Jacques was rightfully proud of his cheese. I am not an expert, but the fully ripened Camembert he gave me on a crust of bread was better than any I had ever had: hints of butter, salted nuts, fresh cream, just an edge of the bitterness the French believe enhances other flavors. He glowed when I described what I tasted in the cheese, asked if I found any hint of apricots. I tasted again, said no, but that I did have an aftertaste of pepper. He nodded and invited me to drop by his cheese plant—the fromagerie—for a tour. With an affectionate wink he told me he would teach me the proper way to milk a cow. I caught the innuendo. So did Julie, who punched his shoulder in reproach.
When I returned to the salon, I found the family settled into a few conversational clusters, most of them holding glasses of something: wine, cider, scotch. For a moment, I stood on the outside and watched. An attractive group of people, I thought. And not one among them looked like a murderer. But after all, what does a murderer look like?
All families have issues among their members, certainly. But for the time being, and perhaps because of the occasion and out of respect for Grand-mère and Isabelle, this clan had set those issues aside. Even Jemima was engaged, talking with Chris, Lulu and David in an apparently civil manner, from time to time even laughing.
Jacques came from the kitchen carrying a huge, steaming porcelain soup tureen, with Julie behind him giving orders: Don’t spill it, set it in front of Gérard’s chair, there isn’t enough bread. When the tureen was safely landed, she announced, “À table,” and a general movement toward the table began.
Grand-mère, standing at the head, asked me to sit on her right and put Freddy on her left. As Gérard seated his mother, Freddy held my chair for me, and patted my shoulder for reassurance when I was settled.
Conversations continued, three or four of them at a time, volume rising and falling, some laughter, some intense debates. It all felt very familiar, not unlike the atmosphere around the table at my parents’ house in Berkeley when there were guests for dinner.
Tears suddenly stung my eyes. I took my napkin from beside my plate, and looked down as I laid it across my lap, hoping no one had seen the emotion that spilled over.
All day, there was a profound question percolating at the forefront of everything I had learned, and that I had not dared to ask about. These were decent, responsible, educated, relatively well-to-do people who seemed to love their children. How could they have let a little rosebud of an apple-picking girl who was only two years, four months, and eight days old get away from them? Forever.
11
When I awoke, there was only the barest hint of morning light coming through my window. I had no idea how long I had slept, or what time it was. And, for a moment, I wasn’t certain where I was. My body clock was no help.
I reached for my telephone on the night table, turned it over to see the time. It was after seven in the morning, but where was the dawn? The day before, I had been surprised when the sun began to fade before four. Now, where was the dawn? The short, late fall days of the northern latitudes were something I was not accustomed to, and didn’t much want to be.
The house was quiet. No smell of coffee came up the stairs. I pulled on long johns, and over them sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt, then thick socks and running shoes. I slipped my telephone into the pouch of my shirt, and went outside.
To say the gray morning was brisk would be a gross understatement. With every step my shoes cracked through an icy crust on the ground. I was tempted to go back inside and crawl under the lovely, warm down-filled duvet on my bed, but my body felt stiff, and stressed, and I was curious to see what I could of the estate, unfiltered by my many hosts.
So, I took a deep breath, steeled myself against the cold, and set out at a fast walk, moved into a jog when the kinks from a long flight, followed by a day spent going from car to parlor to car to parlor, began to work loose. It felt good to be out in the open and alone with my thoughts. By the time I passed through the compound’s gate I was running at a steady pace, not thinking any more about kinks or footfalls, letting the fragmented bits of information I had acquired over the past week sort themselves into coherent streams. Or not. There were still plenty of unattached bubbles of fact and supposition floating around.
The previous night, after dinner, I called Rich Longshore and asked him how the investigation was going. He told me they had a witness who saw a man steal the car that ran down Isabelle. The witness thought he could identify the thief if he saw him again, but his description fit half the county’s male population between the ages of eighteen and thirty: medium height, thin, dark hair. One bright spot of hope was that the thief had been talking to someone on a cell phone as he approached the car, and the witness thought he sounded “foreign,” though he couldn’t pinpoint the accent.
Records from the closest telephone cell towers were being searched and there was a good possibility the police would be able to narrow down both the sender’s number and the receiver’s. But it would take time. Other than that? Nada.
Rich again warned me to be careful.
When my Uncle Max didn’t answer at his home, his office, or his mobile, I called Guido.
“Max has worked out a tentative agreement for us with the studio,” Guido told me. “Staff cuts will happen, but it looks like the series will not only be picked up for another season but you and I will get a raise.”
“How did Max pull that off?” I asked.
“He told the suits that we’re already working on the first project for next fall, and if the network didn’t lock us in right away, Max was going to shop our series to another network. Or maybe take it to HBO or Showtime.”
Good old Max, I thought. “Anybody ask him what the topic of this project might be?”
“He laid it out going in,” Guido said, hesitating before he continued. “He told them that Maggie MacGowen was in Normandy at that very moment investigating the murder of the mother she never knew existed until the woman was murdered. Your story has been all over the news since last night, connecting you to the ‘mystery woman’ the police were trying to identify last week. I suspect Max planted the story for the benefit of the suits.”
“He wasn’t supposed to spill that she was murdered,” I said.
“Well, he did.”
“Some idiot took pictures that night of me and Isabelle playing tug-of-war with a shopping cart,” I said, remembering a camera flash twice. “I suppose they’ve gone viral.”
“What idiot took pictures?”
“I assumed he was a lurking paparazzo, hoping for a celebrity sighting.”
“No photos have shown up,” Guido said. “Yet.”
I was more surprised than I was relieved. Those opportunistic photogs earn their living selling their wares to news outlets, the skuzzier the better. They mine news reports hoping they have something saleable in their files, and they waste no time getting their shots delivered. Even a small story, such as this one, would earn the guy who took the pictures outside the market a paycheck because of the news tie-in. I did not want those shots to be aired, but I found it odd that they weren’t.
I fulminated with Guido for a few minutes about using my story as a project topic. I didn’t want to exploit Isabelle’s murder or possibly hurt people I cared very much about, specifically Mom. Maybe later we’d do something, I told Guido, and only some parts of the story, and my mom would have to agree before we did anything.
Guido suggested that it was only fair for us to do a full-on examination. Over the years, he reminded me, we had snooped into very personal corners of various people’s lives and broadcast their secrets on national television. Now it was my turn for the exposure. I told him I would think that over. And, I told him, if he were concerned about playing fair he had better come up with a story of his own that was worth telling. He laughed, said that if that was the case he’d have to either invent something or commit something.
After talking with Guido last night, I called Mom, but got only her machine. I
was worried about her. This morning, I was still worried about her, wanted very much to hear her counsel. But I would have to wait until evening to try her again. By then, the funeral would be over. We had a lot to talk about.
In the meantime, I was determined to get a look at the estate. The sun was finally up, though “up” was maybe an exaggeration. There was no dramatic instant of transition from night to day of the sort I saw every morning in Malibu Canyon. Instead, the dark Norman sky gradually became a lighter shade of gray. Rain was forecast for the entire weekend, maybe turning to ice. Now, I thought, before the weather broke, might be my best opportunity to get out and explore.
I ran down the center of the estate’s narrow perimeter road, a typical sunken road of the region, the sort that bedeviled American tanks when they were put ashore on D-Day in 1944; the landing beaches were about thirty miles to the east. The sides of the road were thigh-high to me and were outlined on top by a continuous ridge of bocage, hedgerows of straggly cedar and thorny hawthorn. The hedgerows grew out of a root mass that was maybe three feet high and made a wall around the fields above the road.
On one side of the road there were carrot fields, the black soil plowed and resting until spring. On the other side there was an apple orchard, the branches of its bare, pruned trees as pale as smoke against the heavy sky. To my left, I could see the long white buildings of the cheese plant, the fromagerie.
I breathed in a rich mix of scents: Wasn’t it Proust who said that smell is the memory sense? What I smelled, instead of Proust’s madeleines at his aunt’s house, was the rich damp soil of the carrot fields, the woodchip-carpeted orchard, a little bit of cow, and wood smoke from a distant fireplace. I knew I had smelled that particular earthy perfume before. I knew I had been in that place before. I just did not know when.
The snapshot of me picking an apple, was it taken near here? I tried to recognize a landmark, but the photo had been taken when the trees were in full leaf and heavy with fruit. My dad was in a light shirt, and I wore a little summer dress and sandals. The orchard now, at the approach of winter, looked nothing like the orchard in the picture.
I ran at an easy pace down the farm road, lost in a sort of reverie, mind wandering as I looked around, getting some idea about the place. Mike would call that dithering along as a nudge for me to pick up the speed. But Mike wasn’t there and I could run at my own pace. It felt wonderful to be out, alone.
Without the background hum of a city or freeway, every sound I heard was crisp and bright in the cold air. When a gate closed or a hammer struck a nail, a tractor drove out into a field or a bird cawed overhead, the sound rang out over a long distance, and seemed much closer to me, accustomed to the white noise of the city, than in reality the sources of the sound were. Now and then I heard cars passing on the village road on the far side of the carrot field: a long approach, a sharp moment as it passed, a long retreat.
Before I could see it, I heard a vehicle coming up behind me. I turned left into a side lane, headed toward the fromagerie, and looked across the angle of the field. There he was, a white service van, probably a deliveryman, driving the rutted road as if he were competing at Le Mans. I waved, didn’t know if he saw me, stepped to the side of the road in case he made the turn, and jogged along next to the soil wall. He had plenty of room to pass.
When the van didn’t slow as it approached the T-intersection, a sharp right-angle turn, I expected it to stay on the straight-of-way. So I moved back to the middle of the road.
A sudden squeal of brakes made me turn, run backwards to look. I saw a great spray of mud and gravel shoot out behind the van, knew that the driver was going to try to make the turn late, traveling too fast, and knew he was an idiot.
He fish-tailed coming out of the curve. I stopped to watch, expecting him to spin out and hit the berm on one side or the other. I gripped my cell phone trying to remember: was Paramedics 15 and Police 17, or the opposite?—so easy to get everyone in the U.S. by hitting 911.
Somehow—brute strength and dumb luck—the driver managed to regain control and straighten out. But during that maneuver, I caught a glimpse of the back of the van and knew I needed to get the hell away.
Painted on the rear doors—a flash-by that took a nanosecond to recognize—was a purple rooster, exactly like the white service van that nearly forced David into a collision yesterday as we left Charles de Gaulle.
I didn’t wait to see who the driver was or what he wanted. I scrambled up the muddy road wall, snagged my sleeve on hawthorn going through the hedge, ripped it loose and started running across the newly plowed field as fast as I could, headed for the fromagerie; there were four or five vehicles parked there. It was tough going on the soft ground. I kept hearing Mike’s voice in my head—put it in gear, baby, put it in gear—and got mad enough to find more speed.
Behind me, I heard the van come to an abrupt stop; a door slid open, someone swore, and then heavy footsteps and grunting followed me. I risked a look back, saw a man with the hood of his sweatshirt drawn tight around over his face, covering all but his eyes and nose, saw him struggle over the mud in heavy boots. I turned back and kept running.
The fromagerie was a short distance ahead. I aimed for it, hoping it was a haven. Suddenly, I heard a second vehicle coming from the direction I was headed. I saw a tiny green truck, not much bigger than a golf cart, with huge tires, careen around the side of the fromagerie at a crazy speed. The little truck drove straight across a gravel yard and onto a narrow tractor path that bisected the carrot field, and straight at me. This didn’t feel good, a setup of some kind, I thought. I kept thinking about Isabelle walking in the night, the car following, lying in wait. The man behind me swore louder.
I veered off toward the orchard, not knowing where to go to escape what looked like a pincer maneuver to me—two men, me in the middle. I pulled my phone out of my pocket, gave up on the emergency number and punched Antoine’s number instead, got a no-service-available beep, swore at AT&T, and picked up my pace.
The man behind me let loose with a great stream of profanities in English, fell back, and ran the other way, back toward his van. Ahead, the tiny green truck changed course and kept coming straight at me—the take-over man, I thought. The truck was small, but it mustered plenty of speed, its fat tires shooting out sprays of mud as it covered the ground.
I reached the edge of the field, scrambled through the hedgerow, dropped into the road, crossed, scrambled up the other side, dropped into the orchard. The truck couldn’t follow.
In the distance I heard both vehicles, couldn’t see either, didn’t know where they were. Cold air burned my lungs, breathing was hard work: I ran. I vowed that if I got away intact, I would be more consistent about running. I looked at the vast orchard all around, bare trees and open sight lines, and fought despair; where could I go to get away?
“Maggie, Maggie!”
I risked a look, saw Jacques Breton coming through the hedgerow at the edge of the orchard, his clothes covered by a starched white smock, a white toque that looked like an inverted ramekin pulled low over his brows, black rubber boots on his feet. The green truck idled in the roadway behind him.
“Please, chérie. Stop. It is me.” He held his arms out to me, imploring me as he jumped down from the root berm. He held a telephone in one hand. “I am so very sorry, my dear, I did not intend to scare you. I saw what was happening and came out to help you.”
I stopped, doubled over and tried to gulp in air. Jacques looked like a starched Pillsbury Doughboy, but underneath all that white I knew he was in pretty good shape. Still, if I could ever manage to breathe again, if he were not the innocent he appeared, I could take him on, put up a decent fight at least.
“I have called Seventeen, emergency,” he said walking toward me. “The police are coming. Who was that man chasing you?”
I managed to gasp out, “I don’t know, but yesterday, leaving the airport, he cut in front of David, almost caused a collision.”
“Y
ou saw him, in Paris?” Jacques seemed horrified. “Yesterday?”
“Yes.” I managed to stand upright again and I could almost breathe, but my hands shook and my heart pounded, and not because of the run.
Jacques reached out and put a hand on my arm, pulled me gently toward him, searched my face. “He didn’t...” The question was difficult for him to get out. “Did he touch you?”
“No. When I recognized the van I just started to run. And then, you came.” I smiled at him. “Like the cavalry in a cowboy movie.”
He tossed his head to one side, a little smile behind his pouty, self-effacing expression. “But I frightened you. I’m sorry.”
“All I saw was a second truck coming at me. I didn’t know it was you.” I looked at the top of his truck—which was about all I could see of it—and back to him. “Jacques, how did you know I was in trouble?”
“I didn’t.” His palms came up. “But I was watching for you. Kelly called and asked me to keep an eye out. She saw you run out of the compound and thought you might be headed this way. When I heard a motor, I thought I should get in the truck and go take a look around for you. Then I heard swearing, saw you running from a man, and...” He leaned his head closer to mine. “My dear, considering what happened to your mother, is it wise for you to be out alone?”
Note to self: Antoine wasn’t very good about keeping secrets. Even when asked to by Inspector Dauvin.
“I needed to stretch my legs,” I said.
“Of course.” Jacques took my elbow and walked me back toward the road, to his truck. He had to make several attempts at his invitation before I understood what he was saying. The police were coming, should be there very soon, and would want to talk to me about what happened. After they were finished, I could stretch my legs by accompanying him on a tour of the fromagerie. Neither his workmen nor his cows were good company in the morning, so I would be doing him a favor. Afterward, he would drive me home.
The Paramour's Daughter Page 16
