Jeannette wiped the dirt from Mme Pomfort’s vegetable bed off the stolen tomato before biting into it. Juice squirted onto her T-shirt, but no matter. She would rinse the shirt in the morning. It was quiet tonight. The stars were visible when you turned away from the cluster of houses with lights on and looked instead over the fields. Late night was her favorite time in the summer. It was warm, her brothers were in bed, and her father was usually at the café or home sleeping off the wine he’d drunk. People had their inside lights on and their windows open, which made spying easier. No one suspected she was entertaining herself this way.
She grinned. She was probably the only one in Reigny who knew that the husband and wife who moved into his family’s old farmhouse and were trying to start a cheese business had just found out they were going to have a baby. She had had to stuff her hand into her mouth, hidden behind the oleander bush outside their parlor window, to keep from laughing out loud when the husband put his big ear against his wife’s belly and cried when she told him the news.
Mme Pomfort had been watching Danse avec les Stars and eating strawberries, holding each berry up to the light of her table lamp to inspect it with a deep frown before popping it in her mouth.
Yves’s house was dark, but there wasn’t anything to see in any case since he lived upstairs, above what had been the parlor and dining room but was now his bookstore. When she had started dropping in for lack of anything better to do, he had explained that he didn’t have children’s books or magazines, or anything she might like to read. She had stolen a book anyway. It wasn’t so bad, old-fashioned, but a good story about a mysterious masked man who was in prison for years and who turned out to be the twin brother of the king of France. It had been handy to know about because she could tell it to the little ones before bedtime and get them to quiet down. She had memorized the author’s name so that if she had the chance, she could pinch another story by him.
She avoided spying on the witch’s house at the far end of the village. It sat at the bottom of a long, wooded driveway and the back end of the house seemed to disappear into the forest of the Morvan. The forest was a bad place to go, filled with ghosts of the fighters killed there by the Boche in the war, her father once told her. The witch was really only a strange lady who spoke English with a funny accent and who had a hundred cats—well, maybe not a hundred, but a lot. One night, though, when Jeannette had gotten up her courage and tiptoed down to look in a window from across the grass, the woman had looked out, right into Jeannette’s eyes. Then she smiled and waved as if to say, “Come here.” Jeannette had run all the way up the driveway, up the street, and home without stopping, frightened by what she couldn’t say. She hadn’t been down there at night since, and though the woman drove past her at top speed often in her red car, she never seemed to see Jeannette and never waved at her again. She hadn’t seemed so scary at Katherine’s lunch party. Maybe her evil side came out only at night.
Thinking about that scary night, she shivered as she walked up the street toward the sharp curve in the road, taking care to step only on the grass so she wouldn’t make noise.
One of her favorite stops on her nighttime prowls was Mme and M. Goff’s house. They usually sat on their patio with a light on, and if Katherine wasn’t talking or reading aloud, he was playing the guitar softly and singing. Her mood lightened as she walked. Jeannette knew who he really was, of course. Like the man in the mask, he was in a kind of disguise, pretending to be nobody when he was really a famous rock-and-roll singer. Her suspicions were confirmed when Brett’s father arrived to start recording an album in secret. Why else would they be here?
Brett had not told her much except that his mother was a professional singer who used to be famous before he was born. He told her that at their home in America, there were big posters of his mother on the walls. She was thin then, Brett said, and had dark hair down to her waist. There were pictures of her with famous people; at least Brett said they were famous. Most of the names meant nothing to Jeannette although she’d never admit it. But Mick Jagger, yes, she knew about him, of course. Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones. Think of it, Brett’s mother was friends with the Stones, and now she was Brett’s girlfriend and Michael’s friend, also, and Michael was Brett’s mother’s friend, which proved Michael was famous. Maybe Reigny was not such a bad place to live.
She melted into the overgrown lilacs that bordered Katherine’s fenced garden. The lilacs were finished blooming, but roses spilled over the fence and scented the air. Before the Goffs planted them, Jeannette and the older of her brothers used to climb the fence. Now, the roses had too many sharp thorns and the gate creaked, which made the dogs bark, so if she couldn’t climb into the pear tree unobserved, like she did sometimes at night, she couldn’t get closer to the house.
The dogs must be sleeping, she thought, as she sat on the stone step below the gate to listen. The words of the song he was singing softly were in English and his odd accent made it hard for her to understand what they were. But the music was so cool, like something you’d hear on a CD or watch a band perform on TV. Katherine’s voice cut into the song, and she sounded upset. “J.B. must have gotten to you. You’ve been singing that for the last hour.”
He said something that Jeannette couldn’t hear, then Katherine spoke again. “Have you thought about how we’ll fund a trip back? Will J.B. pay for it as part of the promotion?”
“He’ll have to even if he takes it out of profits from the tour. But I’m not sure I can do it. What about the dogs?”
There was silence for a minute and then Jeannette heard Katherine’s laugh, which sounded like a pony she once rode at a traveling fair. “You’re joking. You are joking, aren’t you? Turn down a chance to poke a stick in Eric’s eye because of the dogs?”
Jeannette wasn’t sure she’d heard right about hitting someone with a stick, but then she heard her own name.
“Jeannette can feed and walk the dogs. The girl could use a little spending money of her own. God knows her father’s not giving her any.” And after something else Michael said that Jeannette couldn’t hear even though she had crept up so close a rose thorn was poking into her hair, “She’s plenty capable. She looks after those boys on her own, and she’s almost fifteen. Anyway, we’ll worry about that when we come to it. The important thing is this is your chance, darling, and you have to take it.”
The guitar playing had stopped and Jeannette heard a chair scraping back on the patio stones and then the kitchen door banging shut. The Goffs had retreated to their house and from here it was impossible to follow what they were saying. To make it worse, the door squeaked open again and she heard the snuffling sounds of the dogs headed down the path to the garden gate. Silently, Jeannette slipped away, back down the street. Take care of those dogs? She wasn’t sure she liked the idea, but the money, yes. It would be nice to have money of her own. Maybe she’d buy a new dress or save for a bus ticket to the Riviera, if buses went there.
That reminded her of Brett. She wondered if Brett knew that his father had gone to see the German man in the château the night he died. It had been so late that the living room lights in all the houses in the center of Reigny were out. But Brett’s family were staying in a big house farther out, one she never spied on because it would have been too long a walk in the dark to get there and back. She had ducked off the road and into the trees opposite the Bellegardes’ driveway when she saw the car lights approaching. But Brett had said nothing about his father having been there, so Jeannette decided not to mention it for now. She didn’t want to upset Brett, and he had already made a sarcastic remark about her creeping around.
She yawned. Nothing more to see tonight, and the little ones would be jumping on her bed early in the morning, always wanting to eat and to be entertained. Time to go home.