Sepulchre (10 page)
'There's no such thing as coincidence, you know,' the girl added. 'Everything happens for a reason.'
Meredith nodded, unwilling to prolong the one-sided conversation, then moved away, still clutching her cell phone in her hand. At the corner, she stopped. The girl was still standing in the same place, watching her.
Meredith forgot all about the flyer tucked inside her jacket pocket. She returned the call that had come through on her cell -just the French travel agent confirming her hotel reservation and rang the airline to check her departure time the following day.
She got back to the hotel at six, feeling tired and with sore feet from pounding the streets all afternoon. She uploaded the images on to the hard drive of her laptop, then started the process of transcribing the notes she'd made in the last three days. She grabbed a sandwich from the brasserie opposite at nine thirty and ate in her room as she carried on working. At eleven, she was through. Totally up to date.
She climbed in to bed and switched on the TV. She channel-surfed awhile, looking for the familiar tones of CNN, but finding only a fuzzy French flic movie on FR3, Columbo on TF1 and porn masquerading as art on Antenne 2. She gave up and read for a while instead, before turning off the light.
Meredith lay in the comfortable semi-dark of the room, her hands above her head and her toes buried deep in the crisp white sheets. Gazing at the ceiling, her mind wandered to the weekend when Mary had shared what little she knew about her birth family.
The Pfister Hotel, Milwaukee, December 2000. The Pfister was where they went for every major family celebration - birthdays, weddings, special occasions - usually just for dinner, but this time Mary had booked them in for the whole weekend, a belated treat for Merediths birthday and Thanksgiving, and to do a little early Christmas holiday shopping.
The elegant, understated nineteenth-century ambience, the colours, the fin de Steele style, the golden cornices, the pillars, the wrought-iron balustrades and elegant white net curtains on the glass doors. Meredith went down alone to the lobby cafe to wait for Bill and Mary. She settled herself in the corner of a deep sofa and ordered her first legal glass of wine in a bar: Sonoma Cutter Chardonnay - $7.50 a pop, but worth it. Buttery, holding the scent of the cask in its yellow tones.
How crazy, of all things, to remember that.
Outside, snow had been falling. Steady flakes, persistent, in a white sky, covering the world with silence. At the counter of the bar, an old lady, in a red coat and a woollen hat pulled low over her brow. She shouted at the bartender, 'Speak to me! Why don't you speak to me?' Like the woman in Eliot's The Waste Land. Her fellow guests in the bar drinking Miller Genuine Draft, and two young guys with bottles of Sprecher Amber and Riverwest Stein. Like Meredith, they pretended not to notice the crazy.
Meredith had just split from her boyfriend, so was happy to be off campus for the weekend. He was a visiting math professor on a sabbatical to UNC. They had fallen into the affair. A lock of hair pushed back from her face in the bar. Him sitting on the edge of the piano stool while she played, a hand dropped casually on her shoulder in the darkened library stacks late at night. It was never destined to go anywhere - they wanted different things - and Meredith wasn't heartbroken. But the sex had been great and the relationship had been fun while it lasted. Even so, it had been good to be home.
They talked most of the cold, snowbound weekend, Meredith asking Mary all the questions about her birth mother's life and early death, all the stuff she'd always wanted to know but had been afraid to hear. The circumstances of her adoption, her mother's suicide, the painful memories like splinters of glass she carried beneath her skin.
Meredith knew the basics. Her birth mother, Jeanette, had fallen pregnant at a tailgate party in Senior High, not even realising it until it was too late to do anything about it. For the first few years, Jeanette's mother, Louisa, had tried to be supportive, but her swift death from cancer robbed Meredith of a reliable and stable influence in her life and things quickly deteriorated. When things got really bad, it was Mary - a distant cousin of Jeanette's - who stepped in, until finally it became clear that, for her own safety, Meredith could not go back. When Jeanette killed herself, two years later, it made sense for the relationship to be put on a more formal basis and Mary and her husband Bill adopted Meredith. Although she kept her surname, and continued to call Mary by her Christian name, as she always had, Meredith at last felt free to think of Mary as her mother.
It was in the Pfister Hotel that Mary had given Meredith the photographs and the piece of piano music. The first was a shot of a young man in soldier's uniform, standing in a village square. Black curly hair, grey eyes and a direct gaze. There was no name, but the date, 1914, the photographer and the place, Rennes-les-Bains, were printed on the back. The second was of a little girl in old-fashioned clothes. There was no name, no date, no place. The third was of a woman Meredith knew was her grandmother, Louisa Martin, taken some years later - late 1930s, early 1940s, judging by her clothes - seated at a grand piano. Mary explained that Louisa had been a concert pianist of some reputation. The piece of music in the envelope had been her signature piece. She played it for every encore.
As she looked at the photograph for the first time, Meredith wondered whether, if she'd known about Louisa earlier, she would have stuck with it. Not turned her back on a music career. She didn't know. She couldn't remember her birth mother, Jeanette, playing the piano or singing. Only the shouting, the crying, and what came after.
Music had come into Meredith's life when she was eight years old, or so she'd thought. To discover that there'd been something there all along, lying undiscovered beneath the surface, changed the story. That snowbound weekend in December 2000, Meredith's world shifted. The photos, the music became an anchor, connecting her to a past, one day, she knew she would go in search of.
Seven years on, she was finally doing it. Tomorrow she'd be in Rennes-les-Bains in person, a place that she'd imagined so many times. She just hoped there was something there for her to find.
When Meredith woke in the morning, her night-time nerves had evaporated. She was looking forward to getting out of town. Whatever she achieved, one way or the other, a few days R&R in the mountains was just what she needed.
Her flight to Toulouse wasn't until mid-afternoon. She had done everything she'd intended to do in Paris and didn't really want to start something new before going off the clock, so she stayed in bed reading a while, then got up and had brunch in the sun at her regular brasserie, before setting out to do some of the regular tourist sites.
She wound her way in and out of the shadows of the familiar colonnades on the rue du Rivoli, dodging swarms of students with backpacks and parties of tourists on the Da Vinci Code trail. She considered the Pyramide du Louvre, but the length of the entrance line put her off.
She found a green metal chair in the Tuileries gardens, wishing she'd worn something lighter. It was hot and humid, crazy weather for late October. She loved the city, but today the air seemed thick with pollution, gas fumes from the traffic and cigarette smoke from the cafe terraces. She thought about heading for the river to take a ride on a Bateau Mouche. She considered paying a visit to Shakespeare & Co., the legendary bookstore on the Left Bank, almost a shrine for Americans visiting Paris. But she couldn't get the energy. Truth was, she wanted to do the tourist stuff, but without having to mix with any tourists.
Plenty of the places she might have visited were closed, so falling back on Debussy, Meredith decided to return to his childhood home in the former rue de Berlin in 1890. Tying her jacket round her hips, no longer needing the map to find her way through the network of streets, she set off. She walked fast, efficiently, taking a different route this time. After five minutes she stopped and, shielding her eyes with her hand, glanced up to get a proper look at the enamel street sign.
She raised her eyebrows. Without intending it, she'd ended up in the rue de la Chaussée d'Antin. She looked up and down the street. In Debussy's day, the notorious Cabaret Grande-Pinte had stood at the top of the street, near the Place de la Trinité. A little further down was the famous seventeenth-century Hôtel-Dieu. And at the bottom of the street, pretty much where she was standing in fact, was Edmond Bailly's notorious esoteric bookstore. There, in the glory days of the turn of the century, poets and occultists and composers had met to talk through new ideas, of mysticism and alternative worlds. In Bailly's bookshop, the prickly young Debussy would never have had to explain himself. Meredith checked the street numbers.
Straight off, her enthusiasm collapsed in on itself. She was standing right where she needed to be - except there was nothing to see. It was the same problem she'd run up against all weekend. New buildings had replaced old, new streets had expanded, old addresses eaten up by the remorseless march of time.
Beneath, in smaller letters: 'French and English spoken'. Her hand flew to the pocket of her denim jacket. She could feel the folded square of paper, the flyer the girl had given her yesterday, right where she'd put it then forgotten all about it. She pulled it out and stared at the picture. It was blurred and badly photocopied, but there was no denying the resemblance. She looks like me.
Meredith glanced back to the sign. Now the door stood open. As if someone had slipped out when she wasn't looking and undone the latch. She took a step closer and peered inside. There was a small lobby with purple walls, decorated with silver stars and moons and astrological symbols. Mobiles of crystals or glass, she wasn't certain which, were spiralling down from the ceiling, catching the light.
Meredith pulled herself up. Astrology, crystals, fortune-telling, she didn't buy any of it. She didn't even check her stars in the paper, although Mary did religiously every morning, drinking her first cup of coffee of the day. It was like a ritual.
Meredith didn't get it. The idea that the future was somehow already there, all written out, seemed plain crazy. It was too fatalistic, too much like handing over responsibility for your own life.
Yet at the same time, something was keeping her from walking away. She was interested, sure, but it was an academic rather than an emotional interest. The coincidence of the picture? The happenstance of the address? She wanted to go in.
She edged forward again. Leading up from the lobby was a narrow flight of stairs, the treads painted alternately red and green. At the top she could see a second door just visible through a covering of yellow wooden beads. Sky blue. So much colour.
It was cool inside. Air trickled from a rattling old fan above the door. Particles of dust were dancing in the sluggish October air. If she really wanted some fin de siècle atmosphere, then what better than to have the same kind of experience that might have been on offer, right here, a hundred years ago? It's research really.
For a moment, everything hung in the balance. It seemed as if the building itself was holding its breath. Waiting, watching. Holding the flyer in her hand, like some kind of talisman, Meredith stepped inside. Then she put her foot on the bottom step and went up.
Many hundreds of miles to the south, in the beech woods above Rennes-les-Bains, a sudden breath of wind lifted the copper leaves on the branches of the ancient trees. The sound of a long-dead sigh, like fingers moving lightly over a keyboard.
'Abbé, et merci à vous pour votre gentillesse. A tout à l'heure.' Julian Lawrence held the phone in his hand a moment, and then replaced the receiver. Tanned and in good shape, he looked younger than his fifty years. He pulled a package of cigarettes from his pocket, flipped open his Zippo, and lit a Gauloise. The vanilla smoke wreathed up into the still air.
The arrangements for this evening's service were in place. Now, provided his nephew Hal behaved appropriately, everything should go off satisfactorily. He sympathised with the boy, but it was awkward that Hal had been asking questions around the town about his father's accident. Stirring things up. He had even approached the coroner's office to query the cause of death on the certificate. Since the officer in charge of the case in the police commissariat in Couiza was a friend of Julian's - and the only witness to the incident itself was the local drunk - the matter had been gently dealt with. Hal's questions had been seen as the understandable reaction of a grieving son rather than comments of substance.
All the same, Julian would be glad when the boy had gone. There was nothing to unearth, but Hal was digging and, sooner or later, in a small town like Rennes-les-Bains, the gossip would start. No smoke without fire. Julian was banking on the fact that, once the funeral was over, Hal would leave the Domaine de la Cade and head back to England.
Julian and his brother Seymour, Hal's father, had jointly acquired the place four years before. Seymour, the elder by ten years and bored after retirement from the City, was obsessed with profit forecasts and spreadsheets and how to grow the business. Julian's preoccupation was different.