Love & Death in Burgundy

by Susan C. Shea

  The quarry pool? If Jeannette wouldn’t feel she was intruding, perhaps that would be a new adventure for the dogs. Michael had never mentioned a pool during his dusk walks. As she ventured down the dirt road, not entirely sure where she was headed, she heard a voice raised and another weeping in the distance beyond a fork in the road. There was a trodden path up a short hill that looked more direct. As she reached the summit and looked over the tops of the greenery, she saw Jeannette, her back to a break in the rocks and, below it, water that reflected the gray of the clouds. The girl’s bare arms were tightly crossed over her chest, and she was shaking her head. Whoever she was talking to was hidden from Katherine. Brett, come to say he was leaving?

  “Non, non,” the girl said, loud enough for Katherine to hear, and took a sudden step backward.

  CHAPTER 26

  Katherine looked around for a way down that would advertise her presence so she didn’t appear to be snooping, but it was too overgrown with dense, tangled brush. She would have to backtrack. She turned and was halfway down the path when, through some branches, she saw the SUV.

  “Cock tease,” he had called her in gross language, hadn’t he? “A heartbreaker,” in more conventional terms. But the characterization had been the same, and now Katherine was afraid J.B. hadn’t been talking about her effect on his son. She hurried down the narrow path, stumbling over a large rock, pulling on the dogs’ leashes when they stopped to sniff something, and found she was short of breath when she got to the quarry road. If J.B. was threatening the girl …

  Jean was walking, slowing up from the other road through the rocky outcropping, wiping a dusty arm across his brow, looking the worse from a night of heavy drinking and a day of stone cutting.

  “Jean, vite, come quickly. Jeannette may be in trouble.” She pulled on his arm. He seemed not to understand. The dogs, sensing her anxiety, began to bark and look around in confusion for the cause of the trouble. From down the road, Mme Pomfort walked slowly over to the church wall nearest the commotion, peering at them.

  “Come with me. Urgent, tout de suite.” She was calling forth her French, which, perversely, was disappearing when she most needed it. She hoped the commotion wouldn’t push J.B. into doing something that would put the girl in danger, but she didn’t know what else to do. She’d feel like an idiot, of course, if J.B. was only there to let her know Brett was leaving town. But Brett was perfectly capable of doing that himself, even if he had to skate over on that rickety board of his to find her. What if there were some other reason J.B. was meeting Jeannette?

  She spun back in the direction of the quarry pool, pointing.

  “Madame, what is this?” a voice called. Mme Pomfort was sailing toward them, a trowel in one hand and a bunch of wilting leaves in the other, a malicious gleam brightening her dark eyes.

  “Jeannette. I think Mr. Holliday is … is … trying to…” She couldn’t say it, but it was clear Madame had an idea. The expression on her face underwent an extraordinary change.

  “Vitement,” the old woman said to Jean, ordering him to hurry in a hissing voice not to be disobeyed, and pushed him in the direction Katherine had pointed to, giving him some instructions that were uttered too fast for Katherine to understand. He took off at a fast walk. When Katherine looked back, Mme Robilier had trotted up to the intersection of the paths, doubtless eaten by curiosity, enough to overcome her dislike of her foe. Reigny was normally so quiet, so completely placid that any stirring of leaves and dust was an event to be milked for all its drama. The two women spoke quickly to each other in high, excited voices, and Mme Robilier nodded before heading for her house at a fast walk.

  “She will call the sheriff,” Mme Pomfort said firmly. “Now, let us see what’s happening to notre petite Jeannette.” Untangling a leash that had wrapped itself around Katherine’s leg, she marched ahead toward “our little Jeannette” with Fideaux, who, perceiving power where it manifested itself, was sufficiently impressed to trot along beside her without stopping.

  By the time Katherine and the bearlike Gracey and the rest of the small rescue party reached the quarry pool, J.B. had backed up, and Jeannette was under her father’s protective arm, crying softly.

  “Easy, pal,” J.B. was saying, holding his arms in front of him. “There’s nothing going on here. Tell him, Kathy,” he said as he turned and saw her coming. “The man’s behaving like I’m some kind of criminal. Tell him to back off.” He attempted a grin, but it faded when he saw the look on Katherine’s face.

  “Verge,” Jean snarled, using a French term for “dirty old man” that Katherine knew only because she had used it once to describe the weedy grass at the edge of her yard, causing Emile to sputter because he thought she was referring to him. Fortunately Yves had been there at the time to provide the vocabulary lesson.

  Now, she strode up to J.B., made braver by the dogs, who had picked up the cues and were giving the producer their fiercest looks, and by the presence at her back of the woman who, at her angriest, resembled the Wicked Witch of the West. “What are you doing here, J.B.? Why have you been bullying Jeannette?”

  “Come on, now,” he whined, “what’s the matter with the bunch of you? I came over to let Jeannette know Brett won’t be around for a few weeks. Big deal.” He ran one hand through his hair and looked hard at the girl.

  Jeannette peeped out from her father’s protective shoulder and said through her sobs, “Non, non, Katherine, that is not what he say to me.”

  “Is he threatening you?” Katherine said, feeling herself grow a couple of inches taller as righteous anger overcame her. Gracey, in her large, shaggy blackness, began to growl. Katherine came closer to the producer. “J.B., have you come on to this … this … child? Have you touched her?”

  “Touched her? Get a grip,” J.B. said, his voice an octave higher. “You mean do I have a hard-on for her? What a joke. Are you crazy?” All evidence of the friendly business partner was gone, and in his place Katherine saw a stranger who had some kind of agenda with Jeannette that she didn’t understand.

  “Jeannette?” she said, and everyone looked at the girl.

  Seeing that she was physically safe with her father, the intimidating Mme Pomfort, and her friend Katherine all there to protect her, Jeannette wriggled from her father’s grasp and pointed to J.B. as she spoke to Katherine. “He know what I saw. He tell—told—me not to say what I saw or he make trouble for me.”

  Mme Pomfort stepped forward to stand in front of Katherine. She still held her trowel, which she used as a pointer, first poking it toward J.B., then toward Jeannette. “Child, you must tell us what you saw. En français. This is not a time for secrets, tu comprends?” Katherine wondered if she was imagining that Madame’s voice softened at the end of her question. Mme Pomfort, who had been unwavering in her dismissal of the entire family only last night?

  J.B. made a move as if to advance on the girl, but the dogs, having figured out what was required of them, barked in unison and stood at sharp attention. Mme Robilier’s voice, as out of breath as if she had run a five-kilometer race, came from behind them. “We took the keys from his car. My Maurice has them, don’t you, dear?” Her husband looked a bit disheveled, as if he had been roused from a nap, but he patted his pocket and smiled at them from where he and Mme Robilier stood.

  J.B. looked around. Truly, he was cornered. His bulk made the notion of running up and over the hill on the narrow path impossible. Jean was flexing his considerable biceps, the old woman with the trowel looked ready to use it, and Katherine was blocking the road.

  “Tell them, Jeannette,” Katherine said, not taking her eyes off J.B.

  “Brett’s father, he was at the château late the night Monsieur died. I saw him from the woods.”

  “For Pete’s sake, the police know I was there. I was meeting with the guy around dinnertime. This is nuts.” J.B.’s face was turning a dangerous shade of purple.

  “What happened?” Katherine said when the girl faltered.

&nbs
p; She started talking faster now, in French, which Katherine struggled to understand. “I told you, he came back later in the night, when everyone was sleeping but me. I saw his car parked at the bottom of the driveway before I had to get home.”

  There was a gasp from Mme Pomfort, and Jean gave his daughter a sharp look, but no one spoke, not wanting to stop Jeannette’s account.

  “But before he got in his car the first time he went there, I saw Brett’s papa throw something into the woods.”

  “The gun,” Katherine said triumphantly.

  Jeannette looked surprised. “No,” she said, in English this time. “No, I see—saw—something shiny and I find it later.”

  “Of course,” said a new voice, in ringing tones. “The murder weapon.”

  Everyone turned toward the speaker. Pippa, a walking stick raised like an exclamation point, returned their stares, her shining eyes focused on the music producer. “I knew it.”

  “Murder weapon?” J.B. said, incredulity in his voice. “No one’s been murdered. Have you lost your minds?”

  Katherine was confused. “What did J.B. throw into the grass?”

  She turned to look at Jeannette at the same time J.B. bolted forward. Jeannette screamed and stepped backward toward the pool as Jean leapt toward J.B. This time, he knew better than to aim at the fat man’s stomach. Instead, he pulled his arm back and punched it hard into J.B.’s face. The fat man crumbled onto the gravel at the same time the assembled women heard a screech and a splash as Jeannette hit the water.

  Because they couldn’t hear anything else above the noise they were making, yelling in two languages at once over the sound of two dogs barking, they missed the sound of the gendarmes’ car turning with a skid into the quarry road, known formally as the sinister-sounding Rue d’Enfer, or Road to Hell. The car stopped behind the SUV and two uniformed young men tumbled out and hurried over to the little crowd. Maurice Robilier looked as confused as Katherine felt, but then he always looked confused. Jeannette had a thick rope in her hands and was climbing out of the pool like a monkey, hair streaming wet. Jean stood over J.B., as did Mme Pomfort, whose trowel was aimed in the general direction of the American’s throat. Pippa stood a small distance away, taking pictures with her smartphone.

  “Oh lord,” Katherine said, waving her hands at Pippa to get her to stop, “that’s all we need. We’ll be on the Internet before supper.”

  The sheriff’s battered van arrived right behind the gendarmes’ car and he trotted over, talking on his cell phone and gesturing at his invisible audience.

  To a gendarme’s question about what was going on, everyone swiveled and started to speak at once. One gendarme stood over J.B., while Jean slunk as far away from the law as he could and still be present. Mme Pomfort was only reluctantly persuaded to aim her trowel somewhere else. Pippa tried to explain something, but her English rendered her account useless and the policeman trying to take statements waved her off. The second policeman was on his phone, presumably calling for advice. The dogs, however, could not be similarly persuaded to stand down. Their lives had little excitement and this was too good to give up.

  Another police car with a flashing blue light, driven by a woman in uniform, crept along the narrow dirt road and came to a stop. Lieutenant Decoste, the policeman who had drunk tea on Katherine’s patio only a couple of days ago as he worked to unravel the threads of rumor and fact presented to him by these same residents of Reigny, stepped out of the car, a puzzled look on his face. From what Katherine understood of his staccato explanation to the gendarmes, he had been on the A-6 from Auxerre to Avallon when he heard about the incident. No one was to leave without his permission, he said, before turning to the gendarmes for a report. He nodded as they spoke in undertones, then turned to the assembled villagers.

  “Now,” he said in a stern voice, “what do you have to say?”

  This time, Katherine noticed, Mme Pomfort was not insulted but thrilled to be at the center of the police investigation. She would have stories to tell for months. Whenever Pippa edged forward and opened her mouth, Mme Pomfort stepped in front of her to block her way. Mme Robilier could hardly get a word in edgewise but was trying, lugging Maurice forward every few minutes until a gendarme finally noticed him waving J.B.’s car keys and accepted them with a polite bow. The sheriff paced a little ways off, still deep in his phone conversation.

  The lieutenant finally turned to a brooding J.B., who had gotten back up and was touching his bruised cheek gingerly with a handkerchief. “This is grave, Monsieur,” he said in English. “You are being accused by these people of causing the death of M. Bellegarde, of killing him. What do you say?”

  J.B. shouted, loud enough to be heard in every house in Reigny, “I didn’t kill anyone, dammit. Why the hell would I? He was about to lend me the money to buy my Memphis studio. We had a deal.”

  This last probably made more sense to Katherine than it did to the police, but could it be true? If he wasn’t creeping around trying to sexually ambush the girl, what was he doing here, threatening her? Because he’d definitely been doing that when she arrived on the scene. And he had just lunged at her.

  The policeman looked hard at J.B., then turned toward Jeannette, who had been silent. “And you, young lady, what is this evidence you found in the grass to prove M. Holliday killed him?”

  Jeannette edged over to the rocks bordering the pool, knelt in the grass, and then brought something over to the lieutenant, looking guiltily at her father, who had lit a cigarette and was watching closely from a distance.

  “What’s this, then?” the policeman asked, holding the shiny object up. “A key? To what?”

  Jeannette shrugged. “Je ne sais pas. I don’t know. It’s what he threw in the grass, that’s all I know. I found it. When I showed it to Brett at the café the other night, he said not to tell anyone. Brett told me to throw it in the pool when I wouldn’t give it to him. I thought I might find out what it opened.…” Her voice trailed off and her father stirred at his observation post. Best not to say too much about her hobbies.

  “So that’s where it was. Brett told me you had it. Damn him, anyway. Look at the mess he’s created.” J.B. ran his hands over his head as if to stimulate his brain into an explanation that would end the suspicion.

  “Brett?” the lieutenant and Katherine said at the same time.

  “My son, who doesn’t have the brains he was born with,” J.B. said glumly.

  “Brett? Are you saying Brett was involved?” Katherine said, totally at sea.

  An anguished voice from the bushes above the clearing startled everyone. “Let him go. My dad didn’t do anything.” A dozen heads swiveled as one and watched Brett Holliday slither down the hill, holding his skateboard and scattering pebbles and twigs before him.

  “And you are?” the policeman said, his voice somewhere between annoyance and curiosity.

  “This is my son,” J.B. said, looking at Brett through squinted eyes. “Don’t say anything, boy. This doesn’t involve you.”

  “It does.” He gulped and looked down at his board, picking at the frayed edge. “Sorry, Dad, this is all my fault.” He looked up at the policeman in charge. “I … I killed the old man, but”—his voice broke—“I didn’t mean to, honest. He was grabbing at me and I guess I panicked.” The boy turned his head back and forth between his father and the policeman as he spoke.

  J.B. groaned. The gendarmes moved closer to the teenager, the elderly women moved farther away, and Katherine realized what had been nibbling at the edge of her consciousness.

  “I took an old gun and some other stuff, just for fun. I was trying to put the bullets back in the case when he came out of a room and into the stairwell. I didn’t think … I mean, he yanked my jacket and I swear he was going to shove me down the steps. I just pushed him away. I didn’t know he’d fall.… I didn’t know he was dead.…” His voice trailed off.

  “But I saw your father,” Jeannette said into the sudden silence, unwilling to con
sider her first boyfriend in such a terrible light. “It was his car.”

  “Well, I was driving it. France is stupid. Back home, I’m allowed to drive.” He glared at the girl, relieved, Katherine thought, to be mad at someone other than himself, and worried sick about what his father was going to say about all this.

  “No, that was me,” J.B. insisted.

  Jeannette stuck out her lip. “It was dark,” she snapped.

  “C’est merveilleux,” Decoste said, clapping his hands together. “Marvelous, two confessions to the same crime. What more could I ask?”

  J.B.’s shoulders sagged and he shook his head. His voice was robbed of its usual bluster. “Look, I came over later, after Brett told me what happened. The old guy might have come to by then, for all I knew. I thought if I got rid of the key on the property, any investigation would stop there. I was shocked to hear Albert had died when I came over the next morning.”

  “You went back?” Brett said. “Dad? I thought you didn’t understand it was an accident.”

  “We will decide if it was truly an accident, young man,” the policeman said, fixing Brett with a look that made the teenager go pale. “Why did you come here now?”

  J.B. tried again. “Officer, he doesn’t know what he’s saying. We have a right to a lawyer. Son, don’t say anything.”

  “Excusez-moi,” the lieutenant said in a commanding voice, holding a hand up in J.B.’s direction. “I repeat, why did you come here today, young man?”

  “Because,” Brett said, pointing toward Jeannette, “she has the other old bullet, and I thought if I put it back with the rest of them and told her to keep quiet about it, no one would figure out it was me. But I never thought anyone would try to blame my dad. And I didn’t know where she hid the key until the other day.”

  Katherine murmured under her breath, “An old bullet casing. Why didn’t I recognize Jeannette’s good luck charm?” Pippa heard her from a few feet away and raised her eyebrows, but Katherine shook her head. Maybe later, much later.