SATURDAY AFTERNOON, 1 MAY
Mara left Aurillac, grumbling loudly that Christophe was not her sole client. For want of anything better to do, she went to see the only other client that she had active at the moment: Prudence Chang.
“If you’re here to see how things are coming, they’re not,” Prudence said as she opened her door to Mara and Jazz. “The fellow you sent out the other day spent half the morning looking at my walls. Didn’t do a lick of work. I haven’t seen him since.”
Prudence, a glamorous Chinese American ex–advertising executive from L.A., spent part of the year in a restored farmhouse not far from Mara’s own place. Most of the renovation of the farmhouse had been (badly) done by somebody else. The selective conversion back to its original state, such as stripping off cheap, ugly walling to reveal the original creamy limestone, was being organized by Mara.
“Oh?” Mara murmured, thinking with despair that this was one more thing going off the rails.
“You look awful.” Prudence tickled the top of Jazz’s head with a perfectly manicured fingernail while taking in Mara’s rumpled appearance with critical, slim-line eyes. Prudence wore designer clothes even in the country and never had a hair out of place.
“It’s Christophe,” Mara complained. “He really is impossible.” She elaborated on her grievances as she trailed Prudence into the kitchen, where she was given the choice of coffee or iced tea. Mara accepted iced tea. She needed to cool down.
“He acts like a spoiled baby. And he’s autocratic as hell.” Now she followed Prudence back into the front room. She flung herself onto a plaid settee, one of a pair.
Prudence arranged her Calvin Klein shirtdress before sitting down more gracefully on the other. “That’s because he’s a de Bonfond. The family’s rich as Croesus. He’s an only child, inherited all kinds of real estate in Bordeaux. And his cousin Antoine—he’s the Coteaux de Bonfond man—practically owns the Sigoulane Valley. Would own it all, if it weren’t for a few ragtag winegrowers who won’t sell out.” Prudence knew a surprising amount about almost everyone.
“The nerve of him sending me to run his errands,” Mara fumed. “He wants me to commission someone to prove Baby Blue has nothing to do with his family.”
“Oh, that’s because one of his cousins, Guy Verdier, is trying to cash in on the publicity by offering to sell the dirt on the de Bonfonds to the media. He’s a—what do you call them?—avocat. Lawyer. So I suppose he’d know how to avoid being sued for libel. Lawyers are generally good at that sort of thing. His father, Michel Verdier, is one of the winegrowers who won’t sell out to Antoine. There’s no love lost between the families. Maybe this is Christophe’s way of doing damage control.”
“Well, I damn well feel like telling him he can get hold of this Fournier fellow himself, especially since he fully intends to suborn the results.”
“Jean-Claude Fournier?”
“I suppose you know him, too?”
“I’ve met him.” Prudence toyed with a carved amber bracelet. “Drop-dead gorgeous and très charmant. Kisses your hand up to the armpit if you let him. He’s a practicing genealogist and a cultural historian, or so he calls himself. Writes things. That’s one of his.” She waved at a large book on the coffee table: Le Visage de la Résistance en Dordogne (The Face of the Resistance in the Dordogne). “And that’s another”—a smaller volume entitled Contes folkloriques de la Dordogne (Folktales of the Dordogne). “Borrow them if you like. He spoke once at the Dordogne Women’s Society meeting. I never really figured out exactly on what, but it was all very interesting. I keep telling you, Mara, you really should join.”
“What, to get my armpit kissed?”
“Or any other body part. Speaking of which, how are you and Julian getting on?”
“Oh,” said Mara evasively. “We’ve both been pretty busy. He’s landscaping Coteaux de Bonfond, and as you know I’m renovating Christophe’s house.”
“You’re supposed to be renovating mine. You need a kick in the pants. You and Julian, I mean. You’re right for each other, you know. So when are you going to get it together?”
“We are. We do. Most weekends.”
“That sounds really thrilling,” Prudence said with patent insincerity. “You two remind me of a couple I used to know. They dated for years, even lived together on and off, but never got out of the starting gate. In the end he drifted off to Hawaii with someone half his age to raise macadamia nuts, and she set up her own software business in Anaheim.”
“And the moral is?”
“You tell me.”
Mara sighed. “The trouble is, Julian might be just as happy doing that. Raising macadamia nuts. If he weren’t so busy looking for orchids.”
“So that’s where it’s at, is it?”
In truth, Mara did not know where it was at, except that their parting the night before had not forecast romantic success. He had asked her to stay. She had turned him down. If he had pressed her, maybe she would have told him what was on her mind. They could have talked things out. But it hadn’t happened like that. Were they, like Prudence’s friends, fated to go their separate ways, he to his botanical pursuits, she, endlessly, to renovating other people’s bathrooms? Her last sight of Julian had been in her rearview mirror, as she left him standing by the roadside outside his house: a tall, indistinct form, lonely in the darkness. The thought of him like that made her swallow hard.
Prudence, who had been studying Mara, broke the silence. “Tell you what. You read Jean-Claude’s Contes folkloriques. It’s full of tales of folks who make pacts with the devil. You could try selling your soul to Satan in return for Julian’s love.”
“No thanks.”
“Oh, it’s not as bad as it sounds,” Prudence reassured her cheerfully. “Around here, people always get the better of the devil, poor dope. Typical Périgordine cunning.”
Mara sat up in bed, pillows stacked behind her, drinking fruit juice straight from the container and squinting through a pair of newly prescribed varifocal glasses, which meant that she couldn’t see anything properly, near or far. Le Visage de la Résistance en Dordogne was balanced on her knees. It was a photo-documentation of the local Resistance effort against the Germans in the years 1940–1944. She was surprised, given Prudence’s description of the author, to find it a serious, well-assembled work.
An hour later, she got up, dumped her juice carton, punched her pillows into shape, resettled, and opened Contes folkloriques de la Dordogne. This was a collection of stories, interlarded with the author’s comments. One, a tale told by a farmer from Liorac, was described as part of an oral tradition still very much alive in the region and representative of the typical werewolf “encounter” tale:
A farmer coming home from a housewarming late at night was walking along the bank of a stream. The moon was full, and he could see almost as well as in bright daylight. He saw a strange man on the other side of the stream, bathing in the water. When the strange man realized he had been observed, he transformed into an enormous wolf. The terrified farmer fell on his knees and prayed to the Virgin Mary. When he opened his eyes, the werewolf had vanished.
“Would’ve done better to swear off drink,” Mara muttered to Jazz, who lay snoring at her feet. She read on:
… If we accept that all legends have their roots in the reality of a people, we must ask why the Sigoulane Valley offers such a particularly rich store of werewolf stories. Perhaps this is partly explained by the fact that in times past wolves roamed freely in the forests surrounding the valley. However, it is also possible that the tales took their origin from a series of gruesome deaths that occurred in the last quarter of the 1700s and again in the middle of the 1800s. Eyewitnesses claimed that a wolflike creature able to walk upright like a man was responsible for the killings. Fact or fantasy? There are many who believe the Sigoulane Beast, as it came to be called, was no figment of the popular imagination …
Mara was growing sleepy. The books gave her a curious picture of the man she had been instructed to meet: the competent historical documentarian sat oddly with the legitimizer of werewolf stories. She yawned. Folktales soon joined The Face of the Resistance on the floor.