Mrs. John Doe (7 page)

She was sipping excellent espresso and politely refusing a shimmering array of pastries when Jacques arrived from the kitchen. He'd changed his clothes; he was now in an old leather jacket, jeans, and work boots, and he was grinning once more.

“Come, mademoiselle, it is time for to go.”

Nora paid for her meal, secretly shocked at the price: An equivalent amount in America would only have gotten her a Big Mac and fries. She smiled, thanked Felicia for the splendid lunch, and followed her guide back through the kitchen to the alley.

The new transport Jacques had procured was a dark blue Renault Modus, and it belonged to his eldest son and his family, who were on vacation in America—New York City, as a matter of fact. Nora got in, and he opened the hatchback and produced a pillow and a blanket, which he handed to her. She settled herself in the comfortable backseat as he drove out of the alley and headed in the direction of the A6, the first leg of their journey.

“This village you wish to visit, mademoiselle—it is in the Franche-Comté, south of Besançon, yes?”

She nodded. “That's right. Jeff— My husband used to joke that Franche-Comté means
French completely,
the only part of France that isn't choked with foreign tourists. His people are from there—well, his mother's people.
La famille de sa mère
. A village in the mountains, in the woods. I forget the name of it, but it means
pine forest
in French. Pinon? Pinelle?”

“Pinède,” Jacques said.

“Yes! You know it?”

“I have heard of it. My family is from Saint-Dié in Lorraine. It is north of the Franche-Comté, but close. My father was
un routier,
a driver of the big trucks, and he would take the wood pieces,
le bois,
from the Jura for the business. He would some of the time take me in the
camion
with him. I know this part of France.”

“I was there once,” Nora said, “but it was twenty years ago. So, your father hauled lumber? My husband's grandfather cut down the trees.”

“Ah, it is the teensy world, yes? Rest, mademoiselle. I will take us to Pinède before the night is here.”

Nora turned her head to look out the rear window, studying the cars behind them for several minutes. No gray Citroën. Forcing herself to abandon the vigil, she lay down across the seat, her head on the pillow, and pulled the blanket over her, grateful for the tinted windows, which kept out the glare of the afternoon sun. It was dark and cool inside the car, and the steady vibration of the tires on the road was more effective than a lullaby. Her first full meal in three days, combined with three days of nervous insomnia, soon did the rest. Despite her nagging worries, she began to doze as Jacques eased the Renault into the stream of traffic heading away from the city.

Her rest was fitful. The weight of all she'd experienced since Bill Howard's phone call, the gnawing anxiety at the dark young man who dogged her steps, and the occasional bumps and swerves and muffled traffic sounds combined to keep her half wakeful, even as exhaustion weighed her down. She sat up at one point, blinking around at the suburban landscape, and caught glimpses of hanging signs along the autoroute:
aéroport orly, lyon, périphérique interieur
. Jacques was silent, seemingly relaxed, moving the car swiftly toward the easternmost reaches of France. She lay back down on the pillow again. The next time she roused herself and looked out at the bright afternoon, she saw a signpost for
C
HILLY-
M
AZARIN
, and the names made her smile. She tried to work out the pronunciation; it would be something like
shee
-lee and mah-zah-
reen,
no doubt. Such a beautiful language…

The roar of the Renault's powerful horn startled her awake. She shot up to a sitting position, gasping. The car was barely moving on the autoroute surrounded by other nearly stationary vehicles. She saw the all-too-familiar problem immediately and relaxed.

“
Pardon,
mademoiselle,” Jacques said, waving an arm at the view beyond the windshield. “I lose my control at this. It is the tangle, the jelly.”

Nora laughed, overwhelmed with relief, and rubbed her eyes. “Jam.”

“
Oui,
the jam. It is these next
sorties,
for Dijon. It is always the way here, at this part of the road.”

“We call them exit ramps in America,” she said, still laughing. She glanced at her watch, amazed to see that three hours had passed since she'd last checked it. “Dijon? We're nearly there. When we get out of this, could you find a rest stop?
Une,
um, petrol station?”

He understood immediately. “
Certainement,
mademoiselle.”

“Merci.”

He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Exit ramp.” He repeated it twice and nodded to himself. Another phrase for his growing lexicon. Nora smiled; she was rather falling in love with her escort.

Soon after the traffic cleared, he pulled into a large service complex and parked. He walked her around the side of the bright glass structure and deposited her at the door of the ladies' room. Only when she was inside did she hear him go into the door beside it.

There was one other person in the big white-tiled room, a young woman about Dana's age who stood at the row of sinks, meticulously making up her face. She had tattooed arms and was wearing a denim jacket and a miniskirt, with silver loops in her ears, both eyebrows, and one nostril. Her hair was a symphony of deep brown and electric blue, piled high in a beehive. When Nora came back out into the room, the girl was painting her mouth. Nora washed her hands and smiled over at the girl, who grinned and held up the lip gloss for her inspection.

“Très Rose de Superbouche!”
she proudly announced.

Nora nodded enthusiastically, as though she would now run screaming to the nearest makeup counter, and left the restroom, thinking, Somewhere under all that nonsense is a pretty girl. Dana had gone through a similar phase, mercifully brief, when she was sixteen, but Jeff had nixed the request for body ink.

Dana. She must call her daughter as soon as tonight's adventure was over. With any luck, she'd have good news for Dana—and herself—by then. Break a leg…

Jacques was waiting for her outside the door. She smiled, charmed by his vigilance, and followed him back around the building. She went inside and bought paper cups of coffee for both of them while he filled the car's gas tank. She remembered to pay cash for everything. They drank the coffee in the car while he called his wife and told her not to wait up for him, he'd be home tomorrow, and no, he hadn't been smoking. So, that explained the raspy voice but no cigarettes. Thank you, Marianne, Nora thought. Only then did it occur to her that even if this mission concluded happily for her, Jacques would still be on the wrong side of France in the middle of the night.

“We can stop for food when we reach the city,” she told him as they resumed their journey. She consulted her watch: It was six o'clock, and they'd be there in an hour. “Then I must be in Pinède by ten o'clock, and it's an hour's drive, so we must leave Besançon by nine. But I won't allow you to keep going all night, Jacques. There will be places to sleep on the way back to Paris, right? We'll have to find one.”

He nodded, maneuvering the car over to the fast lane on the highway. “Yes, mademoiselle, there are many of the motels along the
autoroute
. Do not worry with this now.”

She didn't; she was too busy worrying about this strange errand. Let it be over soon, she thought, tonight in Pinède. He'll be there, and we'll be safe, and there will be
three
of us going back to Paris, as long as—

She turned abruptly to look behind the car again, scanning the traffic that trailed them for the gray Citroën. The sun was setting, and in this light all the cars on the road seemed to be gray. She peered at windshields, trying to see beyond them, searching for dark skin and dark hair…

“He is not there, mademoiselle,” Jacques said quietly. “I keep the peeled eye, but there is no such car since Paris. From now, we will have the smooth sailboat.”

Just as he uttered these words, a low rumbling sound began in the distance and spread across the sky above them.

Jacques chuckled. “Too soon do I speak, yes? Tonight it will be the rain.”

The ancient Gallic stronghold that would eventually become the city of Besançon was built on an oxbow in the Doubs river, a tributary of the Saône, close to what is now the border of France and Switzerland. The original town inside the curve is surrounded on three sides by water and was once protected on the south by the magnificent citadel on Mont Saint-Étienne. Six other hills ring it, some with their own smaller fortresses. The modern city sprang up in the valley across the river from the old quarter. Besançon is the capital of the Franche-Comté, the
free county,
France's last incorporated province.

It was twilight when the Renault Modus crossed the bridge into the old town. Nora and Jeff had stayed there overnight on their honeymoon, in a little guesthouse near the foot of the mountain. Now she remembered two things about the neighborhood that she could use: a pleasant restaurant with sidewalk tables and a florist. She hoped they were still there. They were; while Jacques waited at a table outside the
café,
Nora walked around the corner to the little shop where Jeff had bought flowers. The woman there was just closing for the day, but she smiled and wrapped a dozen red roses for Nora.

The specialty of the restaurant was a savory beef stew with peas, leeks, and new potatoes, as delicious as she remembered. Jacques liked it too, and he suggested a burgundy to go with it, explaining that it was bottled “just down the road.” He ordered a glass for her, but he drank only water. She wasn't a bit surprised to see that he had perfect manners, any more than she'd been when he readily agreed to join her for dinner. By now, very little about this charming man would surprise her.

Nora looked around, delighted. She'd enjoyed her day here twenty-one years ago. She and Jeff had spent the morning exploring the old town, including the cathedral and the birthplaces of Victor Hugo and the Lumière brothers, and then they'd stormed the sprawling citadel above the city in the afternoon. She recalled the spectacular views from the battlements overlooking the river valley, and she remembered the museum in the fort dedicated to the French Resistance fighters and deportees of World War II, when the Germans occupied the citadel until the Americans expelled them. It was a beautiful city in a dramatic setting of blue river and green hills, rolling away as far as she could see.

Still, as nice as it was, she and Jeff hadn't made that long-ago trip from Paris just for the sights. It had been a personal journey for her husband. Late that afternoon, they'd driven their rental car out of town, to the south, on roads that climbed up into the hills, arriving at sunset in the tiny mountain village where his mother's family had once lived. He'd shown Nora the little house in a row of similar houses at one end of the village's only street, not far from the gray stone church. As a teen, Jeff had spent several summers there with his mother and his widowed great-aunt, Jeanette, while his father traveled for business back in the States.

His great-uncle, René, had been a woodsman like his brother, Henri, Jeff's grandfather. The two brothers had chopped down pine trees in the wild woods beyond the village. All four of Jeff's grandparents had died before he was born, and he'd never known his great-uncle, René, either. Grand-tante Jeanette had served as honorary grandparent for Jeff; she'd taught him to play the piano on her ancient spinet and sent him off with some of the men in the town to learn how to fell trees. He'd loved the village and working with the men in the forest and, most of all, his great-aunt's baking. He hadn't been able to get enough of her croissants and spice cookies and Black Forest cakes.

He and Nora had looked at his great-aunt's house from the road because new people had lived there and he hadn't wanted to impose on them. Then he'd taken Nora into the big wrought-iron-fenced cemetery behind the church and placed a dozen red roses on
Grand-
tante Jeanette's grave. He'd told his bride that she had loved red roses and he made this pilgrimage whenever he was in Europe. He'd brought Nora there, he said, so he could share these memories with her. Nora had been moved by his revelation. She already loved him, of course—she had been carrying his child—but seeing that aspect of her groom's character had deepened her affection for him.

Now she relaxed at the sidewalk table in Besançon, sipping coffee as she and her driver watched the locals strolling by. Somewhere, in a bar or nightclub down the street, a girl was singing a lively
chanson
to the accompaniment of an accordion, and after a while other voices joined in. The lights of the shops and houses were just coming on when another ominous peal of thunder told her it was time to go. As the raucous singing ended in laughter and applause, Nora asked for the check.

Just before they got up from the table, Jacques said, “
Un moment,
mademoiselle. This village, Pinède—Is mademoiselle meeting someone?”

She thought about how to answer this, finally deciding that there was no reason to be duplicitous with him.

“If all goes well,” she said, picking up the roses, “I'll be meeting my husband there.”

He raised his eyebrows at this. “So, I should not be calling you mademoiselle. You are madame.”

“Mademoiselle will do,” she told him, and they walked back to the car. Nora took a nostalgic look around before she got in, remembering how happy she'd been the last time she was here, and why. She smiled at the quiet streets and squares, and up at the former military garrison on the ridge above them. This time she sat in the front seat beside him, and Jacques drove around Mont Saint-Étienne to the southbound autoroute.

Dix roses pour Grand-tante J ce soir: Ten roses for Great-aunt Jeanette tonight
. Jeff had always placed a full dozen roses at her grave—it was part of his ritual—so the
ten
in the message was obviously the time Nora was to be there. He'd be waiting for her in the churchyard, he would explain everything, and he'd take that damned manila envelope from her. He'd tell her why she'd had to come to France, and then to this remote part of it, and he'd assure her that everything was all right now. He'd have his own rental car, so Jacques could follow them back to Paris. They'd stop somewhere on the way, a room for them and a room for Jacques. She'd sleep in her husband's arms while the rain fell outside, washing over everything, making the world clean and clear once more.

As evening and the gathering rain clouds darkened the sky, she fought her urge to make another wish. This was no time to tempt fate. The car continued on its way toward the distant mountains.