The café, which scratched out a partial living for the wheat farmer and his wife, who owned it, was located in what would have been a good spot had there been a reasonable amount of traffic coming through Reigny-sur-Canne and if the proprietors had a sign that stuck out into the street. At the junction of two narrow roads that came together in a Y, the building stood almost in the intersection, its pockmarked stucco facade free of any modern marketing gimmicks. A flower box with some brave geraniums stood on one side of the door. The problem was if visitors didn’t know that it was there, they were likely to sweep past the store and then have to look for a relatively safe place to turn around. Strangers passing through town probably said, “To hell with it,” and kept on driving until they came to the next little hamlet in the commune, twelve kilometers down the road, which had its own little shop for Badoit water and yogurt.
The only sign, painted directly onto the stucco over the store window in red letters, which the owner touched up every couple of years, was economical and to the point: *CAFÉ*VIN*EPICERIE*. It didn’t say “live music” because, in spite of the sound wafting from its interior as Katherine and Michael entered this evening, there wasn’t entertainment on a regular basis other than the exchange of gossip and heated complaints about whichever national government was in power. And the sign, Katherine had discovered after they bought their house, was not entirely accurate. While espresso and local wines were always available, bread, milk, eggs, and cheese were not. This was not the place to come if you ran out of sucre or dry beans for tomorrow’s cassoulet unless one or the other of the owners had thought to order them for the weekly delivery or, on a whim, had gone directly to the wholesale supplier while doing other chores in the larger cities of Autun or Dijon. Everyone in Reigny knew this, of course, and did their basic shopping at the supermarchés in the big towns, which lessened their reliance on the Reigny café, which, in turn, lessened the urgency on the part of the owners to stock the shelves.
The coffee and wine business was booming tonight because locals who dreamed of an audience for their talent all year round were here to try out for a place on the stage of the annual Feast of the Assumption fête.
Katherine had explained to Michael that they weren’t auditions because she would make sure everyone who wanted to perform got at least a little time onstage, even if it was early in the day or while the food was being served in another tent. The trick was to keep the most enthusiastic performers, who were often the least talented, from taking and holding the small stage pretty much at will. That’s what had happened the prior year to everyone’s annoyance except Emile’s, who was fond of telling Katherine and Michael how exceptionally well received his encores had been.
Emile’s only concern this year, he had explained to Katherine more than once, was that she would not invite him to perform twice—something French on his beloved accordion, and a “true rock and roll” classic on his electric guitar with the renowned American performer living incognito among them. He wanted Katherine to understand that he and his fellow pétanque players, a drummer and a bassist, were crowd-pleasers in both styles.
Yves, who held the door open for Katherine and Michael, rolled his eyes and murmured in her ear that he hoped Michael would not join Emile’s motley crew of amateurs on the stage.
“Not tonight anyway,” Katherine said. “He and Betty Lou are hoping to get some response to their new arrangements before they decide if they should record them.”
Yves was twitchy with energy and soon abandoned them, and Michael headed off to get them drinks while she claimed a table. Katherine didn’t like crowds or big parties. In Los Angeles, she had always felt like an outsider, which she knew made her react snobbishly, fuming silently at what she called “these pod people” while drinking too much overly oaky chardonnay. “But if I had their money,” she admitted to Michael after a party she’d wanted to flee the moment they entered the house, “I would only spend it on vintage clothes and better paintbrushes and tap-dancing shoes, and I’d still look like this, and they’d still look down their noses at me and call me quaint or worse behind my back.”
This party scene was as far from the modernist canyon lifestyle of L.A. as it could be. She reminded herself this was what she had wanted. She looked around at the high-ceilinged fluorescent-lit space littered with small tables and rickety chairs, the scuffed linoleum floors, a faded poster for Kronenbourg beer on one wall, and a line of decorative plates high on another. Yes, this suited her better.
A burst of laughter from the next table caught her attention. She didn’t recognize a single face among the party of unshaven men upending bottles of beer and shouting merrily. After a confused moment she realized they were Polish workmen, a group of summer migrants hired to rebuild a stone bridge at the far end of Reigny, beyond Pippa’s house, that had been undermined by a flood last winter. Jean had assumed he would get the job, but the district’s bureaucrats had apparently not even considered the idea that a local—or maybe Jean in particular—could do it. As a result, the quarryman was looking daggers at the party from his position at the end of the zinc bar.
His glance met hers and he gave her the same belligerent glare, and when she looked away quickly, it was to see Mme Pomfort peering at her from the opposite direction, mouth turned down in its habitual moue of disapproval. The widow bent toward the other woman at her table, hand covering her mouth, and said something. That lady, hawk-nosed, buttoned tightly into a black trench coat, and looking much like a large crow, cut her eyes in Katherine’s direction, then ducked her head to hear what else Mme Pomfort had to tell. Katherine began to feel as though she had a target painted on her back.
To her surprise, Pippa Hathaway was sitting in a far corner of the room, looking at no one in particular and sipping a glass of red wine, her face slightly flushed. When their eyes met, she gave Katherine a look designed to carry meaning and lifted a small notebook surreptitiously. Katherine understood she was here doing research, probably looking for clues to a murder, and was debating whether or not to signal her to join them when suddenly everyone in the café jumped as if they’d received simultaneous electrical shocks. Emile had tested the amplifier volume with a shrieking chord that vibrated in Katherine’s teeth.
Before the patrons had recovered, the door opened and Penny came in wearing a floaty dress that shouted “Paris” and was wrong for the occasion. Her eyes darted around, rested briefly on Katherine, then kept moving, with only a dip of her head in greeting. Okay, Katherine thought, she’s still pissed at me.
Penny saw Yves and made for him, touching his arm possessively when she got to where he was standing, talking to the young cheese makers. He tossed his hair back and moved a millimeter away, enough to make her hold on his arm tenuous, a bit of drama that made Katherine wince in sympathy.
Looking around for Michael, Katherine noticed Mme Robilier, whose flowers would have to be accommodated somewhere on or near the stage. She was sitting with her elderly husband, who looked confused by the activity. A middle-aged couple, their son and his wife, Katherine guessed by the young man’s strong resemblance to the older one, shared their table. The three Robiliers who did not suffer from dementia were facing the stage with rigid backs, turned as far away from Mme Pomfort’s table as possible. The speculation about German-born Albert’s intruder and gossip about Nazi sympathizers in Reigny had raised the temperature of dislike between the two women, a pity, thought Katherine, since they held adjoining properties and would be neighbors until they died. No one who held land in Reigny-sur-Canne sold their legacies outside the family.
Emile had continued to refine the sound from his amplifier, drowning out conversation with electronic squeals and hums as he adjusted the knobs on his secondhand equipment. His drummer, a car mechanic who hung out at the pétanque court most days, practiced his cymbals. The bassist, a young guy Katherine didn’t recognize, sat calmly, surveying the audience. Mme Pomfort pantomimed her verdict with hands over her ears.
Emile had set his silver-and-red accordion at the edge of the small platform, which happened to be close to where Jean leaned against the bar. Emile was eyeing Jean nervously as he tuned his electric guitar. Katherine shook her head as Michael came back, put the thick stemless glasses down, and turned his chair around to straddle it, cowboy-style.
“He’s afraid Jean will make off with the accordion,” she told Michael, dipping her head in Emile’s direction. “He’s convinced Jean broke into the château and has been worrying for days that Jean is on a one-man burglary rampage.”
A particularly discordant lick from the stage froze Michael. “Oh boy,” he said, refusing to look at the stage.
Penny was having a hard time getting Yves’s attention as he made a great show of charming the new resident couple, and now she left his side, moving over to where Emile was bent over a speaker. He looked at her, grinned broadly at something she said, and held up his index finger. Darting over to his pile of equipment, he brought back a tambourine, thrusting it at her with what Katherine could only describe as a leer. Ironically, given his former profession, he had a missing molar that made him at this moment look quite piratical.
Suddenly, standing up straight, he settled his guitar over his torso, planted his legs in a crouch, rolled his shoulders forward, and, with the help of his little band, launched into the approximate tune of a deliberately nasty Rolling Stones hit. Michael coughed to cover up a snort of laughter. “I’m not sure I can make it through one number.”
“That’s what the wine is for, darling,” Katherine said. And if that weren’t enough, Penny now leapt up and stood next to him, tentatively waving the tambourine around as she struggled to find the beat.
Emile ended with a flourish and gave a jaunty bow. There was sketchy applause, which he interpreted as a request for more, and he responded by sailing enthusiastically into the first verse of an American pop song made infamous by its white-booted singer-songwriter several decades ago. At that moment, a hand grabbed Katherine’s shoulder and squeezed. “Hey there, kids.” She jumped, and the ruby-colored wine slopped over the lip of her glass.
J.B. and Betty Lou sank into the remaining chairs at the Goffs’s table, looking around at the crowd and beaming. Betty Lou propped her guitar case next to Michael’s and said, “When are we on?”
Michael said not until Emile had left the stage unless they wanted to perform as a trio.
“Can’t miss an evening of homegrown talent, right, darlin’?” J.B. said. He looked around for a nonexistent waiter. “Shoot, I gotta get up again? What’re you drinking, guys?” he said as he struggled to his feet, the Hawaiian shirt this time fire-engine red with large white flowers, possibly more noticeable than Penny’s silk dress in this crowd, especially because it was paired with hippie-era sandals.
J.B. made his way back to the table in a few minutes, having managed, in spite of his inability to do more than point, to commandeer a plate of bread and sliced sausages, charcuterie. “So, what’s going on with old Albert’s death?” he said, popping a torn chunk of baguette into his mouth and speaking loud enough to be heard over Emile’s guitar. “Have the cops been over to see you, Kathy? I hear they’re making the rounds.”
Katherine wished he hadn’t brought it up. She pitched her voice low. “I don’t know much. Adele says the investigator’s been back to talk to her and Sophie again, but I hate to pester her for details. She really is undone.”
“Poor thing,” Betty Lou said. “They’d been married for a long time, I expect. Although, I have to say, he was kind of controlling, if what I saw at your party was typical.”
“Old-fashioned,” Katherine said.
“She have any part in his business?” J.B. asked.
“I don’t think so. He never talked about it to us.”
Emile ended the song to raucous applause from the Polish table and immediately plunged into another number. Michael turned back to the table. “He’s got another guitar up there and he keeps nodding at me. I either need a lot more wine, or to leave before he asks me to come up and play with him.”
Betty Lou laughed. “Happens a lot. You say your voice is shot, or your hands are, or something. J.B., offer the guy a glass of wine and get him over to the bar and off our stage, okay?”
“In a minute, honey.” J.B. was still probing. “Are the police checking into any Gypsies hanging around, or that nasty piece of work who runs the trash yard? Seems to me he might’ve been looking to rob the old man.”
Katherine looked around. Jean, owner of the used-parts business, such as it was, seemed to have focused his scowling attention on Emile. “J.B., you need to keep your voice down,” she said. “He’s right over there.”
“Hell’s bells, none of these good people speak a word of English. Believe me, I’ve tried. Try getting directions to a decent restaurant, right, honey?” Betty Lou lit a new cigarette and shrugged. “Seriously, Kathy, I expect the cops are checking out the locals. Who else could it be?”
“You’re the one who told us he was named in a big American magazine as a rich man, J.B. Anyone could track him down here. That wouldn’t be hard, and I’m sure the people who live here would prefer it was an outsider.”
“So you think it’s a stranger?” J.B. looked at her thoughtfully, drumming his pudgy fingers on the table. “Did you tell that to the policeman?”
“Of course not. I haven’t a clue who it was if there was even anyone to blame. I try not to think about that.” Which wasn’t precisely true, she admitted to herself. Lately, she had caught herself looking at people as though she were fitting them for a killer’s personality. The middle-aged woman who cleaned for Adele once a week? Shifty, just because she had a limp and a lazy eye? How insulting and ridiculous, and what motive other than Albert’s probable grousing about how much he paid her? The Danish businessman who had rented a house for the summer and whom she saw prowling around the forest near Château de Bellegarde, supposedly bird-watching? What did she think he was up to other than trying to find the overly enthusiastic birds who woke her every morning at five? But she couldn’t help it. If Adele was reporting correctly, the police were inclined to believe someone had been in the château with Albert that night and might be implicated in his death. If she believed Jeannette, she had to include J.B. in that list, but that made no sense. Jeannette must have been mistaken. There was no reason for the American to be sneaking around Albert’s castle in the middle of the night.
For an instant, she considered introducing J.B. to Pippa, if only to give the young writer someone new to question, but something stopped her. What was it about J.B. that seemed at times too intensely interested in Albert and his business and the possibility that someone had actually killed the old man? Pippa had some of the same not-quite-proper level of curiosity, but then she was a writer desperate for material. J.B., however, asked too many questions and seemed far more eager for answers than made sense for a short-term visitor, and there was something that bothered Katherine about the way he kept at it.
“Well, here’s another thought,” he said now. “What if Bellegarde knew something about someone here in town, say another German, and was going to tell all? Collaborators or something. I heard there’s a lot of old war grudges alive and well.”
Where had he picked that up? Katherine wondered. It would have to have been someone who spoke English—Penny, perhaps, in an effort to keep any suspicion from attaching itself to Yves? If it was her, that woman was making trouble in her clumsy attempts to protect Yves. She decided to find out, if only to suggest to Penny that it wasn’t such a good idea.
“Michael and I are trying to mind our own business, which is hard to do since we’re—well, I’m—also trying to support Adele and Sophie. They are utterly alone up there in that big, cold place.”
“Counting their money, I’ll bet.” J.B.’s grin was laced with something harder. Katherine didn’t understand him on that score either. Was he really going to be a good fit for Michael? Did she have to worry privately if he, too, would find a way to take advantage of her husband?
“I really don’t know,” she said, putting as much finality into her voice as she could. J.B. was annoying her tonight and, much as she liked Betty Lou and hoped Michael was about to be recognized for his talent, she was counting the days until J.B. and his family left Reigny.
Emile had reached the final chorus of a summer anthem of thirty years earlier and was crooning in what he intended to be the voice of the lead singer, if the star sang off-key with a rustic Burgundian accent. Katherine noticed Pippa still sitting in the corner, eyes fixed on the Don Henley wannabe, mouth open in what was either awe or horror.
Katherine was about to suggest it was a good time to leave, but J.B. stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Well, if it wasn’t someone who snuck into town pretending to be a tourist,” he roared over the sound, “it must be one of the local lowlifes.”
Unfortunately, Emile’s ending chord faded away just then, and J.B.’s words fell or rather blasted into a sliver of quiet. The Poles, oblivious, began their hooting and clapping, but Katherine could feel the eyes of the neighbors on them. Betty Lou barked cheerfully at J.B. to mind his own goddamn business, and said this would be a good time for a diversion.
Betty Lou gave her husband a look that sent him over to congratulate Emile and practically pull him off the stage. Michael and Betty Lou grabbed their guitars and climbed up the steps to a sudden shower of excited comments that papered over any collective insult J.B. had made. They put their heads together for a couple of minutes, then Michael pulled the inadequate microphone to the space between them, and the two brought their chairs in close. The audience was quiet, curious. When Betty Lou sang the opening lines of the Rolling Stones’s “Wild Horses,” Katherine was suddenly riveted. If she had ever known, she had forgotten that the woman had a glorious, husky voice, aching with passion and meaning.
Then Michael joined in, singing a tender harmony and playing so sweetly that Katherine found she was swallowing around a lump in her throat. Oh yes, he was good. Oh yes, he deserved a chance. Her vision blurred with tears she would not shed. Screw the Leopards if they tried to stop him this time.
The people in the café must have felt the same. There was a collective holding of breath, an intense kind of listening. The bartender stopped pouring wine, the Poles stopped drinking, and Emile looked as though he might faint from awe. When the music ended, there was an instant in which time stopped, and then wild applause, whistles, and people banging beer bottles and stomping their feet.
Betty Lou elbowed Michael and winked. Michael looked around, a slow smile breaking across his face, his color mounting. Katherine realized that to him this had been an audition.
They did one more song, then quit, over loud requests of “Encore, encore!” Katherine, getting ready to leave with Michael, who was still being congratulated at every table he passed by, noticed that Penny was flushed and self-conscious, apparently deep in conversation with Emile while sneaking peeks at Yves every few seconds. He was looking around with alcohol-glazed eyes, having run out of things to chat about to the young man with the big ears and his wife.
Katherine darted over to Penny. “I know you met Betty Lou at my lunch. The man with her is J.B., her husband and manager. Have you met him already?”
“Oh, is that who it is?”
Penny wasn’t a good actress. So she had bumped into him somewhere and had unloaded her anyone-but-Yves theory. For all her jumping around onstage as Emile’s new tambourine player, she seemed unhappy. Another lovers’ quarrel to be made up later? In any case, Penny wasn’t in a confiding mood.
“Did you see that Pippa is here? Over in the corner, by herself. She might like company.”
Penny cast a careless look around but didn’t seem interested.
“Come by for coffee tomorrow?” Katherine said, unhappy at Penny’s coolness.
“If I’m in Reigny,” Penny said, nodding and turning back to her musical mentor of the moment.
“Darling, you were out-of-this-world wonderful, you and Betty Lou,” Katherine said to Michael. “And now I want to go home.” She had caught up with him at the bar. “Penny’s mad at me for not taking Yves’s part in this police business, plus she’s making a fool of herself trying to get Yves’s attention and he’s getting drunk and who knows what he’ll say or sing. J.B. is upsetting everyone by talking about Albert’s death like that. Look at Mme Pomfort. She’s about ready to hit him with her bag.”
“I doubt she understands half of it.”
“That’s not the point. He’s loud and—”
“And you don’t like him.” He tilted his head and gazed at her, his expression neutral.
“It’s not that,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper. “I’ve been working so hard to fit in, to be accepted, you know? And I feel like I have to apologize for him every time he opens his mouth.”
“Baby, you take on the weight of the world and there’s no reason to. If someone has to ride herd on him, it’s Betty Lou. So, you liked our arrangements? Didn’t I tell you she has a helluva voice?”
“Yes, you did, and yes, I liked—no, loved—it tonight. I’m so proud of you.” She squeezed his arm and his answering smile traveled into his eyes.
“Let me find the men’s room. Be right back,” he said.
In light of everything J.B. and Betty Lou had done for him, Michael wasn’t about to criticize the producer, especially if the idea of a recording was becoming more likely. But, said a little voice in her head, what if Jeannette was telling the truth? What if J.B. had been at the château later than the police realized? No use thinking about it now, she decided. Instead, she went over to Pippa’s table, tucked into a far corner.
“I’m soaking up atmosphere,” the young woman said. “This is wonderful research.” She giggled. “Not so much that peculiar Frenchman’s playing, actually. He’s rather awful, don’t you think?” Her hands fluttered in front of her face. “But he may be a friend.… I’m so sorry if I…”
“No, I agree. Emile wants to have a big spotlight in the fête, and I think this performance is supposed to nail our support.”
“Will it? I mean, does one have to accept every bloke who comes along?”
“In little Reigny, Pippa darling, there aren’t enough candidates to turn anyone down. And it’ll be fun, you’ll see.” Saying good night to Pippa, she turned toward the door. “Uh oh,” she muttered to herself. “The evening’s not quite over.”