy here,” Erika managed to utter, though the words were no more than a whisper, almost as if she were speaking to herself. “I hoped to find some token of his time in this house, just a little memento.”

  “A memento?” Addressing her old friend, the abbess, Grand-mère did not take her eyes from Erika. “The major’s daughter wants a memento. Too bad, though. I did my best to burn any trinkets the Nazis left behind. And you, Ma Mère? Other than scars and nightmares, have you saved souvenirs from that time that you might share with her?”

  The abbess blanched; bad memories stirred. Sh
e took out her rosary beads and silently ran them through her fingers.

  “My father was not a Nazi,” the intruder managed to say in a bolder voice.

  Jean-Paul gave Erika’s arm a hard jerk. When she looked back at him, he said, “Don’t be a fool. Shut up.”

  “Madame von Streicher Karl,” Grand-mère said to get her attention. “Do you think it matters in the least whether your father was a Nazi or not? He wore their insignia, he marched to Nazi orders. He shielded himself behind their power when he abused our people.”

  “My father was a good and decent man. I knew him.”

  “He dandled you on his knee,” Grand-mère said with a dismissive wave. “You know nothing about the man. But because you are so insistent, I will tell you what you want to know about your father’s lovely sojourn in this house.”

  “Élodie?”

  Grand-mère heard the note of caution in her old friend’s voice, but shook her head. “I’ve had enough of this woman’s nonsense.”

  I put my arm around my grandmother and she patted my cheek. Looking up at me, she said, “Yes?” I nodded. She was right. It was time.

  “You want to know how your father died,” Grand-mère said, taking a step closer to Erika. “That kind and decent man of your fantasies was a thief, a martinet, and a rapist. He forced a child of only fifteen into his bed. And when he impregnated her, he sent her to the village pharmacist and forced the old man, who knew nothing of such things, to terminate the pregnancy. A terrible butchery was done to that precious girl.”

  Ma Mère groaned. I rushed to her, worried that she might faint. As I hustled to help her into a chair at the far end of the room, I said, “Grand-mère, enough.” But the abbess took my hand and said, “No, let her tell it.”

  After a nod from the abbess, Grand-mère continued. “Only a week after that barbaric procedure, your father tried to force himself onto the girl yet again. She begged him, telling him that she was still bleeding, that she had not yet healed. And he did not care.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Erika said.

  “No?” Grand-mère walked over toward the arrangement of chairs where the abbess was resting. She grabbed a corner of the Persian rug between the cluster of chairs and flung it back, exposing a big black stain on the gray stone floor. “On this very spot, to stop your father from harming that child further, I slit his throat. You want a souvenir of your father? Here it is. Your father’s blood still darkens this place. Shall I rip up the stones for you to take with you?”