A Provençal Mystery (27 page)

Forcing myself to seem casual, I asked her about the clock, which she said an uncle had brought back from Disneyland in the 1970s. Then I said, “And that woman's head?”

“Ah, yes. Sister Agatha gave me that to keep for her. She said someone with a key would come for it.”

“You have it out in plain sight. Perhaps you could put it away? It is very important.”

“No one ever comes here, even the seigneur. That's why she chose me to keep it. No one can get inside it without the key.”

“For now, please, is it possible to put it away in a safe place? I know who has the key.”

She nodded. “Certainly,” she said, then reached up, carefully took down the head, and carrying it like a baby, put it in a cupboard.

“Don't tell anyone about it,” I said.

“Of course. But no one ever comes to see me, you see. No one. I am self-sufficient.”

She seemed regretful as Foxy and I left, and I thought perhaps she was lonelier than she wanted to admit.

I considered going to Avignon, picking up Roger and Rachel, and returning to collect the reliquary, but instead made a risky decision. First I ate a croque monsieur at the bar in New Chateaublanc, then, after sundown, I set off for the chateau, where I planned to sneak into the shed in back to see what I could find.

I hadn't decided to do it until after talking to Madame For
ê
t and seeing the reliquary, a jarring (no pun intended) piece of reality in what had been just hazy speculation. Madame Forêt said that the seigneur never came to her house. Wasn't that significant? Agatha must have known it and decided to give the reliquary to her for safe-keeping. And the chateau was so close. I needed to know what was in that shed. It had to have something to do with Agatha’s murder. Why else would I have seen fear in Chateaublanc's hooded blue eyes as he arrogantly berated me about my American nosiness?

Roger would never approve of this enterprise. Neither would Rachel. Or even my more rational self.

My cold hands were clenched over the steering wheel of the car, and I leaned forward to try to see well enough to steer along the narrow dark road. The few lit windows in the silhouetted shadow of the chateau served as a beacon. I imagined the family all sitting in a parlor of sorts: Chateaublanc in his jodhpurs and a turtle neck cableknit sweater, back from riding, reads some leatherbound tome from the chateau library. His wife gracefully leans over the two children as they study at an antique refectory table in a pool of light from an overhead chandelier. The dog—is there a dog?—lies asleep by the fire. Ridiculous! I had to grin when I realized that the picture in my head came from some composite of old French paintings of aristocrats I had seen. The Chateaublancs were probably all wearing jeans as, in some approximation of a den, they watched TV—an old Dallas rerun, perhaps, or the French version of
Love Connection
, in which the participants always let the audience know when they had been to bed together.

Suddenly an embankment reared up on the right side of my vision. The car was heading straight for it. I corrected the wheel and decided to concentrate on what I was doing.

I had in my mind a rough map of where the shed would be on the property—almost directly behind the house, hidden by the stone wall. The road I was on split before the chateau. One fork became the driveway to the front of the house, and I had the feeling that the other fork snaked up in back of the house and then up the mountain in a kind of dog leg to a turnaround.

I took the second fork, and I estimated I had driven the right distance when I saw that the lights of the house were directly opposite. I parked the car on the grass verge that ran alongside the stone wall on the shoulder of the road. I told Foxy to stay in the car and, flashlight in hand, I opened the door, got out, and shut the door slowly so it would make no noise. I could see my breath in the frigid night air. No wind blew. Nothing moved. A tree stood next to the wall on the road side. Its trunk shone darkly in the light of the flashlight, its crown disappeared in the night sky. Several more grew inside the fence on the sides of the shed. But all the trees were too far away from the wall to do me much good in climbing it.

Once I’d done a little mountain-climbing, in spite of my fear of heights, but that was ten years before, when I was thinner and in better shape. Yet the wall was only eight or nine feet high, with hand and foot holds between the stones. The chances of being caught while trying to climb the wall made the project seem foolhardy, but what else was there to do? I was determined to take the chance.

Using my flashlight, I mapped the stony expanse with my eye, then doused the light and put it in my pocket. The climb didn’t look so bad from the ground. Yet I was afraid—the coldness that I felt came from more than the weather. But when I thought about getting in the car and leaving, the image of the little nun Antoinette leaping from the roof of the convent came into my mind. This was nothing compared to what she had done.

I wedged my right foot in a crevice about two feet up, reached my left hand as high as I could and held on to the round corner of a stone, rough under my hand. Precarious, but I had begun. Then I stuck my left foot into a crevice, as my right hand gripped a higher stone. An awkward fly, I was, sense of balance ready to give way. I clenched and unclenched my left hand, which felt tight from the unaccustomed grasping.

My muscles were aching with tension, but I boosted myself up until I sat on the top of the wall. Getting down was just as difficult. Three feet from the ground, I lost my balance and fell into a bush. Unhurt, I got up and walked around the shed to its front door. A narrow leaf-littered path led from there down to the back of the still-lit chateau.

The door to the shed was locked, so I went around to find a window. It was open, but screened. I knew those metal-framed screens—when forced upward, they depressed a flexible metal bow and can be lifted out. Within minutes I was inside. At first all I could see in the faint light were several flat rectangular objects on easels at eye level. As my eyes adjusted, vague patterns and colors emerged, barely discernible in the darkness. Paintings. That was clear.

I took the flashlight from my pocket, turned it on, and trained it on one of the paintings. It leaped into my vision: the artist had painted light, light that sharply illuminated shapes, rounding them then dissolving them into blackness. That light fell on a woman in a seventeenth-century dress, creating her and obliterating her. The dress, which was made of a deep red satiny material, flowed along her body then into folds, each fold smooth as if sculpted, glowing brilliant rose color where the folds were closest to the eye, then darkening to crimson as it fell into the creases. Her left arm disappeared into black nothing, but the bones of her right hand protruded starkly white, as if the artist had been able to see under the flesh. Her face was half in the shadows; on the lit right side, a deep blue eye, hooded and recessed into the eye socket, stared ahead; the mouth, half-relaxed, spoke silently of the sitter’s certainty of her own nobility and righteousness. A Chateaublanc, appearing, like a ghost, from oblivion—or disappearing into it.

The technique was almost as extreme as Georges de la Tour’s. I flashed the light on another painting, this one of a family, all with the same Chateaublanc face. An aristocratic family in the parlor, so like the scene I had imagined in the car that I had to laugh.

In the third painting, a baby with those deep-set blue eyes lay in the arms of his mother. I knew the mother: it was Isabelle des Moulins. Tiny, dark, with a mole under her left eye and a ringed right hand with a stump where the missing sixth finger had been. The artist had painted the stump in bright light, as if to identify her. In the background stood a male Chateaublanc, shadowed, but the face, in full, stood out—the eyes half-shut in guarded hostility, and the mouth drooping with dissipation.

This was what Chateaublanc did not want me to see.

I put out the light, went out the window, and closed the screen. As I was boosting myself up the wall, I heard a dog bark. There had been a dog, after all. A circle of light bobbed up and down, elongating and shrinking as someone walked toward me. I tried to scale the wall fast, but before I reached the top, the circle of light pinned me. I couldn’t see the holder of the flashlight except as a shadowy figure, nor did I stay to try to identify him. Instead, I scrambled up the final couple of feet, threw myself to the ground, and leaped into the car. I jammed the key in the ignition, turned it, heard the engine start, then drove away.

The cell door slammed behind me. I shivered with fear and the dank cold. The sun had never reached this place.

At first I just stood in the middle of the cell, unwilling to move. If I moved, I thought superstitiously, that would mean I really was an occupant of the cell, not just visiting.

A foreigner. In a foreign jail. Alone. Locked in. Could they lock me up forever? How much clout did Chateaublanc have? I reached out and grabbed the iron bars of the cell door. They yielded only slightly, then went rigid. Though I wanted to shake them, I didn’t. If I did, then next I would scream, and after that lose my mind.

I could feel my blood pumping through my body, and it made me realize my animal fraility.

Two police had cornered me at the top of my apartment's stairs, just as I had opened the door and let Foxy in. They had told me they were arresting me.
Arrêter
—it could mean “stop,” too, I thought, but I knew it didn’t in this case. No Miranda rights. No phone call. French justice was still based on the Napoleonic Code—the police could hold me incommunicado, without access to a lawyer, as long as they wanted. They had done the equivalent, I supposed, of booking me for breaking and entering. At some time a hearing would take place, but when?

Tomorrow I wouldn’t show up at the archives, but who would care enough to try to find out what had happened? Rachel? Roger? And if either of them did, how could they find out that I was in jail?

I imagined Foxy pacing the floor, wondering when I would come home to take him out, then lying down with resignation. He would wait forever. He would let his bladder burst before he would urinate on the floor.

“
Mon chien
!” I yelled, finally shaking the bars. “
Monsieur, s’il vous plaît
!”

A guard came to the door and said, “
Votre chien? Vous avez un chien
?”

Trying to calm down enough so that I could speak clearly and make myself understood, I told him about Foxy, about how no one knew I was in jail.

His face turned sympathetic. “
Quel dommage
!”

What a shame! he had said. I could read into it a love of dogs and a real commiseration, but I knew that he would do nothing, that he had heard this before and done nothing.

Finally I sat down on the cot with its thin mattress and put my head in my hands. With my eyes shut, I tried to imagine myself out of the cell. The cell smelled of cold metal, old clothes, and bad drains.

“Don’t despair.” The voice, speaking French, was soft and urgent. I knew it was Rose. Rose was present, a body sitting next to me. I felt myself relax, then I thought, am I going crazy?

Chapter 25

Half asleep, I heard the grating of metal. At first it alarmed me, then I realized it was a key turning. I opened my eyes and saw Roger standing outside my cell with a guard.

“Dory, you put yourself in great danger,” he said.

“I know,” I replied. “But I had to.”

“Come on, I’ve arranged for you to be released.”

I stood and stretched—at last my body felt free. Then I thought of who had put me there. “But Chateaublanc . . .”

“He has agreed to drop charges.”

“And the police? You do have influence.”

A small smile came over his face. “A little, maybe. Anyway, the police don’t like to deal with arrested Americans. They’re always threatening to call the embassy and destroy Franco-American relations. That sort of thing.”

“Chateaublanc is guilty of murder.”

“I suspect you’re right, but we still can’t prove it. The police have placed one condition on your release.”

“Which is?” I would have agreed to almost anything.

“That you stop interfering in their handling of the case.”

“Oh,” I said, then, “How did you know I was here?”

“I know you by now, Dory. You were determined to go back to Old Chateaublanc—I could tell. I came by your place to see if you had returned. You weren’t there. A neighbor—that woman on the second floor. . . “

I searched for the word for “gossip” and said, “
La commère
.”

“Yes. She told me she had seen police escorting you to a police car. Come on, I’ll drive you home now. Foxy must need to go out.”

Then I realized that I was very fond—extremely fond—of this large Frenchman. After I was released, I fell into his arms.

The sun came up as we walked Foxy along the river and I told Roger what I had discovered during my Sunday adventures.

“Those paintings in the shed,” I said. “They provide the link between the diary and the Chateaublancs. That sixth finger, just like Anne Boleyn. Those Chateaublanc eyes on the child.”

“
You took big chances,” he replied, then added reluctantly, “but you were very brave. Climbing over that wall. I wish I'd seen that.”