Bennett Sisters Mystery, Volumes 1-2, page 15
“Why are you back?” she asks. Perhaps not the friendliest tone.
“To get what’s mine.” He stumbles across the room, holding a chair for balance.
“Drunk again. I see your travels haven’t changed you.”
He glares up at her, takes a step toward her and slaps her hard. “Shut up and get my clothes.”
In the corner, hand to her cheek, Marie-Emilie leans against the wall. “Get them yourself.”
He wavers for a moment, unsteady on his feet. Then, as if making a decision, he nods. “Open the door in the floor. Light the lantern.” He walks heavily out into the garden, leaving the door open to the night.
She wants to run, to find Stephan. But it is late, past midnight and the village is sleeping. She stands at the back door as Weston returns, a wooden wine case in his arms. He struggles toward her. “Open it, you daft woman! The lantern!”
She lights the kerosene lantern and pulls up the trap door as he sets the case of wine on the floor and returns outside. In a moment he is back with another case.
“Hand me that one. Put the lantern here on the step.”
She does as she is told. The wine is his business; she wants nothing to do with it, or him. If she doesn’t complain, he will not hit her again and he will leave. He is down below, opening the wooden door to the wine cave. Then she is pushing the second case toward his waiting hands.
“Go get another. The truck’s in the alley. Hurry, woman.”
Despite herself, she helps him. They bring in the wooden cases then stack the bottles carefully on the old racks. It takes almost three hours. She is exhausted. When he tells her again to get his clothes she hasn’t the strength to say no. She pulls herself up the stairs, throws his clothes in an old carpet bag.
He emerges from the cellar holding the key to the wine cave. It has always hung on a nail but now he will take it with him. He tucks it into his inside jacket pocket, grabs the carpet bag, and turns toward the alley where the truck is waiting. He stops in the middle of the garden and walks back to her.
“Tell no one about the wine, do you hear? No one. Or I’ll beat the livin’ shit out of you, woman.” His breath is sour and again he is unsteady. She wonders if he will drive on the road wherever he is going, or will end up in a creek.
“I have seen her. The girl, heavy with your child.”
He is clear for a moment. Furious, but clear. “What the fuck do you care?”
“You must help her. Send her money.”
His chest rocks as if he laughs but no sound comes out. He will not help the girl. He has used her and thrown her away, just as he has Marie-Emilie herself.
“You must care for her, for the baby. You are not so cold, Weston, that you would abandon them in these terrible times.” She tries to reach him, to find something inside him that is good and decent. She offers him one last chance to be honorable.
He drops the bag and grabs her shoulders roughly. He opens his mouth as if to agree, or disagree. But he can’t. He doesn’t care enough for that.
His fingers dig into her back. For a moment she thinks he will kiss her, as in goodbye. As in, we are finished forever. She could take that. She would welcome it. But instead he shakes her, gives her a push that sends her backward. She trips on a rock and sits down hard on the ground.
As he pushes the gate open, she begins to cry.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Before the birds were up, the inspector and his team knocked on the front door. Merle answered, already dressed, and stood between her sleeping son and the forensics crew as they tramped through the house and out the back door. Before she had time to comb her hair the workman from Electricité de France arrived to set up her service. Hallelujah.
In the back he climbed up a pole in the alley. He had an excellent view of the pissoir where three men dressed in white coveralls, gloves, masks, and paper hats filed in and out. Merle watched from the gravel patio, chin resting on her hand. Fernand and his son arrived with white plastic pipe, ready for the big day. Water and electricity in one day? It was too much. She needed coffee. She went inside to rouse Tristan for his daily trip to get breakfast.
As she shooed him out the door, another man appeared. “It’s the roofer.” Tristan introduced them then ran off down the cobblestones to the patisserie.
Perhaps the first Frenchman close to her own age she’d met — the village seemed overwhelmingly elderly — who was also taller than a postbox. Probably had bad teeth. She stuck out her hand. “Bonjour. Call me Merle. You speak English?”
“Yes. Your son tells me you are —“
Jean-Pierre Redier, the gendarme, knocked loudly on the front door. He spoke rapidly in French to her. Pascal’s dark eyes rounded as he translated. “He says he needs to speak to the inspector?”
Merle led the gendarme through to the backyard and closed the door. Pascal leaned against the stair, arms crossed. “This is a busy place.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” She motioned upstairs. “Come on, I’ll show you the inside first.”
The broken door sat propped against the wall. Plastic covered the broken windowpanes. But the room was showing improvement. The guano quotient was way down. Only a white powdery sheen and a dank odor remained on the armoire and bed.
“Before I work inside, I must fix the hole outside.” He walked to the window. “If there is room for my ladder.”
“You arrived late,” Merle said. In the garden the inspector and gendarme were having a lively discussion, waving hands, smoking cigarettes, as the crew bagged bones. “A little discovery in the pissoir.”
Pascal smiled — his teeth were just fine — and wagged his finger. “That is not a nice word for a lady, madame. Say latrine, or at least la pissotiere.” He looked again. “What is it they found?”
“A human skeleton, it seems. A bit spooky.”
“Ah. Very Edgar Allan Poe.” She squinted. “You know. The Cask of Almontillado.”
“You’ve read Poe?”
“My English isn’t so bad,” he countered. “Now, madame —“
“Call me Merle. It’s Pascal, right?” She had laid a hand on his forearm. His muscled tightened and she pulled away. “How long do you think it will take?”
“First, Merle.” He smiled as he said her name. Was her name somehow humorous? She remembered the laughter of the boys at the tabac. “First the smoke bomb.” He patted his canvas bag. “No more birdies.”
Merle drank her coffee, ate her croissant and yogurt, and watched the hive of forensic technicians take photographs, bag evidence, and talk. The EDF man was efficient, now that he’d finally arrived, hooking up the meter at the house and the electricity on the pole. Fernand swore at the crowd. By noon the refrigerator and stove were working. Pascal climbed Albert’s ladder, dropped a smoke bomb in the hole in the roof, and sent the pigeons angrily on their way.
Tristan and Albert left in the afternoon to practice fencing. Merle walked to the grocery and stocked up on food, made herself a salad and cheese plate, and ate it on the patio under a cloudy sky. When the forensics crew returned from lunch she took the inspector aside.
“Did you speak to Sister Evangeline about the death of Justine?” she asked.
He answered something, too fast, and she urged him to speak “plus tard.” He repeated it slower, that he had spoken to a woman who knew Justine. “Not Sister Evangeline?”
He shook his head, staring in his inscrutable way. The stains on his shirt had increased, and his tie was a mess. The forensics team was finishing up, packing their kits. Merle continued in her blundering French. “She stopped me on the street. Two days after Justine died. She looked different, with brown hair, not gray. I think the gray hair was false.” She didn’t know the word for ‘wig.’
He smoked his cigarette, waiting for more.
“She gave me the key to the gate, there, on the alley. She said ‘they’ would kill for it.”
That got his attention. “They?”
“I don’t know who.”
“Can I see this key?”
She pulled the chain over her head and handed it to him. The key dangled, large and old. He examined it carefully, turning it over on his palm. Merle knew there was no writing on it, no number or identifying mark. It was just a simple, old-fashioned skeleton key.
“She had a bruise on her cheek, here. As if someone had hit her. She seemed afraid.”
The inspector puffed. “We were told she had left town by the owner of the bistro.”
“But I saw her.”
“Thank you, madame, for the information.”
“Is there anything new about Justine LaBelle? Do you know where she was from, who she was?”
“She was from Bordeaux. She was well known there. She had been in police custody.” He stared up into Merle’s eyes, holding her look. “But she did not deserve her fate.”
One of her Harlem clients, Freddie Wilson, came suddenly into her head. She was trying to get off the streets, clearly a working girl with the gaunt look of a junkie, not unlike Justine. They heard she’d overdosed. Merle felt she had ignored the obvious, let down the woman and the entire community. Something might have been done, should have, but sadly, irrevocably, wasn’t. It had been years but the guilt, the remorse of doing nothing, remained.
“I agree, Monsieur. She did not.”
Perhaps the inspector felt the same way, a little guilty that the state had let down Justine. She felt his eyes on her back as she walked to the house. Pascal was coming down the ladder after putting a temporary cover over the hole to keep the birds from returning. She waited for him at the door, her jaw working angrily at the inspector’s implication. He doesn’t know me. Was he testing her, seeing if she looked guilty?
The roofer stood silently, watching her face. He looked at the inspector watching them both with eyes like slits. Merle gave him a last glare and turned to Pascal.
“I hear a glass of wine is recommended to all workers, if you want them to come back tomorrow.” Just looking at him made her feel better, like all of France didn’t have the wrong idea about her motives. “Monsieur le couvreur?”
He took her elbow, turning her toward the kitchen door. “You promised to call me Pascal.”
* * *
An older woman opened the door of the church offices, simply dressed in a flowered blouse, but elegant in that French way. Merle had seen her with Albert. Her gray hair was pulled into a chignon, her blue eyes danced over the visitor with the peach paint under her nails.
It was late morning the next day. She’d left Pascal tied to the chimney, high above ground, and the plumbers busy laying pipe. With progress at the house, Merle allowed herself a few hours off. She introduced herself to Mme Beaumount, said she had relatives born in the village and made her request to look at parish records. “De naissance, mariage, décès, par example.” Births, marriages, deaths.
Merle stuffed a five-euro bill in the donation box and was led back into the church, down stone steps into a small basement room. Mme Beaumont waved a hand at the shelf of volumes. “Quelle année?”
What year indeed. The records went back three hundred years, at least, assembled in a series of large, leather bound books lined up on a wall of shelves. She pointed to the next to last, printed in gold with ‘1900-1950.’ Mme Beaumont set it on a wooden table. She gave her a pair of thin white cotton gloves and disappeared back up the stairs.
Merle switched on the gooseneck lamp and pulled her notepad and pen from her purse. The room must have been specially sealed because there was no smell of mildew or rot, even with all these old pages in the basement. The gloves were thin and baggy but would keep the old pages clean.
She took a breath. Here were births, confirmations, deaths, banns, and marriages, as well as other curious notations. Families, generations, descendants. She began in the thirties, scanning down the lists written in a black curlicue flourish. Here were Andres and Jeans and Danielles and Jacquelines. But the name she was looking for was Chevalier.
Albert’s baptism, 1943. A Laurent Chevalier, baptized in 1919. And his sister Josephine in 1920. Josephine was confirmed in 1931 and apparently her sister, Marie Madeleine, in 1933. Another Chevalier was baptized in 1929, Marcel. His parents were Frederic Chevalier and Angelique Leduc, neither of whom showed up anywhere else.
What about the sender of those letters? The name Dominique was common; she found it on almost every other page as a mother, a child, a man. Without a last name it was impossible.
1948: Marcel Chevalier again, married in the church. He and his wife had a child who was baptized, and died, on the same day in 1949. She wrote his name on a separate page of the notebook: “cousin to M-E?” There was the mayor, Michel Redier, born in 1949.
What relative had given them the house? She didn’t know. Were Marie-Emilie and Weston married here? Born here? Confirmed here? It appeared not.
Merle ran her gloved finger carefully down the listings, ignoring her stomach. Slipping the heavy book back onto the shelves she pulled out the last volume, “1950-2000.”
The pages were crisper, less speckled by moisture and time. The same delicate handwriting, flourishes and all, until 1953 when someone new took over, with a less flamboyant hand. It was easier to read, though less pretty.
Where was Harry’s birth? That was odd. There were births that year, 1950, several in May, but none named Harold. Had they changed his name? But not a single birth on his birthday, May 30th.
Another Redier, a boy born in 1951, to the same parents as he-who-would-be-mayor. She scanned through the end of the 1950’s and half through the ‘60s and closed the book.
Back at the house she found Albert, Pascal, and Tristan drinking wine in Albert’s small yard. They had both garden gates propped open to watch for her. Fernand and Luc had laid all the pipe, connected it to the water line, and began re-filling the trench. They had left already but not without this message, relayed by Tristan. “Tomorrow they’re coming early to punch through into the house. Fernand warned us to be out if we don’t like noise.”
Merle took the small glass of wine Albert handed her and sat at the table. “Where does he propose we go?” She took a sip. “This is good, Albert. What is it?”
“Château Gagillac, of course. Have you forgotten your appointment tomorrow?”
Merle sat back. She didn’t forget appointments, and yet. Her calendar mind had fled. She wondered if she’d get it back when she went home. “I don’t know, Albert. I know nothing about wine and the brother—“
“Gerard.”
“He’ll realize it, won’t he?”
“He speaks no English. You speak very poor French.”
“Truth hurts.”
Albert pushed over a tray of sliced baguettes and olive tapenade. “I cannot come tomorrow. The boys have a special practice for the tournament. But Pascal says he can go.”
“If you allow me to come down off the roof,” Pascal said. “Merle.”
He rolled her name on his tongue as if it filled his mouth with something sweet. Tristan was watching her with his chunks of melon paint in his hair and hands.
“You may come down if you use the ladder, Pascal.” She turned to Albert. “But you must let me use your bath. Before it becomes an international incident.”
“Hey,” Tristan said. “It was in the paper. They’re calling it a public health crisis.”
* * *
Merle thought it might be a Thursday. So unlike her. What would Harry say about his Calendar Girl now? He wouldn’t even recognize her. The lists, the perpetual calendar in her head: gone. Well, almost gone. It might be Thursday, June 25. If it was, she had been in France almost three weeks.
Albert lent Pascal the Deux Chevaux. The roofer ground the gears but managed to turn the car around, as tricky as a French verb, then drove through the old medieval gates to the city. He’d rolled down the roof and the wind blew through their hair. Merle wished she’d worn the scarf but at least her hair was clean. Albert’s tiny bathtub was a lifesaver. She smoothed her skirt over her knees. It was the last clean thing in her suitcase.
“Are you from around here? Originally?”
“From the Languedoc, but I am here one year.”
“Do people treat you like you’re an outsider?”
“Small villages are like that. They are dying. They have no new jobs, no more land for the sons to take over. So they resent foreigners who have so much money.” He watched the road. “They warm up when they get to know you. Everyone knows you.”
“I know. I finally had to bribe my neighbor with a tart.” Madame Suchet who swept her front steps in high heels and jewelry had still been too wary to invite her in. But it was a first step. And she’d met the next door neighbors too, a young arty couple from Paris, Yves and Suzette, who were very chic.
“Did you know Justine LaBelle?” she asked Pascal.
“Um, no.”
“Did you see her around town?”
“Once or twice. She was hard to miss. With that hair.”
“I’ve seen other women with orange hair. Did she have friends?” He shrugged again. “What about this so-called nun, Sister Evangeline?”
“Never heard of her.”
“Do you know the gendarme?”
“You ask a lot of questions.” He glanced at her. “I see him around. Jean-Pierre is a good man.”
“You think so? He seems pretty cocky to me.” Pascal shrugged, noncommittal. Probably a friend of Jean-Pierre’s, they drank together, or played cards in that restaurant where she’d seen him at lunchtime. “The inspector thinks I am somehow involved in Justine's death.”
“And were you?”
“No. But here I am living in the house she claimed as her own.”
He glanced at her. “They will find the killer.”
The small sign for Château Gagillac peeked out of the overgrown bushes in the ditch by the road. He muscled the little car onto the dirt lane. Unruly hedgerows gave way to roses blooming along the rows. The gravel crunched under their shoes as they walked to the stone building. A thought came to her. “What if they ask about a work permit?”
“To get what’s mine.” He stumbles across the room, holding a chair for balance.
“Drunk again. I see your travels haven’t changed you.”
He glares up at her, takes a step toward her and slaps her hard. “Shut up and get my clothes.”
In the corner, hand to her cheek, Marie-Emilie leans against the wall. “Get them yourself.”
He wavers for a moment, unsteady on his feet. Then, as if making a decision, he nods. “Open the door in the floor. Light the lantern.” He walks heavily out into the garden, leaving the door open to the night.
She wants to run, to find Stephan. But it is late, past midnight and the village is sleeping. She stands at the back door as Weston returns, a wooden wine case in his arms. He struggles toward her. “Open it, you daft woman! The lantern!”
She lights the kerosene lantern and pulls up the trap door as he sets the case of wine on the floor and returns outside. In a moment he is back with another case.
“Hand me that one. Put the lantern here on the step.”
She does as she is told. The wine is his business; she wants nothing to do with it, or him. If she doesn’t complain, he will not hit her again and he will leave. He is down below, opening the wooden door to the wine cave. Then she is pushing the second case toward his waiting hands.
“Go get another. The truck’s in the alley. Hurry, woman.”
Despite herself, she helps him. They bring in the wooden cases then stack the bottles carefully on the old racks. It takes almost three hours. She is exhausted. When he tells her again to get his clothes she hasn’t the strength to say no. She pulls herself up the stairs, throws his clothes in an old carpet bag.
He emerges from the cellar holding the key to the wine cave. It has always hung on a nail but now he will take it with him. He tucks it into his inside jacket pocket, grabs the carpet bag, and turns toward the alley where the truck is waiting. He stops in the middle of the garden and walks back to her.
“Tell no one about the wine, do you hear? No one. Or I’ll beat the livin’ shit out of you, woman.” His breath is sour and again he is unsteady. She wonders if he will drive on the road wherever he is going, or will end up in a creek.
“I have seen her. The girl, heavy with your child.”
He is clear for a moment. Furious, but clear. “What the fuck do you care?”
“You must help her. Send her money.”
His chest rocks as if he laughs but no sound comes out. He will not help the girl. He has used her and thrown her away, just as he has Marie-Emilie herself.
“You must care for her, for the baby. You are not so cold, Weston, that you would abandon them in these terrible times.” She tries to reach him, to find something inside him that is good and decent. She offers him one last chance to be honorable.
He drops the bag and grabs her shoulders roughly. He opens his mouth as if to agree, or disagree. But he can’t. He doesn’t care enough for that.
His fingers dig into her back. For a moment she thinks he will kiss her, as in goodbye. As in, we are finished forever. She could take that. She would welcome it. But instead he shakes her, gives her a push that sends her backward. She trips on a rock and sits down hard on the ground.
As he pushes the gate open, she begins to cry.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Before the birds were up, the inspector and his team knocked on the front door. Merle answered, already dressed, and stood between her sleeping son and the forensics crew as they tramped through the house and out the back door. Before she had time to comb her hair the workman from Electricité de France arrived to set up her service. Hallelujah.
In the back he climbed up a pole in the alley. He had an excellent view of the pissoir where three men dressed in white coveralls, gloves, masks, and paper hats filed in and out. Merle watched from the gravel patio, chin resting on her hand. Fernand and his son arrived with white plastic pipe, ready for the big day. Water and electricity in one day? It was too much. She needed coffee. She went inside to rouse Tristan for his daily trip to get breakfast.
As she shooed him out the door, another man appeared. “It’s the roofer.” Tristan introduced them then ran off down the cobblestones to the patisserie.
Perhaps the first Frenchman close to her own age she’d met — the village seemed overwhelmingly elderly — who was also taller than a postbox. Probably had bad teeth. She stuck out her hand. “Bonjour. Call me Merle. You speak English?”
“Yes. Your son tells me you are —“
Jean-Pierre Redier, the gendarme, knocked loudly on the front door. He spoke rapidly in French to her. Pascal’s dark eyes rounded as he translated. “He says he needs to speak to the inspector?”
Merle led the gendarme through to the backyard and closed the door. Pascal leaned against the stair, arms crossed. “This is a busy place.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” She motioned upstairs. “Come on, I’ll show you the inside first.”
The broken door sat propped against the wall. Plastic covered the broken windowpanes. But the room was showing improvement. The guano quotient was way down. Only a white powdery sheen and a dank odor remained on the armoire and bed.
“Before I work inside, I must fix the hole outside.” He walked to the window. “If there is room for my ladder.”
“You arrived late,” Merle said. In the garden the inspector and gendarme were having a lively discussion, waving hands, smoking cigarettes, as the crew bagged bones. “A little discovery in the pissoir.”
Pascal smiled — his teeth were just fine — and wagged his finger. “That is not a nice word for a lady, madame. Say latrine, or at least la pissotiere.” He looked again. “What is it they found?”
“A human skeleton, it seems. A bit spooky.”
“Ah. Very Edgar Allan Poe.” She squinted. “You know. The Cask of Almontillado.”
“You’ve read Poe?”
“My English isn’t so bad,” he countered. “Now, madame —“
“Call me Merle. It’s Pascal, right?” She had laid a hand on his forearm. His muscled tightened and she pulled away. “How long do you think it will take?”
“First, Merle.” He smiled as he said her name. Was her name somehow humorous? She remembered the laughter of the boys at the tabac. “First the smoke bomb.” He patted his canvas bag. “No more birdies.”
Merle drank her coffee, ate her croissant and yogurt, and watched the hive of forensic technicians take photographs, bag evidence, and talk. The EDF man was efficient, now that he’d finally arrived, hooking up the meter at the house and the electricity on the pole. Fernand swore at the crowd. By noon the refrigerator and stove were working. Pascal climbed Albert’s ladder, dropped a smoke bomb in the hole in the roof, and sent the pigeons angrily on their way.
Tristan and Albert left in the afternoon to practice fencing. Merle walked to the grocery and stocked up on food, made herself a salad and cheese plate, and ate it on the patio under a cloudy sky. When the forensics crew returned from lunch she took the inspector aside.
“Did you speak to Sister Evangeline about the death of Justine?” she asked.
He answered something, too fast, and she urged him to speak “plus tard.” He repeated it slower, that he had spoken to a woman who knew Justine. “Not Sister Evangeline?”
He shook his head, staring in his inscrutable way. The stains on his shirt had increased, and his tie was a mess. The forensics team was finishing up, packing their kits. Merle continued in her blundering French. “She stopped me on the street. Two days after Justine died. She looked different, with brown hair, not gray. I think the gray hair was false.” She didn’t know the word for ‘wig.’
He smoked his cigarette, waiting for more.
“She gave me the key to the gate, there, on the alley. She said ‘they’ would kill for it.”
That got his attention. “They?”
“I don’t know who.”
“Can I see this key?”
She pulled the chain over her head and handed it to him. The key dangled, large and old. He examined it carefully, turning it over on his palm. Merle knew there was no writing on it, no number or identifying mark. It was just a simple, old-fashioned skeleton key.
“She had a bruise on her cheek, here. As if someone had hit her. She seemed afraid.”
The inspector puffed. “We were told she had left town by the owner of the bistro.”
“But I saw her.”
“Thank you, madame, for the information.”
“Is there anything new about Justine LaBelle? Do you know where she was from, who she was?”
“She was from Bordeaux. She was well known there. She had been in police custody.” He stared up into Merle’s eyes, holding her look. “But she did not deserve her fate.”
One of her Harlem clients, Freddie Wilson, came suddenly into her head. She was trying to get off the streets, clearly a working girl with the gaunt look of a junkie, not unlike Justine. They heard she’d overdosed. Merle felt she had ignored the obvious, let down the woman and the entire community. Something might have been done, should have, but sadly, irrevocably, wasn’t. It had been years but the guilt, the remorse of doing nothing, remained.
“I agree, Monsieur. She did not.”
Perhaps the inspector felt the same way, a little guilty that the state had let down Justine. She felt his eyes on her back as she walked to the house. Pascal was coming down the ladder after putting a temporary cover over the hole to keep the birds from returning. She waited for him at the door, her jaw working angrily at the inspector’s implication. He doesn’t know me. Was he testing her, seeing if she looked guilty?
The roofer stood silently, watching her face. He looked at the inspector watching them both with eyes like slits. Merle gave him a last glare and turned to Pascal.
“I hear a glass of wine is recommended to all workers, if you want them to come back tomorrow.” Just looking at him made her feel better, like all of France didn’t have the wrong idea about her motives. “Monsieur le couvreur?”
He took her elbow, turning her toward the kitchen door. “You promised to call me Pascal.”
* * *
An older woman opened the door of the church offices, simply dressed in a flowered blouse, but elegant in that French way. Merle had seen her with Albert. Her gray hair was pulled into a chignon, her blue eyes danced over the visitor with the peach paint under her nails.
It was late morning the next day. She’d left Pascal tied to the chimney, high above ground, and the plumbers busy laying pipe. With progress at the house, Merle allowed herself a few hours off. She introduced herself to Mme Beaumount, said she had relatives born in the village and made her request to look at parish records. “De naissance, mariage, décès, par example.” Births, marriages, deaths.
Merle stuffed a five-euro bill in the donation box and was led back into the church, down stone steps into a small basement room. Mme Beaumont waved a hand at the shelf of volumes. “Quelle année?”
What year indeed. The records went back three hundred years, at least, assembled in a series of large, leather bound books lined up on a wall of shelves. She pointed to the next to last, printed in gold with ‘1900-1950.’ Mme Beaumont set it on a wooden table. She gave her a pair of thin white cotton gloves and disappeared back up the stairs.
Merle switched on the gooseneck lamp and pulled her notepad and pen from her purse. The room must have been specially sealed because there was no smell of mildew or rot, even with all these old pages in the basement. The gloves were thin and baggy but would keep the old pages clean.
She took a breath. Here were births, confirmations, deaths, banns, and marriages, as well as other curious notations. Families, generations, descendants. She began in the thirties, scanning down the lists written in a black curlicue flourish. Here were Andres and Jeans and Danielles and Jacquelines. But the name she was looking for was Chevalier.
Albert’s baptism, 1943. A Laurent Chevalier, baptized in 1919. And his sister Josephine in 1920. Josephine was confirmed in 1931 and apparently her sister, Marie Madeleine, in 1933. Another Chevalier was baptized in 1929, Marcel. His parents were Frederic Chevalier and Angelique Leduc, neither of whom showed up anywhere else.
What about the sender of those letters? The name Dominique was common; she found it on almost every other page as a mother, a child, a man. Without a last name it was impossible.
1948: Marcel Chevalier again, married in the church. He and his wife had a child who was baptized, and died, on the same day in 1949. She wrote his name on a separate page of the notebook: “cousin to M-E?” There was the mayor, Michel Redier, born in 1949.
What relative had given them the house? She didn’t know. Were Marie-Emilie and Weston married here? Born here? Confirmed here? It appeared not.
Merle ran her gloved finger carefully down the listings, ignoring her stomach. Slipping the heavy book back onto the shelves she pulled out the last volume, “1950-2000.”
The pages were crisper, less speckled by moisture and time. The same delicate handwriting, flourishes and all, until 1953 when someone new took over, with a less flamboyant hand. It was easier to read, though less pretty.
Where was Harry’s birth? That was odd. There were births that year, 1950, several in May, but none named Harold. Had they changed his name? But not a single birth on his birthday, May 30th.
Another Redier, a boy born in 1951, to the same parents as he-who-would-be-mayor. She scanned through the end of the 1950’s and half through the ‘60s and closed the book.
Back at the house she found Albert, Pascal, and Tristan drinking wine in Albert’s small yard. They had both garden gates propped open to watch for her. Fernand and Luc had laid all the pipe, connected it to the water line, and began re-filling the trench. They had left already but not without this message, relayed by Tristan. “Tomorrow they’re coming early to punch through into the house. Fernand warned us to be out if we don’t like noise.”
Merle took the small glass of wine Albert handed her and sat at the table. “Where does he propose we go?” She took a sip. “This is good, Albert. What is it?”
“Château Gagillac, of course. Have you forgotten your appointment tomorrow?”
Merle sat back. She didn’t forget appointments, and yet. Her calendar mind had fled. She wondered if she’d get it back when she went home. “I don’t know, Albert. I know nothing about wine and the brother—“
“Gerard.”
“He’ll realize it, won’t he?”
“He speaks no English. You speak very poor French.”
“Truth hurts.”
Albert pushed over a tray of sliced baguettes and olive tapenade. “I cannot come tomorrow. The boys have a special practice for the tournament. But Pascal says he can go.”
“If you allow me to come down off the roof,” Pascal said. “Merle.”
He rolled her name on his tongue as if it filled his mouth with something sweet. Tristan was watching her with his chunks of melon paint in his hair and hands.
“You may come down if you use the ladder, Pascal.” She turned to Albert. “But you must let me use your bath. Before it becomes an international incident.”
“Hey,” Tristan said. “It was in the paper. They’re calling it a public health crisis.”
* * *
Merle thought it might be a Thursday. So unlike her. What would Harry say about his Calendar Girl now? He wouldn’t even recognize her. The lists, the perpetual calendar in her head: gone. Well, almost gone. It might be Thursday, June 25. If it was, she had been in France almost three weeks.
Albert lent Pascal the Deux Chevaux. The roofer ground the gears but managed to turn the car around, as tricky as a French verb, then drove through the old medieval gates to the city. He’d rolled down the roof and the wind blew through their hair. Merle wished she’d worn the scarf but at least her hair was clean. Albert’s tiny bathtub was a lifesaver. She smoothed her skirt over her knees. It was the last clean thing in her suitcase.
“Are you from around here? Originally?”
“From the Languedoc, but I am here one year.”
“Do people treat you like you’re an outsider?”
“Small villages are like that. They are dying. They have no new jobs, no more land for the sons to take over. So they resent foreigners who have so much money.” He watched the road. “They warm up when they get to know you. Everyone knows you.”
“I know. I finally had to bribe my neighbor with a tart.” Madame Suchet who swept her front steps in high heels and jewelry had still been too wary to invite her in. But it was a first step. And she’d met the next door neighbors too, a young arty couple from Paris, Yves and Suzette, who were very chic.
“Did you know Justine LaBelle?” she asked Pascal.
“Um, no.”
“Did you see her around town?”
“Once or twice. She was hard to miss. With that hair.”
“I’ve seen other women with orange hair. Did she have friends?” He shrugged again. “What about this so-called nun, Sister Evangeline?”
“Never heard of her.”
“Do you know the gendarme?”
“You ask a lot of questions.” He glanced at her. “I see him around. Jean-Pierre is a good man.”
“You think so? He seems pretty cocky to me.” Pascal shrugged, noncommittal. Probably a friend of Jean-Pierre’s, they drank together, or played cards in that restaurant where she’d seen him at lunchtime. “The inspector thinks I am somehow involved in Justine's death.”
“And were you?”
“No. But here I am living in the house she claimed as her own.”
He glanced at her. “They will find the killer.”
The small sign for Château Gagillac peeked out of the overgrown bushes in the ditch by the road. He muscled the little car onto the dirt lane. Unruly hedgerows gave way to roses blooming along the rows. The gravel crunched under their shoes as they walked to the stone building. A thought came to her. “What if they ask about a work permit?”
