Disturbing the Dark

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Hello, Maggie MacGowen!”

  I turned and saw Paulette Matson with a curly-haired toddler in her arms, headed my way. I said to her, “Looks like you found a friend.”

  “This is Monique,” Paulette said, smiling into the beatific face of the little girl. “She’s the big sister of the little baby that was baptized this morning.”

  “Hello, Monique,” I said, shaking her tiny hand. She reached out and took a chunk of cheese off my plate. While she was busy eating it, I said to Paulette, “You do get around.”

  She laughed her big laugh. “I told you we found a room with the sweetest family? Well, it’s the family of the little guest of honor. They insisted that we come to the party. And here we are.”

  “Where’s Henry?” I asked.

  “Probably talking to your builder, Freddy Desmoulins.”

  “That builder is my brother,” I said. “Half brother, anyway.”

  “Your Freddy is very sharp. Henry loves the concept for his project. They’re talking about expanding into other areas,” she said. “They’re all over the idea of green energy, sustainable agriculture, affordable housing, preserving the charm of village life. Or American small town life. You should hear the two of them go on.

  “You have to admit though, that putting up affordable senior housing near existing towns with businesses that are struggling to hang on as young people move away makes a whole lot more sense than building more of those hideous pop-up cities for old people out in the most godforsaken patches of desert in the American Southwest. I wonder if there’s a plot to dehydrate the oldsters.” She took a breath and smiled prettily at me. “I think that building into existing small towns makes so much more sense, don’t you?”

  “Are you going to build the village of Rutland, Countess?”

  “No way.” She laughed as she took a tiny pear tart from my plate and offered it to Monique. “I think it may be time to bury the count and countess. It was fun, though. Henry said he’d buy me a tiara, just as a little memento of this crazy summer.”

  I wiped Monique’s sticky hands with my napkin. “You were a lovely countess, Paulette.”

  She leaned closer, conspiratorial, and nodded toward Jean-Paul. “That handsome man of yours has been over there wheeling and dealing for a while now. Something big happening?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, looking over at him. From his posture and his gestures, I knew that this was not a happy conversation.

  “Oh, my!” Paulette waved her hand in front of her face as she smiled down at Monique. “How can such a sweet little girl be making such a big stinky poo? I love you to death, sweet pea, but Auntie Paulette has her limitations. Excuse us, Maggie, it’s time to hand this bundle off to a mommy or a grandma with a diaper bag.”

  “See you around,” I said. As I ate, I watched Jean-Paul. His conversation—or was it several conversations?—dragged on. When I was finished, I picked up my plate and dumped the remains into a trash can. Out beyond the expanse of gold sand, the ocean beckoned. I was ready to go for a swim. I glanced again at Jean-Paul, hoping he would join me, but he did not look up.

  Raffi, one of the archeology students, who did indeed have curly dark hair and long black eyelashes, as Taylor had described him, bailed out of a soccer game and, panting, chest heaving, dropped onto the sand in a patch of shade and stretched out. Happy for the opportunity to talk to him, I went over and kneeled in the sand beside him.

  “You okay, Raffi?” I asked.

  He opened an eye, and when he saw who was talking to him, sat right up. “Miss MacGowen.”

  “Rough game?” I asked.

  “Those kids.” He gave me a self-deprecating little smile. He had to be all of twenty-three or -four. “I haven’t played for a while; I think I’m getting old.”

  “Not yet, you aren’t.” I found half a mussel shell in the sand and brushed it off. “Raffi, you know I helped pack up Solange’s things.”

  He nodded.

  “We found her notebook, the one she always carried,” I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I looked through it.”

  “She talk about me?” he asked with a wry grin.

  “It was all work-related,” I said. “I have a couple of questions about some of her notes, and about some of the sketches. Does it bother you to talk about it?”

  “No.” He gazed off toward the water. “I didn’t know Solange all that well. We had a few seminars together at university, but we were focusing on different areas of research.”

  “Does this mean anything to you?” With the edge of the mussel shell, I smoothed a patch of sand and did my best to replicate the obelisk-like shape Solange had sketched twice. With my fingernail I wrote FeR under the shape. He was nodding before I had finished.

  “Fe stands for iron, of course. And R probably means Roman. I found that fragment out by the old wall in the pasture.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can only guess without getting it into a lab, but it looks like part of a shaft, maybe a bolt. I suspect it was cast using a mass-production method commonly found all over the Roman Empire by the third century. I showed it to Solange to get her opinion, but she took it and did not return it. Was it found among her things?”

  “We didn’t see it,” I said. “When did you find it?”

  “When?” He shrugged, thinking. “Not long after we arrived here. A couple of weeks ago, I guess. I was just out looking around. I had noticed that the tool marks on some of the sandstone blocks in the wall around your family compound were similar to those found among the ruins of a pre–Roman-era building at a site near Rouen where I worked last summer. The blocks that interested me had been combined in the construction of the compound wall with longer stone blocks cut from a different quarry using more modern tools. I assumed that the smaller stones came from an earlier structure and were repurposed to build the wall. It is still common for people to repurpose building materials, is it not?”

  “It is.” Used brick and barn wood came to mind as examples.

  He continued: “During my walk about, I found a wall, or ­remains of a wall, out in the cow pasture that was clearly built from the same stone. When I dug down a bit, I found evidence of a foundation for a structure that was at least twelve feet long on a side. I think that if the grass were cut very short you might be able to see the indentation in the soil where there was once a fairly large structure.”

  “A pre-Roman structure?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “We only began to study the site after we had to give up on the carrot patch. If I had to guess, I would say that the older sandstone blocks, the square ones, could easily be pre-Roman. But because stone can be used over and over infinitely, and was frequently transported over long distances, the structure in the meadow could have been built by Celts, Romans, Franks, Vikings, Normans, or by the Martin family. But that site is also where I found the piece of iron, and that is provocative.”

  “Did you discuss this with Olivia?”

  “In passing. She agreed. But at that time, we were still focused on examining the earth turned up during the sewer excavation, so the topic was tabled. I was very happy when we relocated to the pasture wall. It has far more interesting prospects than the carrot field.”

  I said, “Solange thought that the land around the trench was ­accreted too recently for you to turn up anything interesting.”

  “I agreed,” he said. “It was a waste of our time. But I think that we set up there as part of Olivia’s agreement with Freddy. He is funding us, you know.”

  I didn’t. I asked, “Why did Solange take that piece of iron from you?”

  Again, the dismissive Gallic shrug. “I thought she would run with it to Olivia to argue that we should move our study site. When she didn’t, I expected her to pull it out at the proper dramatic ­moment. Or to bury it.”

  “Bury it?”

  “Roman iron might not fit with whatever conclusions Solange had in mind.”

  “The little stinker. I bet you we
re pissed.”

  He shrugged off the suggestion. “All’s fair in love, war, and the quest for institutional grant money, yes?”

  “I suppose.” I got to my feet and brushed sand off my bottom. “Thanks for your time, Raffi.”

  “My pleasure,” he said, shielding his eyes from the sun at my back to look up at me. “If that piece of iron turns up, will you let me know?”

  “I will.”

  He tried to be very cool about what Solange had done to him, but if he weren’t angry would he have mentioned it to Casey and David?

  I was hot and thirsty as I headed back toward the pavilion. Quite a few people had already left, and others were gathering their families together and saying their good-byes. The women inside were wrapping food and clearing the big table of everything except cheese, sweets, and drinks. I filled a glass with cold lemonade and went out to look for Jean-Paul, hoping he was ready to go home.

  He was still on the phone, or on the phone again, but he waved at me and I started walking toward him. As I approached I heard him tell the person on the other end of his phone, “Absolutely not. I’ll get there Wednesday.” This was followed by, “Tomorrow is impossible.” More argument followed. When he was within my reach he abruptly ended the call.

  “Trouble?” I said.

  He bobbled his head, yes and no, as he slipped the phone into his pocket.

  “Did you eat something?” I asked. If he wanted to tell me about the conversation, he would.

  He pulled me into his arms, rested his chin on my head, and took a couple of deep breaths. “Will you come with me to Paris tonight?”

  “I have waited my entire life for a man to say that to me,” I said. “But as you just told someone else, tomorrow is impossible. Why do you ask? What’s up?”

  “It’s complicated.” He pulled back enough so that he could look into my face. I thought he was going to explain, but instead he asked, “What happened with Dieter Schwarz?”

  “I grilled him mercilessly,” I said. “I thought he was just another poor soul looking for the remains of a lost family member or for war souvenirs. But it turns out, he was dogging you.”

  “Me?”

  I told him what I had learned from poor Dieter.

  “I hate the press,” he said.

  “I am the press,” I said.

  He laughed. “Merde. So you are. But not of his sort. Don’t think America is the only nation with some version of Fox News. Fear mongers of the worst sort, and he’s one of them. Fair and balanced horseshit.”

  “Your grasp of American slang is coming along well,” I said. “I’m leaning toward using a single multi-purpose obscenity like merde, though I have learned some interesting new ones from my grandmother.”

  “Merde is usually le mot juste,” he said.

  As we walked toward the pavilion with our arms around each other, I asked, “Do you really have to leave tonight?”

  “Oui.”

  “Merde,” I said, because it was the perfect word for the moment.

  18

  As arguments go, the little tiff I had with Jean-Paul as he packed his bag didn’t amount to much. I could maybe join him in Paris on Tuesday or Wednesday, but I could not go with him Sunday night.

  Guido’s hearing was set for first thing Monday morning. Because of the language the network used when applying for our French work permit, I was listed as Guido’s supervisor. I had to be at the hearing to vouch for him.

  Besides that, we were way behind on our filming schedule. Other than hours and hours of background footage the interns had been shooting to stay busy, we had not made any progress since the interview with Grand-mère on Friday morning. There was no way I could run off to Paris, or anywhere else, on Sunday night.

  “I hate to leave you here alone,” Jean-Paul said. “Not until all this strangeness that’s going on gets sorted out.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, cramming his laundry bag into the top of his overnight bag. “I’m surrounded by people day and night, whether I want to be or not. And besides—” I reached over and pulled open the top drawer in my bedside table. “I have Grand-mère’s purloined Luger, and it’s loaded.”

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” He saw the Luger and pushed the drawer shut again. “That’s the best argument yet for you to come with me. You’re more likely to shoot— ”

  “I know.” I held up my hand. “I’ll shoot off my own ass before I hit any intruder. But I will make a great, lovely kaboom doing it and that will bring everyone running.”

  “When did your grandmother give you that old cannon?”

  “After we found Erika in our room this morning,” I said. “She told me that if I found ‘that woman’ lurking around here again I should put a slug between her eyes. Grand-mère thinks all Americans know how to shoot.”

  He dropped down onto a corner of the bed and studied me, looking dejected. “Merde.”

  I straddled his lap and pushed him onto his back. “You’re welcome to stay, you know.”

  “There we are, at an impasse.” He rolled us over until he was on top, looking down at me. “If all goes well tomorrow, I’ll be back on Tuesday.”

  “And if things don’t go well?”

  “Just promise you won’t shoot yourself in the ass. I’m quite fond of your ass. Exactly where it is.”

  He pulled us both to our feet and picked up his bag.

  “Jean-Paul,” I said, holding his arm as we walked downstairs. “Exactly what is it that you do when you aren’t the consul general? Every time I ask you, you say you’re a boring businessman. But what sort of boring business are you in? And don’t say that if you told me you’d have to shoot me because we have already delegated that little job to me.”

  He laughed. “It’s complicated.”

  “Should I take notes?”

  He let out a long breath as he worked on his answer to the question. “Could we just say that I am in the business of statecraft?”

  “What does that mean?”

  Grand-mère was waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs. Jean-Paul kissed my cheek and said, “It will take more time than we have to explain.”

  “Jean-Paul,” Grand-mère said, “your driver is here.”

  I tugged his arm to hold him back. “You have a new car. Why do you need a driver?”

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out the keys to his new BMW, and folded my hand around them. “You need wheels. Just remember to watch six. And leave that damn Luger in the drawer.”

  There was neither time nor privacy for a passionate good-bye. The driver put Jean-Paul’s bag in the trunk and opened the back door for him. A round of kisses and then a wave as they drove out the compound gate. Grand-mère stood beside me and watched them leave. When they were out of sight, she heaved a great sigh.

  “I have come to hate good-byes,” she said.

  “He’ll be back in a few days,” I said.

  “A few days?” She seemed unusually wistful. “This morning when I woke up I said to myself, as I have said every morning for the last several years now, Well Élodie, old dear, you’ve been given another day. Will I see another? Or one after that? Every good-bye sounds final, and every hello is a little surprise.”

  “Chère Grand-mère.” When I wrapped my arm around her shoulders, for the first time she seemed fragile. “Don’t be sad. And don’t you dare talk about leaving us for a very long time yet. Hell, we haven’t finished the film.”

  She laughed, a big, strong laugh. “Then I promise I won’t call the undertaker just yet. Would you like a cold cider?”

  As I followed her into the kitchen, she told me that we were having dinner at Freddy’s house, at seven. Olivia wanted to reciprocate for all of the meals she’d eaten with the family by cooking for us. She hadn’t the confidence to prepare a meal for the usual mob, but that Sunday night there would only be a few of us for dinner, so she had volunteered.

  “I have a question about something Jean-Paul’s mother said to me.” I sat down
at the table and watched her pour cider into two tall, narrow glasses.

  “Yes?” She sat down beside me.

  “Madame Bernard told me you advised her to keep her daughter, Karine, away from Pierre Dauvin. What were your issues with Pierre?”

  She let out a surprised little laugh. “Issues with Pierre? No, dear, the issue was with Karine. She was a silly, romantic girl, and Pierre was, and is, a serious boy. But he was also a normal teenager full of hormones and she was both very beautiful and very available. We did not want the girl’s pursuit of Pierre to end in a situation they would both regret for the rest of their lives.”

  “We? You, the other grandmothers, and Ma Mère?”

  “Of course. But I could hardly say that to the girl’s mother, could I?”

  Of course not. What would the village do when the grand­mother mafia was gone?

  The topic shifted to the winter, which she usually spent in Paris at the house in the Marais district that she inherited from her parents. She wanted me to come and stay with her. Sometime in early September I would have to go home to California to take care of business, but I planned to be back in Normandy that fall in time to film the apple harvest. After that, I had work to do, but I promised to spend at least part of the holidays with her in December, in Paris. Exactly when that would be would depend on my daughter and my mom. And possibly Jean-Paul.

  Grand-mère and I had our mobile phones on the table, comparing calendars. I was thinking how nice it was, and how rare it was, to be alone with my grandmother. For the second time, though no one else was in the house, I heard water running through the plumbing.

  “Where does that noise come from?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “Probably someone using the outside tap.”

  I got up to see, following the sound of rattling pipes from the kitchen to the mudroom, and out the back door, with Grand-mère following. Antoine was washing mud off a pair of bright blue muck boots using the faucet that extended out the back wall.

  “Did I see Jean-Paul leave?” Antoine asked, shaking water off the boots. When I said he had, Antoine said, “Better let Freddy know there’s one fewer for dinner.”