Dead and Breakfast

by David Crossman

  “Was evil,” Lavida repeated. “You said ‘is’, but Gayla’s dead. And, not to be heartless, but good riddance from the sound of it.”

  Past tense. “Of course,” said Caitlin, but it was a reluctant acquiescence. However strongly the evidence argued against it, she was unreconciled, at some level beyond the reach of reason, to the fact that Gayla was dead. She thought of Joanna’s comment about her malignant spirit having been absorbed by Amber upon her sister’s death.

  Dead. There could be no doubt. Joanna herself had seen the body; ‘delicately veined alabaster on that cold, aluminum table.’ Then it had been cremated. Reduced to a neat little pile of ashes. But there were the niggling facts that Amber had suddenly become a restless sleeper; that, surrounded by beauty, she photographed dead rabbits. ‘Sundrop’? It was the little things that simply didn’t seem content to sit down and shut up.

  “Terrible thing to say about anyone,” Lavida intervened, when enough time had passed. “Especially of someone so young. She would have graduated next year. Had her whole life ahead.” It was an obligatory comment, carrying no conviction and demanding no reply. Gayla had drowned.

  Caitlin cringed inwardly at the effort it took to suppress the instinct that it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person. “Where did she go to school?” she said, to dispel the notion.

  “Dartmouth.”

  “Damn!” Caitlin cursed involuntarily.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “That’s one too many coincidences.”

  “What are you talking about?” There was a knock on the door on Lavida’s end of the line. She cupped her hand over the phone and said something indiscernible to someone in the background, presumably her secretary. “Cait?” she said, removing her hand from the mouthpiece. “I’ve just been reminded I’m late for a meeting.” She paused for ‘good-bye’. “Cait?”

  The narrow window in the closet overlooked the periphery of the gravel car park. Caitlin stood there watching, the phone to her ear, as two young girls, one black and the other white, got into a little red rental car and, waving enthusiastically to a party or parties unknown – probably a van full of irate amateur photographers – drove away. Even from this distance, she’d been able to easily read the bold white and purple insignia on Delilah’s sweatshirt. “Dartmouth,” she whispered.

  Lavida had said her name a few more times before she finally responded. “Dartmouth,” she repeated, without expression.

  “That’s what I said,” said Lavida. “Listen, I’ve got to go. Are you all right?”

  The little red car drove through the gatehouse and down the tree-lined drive. Not one accomplice, thought Caitlin. Two.

  “Can you find out who her roommate was?”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard,” Lavida replied. “Anything else?”

  Caitlin hesitated a moment. “I know you go to see Michael from time to time. Give him my love.”

  “Of course. I’ll call when I find out anything.”

  “Okay,” Caitlin replied automatically.

  “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  She wasn’t sure of anything, anymore. The puzzle pieces she’d discarded in the light of what little cold logic she could muster were suddenly back on the table, all done up in Dartmouth gray.

  “I’ll be here tonight.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to you then. Bye-bye.”

  “Cheers.”

  Caitlin, her thoughts light years away, handed the phone to Jill, who hung it up.

  “Who was that?”

  “A friend of Michael’s,” Caitlin said automatically. “A lawyer who’s . . . gathering some information for Joanna.” Still staring out the window at the gatehouse and the empty land beyond, she added, as much to herself as to Jill, “I don’t know how, but Amber is the one who drowned in that lake – and Gayla took her place.”

  Jill gasped audibly. “You mean the girl with Mrs. Capshaw – our Amber – is really . . . ”

  “Gayla,” said Caitlin, completing the thought. “As Gayla she’s got nothing, but as Amber, she gets it all.”

  “You forgot your lens,” Farthing observed pointedly as Caitlin climbed behind the wheel.

  “My apologies, everyone.” Caitlin fastened her seat belt and started the engine. “I had a phone call . . . from the States.”

  “Oh dear. Not bad news, I hope,” said Mrs. Griffeth, who would have loved nothing more than to hear of someone else’s grizzly misfortune. The more ghastly, the better. Hers was the kind of poverty-stricken spirit that revels inJerry Springer.

  “No,” said Caitlin quickly. “Just . . . business. Legal matters.”

  “Nice having your own little nest of lawyers, isn’t it?” said Farthing, from his place of isolation in the fourth seat back.

  “Yes, it . . . ” Caitlin suddenly snapped her eyes on the rear-view mirror. She hadn’t told him anything about Michael. Farthing stared back, smiling. “Yes,” she said, and left it at that.

  “A lawyer in the family,” Mrs. Griffeth chimed in. “My papa always said he wanted three sons, one a lawyer, one a doctor, and one a mechanic. That way you’re covered coming, going, and getting there, he’d say. Papa always wanted sons.”

  “I think he might have added ‘accountant,’ to the list,” said Mr. Wagner good-naturedly. “We’re pretty handy to have around.”

  Mrs. Wagner, who very rarely let her husband have the last word, pounced. “At least once a year.”

  “Looks like we’re going to get a little rain today,” said Piper, who sat just behind the driver’s seat.

  Caitlin eased the van through the ancient gatehouse, the only part of the estate yet to feel the renovator’s hammer. “You can get some wonderfully moody shots in the rain,” said the professional instructor part of her, while her consciousness wandered recklessly, aimlessly, through the mental catacombs discovered by her talk with Lavida. “A world done up in blue skies and sunflowers all the time would get a bit tedious after a while, don’t you think?”

  “Look at Adam and Eve,” said Mr. Wagner. “They had it perfect, but it wasn’t enough, was it?”

  At a bend in the drive they nearly collided with a police car coming in the opposite direction. Both vehicles swerved to a stop at the side of the road. Moments later, Jean-Claude rapped his knuckles on the window, which Caitlin, perhaps more shaken than the situation warranted, rolled down.

  “I am sorry,” the officer said in French. He patted her shoulder. He leaned through the window as much as Caitlin’s presence would allow. “Is everyone all right?” he asked in English, giving the passengers a cursory once-over.

  In the shock of the moment, Mrs. Wagner had reached over the seat and seized Amber’s hand, which the girl now shook off with unwonted force. Everyone but Farthing had clutched at something or someone – a natural reaction – that they were slowly releasing now that the peril had passed.

  Why hadn’t Mrs. Wagner grabbed her husband, as might be expected? He had put his arm around her. Instead, she had reached over the seat and taken Amber’s hand. Caitlin observed all this in a fraction of a second as she surveyed the scene through the little proscenium of her rearview mirror.

  “Nothing seems to be broken,” Piper volunteered on everyone’s behalf. “It’s customary to drive on the right, isn’t it?”

  Jean-Claude, whose English was insufficient to the task, looked to Caitlin for a translation. She complied, slowly releasing her death grip on the steering wheel.

  “Ah. I’m sorry many, many times,” said Jean-Claude, flashing a sincere smile. Caitlin forced herself to think of Michael. “My fault.”

  “That’s obvious,” said Mrs. Wagner, not enough under her breath so no one would hear.

  Jean-Claude, uncomfortably close, turned his clear, wine-deep eyes to Caitlin, in whose mind’s-eye the image of Michael went hazy for a moment. “I was coming with good news,” he said, lapsing into French, “We have captured Depardeau.”

  “Depardeau?”

&nb
sp; “The man who killed his wife,” Jean-Claude reminded gently. As if instinctively aware of the discomfort he was causing Caitlin, he leaned away.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Caitlin. “I’m sure everyone will be. But surely you needn’t have come all the way out here to tell us.” Frankly, she was flattered.

  “Oh, I tried to telephone from my car, but the line was busy.” Caitlin flushed, thankful that none of her passengers spoke French well enough to get the gist of their conversation. “I see.”

  “Besides, it is one of your guests who lead us to the hiding place.”

  “One of my guests?”

  “Yes. Yes, Mr. Farthing” He tossed a quick nod of appreciation at the lone occupant of the back seat, who turned aside as if not to have noticed the mention of his name which, in French, sound like Farting.

  “That Mr. Farthing?” she said, with a covert jerk of the thumb.

  “Yes,” Jean-Claude assured her. “Last night, when I was walking back to the car.”

  Caitlin flushed a little deeper, her feelings, as always, betrayed by her face.

  “He comes to me, out of nowhere – like the ghost, smoking a cigar. We talk a minute, then say goodnight, and he goes back toward the chateau.” Jean-Claude walked along the window ledge with his fingers. “Then he stops and calls to me. ‘ By the way,’ he says, ‘the man you look for is in the barn about two kilometers away.’ He gives the directions, butexactement! I tell him we already searched there, and he says there is a hidden room in the floor – used by the Resistance during the war.

  “So, we surround the place this morning – why not? – and it is exactly as he says. There is Depardeau, sound asleep, as if he was safe in his mother’s arms. He was in the police van before he knew where he was.”

  Caitlin turned in her seat and regarded Farthing, who was fiddling with the lens of his camera.

  “What’s he saying?” asked Mrs. Griffeth.

  “He says they found the fugitive they’ve been looking for. He just wanted us to know we needn’t worry.”

  “Oh my goodness! What a relief.”

  Mr. Piper tapped Miss Tichyara’s knee avuncularly. “That’s good to hear. I’m sure we’ll all sleep a little better now.”

  Caitlin was still staring at Jeremy Farthing, wrestling to subdue a flurry of conflicting emotions. Sensing her attention, he raised his eyes and looked at her. “Seems the crows have come and gone,” he said with a smile. “Good work, Officer,” he added in perfect French.

  Of course. He’d have to speak the language fairly fluidly to have imparted complex directions to Jean-Claude.

  “He had help,” Caitlin said meaningfully, allowing Farthing the opportunity to acknowledge his contribution.

  “How nice of the citizenry to step up. Warms the cockles, doesn’t it?” He resumed the study of his camera.

  “Well, I just wanted you to know you were right,” said Jean-Claude.

  “Never doubted it,” said Farthing, without looking up.

  “I wish everyone would speak English,” said Mrs. Wagner, who had been fidgeting throughout the exchange. “It’s rude not to speak a language everybody knows.”

  “We are in France, my love,” her husband reminded.

  Mrs. Wagner was not about to be bested by common sense. “Well, this is the 21st century, for goodness sake. I can’t believe that with television and the Internet and what not, they haven’t learned English by now. There’s no excuse.”

  Mr. Wagner released an apologetic sigh for general consumption.

  Jean-Claude, for whom only the nouns of the exchange had any meaning, slapped the window ledge with the flat of his hand and stood up. “Well, I’m keeping you from your journey. Please, go. Enjoy!”

  “Thank you, Jean-Claude,” said Caitlin, with a controlled smile which, she hoped, did not betray too much of the feeling behind it. “You’ve been very kind.”

  “Not all. Not at all.” Jean-Claude saluted cordially, and stepped back as the van pulled away. “Drive carefully!” he called in English. “Have a nice day!”

  Chapter Twenty-Four– Through the Looking Glass

  Chateau de Castelnaud is a rambling 12th century Norman fortress, perched high on a bluff overlooking a bend in the river and the broad sweep of the Dordogne Valley. It’s also a photographer’s paradise. For those who had a preference for landscapes, they lay at the doorstep in infinite variety: from panoramic vistas of Napoleonic proportions surging to the horizon in every direction, to gentle impressionistic swatches of fields, vineyards, orchards, and little stone farms dappled one moment in sunshine and shadow and the next awash in dripping hues of blue and gray as fast marching battalions of rain clouds trampled up the valley.

  For those preferring a more intimate canvas, the texture of the castle itself, the hand-wrought hinges on the massive wooden gate, the wheelbarrow bursting with flowers, the workmen’s bottle of wine set carelessly on the edge of an ancient well, and countless other impromptu vignettes teased the artistic sensibilities, real or imagined, of the students.

  Caitlin enjoy these things, too – both the microcosm and macrocosm – and had photographed them hundreds of times, in all kinds of weather and mood. Many of those pictures had appeared in travel and food magazines, in both the U.S. and Europe. But herforte, and her passion, was candid snapshots of people.

  Her early attempts at covert portraiture had been frustrated by the lack of a really good telephoto lens, the result being that when she was drawn close enough to capture telling facial detail, the subjects became aware they were being photographed and either hid their face in feigned modesty, or put on their ‘I’m having my picture taken’ mask, which effectively shielded the very essence she was trying so desperately to capture.

  Now, however, she had a little array of lenses – carefully selected and modified over the years – that allowed her to count the hairs on a flea’s hind legs at a hundred paces. With these, she had created a personal gallery of her students and the people they encountered on their photographic forays through the European countryside.

  There was that in her conscience which told her that such intimate portraiture, in which people were captured psychologically naked, at their most unguarded and vulnerable, was an invasion of privacy, one at which she herself would have taken offense.

  In the town meeting of her mind, however, this conscientious voice had long ago been shouted down by that of the blustering, self-important artist who, over time, had learned the language of justification and could convincingly argue that these unwitting subjects were not being trivialized, but immortalized by the photographic image, ennobled by the raw truth of that image.

  Bovine excrement of course, and she knew it at a deep unspoken level. Like every photographer of people . . . like Mr. Wagner, she was a voyeur plain and simple, wanting to breach the walls people threw up around themselves, without having to compromise her own defenses.

  Nevertheless, the conceit prevailed, made more palatable by the fact that she would select the most attractive shot of each student and send it to them in the follow-up letter in which she would casually mention the spring trip to Tuscany and the summer trip to the Black Forest.

  “Mercenary,” she thought aloud, and she framed a close-up of Mrs. Wagner – some eighty feet away – in her viewfinder.

  As always, it was the eyes she found most compelling – and in Mrs. Wagner eyes, at the moment, there was an uncharacteristic nervousness or urgency. The woman’s camera dangled from her neck, unused, and she seemed to be trying to catch the attention of someone off screen. Caitlin lobbed a glance over the top of her viewfinder and followed Mrs. Wagner’s line of sight – fully expecting to find Mr. Wagner at the receiving end of it. Instead, it was Amber.

  Caitlin widened the shot in her viewfinder and watched as the younger woman drifted into the frame. Despite the fact they had made eye contact, and it was clear even from eighty feet that Mrs. Wagner wished to talk, Amber didn’t go to her directly, but slowly wandered
in her direction, looking studiously about and, now and then, pausing to snap a picture of whatever caught her fancy. When at last she gravitated into casual orbit around Mrs. Wagner and they fell into conversation, it would have seemed the most natural thing in the world, if not for their eyes.

  Both women were now in the viewfinder, circling one another in a curious ballet, and as Caitlin framed their faces, she was stunned at the intensity – and similarity – of their eyes.

  Odd she hadn’t noticed the coincidence before. Of course, they had pretty much avoided one another, so opportunities to observe them side by side were rare. Nor was there any marked similarity in their features or figures that would have indicated any relationship. Though roughly the same height, Mrs. Wagner was aggressively round where Amber was lithe. In their expressions as they passed back and forth through the tiny theater of Caitlin’s viewfinder, however, the younger woman reflected the older as surely as if she were intentionally mimicking her, as if they were mimicking each other. And their eyes, uncommon combinations of gray and green flecked with gold, were identical.

  As Caitlin widened the frame, another set of characters appeared on the stage: Mr. Piper and Miss Tichyara.

  Partially concealed by the shrubs that lined the steps they were sitting on, they would have been all but invisible to Mrs. Wagner and Amber, who seemed to be the subjects of Mr. Piper’s photographic efforts.

  He, too, had a powerful telephoto lens – better than Caitlin’s if truth be told – so he was getting the same shot from the opposite side, which meant he might see her watching them. Caitlin sidled into cover behind a nearby walnut tree.

  Miss Tichyara, her eyes downcast, was talking intently – her hand resting lightly in the crook of her companion’s left arm. He responded in clipped phrases, the bulk of his attention focused on Amber and Mrs. Wagner, whose intercourse, for whatever reason, seemed to hold a particular fascination.

  Widening her lens to accommodate the entire odd ballet, Caitlin’s viewfinder soon incorporated Mr. Wagner as he wandered in from stage left with no apparent purpose. No doubt he had been photographing local flora, for which he had demonstrated a modest natural talent, and had gravitated toward his wife as the natural terminus of his peregrinations.