A Provençal Mystery (26 page)

“Whoever it was, he was just trying to frighten us,” Roger said. “Or there would have been more shots. We should go back to the car.”

I stood, trembling—a delayed reaction. I felt exposed and fragile in that deserted village remote in time and space. Whoever had shot at us could be lurking behind trees or behind a wall. I leashed Foxy and we quickly gathered up the tablecloth and remains of the feast. Roger put his hand on my elbow, and, peering warily around huge rough rocks and through the bushes, sometimes crawling on hands and knees, we made our way along the stony path to the road. Though I was not hurt, a certain shakiness made me unsure of my footing and very careful. Once I thought I saw a shape behind a wall, but could not be sure. The glaring sun shone down on us like a spotlight, making us all too visible.

Once in the car, we rolled up the windows and locked the doors. Roger turned the key in the ignition and started up the engine. The radio blasted a sane outside world—a news broadcast —into the interior space of the car, and I was grateful for it.

Then suddenly anger surged through me. I literally saw red, a thin veil. Who had dared to do this?

“I think it definitely was Leach who shot at us,” Roger said, gripping the wheel tightly and looking straight ahead at the road winding before us. I knew if he loosened his grip, his hands would shake.

“Just because he said he was going to Aix? Why couldn't it have been Chateaublanc? Or his gardener?” I said, though I didn't believe my own words. I couldn't imagine anyone killing anyone. Not really. I wanted to keep talking to avoid thinking too much about those gunshots..

“Leach. Because of his hatred of Agatha,” he said

“You just found out about the possibility his mother died because of her? Is that why?”

“Maybe.”

“It's Chateaublanc,” I said. The rest of the way back to New Chateaublanc, like the characters in murder mysteries, we talked about the suspects—their motives, their opportunities—but reached no conclusions.

In New Chateaublanc, Roger parked the car, and we all got out. Then his big arms wrapped around me, and I moved my head to kiss him—his mouth was soft as a horse’s muzzle.

I stepped back. “I don't think we want anyone at the archive to know about this, whatever this is,” I said.

“Agreed,” replied Roger

“And don't you have to get back to Avignon?”

“And you, you're on your way to Aix?”

Yes,” I said, but it turned out that I wasn't.

Chapter 23

Soon after I started driving away from New Chateaublanc, I abandoned my plans to go to Aix but instead decided to find a small town where no one would know where I was and I could hole up for Saturday night. Whoever had heard me say I was going to Chateaublanc had also heard Jack give me the name of the hotel in Aix, and that person could go directly to Aix by way of Cavillon and the Autoroute to await me there. That person could be a murderer. Madeleine. Or Fitzroy. Or Jack. Maybe even Rachel. My apartment was not safe, either; everyone in the archive knew where I lived—I'd bragged about it so often. I turned off the main highway to a two-lane road. Whoever had shot at us was not now following me—not a car was in sight.

Now that I was alone and thinking of the gunshots, the murder slowly flooded my mind, for the first time in its full horror. I had not been able to look at it straight on before. A woman was dead. Lost to the world. Someone had killed her. Perhaps the same person who had just tried to kill me and Roger.

Though it was off-season, I found a small hotel open in a little town a few miles away from Chateaublanc. The hotel bar was deserted except for the owner, who gave Foxy some water, then took my order for a quarter litre of wine, a good Côtes de Luberon. Sitting at the tiny table, drumming on its surface, I thought I would jump out of my skin. What had I been doing when I announced my plans to go to New and Old Chateaublanc? Had I been daring the murderer to follow us, to come out in the open and make an attempt on our lives? Of course that was what I had been doing, I thought. My insides clenched up. My jaw was tight with tension.

The wine arrived, and I took a big mouthful of it, not caring, wanting to slosh down something, anything, to alleviate my fear and trembling.

I thought about how I could never again look at the land and my life in long perspective in a lonely spot without anxiety. I felt afraid and unsure of where danger lay. For a while, like Sister Rose, I thought of going home. The good old U.S.A. I knew it was impossible. The French police wouldn’t like it, and I would let down the person who gave me the diary in hopes that I would find out the truth—if that’s what was really going on. And, to be honest, in spite of everything, I wanted to know the end of Rose's story and achieve justice for Agatha by finding out who killed her.

With the second glass of wine, I thought maybe I was being melodramatic. The person who shot at us could have been someone just trying to warn us off from investigating the murder. Why didn’t that person kill us? We certainly were vulnerable enough—alone and unarmed.

Pleased at my logic, I cheered up a bit. I drank the rest of the wine, tracing lines with my finger in a haphazard way in the film of foggy moisture left by the carafe on the table.

For the rest of the evening, Foxy and I walked around the narrow crooked side streets of the small town, then went back to our hotel, where we ate a simple meal and finally climbed the steep stairs to our room. “Just you and me, Foxy,” I said to him. I thought that if he could talk he would say, at such moments, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard that one too many times.”

We slept late on Sunday. Walking around town in the mid-afternoon, Foxy and I came to a church, built squarely of plain stone. A placard advertised that a visiting choir was to chant a Gregorian Mass. Drawn by the voices, I tied Foxy up outside and went in to stand in the semi-dark of the anteroom inside the door. As my eyes adjusted to the light I became aware that someone was staring at me. It was a marble Christ, man-size, half-dead in his languid posture, bound in marble ropes hardly needed to restrain him. His flesh lay slack on his bones. His eyes looked straight ahead into those of the observer. Staring back, I saw a man suffering, not a god. A man who struggled with doubt more than the ropes, who wondered if he had taken on more than he could handle. Who had sculpted him, and when, and why this Christ in this little church? Why not a more awe-inspiring Christ, a more God-like Christ? His eyes asked nothing but connection, not belief, not sympathetic suffering, not gratitude, certainly not worship. Did Therese and Agatha know this Christ? Did Rose?

A family came through the door and broke my communication with the statue. They proceeded into the main room, and I followed them. The arched stone ceiling reared up into shadow. A few stained glass windows provided a dim colored light. I took a seat in the middle of the church, which was about two-thirds full of communicants. The thick stone shut out the world, or so it seemed. Candles guttered in the disturbed air as more communicants came in. A deacon put incense on the burner and the ancient smell threaded through the air. A procession of ecclesiastics, some carrying torches, the one at the head swinging the smoking censer, walked solemnly to the altar.

In the sanctuary, lit only by candles, a flat altar lay as if awaiting animal sacrifice. For the sake of authenticity (this was, after all, a thirteenth century mass), it was stone, a plain low shape, and in plain sight, moved up to the front. I stared at it—a table and a gravestone, marker of the primitive origins of the sumptuous Church of Rome.

Then the choir began chanting the mass. The priests, in low voices, chanted, faced east and west, swung censers. Smoke and the smell of incense drifted like spirits from the sanctuary towards the congregation. The voices chanted, chanted, chanted.

The repetition of the chanting made the light seem to throb, as if the whole earth breathed. Or was that a trick? Something swelled in my brain, and without a sense of movement my mind slipped into another state. As the white-robed priest held up the chalice for the congregation to see, wine changed to thick blood, and the wafer became crisp white flesh, appetizing as veal. Something was up there near that stone, urged in by the voices and the lights. Something ineffable and old, neither malicious nor benign, antedating even Sister Rose’s world, even Christ's and the Jews'. And something was happening to me—a loss of a sense of myself, a transcendence of an entity called Pandora Ryan. The people in the church, the priests, the smoke, the incense, breathed together, a body, a pulse, a huge flame. The choir sang, the priests intoned.

The congregation stood, and that broke it.

I came back to myself. Before the rest of the congregation, I slipped out of the church, untied Foxy, and walked with him to the car, which, in the aftermath of my experience, looked strange and futuristic. I shook myself like a dog to fling off conflicting emotion—weird, a trick, nothing but an ancient mantra, slipping into an altered state. Maybe a flashback from meditation, I said to myself. Really! Like some California flake! But no, it had been more than that. Shaken, I got into the car and drove to Old Chateaublanc. There were things I had to do.

Chapter 24

I left the car by a ruined stone house and walked the deadend alley off the main road. Rosemary bushes and thyme grew wild along its edge—the air smelled of warm, pungent herbs.

At the last house on the alley, stone like the others, I knocked on the unpainted wooden door. An old woman, bent with age, opened it. She was blind in one eye—it had turned bluish and opaque–and she tilted her head to see. “Yes, Madame? You wish something?” Her accent was as thick as her cheese vendor brother’s.

“Madame Forêt? Your niece Hélène told me about you. She said you used to work for the nuns. I would like to talk to you about that,” I said.

Foxy sniffed her feet. “Is he gentle?” asked the woman.

“Oh, yes.”

She extended one of her hands further for Foxy’s inspection. “Beautiful dog,” she said, then, “Come in. Bring him, too.” She opened the door wider, and we entered a room with a fire burning in a fireplace built of large stones. She motioned me to sit down on a wooden bench. Foxy went over to stare into the fire, then he lay down contentedly.

“I worked at the convent, yes. In the gardens. My hands are witnesses to that.” Proudly, she held out her creased palms, callused with a lifetime of work. The knuckles were swollen and red. When she turned her hands over, I saw that two of her nails were distorted by an old injury. “And why are you interested in the convent?” she asked.

“Research. I’m an American historian.”

“American. So far away.” She poked at the fire, and flames rose under her prodding. “I haven’t been at the convent for a long time.”

“Were you there during the war, World War Two?”

“Yes, I was.” She put the poker down and turned to look at me with her one eye, like a bird.

“Did you know a Sister Agatha?”

She smiled. “Who could forget her? Always joking. I haven’t seen her in years.”

I told her of Agatha’s murder. She let out a shocked sigh. “Oh, what a shame! What a shame!” she said. “Who could do such a thing?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. I think it might have something to do with what went on in the war. Tell me, did she help shelter Jewish children?”

She went to a cupboard and took out a bottle. “Yes. We kept it secret. Some of the nuns objected—they said that the Nazis could kill us all. True. That was true. And we were afraid. But other nuns, some other nuns, stood with her. Me, I stood with her. Sister Agatha acted without fear. Maybe because she was so young. I was, too” She took two glasses out of another cupboard and poured a large shot of liquor into each of them. “Here, a glass of marc. It’s chilly outside.”

I took the glass from her and sipped my drink—very strong and harsh—as she threw hers down in one gulp, then poured herself another.

“Did people in town know the nuns sheltered children?” I asked, after I had stopped coughing from the marc's assault on my throat.

“Not most of them. As far as I could tell.”

“Tell me more about Agatha,” I said. I fnished off my drink. Alcoholic warmth coursed through my body.

She replenished my glass and said, “Agatha? She was from New Chateaublanc. The oldest of the three Ballard girls. The middle one, Martine, went to Marseille and became a bookkeeper. Giselle married a farmer and had seven children. But Agatha, she always wanted to be a nun. When she was a kid, she liked to play tricks on people, getting in trouble. But still she always wanted to be a nun.”

“Not an unusual story,” I said.

“No. God loves people with a sense of humor.”

I took a sip of my marc. “Did any of you ever come across an old diary in the library there?”

“A diary?”

Was she stalling for time?

“The work of a converse nun from the seventeenth century. It tells of her life in the convent.”

She looked down into her glass. “No, Madame,” she said. “I saw nothing like that. But, remember, I worked with my hands, and I was not one of them.” Like Rose, I thought.

I had found out very little. A wasted trip. “I must be going,” I said. As I stood, my eye went from the fire to the mantelpiece, where an assortment of curios were lined up in a haphazard row: a Mickey Mouse clock with its hands at twelve, an old coffee mill, seashells, a couple of books on their sides. . .
And in a dark corner, where the shelf met the wall, a head, a woman's head made of verdigris-covered copper, with enameled eyes and curling hair.