“You know, Fabrice,” said Jean-Paul, “Cady will have to leave soon, probably in the next day or two. Why don’t I come stay with you for a little while?”
Cady opened her mouth to contradict him, but swallowed her words. She already felt so comfortable here and had imagined staying for longer than “a day or two,” but she was reminded once again thatFabrice was nothercousin. It bothered her that Jean-Paul seemed to be pushing for something diametrically opposed to what Fabrice had always wanted, but this was not her family’s château, or her ancestral village, or really any of her business. Jean-Paul had been kind, but he couldn’t have made that distinction any more clear.
Staring at the fire, she absently stroked Lucy’s espresso brown coat. Most of the dog’s fur was wiry, but her head and ears were pure velvet. Lucy’s breath was steady as she slept, counting off the seconds, the moments. Once, Cady had been sent to “mindfulness class” and learned that Buddhists occasionally rang a bell, at which point everyone was supposed to stop what they were doing and concentrate on nothing more than breathing: in and out, in and out. The whisper of the air traveling through one’s throat and into one’s lungs, a reminder that all we have is the here and now, what’s in front of us. No past, no future, just this moment.
But, Cady remembered thinking in class, as she sat uncomfortable and cross-legged on the floor,what if this moment, the one right this second, sucked?
“Cady?” Jean-Paul interrupted her thoughts.
“Sorry. What?”
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Of course. Sure.”
“Cady”—Fabrice waved a scrap of paper in her general direction—“go get us another bottle of that Bordeaux. I drew you the damned map you asked for.”
“I’ll get it,” said Jean-Paul, getting to his feet.
“No, really,” said Cady, taking the note and grabbing the flashlight from the counter. “I like going. It’s a mysterious French wine cellar. Can’t get enough of it. We don’t have anything like it where I’m from.”
Lucy lifted her anvil-size head.
“Especially with my trusty canine companion for protection. C’mon, Lucy.”
She left the men talking about Paris in its bohemian heyday. Jean-Paul, of course, had gone to the Sorbonne and to Cambridge. He was educated, erudite, at home with great literature and great ideas. Meanwhile Cady could barely make it through Fabrice’s novel, and even then didn’t understand most of what she was reading. She had realized with a start last night that Fabrice had been younger than she was now when he wrote it. She yearned for a copy ofThe Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Or maybe Harry Potter. Something she had read before, repeatedly; a book with a story line told in a straightforward fashion. Fantasy was one thing; this “new novel” business was something else entirely.
Down in the cellar, lost in her thoughts and with only the beam of the flashlight to guide her, she turned into the wrong room and walked straight into a pile of boxes.
Out of one spilled some very old film cartridges. Exposed, but undeveloped, film cartridges.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
PRESENT DAY
CHÂTEAU CLEMENT
Cady
“I thought maybe I’d have to send a search party.”
“Look whatIfound.” She set the bottle of Bordeaux on the table and beside it the box of film cartridges.
Fabrice gave her a side-eyed glance. “A box of garbage? Plenty more where that came from.”
“It’s not garbage, Fabrice,” Cady said, unable to contain her excitement. “These are photographs waiting to be developed—and look at the handwritten notes! I think these must have belonged to your grandfather.”
“That reminds me,” said Jean-Paul. “I brought Yves Clement’s photographs from my mother’s house as well.” He leaned over and extracted a thick manila envelope from his leather courier bag. “These are copies; the originals are in the archive. Do you remember, Fabrice? I tried to show these to you a few years ago—”
“Ça me fait chier ça,”said Fabrice. Cady wasn’t sure of the expression, but she caught the general gist: He didn’t care to see them.
“But they were taken by your grandfather, of this very estate,” Cady urged. “Okay if I look through them?”
He shrugged.
Cady took the photos out of the envelope and studied them. As Jean-Paul had told her, most were of the people who used to work the estate, primarily in the fields. They fed right into her imagination of the ghosts roaming the grounds of the château, though unfortunately there weren’t many interior shots. Yves Clement appeared to have been a nature lover: There were dozens of photographs of birds—quail and grouse—horses, goats, and hunting dogs.
“And these are of Josephine Clement,” said Jean-Paul, handing her half a dozen photographs of a lovely young woman with a delicate face, her dark hair piled in a huge halo in the Gibson-girl style. A distinctive mole on her neck looked almost like a heart. “She was very young when she married Yves: only eighteen, and he was nearly forty. But by all accounts they appeared happy together.”
