Bennett Sisters Mystery, Volumes 1-2, page 13
“Shoo them out, Albert!” Merle stepped over the door and pried open the front window and flung open the shutters. “Out!”
In a few dirty minutes the room was cleared. Coughing, Merle stared up at the hole in the ceiling. Blue sky shone through a hole in the tile roof. A pile of sodden plaster had dried on the floor beneath. A window that faced the garden had two panes gone and a shutter. Tristan stood covered in feathers and white powder, hands on his hips. “Wow, this is so great. Very exotic.” He picked a feather off his tongue. “Ack.”
“Look at this.” Merle pushed open a door to a side bedroom. A carved wood bedstead and moldy mattress sat in the middle of the room. The pigeons had partied in here too, along with a mouse colony of legendary proportions. But with a new mattress, a lot of scrubbing, a luscious color on the walls? She shivered. Maybe Harry was right about her. Harry — when would she stop thinking about him?
“Awesome.” Tristan frowned. “Looks like a park in New York.”
“Having a house in France is a filthy business,” she said, leading him back downstairs to find tools and plastic to cover the holes. If only he knew how dirty it could get. She tried to put the legal problems out of her mind. Enjoy these moments. Not the past or the future. Right now. It could be over tomorrow, or next week. This time would end — but for once in her life she intended to live right here in the moment.
Chapter Eighteen
1950
Marie-Emilie walks up the road, her feet aching from the long day. No rides for her, not this day. Some Malcouziac farmers had slowed, saw who she was, and snapped the reins again. So she walks on.
She can see the village ahead, up the hill. Sitting on a log to rest she examines the soles of her shoes. The hole is growing bigger on the left one, almost through. The right wore through yesterday. Still she has no regrets. She has made it to the convent and delivered her message. The sisters had been understanding and given her meals. Without that food, and the loaf of bread and cheese they pressed on her for her journey, she would never have come back.
Perhaps she shouldn’t, she thinks, staring at the dark cloud passing over the city walls. But Stephan is waiting for her. He promised they would leave as soon as he arranges everything. So she gets back on her feet and walks on.
Spring is almost over and with it the rains. Soon the summer heat will return. Why is she still in this village where everyone hates her? Soon, soon, she whispers to herself. She turns the corner to her house. Someone has splashed red paint on her shutters. She touches it, still damp. Unlocking the door she takes her bucket to the garden and fills it. In minutes she has scrubbed the shutters, leaving only a shadow of stain not unlike the stain this village has imprinted on her heart. She looks down the street in the evening dusk, an eerie purple bruise of a sky. Not a soul watches, not a soul cares.
Exhausted she falls into her bed. She wants to stay awake for Stephan, in case he hears she is back. Should she go to his rooms above the bakery? She is too tired. Tomorrow is soon enough. She’s walked nearly thirty miles today.
When the knocking begins she barely hears it from upstairs. She is deep in a dream. She pulls herself up and walks down the stairs. As she reaches the floor below she wakes up and feels a flicker of happiness. It will be Stephan. He can’t wait to see her. She runs her hands through her tangled hair and pulls her dressing gown together as she unlocks the shutters.
Chapter Nineteen
Fernand, a bandy-legged, leathery-faced old coot who smoked a crusty pipe, got to work on her plumbing needs with his homely son, Luc. They searched gamely for underground water lines. After days of looking she felt lucky to find a willing plumber at all. There was hope that a drain in the stone-floored kitchen actually led to the sewer. Merle left them to explore, and Tristan to scrubbing upstairs, to beg Monsieur le Maire to expedite her utilities. The candles and flashlights, not to mention eating all meals out, were getting old.
A waste of time with the mayor at city hall. The same with tracking down the locksmith for the garden gate. His shutters were closed, his door locked. She so wanted the pile of vermin-infested debris in her garden to disappear. The only way to do that was to open the locked gate. Could she take it off its hinges? Break it down? She hated to ruin it. She stepped into the bistro across the street to ask if they’d seen old Andre. The waiter shrugged at her Idiot French and turned his back.
On the street this morning no sign of Jean-Pierre. She ducked into the alley behind Andre’s shop. Maybe the old man was hiding from her. Possibly the mayor and the gendarme had warned him about helping her. She walked up the mossy cobblestones, looking into open windows. These houses were in bad shape, in need of even more help than hers. She stopped to peer inside a vandalized house. A tree was growing in a pile of debris, right through the roof. Beer bottles and trash were everywhere. Graffiti covered the walls. Suddenly she was pushed from behind, into the doorway.
“Quiet,” the woman hissed, her fingers tight on Merle’s wrist. She was shorter than Merle with a blue knit cap pulled low on her head and brown curls poking out below. She wore large sunglasses.
“You speak English.” Merle had been mugged twice in Harlem. Strong as she was, the woman wasn’t a threat unless she had a weapon. She was slight, and weapon-less. “Let go of my arm.”
“Don’t talk.” The woman took off her sunglasses and Merle saw the bruise on her cheek, just below her eye, angry and purple. Her accent was French, but British.
“I don’t have any money. Look.” She pulled out her pants pocket with her free hand.
“Here.” The woman opened her fist to show a large key. “Take care of her memory — her garden. Whatever it is, they will kill for it. Be careful.” She pressed the key into Merle’s hand, wrapped her fingers around it, then ran out the door.
“Who? Wait!” Merle jumped back into the alley. The woman ran hard to the street. Tightening her hand around the key Merle ran down the alley to the street.
Was that — yes, it must be. Sister Evangeline. Who had the key to the gate. The knit cap and brown hair were a disguise — or a new disguise. The baggy pants, the small nose: it had to be her. Merle slipped on the mossy stones, ran in the direction she’d gone but the street was empty.
* * *
Tristan leaned the extension ladder against the house, estimated the distance to the roof and raised the top section. He climbed slowly up to the edge of the sloped tile roof slick with moss. His mother was tearing around the village, mad to get the utilities hooked up and handymen hired. He might fix the roof. Or just take a look.
He squinted into the sun, getting a long view of the vineyards that wrapped and twisted around the hills that surrounded the village. Tall trees swayed in the wind on top of a hill next to a large house which he guessed qualified as a chateau. A creek ran down the opposite hill, bisecting the vineyards laid out in careful rows that matched the topography like a tight glove. The hole in the roof was almost two feet across. Major. He climbed back down and went to check on the plumber.
Fernand stood scratching his head in the back room of the first floor where his mother wanted both a bathroom and a kitchen, even though it wasn’t even half the size of their kitchen at home. She also wanted to make the stone outhouse into a real laundry room. But first Fernand needed to get water into the house. He shook head sadly at Tristan.
“No water? ”
“Non, rien.”
Fernand went on in French but Tristan couldn’t follow it. He pointed down the drain in the floor. “Where does this go? To the sewer line?”
Fernand held up a finger. “Ah! Oui!” He motioned Tristan to follow him into the living room where the big cupboard had been pulled back from the wall. He leaned down, stuck two fingers in knots and pulled up the floorboards.
“A trap door! Cool.”
Fernand jabbered away then began to close the door again when Tristan held his arm. Grabbing a flashlight out of the tool pile Tristan shone it down the opening. He made walking motions with his fingers. Fernand looked alarmed. “Wait here. Attendez-moi ici.”
Tristan stepped onto the wooden stairs, tapping each one with his toe for rotten planks before shifting his weight onto it. Lower and lower he went, until only his head was above the floor. He waved at Fernand and disappeared.
Merle pushed through the front door of the house, noting again the weak hinges and need for grease. Tomorrow she would paint it. Yesterday she’d scraped and sanded the door and found the wood in decent shape, its curved top too pretty to replace.
“Mom!”
Tristan and Fernand turned toward her. Her son was covered with dirt, cobwebs on his eyebrows. “There’s a cellar. It’s full of old junk.” Tristan shone his flashlight down the hole in the floor. “Fernand says that hole in the back room hooks up with the sewer.”
Merle looked at the plumber. He shook his head. “Pas d’eau. No water. Mais — How you say, sewage? I put zee water down the hole and voila! It disappear!”
“But you have to dig?”
“Ah, oui, madame.” He said the water line connected from the alley. “Tomorrow, we dig.”
“And today,” Merle said, marching outside, skirting the debris, “we open the gate.” With a sort of magic, the key slipped into the lock. She wiggled it and pushed down the handle. It swung open.
She held the key tightly against her chest. The encounter with Sister Evangeline, if that’s who she was, seemed like a dream. Why had she given Merle the key? Did she kill Justine LaBelle? It didn’t sound like it but who knew. She would have a chat with the inspector.
But first, a trip to the dump. “Fernand? Do you know a man with a truck?”
* * *
The next morning digging began in earnest. Merle primed the front door as Tristan helped Fernand and Luc in the yard. The blessed event of taking all the mattresses, upholstery, preserves, and rotten trash to the dump had taken place late the previous evening. The yard looked three times bigger without it.
In late morning they took a break. Merle motioned Fernand to the outhouse while Luc and Tristan draped themselves over chairs, exhausted. The plumber called the small building ‘le pissoir’ with a sneer. He measured it and discussed — mostly with himself — the legal, physical, and environmental problems of closing up a centuries-old crapper.
Merle put her hands on her hips. You had to take a firm line with workmen, she knew that from previous renovations. “I want a laundry room. This is perfect.”
He took off his little hat and rubbed his nearly-bald head. “We have no water.”
“Keep digging and we will. We must, Fernand.” She stuck her head through the outhouse door, a true act of courage. “Is this wide enough for a washer and dryer?” She stepped inside, stretched her arms and could touch both walls. Clothes dryers were not common in rural France with all its sunshine. Especially in medieval latrines.
Fernand got out his tape measure again and measured the inside dimensions. He wrote in a little notebook, tapping the pencil lead to his tongue like a character from a ‘40s movie. Frowning, he measured again.“Bizarre. Forty-seven centimeters wider on the outside.” He held his hands eighteen inches apart.
“Maybe it’s the thickness of the walls.”
They were only four inches thick. The latrine appeared to match the stone on the back of the house, a more recent addition, down to the stone sills on the windows.
Fernand walked around the latrine, tapping the walls with his metal tape measure. “Voila!” He said one side wall, left as you entered, was thicker. There was a false wall on the inside. They could make the laundry wider by taking down the interior wall.
“Très bien,” she said. His face dropped. He didn’t do stonework, he said sadly.
* * *
Low clouds clung to the hilltops above the vineyards when the man from the water department showed up, to everyone’s surprise, with his shovel. Merle suspected the mayor’s hand in this; he wanted her finished with her house and out of town — or behind bars — as soon as possible. Was this an anti-American thing, she wondered, or did he hate all foreigners? She watched as the work began in earnest. With the plumber and his son and Tristan there were four strong backs. They took turns with shovel and pickaxe on the rocky earth and had made it through the gate and six feet into the garden when the rain began to fall. Merle moved the metal tub from the garden to the second floor to catch rain that fell through the hole, and then used it with a dose of bleach to give the armoire another scrubbing.
By mid-afternoon the rain was steady. Fernand and his crew took refuge somewhere and would probably not be back. Merle gave Tristan the sledgehammer she’d bought at the hardware store and put him to work inside the pissoir.
“Just prop the door open,” she said. “If you hit the rocks enough to loosen the mortar you can pull them out. And try not to hurt yourself.”
Tristan flexed his muscles and gave the wall a whack, dislodging dust mostly. He grimaced. “This should be fun.”
Merle watched him swat the wall again with the enthusiasm of Mighty Mouse. They had been getting along well, with minimal carping. He even seemed to enjoy the hard work. She knew the feeling. Hard work kept the mind occupied, relieved the stress of grieving. She backed away, feeling the rain run down her neck. It was welcome rain, warm and nurturing, and felt good on her face. Then she remembered the roof, frowning at the hole and the pigeon perched in it.
“Madame Bennett?” She turned to see Albert standing under an umbrella in the arch of the gate.
“Hello, Albert. Any word on that roofer?”
“I will call him again. Can you come for some tea? I have looked at those letters you gave me.”
After a check on Tristan she followed the old priest through his garden. Settled into a corner of his kitchen, she used the tea towel he offered to dry her face and hands. She’d hardly had time to say more than ‘can I use your telephone’ to Albert for the several days. “The rain is nice, isn’t it?”
He put the kettle on his stove. “Very necessary for the grapes. I am going out to a vineyard tomorrow, would you care to come? You get wine, very cheap.”
“I’m so busy, Albert. But thank you.” His face dropped, worry replacing his usual smile. Could he be lonely? She had seen the gendarme pass by Albert’s house, eyes dark. Maybe he had no friends here anymore. She hadn’t heard him mention any relatives. “Sure, I’d love to go.” The smile returned as he poured water into the teapot.
She dropped a lump of sugar in her tea. “I saw Sister Evangeline. I think.”
“Really? But she left town. ”
“They think she did. Do you think her gray hair was a wig? Anyway, she had brown hair and she gave me this.” Merle pulled the key to the garden gate from inside her shirt where she’d strung it on a chain. “The key to the gate. But what she said was strange. She said ‘they’ would kill for it.”
“They?”
“I assume whoever pushed Justine. But I don’t understand why would anyone kill her.”
“Do you think she slipped, or perhaps killed herself?”
“My watch was on her arm. There was a deliberate attempt to incriminate me.” Merle frowned into her tea. “Maybe that was all it was, but it seems a bit much to kill somebody just to frame me.” Albert frowned, thinking. “I don’t think Evangeline was a nun.”
His kitchen had the spare feel of a monastery, cozy and dry while raindrops nattered on the windowpanes. “I had my doubts. I’ve known a good number of sisters in my lifetime. Shall I read the letters?” He pulled them from a shelf by the table, smoothing the first letter with his gnarled hand. “The writing is faint at times.”
‘Cher Marie-Emilie. It has been a long time since I have seen you but I think of you every day. Why don’t you answer my letters? Here is my address again. 743 Place de la Bastille, Segala. My situation is not good. I work for a family but they have no money. I only have the bread and a little cheese in the evening. Can you help? You said you would help but now I hear nothing. I am alone and sometimes in the night I cry. I cry for all of us.’
“There is more but I can’t read it. But it is signed, Dominique.”
Merle sat back in the chair. “I saw that. I wonder, who was she?”
“Or he. Could be a man. And this Marie-Emilie?”
“My husband’s mother. She lived in the house. Harry — my husband — was born there. But she was dead by the time these letters were sent.”
“It appears this Dominique was someone she knew. Have you looked in the old records at the parish?”
If she had time. How many days would she have here before they gave her passport back? The inspector hadn’t been by to make sure she was still in town. Even the gendarme had grown bored, making a couple cursory passes of the house each day. “Do you think she would be listed there?”
“Perhaps. If we knew her full name. Her address here is Segala. That is many kilometers away. ”
“Please, continue.”
“‘Cher Marie-Emilie. The days go by so slowly without word from you. How is the boy? I fear when you do not write. Have I offended you? The weather is fine for so close to the new year. The hired man and I will be alone when the family visits to the south. I do not like him. At night sometimes I think of Malcouziac and your kindness and I cry. I hear nothing from Malcouziac. I wonder if you do and what they say about me. I no longer care but my heart remains there and always will. Dominique.’”
“So she must be from here.”
“It appears. This is the final one. ‘Cher Marie-Emilie. I will not bother you again with my letters. The family has turned us out. There is no money, no food, no roof over our heads. A new owner has come to the mas — the farmhouse — and we are all dismissed. If you have a heart send francs to la poste in Malcouziac.’”
