A Temporary Ghost (The Georgia Lee Maxwell Series, Series 2) (16 page)

Vivien hadn’t mentioned working today. Through my half-open door I heard indistinguishable murmuring punctuated by extended silences, which meant she was on the phone with her lawyer. Alexander had left early, the sound of his motorcycle splitting the morning calm. I puttered around. I should transcribe yesterday’s interview with Vivien, I told myself, but didn’t move to follow up this unexciting impulse. While shuffling through my plastic tape boxes, though, I uncovered the one labeled, “Pedro Ruiz.”

I remembered Pedro’s almost childlike eagerness to be taped. He had asked if I were going to transcribe the interview, had even asked me when I’d do it. Since his death I hadn’t thought of it again, especially since he’d made no new revelations during our talk. Now I seized on it. Transcribing the tape would be the final favor I could perform for a dead man.

But it, too, had to wait. Ross stuck his head in my door and said, “I’m going to drive down for the paper. Want to come?”

Below, Vivien’s voice murmured on. Ross’s hair was still damp from his shower. A trip to Beaulieu-la-Fontaine was immediately appealing. I put aside Pedro’s tape. “Sure.”

The wind was still high, the sky overcast, the top of Mount Ventoux shrouded in clouds. I thought I smelled rain as we walked to the car. “Alexander made a half-assed apology last night,” I said.

“Stupid twit.”

“He said Vivien wanted him to.”

“Sure. She always mops up after him.”

We skimmed down the hill to town. Beaulieu-la-Fontaine was more animated than I’d ever seen it. People with woven shopping baskets selected vegetables from the grocery store bins or stopped to chat. Racks of sunglasses, postcards, and even clothing were arrayed on the sidewalks. Two plump women wearing aprons sold bunches of asparagus and baskets of strawberries in front of a garage. Several bicyclists in full regalia— knee-length black stretch pants, colorful jerseys and helmets— were congregated at the fountain, splashing water on their faces. Ross found a parking space half a block from the Maison de la Presse, and we went in to find it fairly populated, with a number of people lined up to pay for newspapers, others browsing at the magazine display, and some school children having a long consultation about buying a plastic ruler. Ross picked up the
Herald Tribune
from the rack of foreign papers and got in line while I glanced over the guidebooks— hiking trails on Mount Ventoux, herbs of Provence, the green Michelin, a stapled-together pamphlet history of Beaulieu-la-Fontaine. I was vaguely aware that the proprietor, an expansive man with a beard, was discussing the performance of a major French tennis player in the French Open with someone in line ahead of Ross.

I glanced outside. Rain was spattering the pavement, and we’d left the car windows rolled down. I went to put them up, leaving him in line as the tennis discussion intensified.

When the windows were closed, the rain, perversely, stopped. Ross hadn’t appeared. A short way down and across the street was the Auberge de Ventoux, where previously I’d seen Alexander’s motorcycle parked. The yellow roses on the fence stirred in the breeze. I walked down far enough to see the parking places in front, and sure enough— the motorcycle was there.

“Georgia Lee!”

Ross was at the car, waving the paper. He tossed it inside and said, “Let’s take a walk. Want to?”

It was too appealing to be a good idea. “What about—”

“Vivien will be on the phone for hours. Dreary legal stuff. Just a short walk.”

“Where to?”

“Where our fancy leads.”

I laughed and shook my head. “I’m not going where our fancy leads.”

He laughed too. “Where
will
you go?”

“Up to the church and back.”

“Great.”

We turned off the main street on to a smaller one leading up the hill. Here, the town’s bustle abruptly ceased. Aside from a woman with a shopping basket hurrying past and a cat whisking through a doorway, the street was empty. We climbed up cobbled steps past lace-curtained windows. Three workmen argued loudly about how to do a plastering job, and in somebody’s garden, a dog yapped ferociously as we went by, but for the most part it was quiet.

The streets grew narrower as we ascended. At last we passed under a rustic archway with poppies sprouting between its stones and emerged on an open plaza in front of the church. The church had a no-nonsense look, heavy and buttressed, which made the onion-shaped, wrought iron bell tower whimsically unexpected. Around the tower, swallows wheeled and dove.

Behind the church, the summit of the hill was covered with wildflowers and weeds. “I’ll bet the view is great from there,” said Ross, and a minute later he was climbing.

I clambered up behind him. From here we had a three-hundred-sixty-degree sweep of the valley. We tried to find Mas Rose, but never did. “Maybe it’s gone,” said Ross, straining to see. “Disappeared without a trace, like Brigadoon. And we’re free.”

Before I thought about it, I said, “Ross, if it’s that bad, why don’t you leave?”

He looked away. “I can’t.”

Suddenly, the rain let loose. Laughing, we hurried through the dripping weeds and down the clay path to the church. Half-drenched, we took refuge on the church porch, in the slight shelter of an overhang above the locked doors, and huddled together to escape the downpour. I felt Ross’s heart beating under his damp shirt. I was dizzy, and this was stupid. When we found Pedro’s body, I’d plucked Ross’s wet shirt away from his chest. Remembering, I shuddered.

Ross drew me closer, and I held on to him. I should move away. Getting wet wasn’t such a big deal. “Why is this happening?” I said.

He didn’t answer. We stood kissing, clinging together, until the rain stopped. It lasted long enough to leave us predictably racked and tormented. Walking down the cobbled streets where the gutters were now gushing, we didn’t talk until Ross said, “We have to finish this the way it should be finished.”

“How? Do they have hot-sheet motels in Provence?”

“I’ll think of something.”

Back on the main street, I checked the Auberge de Ventoux. Alexander’s cycle was in front. The sun was out now, and a waiter was toweling off tables and chairs at the Relais de la Fontaine, a few doors from the hotel. A handful of people had ventured out for a drink already.

One of them was Alexander.

He was sitting near the cafe wall, half-hidden from my view by the waiter, and he was with somebody. I craned my neck. It was a woman wearing blue slacks, her face hidden by a floppy white straw hat. She and Alexander leaned toward one another, deep in conversation. I nudged Ross. “Isn’t that Alexander at the cafe? Who’s he with?”

Ross gave a cursory glance. “Some unlucky woman. Probably just picked her up.”

I wondered what Vivien would think, but I didn’t feel like bringing her name into the conversation. I watched Alexander until we reached the car. He never looked our way.

A MESSAGE

Back at Mas Rose, I indulged in a dreary orgy of self-recrimination. Letting myself be seduced by Ross was unprofessional, unethical, and probably a few other “un” words as well. I had known I shouldn’t go to the village with him, yet I’d leapt at the chance. “Finish this the way it should be finished?” Forget it.

I found Pedro’s tape, jammed it in the recorder, and yanked on the headphones. Presumably, although the proposition got shakier by the day, I still had a book to write. In the intervals when I wasn’t making out on church porches like a randy teenager, I could get some work done.

The transcribing calmed me. Listening to Pedro with my fingers rushing over the typewriter keys, making the stops and starts necessary to get it down accurately, didn’t leave room for stray guilt. Hearing Pedro’s voice, I could picture him so clearly, with his tan, salt-and-pepper curls, and neck chain. How odd it seemed for him to be alive then, and dead now. Death was too abrupt, I mused.

If you don’t like it, write a letter to the editor, I advised myself sourly. Pedro said, “Jeez. I’ve got to get downstairs,” and I heard the click indicating the recorder had been turned off.

My hand was traveling toward the stop button when I heard another click on the tape, and Pedro’s recorded voice spoke again. He said, “Why don’t you ask Vivien where her son was the night Carey was killed?” Then another click, and I was listening to dead air.

I sat immobile, my finger hovering over the button, staring at the recorder as if it had started to play the “Marseillaise.” What had I heard? I recovered the power of movement and pushed the stop button, rewound, and listened again. The words were a rushed growl, but it was unmistakably Pedro.
Ask Vivien where her son was the night Carey was killed.

Unsorted images and ideas tumbled in on me: the scene Marcelle had overheard between Vivien and Pedro, when Vivien was crying; Blanche telling me Pedro had been fired because Vivien was broke; Pedro’s uneasiness when I asked him why he’d continued working for Vivien. “It’s a good job. She needed somebody,” he’d said.

Ask Vivien where her son was.
I’d ask her. I certainly would.

I rewound and listened to the entire interview again, including Pedro’s addendum. When had he put it on? He would’ve had plenty of opportunity. I didn’t— couldn’t— lock my door. All he had to do was come upstairs and walk in. Now I understood why he was so curious about when I’d transcribe it. I’d said I would do it the next day. He didn’t live long enough to know I hadn’t kept my word.

How long had Pedro been threatening to implicate Alexander in Carey’s murder? Probably since Vivien told him he was fired. The message to me was, I guessed, the most daring and decisive step in a war of nerves. If she did what he wanted— pay him off, reinstate him— he could back away from what was, after all, only an insinuation. If she didn’t, he’d give me the full story— or so he must have threatened.

Now the full story was ashes, along with Pedro himself.

I listened to all the empty minutes until the end of the tape to be sure he hadn’t put on other messages. He hadn’t. I rewound and ejected it, took a blank label, pasted it over the one where I’d written “Pedro Ruiz,” and replaced the tape in its plastic case.

I didn’t think anyone concerned suspected what Pedro had done, or the tape wouldn’t be here. Still, I had to take care of it now. I couldn’t lock my door, but I could lock my suitcase. I took it out of the closet. I put the tape in a compartment of my folding cosmetics holder, put the holder in the side pocket of the suitcase, locked the suitcase, and put it back in the closet. From the closet, the tape seemed to be sending out powerful, if invisible and inaudible, signals. Anybody would notice them. I had a hard time convincing myself otherwise, a measure of my paranoia.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed staring at the closet when Vivien knocked. I’d divided my time today between kissing her lover and incriminating her son, and I must’ve looked wild. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Fine. Fine.”

“I’m ready to work now. Sorry I’ve been tied up.”

She didn’t seem to have noticed anything special about the closet. I said, “All right.”

“Come to my room. It’s too rainy to sit outside.”

We set up in the solarium.
Ask Vivien
… “We were talking about the night of the murder,” I said.

She stirred restlessly. “I thought we’d finished with that.”

“Almost.”

With the air of getting through it as quickly as possible, she said, “I got home from Ross’s place around midnight. The police were there. I wouldn’t say where I’d been. I wasn’t thinking clearly. Blanche had come in from the movies a little earlier.”

I nodded. “What about Alexander?”

Tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes deepened. “Alexander?”

“Where was he that night?”

She looked puzzled. “California. That’s where he lives, you know. San Francisco.”

“You called and spoke with him right away?”

“I called. He wasn’t there, so I left a message on his machine. He phoned back the next morning.”

“Where had he been?”

“He spent the night with— a friend.” She sat back and crossed her arms.

I was about to ask who the friend was when she said, “I don’t see the point of this. Didn’t Alexander apologize to you for the way he acted yesterday?”

“Yes, but—”

“I hope you’re not going to harass him. He’s opposed to the book as it is.”

Harass
him? I responded sharply. “I know he is. I’m curious about why.”

She was digging her fingernails into her arms. “This isn’t pertinent.”

“It’s important to know the whereabouts of the major characters.”

We stared at each other. “I can’t work anymore today,” she said, and she watched me with folded arms until I left.

RELAIS DE LA FONTAINE

Alexander returned soon after my contretemps with Vivien. From my window, I watched him get off his cycle and walk to the house with his easy, long-legged stride. He looked energetic, powerful. Powerful enough to murder not once but twice and get away with it. Unless I did something.

What did I have? A sentence spoken by a dead man; my awareness of his lie about when he arrived in France; his effort to bribe me out of writing the book.

The sky had cleared. That was fortunate. I had decided to return to Beaulieu-la-Fontaine, and Ross wouldn’t be driving me this time.

As I left, I avoided looking at Blanche’s closed door. I hadn’t talked with her about
The Book of Betrayal.
I’d do it as soon as I got back.

I was half a mile down the road when I heard thumping footsteps and turned to see Ross, out for a run. I hardened myself against his importuning me to roll around with him in damp bushes, but he didn’t, waving as he went by without slowing down. His torso and legs were golden from the sun, I couldn’t help noticing, as he rounded a bend and vanished from my view. I imagined, even hoped, he would come back and honed my arguments against further involvement in case he did, but it was wasted energy.

When I arrived, Beaulieu-la-Fontaine was in the grip of its midafternoon somnolence. I walked past closed shops to the phone booth in front of the post office, and in a couple of minutes was listening to the phone ringing at Worldwide Wire Service, miles to the north, in Paris, my hometown.