Love & Death in Burgundy

by Susan C. Shea

  * * *

  A half hour later, they were sitting on a bench at the top of the driveway. Jeannette was spitting onto her finger and patting the moisture on the outside of her elbow, which was bright red and had a raw patch. “Ce n’est rien, it’s nothing,” she said. “Only the little sting, you know?” She smiled at Brett, who was checking his board for damage. “I think I did better this time, non?”

  “Wanna go again?”

  She wanted to do whatever Brett wanted, was floating and a little dizzy with the pleasure of having him hold her around the waist and push her hip out to show her how to balance on the board. When she fell, he grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet after catching the board, and this last time, he bent his head down to look at her elbow and his hair grazed her chin. She breathed in the scent of him through her open mouth and was about to say yes when she heard the deep sound of the Mercedes diesel engine.

  “We’d better get out of here. Come on, viens ici, this way.” Jeannette scampered into the heavy brush at the far side of the driveway, waving her arm at Brett to get him to move quickly. They disappeared into the tangle of rhododendrons and walnut trees a few seconds before the Bellegardes’ car rounded the bend and pulled into the gravel courtyard. From their hiding place, Jeannette and Brett could see the Bellegardes struggling with plastic bags from the supermarché, talking in low tones to each other as they crossed the courtyard, hauling the groceries in through the ancient wooden doors to the château.

  Jeannette tried to guess what might be in the bags. They ate weird things, she knew from the time she found the sitting room’s French doors unlocked and snuck into the pantry. Jars of bright red cabbage that had German-language labels she couldn’t read. A tin of foie gras, which she knew was expensive and which she would have liked to take except it was the only one, and if they noticed it was gone they’d be more careful about locking doors and then she’d never get back in to look around. She had taken one of a stack of small tins of fish and had opened it with the little key that was attached to its lid when she had climbed back into her hiding place in the tree. But she spat out the fish, which was oily and pickly at the same time, and which looked like something that had been lying around in the mud by the river too long.

  Jeannette became aware of how close Brett was. Their arms were touching and his skin was warm. Suddenly, he shifted his weight and leaned forward and across her, bumping her chest with his shoulder. She stepped back abruptly, looking quizzically at him and then in the direction he was facing. “I thought I heard something,” he whispered. But the bold way he stared into her eyes made her blush for some reason.

  “Where?” she whispered back. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Oh, it’s gone now, I guess,” Brett murmured. “Probably a cat.”

  “Ah,” Jeannette said breathlessly, her breast still tingling where he had brushed against it. “We can go now. The sign on the driveway says they will be opening for tours in an hour, so they’re probably getting ready.”

  “I went on the tour. Well, part of it. The tower sounded cool, but the stairs were shut off, so I bailed.”

  “The stairs are the best part; they’re rounded, you know, and very steep. But the rest is boring,” Jeannette said, not sure what “bailed” meant but confident that Brett hadn’t enjoyed it any more than she had when her school group went. “Monsieur wants you to look at the stones and pictures of Madame’s great-grandparents. There are some old guns and ladies’ dresses that I sort of liked, but that’s it.”

  “Yeah? Maybe they’ll let me fire an old musket. Bam,” he said, closing one eye and pulling a pretend trigger.

  Jeannette started to laugh, but clapped her hand across her mouth. “Come on, let’s go before they see us.”

  Brett tucked his board under his arm and the two of them ran lightly down the driveway. When they were clear of the Bellegardes’ and walking back toward her house, Brett asked, “Do you spy on them or something?”

  “I spy on everyone,” Jeannette said, giggling. “I do—have done—it since I was a kid. It’s the only thing to do here. You should have seen the way M. Bellegarde insulted Yves the other day.”

  “He yelled at me, too, for nothing. What happened? Were you spying?”

  “Mais non, Katherine invited me to lunch and when we were leaving, M. Bellegarde hit Yves over the head with a plate. He broke the plate, too. Oh, it was so funny,” Jeannette said, laughing out loud.

  “Why’d he do that?” Brett said.

  “I don’t know, but I think Yves slept with his daughter. At least that’s what Papa says. It was so funny to see Yves’s face. I nearly died laughing.”

  “Weird,” Brett said. “You’d think old people would be over this stuff. I mean…” He trailed off.

  Jeannette snuck a look at him. His face was flushed and his lower lip stuck out. He was angry, which only made him look handsomer. For some reason, her breast tingled again, and she hit it lightly with her own arm to stop the sensation. “Your parents, do they fight?”

  Brett snorted. “Well, yeah. All the time. About everything, it seems. Don’t yours?”

  “My mother died when I was a little girl. I’m sure Papa would get mad at her if she were here. He is mad at everyone. It is his way, I think.”

  Brett didn’t say anything and Jeannette hoped telling him wasn’t a mistake, that he wouldn’t stop spending time with her now that he knew. Hurriedly, she changed the subject. “M. Bellegarde is a Nazi. Mme Pomfort, the lady who owns the church garden, she says so.”

  “Isn’t that stuff old history?”

  “Sure,” Jeannette said, hoping she had chosen the right word in English. “He’s German, anyway, and Mme Pomfort, she hates all Germans. She says the people who live next to her are German sympathizers, although Papa says she only says that because they are fighting about the church garden.”

  Brett picked at the plastic label on his skateboard, a cartoon of a Japanese boy with a cape. “I think we’re going to the beach next week,” he said. “Mom says we need a change of scene, or something.”

  “Lucky you. I’ve only been once, with my class. We were studying the war and went on a bus to Normandy. The water was so cold and the wind was blowing. Zut, but it was still fun.”

  “We’re going south,” Brett said. “You know, the Riviera? My mom says it’s like San Diego, really warm and sunny. My dad says he’ll rent me a motorbike. It’ll still be a bore. They don’t have surfing, he told me.”

  Jeannette wasn’t going to admit she had no idea what San Diego was, so she said, “Lucky,” again and remembered photos of a beautiful blue sea with palm trees and women in bikinis sitting on beach chairs. It was an ad for somewhere on the Riviera and she had promised herself she’d get there someday. And here was Brett, about to go but not at all excited. She had to practice being not excited when something good happened. Sadly, she didn’t have much opportunity.

  A car engine sounded somewhere in the village and in a minute, the Hollidays’ SUV pulled up alongside the pair. “Hey, kids,” said Betty Lou, rolling down her window and washing them with cold air and the smell of cigarettes, “what are you doing outside on a hot day like this? Brett, I need you at home to help me with something. Hop in.”

  Without a word, Brett opened the passenger door, threw his skateboard over the seat into the back, and climbed in. “Bye, sweetie,” Betty Lou called out to Jeannette as the car pulled away.

  Jeannette stood in the road for a moment, unsure. Brett hadn’t said good-bye or that he’d see her tomorrow. She couldn’t decide if he liked her or not. Was she too young for him? Would he like her better if she wore makeup or a push-up bra? She wished her best school friend lived in the same town so she could ask someone. It was hard sometimes not having a mother, although she wasn’t sure this was something girls talked to their mothers about in any case.

  “’Nette,” a man’s rough voice bellowed from somewhere out of sight. “Vite, come home and fix dinner, right now. The k
ids are hungry.”

  “Coming, Papa,” Jeannette called, and, shaking off her confusion, she ran down the hill. Sausage and fries, and after dinner they would all watch the dubbed American police show on the new TV her father had brought home.

  CHAPTER 4

  Katherine peered at a gangly rosebush that was losing its battle for morning sun to an aggressive hydrangea. She bent a stem of the larger plant back until it snapped, knowing that she wasn’t really solving the problem, but promising the timid rose more attention later in the month, after the vernissage, the opening party for her art exhibition. The offer of a solo show in her adopted country had been an extraordinary compliment. The gallery owners had spent several years in Los Angeles, which they felt created a bond between them and Katherine. Still, she had been taken aback at the challenge. Now, she was working hard to complete a dozen or so oil paintings of the Yonne countryside.

  Still brooding over the loss of her plate and the quarrel that had led to it, she wondered for the umpteenth time if she had been too quick to bring Penny into her small circle. When Penny had arrived two years ago, Katherine had welcomed another American and someone who spoke English comfortably. She sometimes retired to her bedroom with a headache after a trip to the veterinarian or the pharmacy from the effort of always having to speak and listen in another language.

  “We are interlopers, cat,” she said as she turned her attention to the climbing white rose that was heavy with scent and spent blooms begging to be cut. “Not you, of course, since you could not have wandered in from too far away. You are the real thing at least, a French citizen. You even meow in French, don’t you?” The cat rubbed up against Katherine’s leg as if to acknowledge the compliment. As she worked, Katherine stifled pinpricks of doubt about Yves’s ability—or perhaps it was willingness—to set aside his love of drama for the sake of harmony in the village after the debacle at the lunch party. The Bellegardes undoubtedly thought she had invited him to come.

  Maybe she had been too optimistic, but after suffering through two winters of loneliness made bearable only by Michael’s presence, Katherine had come up with a plan to be part of Reigny’s annual summer celebration, to be, in fact, responsible for the best show ever. She had put herself forward at every opportunity since early spring. She had begun by bribing the mayor’s wife with a shockingly expensive box of nougats from the best master candy maker, the maître chocolatier, in Avallon. Having gotten her to agree that it would be amusing to let Mme Goff organize the entertainment, Katherine had all but stalked her neighbors on market days in Ancy le Franc, Avallon, and Noyers. She had engaged in a campaign, with the anticipated victory taking the form of extravagant public praise and three kisses from Mme Pomfort when the event was over. Nothing else would do. Her future happiness in her adopted home depended on breaking through Madame’s formidable disapproval, and the fête was her one chance. Now, she wondered if it was a lost cause. Word of the debacle at Mme Goff’s house would be all over Reigny and it would especially shock the women who hadn’t been invited, never mind that they would not have come in any case.

  The phone rang. Michael might be out, bringing the garbage to the big bins in the village poubelle. She pulled off her thick gloves and hurried in the kitchen door, which flapped noisily behind her. Only nine o’clock and the flies were out. If Jean ever came back to finish repairing the roof, she would ask him to work on the doors so they stayed closed. Jean was a hard man to pin down, however, unless he wanted payment in advance, in which case he was there every day.

  Michael was sitting on a battered rococo sofa she had found at another flea market, one of the endless summer vide-greniers that peppered the landscape and attracted steady crowds to villages and towns all over Burgundy to examine bits and pieces from other people’s attics and storerooms, everything a potential treasure beyond price. He was leaning forward, reading a score propped on his music stand as he strummed a guitar. The phone was within reach, perched on a round table with intricately carved, if chipped, legs.

  “For heaven’s sake,” she said as she skirted the music stand and a sprawling dog, “why don’t you pick it up?”

  “What good would that do?” he said with a sheepish look. “I feel like an idiot because I have no clue what they’re saying. Anyway, it’s always for you.”

  “Except when it’s J.B. for you,” she managed to say as she banged into the table’s edge and yanked the receiver off its plastic base. She was tempted to let it ring, fearing it would be someone who had heard about the melodrama at the other day’s lunch and wanted a full account, perhaps one of the Parisian families that came down to their houses during the summer months.

  “Mme Goff ici. Oui, c’est moi. Is it you, Adele? Wait, I can’t understand. Slower, please.” As she listened, she began to flap her free hand faster and faster at Michael, signaling him to stop picking out chords and pay attention.

  “How could this be? Are you sure? Are you alone?” Her questions appeared to be shoehorned into slight pauses in her friend’s rapid speech. Michael sat back, laid the guitar on the seat next to him, and watched his wife’s agitated movements. “Have you called the police? Yes, of course we will. We’ll be right over. Five minutes, I promise.” She hung up and stood there, silent.

  “What’s the fuss about?” Michael said. “Somebody stole the ancestral silver?”

  “Michael, it’s awful news. I can hardly believe it. Albert’s dead. Adele wants us to come over right now. Honestly, she sounds like she’s falling apart.”

  “Poor guy, did he have a heart attack? He sure was riled up at your party.”

  “Adele says he fell down the stone stairwell. But then she seemed to be saying he was murdered. Of course, that might be my French failing me.”

  “Why’d she call you, I wonder?” Michael said. “Why not her daughter? I assume she called for an ambulance?” He sat with his hands on his knees, watching as his wife darted around the room, alternately scooping up and dropping sweaters and scarves appropriate to the changeable weather of a Burgundian summer day. She grabbed first one then another half-filled string bag, examining the contents of each.

  “Because we’re her friends. And she did call the mayor, and he’s sending Henri. You remember him, the sheriff?”

  “Don’t they have to call the regular police?”

  “I presume it’s Henri who calls the police or the firemen or whomever you call if someone has fallen down the stairs and died. It may be the mayor who calls in the gendarmes. I don’t understand the way the French handle these things, but it’s not as simple as it might be. And if he was killed … I really don’t know.”

  “Slow down, sweetie, you’re going to trip over an animal if you don’t take it easy.”

  Katherine did stop, pivoting in the center of the room. What was she looking for? she wondered. She needed to concentrate, but to do it quickly. Then she darted over to a hulking armoire under the stairs. “She needs us now. For all I know, she has called Sophie, but Sophie’s in Paris, and that means at least two hours, even if there’s a fast train leaving the moment she gets to Gare de Lyon. For heaven’s sake, what are you doing?” She stared as Michael ambled toward the kitchen doorway, which was framed by age-stained beams. Dusty bunches of dried leaves and flowers were suspended over the doorway, decorated by drifts of cobwebs.

  “The dogs have to eat if we’re going to be gone for a while. And I expect we won’t get out of there for hours once that woman gets going.”

  “‘Gets going’? Michael, her husband is dead. What can you be thinking? Let the dogs’ breakfast go.”

  “It’ll only take a minute. Anyway, I’m sure he wasn’t murdered.” Michael’s voice was muffled because it was coming from inside the open refrigerator, where he and the two dogs were searching for a bag of fresh bones from the butcher.

  “How can you be sure? You don’t like him. Yves doesn’t like him. I’m not sure who in Reigny does in particular, other than his wife, and I only assume she does. She’s n
ot very demonstrative.” Katherine fluttered around the crowded room with its stacks of dusty art books and eccentric, mismatched furniture, looking for the belongings she needed in order to make this decidedly unsocial call on her neighbor. Michael didn’t answer, which could have been because her point was well taken, or, she had to admit, because disliking someone wasn’t much of a motive for murder. She stuck first one, then another straw hat on her head, unpinned the silk flower from the discarded model, and stuck it on the one she wanted to wear. She stuffed a scarf, a plastic packet of tissues, and a sketch pad into her bag, muttering, “One never knows.”

  A few minutes later they were in the car, backing out of their driveway at great speed. Katherine never quite got used to the abandon with which Michael careened backward into what might have been a horrible car crash. For his part, Michael said he had supernaturally good hearing that would warn him if a car was hurtling toward the bend in the road right before the entrance to their driveway, screened at this time of the year by masses of tall hollyhocks and a quince bush as tall as a tree. Theirs was an uneasy truce in all matters of driving, and Katherine twitched as she always did and held her breath until Michael ground the Citroën’s machinery into a forward gear and whined noisily down the lane.

  The scene at Château de Bellegarde made Katherine’s heart lurch against her ribs. It wasn’t unusual to have a handful of cars parked on the gravel circle at the top of the paved driveway on summer weekend days, but the uniformed gendarme standing at the door next to the old portcullis was a first. So was the police car, which was parked at an awkward angle nearby. In addition to Albert’s car, she recognized the sheriff’s battered van, which was always present at official occasions in Reigny.

  “I was hoping that Adele was, well, perhaps imagining all of this. But if that man is here, it must be real.”