Blackbird Fly (26 page)

Was it possible to hide from your own life, from the
prescribed steps, the set-in-stone trajectory? Was it possible to,
say, change your name and live in France and be a completely
different person, one your parents wouldn’t recognize, someone
carefree, a nature girl, a
bon vivant
? Was it possible to
forget the people you leave behind, those who nurtured and loved
you, those who made you who you were? If you wished, wished, wished
hard enough, would your fairy godmother, or an ogre-ish old widow,
give you a string of magic pearls that would transform you into
somebody who could do such a thing? A woman who could decide
absolutely and exactly what would make her happy, right there, on
the spot, and then actually do those things, without compromise or
regret?

She sighed under the pillow. How old do you have to
be to stop believing in fairy tales? Because she didn’t think she’d
actually reached that age.

Good old practical Merle. She would see what was
right, what was necessary. She wouldn’t flinch from duty,
responsibility, a promise made at an altar. She would carry on. She
wouldn’t — no, she
couldn’t
change. She was who she was.
Haircuts be damned.

Moonlight was not a string of pearls. She wasn’t a
princess, or even a
bon vivant
. She was the clear-eyed one,
the sensible child, the one who would clear her name, sell the
house, and go home.

Chapter 27

Gerard stood a good half-mile out, deep into the
vines. Rogers found him at last, after tramping over the rocky
ground for fifteen minutes. Even in the twilight, the stars popping
out, the old boy was out coddling his piss-poor vines, some so old
and rotten they should have been pulled years ago. Gerard had a
fantastic vision of himself as some sort of maestro of wine-making.
As if he knew how to look for noble rot and the precise moment the
grapes were ready. Rogers knew more than this French peasant did,
and he lived in the Big Smoke.

The only smoke Gerard knew was from his cigarette. It
led Rogers down the row in the dusk. The Frenchman looked up at the
sound of the crunching of soil under his feet. He stared, the tip
of his cigarette glowing. Rogers stopped and caught his breath.

“
How’s the season going then?” he
said to be friendly. They had to trust each other, at least a
bit.

“
Pas mal
,” Gerard grunted. He
wore that stupid smock again like he was auditioning as a mad
scientist in a B-movie.

In French Rogers said, “Are you ready then? Have the
gasoline?”

Gerard took a draw of his cigarette. “In good
time.”

“
This is a good time. You don’t want
to be buying it right before. It’ll look suspicious.”

Gerard shrugged. Rogers bit down on his molars.
Idiot
.

“
Just so you have it in time. What’s
that American woman doing out here?”

Gerard brushed past him, his long legs headed back to
the house. Rogers turned, skipping to keep up, stumbling on a wire.
He growled as he caught himself, swearing. Gerard didn’t turn back.
At the house he went inside and shut the door in Hugh’s face.

And locked it.

Rogers knocked. “Come on, old man. Let’s have a
little parley.
Ouvrez la porte
.” He didn’t dare raise his
voice this close to the buildings. He looked around the yard and
shrank into the doorframe, knocking again.

Odile answered the door. She didn’t like him, never
had. If Gerard was the silent, brooding type, he at least could be
counted on to carry through with the plan. He had the rebel in him,
and that was enough to get him to go along. Odile was not so solid.
She suspected Hugh of having motives. Which of course he did have
and he wasn’t about to share them with a haggard old wreck of a
Frenchwoman.

“
Mr. Rogers,” she said. “Or should I
say Mr. Simms. I’m sorry I can’t ask you in. I’m in the middle of
something.”

By the look of her she was in the middle of washing
dishes, or plucking a chicken. Her hair had come loose in damp
strands around her face. She wore plastic gloves, yellow ones,
slipping them off now and slapping them on her thigh like a
bullfighter. He took a glance at her steely blue eyes and stepped
half a step back.

“
Quite all right, Odile. Turn off
the porch light, would you?” She snapped it off, leaving them in
the shadows. The last light clung to the western sky, a slash of
violet. “That’s better. Now, what about this American? You can’t
have her out here snooping around. It’s dangerous.” She shrugged,
the French answer to anything they disliked hearing. “Why do you
need tours anyway?”

“
For the money of course.” Her voice
was disembodied in the gloom.

“
Then do them yourself.”

“
It is your people who want to see
the wineries, the English.”

“
It can’t be lucrative, Odile. What
do you get, ten euros a head?”

“
Twenty, plus the wine they
buy.”

“
Twenty? Really. Enough to pay off
the mortgage, is it?”

She breathed out noisily. He’d made her mad. He’d
been right then, Odile held the purse strings while her crazy
brother puttered around with the grapes. But Gerard would do as he
was told. If you kept your thumb on him.

“
We count on you for that, Mr.
Rogers. You were to pay us for our expenses so far and we have seen
not a sou. The bottles come tomorrow and who is to pay for
them?”

“
Don’t worry about things like that.
Just get rid of the American.”

“
As soon as you pay us. Where is the
money? How do we know you have it for us? We have bills to
pay.”

“
So you’ve said.” He searched the
dim light for her eyes. “Get rid of her, Odile.”

Chapter 28

When Pascal arrived at eight-thirty, Merle was
dressed in jeans, shirt, and bandanna covering her hair. She waved
him in as she left for the post office, logging onto the internet.
A tiny postman named Charles called to her: “
Madame Bennett?
Vingt-cinq , Rue de Poitiers?
” He held out an oversized white
envelope. It was from the lawyers, McGuinness and Lester, Esq.,
postmarked a week before.

Back at the terminal she had two emails, one from
Tristan at camp. He was fine, he said, and he hadn’t hit anybody
yet. The weather was cool and damp. He was canoeing most
afternoons. She wrote that she missed him, and would bean him
herself if he got into another fight. The other email was from
Annie, making plans to come to France. She was excited and still
hoped to bring Tristan with her if she could get Bernie and Jack to
pay for the ticket. Merle wrote back with her credit card number
and told her sister not to bother their parents.

At the patisserie she bought herself a croissant and
a café au lait, and opened the envelope. Inside was Harry’s second,
secret will, a legal-size document only three pages long. A note
from Troy Lester was attached.

“
Merle:Annie made me do it. Also
enclosed are what was left in W.S.’s files. Hope you’re doing well
over there. T.L.”

She pulled the file out of the envelope. It contained
only a few papers. The first three were yellowing invoices for wine
and armagnac from Weston Strachie’s Mediterranean Import-Export
Company, carbon copies of the documents in the file she’d gotten at
the will reading. All were dated 1953, to two liquor distributors
in the U.S. and one in England, all describing cases of wine they
had ordered. The last piece was new to her, a letter also from late
1953, from a New York distributor, a name that matched one of the
invoices — Empire Warehouses. A demand for a shipment partially
paid for but never received. Empire threatened legal action.

Had Weston been sued? Was the wine in the basement
the same wine mentioned here? She reread the invoices. No,
different vintages. He might have lied to the distributors about
what he was importing, but that didn’t make much sense.

Merle picked up the will.
‘Sound mind,’ my
ass
. Harry left Courtney Duncan, and her daughter, Sophie, who
he acknowledged as his child, the pension fund and the apartment on
12th street. Nothing new. Furniture, gifts, jewelry. Hold on. Harry
also left ten cases of Bordeaux to Courtney, bought through a
British company. Was this the man who had called? Atlantic
Investments, it sounded familiar. He had been rather nice on the
telephone, considering a big investor was now both dead and broke.
Mr. Rogers, like the sweater-and-sneakers guy.

Ten cases could make a nice nest egg if the bottles
aged well, and lasted until Sophie went to college. What was the
wine in the basement worth? Pascal had called it a jackpot but she
had assumed that meant a jackpot of flavor. Maybe he meant it was
worth a fortune. How did you sell a stash of wine like that?

Pascal. She had left him alone in the house. He
didn’t know about the wine in the basement — did he? The hair stood
up on her neck. Was that why he was so quiet last night, he had
plans to steal the wine? Maybe he was loading it in a truck right
now. She stuffed the papers back in the envelope and jogged back to
rue de Poitiers.

As she unlocked the front door Pascal’s boots hit the
stairs. As she relocked the door he stood at the bottom, covered in
plaster dust, his hair and eyebrows white as snow.

“
I’ll be back in a couple hours.
Après dejeuner
.”

“
You’re filthy. Would you like to
wash? In the garden?” The bottom half of his face the only clean
area on him. He must have covered it with a scarf. “You should
clean up,” she said. “Come on.”

Peeling off his shirt he lowered his head while she
pulled the chain on the cistern. He ran his hands through his hair,
his neck, eyes, ears, then washed his hands. Merle handed him a
towel. The sun glistened off his shoulders and chest, not an
unwelcome sight. He dried off, shook his shirt and pulled it back
on, and went out the back gate.

Merle stood in the sunshine, staring at the white
footsteps he’d left in the dirt. If he’d been searching the house
while she was gone, he made a good cover of plaster dust. He knew
where the trap door was. She ran upstairs to see how much work he’d
gotten done, and found a huge pile of debris under the ladder. He’d
been up in the attic, cleaning out the birds nests. Twigs,
feathers, guano: delightful.

She shut her bedroom door tight and walked back
downstairs. She hated to think it but she couldn’t take chances.
Pulling up the trap door she unlocked the wine cave. The bottles
were all there, except for the three she’d taken upstairs. She
breathed a sigh of relief and locked it all up again.

Outside she moved around the flowers, watering.
Pascal was just a worker, not a thief. That was a relief, and
enough. She was moving around the wisteria when she did a
double-take. A rose bush she’d never seen before sat in
newly-turned earth. It hadn’t been there yesterday. Planted next to
the white clematis vine, by the wall.

The soil was still mounded and soft around the woody
stem. A tag dangled from its base, a label: “Reine de Violette.”
Queen of Violet. A purplish-red blossom rose toward the sun. Who
had planted it — Pascal? She stalked the edges of the garden,
looking for new plants. There was a new, tiny clematis, almost
invisible, in the northeast corner. A tiny row of marigolds next to
the stoop.

She spun around, heart pounding. Someone else had a
key to the garden.

The gendarme stood on his steps, locking the door to
the tiny police bureau as she rounded the corner. Lunchtime, time
for his card game. He blinked a few times as if trying to place
her. This new hair had its devices. “Madame,” he said, nodding.

“
Bonjour.”
Damn, in French
.
“Do you know if Madame Labelle had friends or relatives, here in
the village?”

He wiped his mouth, narrowing his eyes. His shoes
were suddenly fascinating. “
Non. Pourquoi
?”

She’d been trained to spot liars, and he was one. She
told him someone had gotten into her garden. Someone who had a key
to the gate. “Did she have any relatives here? Or maybe a close
friend.”

He brought his dark eyes up to hers and bid her good
day. He walked away in slow, steady strides, the swagger of
authority as universal as mother’s milk. Off to his juicy,
card-playing lunch. What had he lied about? Justine had relatives
here in town, or friends? Did he know who had the key to her garden
gate?

She knocked on the door of the gendarmerie but no one
answered. She’d have to suss out the inspector elsewhere. As she
walked back through the streets, she looked at the faces that
passed. Was one Justine’s friend, or a cousin or a sister? They
stared back, unsmiling, looking through her as if she was
invisible.

Pascal returned about one-thirty from lunch. Upstairs
the sound of pounding started. Downstairs she looked over the will
and invoices again, spreading them out with the other papers she’d
gotten from the lawyers. Weston Strachie had made some distributors
angry. He hadn’t delivered his wine. Maybe he meant to deliver
these cases mentioned, maybe he had paid for the wine in the
basement with these men’s money. Maybe he’d had problems with
customs or something. It didn’t make him a thief.

She spread her hand over the will. Not again today,
she thought. Reading about Harry’s devotion to Courtney and Sophie
was too hard. She folded it and put it away.

So, back to work. Next on the list: the rug. She
opened the trap door to the basement again. The place gave her the
creeps, but since they’d found the wine it had begun to look more
pleasant, a disguise of filth and vermin to keep out intruders. The
stairs creaked as she stepped slowly under the floor, sweeping the
flashlight around the dank, earth floor and the mossy stone walls,
eyes peeled for furry rodents.