Blackbird Fly (20 page)

He emerges from the cellar holding the key to the
wine cave. It has always hung on a nail but now he will take it
with him. He tucks it into his inside jacket pocket, grabs the
carpet bag, and turns toward the alley where the truck is waiting.
He stops in the middle of the garden and walks back to her.

“
Tell no one about the wine, do you
hear? No one. Or I’ll beat the livin’ shit out of you, woman.” His
breath is sour and again he is unsteady. She wonders if he will
drive on the road wherever he is going, or will end up in a
creek.

“
I have seen her. The girl, heavy
with your child.”

He is clear for a moment. Furious, but clear. “What
the fuck do you care?”

“
You must help her. Send her
money.”

His chest rocks as if he laughs but no sound comes
out. He will not help the girl. He has used her and thrown her
away, just as he has Marie-Emilie herself.

“
You must care for her, for the
baby. You are not so cold, Weston, that you would abandon them in
these terrible times.” She tries to reach him, to find something
inside him that is good and decent. She offers him one last chance
to be honorable.

He drops the bag and grabs her shoulders roughly. He
opens his mouth as if to agree, or disagree. But he can’t. He
doesn’t care enough for that.

His fingers dig into her back. For a moment she
thinks he will kiss her, as in goodbye. As in, we are finished
forever. She could take that. She would welcome it. But instead he
shakes her, gives her a push that sends her backward. She trips on
a rock and sits down hard on the ground.

As he pushes the gate open, she begins to cry.

Chapter 22

Before the birds were up, the inspector and his team
knocked on the front door. Merle answered, already dressed, and
stood between her sleeping son and the forensics crew as they
tramped through the house and out the back door. Before she had
time to comb her hair the workman from
Electricité de France
arrived to set up her service. Hallelujah.

In the back he climbed up a pole in the alley. He had
an excellent view of the
pissoir
where three men dressed in
white coveralls, gloves, masks, and paper hats filed in and out.
Merle watched from the gravel patio, chin resting on her hand.
Fernand and his son arrived with white plastic pipe, ready for the
big day. Water and electricity in one day? It was too much. She
needed coffee. She went inside to rouse Tristan for his daily trip
to get breakfast.

As she shooed him out the door, another man appeared.
“It’s the roofer.” Tristan introduced them then ran off down the
cobblestones to the patisserie.

Perhaps the first Frenchman close to her own age
she’d met — the village seemed overwhelmingly elderly — who was
also taller than a postbox. Probably had bad teeth. She stuck out
her hand. “
Bonjour
. Call me Merle. You speak English?”

“
Yes. Your son tells me you are
—“

Jean-Pierre Redier, the gendarme, knocked loudly on
the front door. He spoke rapidly in French to her. Pascal’s dark
eyes rounded as he translated. “He says he needs to speak to the
inspector?”

Merle led the gendarme through to the backyard and
closed the door. Pascal leaned against the stair, arms crossed.
“This is a busy place.”

“
You don’t know the half of it.” She
motioned upstairs. “Come on, I’ll show you the inside
first.”

The broken door sat propped against the wall. Plastic
covered the broken windowpanes. But the room was showing
improvement. The guano quotient was way down. Only a white powdery
sheen and a dank odor remained on the armoire and bed.

“
Before I work inside, I must fix
the hole outside.” He walked to the window. “If there is room for
my ladder.”

“
You arrived late,” Merle said. In
the garden the inspector and gendarme were having a lively
discussion, waving hands, smoking cigarettes, as the crew bagged
bones. “A little discovery in the
pissoir.”

Pascal smiled — his teeth were just fine — and wagged
his finger. “That is not a nice word for a lady, madame. Say
latrine
, or at least
la pissotiere
.” He looked again.
“What is it they found?”

“
A human skeleton, it seems. A bit
spooky.”

“
Ah. Very Edgar Allan Poe.” She
squinted. “You know. The Cask of Almontillado.”

“
You’ve read Poe?”

“
My English isn’t so bad,” he
countered. “Now, madame —“

“
Call me Merle. It’s Pascal, right?”
She had laid a hand on his forearm. His muscled tightened and she
pulled away. “How long do you think it will take?”

“
First, Merle.” He smiled as he said
her name. Was her name somehow humorous? She remembered the
laughter of the boys at the tabac. “First the smoke bomb.” He
patted his canvas bag. “No more birdies.”

Merle drank her coffee, ate her croissant and yogurt,
and watched the hive of forensic technicians take photographs, bag
evidence, and talk. The EDF man was efficient, now that he’d
finally arrived, hooking up the meter at the house and the
electricity on the pole. Fernand swore at the crowd. By noon the
refrigerator and stove were working. Pascal climbed Albert’s
ladder, dropped a smoke bomb in the hole in the roof, and sent the
pigeons angrily on their way.

Tristan and Albert left in the afternoon to practice
fencing. Merle walked to the grocery and stocked up on food, made
herself a salad and cheese plate, and ate it on the patio under a
cloudy sky. When the forensics crew returned from lunch she took
the inspector aside.

“
Did you speak to Sister Evangeline
about the death of Justine?” she asked.

He answered something, too fast, and she urged him to
speak “
plus tard
.” He repeated it slower, that he had spoken
to a woman who knew Justine. “Not Sister Evangeline?”

He shook his head, staring in his inscrutable way.
The stains on his shirt had increased, and his tie was a mess. The
forensics team was finishing up, packing their kits. Merle
continued in her blundering French. “She stopped me on the street.
Two days after Justine died. She looked different, with brown hair,
not gray. I think the gray hair was false.” She didn’t know the
word for ‘wig.’

He smoked his cigarette, waiting for more.

“
She gave me the key to the gate,
there, on the alley. She said ‘they’ would kill for it.”

That got his attention. “They?”

“
I don’t know who.”

“
Can I see this key?”

She pulled the chain over her head and handed it to
him. The key dangled, large and old. He examined it carefully,
turning it over on his palm. Merle knew there was no writing on it,
no number or identifying mark. It was just a simple, old-fashioned
skeleton key.

“
She had a bruise on her cheek,
here. As if someone had hit her. She seemed afraid.”

The inspector puffed. “We were told she had left town
by the owner of the bistro.”

“
But I saw her.”

“
Thank you, madame, for the
information.”

“
Is there anything new about Justine
LaBelle? Do you know where she was from, who she was?”

“
She was from Bordeaux. She was well
known there. She had been in police custody.” He stared up into
Merle’s eyes, holding her look. “But she did not deserve her
fate.”

One of her Harlem clients, Freddie Wilson, came
suddenly into her head. She was trying to get off the streets,
clearly a working girl with the gaunt look of a junkie, not unlike
Justine. They heard she’d overdosed. Merle felt she had ignored the
obvious, let down the woman and the entire community. Something
might have been done, should have, but sadly, irrevocably, wasn’t.
It had been years but the guilt, the remorse of doing nothing,
remained.

“
I agree, Monsieur. She did
not.”

Perhaps the inspector felt the same way, a little
guilty that the state had let down Justine. She felt his eyes on
her back as she walked to the house. Pascal was coming down the
ladder after putting a temporary cover over the hole to keep the
birds from returning. She waited for him at the door, her jaw
working angrily at the inspector’s implication.
He doesn’t know
me
. Was he testing her, seeing if she looked guilty?

The roofer stood silently, watching her face. He
looked at the inspector watching them both with eyes like slits.
Merle gave him a last glare and turned to Pascal.

“
I hear a glass of wine is
recommended to all workers, if you want them to come back
tomorrow.” Just looking at him made her feel better, like all of
France didn’t have the wrong idea about her motives. “
Monsieur
le couvreur
?”

He took her elbow, turning her toward the kitchen
door. “You promised to call me Pascal.”

An older woman opened the door of the church offices,
simply dressed in a flowered blouse, but elegant in that French
way. Merle had seen her with Albert. Her gray hair was pulled into
a chignon, her blue eyes danced over the visitor with the peach
paint under her nails.

It was late morning the next day. She’d left Pascal
tied to the chimney, high above ground, and the plumbers busy
laying pipe. With progress at the house, Merle allowed herself a
few hours off. She introduced herself to Mme Beaumount, said she
had relatives born in the village and made her request to look at
parish records. “
De naissance, mariage, décès, par example
.”
Births, marriages, deaths.

Merle stuffed a five-euro bill in the donation box
and was led back into the church, down stone steps into a small
basement room. Mme Beaumont waved a hand at the shelf of volumes.
“Quelle année?”

What year indeed. The records went back three hundred
years, at least, assembled in a series of large, leatherbound books
lined up on a wall of shelves. She pointed to the next to last,
printed in gold with ‘1900-1950.’ Mme Beaumont set it on a wooden
table. She gave her a pair of thin white cotton gloves and
disappeared back up the stairs.

Merle switched on the gooseneck lamp and pulled her
notepad and pen from her purse. The room must have been specially
sealed because there was no smell of mildew or rot, even with all
these old pages in the basement. The gloves were thin and baggy but
would keep the old pages clean.

She took a breath. Here were births, confirmations,
deaths, banns, and marriages, as well as other curious notations.
Families, generations, descendants. She began in the thirties,
scanning down the lists written in a black curlicue flourish. Here
were Andres and Jeans and Danielles and Jacquelines. But the name
she was looking for was Chevalier.

Albert’s baptism, 1943. A Laurent Chevalier, baptized
in 1919. And his sister Josephine in 1920. Josephine was confirmed
in 1931 and apparently her sister, Marie Madeleine, in 1933.
Another Chevalier was baptized in 1929, Marcel. His parents were
Frederic Chevalier and Angelique Leduc, neither of whom showed up
anywhere else.

What about the sender of those letters? The name
Dominique was common; she found it on almost every other page as a
mother, a child, a man. Without a last name it was impossible.

1948: Marcel Chevalier again, married in the church.
He and his wife had a child who was baptized, and died, on the same
day in 1949. She wrote his name on a separate page of the notebook:
“cousin to M-E?” There was the mayor, Michel Redier, born in
1949.

What relative had given them the house? She didn’t
know. Were Marie-Emilie and Weston married here? Born here?
Confirmed here? It appeared not.

Merle ran her gloved finger carefully down the
listings, ignoring her stomach. Slipping the heavy book back onto
the shelves she pulled out the last volume, “1950-2000.”

The pages were crisper, less speckled by moisture and
time. The same delicate handwriting, flourishes and all, until 1953
when someone new took over, with a less flamboyant hand. It was
easier to read, though less pretty.

Where was Harry’s birth? That was odd. There were
births that year, 1950, several in May, but none named Harold. Had
they changed his name? But not a single birth on his birthday, May
30
^th
.

Another Redier, a boy born in 1951, to the same
parents as he-who-would-be-mayor. She scanned through the end of
the 1950’s and half through the ‘60s and closed the book.

Back at the house she found Albert, Pascal, and
Tristan drinking wine in Albert’s small yard. They had both garden
gates propped open to watch for her. Fernand and Luc had laid all
the pipe, connected it to the water line, and began re-filling the
trench. They had left already but not without this message, relayed
by Tristan. “Tomorrow they’re coming early to punch through into
the house. Fernand warned us to be out if we don’t like noise.”

Merle took the small glass of wine Albert handed her
and sat at the table. “Where does he propose we go?” She took a
sip. “This is good, Albert. What is it?”

“
Château Gagillac, of course. Have
you forgotten your appointment tomorrow?”

Merle sat back. She didn’t forget appointments, and
yet. Her calendar mind had fled. She wondered if she’d get it back
when she went home. “I don’t know, Albert. I know nothing about
wine and the brother—“

“
Gerard.”

“
He’ll realize it, won’t
he?”

“
He speaks no English. You speak
very poor French.”