Fortune's Deadly Descent (11 page)

A distant rumble, then a dazzling beam through the rain, and within moments the brakes on the train hiss as the giant machine halts in front of us. It’s slightly longer than the length of the platform. In less than a minute, the driver sounds his horn and we hear metal on metal as the train rolls away. Only one passenger has stepped off. A young man in dark skinny jeans and sneakers lumbers down the platform stairs. He zips his leather jacket and tucks his chin into his collar against the rain. The train is already out of sight. Steam rises and fades from the tracks.

I tell Oliver about the tractor, and in telling him I realize that by the time the man we’ve been calling the stranger offered to help me, Benny might already have been jouncing away with someone else.

We gaze downhill, where the vineyard appears to curve toward town. Surely Moreau has stood where we’re standing now, has seen what we see. Has he come to the same conclusions?

Oliver rubs his eyes and succumbs to a monster yawn.

“Jet lag’s eating you alive,” I say. “If you need to crash, I understand.”

He assures me he’s fine, says not to worry, suggests we follow the vineyard down to where it meets the town.

Not so long ago, Oliver couldn’t stand the sight of me. Everything I did or said was met with eye rolling and a smart-ass reply—if he replied at all. How he turned out to be one of the kindest people I know, I’ll never comprehend. I just wish he were more willing to open up about the past. I can’t help believing that what’s happened to Benny is at the end of a chain leading back, link by link, to our own particular history. I don’t know if it’s as simple as Isabel trying to reclaim what she sees as hers, or Jonathon seeking vengeance. Since he’ll never spend another day outside prison, revenge would seem to be his
only
motive. But he’s a psychopath. I put nothing past him.

Years ago, Jonathon wrote several letters to Oliver. I made a point of leaving them on the kitchen counter, but Oliver tossed each one, unopened, into the recycling bin. I left them there, never knowing what they said. The letters eventually stopped coming. And then, soon after Oliver turned twenty-one, his attitude toward his father began to change. With maturity came curiosity: he wanted to know how Jonathon could’ve done what he did to us. It’s the only time I know of that Oliver visited him.

What went on during that encounter, the emotional chaos Oliver must’ve endured…this is exactly the kind of thing he’s reluctant to share. He’s a grown man now. I can’t force him to tell me what he’d rather not say. What I
do
know is that Jonathon apologized repeatedly, claimed that years of stress, of compounding each mistake with a worse one, had left him temporarily out of his mind. He claimed it had taken years in prison for him to recover. And now, he said, he was consumed with remorse. I believe none of this, not a word. Finally, after making his case to Oliver, the son of a bitch asked to be forgiven. “And
did
you
forgive him?” I’ve asked Oliver more than once. His answer, each time, has been a single nod, a not-so-convincing yes.

“When we get back to the car, see if you can find us a pension on your phone,” I say. “Honestly, you look like you’re going to fall over.”

He smiles gently from the side of his mouth. “I won’t.”

So I turn my attention to the ground again, kick the dirt with my boot. Until today’s rain, the soil was hard packed from weeks of drought…but before I can follow this thought all the way through, Jonathon interrupts my concentration again. If he’s the one who engineered all this, then what has he done with Benny? Who would he give him to? Is it remotely possible that he’d have his own son killed to punish me? I can’t let myself believe that…yet this is a man who once threatened to kill Oliver to get me to do his bidding.

My umbrella leans against the tree, its metal tip aimed at the sky. I flip it over and stab it in the ground and tell myself, for god’s sake,
focus
.

I ask Oliver, “Could a tractor leave tracks this deep if the soil’s so dry?”

“Good question,” he answers. “They’re pretty heavy, but I’m not sure—”

“Or maybe the tracks are from ATVs,” I say. “If the police were searching here. Or vintners going from one field to the other.”

I glance east and west. Whatever made the tracks, I have no doubt that the French gendarmes have seen them, not to mention Interpol.

“What do we do now?” I say.

Before Oliver can reply, we hear glass breaking in the distance, followed a split second later by the earsplitting wail of a car alarm.

We cut back through the plane trees and recross the tracks. By the time we reach the platform, the man in the trench coat is fleeing down Rue de Saint-Corbenay with my computer bag clutched to his chest and my backpack swinging awkwardly from one hand.

I’m too stunned to react for a moment, and even after I start to run my legs feel dead—I might as well be running through loose sand. Six days of virtually no sleep, barely any food, my nerves zinging with adrenaline, have left me pathetically frail, at least five kilos lighter. It’s all I can do to keep hold of the flopping purse at my shoulder. In seconds, Oliver’s way out ahead, a flailing streak of red darting through the flap of blackbirds. The shriek of the alarm manages to pierce the acoustic trickery of the place, traveling around walls, down lanes, drowning out the
moutarde
woman in the village square. For a second, I wonder if Benny hears it too.

Despite the rain, housewives begin poking their heads out second-floor windows. “Shit!” Oliver says, kicking at the nuggets of safety glass. “Shit, shit, shit.”

By the time I reach him, I have no breath. The air around my head feels thin, diluted, silvery gray. I can’t talk. I cover my eyes. Even a groan takes effort.

Oliver extracts the keys from my jacket pocket. The alarm continues its wail, yet a woman’s voice somehow makes itself heard. I drop my hand and see a thin, attractive young woman in jeans and a white blouse approaching from the corner house, where the front door stands open. A cell is clutched in her hand.

“Police,” she shouts, the same in English as French. I shake my head no. Wave my hands no. This is the last thing we need.

She chatters on in French as blots of rain darken her blouse, revealing the lace of her bra, and flattening the blonde hair lying across her bony shoulders.

“Police,” she shouts again, and then I understand she’s already called them.

I doubt Moreau could have returned from Zurich so soon. Anyway, he wouldn’t answer a call about a car break-in, would he?

Oliver fumbles with the keypad and manages to kill the alarm. The silence is long, high-pitched, unnerving.

Second-floor windows begin to close.

Oliver opens the rear door, snatches up his backpack and computer bag, shakes the glass free. “He only got yours,” he says.

“This is a disaster,” I say. “We’ve got to get out of here. She’s called the police.”

Oliver appears to notice her only now. She’s trying to tell me something else. The rain isn’t enough to move her to go inside. She’s persistent, shivering, her nipples lifting through the sheer fabric.

I raise my palms and jostle my head. “I’m sorry! I don’t speak French!”

“
Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
” she asks, which surprises me more than anything happening here.

“
Ja
,” I tell her, stunned, lowering my hands. Why on earth would she ask me this?

I’m thoroughly soaked, my umbrella abandoned by the plane tree. All of my clothes are in the hands of trench coat man, my hairbrush, toiletries, everything.

The woman glances at Oliver and then the Rover. Of course. The Swiss plate has given us away.

Still, a German-speaking French person in a village this small seems remarkable.

“
Sie sollten beide in das Haus gekommen
,” she says, motioning toward her door.

I glance at Oliver. His hood shadows his forehead, his eyes two dark smudges of fatigue. What is it, three, four o’clock in the morning for him?

He nods and the rain collecting on his hood dribbles down his face. Yes. We should come inside the house.

Our host, whose name is Seraphina, hands Oliver a vinyl tablecloth and a roll of duct tape to cover the broken window in the car. I catch him looking at her breasts. How could he not? I can hardly see anything other than the two raised brown dots myself.

I remove my Wellingtons at the door as Oliver goes out.

Seraphina offers me a towel. It smells slightly musty, as if retrieved from a closet that’s never opened.

The small front room is steeped in filmy green light thrown from a square stained glass window on the opposite wall. The floor seems an extension of the street outside—large slick stones, wide, smooth grout in between. The kitchen consists of a black-veined porcelain sink, an oven barely as wide as a cake pan, a camper-sized refrigerator, and three feet of freestanding counter. The air smells of cabbage, potatoes, and dust. The dreary orange upholstery, the antennae sprouting from the television…this place looks as it must have long before Seraphina was born. Yet she herself looks every bit a modern Frenchwoman—covetously thin, simply dressed, while somehow throwing off that mythic French self-confidence that reveals itself as style.

I thank her again.

She says she’s sorry for my troubles. “
Verbrechen ist im Saint-Corbenay sehr selten
,” she says. Crime is very rare in Saint-Corbenay.

“Hmm,” I say.

She takes my jacket and invites me to sit at a small kitchen table, her voice a near whisper, as if someone’s asleep elsewhere in the house. She goes into a back room and returns moments later wearing jeans and a blue long-sleeved shirt with a scooped neck, her damp hair hastily secured by a Scünci. Her lips look fuller this way. I decide she’s likely Oliver’s age and childless.

She offers me tea and puts a kettle on the stove, ignites the pilot light with a match. Her fingers are ringless.

She shows me to the bathroom, two narrow doors side by side. One has the bathtub, the other the toilet and sink. I close myself inside the one with the sink.

A small pink crock of what must be cold cream sits on a shelf next to shapely glass jars of blue and pink fluids. A boar-hair brush and hand mirror lie next to it. The brush is lightly strung with gray hair.

Seraphina doesn’t live here.
This is not her house
.

The mirror over the sink has lost much of its silvering—a cloudy black river seems to be eating through the glass. I’m barely able to make out my face, but see enough to recognize the gray-blue of my eyes inside mascara-blackened sockets, the dark, wet curls against my bony cheeks.

I rinse beneath my eyes. Water dribbles into my mouth. It tastes like iron. I try to squeeze my hair dry with the towel, then see that my hand has started bleeding again.

I return to the front room, pressing a Kleenex to my hand just as Oliver comes in from outside without knocking. He’s clearly shaken, exhausted, cold. He gives Seraphina the duct tape. She
smiles, holds a towel out to him, and in her whispery voice offers to take his jacket. He peels it off his body, puddles gathering at his feet. Is getting the floor wet the reason he looks so embarrassed? Or is my normally straight-backed, confident son a little shy with Seraphina’s eyes on him? This is a side of him I’ve never seen. I think of the romance novels I edited years ago, the most depressing episode in my professional life—the coy glances, nervous hands, flushed faces.

Seraphina hangs his jacket near the door. She looks down at my hand.

“
Sie bluten
,” she says.

I explain the slivers of broken glass from my phone. She retrieves a set of tweezers, sits across from me with a wet cloth, and carefully cleans out my hand.

The teakettle whistles and Oliver quickly gets to his feet and shuts it off. Seraphina tells him where to find the tea, and he makes three cups and sets ours in front of us. A forced familiarity fills the air.

I can’t imagine what’s taking the gendarmes so long. The station is at the edge of the village, not far from where we are now. No sooner do I think this than someone knocks. In steps Moreau’s subordinate, his thick mustache like a limp mouse glistening around his mouth

He nods a familiar hello to Seraphina. I see from the amount of water on his jacket that he’s most likely been right outside, taking note of the Rover. This would explain what’s taken so long.

“
Bonjour. Parlez-vous français?
” he asks Oliver.

Oliver shakes his head. “
Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
English?”

The man laughs as if to himself and pulls out a small blue notebook and pen.

“No,” he says, and then proceeds to speak English.

“Your name?”

“Oliver Hagen.”

Hearing him say his last name reminds me once again that he changed it from Donnelly to Hagen when he turned eighteen.

“Swiss?”

“Yes.” Oliver leaves it at that.

“And your name?” the man says.

I assume he means me. His eyes are on his notebook. He continues writing.

“Celia Hagen.”

“Swiss?”

“Yes.”

Either he’s a good actor or his short-term memory is severely impaired.

Seraphina offers him tea.

“
Non. Merci
,” he says, all business. He remains in the low-sloped doorway that looks as if it was constructed in the Middle Ages.

“So,” he says, suddenly meeting my eyes. “Why are you here, in Saint-Corbenay?” It’s as if I’m being accused of a crime.

“Someone broke into my car and stole my computer and backpack,” I say. “It had my clothes, toiletries, everything.”

He doesn’t write this down.

I glance at Oliver. His eyes narrow. “We saw the man,” he says. “He was wearing a tan trench coat and wool cap.”

The gendarme draws in a breath and says something in French to Seraphina. Apparently, he’s reconsidered the tea. Seraphina rises to the stove and pours him a cup.

“We saw him earlier,” I add. “Near the market square. He walked by with vegetables in a sack. I’m sure someone in the market will remember him.”