Blackbird Fly

by Lise McClendon

  “I have finished the exterior of the roof. Tomorrow I will

  come with supplies to finish the ceiling upstairs. Pascal d’Onscon.”

  So formal, his full name, in case she had other Pascals in the wings. What did she expect — sonnets? In weeks, maybe less, the repairs would be complete and she would put the house on the market. If it didn’t sell, she would rent it for the winter. She would never come back.

  This should have made her sleep soundly, the knowledge that things would be done, her tasks accomplished, her name cleared. But she watched the moon rise in the east, almost full, and shine onto the bed linens. She didn’t want the summer to end. She wanted it to go on, full of flowers, wine, olives, and — possibility. Yes, possibility, that thing she was so afraid of. Now she hungered for it, she lived for it. She rolled onto her stomach and put the pillow over her head.

  Was it possible to hide from your own life, from the prescribed steps, the set-in-stone trajectory? Was it possible to, say, change your name and live in France and be a completely different person, one your parents wouldn’t recognize, someone carefree, a nature girl, a bon vivant? Was it possible to forget the people you leave behind, those who nurtured and loved you, those who made you who you were? If you wished, wished, wished hard enough, would your fairy godmother, or an ogre-ish old widow, give you a string of magic pearls that would transform you into somebody who could do such a thing? A woman who could decide absolutely and exactly what would make her happy, right there, on the spot, and then actually do those things, without compromise or regret?

  She sighed under the pillow. How old do you have to be to stop believing in fairy tales? Because she didn’t think she’d actually reached that age.

  Good old practical Merle. She would see what was right, what was necessary. She wouldn’t flinch from duty, responsibility, a promise made at an altar. She would carry on. She wouldn’t — no, she couldn’t change. She was who she was. Haircuts be damned.

  Moonlight was not a string of pearls. She wasn’t a princess, or even a bon vivant. She was the clear-eyed one, the sensible child, the one who would clear her name, sell the house, and go home.

  Chapter 27

  Gerard stood a good half-mile out, deep into the vines. Rogers found him at last, after tramping over the rocky ground for fifteen minutes. Even in the twilight, the stars popping out, the old boy was out coddling his piss-poor vines, some so old and rotten they should have been pulled years ago. Gerard had a fantastic vision of himself as some sort of maestro of wine-making. As if he knew how to look for noble rot and the precise moment the grapes were ready. Rogers knew more than this French peasant did, and he lived in the Big Smoke.

  The only smoke Gerard knew was from his cigarette. It led Rogers down the row in the dusk. The Frenchman looked up at the sound of the crunching of soil under his feet. He stared, the tip of his cigarette glowing. Rogers stopped and caught his breath.

  “How’s the season going then?” he said to be friendly. They had to trust each other, at least a bit.

  “Pas mal,” Gerard grunted. He wore that stupid smock again like he was auditioning as a mad scientist in a B-movie.

  In French Rogers said, “Are you ready then? Have the gasoline?”

  Gerard took a draw of his cigarette. “In good time.”

  “This is a good time. You don’t want to be buying it right before. It’ll look suspicious.”

  Gerard shrugged. Rogers bit down on his molars. Idiot.

  “Just so you have it in time. What’s that American woman doing out here?”

  Gerard brushed past him, his long legs headed back to the house. Rogers turned, skipping to keep up, stumbling on a wire. He growled as he caught himself, swearing. Gerard didn’t turn back. At the house he went inside and shut the door in Hugh’s face.

  And locked it.

  Rogers knocked. “Come on, old man. Let’s have a little parley. Ouvrez la porte.” He didn’t dare raise his voice this close to the buildings. He looked around the yard and shrank into the doorframe, knocking again.

  Odile answered the door. She didn’t like him, never had. If Gerard was the silent, brooding type, he at least could be counted on to carry through with the plan. He had the rebel in him, and that was enough to get him to go along. Odile was not so solid. She suspected Hugh of having motives. Which of course he did have and he wasn’t about to share them with a haggard old wreck of a Frenchwoman.

  “Mr. Rogers,” she said. “Or should I say Mr. Simms. I’m sorry I can’t ask you in. I’m in the middle of something.”

  By the look of her she was in the middle of washing dishes, or plucking a chicken. Her hair had come loose in damp strands around her face. She wore plastic gloves, yellow ones, slipping them off now and slapping them on her thigh like a bullfighter. He took a glance at her steely blue eyes and stepped half a step back.

  “Quite all right, Odile. Turn off the porch light, would you?” She snapped it off, leaving them in the shadows. The last light clung to the western sky, a slash of violet. “That’s better. Now, what about this American? You can’t have her out here snooping around. It’s dangerous.” She shrugged, the French answer to anything they disliked hearing. “Why do you need tours anyway?”

  “For the money of course.” Her voice was disembodied in the gloom.

  “Then do them yourself.”

  “It is your people who want to see the wineries, the English.”

  “It can’t be lucrative, Odile. What do you get, ten euros a head?”

  “Twenty, plus the wine they buy.”

  “Twenty? Really. Enough to pay off the mortgage, is it?”

  She breathed out noisily. He’d made her mad. He’d been right then, Odile held the purse strings while her crazy brother puttered around with the grapes. But Gerard would do as he was told. If you kept your thumb on him.

  “We count on you for that, Mr. Rogers. You were to pay us for our expenses so far and we have seen not a sou. The bottles come tomorrow and who is to pay for them?”

  “Don’t worry about things like that. Just get rid of the American.”

  “As soon as you pay us. Where is the money? How do we know you have it for us? We have bills to pay.”

  “So you’ve said.” He searched the dim light for her eyes. “Get rid of her, Odile.”

  Chapter 28

  When Pascal arrived at eight-thirty, Merle was dressed in jeans, shirt, and bandanna covering her hair. She waved him in as she left for the post office, logging onto the internet. A tiny postman named Charles called to her: “Madame Bennett? Vingt-cinq , Rue de Poitiers?” He held out an oversized white envelope. It was from the lawyers, McGuinness and Lester, Esq., postmarked a week before.

  Back at the terminal she had two emails, one from Tristan at camp. He was fine, he said, and he hadn’t hit anybody yet. The weather was cool and damp. He was canoeing most afternoons. She wrote that she missed him, and would bean him herself if he got into another fight. The other email was from Annie, making plans to come to France. She was excited and still hoped to bring Tristan with her if she could get Bernie and Jack to pay for the ticket. Merle wrote back with her credit card number and told her sister not to bother their parents.

  At the patisserie she bought herself a croissant and a café au lait, and opened the envelope. Inside was Harry’s second, secret will, a legal-size document only three pages long. A note from Troy Lester was attached.

  “Merle:Annie made me do it. Also enclosed are what was left in W.S.’s files. Hope you’re doing well over there. T.L.”

  She pulled the file out of the envelope. It contained only a few papers. The first three were yellowing invoices for wine and armagnac from Weston Strachie’s Mediterranean Import-Export Company, carbon copies of the documents in the file she’d gotten at the will reading. All were dated 1953, to two liquor distributors in the U.S. and one in England, all describing cases of wine they had ordered. The last piece was new to her, a letter also from late 1953, from a New York distribu
tor, a name that matched one of the invoices — Empire Warehouses. A demand for a shipment partially paid for but never received. Empire threatened legal action.

  Had Weston been sued? Was the wine in the basement the same wine mentioned here? She reread the invoices. No, different vintages. He might have lied to the distributors about what he was importing, but that didn’t make much sense.

  Merle picked up the will. ‘Sound mind,’ my ass. Harry left Courtney Duncan, and her daughter, Sophie, who he acknowledged as his child, the pension fund and the apartment on 12th street. Nothing new. Furniture, gifts, jewelry. Hold on. Harry also left ten cases of Bordeaux to Courtney, bought through a British company. Was this the man who had called? Atlantic Investments, it sounded familiar. He had been rather nice on the telephone, considering a big investor was now both dead and broke. Mr. Rogers, like the sweater-and-sneakers guy.

  Ten cases could make a nice nest egg if the bottles aged well, and lasted until Sophie went to college. What was the wine in the basement worth? Pascal had called it a jackpot but she had assumed that meant a jackpot of flavor. Maybe he meant it was worth a fortune. How did you sell a stash of wine like that?

  Pascal. She had left him alone in the house. He didn’t know about the wine in the basement — did he? The hair stood up on her neck. Was that why he was so quiet last night, he had plans to steal the wine? Maybe he was loading it in a truck right now. She stuffed the papers back in the envelope and jogged back to rue de Poitiers.

  As she unlocked the front door Pascal’s boots hit the stairs. As she relocked the door he stood at the bottom, covered in plaster dust, his hair and eyebrows white as snow.

  “I’ll be back in a couple hours. Après dejeuner.”

  “You’re filthy. Would you like to wash? In the garden?” The bottom half of his face the only clean area on him. He must have covered it with a scarf. “You should clean up,” she said. “Come on.”

  Peeling off his shirt he lowered his head while she pulled the chain on the cistern. He ran his hands through his hair, his neck, eyes, ears, then washed his hands. Merle handed him a towel. The sun glistened off his shoulders and chest, not an unwelcome sight. He dried off, shook his shirt and pulled it back on, and went out the back gate.

  Merle stood in the sunshine, staring at the white footsteps he’d left in the dirt. If he’d been searching the house while she was gone, he made a good cover of plaster dust. He knew where the trap door was. She ran upstairs to see how much work he’d gotten done, and found a huge pile of debris under the ladder. He’d been up in the attic, cleaning out the birds nests. Twigs, feathers, guano: delightful.

  She shut her bedroom door tight and walked back downstairs. She hated to think it but she couldn’t take chances. Pulling up the trap door she unlocked the wine cave. The bottles were all there, except for the three she’d taken upstairs. She breathed a sigh of relief and locked it all up again.

  Outside she moved around the flowers, watering. Pascal was just a worker, not a thief. That was a relief, and enough. She was moving around the wisteria when she did a double-take. A rose bush she’d never seen before sat in newly-turned earth. It hadn’t been there yesterday. Planted next to the white clematis vine, by the wall.

  The soil was still mounded and soft around the woody stem. A tag dangled from its base, a label: “Reine de Violette.” Queen of Violet. A purplish-red blossom rose toward the sun. Who had planted it — Pascal? She stalked the edges of the garden, looking for new plants. There was a new, tiny clematis, almost invisible, in the northeast corner. A tiny row of marigolds next to the stoop.

  She spun around, heart pounding. Someone else had a key to the garden.

  The gendarme stood on his steps, locking the door to the tiny police bureau as she rounded the corner. Lunchtime, time for his card game. He blinked a few times as if trying to place her. This new hair had its devices. “Madame,” he said, nodding.

  “Bonjour.” Damn, in French. “Do you know if Madame Labelle had friends or relatives, here in the village?”

  He wiped his mouth, narrowing his eyes. His shoes were suddenly fascinating. “Non. Pourquoi?”

  She’d been trained to spot liars, and he was one. She told him someone had gotten into her garden. Someone who had a key to the gate. “Did she have any relatives here? Or maybe a close friend.”

  He brought his dark eyes up to hers and bid her good day. He walked away in slow, steady strides, the swagger of authority as universal as mother’s milk. Off to his juicy, card-playing lunch. What had he lied about? Justine had relatives here in town, or friends? Did he know who had the key to her garden gate?

  She knocked on the door of the gendarmerie but no one answered. She’d have to suss out the inspector elsewhere. As she walked back through the streets, she looked at the faces that passed. Was one Justine’s friend, or a cousin or a sister? They stared back, unsmiling, looking through her as if she was invisible.

  Pascal returned about one-thirty from lunch. Upstairs the sound of pounding started. Downstairs she looked over the will and invoices again, spreading them out with the other papers she’d gotten from the lawyers. Weston Strachie had made some distributors angry. He hadn’t delivered his wine. Maybe he meant to deliver these cases mentioned, maybe he had paid for the wine in the basement with these men’s money. Maybe he’d had problems with customs or something. It didn’t make him a thief.

  She spread her hand over the will. Not again today, she thought. Reading about Harry’s devotion to Courtney and Sophie was too hard. She folded it and put it away.

  So, back to work. Next on the list: the rug. She opened the trap door to the basement again. The place gave her the creeps, but since they’d found the wine it had begun to look more pleasant, a disguise of filth and vermin to keep out intruders. The stairs creaked as she stepped slowly under the floor, sweeping the flashlight around the dank, earth floor and the mossy stone walls, eyes peeled for furry rodents.

  Most of the junk was gone, old bottles, nests of cotton that were once clothes, ancient preserves and unrecognizable lumps of mold. The wooden kegs she’d fallen into must have once held potatoes or carrots but animals had cleaned them out. She kicked one and saw a huge cockroach skitter away.

  The rolled-up carpet, source of whiskered varmints, was large and heavy. Setting down the flashlight, she picked up one end. Under it was a piece of tarp. Oil cloth, it felt like. So maybe it wasn’t rotten. She shook it, hoping any mice would run away, but nothing came out. Dragging one end toward the stairs, she groaned under the dead weight. As she backed up the stairs, knees splayed, the length of the rug swung out, knocking over bits of broken kegs like a mermaid’s tail.

  Heaving it around corners, she pulled it out into the garden into the golden summer light and took a good look at it. The exposed top was covered with mildew. The sides weren’t so bad, and the oil cloth had at least partially done its job of protecting it from creeping damp. She kicked it with her foot, unrolling it on the gravel by the table.

  An Oriental rug of reds and blues, very faded. Worn too, with places where the backing showed through. She folded it back in half so that the moldy top could be scrubbed, filled the tub with cistern water and got a scrub brush from the house.

  The mold was superficial, probably developing since the hole in the roof. With elbow grease and soapy water, it yielded. The hard work was satisfying, the way it had been when they first arrived. She threw the rest of the water on the rug, swished it around, rinsed it with a clean tub then called it good.

  The sun had left most of the garden. She had managed to get herself soaking wet. Her pink polo shirt clung to her chest, more than a little transparent, her blue running shorts dripping on her bare feet. Putting the tub and scrub brush away, she considered stripping off her wet clothes right here. The towel would serve as back-up in case Pascal was still around. She unbuttoned a button and stopped. Yves and Suzette had a good view of the garden.

  As she stepped into the kitchen she heard footsteps on the
stairs. So, Pascal had almost caught her naked in the garden. The thought made her skin crawl, or maybe she was just cold. The house stayed at least ten degrees cooler. She paused at the kitchen door just as a creature, a large hairy mouse, ran up through the trap door and stopped at the bottom of the stairs, staring at her.

  The animal sat up on its haunches, the size of a small rat. It didn’t look like any rodent she’d seen. It had a long nose and big, round ears but was chubbier, almost Mickey Mouse-ish. His black eyes were large and round, the fur brownish gray. But he was a mouse, a filthy rodent, and he wasn’t running away.

  Pascal peeked around the doorframe from the lower steps. “I see you have company,” he whispered, smiling at the thing.

  The creature looked fairly tame, chewing something, unafraid. “What should I do?” she whispered through chattering teeth.

  “Say hello.” He crouched down on the step. “Bonjour, petit loir.” The animal turned its black eyes toward him for a minute then jumped backwards like a miniature kangaroo.

  Merle backed toward the kitchen door. “Here you go. The big wide outdoors. All yours.” She stepped aside. “Tell it to go outside.”

  He clucked his tongue. The loir twitched its long hairy tail. Pascal eased over the stair railing and dropped softly onto the floor. “Close the trap door,” she whispered. He tipped the door until it closed with a loud thunk. The animal took off like a shot up the stairs, its skittering claws scratching against the wood.