Deadly Slipper (8 page)

“Toi.”
Her eyes had never left his face.
“Va t’faire foutre,”
she directed, telling him crudely what he could do with his form and his signature together.

It was not a hot day, but Gaston found as he edged
past—she left him barely enough room to get by without actually having to brush up against her—that he was perspiring heavily. Defeated, he scrambled into his minivan and drove rapidly away.

•

Les Colombes was also on Gaston’s route. He had no mail for the de Sauvignacs, but after his experience at La Binette, Gaston felt that he owed himself a stop at the château. He needed something to calm his nerves. He was so shaken that he ground his gears twice as he downshifted to take the steep ascent.

The château was, of course, altogether a different matter, for the de Sauvignacs had once been, and for many remained, the first name in the land. Henri de Sauvignac père, now long dead, was still remembered with affection as a dotty old gentleman with a passion for botany. The son, the present Henri de Sauvignac, was a more worldly character, known in his heyday for his elegance, high living, and appetite for women. He had taken his wife, Jeanne Villiers that was, a willowy, compliant creature, from a well-to-do bourgeois family. In the sixties, the couple had made a handsome grouping with their two little boys, driving about grandly in a shiny new Citroën with hydropneumatic suspension, the first of its kind in the area.

Of the two de Sauvignac sons, Alain, the elder, had grown up, studied civil engineering, and gone abroad to work in places like Gabon and Cameroon. Patrice, the younger, had not grown up because he
had drowned in a pond in the woods below Les Colombes when he was seven. It was a terrible tragedy, and some said that Jeanne de Sauvignac had never fully recovered from the loss.

Now in their seventies, the de Sauvignacs lived almost like recluses but still commanded respect. Aristocratic folk, Gaston called them, with an old-fashioned sense of
ce qu’il faut.
Even on days when he had no mail for them, he frequently made the steep drive up just to look in on the old people. In winter Monsieur was often good for a small tot of rum, in summer a refreshing
coup de blanc
, either of which Gaston took standing on the stone floor of the cavernous kitchen.

In return, the
facteur
gave them the latest local gossip and ran the odd commission, rub for Madame’s rheumatism from the pharmacy in Belvès, cigarettes and newspapers for Monsieur from the Chez Nous emporium in Grissac.

The de Sauvignacs still had their Citroën. Like them, it had grown old but retained a certain dusty cachet. From time to time, Monsieur might still be seen puttering sedately along the roads, raising a hand in greeting to the locals, and stopping occasionally to offer, with seigniorial courtesy, directions to lost motorists and rides to bewildered hitchhikers passing through his
territoire.

•

As he neared the top and turned onto the path running up to the rear of the great house, Gaston
remembered that he had been meaning in any case to ask the de Sauvignacs about the
pigeonnier.
If nothing else, it would give them something to chat about and be good for his
coup de blanc.

He had shown the photocopy earlier in the week to his fellow
facteurs
(keeping quiet about Mara’s cash incentive), with no luck. Now, standing in the vast, damp stone kitchen of the château, he watched anxiously as Henri de Sauvignac studied the, by now, much-wrinkled photocopy. Before looking at it, the old gentleman had first taken his glasses from his jacket pocket and polished the lenses with care before setting them on his beaklike nose. A once imposing man, he was now stooping and cadaverous, but still meticulous in his habits.

“Hundreds like it in the region, m’boy.” He shook his head and passed the photocopy to his wife. Jeanne de Sauvignac, trailing several layers of shawls, looked about for her glasses, could not find them, and ended by squinting ineffectually at the paper at arm’s length.

“Dear me,” she murmured with an absent, lopsided smile that always made Gaston think of village idiots, even though he was ashamed to harbor such a disrespectful thought in association with someone belonging, if only by marriage, to the first family of the region.

“You’ll have a time finding one among so many,” Monsieur observed. “Things have a way of blending in. One gets so used to seeing them, buildings, people,
one no longer in fact sees them, not for what they really are.” He seemed to imply that Gaston would be destined to pass by that particular
pigeonnier
every day of his life and never recognize it.

Gaston thought disconsolately that this might be true. He tried to envision all the pigeon houses that he routinely encountered. Many were attached to houses. Others, like the one Mara was looking for, were solitary, freestanding towers. It could have been one of them or none of them. Pity the detail was so hard to make out.
Merde
of a print. Why couldn’t the
pigeonnier
have been one of the really distinctive ones, like that self-important cross-timbered block set on six stone pillars he’d once seen in Quercy?

“She’s offering a reward.” Gaston felt it appropriate to impart the information to the de Sauvignacs. A thousand euros wasn’t to be sneezed at and would establish that his inquiry was serious.

“Hmmm,” said Henri judiciously. “As much as that. But you have only her word that she’ll pay up.”

“She seemed sincere,” Gaston ventured cautiously. “Of course, I know with foreigners it’s say one thing, do another. Still, it’s worth keeping one’s eyes open.”

“Of course. You do that, m’boy,” agreed Henri and offered Gaston the longed-for
coup.

“But what does this person want with a
pigeonnier?”
Madame’s watery blue eyes goggled at the postman. Her dry, yellowy-gray hair was as faded as her face. “Will she buy it?”

“Ah. There’s a story,” exclaimed Gaston, enjoying
the cool trickle of wine down his parched throat. And he then spun the de Sauvignacs his version of Beatrice Dunn, enjoying their scandalized attention.

“Funny how life brings things back around,” he wound up his narrative with a deep, philosophical sigh. “First
la canadienne disparue.
Now, all these years later, the sister.”

“Indeed,” Henri said dryly.

Jeanne, bony beneath her shawls, stirred restlessly.

“Well,” said Gaston, feeling it was time to change the subject, “what do you hear from—where is he now?”

“Douala,” Jeanne said at once.

“Ah, yes,” Gaston nodded knowingly. Their son, Alain, was off in Africa, constructing roads. It seemed to the postman that he could have built a superhighway all the way around the continent, he’d been at it so long. For twenty years at least, Gaston had carried up letters bearing colorful stamps from places like Abidjan and Libreville. “Still building things?”

“Bridges.” The mother gathered her draperies primly about her. “He’s their, what do you call it, washout expert. Very important work.”

“Head operations engineer, actually,” corrected her husband.

“It rains a lot out there, you know,” Jeanne confided. “Bridges are always washing out. He works terribly hard. Of course, it has its compensations. He’s much in favor with influential people in the Cameroon. He’s been to the
presidential palace
, you
know.” Her rusty voice pealed with pride. “And he speaks the local patois quite well.”

Gaston had heard much of but never clapped eyes on this prodigy, who seemed to like living in places where things collapsed in the wake of tropical storms. For his part, the
facteur
couldn’t understand this preference for the jungle, with mosquitoes and snakes, over the healthy Dordogne countryside.

“His contract has just ended, so he’s coming back to be with us.” Madame’s puckered cheeks went pink with pleasure. “For a visit, before he lines up something else. He’ll be home any day now.”

That was another side of the Dordogne, Gaston reflected. Young people fleeing for lack of work, only the old remaining. A countryside abandoned to foreign holiday cottagers, or people from Paris who spent two weeks a year in run-down family houses that stood empty and shuttered the rest of the time. How many were like the de Sauvignacs, left stranded, waiting eagerly and pathetically for the next visit from children who had moved on to other lives, other worlds?

Although, in the de Sauvignacs’ case, Gaston had heard that it was some problem between father and son that had caused Alain to leave home and stay abroad. Something to do, perhaps, with Alain’s objection to his father’s profligate ways, his chronic fondness for a bit of skirt. No doubt about it, the old fellow had been a spender and chaser in his day. Women from Limoges to Bordeaux, until his wife’s
money had given out. It was rumored that this was the bone of contention: Henri de Sauvignac had run the estate into the ground, and the son sweated in Africa to keep Les Colombes in de Sauvignac hands.

Outside, it had grown very dark, even though it was the middle of the afternoon. A wind was building up. Tendrils of ivy tapped fretfully on the small panes of the kitchen window, and Gaston could see trees swaying in the distance. He drained his glass, saluted—for some reason with the de Sauvignacs he always raised a respectful forefinger to the side of his cap by way of greeting and leavetaking—and hurried out to his van.

The first drops of rain were already smacking down, forming big craters in the dust on his windshield. He looked back. Husband and wife seemed to be clinging together in the obscure opening of the kitchen doorway, Madame’s draperies whipped by a moist wind. He had the impression of a pair of ragged crows balancing precariously on their perch.

Rapidly he backed out of the overgrown courtyard, where in better times tradesmen had called with crates of champagne, oysters in season, truffles, and foie gras; and where nowadays few but Gaston, with his belly and beetroot nose, ever came.

In the cover of the shrubberies at the corner of the house, a large shape stood motionless as the postal vehicle bumped off down the narrow lane. Vrac stepped out onto the weed-choked, rain-spattered flagstones.

Jeanne saw him first and uttered a startled cry. She stamped her foot. “Go away. Shoo!”

Henri looked up and frowned. Then he said, “Ah, it’s you. Come here.”

“You’ve got
a fouine,”
said Mara.

She was balanced precariously on the courtyard wall, peering at the rough tile ends of Prudence Chang’s roof. Down below, Jazz was whining and trying to scramble up after her.

Prudence, dressed in a smock like the figures in the Quimper ware she collected, frowned. Sunlight gleamed on her faultless casque of black hair. “I’m from L.A.,” she complained. “The only wildlife you get there is Homo sapiens. So what’s a foo-een in
anglais
?”

“A marten. Like a weasel.” Mara shooed Jazz off and jumped down. “They like old stone houses. Look, you can see where it’s been getting in. That hole right there. It’s made its den in your roof.”

“Oh, swell,” said Prudence.

Like many of the expatriates coming back to the region for the summer, Prudence had called Mara first. If the toilets didn’t work, if mice had chewed the wiring over the winter, if renovations were needed, Mara knew exactly what to do and whom to contact—fixers like Edouard, who would block up Prudence’s roof; Kranz, the plumbing whiz; masons and painters who attended to damage done over the winter by wind and water. She also subcontracted
work to a quaint trio of unmarried sisters in Limeuil who specialized in custom sewing.

“You’ll have to leave it,” Mara advised, brushing her hands off on her jeans. She had stopped by to check on a delivery of tiles from Pablo for the renovation of Prudence’s kitchen. The stainless-steel double sink had been installed, but the new tiles for the counters had not arrived, despite the dealer’s fervent promise to expedite them.

“Leave it?” Prudence objected. “Mara, it crashes around up there at night like a drunk husband. I’m losing my beauty sleep. And it smells.”

“It’ll smell worse if you close the hole up now. It’s rearing a litter up there, and the lot of them will die. Wait until the babies are grown and leave the den. I’ll get someone to seal it up for you then.”

“Oh goody,” said Prudence unenthusiastically. “I can hardly wait.”

“By the way,” said Prudence, walking Mara to her car. “That landscaper you set me up with.”

“Julian Wood?”

“He’s been asking questions about you.”

“Oh?” Mara felt her cheeks go warm. “Like what?”

“Like what do I know about you. If you’re attached. I think he’s interested. Sweetie, you’re turning pink.”

Mara gave a snort of laughter. “He’s fixated on orchids. I doubt if he thinks about anything but flowers. Besides, he’s not my type. And I haven’t turned pink.”

Prudence cocked an Oriental eye at her. “What’s your type, then?”

Mara was sure that the pink was now a dark red. “Oh,” she said evasively, “someone a little more urbane. Less—less botanical. For heaven’s sake, Prudence, I don’t know.”

“That’s your problem,” Prudence said, stepping back to regard her severely. “You really don’t. I’ve known you now for—what?—two years? And in all that time I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with a man. I mean, not seriously. What’s wrong, gone off them?”

“Not at all.” Mara was now on the defensive. “But I’ve been there before, don’t forget. Marriage, divorce, the whole bit.” And she had. Hal, her ex, had been a brilliant architect specializing in old stone structures. Everything she knew about restoring houses she had learned from him. Hal also had an ego bigger than the buildings he worked on and a love affair with the bottle that she simply couldn’t compete with. Other relationships had followed for her, none of them satisfying. For some reason, she seemed to gravitate toward men who, though outwardly unlike Hal, inevitably revealed the same underlying trait: 150-proof self-worship. Although Julian didn’t seem eaten up by conceit. Or was he? She knew nothing about him, really.