Love & Death in Burgundy

by Susan C. Shea

  “Oh, he hates that idea. Says he’s too young to sing those old-fashioned pieces. Believe me, I tried that already. I wonder if there are any rock songs that feature accordions?”

  “Spare me,” Michael said, laughing. “The problem isn’t the instrument, I guess. It’s Emile; he’s not a musician. He’s a retired dentist.”

  Katherine paced. “That’s not the point. It’s not like you’re going to record with him. It’s for a day—no, not even that, an afternoon—and he’s been a good neighbor to us.”

  “He has?” Michael laid down his guitar, placed his hands on his knees, and squinted up at his wife. “I seem to recall him delivering a long lecture on how not to exit the driveway in a way that would leave tire tracks near his yard. And I distinctly remember the time he and his buddies got drunk and threw beer cans at our roof. You didn’t think he was such a great neighbor then.”

  “Poor Emile. You know he’s lonely, he’s never been married, and he wants to be liked. We all want to be liked, don’t we?” A picture of Mme Pomfort, her mouth turned downward in the mother of all frowns, flashed into Katherine’s head, and she sat down abruptly. “Oh dear, I think I’m doomed around here, Michael, I really do.” She took a long sip of her wine and proceeded to tell him about Jean and Mme Pomfort and the ultimatum.

  When she finished, Michael picked up his guitar again and started playing some chords quietly while he talked. “The old lady has a point. Get anywhere near that guy and it winds up being trouble. I know you like the girl, although I’m positive she took your iPod last fall. She’s in and out of the house all the time and never announces herself or asks if it’s convenient.”

  “I don’t think many teenagers would, my love.”

  “And she lies. J.B. said she told Brett her father used to be a policeman, which is a joke.”

  Now Katherine laughed. “It’s a stretch, I’d agree, but there’s no one else to talk to. I try, but all people do is look sideways at us in the café or the market. We’ve been here three years, Michael, and I miss having a friend.”

  “What about Penny and that idiot Yves? They hang around here all the time. And this summer there’s Betty Lou and J.B. No one’s gossiping about us, especially now that Albert’s dead.”

  “How would you know what they’re saying? You don’t speak a word of French. For all you know, they could be saying we murdered him.”

  “Maybe you should make friends with that English writer. At least she speaks the language, and she doesn’t have any friends either, as far as I can figure out. If you really don’t like it here, come up with another plan and I’ll make it happen—as long as it’s not L.A. again. But if you complain too much about Reigny, you sound like Penny.”

  Stung by his words, she gulped her wine and looked up into the pear tree. “I’m going to heat up the ratatouille and sausage,” was all she said, and she jumped up and took off for the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 16

  The next morning, still feeling bruised by her encounters with the neighbors and Michael’s lack of sympathy, Katherine walked to Yves’s bookstore. She rarely bought any of his stock, it was so expensive. She couldn’t afford a rare copy of anything, and looked only for secondhand copies of French novels, poetry, and translations of her favorite American authors. Yves carried a lackluster selection of these, usually leftovers from a purchase of better books. But she was restless today and, if she were to take Madame’s advice, she had better curry favor with Reigny’s acceptable citizens, starting with Mme Robilier, who worked part-time for Yves.

  The little bell tinkled as she pushed the door open—an affectation of Yves’s since he could see anyone who came in from his desk near the door. His chair was empty, however, and a worn cardigan was draped over the back. She heard voices and saw Yves and another man in the far corner chuckling together over something. He glanced at her and waved but didn’t come to meet her. A small woman with steel-gray hair in a matching gray dress with a blue scarf wound around and knotted at her throat appeared at the end of a tall bookcase, flapping her thin hands.

  “Bonjour, Madame,” she said, turning bright, black eyes on Katherine. “May I help you?” she said in English.

  We might be strangers, Katherine thought, instead of neighbors who see each other once a week while walking through the village. “Bonjour, Madame Robilier. Comment ça va?”

  “Not so good, Madame, not so good.” She was still speaking in English, which Katherine took as a put-down of sorts since her own French was surely passable for casual chat. “My rheumatics plague me every day, you understand? My husband tells me I must not complain, but, then, he is healthy always.” She said it like an accusation and did not refer to the fact that her husband was suffering from dementia and would be an unlikely source of informed comfort. “Are you looking for something special?”

  Katherine remembered that the American habit of asking how one felt was understood to be insincere at home, to be answered with something simple, like “Fine.” Not always so in France. Maybe it was the same most of the time, she thought, but if you ask an older person, at least, you had better be prepared to hear the answer. “Do you have any Balzac that isn’t too rare for my purse?” She smiled.

  “Balzac, you say? M. Saverin is quite a collector of Balzac. Let me fetch a few for you to examine.” She trotted off, still unsmiling, while Katherine sat obediently in one of the chairs that faced the desk, wondering what she needed to do to make Mme Robilier like her. Yves made no further move to greet her, still caught up with his other customer, a stranger to Katherine.

  Fifteen minutes and a shocking twenty-five euros later, she still had no idea how to get the prim woman with the perpetually fretful expression to smile in a neighborly way. The bookseller’s assistant had remained formal as she pressed a shabby copy of Lost Illusions on Katherine. Fitting, Katherine thought, and wondered if this was another veiled comment on her status in Reigny.

  The only clue came when Madame commented, seemingly out of nowhere, that she understood Mme Goff recently paid a call on Mme Pomfort. “One of my neighbors happened to notice—not me. I do not peer out at the comings and goings of the people who live here.” The unnamed neighbor had apparently reported that Katherine had been seen in the church garden on the church bench. Katherine thought she understood the implications. Mme Robilier was being upstaged by Mme Pomfort in some way that Mme Robilier was unclear about, but about which she was intensely curious.

  “Yes, I need flowers for the stage at the fête. You know I am in charge of this year’s entertainment, which I’m happy to help with.”

  Mme Robilier sniffed and muttered something about the general taste for ordinary flowers. Katherine left, feeling quite sure that she had to pay a call on the bookseller’s assistant right away and offer her a prime spot onstage for her blooms. How to do that without further incurring Mme Pomfort’s wrath she could not imagine.

  She got no enlightenment until Yves bounded up the garden steps an hour later, singing out his usual “Bonjour, Katherine,” as he came. He was, Katherine decided as she abandoned her fight with the cranky washing machine, which was refusing to spin with more than one towel in its basket, irrepressible, not unlike a toy she remembered from childhood, a scary-looking inflated clown doll that you were supposed to knock down. The damn thing was weighted so it popped back up immediately no matter how hard you hit it. At age nine, she had begged for the toy, but soon lost interest when she realized you couldn’t win against it. Her mother berated her for wasting such an expensive gift. Given that her mother was running through her husband’s disposable income faster than he could replace it, spending more on Johnnie Walker Black Label than on inflatable clowns and matching socks for her children, it struck Katherine as ironic later on when she was old enough to buy her own scotch.

  Childhood was overrated, she had often thought, and maybe her jaundiced view was the reason she had shied away from inflicting one on a child of her own. Lucky for her, Michael didn’t much care. Music
was—or had been—his life. Funny if he should find his way back to his dream at this time, after such a crushing blow to his ego.

  “Thank you for visiting my humble shop,” Yves said, pulling her attention back from her private thoughts. “I hope you will enjoy the Balzac. See, I have brought you another, which you will adore, as a gift.” He held out a small cloth-covered volume.

  “Buy one, get one free?” She laughed. Really, he was hard to resist.

  “Yes, well, I cannot help myself when someone as charming as dear Katherine comes calling.” He plopped into a wicker chair, shooing away the dogs who rushed over to be petted or played with. “Go, depart,” he said sternly, but in French, so that they merely grinned at him with open mouths and settled near his feet. “I wanted to tell you something,” he said, the smile disappearing, as she slipped into the other chair, “something about Mme Robilier. She was not warm to you, yes?”

  “Yes,” Katherine said, “I did notice. I assume it was because of the flowers for the fête. I felt I had to invite Mme Pomfort to supply them since I have been given the responsibility for the stage. I was told she always does the flowers and expects to be asked.”

  “Yes, well, she certainly does, and I think Mme Robilier had hoped you might upset that tradition. But that’s only a bit of it. Mme Pomfort tells anyone who will listen that the Robiliers are Nazi sympathizers from the war days. You may not believe it after all the years, but that is still a huge insult to a Frenchman.”

  Katherine nodded. “Mme Pomfort managed to hint about that to me. Surely if it isn’t true, everyone knows.”

  “It is not so simple. Mme Robilier’s dead father-in-law was of German extraction. His mother was German, and when they came to Reigny long ago it was to take possession of a parcel that had been in the French side of the Robilier family for many generations. So this German woman and her son were here when the Vichy government was in power. This area was Vichy-controlled, but the forests were where the patriots hid out, you know?”

  “Yes, I went to the Musée de la Résistance en Morvan to see the historical exhibits earlier this year. Such brave people.”

  “It’s not history around here. It’s as though it happened last week, you know? Nazi troops came through during the occupation, although they didn’t take over the town, stealing everything to eat, and shooting suspected spies, who were usually local farmers driven to join the Resistance, if they were even involved.”

  “If they were Vichy sympathizers, wouldn’t the Robiliers have been dealt with harshly? I’ve read terrible stories.”

  “There was no proof. The Nazis took everyone’s livestock and everyone’s milk. My great-aunt told me when I was a child that Reigny was so disrupted by the war that no one had the stomach to continue the violence a moment more. Better to forget and move on, although, in truth, no one has forgotten, only accepted that what’s past cannot be repaired. And I do not think the Robiliers were actively sympathetic, anyway.”

  “It sounds as though at least some of Reigny’s residents didn’t move on, not completely. I know about the fight over the church garden. I thought that was why Madame made such a point of saying it was the church’s garden where I sat with Mme Pomfort last week. The Catholic Church doesn’t own it, right?”

  “Precisely. The churches and lands were seized centuries ago. The Catholics use the church building but the state owns it. But there was some documentation long ago that awarded the land next to it, they say, to the ancestors of the Robiliers.”

  “An old wound. Are there papers somewhere?”

  “Yes and no. Papers, but not as clear as the Robiliers profess them to be.” Yves leaned forward. “My assistant says Mme Pomfort told the police lieutenant the other day that the Robiliers had some kind of Nazi connection to old Albert. It sent him to call on them, fishing for a possible motive for her husband to have broken into the Bellegardes’ château with the intention of doing harm to him.”

  “But that’s absurd. Madame’s husband is ill, everyone knows that. He can hardly get out of the house. I’ve seen her leading him to the church for the Christmas festival. How ridiculous, and how mean of Mme Pomfort.”

  “Yes, well, you can see how it might upset my poor assistant to be lumped together with the German in the château.”

  “You too? Poor Albert. He must have felt as though he had a target on his back half the time.”

  “Pauvre Albert, as you call him, says he was out of Germany by the time he was eight years old, but how do we know, eh? The elders here are a scarred and bitter bunch. You know Mme Pomfort has never invited any of the Bellegardes to her garden party the week after the fête. It bothers Sophie greatly.”

  “Oh, damn Mme Pomfort. I’m sick of hearing about her. Who said she gets to make up the rules?”

  Yves paused and raised an eyebrow. “But you do not know? She is related by birth, yes, by birth, not marriage, to a grandnephew of a Bonaparte. It is a distant connection, but quite correct.”

  “So? I’m related distantly to a lieutenant governor of Colorado, but I assure you my family never tried to run my hometown.” Not that being related to poor Horace Tabor would have counted for a lot, she added to herself.

  “Ah, but you are not French,” Yves said with a tight smile. “Here, these things matter. We are not as democratic as we would have you believe.”

  “Obviously.” Katherine sighed. “In any case, I don’t understand why your Mme Robilier should be so unfriendly to me. I have no part in all this social one-upsmanship.”

  “What is that word? Ah,” he said, waving Katherine’s attempt to explain it away, “Katherine, cherie, the lieutenant came to see you, too, and people are talking about your sudden friendship with the Bellegardes.” He shrugged.

  “Sudden? That is so unfair. No one else will have anything to do with me, as if I were an Ugly American, which I am not. If the Bellegardes extend a hand of friendship, I’m supposed to reject them, the only people who do? Other than you, of course.”

  “It is only that we—they, I mean—have to wonder why the Bellegardes bring you into their affaire.”

  “What can you mean?” Katherine cried out. “I’m beginning to think all of Reigny has nothing better to do than make trouble. Or, that you all hate Americans no matter how much we try to fit in. Maybe the police have other reasons to think Albert didn’t fall.”

  Yves stared at her. “But, you mean me? Penny said you mentioned me to the police. She is very upset with you.”

  “The police already knew you and he quarreled at my house,” Katherine said, wondering if this was why he was touchy. “The lieutenant asked me about it when he came here. I told him it was nothing. Surely Penny reported that to you while she was at it?”

  “But, dear Katherine, how would they know in the first place?”

  “Half the town was here, or at least half the women.” She didn’t say that it had been J.B. who first mentioned it in front of the gendarme. If the French had to stick together, she was beginning to think the Americans did also. J.B. was too important to Michael’s and her future to throw to the mob. “Our young English neighbor would probably love to conjure up a murder, but she doesn’t speak French, and anyway she hardly knows anyone in Reigny.”

  “Philippa knows me. She comes to my shop regularly to see if I have picked up any Maigret in English translation. Sometimes, if I see a cheap French edition of an Agatha Christie, I pick it up for her. She told me she practices her French skills on them because she knows all of the books in English. Are you telling me she believes someone killed the old man?”

  “Not really. Pippa is fantasizing, you know, making up a story. No one really thinks Albert was murdered.” Her words sat there, surrounded by silence. “Do they?”

  “What about the gun?” He looked at her from under his bushy eyebrows and she wondered briefly how he knew about the gun unless he had spoken with Adele. Then she recalled Sophie’s look of desperate, badly concealed concern. Of course. Sophie had told him.
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  “From what I heard, it wasn’t fired. It was thrown in the bushes.”

  “Were there fingerprints?”

  “How would I know, Yves? You can ask the gendarmes.”

  “Once the captain took on the case the Auxerre gendarmes became silent, which is too bad for me because a few of them are buddies from school.” He looked glum.

  “Have you been questioned? Are they treating you like a suspect?” She looked at him with new interest. Was Yves more than the local bad-boy flirt?

  “I was in Paris that night for a book event.”

  So Penny had said. But Emile thought he saw Yves fifty kilometers from Reigny. Yves was capable of flying off the handle, of childish behavior, and of a frequently expressed glee in getting even. That being so, Katherine chided herself, it hardly equated with trying to kill someone. “I’m sure you’re not a suspect, then, as long as your alibi is good.”

  “Alibi? Suspect? Merde, I feel I am in a police station at this very moment.”

  “I didn’t mean you are a suspect, Yves. Calm down. I was only saying that from the detective’s perspective, you’re in the clear.”

  But she saw the bookseller’s propensity for self-drama had been fired up. Yves disentangled himself from the dogs and prepared to leave. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said in an aggrieved voice. “I hope you enjoy the book.” And before she could protest further, he had retreated down the steps and out the gate.

  “Damn and blast,” she said, wondering how many residents of her new hometown she could insult in one day. She would call Adele, the only friendly face left, unless, of course, Adele had turned on her too. She picked up the book and headed in to the telephone, sorry that her disagreement with Michael the evening before meant she would not have as sympathetic an ear when he returned. He was, as always these days, deep in the studio work, twenty kilometers away. If this music project didn’t pay off, he would be disappointed, even if he’d never admit it. He was so armored against the hurt of the Crazy Leopards days. It had better work. She had seen and then promptly turned away from the bank statement last month. She wasn’t sure where the money had gone, but it was becoming obvious their nest egg wasn’t going to stretch far enough. A lot was riding on the album and the tour to promote it, more than either of them had admitted to each other.