A Temporary Ghost (The Georgia Lee Maxwell Series, Series 2) (3 page)

The caption read, “The Howards collect contemporary art. A recent acquisition is Ross Santee’s ‘Nice Boy.’ ”

Personally, I thought “Nice Boy” was a smart-ass cheap shot at an overused target, but Ross probably would have said that was exactly the point— always a good all-purpose response to criticism. Since Ross had relieved me of most of my luggage, however, I was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt.

As we descended into an underground passage to the station, the T.G.V. started to move, its two minutes in Avignon over, the next stop Marseilles. We walked through the station and out the front door. A crowded parking lot stretched before us, beyond that a busy street, and beyond that stood the city walls of Avignon, battlements and towers of mellow gold stone looking ancient, and romantic, and all the relevant adjectives according to the guidebook. I was in Provence, in the fabled South of France. The sun was shining, as it was supposed to.

We crossed the parking lot to a white Renault with a Hertz sticker on the windshield. As Ross was putting my suitcase and typewriter into the trunk he said, “Vivien’s really eager to meet you.”

I wondered why, if she was that eager, she hadn’t come to the station. He must have seen the question on my face because he said, “She’s scared, too. She decided to wait at the house.”

Scared? Had my anonymous correspondent sent her a letter, too? We got in the car and I said, “What’s she scared of?”

He tilted his head back against the headrest. In repose, his face looked drawn. The openness he was exuding could be taking some effort. “You don’t really have to ask, do you?” he said. His manner had an easy intimacy appropriate to good friends. “She’s going to have to relive everything to do this book.”

I distinctly remembered the editor saying Vivien was looking forward to getting to work. At a loss, I retreated to inanity. “Maybe it won’t be so bad.”

He shook his head with a suggestion of vehemence. “Everything about this has been as bad as it could possibly be.”

“Then why does she want to do a book?”

“I begged her not to. You might as well know that.” He spoke firmly, but without rancor.

“Why?”

“It’s been tough enough to put it behind us as it is. Tough enough to— not even live, just continue. Raking it up again is a mistake.”

“If you feel that way, I don’t see—”

“It’s not how I feel that counts, it’s how Vivien feels.” His ironic smile didn’t quite jell. “She’s had… a lot of expenses. The lawsuit about the estate drags on. We keep hearing rumors of a settlement; then they start wrangling again. Carey’s relatives are being absolutely outrageous.”

“So she decided to write the book.”

“Yes. You can imagine how they feel about
that.”
He started the car, but before we drove away he turned toward me again. This time his smile looked genuine. “Hey— welcome to Provence,” he said.

His attempt to make me feel better succeeded to an extent. I wondered if any of Carey’s relatives were angry enough to send me the letter:
“A killer shouldn’t profit from her crime.”
Could be. And the postmark was New York, where the legal battle was going on.

We were on the traffic-choked street that ran beside the city wall. As Ross maneuvered around a tourist bus I said, “When did you arrive?”

“Let’s see. We’ve been here ten days, I guess.”

The letter was postmarked a week ago. If Ross had written it himself to discourage the book project, he’d given it to someone else to mail. I shook myself mentally, disgusted that a letter could have poisoned my attitude this way. I tried to concentrate on the serene gold stone of the wall. Were we near the famous bridge, of the
“Sur le pont d’Avignon”
rhyme?

Ross made a right-hand turn onto a street lined with garages, swimming-pool services, and low-rise apartment buildings, obviously heading out of town. “I wish I could show you Avignon, but I promised Vivien I’d bring you right back, and I’ve got to stop and pick up a few things,” Ross said.

That was fine with me. I wanted to meet Vivien, too. And “picking up a few things” evoked one of the lovely Provencal outdoor markets I’d read about, with ropes of garlic, shimmering black and green olives, gorgeous vegetables, tender goat cheese. I wondered if it was market day in Beaulieu-la-Fontaine, or some other village nearby.

Fifteen minutes out of Avignon, Ross turned off into the vast parking lot of an establishment billing itself an “Hypermarché.” Soon we were piloting a grocery cart through a store that covered acres and sold everything from computers to Pampers to compact discs to sweat socks. My dreams of a bucolic shopping experience were shattered. Consulting a list, Ross bought Q-tips, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Ban antiperspirant, a bottle of Beefeaters gin, a bag of Fritos. We passed a barrel of plastic flowers, and he selected a hollyhock in garish orange and tossed it into the cart.

As we stood in one of the fifty or so checkout lines he seemed to have an inspiration. “Say—” He turned to me. “You speak French, don’t you?”

“I do OK, I guess. I’m not perfect.”

“Great!” He looked overjoyed. “You can talk to Marcelle.”

“Marcelle?”

“The housekeeper. We never imagined she wouldn’t speak English. It’s driving everybody nuts.”

“None of you speaks French?”

“Blanche reads it perfectly. I’ll bet she could speak, too, but she’s too timid to try.”

I knew the feeling, one I’d wrestled with when I first came to live in Paris. “I’ll do my best.”

We moved through the line. When we’d checked out, Ross bowed ceremoniously and handed me the orange plastic hollyhock. “Now it’s official. Welcome to Provence.”

I laughed. For some reason, I thought of “Nice Boy.”

After we left the shopping center behind, the countryside began to resemble the Provence I’d seen in pictures— tile-roofed houses of biscuit-colored stucco, a line of hills in the distance. Once out of bustling Carpentras, the only town of any size near Beaulieu-la-Fontaine, I began to believe I’d arrived. Sweeping vineyards and cherry orchards spread under the impossibly blue sky, and the green bulk of Mount Ventoux, the tallest mountain in the region, loomed ahead of us. Shrubs of broom, bursting with yellow flowers, seemed to leap from the hillsides, cabbage-size roses drooped from walls, huge clumps of purple irises stood waist-high at crossroads.

Most striking were the poppies, their scarlet blooms sprinkled along the roadside, sweeping up the sides of ditches, decorating the foundations of walls and the bases of stop signs. The first time I saw a field of them, a mass of brilliant red, I gasped and cried, “Look!”

Ross glanced over. “Not bad, eh? You can see why van Gogh and Cezanne got excited about this part of the world, can’t you?”

“You sure can.” Making conversation, I went on, “Do you think being here will have an effect on
your
work? Your— art, I mean?”

He winced, almost imperceptibly, before answering with a curt, “I don’t know,” and I could see I’d somehow put my foot in it. Was he ticked off because I’d tacitly compared him to van Gogh and Cezanne? God knows, judging from “Nice Boy,” it was outrageous flattery. I retreated into silence.

We hadn’t spoken for five minutes or so when he said abruptly, “I don’t paint anymore. I don’t do any of that.”

The words, although matter-of-fact, sounded bleak and sad. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I was.

“It’s OK. I haven’t since— it happened.”

“Forgive—”

“Vivien was hoping…” He cleared his throat. “She thought I might be able to get back to it here. She even had my old stuff shipped over. Cost a bundle. Thought it would inspire me, I guess.” His voice trailed off in a desolate, self-deprecating chuckle.

I felt awful. “I wish I hadn’t said anything.”

“How were you supposed to know? It’s all right.”

It wasn’t, though. His square, boy-next-door jaw was tight. I turned away and watched another poppy field glide by, as glorious as the first.

MAS ROSE

Beaulieu-la-Fontaine was a postcard-pretty village, a collection of tile roofs staggering up a hill to a church whose steeple was embellished by a curlicued wrought iron bell tower. We drove along a main street shaded by plane trees, past shuttered houses, closed shops, a couple of sidewalk cafes with empty tables. The place looked sleepy to the point of being deserted. “Where is everybody?” I asked Ross.

“God knows. They all vanish from around lunchtime to four-thirty, and then the stores reopen and everything picks up steam again.”

I was familiar with midday closing from Paris, but had never seen it observed so rigorously. We passed a corner where an imposing fountain stood, overgrown with green moss through which I could still make out a motif of dolphins and scallop shells. “Is that fountain the
fontaine
in Beaulieu-la-Fontaine?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Blanche. She reads the books and knows all that stuff.”

We left the village behind and began to climb a forested ridge, stands of low, scrubby oak interspersed with vigorous yellow broom, the grassy shoulder of the road a tangle of wildflowers. “Almost there,” said Ross with obviously forced enthusiasm.

I toyed with my plastic hollyhock, which looked ever more ridiculous compared with the bounteous natural beauty all around. Why couldn’t Ross have given me a real poppy or a sprig of broom as a gesture of welcome? I hoped I wouldn’t have to meet Vivien with a plastic hollyhock in my hand.

We rounded a curve. When I saw the slanting tile roof ahead on our left I knew we had arrived, even before Ross said, “There it is. Mas Rose.”

“Mas Rose?”

“ ‘Mas’ is the word for farm around here, Blanche tells me. It means pink farm, or something like that.”

Mas Rose was indeed pink, a dusky shade more intense than the pale gold of other houses I’d seen so far. I glimpsed its walls and roof above the slanting tops of a windbreak of cypress trees inside a bleached stone wall.

We turned through an open gate into a stony yard. The house was a rambling structure, probably added on to several different times, and it was solid, rough-hewn, and splendidly at home in its surroundings. “It looks primitive, but it’s been completely done over,” Ross said, unaware that I loved it on sight.

He parked next to a shed, also pink and tile-roofed. “That’s my workroom,” he said, giving “workroom” a self-mocking twist.

I wasn’t paying attention. I’d just seen the view. All along the ridge behind the house the ground fell away in a steep bluff covered with scrub oak, broom, boulders, and wildflowers. Farmland stretched below, neat fields and stands of trees reaching to the folded green valleys of Mount Ventoux. The mountain’s barren-looking summit was almost lost in clouds.

We got out of the car. The property extended a good way, the wall separating the road from a large lawn of hummocky grass. Near the house a stand of twisted, silver-leaved olive trees sheltered a rustic stone table and white metal chairs. On the table sat a Diet Coke can and an empty glass.

As Ross was taking my bags from the trunk, glass patio doors on the side of the house, an anomaly surely dating from the renovation, slid open. A dark-haired woman wearing a green cotton sundress and a yellow apron rushed out toward us. For a gut-clenching moment I thought she was Vivien, but this lady was plumpish, with frizzy hair— a total contrast to the thin, languorous, ballerina-like look of Vivien’s pictures. Besides which, I couldn’t imagine Vivien wearing an apron.

As the woman approached, she called out, “Can I help?” in French, accompanying the question with a broad pantomime of lugging suitcases.

When I responded, in French, “I think we can handle it, thanks,” she stopped in her tracks, round-eyed.

“You speak French!” I now saw she was barely in her thirties, dark-eyed and dimpled, cute enough to play the French maid in an old-fashioned farce. I had pictured Marcelle, the housekeeper, as an old woman in backless bedroom slippers, but all my preconceptions were taking a beating.

I told her my name and said, “I speak a little. I’ll try to help.”

She seemed overcome. She said, in a rush, “Madame, I’m so glad you’re here. You can’t imagine the difficulties…” She broke off with a glance at Ross and continued, more demurely, “You had a good journey?”

“Very pleasant.”

We had reached the stoop in front of the open patio doors. With a nod, she motioned to Ross and me to precede her.

“You really can talk to her,” Ross said admiringly.

I felt smug. “I guess I can.”

Obviously straining for heartiness, he said, “Well, come on in! Let’s see what Vivien’s doing.”

We entered a huge kitchen, dim and cool after the brilliance outside. The floor was of golden-brown tile. A long table covered with flower-patterned oilcloth was surrounded by ladder-back chairs, and a massive wooden dish cupboard took up one wall. Pieces of bright yellow pottery were lined up on the mantel of a fireplace big enough to roast an ox. If you preferred to roast your ox in an oven, two of them were built into the wall, and I spotted a microwave, too. The oversize, stainless-steel stove would have been perfectly at home in a restaurant. On the table was a bowl almost overflowing with ruby-red cherries, and their sweet smell wafted to me. From somewhere, upstairs I thought, came music— a male voice singing in a nasal whine, accompanied by a dissonant violin.

Almost the moment we stepped inside, a man’s voice called, “Ross? Is that you?” and a slight man with dark eyes and crisp gray curls, wearing a blue velour sweatshirt, white slacks, and a gold neck chain, appeared in the doorway at the other end of the room. He glanced at me and said, “Hi.”

I felt myself do a double take and hoped it didn’t show. This must be Pedro Ruiz, Carey Howard’s male housekeeper, the one who had found Carey’s body. What was he doing here? His testimony at the inquest two years ago had hardly been favorable to Vivien. Mas Rose came equipped with a French housekeeper. Surely our group didn’t need two.

When Ross introduced us, Pedro gave me a perfunctory handshake. He smelled like cigars. He said indifferently, “Pleased to meet you,” before turning back to Ross. “Can I see you for a second?”