Part 5 (1/2)
He leveled a stern eye on her. ”If you sample it, you will tell her it is ambrosia, or she will fret and burn my dinner for the next two weeks.”
Nick cleared her throat, mostly to stop a rising chuckle. ”I'm allergic to fish.”
”I wish that I were.” He flipped over the receipt and began adding in figures from another.
Nick went back to the kitchen, where she found Adelie Laguerre at the st.u.r.dy old wooden table, up to her elbows in chopped vegetables and mushrooms. Table grapes, two fresh, braided natte aux pivots loaves, and a small bunch of garlic bulbs sat waiting their turn in the double-sided willow basket she took when she went to the village market.
French kitchens were a lot like Brit kitchens, Nick had noticed. Well, the French always had a bottle of wine standing around to be added to whatever was simmering in the pot for dinner, and they were a bit obsessive-compulsive about having fresh bread every day of the week. But the British were just as much a pain with their pots of tea and after-dinner puddings.
The dark-haired woman smiled as Nick came in, but like her husband did not stop working. ”I just made up your room, mademoiselle. You are very tidy for an American.”
Accustomed to the French way of delivering backhanded compliments, Nick grinned. ”I travel light. Madame, the petrol station owner told me that you've lived in St. Valereye all your life. Is he right?”
”He is.” With a flick of her chopping knife the innkeeper's wife decapitated a stalk of broccoli and began expertly reducing it to a pile of small florets. ”My grandparents came here from Perigueux with my father when he was a boy, to escape the war. I wanted to go to Paris when I was young, but Papa would not allow it. So I married Jean, which was almost as good-he is from Ma.r.s.eilles,” she added. ”Why do you ask?”
”I was wondering if you knew anything about that old chateau up on the hillside?” Nick gestured in the general direction.
Adelie put down the knife in her hand and turned to stare at her. ”I know of it. You have gone there today, mademoiselle?”
”I was riding around and saw it from the road,” Nick lied. ”I tried to take a walk around the place, but an old man chased me off.”
”The crazy Basque.” Adelie made a sound of contempt that only women born in France could produce and went back to chopping. ”He does this to everyone, not just visitors. Jean and I tried to speak to him about it after Ma.s.s one Sunday. Some of the Germans like to hike and have picnics, and there is a pretty stream there. He told us to keep our guests away or he would have them arrested-and he is supposed to be a priest.”
So he used the same threat even with the locals. Interesting. ”Does he give services at the church?””He only comes to Ma.s.s. But I heard the men who came here with him call him Father Claudio.”
He might be a retired priest, or he might be something else. ”Does he own the property?”
”Him? Oh, no.” She shook her head as she began heaping the vegetables into a wire potee basket already stocked with lamb and onions. ”The chateau belongs to the church.”
Nick glanced through the kitchen windows at the charming little sanctuary where most of the villagers attended Ma.s.s.
Adelie followed the direction of her gaze. ”Not our church, mademoiselle. The Holy Father's church in Rome. They own many such properties in France. Some believe the ghost who haunts it may have been a priest, murdered during the revolution.”
Nick straightened. ”There's a ghost haunting it?”
”So they say.” The older woman wiped her hands on her ap.r.o.n. ”Every old house has a ghost or two, non?”
Nick moved closer. ”Tell me more about this ghost.”
Adelie sighed. ”I first heard of it after the crazy Basque came to town to complain about my brother's son, Misha. Misha and his friends are boys who like to play harmless tricks, you know? They had been going out to the chateau and trying to scare the old man.”
”Making noises like a ghost,” Nick guessed.
The innkeeper's wife nodded. ”My brother scolded Misha, and told him to stay away, but my nephew would not listen. He and two of his school friends went out to le chateau one night to, how do you say, get even with the crazy one?”
”What happened?”
Adelie looked uneasy. ”Misha went into the chapel to hide, but never came out. His friends looked through the windows but did not see him. They ran all the way back to the village to tell my brother. He drove out there to look for Misha, and found my nephew walking on the road. Misha would not say anything for hours, until we tried to take him to the hospital. Then he wept in terror, and told us that the ghost had tried to steal his soul.”
”It's not a place for kids even during the day,” Nick said. ”I can only imagine how scary it looks at night.”
”It was not that, mademoiselle. I know the tricks a young imagination can play. When I was a girl, I became convinced that a troll lived under my bed,” the older woman said. ”I heard it breathing and moving under there. After many nights I worked up the courage to look, and something reached out and scratched me. I screamed the house down until Papa came and moved my bed to show me there was nothing beneath it but my cat, Lupi.”
”Your nephew probably encountered something similar,” Nick told her.
”No, mademoiselle. He saw nothing. He only heard the ghost rattling his chains, and calling his name-calling him Michel-and a terrible hammering sound.” Her eyes went to her hands. ”I would not have believed him myself, but he was paralyzed by fear. I cannot believe it was all a lie.”
Nick recalled the grimy condition of the chapel's interior. ”He might have imagined that, too.”
”We can only hope.” She picked up the potee basket, lowering it into the pottery dish and pouring a generous measure of wine over it before covering it with a lid for cooking. ”I will tell you this. After what happened to Misha, there is not a man in this village who will go near the chateau. Not even my Jean.”
Nick had heard a hundred stories of hauntings and ghosts, and knew most had occurred only in the mind of the storyteller. Had the details been slightly different, she would have believed that Misha had done the same. A boy in trouble might say anything to appease an angry parent.
There was only one problem, and it was not the name-calling or the chain dragging. Anyone who had read d.i.c.kens enough times would attribute the same sounds to any unhappy spirit.
The hammering sound didn't fit.
No one was making any repairs to the old chapel, the old man had said, and no one would work in there at night. She had not seen any tools, nor any indication anything was being used to fix the old place.
So who had been hammering up there, and why?
Chapter 5.
”Dr. Keller, I would speak with you.”
eliane Selvais, Richard Tremayne's tresora, came into the room where the guards had locked Alex. The tall, slim blonde in the pastel blue suit usually radiated a composed, wintry persona, but one glance told Alex that eliane's calm had more cracks in it than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
”These ridiculous attempts of yours to escape the castle are causing a great deal of-” eliane stopped speaking as soon as she saw the window Alex was working on. ”Mon Dieu. What are you doing?”
”Escaping the castle.” Alex worked another piece of the window frame loose and tore it off, tossing it over her shoulder. Prying up the wooden frame had been easy; she hadn't yet figured out how to knock out the iron bars. ”You don't happen to have a hammer and chisel on you that I can borrow, do you?”
The Frenchwoman quickly closed the door and locked it. ”You go too far, Doctor. The high lord is already seriously displeased with you.”
”I haven't gone far enough, and f.u.c.k the high lord.” Peering through the bars over the window, Alex tried to estimate the drop.
For a human it would be a lethal one, but she might manage it without breaking her legs. Or maybe she'd throw eliane out first, use her as a drop cus.h.i.+on. ”Are we four stories up here, or five?”
”Alexandra, please.”
Now there were two words Alex had never thought she'd hear out of eliane's perfect, disapproving lips.
She let go of the edge of the sill. ”I'm sorry; refresh my memory here. Exactly when did you and I become old pals?”
”I know we are not friends.” The other woman sighed. ”But we can be civil to each other.”
”Not without drugs, which no longer work on me,” Alex told her. ”So, go back to kissing Richard's a.s.s or whatever it is you do for him, tresora, and leave me alone.”