Disturbing the Dark

by Wendy Hornsby

  I looked out across the terrace to the herb garden where Grand-mère and Freddy were snipping herbs for Gaston’s sauces. I said, “I don’t want to be around when you tell Grand-mère.”

  “She knows,” he said, raising a shoulder. “She’s known from the beginning; we didn’t plan to be here this long. Why do you think she and Aunt Isabelle went to such lengths to draw you into the family fold?”

  “Me?” I had to laugh. “I know nothing about farming, and my life is six thousand miles away.”

  “Maggie, it’s not only you that Grand-mère has her eye on. She sees David as the best hope for the future of the estate. But he is in the wrong family line to inherit Martin property. However, your Casey and my Lulu…”

  I turned to see where my daughter was, and found her with David, looking out at the ocean. “You think Grand-mère is plotting a sort of dynastic union between our family and the Bretons to keep the estate functioning?”

  “We’ll see,” he said, taking his knife back from me and picking up another mussel. “We’ll see.”

  What Antoine said reminded me to keep a close eye on my grandmother; she was full of tricks. I know how hard she worked to bring Jean-Paul and me together, hoping that I would follow him home to France when his appointment to Los Angeles finished so that I would be near her, forever. Her campaign had been quite successful, though how things would work out in the end for us was still a great unknown. It made perfect sense that she would now focus her machinations on my daughter and David Breton with the same goal. Gaston was not the only person I would not turn my back on while I was there.

  When all the shells were open, Gaston set the platter of mussels and whelks in the middle of a large round table and summoned his guests. We ate the fresh shellfish raw, doused with various spicy sauces and washed down with a very old, rustic white wine from Burgundy; it was the color of honey. Empty shells were tossed into pails, where they soon formed precarious towers. There was a time I would have passed on raw snails, but among the things I had learned during my sojourn in France was to just eat what was put in front of me, enjoy it because it was always interesting and delicious, and not to ask a lot of questions about what it was or where it had come from, either geographically or anatomically. So far, no disasters.

  The conversation was lively and fun. Over the last nine months, ever since I had learned that I belonged to this family in France, I had worked on my rusty college French, with a great tutor, Jean-Paul Bernard. And now, after a two-week immersion in the country, I found myself easily slipping between French and English and hardly noticing. Several times that night I had to remind myself that Guido, while fluent in Spanish and Italian, was left clueless about what the rest of us were talking about when everyone was speaking French. Renée Ferraro, I noticed, made sure that Guido did not feel excluded, even if that meant the two of them holding a separate conversation all of their own.

  After the shellfish, there was a moment of respite. When Gaston rose from the table and tied on his big, white chef’s apron to prepare the next course on the large grill at the far side of the veranda, Casey and David cleared the table. I went over to watch Gaston cook, ­hoping to learn something.

  First, he slathered the lobster and crabs, in the shell, with butter and herbs and then cooked them over a dried apple-wood fire until the shells were brown. While they cooked, he set a large paella pan over the fire at the other end of the big grill and poured in a sauce made of fresh herbs, butter, and cream. When it was hot, he laid in the fileted sole and cooked it quickly. Then he added the crabs and lobster, gave it all a toss or two, and then to the applause and cheers of his guests, flambéed the pan with Calvados and then set the pan in the middle of the table for people to serve themselves.

  As I savored every bite I vowed to join Casey on her morning run. After I mopped the last of the sauce from my plate with a piece of bread, I sat back, sated and happy. At my house, the meal would end there. But we were in Normandy, and far from finished.

  Casey and David cleared the table again while Gaston poured shots of Calvados into exquisite little glasses and passed them around. We had reached the midpoint in the meal, time for the traditional trou Normand, or hole. A break. It was believed that alcohol opened the blood vessels of the stomach in preparation for the next round of food. So, we drank our shots, and we rested, and got ready for the next course.

  The conversation turned to the ad hoc graveyard among the carrots. Antoine asked Gaston about the actual process of disinterring the remains.

  “It would be so much easier if the poor bastards were American, British, or French,” Gaston said, rising to check the fire in his grill. “If they were, an honor guard, a brass band, and a specialized military unit would be at the site tomorrow at dawn. A motorcade would carry away the remains and fly them to Hawaii for identification. And then someone would hand Élodie a check for the carrots that were disturbed, and we would be done with it. However, if, as Élodie assures us, they are German, the priest will ask the parish sexton to appoint some men here to do the honors. He will offer prayers for the immortal souls of the dead, up they’ll come and off they’ll go to Orglades to be joined again in yet another anonymous hole.”

  “I would sure like to expedite all that,” Freddy said. “I can’t wait for the lab in Nice to get back from vacation.”

  “There is a way,” Renée said. “I spoke with Nice this afternoon. If you’ll forgive the description, there is a skeleton crew in place at the forensics lab. If anyone can deliver to them proof of the nationality of the remains, then the proper authorities will be notified and you’ll be finished with the problem. As soon as the day after tomorrow, perhaps.”

  Grand-mère caught my eye and held it. Clearly, she had something to say to me. Privately.

  “No more talk of dead people,” Gaston said. “Now we eat.”

  The entrée was served: grilled summer vegetables and pan-seared escalope of duck with foie gras, served with sauce Normande, which is made of fresh cream, butter and, Calvados, of course. The duck was accompanied by a lovely dry Côtes du Rhône.

  Coffee, apple tart, cheese, and apple brandy followed. The cheese Freddy brought from the fromagerie stank up the car on the way over, but tasted rich and mellow with the delicious Calvados hors d’age that Gaston uncorked and poured for us with great ceremony.

  We lingered. The conversation turned to the community center Freddy was building for the residents of his new development. Eventually the center would offer a year-round swimming pool, a gym with locker rooms, and a large multi-purpose room with a kitchen. At the moment, though the facility was still unfinished, the kitchen and the locker rooms were functional and were being used by the students who were working on the estate that summer. The young people were housed in a tent city on the graded site of the future tennis courts behind the community building, locating their joyful evening noise as far away from Grand-mère’s house as it was possible to be while remaining on the estate.

  Gaston, as the mayor, hoped that he and Freddy could work out an arrangement so that the villagers would be able to use the facilities. At least the senior citizens, the mayor said. And the youth, ­David added. Freddy suggested that a little help with the permit process might sway him. And so it went until the conversational string ran out. It was time to bring the evening to a close.

  As we said our good-byes and walked out together to the car park, Renée offered Guido a lift, and he did not refuse. Grand-mère shooed Freddy, Casey, David and Antoine into Antoine’s Mini, took me by the elbow and handed me Freddy’s car keys. “I need to check something, tonight. You’ll drive.”

  We waited until everyone else was gone. When the lights of the second car turned from the drive onto the village road, Gaston came out from around the house carrying a shovel and a flashlight.

  “Will this do?” he asked.

  “Assez bien, merci.” Grand-mère put the shovel into the trunk and climbed into the passenger seat holding the flashlight in her lap.


  Gaston leaned into her open window. “I am not sure this is wise, Élodie.”

  “Wise?” She shrugged. “Perhaps not. But necessary, yes. Maggie, dear, allons-y.”

  There was no moon. We drove through the dark under a canopy of stars, the only car on the village road.

  “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” I asked.

  “We are going to rob a grave, my dear.”

  6

  “Someone is out there, Grand-mère.” I shone the flashlight into the carrot field where I had seen a faint glimmer in the sweep of our headlights when we made the turn at the end of the ­orchard. Just a bit of light among the carrot rows, or maybe not; there and gone too quickly for me to be confident that it had been there at all. A reflection off a scavenging rabbit’s eye or a shiny leaf?

  “Zut alors,” Grand-mère said, aiming the flashlight into the trench where the skull had been found. “You see? It’s what I was afraid of.”

  I did see. Someone had been there before us, digging around in the bottom of the trench with a tool no bigger than a garden trowel. Or one of Olivia’s excavation tools. I looked off again into the distance where I thought I had seen a light, but there was nothing to see except carrot tops ruffled by a breeze.

  “Did they find anything?” Grand-mère asked, giving my shoulder a little nudge. “Go down closer and see, please.”

  It was dark and creepy out in the carrot field, and even creepier down in a trench that intruded into a mass grave. But Grand-mère was so determined that I take a look that I hoisted up my skirt and did as she asked. I scooped up some of the loosened dirt at the bottom of the trench, held it up to the light and let it run between my fingers. Nothing but rocks and soil.

  “What are we looking for, exactly?” I asked.

  “The one man we didn’t burn,” she said, handing down Gaston’s shovel.

  “What happens if we find him?”

  Above me, she was a black outline, backlit by the light streaming into the night from the headlamps of Freddy’s Jag. I couldn’t read her face and her only immediate response was to lift one shoulder. What did that mean?

  “Just dig,” she said.

  And so I did. I started at the marker Pierre Dauvin had placed at the spot where the skull had landed after it fell off the ditch-digger scoop and walked back to the spot where the scoop’s teeth had first bitten into the ground to bring up that last load. Between the two points, I dug, dumping the turned-up soil onto the road above. Grand-mère kicked through each load with the toe of her shoe, now and then holding something up to the lights from the car before dropping it again. When the hole I stood in was about three feet deeper than the trench, I stuck the shovel into the ground and leaned on it. Soft soil or not, the digging was hard work.

  “Ça va?” Grand-mère asked.

  “How far down did you put him?”

  “Maybe one meter, but remember the soil builds up over time.”

  I wiped my face with the tail of my blouse and pulled out the shovel. My phone buzzed in my skirt pocket before I had plunged the shovel back into the dirt. I pulled it out and checked caller I.D. It was Casey, so I answered.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m with Grand-mère.”

  “I thought I heard you come in, but there’s no one here. It spooked me.”

  “Guido isn’t back?”

  “No. No one is here.”

  “Are the doors locked?”

  “When did anyone around here ever lock doors?” she said. “Is Grand-mère okay?”

  “Everything is just peachy, honey. We’ll be home soon. I’m calling Antoine to go over and check the house.”

  She argued a little about the necessity of that, but agreed to open the front door and wait for Antoine to arrive. Grand-mère was talking over me, asking what was wrong, but instead of answering her when I ended Casey’s call, I called Antoine and asked him to check the house. I could hear jazz playing in the background so I knew I hadn’t wakened him, but I was sorry to send him out again. He did not seem put out by the request and promised to go straight over. When I put my phone away again I told Grand-mère that Casey had heard something.

  “Antoine is going to see about it?” she asked.

  “He is.”

  She nodded as she pointed at the shovel. “Please, chérie, just a little further down, yes?”

  I dug. I hadn’t gone much further before the tip of the shovel glanced off something hard. Grand-mère heard the clunk and bent forward, urging me on. Feeling a bit queasy, I poked around with the tip of the shovel to define the outlines of whatever was down there, found an edge, wedged the shovel under it and lifted.

  “Ribs,” I said, jumping away, feeling queasy. I had dislodged three of them, pale brown spikes now sticking up out of the black earth.

  With surprising agility for an old girl, Grand-mère lowered herself into the trench and took the shovel from me. She scraped around in the dirt among the remnants of someone’s rib cage. Then she got down on her knees and dug with her hands. Out of the dirt came shreds of rotted fabric, hard black lengths that looked to me like bits of an old leather belt. And buttons. Lots of brass buttons. She asked for the flashlight to examine one of her finds, seemed satisfied with it, and rose to her feet.

  “Chérie, can we cover this back up now?”

  “What did you find?”

  She shook her head. “Better that you don’t know.”

  With that, she put a hand on my shoulder for support as she climbed back out onto the road. I filled in the hole and stomped around on the dirt in my sandals to pack it down again. When I was finished, the area looked like what it was, a recent hole, filled in. And that was all right. I picked up one of the brass buttons Grand-mère had dropped, a Nazi eagle still attached to a shred of heavy fabric, and knew that in the morning when Pierre investigated he would find all the proof he needed that the remains discovered in that place were, indeed, German. Grand-mère offered me a hand out. Standing at the edge of the trench, for insurance, or maybe out of habit, I took out my phone and snapped a few photos of the site before we got into the car and drove home.

  When they heard the Jag drive up, Casey and Antoine came outside.

  “Holy merde,” Antoine said when he saw how filthy we were. “Was there an accident?”

  “No, no,” Grand-mère said, patting his cheek on her way inside, leaving a muddy streak. “Looking for night crawlers in the carrots.”

  She went on upstairs without saying anything more. I wanted to follow, but my daughter held me by the arm and gave me a hard-eyed, motherly looking over.

  “You need to explain yourself, missy,” she said.

  “Did I blow curfew?”

  Antoine chortled. He leaned over and kissed Casey on the cheek, decided against getting that close to me, and said, “I’m not sure I want to know what you two were up to tonight. I’ll sleep on it and maybe we’ll talk tomorrow. Maybe.”

  “In the morning,” I said, “will you please call Pierre and tell him that during the night someone was digging in the sewer trench?”

  He glanced up the stairs, following the sound of Grand-mère’s bedroom door closing. All he said was “Merde.”

  Casey and I stood in the open doorway and watched him until he had crossed the compound and gone back inside his house before we closed and locked our own front door.

  “Seriously, Mom,” Casey said, following me into the kitchen. “You and Grand-mère went digging?”

  I took the button from my pocket and handed it to her. When she realized what it was, she paled and set it on the counter.

  She said, “You do know that it’s illegal in Europe to buy, sell, or display Nazi insignia.”

  “I haven’t done any such thing. I merely dug around on family land and that’s what popped out.”

  “Dear God, Mom.” She reached over and felt the shred of fabric still attached to the button. After a minute, she asked, “
Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Grand-mère was looking for something.”

  “Did she find it?”

  “I don’t know what she found. There wasn’t much light out there and she was not sharing. But I do know this: we weren’t the only ones who went digging tonight. We’ll leave it to Pierre to figure it all out. In the meantime, sweetheart, I need you to say nothing about this, to anyone. If Pierre asks you, don’t lie. After all, you really don’t know anything, right?”

  “Except that you came home looking like you’d been wrestling in the mud.”

  “And maybe we were.”

  She picked up the shred of fabric and dangled the button in front of me. “What are you going to do with this?”

  “I have no idea. I should have dug a hole and buried it.”

  “I’ll deal with it.” She slipped it into her pajama pocket.

  Casey stayed close beside me while I locked the back door and went upstairs.

  * * *

  Though there was a hopeful band of pink rising along the eastern horizon, it was still dark when I set out for a run with Casey and David. An easy five miles, they said. On flat ground; a given because the area was entirely flat. But they were young, and fast, and competitive, so I gave up the effort to keep stay abreast of them and settled for the struggle to merely keep them in sight in front of me. After the big dinner at Gaston’s the night before and some grave robbing afterward that left me muscle-sore, I woke up feeling stiff and logy. A good run usually makes me feel better, but at a pace more suitable to a forty-something cookie like me than a dash down the side of the village road with two very fit youngsters.

  We all wore reflectors on our shoes and on the fronts and backs of our jerseys, but during the transition between dawn and daylight we were barely visible to cars on the road until they were right on us. As Casey and David pulled out further in front of me, I lost sight of them altogether except for a glimpse in silhouette when they went over the slight rise where the culvert at the Foullard farm driveway passed under the road.