“Not yet, and I’m almost through my half,” she answered, yawning. “The handwriting is hard to read, and the letters are very official.”
“You have the right to say that they’re boring,” Florence said.
“They’re boring.”
Florence laughed and bent her head back down and continued to read. Only letters addressed to the archbishop had been saved. His letters were now either lost or in another archives, perhaps in Paris or the Vatican. She certainly wasn’t willing to spend more time on this than she had today, and she regretted not having brought along a silk scarf to protect her neck and throat from the air-conditioning. Her head began to ache.
“Bastide B.,” Elodie said aloud.
“Pardon?”
“This is a letter from a priest, Père Guy Bernard, from Sainte-Marie in Puyloubier,” Elodie continued. “It looks like Père Guy is complaining about ‘des problèmes’ at the Bastide B. It’s hard to read his writing.” With a gloved hand, Elodie passed the letter to Florence. “There’s more at the bottom. Can you read it?”
Florence took the letter and leaned forward, trying to ignore her pulsating headache. “‘Avec les bonnes,’” Florence read aloud. “Servant girls. He calls them ‘les filles rondes.’”
“Round?” Elodie asked. “Pregnant?”
Florence nodded. “And as the parish priest, Père Guy would be frequently at the bastide.”
Elodie began to read the next letter. “This is a letter from the cardinal,” she said. “He mentions, near the bottom, ‘Je regrette de ne pas pouvoir vous aider avec les problèmes à la Bastide B.’ The date is hard to read, but it looks like it says July of 1742.”
“The cardinal cannot help with the problems,” Florence said. “Can’t or won’t?”
Elodie read on, and once she finished the letter said, “The cardinal says, at the end, that he would like to remind the archbishop of the count’s generosity.”
Florence slammed the wooden table with the palm of her right hand. “Now we need to look at those ledgers again.”
“To look up the count’s donations?” Elodie asked.
“Exactly. He bought himself out of les problèmes.”
Verlaque awoke that morning with the first chirping of birds and, mercifully, cool air coming in through the open window. He looked at Marine, still asleep, her arms straight at her sides, her expression serene. As he pulled up the white sheet, to cover her shoulders, he heard his cell phone ring in the kitchen. He jumped out of bed and ran and picked up the phone. He was about to turn it off when he saw that the caller was Bruno Paulik. It was just before seven.
“Bruno, good morning,” Verlaque answered.
“Sorry to call you so early,” Paulik said. “But something’s strange in Puyloubier.”
“I’ll say.”
“There’s a blind lady—a Parisian—who turns on the lights in her house every night.”
Suddenly, the entryway of Ursule Genoux’s apartment came into Verlaque’s head. Happy yellow walls, with hats hanging on pegs. “And during the day, does she wear big sun hats?” he asked.
“Come to think of it, yes. Léa and Hélène see her a lot. Léa commented on the hats, as around here it’s usually British women who wear them.”
“Or women from northern France careful with their skin,” Verlaque offered. “Ursule Genoux, her sister, or—”
“Agathe Barbier. I’ll order a squad car put in front of the woman’s house.”
“Perfect. I have a day full of meetings in Marseille,” Verlaque said, looking at his watch. “Marine and I are eating dinner in Puyloubier tonight. Marine’s crazy about that place, especially the eccentric waitress. We’ll swing by your house after, for a nightcap.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
New York City,
September 23, 2010
The next day was one of the happiest and most terrifying of my life. First, for the good stuff. I can’t remember a time when I felt as happy as I did when I heard Tinker Bell coming up the drive. I ran outside as Sandrine was parking the car. “Where were you?” I yelled as she got out and opened the back hatch, pulling out various bags.
“I told you!” she answered, walking over and giving me the bise.
“You most certainly did not.”
“I most certainly did, M Barbier famous la-di-da writer. Don’t you check your text messages?”
“All the time,” I said. “And your uncle didn’t know where you were either.”
She closed the trunk and looked at me. “I told him too.”
“No, apparently not.”
She put her huge blue purse on Clochette’s dented roof and dug around a bit, pulling out her cell phone. She turned it on and scrolled through her history. “Merde!”
“What?”
“It didn’t send,” she said. “I copied you both on the same message. I must have been out of range.”
“So where were you?”
“In the Cévennes,” she replied. “At a friend’s old cabanon. She lets me use it whenever . . . I need to get away.”
She began walking toward the house, and I grabbed one of the bags from her to help. I said, “I’ve been worried sick.”
She turned and looked at me like I had just said the nicest thing in the world. “You were?”
“Of course.”
As she walked into the house she stopped, looking around. “Do you remember that part in The Sound of Music when the mother superior tells Maria to go back to the captain’s house and face her demons?”
“Vaguely,” I replied, still pissed off. “Let’s get a glass of wine and you can explain.”
Sandrine marched on, ahead of me, toward the kitchen, her high-heeled sandals making an extraordinary amount of noise on the tile floors. All of a sudden I was thrilled to have her back in the house.
“Do you think there are demons here?” I asked, getting a bottle of white wine out of the fridge.
“No,” she said, again looking around as if we were being overheard. “But there are ghosts. And . . . I just couldn’t face . . .”
“The ghosts? And sad memories?”
“You know about Josy?” Sandrine whispered.
“Your uncle told me,” I answered. “I’m so sorry, Sandrine.”
She slumped down in a chair. “It’s
