The Paramour's Daughter

by Wendy Hornsby

  A passing car sprayed the windshield with mud. Max fumbled with levers until he found the window washer. I urged him to continue. “What happened?”

  “Isabelle accused him of trying to steal you, and abandoning her, and yada, yada.” He shrugged. “End-of-the-affair entrails, you know? Nasty stuff. Isabelle wasn’t big on sharing.”

  “Sharing me or my dad?”

  “Both.”

  “Poor Claude,” I said. “Merry Christmas to him, huh?”

  “Yeah, poor bastard.”

  We drove through the compound gate at that point. I wanted Max to back out and drive around some more, to finish the story, but the crush of cars pouring in through the gate made that impossible.

  Max parked next to Antoine’s Mini. He gave my hand a squeeze. “Honestly, honey, I don’t know exactly what happened. But when we took you home to Betsy, you had a black eye and a plaster cast on your little arm.”

  “Jesus Christ,” a horrified reaction from the backseat.

  Before either Casey or I could grill Max further, Antoine opened my door and held out a hand to me. The rain had abated for the moment, but the sky promised more.

  As we walked toward Grand-mère’s house, Max sticking close beside me, Antoine asked, “Have you forgiven me, cousin?”

  “Don’t give it another thought,” I said. “Dauvin was just doing his job, and you were being honest.”

  Grand-mère’s Mercedes, with David driving, pulled in beside Max’s Toyota. Freddy made a beeline across the compound toward us. He took Casey gently by the arm and asked if he could have just a little word with her. I didn’t intervene, but I watched them closely. He seemed to be apologizing to her, probably for what she overheard Claude say; so many apologies, so many worries. How big were the stakes?

  Interesting, I thought as I watched Casey and Freddy, standing side by side alone for the first time, how very much alike they were—a closer resemblance to each other than to any other of the blood kin there. Much closer. Why hadn’t I noticed before?

  Both Casey and Freddy had Élodie’s patrician nose, they were both tall, broad in the shoulders, narrow in the hips. His wide, clear brow was very much like Casey’s, which I found interesting because it was in the shape of her face and in her build that Casey looked most like my sister Emily. I couldn’t see anything of the angular Claude in Freddy, but I did see something of Emily, who, as far as I knew, had absolutely no genetic relationship to Freddy. Interesting, I thought. Very interesting. I began to make a few computations.

  The conversation between Freddy and Casey seemed to end on a friendly note, and they were smiling and chatting happily when they started for the house, David now tagging along with them. Max, ever protective, excused himself from me and Antoine and joined that trio, just to make sure all was well with his grand-niece.

  Antoine went ahead to give Grand-mère Marie a hand as she slowly walked toward the house, leaning heavily on her cane. I caught up with Grand-mère and Bébé. After the usual remarks were exchanged about the service, it was fine, and about the crowd, it was large, I looked across Grand-mère at Bébé, who walked on her other side.

  “Antoine tells me you and Freddy are almost twins,” I said.

  Grand-mère answered for him. “They are only four days apart.”

  “Who’s older?” I asked.

  “Freddy is,” Bébé said. “And I never let him forget it. So what if we both turned forty? He’s still older, and always will be.”

  “When was the big birthday?” I asked.

  “In June.”

  He had just told me exactly what I wanted to know. Everything after that was just conversational shuffle. I asked “Was there a party?”

  “A small celebration.” He shrugged; times are tough. “Grand-mère took us for dinner and there was cake and champagne after. Very lovely, and very generous.”

  She reached up and patted his cheek. “If my Bébé is forty, how old am I?”

  He captured her hand and kissed it. Looking deep into her face he said, “Not nearly old enough, my dearest dear. Not nearly old enough.”

  She leaned her head against his shoulder and we continued into the house.

  The crowd inside was quite subdued. I greeted people, met people, was kissed and patted and offered condolences as they came, paid their respects, had some tea, moved on. Whenever I saw a dirty teacup, I dutifully picked it up and delivered it to Oscar in the kitchen.

  At the first opportunity I had for a break, I found Max and took him outside on the pretext of showing him the garden. We stopped under a pergola for shelter from the weather.

  When I was certain that no one could overhear us, I said, “Isabelle carried Dad’s picture in her wallet until the day she died.”

  “Yeah?” He thought that over. “Interesting.”

  “After you and Dad took me to the U.S., did Dad ever see or hear from Isabelle again?”

  “From time to time. They held those patents together so there was some ongoing communication about renewals and revisions, legal docs back and forth. But Hubert was usually the middle man.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “Your dad kept all contact to a minimum, but he did respond to her. He was afraid to ignore her.”

  “Why afraid?”

  “For you. He always expected that Isabelle would change her mind and come and fetch you back, especially after she divorced Claude. He didn’t want to trigger something: She could pull some pretty weird stuff. For the same reason, there were no legal actions taken to get her to legally relinquish custody rights once you were in the States.”

  “Dad thought she wouldn’t sign me away?”

  “He knew she wouldn’t.”

  “Did you know that Isabelle was pregnant when you and Dad came and got me?”

  He frowned, deep V’s forming between his thick brows. “Says who?”

  “Do the math. I was two in September, and Dad was here, with Isabelle. Freddy was born the following June.”

  The frown deepened. I wondered if the fingers on the hands thrust deep into his coat pockets were counting backward. Finally he said, “So what? She was married to Claude at the time.”

  “So what? Look at Casey and Freddy together, then you tell me,” I said.

  “Goddamn it.” He sank into a dark reverie, working things through.

  “Why was my arm in a cast?”

  He roused himself, shook his head. “We were never given a good answer. Isabelle and Claude were living in Paris at the time. Late one night some neighbors found you outside in the middle of the street during a thunderstorm, nearly naked, obviously hurt and screaming your head off. The police were called, a social services file was opened. We were ready to use the file against Isabelle if she ever changed her mind and came after you.”

  “She must have offered you some explanation.”

  Max shook his head. “Claude said the storm scared you and you hurt yourself when you ran outside.”

  “That’s plausible,” I said.

  “Except you had a spiral break. Someone twisted your arm until it broke. Ben Nussbaum made a careful X-ray record in case we ever needed to go to court.”

  “Mom!” Casey, coatless, shivering—it had begun to sprinkle again—came around the side of the house. “Here you are. I’ve been looking all over.”

  “I’m not lost. I’m with Max.”

  “You’ve got to come inside.”

  I had guessed right that once the funeral was over pretense and politesse would quickly slip away: fatigue, alcohol, grief, history, who knows what the catalyst was that afternoon? Certainly Bébé’s needling of Jemima before we left the chapel was a harbinger of animosities to be revealed.

  The ugliness, it seemed, began while I was in the garden with Max. In my absence, Claude had taken some cheap shots at me, questioning my intentions in coming to France. As soon as I walked back into the salon he confronted me directly. Obviously, he had been drinking.

  “How do we know, except on your w
ord,” Claude demanded of me, “that we just interred Isabelle Martin?”

  Freddy, profoundly chagrined, tried to quiet his father, but his efforts only seemed to anger Claude more. Claude brushed his son aside.

  Pierre Dauvin stepped in. “We have certification from the Los Angeles coroner that proper identification was made.”

  “Based on what?” Claude wanted to know. Pointing at me, dismissing me by his tone of voice, he said, “Her word? She doesn’t remember her mother. How could she identify Isabelle?”

  Grand-mère clapped her hands like an angry school teacher. “That is enough, Claude.”

  “No it is not,” he shouted. The rest of the room fell into an embarrassed silence. “How do we know this woman is not an imposter?”

  Uncle Max stepped forward. “I knew Isabelle. I verified her identity with the coroner. And I can assure you that my niece is who she says she is.”

  “Max Duchamps,” Claude spat. “You are the last man I trust to tell the truth here.”

  Then he wheeled and pointed at Casey. “That one says she saw police photographs of Isabelle, but she refuses to produce them. And who is she, anyway?”

  Casey held her shoulders back and her head high during this verbal assault, and I was proud of her. I wanted to put my arms around her, but instead I used them to restrain Max. I was afraid he would deck Claude and break all those borrowed china teacups. It was David who went to Casey’s side and put a supportive arm around her.

  I turned to Antoine and said, quietly, “Tell Dauvin that I do have some of the coroner’s photographs of Isabelle. If it is all right with Grand-mère, I will show them to Claude.”

  Antoine asked both Dauvin and Grand-mère for approval. Then he turned to me and, gesturing toward the next room, said, “Please.”

  Dauvin, Freddy, Max and Claude went with me into the small library off the salon where some of the young people had retreated to play video games. I asked Chris, Antoine’s son, to lend me his laptop. While Freddy asked the kids to go outside for a few minutes, I accessed my email via the Internet and pulled up the message Rich sent with photos attached. When the first one, Isabelle’s passport photo, was on the screen, I turned the monitor to show the others.

  “Is this Isabelle Martin?” I asked.

  They all three agreed that it was.

  As Claude began to protest that the passport photo proved nothing, I pulled up the first of the coroner’s postmortem shots. It wasn’t gruesome, but it was apparent that the subject had been terribly injured. There were obvious contusions, her skin had a blue tinge and she looked dead, not asleep. LA County Coroner, the date and time, were stamped in a bottom corner.

  When he saw the image, Freddy gasped and crossed himself. Dauvin’s face was set in grim lines; he had seen them, but showing them to the family seemed to distress him.

  Freddy opened the third of the attached photos, saw the more graphic of the coroner’s pictures Rich had sent, and announced, “Papa, enough. Go home. Now.”

  As Claude stormed out, I told Freddy and Dauvin that I had Isabelle’s effects in my room. Through Freddy, Dauvin informed me that her things had been removed from my room during the funeral and were currently at the local police station. I was disappointed, because going upstairs, and taking Casey with me, to retrieve the bags would have given me a plausible excuse to disappear for a few minutes, to cool off, to talk through the situation with my daughter.

  I was unnerved by the intensity of Claude’s animosity toward me, and furious that he had turned on Casey. I was grateful when he was gone, though shimmers of his pent-up rage still filled the house after the front door slammed behind him. Forty years was a long time to harbor such very bad feelings, especially toward a little kid. I wondered if, along the way, Claude had done some of the same math that I had concerning his son’s birthday.

  Max was huddled with Casey when I went back into the salon. I saw her shake her head firmly as he spoke to her; she did not agree with whatever he was asking of her. My guess was that he wanted to spirit the two of us out of there. I went to my daughter.

  “That was brutal,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “My God, Mom, what is the guy’s problem?”

  “He’s a variation on the fairy-tale cliché, the wicked stepfather,” I said.

  “Wicked is right. You stay away from him, Mom,” she ordered, gray eyes narrowed. “Promise me.”

  “I will do my very best.” I turned to Max. Again, his face was set in a series of downward-pointing V’s—thinning hairline, furrow between the brows, frown, brackets around his mouth—the way it looks when he’s worried.

  I asked, “Spiral fracture, huh? What else?”

  “The question, my dear, is not what, but who?”

  “You’re right,” I said, looking around the room at groupings of heads bent together, the susurrus of many quiet conversations rising and falling like wind in trees. People were beginning to leave, embarrassed maybe to have seen such a raw family contretemps at a time of mourning. Soon, only the family would be left, their issues unbuffered by the presence of guests. Thinking about that moment, I felt dread rise up from the pit of my stomach and settle in the back of my throat, like a burr I could not dislodge.

  Freddy was headed for the door. I assumed his intention was escape from the barely veiled scrutiny of the others. His face still glowed from humiliation. I felt deeply sorry for him, caught in the middle between his father and me, and certainly now the object of pity. Before the situation deteriorated further, he and I needed to talk.

  I leaned into Max and whispered, “Stick close to Casey. I’ll be back.”

  “Maggie.” He snagged my arm. “Where...?”

  “Trust me.” I kissed him on the cheek and took my arm from him as I turned to my daughter. “Casey, stay with Max. I have my phone.”

  On my way out the front door I stopped for my coat and an umbrella. Freddy was already halfway across the compound, bareheaded—it was drizzling again—bypassing Isabelle’s house where, I assumed, his father had been exiled in disgrace. Where was he going?

  “Freddy!” I called, opening the umbrella as I dashed toward him. He saw me, hesitated, doubled back and met me. I held the umbrella over us both. “Where can we talk?”

  He glanced at Isabelle’s house, shuddered—shivered?—took my elbow and nodded toward the compound gate. “Walk with me? I want to show you something.”

  Before we got to the gate, a bright yellow Lamborghini muscled its way into the compound. The low-slung car churned mud and gravel before it rumbled to a stop so close to us and so suddenly that we had to jump back to avoid being splashed. The driver, a young man with obviously dyed blue-black hair, wearing wraparound sunglasses in a rainstorm, rolled down his tinted window a few inches and asked, arrogantly, in English, “Where’s the party?”

  “The memorial reception is there,” Freddy said, reproach rife in his tone as he pointed toward Grand-mère’s house.

  Without another word, the window went up and the car rumbled on.

  I had seen the lower edge of a bruise below the shades on the young man’s left cheekbone. Someone had landed a punch to his handsome face. There was something about the kid that was familiar, the cast of his head, maybe. Familiar from where, though? TV? Supermarket tabloids? Did he have a tiff with paparazzi?

  “Who is that?” I asked, intrigued.

  “Jemima’s boyfriend.” Freddy pulled a scarf out of his coat pocket and wrapped it around his neck.

  “Sergei Ludanov, Junior?” Jemima had invoked the boyfriend’s name as a warning to Bébé.

  “That is what I’m told.”

  Ludanov, Junior, parked his six-figure, six-hundred-plus horsepower ego-boost so close to the front door that anyone going in or out would have to walk around it. He, however, would not get wet going between car and house.

  “He’s a punk,” I said, turning away, walking on.

  “Antoine says he’s a Russian mafia prince.” Freddy took the umbrella
and held it over us; I put my hands in my pockets. “His father is quite notorious, owns casinos, clubs, a resort or two on an island he owns off the coast of Cambodia. He’s suspected of having a hand in various criminal activities, currently big-scale money laundering. But he’s never been brought to trial. Something always seems to happen to the witnesses against him. They shut up, or they disappear.”

  “Gérard allows Jemima to see this guy?”

  “She’s eighteen. What can he do? Assuming he wants to do anything. The guy’s family is very rich, and Gérard has some pressing needs at the moment.”

  As we turned onto the village road a companionable silence settled over us. I was running through various hypotheticals that could involve Junior and maybe his father, and their money. Freddy was lost in his own thoughts. He looked so miserable that I reached over and patted his shoulder.

  “Maggie,” he said, capturing my hand and folding it into the crook of his elbow. “How can I apologize for my father’s behavior?”

  “Don’t even try,” I said. I had forgotten about Claude for the moment. “I gather that he is not happy that I popped up.”

  He shook his head, agreeing with me.

  “I have a feeling that some of the others are unhappy, too,” I said.

  “It’s what you said earlier.” Freddy gave my hand, where it rested on his arm, a squeeze. “You’re an unknown quantity. It’s natural that some people are worried.”

  “Are you?”

  He cocked his head, not yes, not no.

  I asked, “If it were up to you, what would you do with our mother’s assets?”

  He took a moment to organize his thoughts as we walked. He asked, “You’ve heard about Uncle Gérard’s subdivision scheme?”

  “Antoine told me about it.”

  “Just so you know, I believe his scheme is ridiculous. I see the influence of Gillian in it, typical English slash-and-burn approach to the land.” His tone expressed profound disdain for all of the above. “First, the proposed scale of the development is too large for the region and for the market, both. Next, by ripping out the orchards, the fields, and the fromagerie and replacing them with endless ranks of cheap, oversized modern houses—you call them McMansions?—he would destroy exactly those qualities that would attract his target market, retired people on fixed incomes.”