Chris looked at his father, shrugged both shoulders, held both palms up, frowned, a wiseass series that said, how difficult could it be to just ask? He glanced at David who gave him an I-told-you-so single-shoulder shrug; I had told David the same thing earlier in the day.
Chris pressed the second boy forward. “This is my friend, Gus Dauvin.”
From Gus I received only the handshake and a shy smile.
“Maggie,” Antoine said, eyes sliding toward his son as he pronounced my name, “may I present Gus’s father, Inspector Pierre Dauvin of the regional office of the Police Judiciare.”
“You’re friends?” I hesitated as I reached for Dauvin’s extended hand.
“Of course. We were in school together,” Antoine said. “As our boys are now. We played football together, like these two. Only better.”
He suggested that the boys get back to work—it was nearly dinner time—and that the adults retire to the arrangement of sofa and chairs in front of the fireplace at the far end of the room.
Dauvin and I made our way toward the chairs. Antoine went to a sideboard and, as he filled three glasses with cider from a stoneware pitcher, he spoke with David, in French. “I told your mother that I will get the croissants in the morning and pick up Grand-mère Marie; she is making the soup. Are you able to get the bread for lunch? Take my car.”
“I’ll go, Papa,” Chris chimed in. “Just give me your car keys.”
David flipped a pencil at him. “The world trembles at the prospect of you behind the wheel, Chris. Yes, Antoine, I will get the bread.”
“Nice kids,” I said to Dauvin as we sat down, proud that I had understood their exchange. Maybe my French was coming back; I had learned French easily, and had as easily lost it. Dauvin nodded and smiled, but obviously he did not comprehend what I said. I tried again, dredging up my fragmented vocabulary. He smiled again, but I doubt that I made myself understood. I was relieved when Antoine joined us.
First there was the ritual of sampling the cider—it was made on the estate, by Antoine—and compliments delivered, before he took the chair facing us.
It was clear to Dauvin that my French was not adequate to understand the message he carried—he never faulted his lack of English fluency—so he agreed that Antoine should stay and translate. But first he swore his old friend to secrecy: The reason he wanted to speak with me here instead of at Grand-mère’s house was that no one else was to know until after the funeral tomorrow that there were questions about the manner of Madame Isabelle’s death.
Antoine seemed sincerely shocked—I watched for his reaction—when it was explained to him that Isabelle’s death had not been an accident caused by some wild California driver, but something more sinister. Dauvin assured us that the police—the LA County Sheriff, Interpol, and the Police Judiciare—were actively investigating, had been through all of last week, but discreetly for the moment. The case was complicated, of course, had presented some unusual difficulties, he said, but several avenues were being pursued, and there had been some success. He would not give us any of the specifics, but he did tell me that I must be cautious, and gave Antoine the obligation to be not only my protector but the protector of the entire Martin family. My cousin’s shoulders went back and his hand reached out and covered mine. Of course, he said, no need to worry.
Dauvin looked into Antoine’s face, the concerned expression of an old friend. I understood enough of what he said next to figure out that Isabelle’s death reminded Dauvin of the event that took away Antoine’s mother, the angel of the house, three years ago. Except that Isabelle had not been driving a car, and no one had dared to suggest suicide. I also understood that Dauvin was worried. When he realized that I understood the gist of what he said, he blushed.
There was a ruckus at the front door, a confusion of female voices speaking at once, shoes hitting the floor, the sound of a ball bouncing. A teenage girl a few years younger than Chris and Gus, all coltish legs and energy, entered the room dribbling a soccer ball between her stocking feet. She lifted the ball with a toe and bounced it off her head. Antoine reached out and scooped the ball from the air before she could catch it.
“Lulu, Lulu, think of your poor mother. Football stays outside.”
“Allô, allô.” Lulu kissed both her father and Dauvin, and stopped in front of me, eyes wide, eager face still rosy from the outdoors.
“Say hello to your cousin,” Antoine said.
“Call me Maggie.” I rose to exchange cheek kisses.
“Hello.” She turned to give her brother a quick wiseacre glance; the big question had been answered. “Maggie.” Then she looked back at me. “Do you have children?”
“Yes. My daughter Casey will be here tomorrow.”
“How old is she?”
“Nineteen.”
I saw her disappointment. “How old are you?”
“Fourteen.” She shook her head. “I am the baby of the family.”
A woman, speaking in rapid French, came in carrying a pair of muddy soccer cleats and an armful of jackets. Obviously, this was Antoine’s wife, the mother of Chris and Lulu. She was a surprise to me: thick, curly dark red hair blown wild by the wind, flashing green eyes, wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. When she spotted me, she stopped in mid-sentence.
As she came toward me, I met her halfway. I offered her my hand and my cheeks, and said, in my best French, “Hello, I’m Maggie MacGowen.”
“I know,” she said in perfectly unaccented, very rapid American English. “Good to meet you, at last. My folks—they grow peaches outside Fresno—record all of your TV programs and send them over to us. When Tony and I were in college he told me all about you, the mystery child. Such a great story. We talked about looking you up and dropping in on you. We didn’t know where you were going to school—I think we’re the same age, forty-three?—but we knew where your family lived and it wasn’t that far away.”
I looked from her to Antoine. “Far away from where?”
“From campus,” she said, offering a dazzling smile that gave evidence of expensive American orthodontia. “Tony and I met at Davis—University of California at Davis, Ag School.”
Again I turned toward Antoine. “I had no idea.”
He shrugged, smiled. “I always had a weakness for California girls.”
“And California fruit-tree propagation.” She put her hand on my arm. “I’m Kelly, by the way. And just so you know, I’m not the only foreign bride in this tribe, if you were wondering why they deign to speak English from time to time.” She leaned toward me and lowered her voice. “Wait till you meet the other one. As they say over here, oh-la-la.”
“Aaahhh.” At the suggestion of that other one, Lulu gripped her throat and performed a death spiral, dropping onto her father’s lap and burying her face in his neck. She pleaded, “Promise me, not her. They aren’t coming are they?”
“Of course they are,” he said, smoothing her tousled auburn hair. “And you will be a gracious hostess, or I will scalp you.”
“I won’t share my room with Jemima.”
“Of course you will,” Kelly said, ignoring the dramatics. “Upstairs to the shower, Lulu. Dinner is in half an hour. David, maybe you should wrap it up. Those two studmuffins can absorb only so much calculus at a sitting.”
Dauvin stood to exchange bises with Kelly, after which she bent down to kiss her husband. “Freddy drove in right after me, Tony. You should take Maggie over and introduce her.”
Antoine nodded, pried himself from his daughter’s arms and out of his chair.
Ready or not, I thought, time to meet Freddy.
Antoine and I walked Dauvin to his car to receive his last words of caution, condolences, and good-byes. Dauvin handed me his card, a stiff piece of cardboard printed with raised police insignia, and told me that tomorrow he would be at the funeral and at Grand-mère’s house afterward for tea. But if I wished to speak with him, I should not hesitate to call at any hour. He assured me that he was sincere w
hen he said, call at any hour. Then he aimed a questioning finger at Antoine. He nodded; of course, his translation services would be available at any time, as well.
As Dauvin drove across the compound and out through the gate in the stone wall, I looked up at the turreted entrance to Antoine’s house and asked, “What was here before this?”
“Until recently, a simple house; I grew up there. My parents took down the burned-out ruins of an old stone barn that once held the cider press and the Calvados distillery and built a home on its foundation.”
He put his hands in his pockets and resumed his elegant slouch, a posture that said he was thoroughly comfortable with himself and with his place in the world. And, maybe, with me.
He said, “Shall I tell you the story about what happened to the barn?”
“Yes, please.”
“It isn’t a pretty story, but it might explain some things to you about our family and about this place.”
“I would like to hear it.”
He took a breath and began. “During the war, the last one, my grandfather, Henri, was in the French army, as his father had been during the Great War of 1914, and his grandfather had been when the Germans invaded in 1871. Three generations, three German invasions.”
We began to walk slowly across the compound toward Isabelle’s house to meet Freddy. “So, in the early months of the last war, the Germans captured my grandfather and put him into forced labor, but he managed to escape. For a while, some members of the Resistance hid him in the crawl space under a house in Belgium. They helped him with fake papers and he eventually made his way home. But, when he arrived here, he discovered that this region was under German occupation, and to make the situation worse, there were German soldiers living in his house.” Antoine pointed his chin toward Grand-mère’s house. “Local girls were impressed to cook and clean for the soldiers, and...”
He hesitated, uncomfortable, obviously searching for the right words. I said, “They took the girls to bed?”
“That’s a delicate way to explain a very ugly situation, but yes, that will do.” He canted his head back to indicate his house behind us. “In the old barn, cider and Calvados were stored in barrels on the ground floor, and upstairs there was a dormitory for the workers. The girls stayed there. My other grandmother, Grand-mère Marie, was among them.”
He smiled gently. “I believe you met her grandaughter, my cousin Julie.”
“David’s mother?”
“Yes,” he said. “So, Grand-mère Marie was very young during the war, not much older than my Lulu is now.
“At night, the Germans, drunk on the cider and Calvados they had with their dinner, would come out to the barn looking for more to drink, and for the girls who lived upstairs.”
He took a deep breath. “My grandfather was furious that the village tolerated the situation. He went storming into the village to gather the men together to attack the Germans, but the only men left were either very old or very sick. So, he went looking for Grand-mère Élodie. They were already betrothed, and she was already working with the Resistance. He found her hidden in a convent in Lessay, protected by the nuns.
“Grand-mère and Grand-père came up with a plan. First, they collected knives from the farms around, sharp little pruning knives and the ones used to castrate bulls and horses. Grand-mère sneaked into the barn and instructed the girls how to use the knives to rip a man’s jugular out of his neck—and whatever else they chose to rip out. She told the girls to give the soldiers plenty to drink with dinner that night, and to invite them out to the barn afterward for a village celebration of the bottling of the new season’s Calvados—a local tradition, they were to say.
“That night, when the Germans came to the barn for the celebration hoping for more drink and village girls, they did not leave again.
“It is said that some of the soldiers were only dead drunk but still breathing when Grand-père marinated them in Calvados—fifty-proof stuff—and set the barn on fire. All that alcohol made a magnificent fire, so big and so bright that it became a bit of a legend around here. Grand-père destroyed his own barn to reclaim his estate and save its people.”
Antoine looked at me, smiling wickedly. “People still say a lot of good booze was lost for a noble cause that night. But the truth is, it wasn’t good booze. During the war, with no fertilizer, no chemicals to treat leaf mold and root rot, no oak for new brandy barrels, the Calvados made better fuel for a funeral pyre than it did a good drink.”
“Quite a story,” I said. “I’ll remember to go to bed tonight sober and to lock my door.”
He laughed. “Don’t worry. You aren’t German. Around here, Americans are the heroes who kicked out the Huns for good, remember?”
“But does anyone think of me as the invader?”
He shrugged. “We’ll see, yes?”
Feeling uneasy about his answer, I moved on to another topic. “Does Isabelle’s house have a story?”
“Not a very interesting one,” he said. “She took down an old storage shed and built a model of energy efficiency long before that became a fad—you could say it has a zero-carbon footprint. At the time she built it, she was working at the nuclear power plant nearby at Flamanville, so it was convenient for her and Freddy to live here for a few years. Later, it was a weekend house for her.
“On the outside, the house looks a bit sterile, but it is really very nice. Very comfortable and efficient, cheap to maintain. And there’s a greenhouse in back.”
“What was she like, Antoine?”
“Your mother?” Both shoulders came up: what can be said? We were no longer walking, but standing in the middle of the compound, facing Isabelle’s house. “She was very brilliant, and maybe because of that she could be impatient with people who weren’t as smart as she was. And, of course, none of us was smart enough to keep up with her in some things, except maybe David and Grand-père; she was very close to both of them. But she was never cruel intentionally, but sometimes—” He thought for a moment, his eyes on the house but his mind some distance away. “Sometimes, she could be erratic. My wife described her as a space cadet. Do you understand the expression?”
“My father was something of a space cadet, too.” From Antoine’s description of Isabelle, I could see where Dad might be added to her short list of acceptable people. My dad was the smartest person I ever knew, but he could lose his way between the campus and our house, a distance of a few blocks.
“Also, I think that both your mother and my father inherited from their parents a very strong will.” Antoine looked down, making arcs in the gravel with the toe of his shoe. “For example, when Grand-père and Grand-mère wanted their property back, nothing could stop them. In that case, it was called heroism. But, in another situation, that force of will could be called, simply, stubbornness.”
His description, sympathetic but not sentimental, was helpful to me. My very brief meeting with Isabelle showed me how determined, how willful, she could be when she wanted something. Or felt she was entitled to something? I would have to work on that.
Antoine, eyes still downcast, sighed deeply. “Your mother criticized my father for building what she thought was, in her words, an unsustainable, inefficient throwback of a house that was neither historically representative nor esthetically pleasing,” he said. “On that, my mother agreed.”
“Your mother wasn’t happy here?”
“On the estate, yes, of course. She grew up here. Her parents grew up here.”
“Here, on this estate?”
“No, the property adjoining,” he said with a wide sweep of his hand toward somewhere in the dark. “But she thought Papa’s house plans were horrible.”
“And he was stubborn about them,” I ventured.
“Exactly,” Antoine said. “Before the house was completed, my parents separated.”
“Because of the house?”
His head came up. “More because there was another woman. You will meet Gillian later tonight, I think
. They’re coming over from London.”
We were still a few yards from Isabelle’s front door. I was freezing, but tried not to show it because I wanted Antoine to keep talking. I sensed that there were things he needed me to know, for his benefit as well as for mine. I rolled my nearly numb hands into the bottom of my sweater, using it as a makeshift muff.
“What does your father, Gérard, do?” I asked.
“He’s a developer, always working on a big scheme, he and Gillian together. He develops properties and arranges financing. She is an estate agent—she markets the properties.” He pursed his lips, shrugged, frowned, meaning he did not think much of his father’s schemes, and probably not much of Gillian, either. “Usually, they work on big commercial projects. But their latest one is very personal.”
I thought of the ugly house: one house didn’t make a big project. I asked, “What is he working on?”
“He wants to take out half of the farm operations to build a large subdivision here. He can’t sell the land, of course, because it belongs to the family, to all of us. But he can offer leaseholds, if we agree.” He looked at me, wanted my reaction. When I winced, he nodded, and continued.
“Over the last decade, many thousands of British retired people have migrated to France—to many parts of Europe, actually. For years their pound was so valuable against the euro that they could live like princes over here on their pensions, almost twice as well as they could live in England.”
“So your father wants to develop a community for English retirees?”
“Yes. Complete with a golf course.” Antoine scowled. “He calls the development Le Vieux Château, the old château. On the prospectus there is a drawing of the house—hardly old, is it?—and some bragging about the Calvados and Camembert we make here. But of course, they would no longer be produced by us if he gets his way.”
I was appalled by my vision of ranks of identical stucco houses with faux turrets tacked on the fronts, all built around a frozen golf course. “Grand-mère agreed to this?”
“No. Never. But Papa still thinks she will come around. Or, forgive me for saying this, she will die first; Grand-mère is almost ninety.”
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