A Provençal Mystery (25 page)

“Maurice!” said his wife. “This is not the time for politics.” She mounted her horse in one graceful movement. “Come, we want to be down the mountain by early afternoon.”

“I promise, Angelique, that we will leave as soon as these people do,” he replied,

“Perhaps we could look around anyway?” I said. I knew it was a mistake—I saw Roger flinch.

Chateaublanc let the horse walk a few paces. “This place is private. Don’t you Americans understand privacy?” He stared at me menacingly. I saw the muscles in his legs contract as he gripped the horse’s sides. Though it had not been far from my mind, the thought came to the forefront with full force: this man could be desperate; he could be a killer.

“Perhaps I step out of bounds,” I said

“But yes,” he replied and looked over at the gardener.

“Madame, Monsieur,” the gardener said. He led us to the front of the house, we said good-bye, then walked down the path under his watchful eye.

As we drove the quarter-mile or so back down to Old Chateaublanc, I looked at Roger. His profile was serious, bold—the cliff-like forehead shading his fine eyes, the firmly folded lips, the prominent chin.

“You're looking at me,” he said, and he smiled, changing the contours of his face. “I'm not a map.”

“In a way you are,” I said.

“I should ask you to drive so I can stare at
you
.” He glanced at me, then turned his gaze back to the winding road.

The highest part of the village was a ruin of rubble, of half-fallen greyish stone houses built so that the side of the mountain acted as one wall. Tree roots had felt their way between the stones and over the years had split them apart. Tiny plants thrived in the mixture of fine gravel and dirt that had sifted into the cracks.

In the square of a ruin maybe a thousand years old, we sat on a stone, happy in silence. On the one wall, gray smoke stains were all that was left of an ancient fire. If I could read those stains, I thought, I might know the people who had lived here so long ago. They had been rebels for centuries—Protestant dissenters, bandits, renegades escaped from city justice. Their presences hung in the air like ghosts. In my mind, their voices spoke in guttural old Provençal, planning insurrection, complaining about
the
tax collector. I wondered if Jack, who studied these rebels, had ever been here.

A little river, a tributary of the Rhone, traced a thin watery line in the distance. We gazed down at the valley of red earth, olive trees, and vineyards. Humans had planted trees and vines in patches on the undulating land but left some of it wild. The valley spoke of human existence, but it was too far in the distance for us to see anyone, not even a worker in a vineyard.

Foxy whined with impatience, so we climbed through an overgrown thicket of bushes up onto an open-air platform, once a second story, now the top of a flat outcropping shaded by an ancient tree. Foxy followed behind us, smelling out tree roots and vestiges of other animals. By now, penetrated by the mid-day sun, the air was warm for winter.

We spread out the red-and-white checkered tablecloth that Roger had brought and began to put out the food. Sitting by the tree on one edge of the tablecloth, I cut slices of cheese and unwrapped the paté. Roger opened the wine, poured us each a glass, then tossed a bit of cheese to Foxy who caught it in his mouth and, ears erect, fixed his attention on him. I put a slice of paté on a slice of bread and took a big bite.

Roger ripped off a chicken leg, settled himself into the other corner of the tablecloth, and sat facing me, his knee up. “So what is that diary telling you?” he asked.

“The mother superior, Fernande, was a seigneur’s daughter. A man who visited her in the convent garden was her brother and Des Moulins’ lover. Des Moulins had had a sixth finger. Her child, if he was a Chateaublanc, could have been the next in line after his father, for the Chateaublanc title and property. Fernande could have killed the little novice Jeanne because she knew about that child.”

“Why would she have known?” Roger said and started eating the chicken leg.

“I'm not sure, but it’s pretty clear that she knew Des Moulins from her life before the convent.”

“That doesn’t have to mean anything.”

“True. But she hinted at trouble. Maybe she did know about the child.”

“Madame des Moulins could have killed Jeanne,” replied Roger. He turned the chicken leg around like an ear of corn to get all the meat off. “Perhaps the novice knew something about her she didn't want known. And maybe Des Moulins was lying.”

“So Rose recorded what she thought was the truth, but it was not?”

“Can you trust this diary?” Roger asked.

I had asked myself that question more than once. Maybe Rose had made the whole thing up. After all, she had a fertile imagination. A novelist in training. One of the first mystery writers. Or she might not even have known that what she wrote was untrue. I paused, aware that what I was going to say next would blunt my case that the diary was good evidence. “Rose was possessed by the devil.”

Roger stopped eating. “How do you know that? A real case of possession?”

“Sounded like it. A devil got inside her, she said.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I believe that she believed it.” I didn't say it, but I was beginning to think that the unseen and unheard did exist—more than I had before. A least a little bit.

“Perhaps the diary has nothing to do with Agatha's death,” said Roger.

“And perhaps it does,” I replied. “I need to find out what happened to that child.“

It was sunny, a bit breezy, and very quiet. Insects droned in the undergrowth. We fell into silence, though neither of us stopped eating.

Finally I said, “I have been thinking more about how Madeleine likes to talk about stepping on a toad.”

“I remember you telling me that she collects ancient sayings and proverbs. Why is it significant?”

“Stepping on a toad was a phrase that Rose used in her diary. Madeleine also used the phrase ‘walked as if he carried a knife at his belt’ to describe her coke-head lover to me. The exact phrase that Rose used to describe the fallen women in the Refuge. An unusual turn of phrase, to say the least. And the supposed scandal of riding on the back of a horse behind a man—she brought that up, too. She’s read the diary and the Des Moulins documents. She has to have. I think she wants me to know. Maybe she’s the one who left the diary at my place. I don’t think Chateaublanc ever saw it before—or would have cared about it, at least at first, if he did. After all, a humble little converse wrote it. On the other hand, maybe he does know something about it and thinks it has clues concerning the reliquary. Funny. I’d thought that Griset or Agatha left it.”

“Maybe so,” said Roger. “Perhaps Chateaublanc hid it, and one of them found it and arranged for you to find it, too.”

“But why wouldn’t he just destroy it?”

“He’s an archivist. Documents are holy objects to him.”

The place reminded me of the hilly meadows on the outskirts of the small town in New Jersey where I had spent my thirteenth summer with an aunt. There the herbs were wild sage and sweet bay, but the insects buzzed as insistently. My friends and I had listened to nature and desired something, not knowing what it was.

“You’re thoughtful,” Roger finally said.

“I was thinking of my adolescence,” I said. “Before I began my misspent youth.”

“Misspent?”

“Actually it wasn't, when I think about it. Though we didn't have much money to spend, we had time. I was a flute player in a band—a gig here, another there. And I worked mornings in a surf shop. Some afternoons, we went to the beach and talked about politics and what we thought was philosophy. We lived day to day.”

“As you should when you're young,” Roger replied.

I nodded, thinking of how that day-to-day life had finally ended, with many of our dreams gone. After a revolutionary feminist friend of mine married a Hollywood producer with a swimming pool, she bought designer clothes and exploited Mexican domestics. Poverty was no longer virtuous and romantic.
Diet for a Small Planet
ended up in cardboard boxes marked “25 cents” at garage sales as steaks (animal flesh) again sizzled on barbecues. Attitudes that had seemed permanent disappeared like smoke. It was "history" (gone) and history (socially significant). People were "history" ("blown away" in war) and history (a generation bringing change).

And here I was in France. France seemed so slow to change. How I loved it. The Provence that I knew was sunny and beautiful, yes, but its darker side appealed to something dark in me. It was a place soaked in blood, layered with history, mysterious with sorcery and the unexplained. The countryside fragrant with lavender in summer once smelled of death, gunpowder, and fear. The arrogant Raymond of Turenne, forcing his prisoners to throw themselves, screaming, to their death into the void at Les Baux. Looting soldiers ravaging fields of rye, leaving starvation in their wake. The Tarasque, an lion-headed, six-footed dragon, who lived in the Rhone River, eating children and other living things until Saint Martha subdued him. The huge stone castle in Tarascon—I had stood on the high roof swept with wind and been afraid. I didn’t have the words to explain it all to Roger in French.

Finally I said, “What were you doing when you were young?”

“Talking revolution,” he said, “but living like a bourgeois.” A smile that began deep in his eyes spread over his face. I could hear rustling off in the bushes where Foxy must have been chasing something.

“Tell me about being a revolutionary,” I said. “What kind of world did you want?”

“One in which the Chateaublancs of Chateaublanc lost their sense of privilege. In which the people of the Third World no longer starved and did not lose their identity. But enough of that.” He was going to make a move, I knew. He ran some mineral water over his hands, greasy from eating chicken, and dried them with a napkin. Then he reached over, took my hand and asked, “How long are you in France, Dory?”

“Until June. Maybe September if I can afford it.”

The questions hung in the air, unanswered: What would happen if we had an affair? Was it foolish to fall in love when we had so little time? Were we already in love?

I decided that I didn't want to try to answer those questions yet. I took my hand from his and leaned back against the tree trunk. I said, "Tell me about Agatha.”

He nodded—a sign that he understood—and said, “Ah, Agatha! The perfect aunt. I used to confide in her about my escapades, and she never judged me or told my parents. I could always count on her.”

“I saw her trying to talk teenagers into sexual abstinence the week before she was killed,” I said.

“Yes, that had become her mission. Long before that, she fought against abortion. She picketed clinics, harassed doctors who performed them. But no more. One day, she just stopped.”

“What happened?” I asked. I was imagining Agatha with a picket sign, walking purposefully in front of a clinic, and I, a pro-choicer, had very mixed feelings.

“A woman she had counseled died in childbirth. It cast a shadow over her, and she moderated her position.”

I sat up straight. “Do you know who the woman was?”

“No, she never mentioned any names.”

“Where was it?”

“In Aix. Agatha used to be at the convent there.”

A chill went over me. “Jack Leach told me his mother died in childbirth, after being advised by Catholics to go through with her pregnancy.”

“Jack is American.”

“This was in Aix. Jack also lived there once. Do you think Jack could have killed Agatha because of this?”

“It makes him even more of a suspect, doesn’t it?” Roger said. “Now I’m even more convinced that he’s the one.”

Foxy barked, and his bark sounded far off. I called him and smiled as I heard him crashing through the brush. Foxy was too domesticated to know how to negotiate brush quietly.

Something whined past my ears.

“Roger!” I cried, in alarm. “A gun shot!” I was so startled that I said it in English.

“
A la terre
!” he shouted, and at first I didn’t recognize the words for “get down.” He reached out and pushed me down.

“Foxy!” I shouted, thinking that a hunter had mistaken him for a wild animal and shot at him. The quiet threatened. All the little noises had ended—insects no longer hummed, and small animals no longer rustled. I visualized them all still, alert, listening.

Another shot. This one slammed into a stone above our heads. Earth rained down on the tablecloth, clods among the red checks.

I struggled to stand, but Roger’s heavy arm held me down. “Foxy!” I said.

“Don't chance getting killed,” Roger replied in a whisper. “You do Foxy no good by getting killed yourself. The person is not shooting at him. He shoots at us.”

I knew Roger was right, but where was Foxy? I lay under Roger’s arm, my body cold with fear, too afraid to cry. Time passed slowly, but my heart was thumping wildly and fast. I could smell dust, burnt rock, and crushed rosemary.

Then I felt something wet on my arm—a nose!—saw Foxy’s anxious eyes. “Oh, my boy!” I cried, and sat to embrace him, as his wagging tail made swaths across the tablecloth.