She disappeared through the door and I mumbled to myself, “I feel like I’m traveling with the female Scarlet Pimpernel.”
She hollered down from the stairs. “ ‘We seek him here, we seek him there. Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell? That damned, elusive Pimpernel.’ ”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Carrying her clipboard and best don’t-mess-with-me expression, Isabella and I left the house, walked to the garage, and hopped into a golf cart with knobby tires. She drove me around the house, up a hill, down a long dirt road and to a small summit, which turned out to be the highest point for miles. We could see the roof of the château behind us, Langeais beyond, and pasture around us. She drove slowly forward, revealing the other side of the hill. Or, hills.
Vineyards, as far as the eye could see.
I guess my jaw opened slightly because she reached up and touched it with her index finger. “Careful, or you’ll catch flies.”
“That’s yours.”
A nod.
We drove down through the vineyards. The thick vine bases rose two feet out of the ground and new shoots were already climbing along taut wire stretched between what seemed like miles of symmetrical rows. I pointed. “How do you have time to manage this?”
“Well, I don’t. I hired a guy who does. We’re a relatively small vineyard. Boutique, really. We make a small profit. I pay him well, give him incentives, and he’s all too happy to help Perrault and Partners make good wine.” A sly look. “Would you like to taste it?”
I nodded and we drove down the hill. I pulled my Costas down over my eyes. “You get more interesting the more I get to know you.”
She laughed. “Which one of me?”
She drove to an old barn lined with metal-looking barrels and computerized modern machinery. She motioned to the barrels. “We don’t use oak anymore. Just aluminum.”
From the far corner, a tall, midfifties, freckled man with wild carrot-red hair walked out of an office. He looked like he’d just stuck his finger in an electrical outlet. His top lip was taut, his accent was thick Australian, and his smile spread ear to ear.
He bear-hugged Isabella. Then me. She spoke in French to begin with, then transitioned to English. When she finished, he responded to her in French, then turned to me and spoke in English. “Welcome, mate.” He stuck out a callused, thick, muscled hand. “Ian Murphy. If you need anything…” I liked him immediately.
Isabella led me to a table where he uncorked several bottles. Two white. Two red. One sparkling. He handed me a glass. He turned his, spinning the wine. He called it “aerating.” Then he gulped, swirled it around his mouth, gargled, and spat in a spittoon-looking thing at his feet. Oddly, Isabella did the same. She gulped, swirled, gargled, and spat with some precision. She motioned for me. I sipped, swirled, and swallowed.
She said, “You’re supposed to spit it out.”
I held up the glass. The wine was really good. “I’m not much of a wine person, but I’m not about to spit that out.”
Ian laughed deeply, welcoming my comments. He talked freely about the wine, and the process. He used words like “volume,” “sticks to your cheeks,” “muscular structure,” “aerobatic something-or-other.” I didn’t understand a word he said, but in five seconds I was pretty well convinced that he knew more about wine than I’d ever known in my life. He poured a second, then a third, a fourth, and finally a fifth. He smiled, proudly. Holding the bottle to the sunlight. “A 2005. Best wine year on record. Maybe ever. Ninety-nine points.” He poured. “It’s firm in the mouth. You can taste the complex body of flavors.” I didn’t know anything about firmness or complex flavors but it tasted like really good red wine to me. I nodded. A young man’s French voice hollered from the back of the barn. He set down his glass. “Great to meet you, mate. If I can do anything—” He shook my hand and returned to the barn.
“What did you tell him?”
“You mean, as in ‘Why are you here?’ ”
“Yes.”
“I told him you were a buyer from a distributor in the U.S.”
I could imagine how convincing I was. But if Ian thought I was someone else to Isabella, he gave no indication.
She looked at me, a long few seconds. Considering something. Considering me. She tucked her clipboard under her arm. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
She drove me back toward the château, taking another road. We skirted the hillside and came upon another barn-garage-looking structure and several doors that led into the rock wall below the château.
She stepped out, waving her hands across the iron doors that led into what looked like caves dug into the rock. “More than a thousand years ago, the people that lived along the Loire River—called Troglodytes—came up here and dug, for lack of a better word, ‘homes,’ into the rock walls. Those caves grew over time.” She unlocked the first door and clicked on a series of light switches on the wall. The cave lit up to reveal it wound deep into the mountain. The entrance was large enough to drive a tractor-trailer through. We followed the primary cave, lined with smaller caves on each side. She pulled a flashlight off its charging post on the wall and shone it into the smaller caves. Each was lined with bottles of wine. Labeled by year. The farther we got back into the cave, the older the dates became. Finally, maybe some two to three hundred meters into the mountain, she walked me to a set of steps, cut into the rock, leading down. She flicked another switch and lights, hung along the wall, shone yellow and dull. At the bottom, she unlocked an iron gate and swung it open. It creaked. Another light switch. This cave was smaller. Low ceiling. Barely tall enough for me to stand in. She pointed her flashlight at a hole in the ceiling. Two bats hung sleeping. She pressed her fingers to her lips, turned left, and walked to another iron door. Like the other caves, the walls around us were lined with numbered bins all stacked high with bottles. “The temperature stays constant at fifty-two Fahrenheit, year round. Perfect for wine.” She unlocked the large iron door, pulled it open, another light switch, and we stepped in. She said, “My father’s room. Where he kept his Reserva.” The room was filled with thousands of bottles of wine. She pointed at a bin labeled “1977 Isabella.” “He bottled that the year I was born. Set it aside for my wedding.” The dates went back to the 1920s. She continued. “Some of it’s gone bad. Some”—a confident shrug—“hasn’t.”
She looked at me. “My father was the head gardener. Eventually, once he’d won the confidence of the countess after her husband died, he oversaw the vineyard as well.” A look away. Then another look at me. Into me. “He was what the countess liked to call a ‘purple-tinted-finger, eccentric genius of the vine.’ My mother cleaned the house, washed linens, and left when I was less than a year old. I have no memory of her. I—” She ran her fingers along the dusty bottles. “I was the ugly kid with glasses and hair down over her face. Dad couldn’t afford childcare so I ran to town, the market, bakery, washed floors, and tried to make myself both useful and invisible.”
She looked around. “By the time the countess died…” A shrug. “I’d been gone a decade and made a little money. Was over here on a vacation of sorts. Saw a sign on the front gate about it being sold at auction. It was run-down. In disrepair. The countess was a widow, had no family, and through the years she’d sold bits and pieces because she needed the money. Châteaufort was a shadow of its former self. I walked into the bank and bought it that day. As I made more, I bought more. Putting it back the way my father would have known it.” A glance around. “I thought he’d like that.”
The underground was a maze of one cave after another and more wine than I’d ever seen in my life. “About a quarter of this wine was down here when I bought it. Much of which was my father’s.”
“You all have been working hard.”
“Ian has. Not me.” A fun smile. “I just sign the checks.” She reached in her pocket. “Speaking of checks—” She handed me a wad of euros. “In case you get lost.”
&
nbsp; “Thanks.”
She smirked. “Consider it payment for services rendered.”
I laughed and pocketed the money.
It was late afternoon when we exited the caves. Sun going down. Coolness in the air. She turned to me, pointing at the château. “Think you can find your way back?”
I nodded. She turned. Almost said something. Didn’t. Then spoke over her shoulder. “I need to do a few things. Can you entertain yourself a few hours?”
“Sure.”
“I won’t be gone long. How about you let me cook you dinner? Say, eight?”
“Can I help?”
Another fun smile. “No, but you can watch.” She waved her hand across the world. “This is France. Food is an experience.” She walked off, then turned. “If you’re nice, I’ll let you open a good bottle of wine. And if you don’t turn your nose up at my cooking, I’ll let you actually step foot in the kitchen—which is a big deal.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I waved, watched her walk to the garage and climb into a silver Mini Cooper with tinted windows. She pulled up next to me and rolled down a window. “If you go into town, you’d do well to remember three very important words: ‘s’il vous plaît.’ ” She pulled her sunglasses down over her eyes, shifted into first, let off the clutch, and exited a driveway that led out through the trees opposite the front entrance. Through the trees, I heard the engine whine, and she shifted into third before fading behind the hill.
I turned around and looked at the château towering above me at the top of the hill. That enormous shell of a house that housed no one. Where memories walked the halls. Something in my gut started to hurt. Pain is not an accurate description. But I don’t know what else to call it. I wanted to call Steady and ask him what he’d gotten me into but I had an idea he knew all too well. That’s why he sent me. And make no mistake about it—Katie, or Isabella, might have thought she was inviting me or ordering me or whatever, but she and I were little more than puppets.
If I thought I was screwed up, I had another thing coming. I lived one lie. This woman lived multiple. Simultaneously. She was probably a genius, illustrated by the fact that she kept it all straight. No wonder she’d won three Academy Awards. If they knew what she was really like, they’d give her one for each persona—Daisy the well-endowed ditz, Ashley the long-legged Asian lingerie model, Isabella the don’t-mess-with-me-I-don’t-have-time-for-you CEO, Gretta the haggard, arthritic gardener. There’s no telling who would be in the kitchen tonight. And while anonymity explained some of them, it did not justify them all. One or two would get the job done. This many had its roots in something else. Something about the number of them bothered me. As in, Katie was trying really hard not to be someone in particular.
I had a few hours, so I grabbed my wallet and walked down the drive and into town. Maybe I could order a cup of coffee. I walked the mile to town, past the thousand-year-old church, around the rock-of-Gibraltar Château de Langeais, and into the center of town, where my nose led me to a bakery. I sat at a table and a server approached me. “Bonjour.”
I held up one finger. “Coffee?”
She said, “Americain?”
I nodded, figuring if she was offering, I was agreeing.
She smiled, nodded, and disappeared inside. When she returned with what looked like a cup of coffee, I pointed at the window and the many croissants displayed in the glass. “Croissant?”
She said, “Shoco-lott?” The word exited her mouth emphasizing all the wrong syllables.
I thought about it. The syllables rolled inside my head, finally registering. “Yes.” Then I tried to remember what Katie had told me. I racked my brain, finally speaking. “See view… place.”
She laughed, grabbed a croissant from the tray inside the window, and placed it on my table. She left me with my coffee and my bread. I was quite proud of myself. I’d just navigated ordering. If I found myself alone, I wouldn’t starve. I looked around and realized it was a good thing I didn’t have to ask for a bathroom because I’d either be looking for a tree or sitting in a Langeais jail after having made misinterpreted hand gestures that landed me there.
I drank my coffee, which was quite good, and nibbled my chocolate croissant, which had been dipped in butter, baked, and infused with chocolate. After a second cup of coffee and a third croissant, the girl left the check. I left a twenty-euro bill on the table, thinking it would cover my check and her tip. It did. She tried to bring me change but I said, “No,” and she smiled.
I figured I’d pressed my luck with the language enough so I stood and began making my way home.
The sound of the engine and the flash of silver caught my eye. A Mini Cooper, tinted windows, wound a serpentine road higher up on the hill. Surely there was more than one. Then she stopped, stepped out, flowers in tow, and began walking across the lawn on the hill above. She was a half mile from me but didn’t see me. She was intent on something else. I wound through the streets, up a series of steps, and exited into a cemetery. A very old cemetery. Isabella, covered in a scarf and sunglasses, knelt in a far corner. I held back. Hiding behind old stones and a mausoleum. She brushed the grave, setting the flowers in the brass fixture, and knelt there a long time. I heard her. Talking first, then sobbing. Occasionally, she would say something but I couldn’t make it out. The distance garbled it. I’d not seen this side of her. This was unabashed. Unedited. Torn open. Laid bare. Whoever this woman was, this was her.
An hour later, she left. I watched her load into the car and slowly wind around the town toward the château. When she was out of sight, I walked up to the grave. The flowers were fresh. Tears still wet on the marble.
My insides hurt. Like they hadn’t hurt in a decade. Old wounds, picked open. The scab and scar, peeled back. I turned, looked away. Pain is pain whether it’s yours or someone else’s. It’s one thing to know it as your own. It’s something else to watch it crack someone down the middle.
I wandered back to town. Window-shopping. Part of me wanted to run. Leave this woman and her problems and her pain and skirt back across the ocean. And part of me did not want to do that. My mind raced. Questions I couldn’t answer. I felt like Steady was walking alongside me. Heard his heels shuffling. Before long, I was talking with him. Out loud. Or, at least, the idea of him. Why me? What can I do? What should I do? What would you do? No, don’t answer that one. A woman and her daughter approached, then crossed the street and passed on the other side—keeping a safe distance. Evidently, my conversation had grown animated. An hour later, I found myself staring through the window of a used-bookstore. Katie’s biography sat in the display staring back at me. The proprietor had both French and English versions.
I gave in to my curiosity, paid the man, and stuffed the book under my arm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Ice Queen was a quick read. Easy to get into. He’d cobbled together tabloid rumors and Katie’s story with a good dose of his own invention. It began with a scene designed to hook the reader, made as melodramatic as possible. It was about ten years ago, when she had “hit rock bottom.” Yes, some of it was true—Katie had admitted as much—but much was fabricated, and its tone and intent was nothing short of cruel.
By page ten I was ready to put it down. The guy was a gold digger and she was his golden goose.
The sound of banging pots and pans mixed alongside the Allman Brothers drew me to the kitchen. The woman I’d witnessed at the graveside was gone. Someone else had taken her place. This woman was singing, “And I got to run to keep from hiding.” Unlike everything else about her, she did not have a good voice. When I poked my head around the corner, she looked like she’d been dipped in flour from ear to elbow. She sneezed, wiggled her nose, waved me forward with a white hand. “Come here. Quick.”
I obeyed. She sniffled, pressed her nose against my shoulder, rubbing hard and smearing flour and snot across my shirt. “Thanks,” I said.
She sneezed. Then sneezed again. Louder. Finally, she arched he
r back, took a deep breath, held it, and—drawing the force up from her toes—sneezed a third time. Having sprayed spit across the kitchen and what looked to be our dinner, she shook her head and said, “Wow!”
“You better?”
“Yep.”
I thought to myself but spoke out loud. “How can someone so small make such a loud noise?”
“Cheap seats.”
“What?”
She pointed to an imaginary row of seats somewhere beyond the kitchen. “Cheap seats. Back row. If you want to reach them, you’ve got to project.”
“Got it.”
She was as close to her physical self—whoever that was—as I’d seen her since we left my boat. No wig. No makeup. No fake eyelashes or fake boobs or fake teeth. This was woman stripped bare. I didn’t know what to call her. So I started there. “What should I call you?”
She was kneading dough. She smiled, didn’t look at me. “Sort of difficult not knowing what to call someone, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Touché.”
She motioned to a small bottle of vanilla extract. “You mind?”
I picked it up, screwed off the cap, and handed it to her. “Peter.”
She stopped. Her eyes found mine. She considered this, her wheels turning. Maybe a slight recognition. A question surfaced. Or was that just me, reading something into nothing.
I shrugged. “It’s my real name.”
“And ‘Cartwright Jones’?”
“I bought him. Or rather, paid some guys to make his name mine. I thought it’d be good to have if I needed to run farther than I’d already run. I’ve used it a couple of times to get in and out of Canada.”
“Fishing?”
“No, I just wanted to know if it’d work.”
“You drove all the way up there to see if your fake passport would let you into Canada?”
A shrug. “Well, yeah, but I was also curious to see if, once out, they’d let me back in.”