A Provençal Mystery (11 page)

“That’s not exactly what he said.”

“It’s what I say,” he replied with a boyish smile. He pushed his plate towards me—there was food left on it. “Here, take this home for Foxy’s dinner. I’ll get Michel to wrap it up for you.”

Foxy came out from under the table with his ears up.

Roger smiled at me and shrugged. To me, the gesture said “all this talk! It is of no consequence.” He returned to the subject of Agatha, “Why would anyone kill a nun?”

“Finding motives is the business of the police,” said Fitzroy.

“God help justice, then,” said Griset.

“They do their job,” replied Fitzroy. “How old was Agatha, do you think?” He folded his napkin by his unused spoon—he never ordered coffee or dessert.

“Seventy-one,” said Roger.

“Did you know her?” I asked.

“It was in the newspaper.”

“It’s strange, she looked younger than that,” said Fitzroy.

“Nuns often do,” Jack said cautiously.

“Why would that be?” I asked, feeling like a provocateur. I mopped up the remaining sauce on my plate with a piece of bread and ate it.

“They don’t experience life,” said Jack. “Agatha was a silly woman. Arrested development, the usual nun. The Church turns its women into freaks.”

“You mean they don’t experience sex,.” My voice was sharp.

“Yes.” I could see dread in Jack’s eyes and sweat on his lip—he knew I was going to disagree with him. He looked to Fitzroy for approval, but met a frown. He stopped talking and began drumming his fingers on the table, in the rhythm that my mother had called “horsie” when I was a child.

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “In the narrow sense, yes. But they seem to me to have an active erotic life if only in their fervent adoration. . .” I was all ready to go on to a little canned lecture about nuns’ love of Christ and how moderns see it only through a constricted focus of Freudian psychology, how moderns have taken the broad river of eroticism and channeled it into a constricted artificial canal defined by the genitals. . . . . I could go on a roll, as I sometimes did when teaching. I could watch the fearful but interested look in Jack’s eyes fade and be replaced by a student’s inert regard. And I could see the look intensify until I began to be overcome with shame at taking advantage of the situation and stopped talking. I didn’t have the heart for it. “Never mind,” I said and added, changing the tone of the conversation, “Maybe you’re right in a way. Agatha was young in attitude, eager. Seemingly unhurt by life. She reminded me of a Girl Scout. It wasn’t difficult to think of her toasting s’mores.”

“Toasting what?” asked Griset, and we Americans laughed, then explained to him what s’mores were, but it was clear from his expression that he didn’t understand their appeal at all.

Michel came with the bill, and we paid it.

Roger turned to me with a question, “You study nuns, then? From before the Revolution?”

“The nuns from the Our Lady of Mercy—they took in fallen women, and still do. I am tabulating the results of my research into their social and economic backgrounds.”

“Not their capacity for prayer?” He was asking questions, but I wondered how interested he really was.

“That will come later, in another chapter of my as yet imaginary book. Now I need to look at their land-holding. Maybe you can help me there. I’ve found some contracts and records of
rentes
in the H Series, but I’d like to look into the land-holding of the nuns’ families. Where’s a good place to look?”

“Perhaps you should ask Chateaublanc,” he said; his face was impassive.

Something was wrong. He should have been able to rattle off a phrase like “the E Series” or say something about looking into notarial records.

I said, “Oh, it’s not worth talking about,” and saw him realize that I was suspicious of him. He reached in his shirt pocket, took out his pack of cigarettes, and prized one out. It was his second within an hour.

“What period do you study?” Fitzroy asked him.

Roger took a drag on his cigarette, “Sixteenth century. Some seventeeth.”

“My uncle has done work on land records of the nineteenth century,” Jack said eagerly. So they are a family of academics, I thought. “You must have read his work. Harold Leach?”

“Harold Leach. Oh, yes.” Roger crossed his legs, held one knee, looked at Jack. It was a dare to Jack to say more. “I am not very interested in the nineteenth century. And in fact now I have some business to attend to and must leave you. Regretfully.” He smiled insincerely, then got up to leave—quickly, as if let out of school. Griset rose with him. In spite of my suspicions, I could not help but see the way Roger’s levis fitted over his solid rear end when he turned to go.

After Roger rounded the corner, Fitzroy looked at me inquiringly, then said: “Why do American women find French men so attractive?”

“Not all of them. Roger is a nice guy,” I said, knowing I sounded lame. When I looked at Roger I thought of a soft but strong embrace of a furry animal. Leda and the swan also drifted into my mind. Feathers and fur are not far apart. I wasn’t about to say that out loud, though.

“But you don’t trust him, any more than you trust any of us?” said Jack. He was smoking again.

“The murder has me a bit anxious.”

“And why are you so anxious?” Fitzroy asked.

“I might be next,” I said, to get him off the track, but aware suddenly that what I had said was true. “What if the killer is just a woman-hater?”

“Maybe it’s a one-time thing,” Fitzroy said quickly. “As we said before, some maniac from outside might have sneaked into the bathroom, forced poison on Agatha, and gone on to new and better bathrooms. Or maybe someone at the convent did the deed, and it didn’t take effect until she came to the archives.”

“We’ve been over it and over it, but we never come to any solid conclusions. How do we know it’s poison?” I asked.

“What else could it be? You told us that her face was purple and there wasn’t a mark on her body,” said Jack.

“Not that I could see. She wasn’t naked,” I replied. “But maybe she was strangled.”

“And no blood?”

“No,” I said. “I do
think
it was poison. Someone could have put it the archive coffee. Who would know the difference? It always tastes like poison.” A weak joke but I wanted to lighten our mood.

“The police checked the coffee pot, remember? I saw them,” said Jack, with his usual touch of pomposity or with concern, I couldn’t tell which.

“Someone—the killer—could have washed out the pot and made some more coffee,” I said.

Fitzroy studied me, “Are you playing detective? Be careful, my dear. This is real life.”

“It’s idle talk,” I replied. “I have no intention of playing detective. I’ve never had that ambition. Never even read Nancy Drew mysteries like most little girls.”

I thought I meant it. When I raised my eyes, Fitzroy was looking straight at me, serious, waiting. “Not going to say anything, are you?” he said, with a look of patience. His eyes were hazel, I noticed.

“About what?” I tried to look bland, but it was difficult.

“Sorry. Maybe I need to make myself clear. Aubanas studying land records. Do you believe it?”

“No, not really.”

“He didn’t even know where land-holding documents are,” said Jack quickly. “And he seemed surprised that you are looking at the nuns’ socio-economic status. He should have known the importance of that. The French are experts in economic history. Ever since the Annales.” I smiled to myself—graduate students liked to parade their knowledge of the Annales, the school of thought championing the notion that demographics and economic change are even more important than wars and “great men” in making history.

“Maybe the University of Marseille doesn’t stress such things,” I replied.

“Have it your way,” said Fitzroy. “But remember, handsome men can also be murderers.”

“You’re not ugly, Martin,” I replied. “Besides Aubanas wasn’t here when Agatha was killed.”

“Maybe he was lurking somewhere,” Martin said. “Perhaps in the reference room.”

“I think he’s a policeman,” Jack said.

“Never,” I replied. “He’s just not the type.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Fitzroy said. He smiled, picked up his coat, shrugged into it, and left. Jack followed him. I stayed awhile with Foxy, thinking.

On the way back to the apartment, I stopped in a public phone booth and called the University at Marseille. The wind was cold, so I shut the door. After being bounced from one person to another, I spoke to a woman clerk named LeBon in the history department.

“I’m calling about a Professor Aubanas.”

“Who?”

Foxy at my side, I stared out the glass at a bearded man sitting slumped on a stone wall, some cars parked on the narrow street. I repeated the name.

“There is no Professor Aubanas here.”

My heart jumped.

“Has he resigned then?”

The clerk went to look at the records. It was close in the phone booth, and I swung the angled door open a little to let in some air. The wind came with it. Someone had scratched a number on the phone box—I stared at it and found myself memorizing it for no reason. The man got up from the stone wall and moved away.

The clerk came back on the line. “No one named Aubanas has ever been part of the faculty.”

A chill of fear ran over me. I thanked the clerk and hung up. Roger really wasn’t what he seemed. It did not surprise me. But then, if he was not a historian, what was he? Why was he hanging around the archive? He had not been there at the time of Agatha’s murder, but could he be connected to it in some way? He knew how old she was when she died. Was that fact really mentioned in her obituary? I needed to go home and look at it. But first I’d spend the afternoon working on my paper.

Chapter 11

Blown by the cold mistral, people buried themselves in their winter coats and hurried across the plaza. I stood by the phone booth, watched them, and tried to warm my gloveless hands. The cold ran deep into the recesses of my body, which did not feel at home in this world of liars and murderers.

The door of the archive, dwarfed by the palace and looking sinister, lurked across the expanse, but I trudged towards it. Where else could I go? Though the murder had happened in the archive, the archive was the only place to be. My feet found their way across the round cobblestones, then up the worn stone steps. I pushed the brass button, Chateaublanc’s voice answered, I identified myself, the buzzer unlocked the door.

Once I was inside, I was restless—or was it anxious?—and found an excuse to go straight to the reference room. I needed some documents from the Carmelite convents sometime, why not now? The identifying numbers would be in the inventory for the H-series, where documents from Old Régime religious history were kept.

I stood in front of the shelves, and my eyes saw that something was different: sandwiched in between thick tomes, the diary’s thin sepia spine stood out as if it were lit up. To my eyes, anyway. Someone had shelved it in the one place where only I looked now that Agatha was gone—in the arms of the H-series. It wasn’t Agatha who had done it— I had looked there since she died and hadn’t seen it. Griset was probably unaware of its presence; he rarely visited the inventory shelves—the readers were supposed to return reference volumes to their places after use.

I reached out for the diary. Then I began to wonder, considering the secrecy with which someone (who?) had put it there, if this wasn’t another piece of evidence for my theory that it had something to do with Agatha’s death. My hand jerked back. The diary, that slim brown sheaf of pages, had become dangerous. I had decided to leave it and resume work on the convent statistics—a repetitious, boring task perfectly suited to calm my state of frightened sorrow. Let the past remain closed. But Agatha’s round face entered my imagination—nodding towards the diary, full of entreaty, she was saying, “Go on, go on, Dory. Read it.” Had someone put it there after she died, knowing that I would find it and comprehend its disappearance and reappearance as significant? I had no choice. I took it to my place and opened it to the point where I had stopped two weeks before.

* * * * *

11 June, 1659

The excitrice wakened me this morning at dawn with a Dei Gratias. Still half asleep, my lazy body itched to stay in bed. But I knew that outside in the world the sun was shining. I overcame the temptation to sleep longer, made the sign of the cross, recited the daily exercise, then tried to think a good thought, as was the Rule. Soon I was able to concentrate, at least for a short time. I dressed in my habit and veil, covered my bed, and made a reverence. Then on my knees I saluted the Very Holy Trinity, the Glorious Virgin, my guardian angel, and all my saints, especially Saint Anne.

After devotions, in the company of my sisters I left the choir in silence. And so went the rest of the morning, prayer and then work. The others went to the workroom to make lace and sew gloves for sale, but I was released to the outdoors and my garden, under God’s sun. The rosemary had grown so much that it was threatening to take over the other herbs. I set to work pruning it.

A shout upset the peace of the garden. It came from inside the convent. I could not make out the words. I put the shears on the outside windowsill, then I hurried into the convent, down to the reception parlor. When the fallen women threaten trouble, I am the one Mother Fernande needs. I am strong, able to bring a violent woman under control or stop a fight, better than Sister Marie Paule who is mistress of the Refuge. She is small and not strong, in body, at least.