Tristan and Albert left in the afternoon to practice fencing. Merle walked to the grocery and stocked up on food, made herself a salad and cheese plate, and ate it on the patio under a cloudy sky. When the forensics crew returned from lunch she took the inspector aside.
“Did you speak to Sister Evangeline about the death of Justine?” she asked.
He answered something, too fast, and she urged him to speak “plus tard.” He repeated it slower, that he had spoken to a woman who knew Justine. “Not Sister Evangeline?”
He shook his head, staring in his inscrutable way. The stains on his shirt had increased, and his tie was a mess. The forensics team was finishing up, packing their kits. Merle continued in her blundering French. “She stopped me on the street. Two days after Justine died. She looked different, with brown hair, not gray. I think the gray hair was false.” She didn’t know the word for ‘wig.’
He smoked his cigarette, waiting for more.
“She gave me the key to the gate, there, on the alley. She said ‘they’ would kill for it.”
That got his attention. “They?”
“I don’t know who.”
“Can I see this key?”
She pulled the chain over her head and handed it to him. The key dangled, large and old. He examined it carefully, turning it over on his palm. Merle knew there was no writing on it, no number or identifying mark. It was just a simple, old-fashioned skeleton key.
“She had a bruise on her cheek, here. As if someone had hit her. She seemed afraid.”
The inspector puffed. “We were told she had left town by the owner of the bistro.”
“But I saw her.”
“Thank you, madame, for the information.”
“Is there anything new about Justine LaBelle? Do you know where she was from, who she was?”
“She was from Bordeaux. She was well known there. She had been in police custody.” He stared up into Merle’s eyes, holding her look. “But she did not deserve her fate.”
One of her Harlem clients, Freddie Wilson, came suddenly into her head. She was trying to get off the streets, clearly a working girl with the gaunt look of a junkie, not unlike Justine. They heard she’d overdosed. Merle felt she had ignored the obvious, let down the woman and the entire community. Something might have been done, should have, but sadly, irrevocably, wasn’t. It had been years but the guilt, the remorse of doing nothing, remained.
“I agree, Monsieur. She did not.”
Perhaps the inspector felt the same way, a little guilty that the state had let down Justine. She felt his eyes on her back as she walked to the house. Pascal was coming down the ladder after putting a temporary cover over the hole to keep the birds from returning. She waited for him at the door, her jaw working angrily at the inspector’s implication. He doesn’t know me. Was he testing her, seeing if she looked guilty?
The roofer stood silently, watching her face. He looked at the inspector watching them both with eyes like slits. Merle gave him a last glare and turned to Pascal.
“I hear a glass of wine is recommended to all workers, if you want them to come back tomorrow.” Just looking at him made her feel better, like all of France didn’t have the wrong idea about her motives. “Monsieur le couvreur?”
He took her elbow, turning her toward the kitchen door. “You promised to call me Pascal.”
An older woman opened the door of the church offices, simply dressed in a flowered blouse, but elegant in that French way. Merle had seen her with Albert. Her gray hair was pulled into a chignon, her blue eyes danced over the visitor with the peach paint under her nails.
It was late morning the next day. She’d left Pascal tied to the chimney, high above ground, and the plumbers busy laying pipe. With progress at the house, Merle allowed herself a few hours off. She introduced herself to Mme Beaumount, said she had relatives born in the village and made her request to look at parish records. “De naissance, mariage, décès, par example.” Births, marriages, deaths.
Merle stuffed a five-euro bill in the donation box and was led back into the church, down stone steps into a small basement room. Mme Beaumont waved a hand at the shelf of volumes. “Quelle année?”
What year indeed. The records went back three hundred years, at least, assembled in a series of large, leatherbound books lined up on a wall of shelves. She pointed to the next to last, printed in gold with ‘1900-1950.’ Mme Beaumont set it on a wooden table. She gave her a pair of thin white cotton gloves and disappeared back up the stairs.
Merle switched on the gooseneck lamp and pulled her notepad and pen from her purse. The room must have been specially sealed because there was no smell of mildew or rot, even with all these old pages in the basement. The gloves were thin and baggy but would keep the old pages clean.
She took a breath. Here were births, confirmations, deaths, banns, and marriages, as well as other curious notations. Families, generations, descendants. She began in the thirties, scanning down the lists written in a black curlicue flourish. Here were Andres and Jeans and Danielles and Jacquelines. But the name she was looking for was Chevalier.
Albert’s baptism, 1943. A Laurent Chevalier, baptized in 1919. And his sister Josephine in 1920. Josephine was confirmed in 1931 and apparently her sister, Marie Madeleine, in 1933. Another Chevalier was baptized in 1929, Marcel. His parents were Frederic Chevalier and Angelique Leduc, neither of whom showed up anywhere else.
What about the sender of those letters? The name Dominique was common; she found it on almost every other page as a mother, a child, a man. Without a last name it was impossible.
1948: Marcel Chevalier again, married in the church. He and his wife had a child who was baptized, and died, on the same day in 1949. She wrote his name on a separate page of the notebook: “cousin to M-E?” There was the mayor, Michel Redier, born in 1949.
What relative had given them the house? She didn’t know. Were Marie-Emilie and Weston married here? Born here? Confirmed here? It appeared not.
Merle ran her gloved finger carefully down the listings, ignoring her stomach. Slipping the heavy book back onto the shelves she pulled out the last volume, “1950-2000.”
The pages were crisper, less speckled by moisture and time. The same delicate handwriting, flourishes and all, until 1953 when someone new took over, with a less flamboyant hand. It was easier to read, though less pretty.
Where was Harry’s birth? That was odd. There were births that year, 1950, several in May, but none named Harold. Had they changed his name? But not a single birth on his birthday, May 30th.
Another Redier, a boy born in 1951, to the same parents as he-who-would-be-mayor. She scanned through the end of the 1950’s and half through the ‘60s and closed the book.
Back at the house she found Albert, Pascal, and Tristan drinking wine in Albert’s small yard. They had both garden gates propped open to watch for her. Fernand and Luc had laid all the pipe, connected it to the water line, and began re-filling the trench. They had left already but not without this message, relayed by Tristan. “Tomorrow they’re coming early to punch through into the house. Fernand warned us to be out if we don’t like noise.”
Merle took the small glass of wine Albert handed her and sat at the table. “Where does he propose we go?” She took a sip. “This is good, Albert. What is it?”
“Château Gagillac, of course. Have you forgotten your appointment tomorrow?”
Merle sat back. She didn’t forget appointments, and yet. Her calendar mind had fled. She wondered if she’d get it back when she went home. “I don’t know, Albert. I know nothing about wine and the brother—“
“Gerard.”
“He’ll realize it, won’t he?”
“He speaks no English. You speak very poor French.”
“Truth hurts.”
Albert pushed over a tray of sliced baguettes and olive tapenade. “I cannot come tomorrow. The boys have a special practice for the tournament. But Pascal says he can go.”
“If y
ou allow me to come down off the roof,” Pascal said. “Merle.”
He rolled her name on his tongue as if it filled his mouth with something sweet. Tristan was watching her with his chunks of melon paint in his hair and hands.
“You may come down if you use the ladder, Pascal.” She turned to Albert. “But you must let me use your bath. Before it becomes an international incident.”
“Hey,” Tristan said. “It was in the paper. They’re calling it a public health crisis.”
Merle thought it might be a Thursday. So unlike her. What would Harry say about his Calendar Girl now? He wouldn’t even recognize her. The lists, the perpetual calendar in her head: gone. Well, almost gone. It might be Thursday, June 25. If it was, she had been in France almost three weeks.
Albert lent Pascal the Deux Chevaux. The roofer ground the gears but managed to turn the car around, as tricky as a French verb, then drove through the old medieval gates to the city. He’d rolled down the roof and the wind blew through their hair. Merle wished she’d worn the scarf but at least her hair was clean. Albert’s tiny bathtub was a lifesaver. She smoothed her skirt over her knees. It was the last clean thing in her suitcase.
“Are you from around here? Originally?”
“From the Languedoc, but I am here one year.”
“Do people treat you like you’re an outsider?”
“Small villages are like that. They are dying. They have no new jobs, no more land for the sons to take over. So they resent foreigners who have so much money.” He watched the road. “They warm up when they get to know you. Everyone knows you.”
“I know. I finally had to bribe my neighbor with a tart.” Madame Suchet who swept her front steps in high heels and jewelry had still been too wary to invite her in. But it was a first step. And she’d met the next door neighbors too, a young arty couple from Paris, Yves and Suzette who were very chic.
“Did you know Justine LaBelle?” she asked Pascal.
“Um, no.”
“Did you see her around town?”
“Once or twice. She was hard to miss. With that hair.”
“I’ve seen other women with orange hair. Did she have friends?” He shrugged again. “What about this so-called nun, Sister Evangeline?”
“Never heard of her.”
“Do you know the gendarme?”
“You ask a lot of questions.” He glanced at her. “I see him around. Jean-Pierre is a good man.”
“You think so? He seems pretty cocky to me.” Pascal shrugged, noncommittal. Probably a friend of Jean-Pierre’s, they drank together, or played cards in that restaurant where she’d seen him at lunchtime. “The inspector thinks I am somehow involved in Justine's death.”
“And were you?”
“No. But here I am living in the house she claimed as her own.”
He glanced at her. “They will find the killer.”
The small sign for Château Gagillac peeked out of the overgrown bushes in the ditch by the road. He muscled the little car onto the dirt lane. Unruly hedgerows gave way to roses blooming along the rows. The gravel crunched under their shoes as they walked to the stone building. A thought came to her. “What if they ask about a work permit?”
“This is what you say.” He shrugged dramatically, palms skyward, his voice high like a girl’s. “Ah, monsieur, peut-être.” He grinned at her. “Believe me, they will not ask.”
And they didn’t. An hour later they were back on the road, instructed in the proper sniff, swirl, and spit routine, and marginally familiar with the modern stainless steel tanks of the mixing room, the limestone soil, and the barrels stacked in the chai for aging. Odile Langois had been cool and efficient, her brother Gerard moody and brusque.
On the drive back Pascal shook his head in sympathy. All that fancy technology, he said, good for nothing.
“Without ‘mis en bouteille au château’ — bottled on site — on the label the wine will go into a cheap bottle at the super-marche. Or even,” he crossed himself, “a wine in a box.”
“God forbid.”
“I don’t know why he bothers to age it. He will not make serious money from his wine until he can set up bottling.” Pascal seemed angry about the whole setup. “All those barrels and a very fine aging chai and expensive modern equipment and yet no bottling.” He was quiet a moment then said quietly, “I have heard Gerard is active in politics for vignerons, grape-growers and small wineries. Be careful of him.”
“What do you mean?”
“He is ambitious, that’s all.”
“Because there’s no grand cru on his label?” She knew that much, that grand cru and premier grand cru were the grand, old class of Bordeaux wines. “Is this about the strike they keep talking about?”
“What strike?”
“The growers. The newspaper says they’re planning some big strike to protest foreign grapes coming into this country for wine.”
“It is just politics.” He glanced at her knees. “Gerard has no label at all, just juice in a jug. But it is good to improve yourself, be something more than when you were born. Don’t you agree?”
“I’m an American. Striving always.”
“So Gerard is a closet American?” They laughed. No one could be more French than Langois, so serious about the grape and a little bitter about his ambitions.
“And you? Did you strive to be a roofer?”
“My father was one, my grandfather also. From a rooftop, my grand-papa told me, you can see the world.”
“So you were born into it. Me too. My father was a lawyer, and all my sisters are.”
“All?”
“Yup. Five sisters, all lawyers.”
Pascal put his hand on his heart. “Zut alors. I see them coming toward me like Charlie’s Angels but in more clothing and briefcases snapping. Ready to — how do you say? — kick my ass.”
He pulled the Citroën into the tiny garage two blocks away from Albert’s, a space he rented from an old lady. They walked back toward rue de Poitiers. Back to reality, she thought, feeling the strange lightness of the morning at the winery and laughter with Pascal.
At the corner the gendarme lounged against a wall, smoking. He straightened at the sight of them but held his ground. His uniform was always perfectly pressed. Merle wondered if he lived with his mother, or who was the woman who took such care. Did the vain bastard press it himself?
Pascal nodded to him, as if they were acquaintances. She simply stared at him, turning back as they walked toward the house, to stare over her shoulder. Just to give a good dose of what he gave her. He fumed, clenching his jaw, then crushed his cigarette on the sidewalk.
The front door was unlocked. Pascal told her that was a very bad idea, leaving the door open like that. “You must tell Tristan to always lock the door.”
Fernand had made progress. The water heater, sitting out in the bathroom like a fat friend who won’t leave, was hooked up and filling the water. The floor was torn up for drains to connect with ‘big smelly,’ the fragrant drain, and three intakes poked through the back wall for the toilet, kitchen sink, and bathroom sink. Luc was busy outside chipping away a last hole for the shower line.
There was a note from Tristan saying he was practicing until six. The tournament was Saturday and he hoped to compete even though he was a beginner. On the roof Pascal began to pound.
Merle grabbed her notebook and escaped. The gendarme had disappeared from the corner. At the post office she waited her turn at the internet kiosk, slipping her smart card into the slot. She checked her email, wrote cursory notes to her sisters and parents, read one from Annie wanting details, gave them all Albert’s phone number and said the house repairs went well. Then she did a search for information about the making of French wine. There was a long, juicy site sponsored by the Bordeaux Wine Office that she printed out.
The line behind her grew longer, techno-savvy seniors and tourists. Ignoring them she entered ‘Justine LaBelle + Bordeaux’ into the search engine. Nothing but hos
pitals in Quebec. She went to a French white pages site. This time she got three matches. Scribbling down the numbers she checked her time. One minute left. She entered ‘Monastères + Dordogne’ in hopes of finding Sister Evangeline’s convent, in case she was a nun. One hit, a Carmelite convent fifty miles away. Then the old woman behind her began to smack her cane on the marble floor.
Back at the house a large truck was unloading at the curb. The beds were here, with bedding, and the dining chairs with rush seats. She ferried the chairs in and grabbed Luc to carry her mattress upstairs. She had decided on a soft yellow the color of sunrise for the bedroom. One day she’d paint it, when she could face that much cheer.
Upstairs she pulled white sheets over the mattress, their clean newness mocking the state of the house. She buried her nose in the fresh linen, savoring its starchy, unspoiled odor. Life could be as simple as virgin white pillowcases. At least for a moment.
Chapter 23
The lush evening scents of moist earth and roses were ruined by the smell of the cigarettes. Last two, and then the pack was done.
It was very late. The surrounding houses were dark. A faint glow on the rooftops from a faraway streetlight, nothing more. Stars were strewn across the sky, millions of them, more than she’d ever seen. As if that milk bucket in the sky had been refilled and spilled using full-fat cream for once.
Merle watered the grapevine and the pear tree and stamped on the loose earth filling the trench. She had tried and failed to sleep. She was so far from home. She had a strong desire to call someone, to speak to her family. The village was beginning to feel very small, especially without a telephone. The distance felt good for awhile. She didn’t want her family worried. But now she felt very alone, cut off from the world. How were her parents? Had Elise found a job? Were the cousins swimming in the pool? Did Annie have a new boyfriend? Had anyone asked questions about her character or checked her criminal record?
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