Love & Death in Burgundy

by Susan C. Shea

  “And J.B. thought he’d like to buy a rock music studio? That sounds bizarre.”

  “Yeah, well, not to J.B. He was probably here today to ask for something.”

  A breathy voice from the edge of the driveway called out, “Bonjour, Mme Katherine; bonjour, M. Michel,” and the bushes parted. Jeannette bounded out and across the gravel, her halo of curly hair aglow in a sunbeam, her long tanned legs flashing. “You saw the body, yes? Was there the blood everywhere?” The girl’s eyes were alive with curiosity and her smile was guileless.

  “Where on earth did you come from?” Katherine said. “How long have you been here?”

  “Shoo,” Michael said, with mock sternness. Katherine knew he thought Jeannette was a good kid overall, although he insisted she had Katherine wrapped around her little finger with her angelic looks and her Frenchness.

  “There’s nothing to see, and if some of the old ladies in town see you poking around, they’ll have fits,” Katherine said. It was true that Jeannette and her siblings were the collective black sheep of the village, a pack of wild things who stole the cherries off the trees and teased other people’s dogs to distraction. Michael had sent them home a half-dozen times when they came to see huge Gracey, “un ours noir.” A black bear, they tried to convince the littlest boy, whose mouth gaped in a combination of fear and wonder.

  Jeannette slid her eyes to Michael for an instant but threw an arm around Katherine and nuzzled her.

  “No, no,” Katherine said, trying to disentangle herself, caught between impatience and sympathy for the girl, who obviously wanted to be involved in any drama that might add excitement to her otherwise too-predictable days. “You’re too much, child,” she said with a laugh. “We have to go home, and no, we did not see M. Bellegarde. Now go away.”

  “I saw him,” Jeannette said in a stage whisper. “I saw him last night, from my hiding place.” She pointed back to the wooded area.

  “Well, it happened later. The poor man fell in the night, long after you were in bed, cherie. Now, let me go. We have to leave.”

  Michael, already in the car, signaled his intent to leave as he normally did, by starting the engine and putting the car in gear. As it chuffed to life, Jeannette backed away, grinning, and raced down the driveway.

  “Where does that child get her energy?” Katherine said, piling her hat and carryall on her lap. “Although, I suppose what really worries me is what she does with it all.”

  Michael had a hunch, but he was sure Kay wouldn’t like it, so he didn’t mention J.B.’s hotheaded son, who seemed on the prowl for something or someone to relieve his boredom.

  CHAPTER 6

  Finally, something exciting. Jeannette could hardly wait for the boys to fall asleep, exhausted, hot, and sweaty, in their beds. Her father was sleeping in front of the television. She knew he wouldn’t wake up until the middle of the night, and then only to stumble to his bed. He wasn’t a bad father, she thought as she snuck down the stairs and slipped through the door into the darkness. She had read about fathers who bothered their daughters or whipped their sons, and her father did nothing like that, bien sûr.

  As she walked quickly along the road, she fingered the cadeau, the gift Brett had given her. She hoped it was a token of his love, although all he had said was, “Here, want this?” as he grabbed her hand and pressed the old shell into it. When she asked him where he got it, he just shrugged, and leaned over to brush his lips against her cheek. She could still feel the place where their flesh had met. Now she kept it in her pocket as a reminder of their romance, although something made her think it would be a good idea to put it in her secret hiding place.

  Tonight she wasn’t on a spying mission exactly, like the ones she had told Brett about. This time, she had to check on something she thought she had seen, and she couldn’t tell anyone. Someone else was taking a walk, because she heard footsteps on the road. There was no one in sight when she turned around. It was probably the new people, the guy with the jug ears and the wife who looked like a farmer already. They took walks in the evening, she knew. Hardly anyone else in Reigny came out after dark for some reason.

  The crickets were quiet at this late hour. As she ran on tiptoe up the Bellegardes’ paved driveway she heard an owl hooting in the woods. There were lights on upstairs in the château. There was also a bright light over the doorway arch, which made it harder for her to poke around without being seen. She eased into the darker area under the trees to think. She wanted to look around in the high grass next to the driveway, where she and Brett had been skateboarding. Maybe the light would be turned off soon.

  Ten minutes later, she sighed. This was boring. Maybe she could go out to the grass. No one was looking out the windows, after all. Suddenly, the hair at the back of her neck prickled. What was that sound off in the trees behind her? She turned her head quickly, but there was only silence and dark. A rabbit perhaps. As she turned back to the upstairs windows, wondering if the body of Monsieur was still there, laid out under the blanket like in a movie, there was more rustling behind her. This time, she thought she heard a breath too. Did rabbits make breathing noises? The time she found a baby rabbit next to the road and brought it home, it had been silent. But then, it had died soon after, so maybe that didn’t count.

  A moment later, a twig snapped nearby and with it came a slight grunting sound like no animal that she could think of. Perhaps the murderer had come back to check on his work? Or to get rid of anyone who might have seen him? Because Jeannette believed Monsieur had been dispatched by someone. Everyone in Reigny said so even if they didn’t agree on who did it. Did that mean she had seen the killer, maybe even knew him? She shivered at the idea.

  Then, out of the darkness, something touched her shoulder. It was a human hand on the bare skin of her arm. The blood rushed to her head and her vision blurred. She screamed and, unable to think, thrashed her way out of the trees, running at full speed down the driveway, hearing someone running behind her, maybe speaking, maybe catching up.

  She rounded the bend into the village, gasping and crying, and threw herself into the house. “Papa, Papa,” she shouted.

  Her father stirred, staggered to his feet, and started shouting too. She skidded into him and hugged him tightly, weeping. She knew he was asking her all kinds of questions, but she couldn’t get enough air to answer at first. She looked over her shoulder at their courtyard, which was empty except for pacing and yapping dogs. The boys had woken up and were staring at her openmouthed from the stairs.

  When she calmed down, she assured him she was all right, that she had thought a fox was in the yard and had gone out to shoo it away so it wouldn’t try to grab the puppies. But it had lunged at her. It was big, bigger than a fox. She brushed her tears away.

  Her father shook her gently. “Ah, ’Nette, the dogs can take care of themselves. Anyway, it was only a barn owl. They swoop in to get the mice that hide in the grassy edge of the yard, you know that.”

  But as she drifted into sleep an hour later, she again felt the touch on her shoulder and heard the sound. It wasn’t simply an owl, it wasn’t an owl at all. She shuddered and pulled the thick blanket up to her neck.

  CHAPTER 7

  The next day was hot and sultry, the humidity high enough to suggest rain was on the way, although the puffy clouds were white and innocent-looking. Katherine was too restless to paint. Michael had come outside to practice. “Tell me what you think, Kay. I may be too rusty at this to know if I’ve got something good, but I kind of like it.”

  It was good, a ballad with the right mix of wistfulness and spirit, a lament for an absent lover who might or might not be worth chasing. When he finished singing and the last notes of the guitar faded, Katherine said, “Bravo, Michael. I already want to hum it. Will you sing melody if you do it with Betty Lou?”

  “Don’t know. Her voice is stronger than mine. If we wind up doing it in a key she’s comfortable with, I’m likely to let her lead and I’ll stick with backup. You kno
w, I haven’t sung much in a while.” He gathered the sheet music he’d made notes on and stood up. Coming over to her, he kissed her full on the mouth and looked into her eyes. “You’re still the best critic I’ve got. You’d tell me if it was crap, right?”

  She put her arms around his neck and laughed. “I would, I promise. When it’s crap, you will hear it first from me.”

  He grinned, reached around to slap her rear end lightly, then disentangled himself from her embrace and said, “And with that, I shall go and present it to J.B. He’s actually a pretty astute guy when it comes to this stuff. If you like it, and he likes it, Betty Lou will go for it.”

  “Hooray, and while you’re working on it, I’ll be trying to turn my current painting, which is crap at the moment, into something half as good.”

  * * *

  After he left, the dogs settled in for naps under the lilac bushes, and Katherine realized she was feeling at loose ends. It wasn’t that she expected to be treated like Adele’s family and kept up to date, but, yes, she guessed privately that she did. After all, who brought Adele and Albert jars of homemade pear compote from last year’s meager harvest? Katherine had offered to paint a portrait of the elderly couple in a style suitable to be hung alongside Adele’s ancestors somewhere in the cavernous château. Pity they hadn’t at least gotten in a few sessions. She could have winged it after that, a skill she had picked up at art school on the numerous occasions when she overslept and missed a figure-drawing class.

  Albert was dead. Funny how the truth of it came and went like a light flickering on and off, causing her stomach to flip uncomfortably each time. She wished she had taken the time to get past his prickliness. He had intimidated her with his frown of disapproval and air of superiority. She couldn’t recall an occasion when he had been more than civil, polite in an impersonal manner, as if she were one of those tourists one put up with only because one had to. But he had occupied space in the village and in her mind, and now that space was vacant and called attention to the missing person in unsettling ways.

  They couldn’t see Château de Bellegarde or the road to it from their house, so Katherine was hampered in what she could learn about events merely by watching. She might take the dogs for a walk. Katherine wasn’t snooping, she told herself. She cared about Adele, and she worried about Sophie’s ability to be a significant help to her mother. Sophie was not a strong person. She was pale, ate like a bird the few times the families had dined together, and hardly said a word. Katherine sometimes thought Sophie might be unstable. No, nervous was more accurate. Someone who was easily startled and perhaps moody. Definitely not someone who was going to be much help to her mother in a time of crisis, especially if she was still feeling the blow of being romantically rejected by Yves.

  Thinking about the bookseller irritated her. How could she have thought him so charming when she and Michael had arrived in Reigny-sur-Canne? He had dropped in on them while they were trying to figure out how to light the strange wall heater, which was so old that the faded and peeling instruction labels were illegible. Yves brought them a nineteenth-century edition of an Émile Zola novel, which Katherine was delighted to have in order to improve her French reading skills. “So much easier to get caught up in than the daily scandals and misdeeds that Le Monde chronicles week after week,” she said in thanking him when she returned the visit, driving the short distance to his poky little bookstore. He was charming, a great teller of amusing stories about the village and its history, and able to converse enough in English so that she didn’t spend entire evenings translating for Michael. He became a regular solo dinner guest, having explained that he was a confirmed bachelor and did not believe in the institution of marriage.

  That should have warned Sophie, who must have indulged in a dream of wedded life anyway. The pickings around here are pretty slim, poor girl, Katherine thought. As soon as they were able, the children of Reigny fled to larger towns or to a city, as young people everywhere do.

  That made her think about Penny, who surely came to the town expecting something different. No charming restaurants, no antique shops or patisseries, and no people her age except Yves. She spent carelessly, without understanding precisely the difference between euros and dollars, which the numerous contractors and suppliers realized at once. She signaled that she was willing to show off her house if people wanted to drop by. But Katherine and Yves were the only people who took her up socially.

  That Penny had not quite graduated from Cleveland’s finest college after returning from a botched freshman year at Wellesley was not lost on Katherine, but not widely known among her Reigny neighbors. What was known was that Penny’s indulgent parents had had the good taste and generosity to die within months of each other before Penny turned thirty, leaving her the brick mansion she grew up in, several million dollars, and, when all was said and done, no reason to stay in Cleveland. After choosing a high-rise apartment in Chicago and touring Europe’s major cities, she had decided she must have a place in France. A persuasive real estate agent found a lovely country property in Burgundy, nestled in the heart of the wine country and only a few miles from the fast train to Paris. Penny had jumped at the chance to possess a seventeenth-century stone house for what had seemed like a bargain price.

  Katherine smiled at the recollection of Penny’s indignation when they first met. “They have to move an entire stone wall to make the bathroom big enough to turn around in, and there’s one dinky little outlet in the kitchen and no place for my dough maker.” Her eyes had begged Katherine for sympathy and Katherine hadn’t had the heart to tell her what life was going to be like as she pushed and pulled the charmingly decayed mill house into her decorator magazine ideal. Deaf to subtle hints, Penny created small and large waves, casually disregarding the status quo, territorial lines, and delicately defined social order that kept the village functioning. Her constant references to superior American workmen may have gone over the heads of the Polish work crews who came for the summer, but probably not her local plumber’s.

  “She really ought to lay off the comparisons, at least when the neighbors are around,” Michael had whispered one night while they were enjoying a meal cooked to perfection on Penny’s gas grill, sitting on Penny’s new flagstone patio. Katherine had shushed him, in part because Penny had opened a Chablis Grand Cru, which was ambrosia to someone who could only afford vin blanc from the nine-euro bin. Katherine did not like to bite the hand that was feeding her so well, at least not during the meal. This latest business, going after Yves when poor Sophie finally seemed to have landed him as a boyfriend, was an insult to the entire town, une scandale.

  “Come on, animals, let’s go out and see what’s been happening in the neighborhood. I can’t gossip all by myself.” The dogs struggled to their feet, probably puzzled. Katherine liked them well enough, but they were Michael’s animals and he was the walk master. Still, anything to get outside and catch the newest smells. “We’ll sniff around at the old quarry, shall we?” Katherine said, snapping on their leashes as she planned a route that would lead them past the château’s driveway and give her a chance to peek. “When Michael gets home from rehearsing, we’ll be ready with the news of the day.”

  The château was quiet and there were no cars visible in the drive when she walked past. The dogs were still engrossed in their investigation of the old quarry path fifteen minutes later when Katherine yanked on their leashes and turned them for home. As they emerged onto the narrow paved road, someone in the distance waved at Katherine, who squinted, not sure at first who it was.

  “Hallooo,” the voice called, loud enough to make the dogs stop and turn their heads. Pippa jogged up to Katherine and explained that she had heard about M. Bellegarde’s death and wondered what had happened. She had been informed by the woman who owned the food shop, the épicure vital, in the nearby village that was part of the same commune, that there were a lot of policemen and maybe someone was arrested? “Was he murdered?” she asked with an eager stare.
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  “No, it was an accident,” Katherine said, startled to hear in Pippa the same quick assumption as Jeannette’s. “Albert Bellegarde fell on the old stone steps in the château, or, at least, that is what the police think at the moment. He was quite old, you know, and probably a little fragile.”

  Pippa’s shoulders slumped and she grimaced. “I was afraid of that. There aren’t many murders around here, are there?” At Katherine’s look of shock, she covered her mouth with her hand. “You must think me terrible. I am sorry, of course. He was so upset at your party, wasn’t he?” She rearranged her face into a socially acceptable degree of gravity. “I have to make up crime stories, but since my French isn’t good enough to read the newspapers here with any hope of accuracy or detail, I’m starved for real events to get the juices flowing, don’t you know?”

  “I hadn’t thought about where writers get their ideas, but surely you can use your imagination? If not, I would think living in London or Paris might be more inspiring, if that’s the right word. And you’re young,” Katherine added. “I wonder what keeps you in a town that is pretty much lived in by old people.”

  “I wouldn’t have a free home otherwise, would I?”

  “You own that little house?”

  “My father bought it ages ago. He and my mother were going to fix it up, rent it out in season, you know? But she died and he doesn’t leave his flat in London at all. Walks the dog, watches telly, and orders Indian takeaway. If I were in London, he’d want me to come over every evening and make tea like the dutiful daughter I’m not, sorry to say.”

  “How sad. You must miss your mother.”

  “She was distressed when I got so tall in the fifth form at school. She used to tell me to scrunch down when I walked or I wouldn’t find a husband.” Pippa shrugged. “We weren’t really close.”