Murder in Lascaux (11 page)

W
ELL, THAT'S JUST GREAT
. First Daglan suspects us of lying about knowing David and Lily Press. Now he thinks we're in league with the guide's nephew.” Toby's clenched grip on the steering wheel had turned his knuckles white.

“It's not going to be easy to convince him otherwise.”

“And since Marc had access to the cave, he's a serious suspect.”

“I know. Still feeling all chummy toward the inspector?”

“Not so much,” Toby retorted, taking a curve in the road a tad too fast.

When we reached Cazelle, Madame Martin was waiting in the hall with a message. We would be leaving for the restaurant in La Roque-Gageac earlier than planned because Marianne had arranged for our group to be given a tour of the kitchen before dinner. Madame Martin explained that the hotel-restaurant Le Beau Soleil was run by an old family of the region and kept hours that suited the locals. Only in the high season of July 15 to August 15 did it permit fashionable diners who arrived as late as nine. At all other times of the year, the desk accepted reservations at seven—period. Marianne wanted us to see the kitchen before the staff was in full frenzy, preparing hors d'oeuvres for as many as twenty tables. If we arrived by six thirty, we could get a good look at the kitchen and talk to the chef before he and his staff were under stress.

The plan put
me
under stress, though, since I needed to call my sister before we went out, and we both needed to get cleaned up. Being cooperative guests, we went into overdrive for our hostess. I tried to put the inspector out of my mind and called Angie while Toby showered. Then while I bathed and dressed, we discussed the call.

Now, you have to understand about Angie. She's my little sister and she's absolutely adorable. At least to me. Toby sees her from another angle. According to Toby, she's a bombshell, and as he reminds me, bombshells tend to explode. I'll admit Angie is lovely, and there has been a little trouble associated with that. At fifteen, she almost flew off to London with a photographer who claimed he could get her signed up with an international modeling agency. (I came back from grad school to help Mom and Dad talk her out of that.) At her junior college she became the object of her math teacher's obsession, and though she claims nothing ever came of it, the professor's pregnant wife smelled lust in the air and denounced the non-couple to the dean. The randy teacher kept his job, but Angie was so embarrassed that she left school. And then there was the yoga master who wanted both her fortune and her flesh.

Angie emerged from all these entanglements with her optimism intact, and that is just the trouble. She never sees the caution light when it comes to men.

So it was no surprise when I learned that Angie's plan for Grandpa's trust fund involved her latest boyfriend, who roasted coffee at the café down the street from the beauty shop where she works. Hank made her coffee, and she cut Hank's hair. But he had higher sights for them both. His idea was to start a business that would truck your motorcycle from your home in icy Boston to your warm-weather destination—Miami, say, or San Diego. All he needed to make it happen was $30,000. With that sum, he'd buy a used Winnebago, and he and Angie would fix it up to serve both as their home-on-the-road and as a motorcycle-transport truck. Of course he'd pay her back when the business was up and running. It sounded fishy to me.

Toby snorted. “I'll say. Something's wrong with his business plan. Guys with motorcycles like to ride them. They don't hire a service to get the bike from one place to the next. How long has she known this Hank?”

“Only a couple of months. Do you think it's just a coincidence that he needs exactly the amount of money that's in Angie's education account? It makes you wonder whether there's any plan at all, other than to get Angie's money and run.”

“So how did you leave it with her?”

“Well, I told her what I was worried about. She was pretty ticked with me for interfering, but she said she'd think it over.”

“In this case, I think you're right to interfere. Your sister doesn't have another penny in the world. You need to talk her out of this.”

“I said as much as I could without alienating her. I'll let her think about what I said for another day or two and then call again.”

“Fine.” Toby put his hands on my shoulders, told me I was a good sister, and that Angie would listen to reason in the end. I felt better.

T
ogether we hustled into the hall just before six, the last to arrive. Marianne informed the group that at the restaurant kitchen we had to stay close together and be out in twenty minutes. We weren't to touch anything. And we were to address all our questions to the chef, so his staff could stay focused on their work. “Monsieur Mazière is being extremely generous to us with his time,” Marianne impressed upon us. “You must help me keep my good credit with the family for future visits.”

I felt like a schoolgirl being lectured into submission before the class outing to the chocolate factory, but I chalked up Marianne's severity to the strictness of the French school system. I would be happy to keep quiet and observe the cooking equipment and the way the staff was organized for an evening's work. I hoped the kitchen tour and meal would banish my family worries and my mental image of Inspector Daglan's suspicious squint.

We climbed into a white Volkswagen van, which had enough seats for all, and found the grim-looking Fernando at the wheel. It was only a short drive to the restaurant. We passed Castelnaud perched high on our right, then drove alongside thick green cornfields until a bend in the road brought our destination into view. La Roque-Gageac has been called one of the most beautiful villages in France, and it is. While some of the towns in the Dordogne are built atop cliffs, La Roque-Gageac is built into one, with its back to the limestone sheaf out of which its houses are hewn. The cliff and the town face the Dordogne River, which holds the golden townscape in reflection.

The van drove through the village and parked in the lot at the end of town. Walking back toward the restaurant, Toby and I let the others get ahead of us and ambled behind them to savor the setting. We passed a small grocery and a café but then had to change to single file, pressing against the buildings to avoid a truck that came barreling along the narrow road between the houses and the river bank. In a minute or two we caught up to the others, who had entered the restaurant. From the street, Le Beau Soleil was easy to overlook, its yellow stone facade indistinguishable from the neighboring buildings except for a faded “Hotel-Restaurant” sign that hung above an alcove leading to an inner courtyard. Inside the alcove, the group stood in a circle perusing a menu on a wrought-iron stand.

Seeing we'd arrived, the group crossed the flowered courtyard and climbed the stone staircase to the second level, where we were all greeted by the chef and his wife, Christine, who stood waiting for us at the hotel reception desk. Madame Mazière was thin, with limp, brown hair and a pasty complexion; she extended her pale hand to each of us in turn. Her husband, Michel, looked ten years younger, his cheeks ruddy from kitchen heat and his eyes dancing with a mirth that seemed to say he was supremely happy. He waved us into the kitchen and proceeded to walk us clockwise around the work stations: nearest the door (and farthest from the stoves) a counter that doubled for preparing hors d'oeuvres and desserts; in the middle of the room a table for putting together the first and second entrée plates; on the far wall one stovetop for broths and soups and another for sautés, two ovens, and a grill for meats; and, as we rounded the room, a huge stainless-steel refrigerator-freezer. Salads, we were told, would be put together after the main courses were served, using a bar to the right of the refrigerator. Besides the chef, there were just two under-chefs, one hard at work at the hors d'oeuvre counter and the other tending the soup pots.

The pots held my interest. While the chef lectured in French and Marianne translated, I tuned out, thinking of our kitchen back home and that our pots and pans were ready for the Goodwill bin. I noticed that, with the exception of a nest of sauté pans, Monsieur Mazière's pots weren't copper. I had been intimidated from buying a new set of cookware by friends who said a serious cook had to have either copper or copper-lined equipment, and I couldn't afford either. I was working up my courage to ask the chef about the material and weight of his pans when I noticed he was already engaged in an interchange with one of our party.

Dotty was asking in colloquial French how the chef and his two handsome assistants managed to keep so trim when they were surrounded by such tempting food. Monsieur Mazière answered the question with a laugh and an assertion that cooking was very hard work. “One doesn't need a gym when one has to lift these,” he declared, suddenly using both hands to raise a heavy roasting pan filled with a dozen or more duck breasts. Dotty gave his shoulder a little flick of her hand, and winked.

Marianne intervened. “We've overstayed our agreed time, Michel. We look forward so much to the meal. Thank you for enduring this intrusion.”

“Not at all. It's been our pleasure,” he replied with a little bow of the head. And then Marianne shooed us out of the kitchen and into the competent hands of her friend Christine, who showed us to our tables—the two best ones, at the ledge of the second-floor terrace, overlooking the Dordogne. The open-air dining room was inviting. A tangle of overhead grapevines provided shade, while the lowering sun filtered through and danced on the cutlery and immaculate white tablecloths. Across the road, the river flowed gently by. Aside from the buzzing of a wasp, all was quiet; there was little traffic at this hour. In France, when it's dinner time, it's dinner time.

Patrick, Roz, and Lily were my companions. Toby was seated at the table next to us, with David, Dotty, and Marianne. I liked that arrangement, since we were a small enough group to talk, and yet at each table there was someone knowledgeable about the cuisine. Patrick might not be local, but he'd studied enough Perigordian dishes to be our guide. Sure enough, he explained that Marianne had deputized him to give us a running commentary on the meal. Our dinner had a main course from time eternal—a pot of braised boar meat. But the accompanying cornmeal cakes were an up-to-the-minute variation on shortbread recipes from medieval times. The lightness and sweetness of these corncakes was just what the boar needed, Patrick explained. Boar was a heavy meat and needed tenderizing with long cooking and a good dose of vinegar in the pot. Cornmeal was just the thing to stand up to the boar without adding more heaviness. Patrick guessed it was because of the strength of the boar course that the other plates were so light— first a thin slice of vegetable pâté (striped orange, white, and green: carrots, parsnips, and spinach), then a small square of filo pastry with crayfish and leeks inside. After the boar course that followed, we were offered a ball of melon sorbet to clear our palates.

Between all this instruction about the food and the pleasure of eating it in these lovely surroundings, there was not much social chatter at our table. As we rested over the sherbet, I asked Roz about her life in Baltimore. She told me she still lived in Guilford, the neighborhood she'd grown up in, just a block from the old family home, which her brother had inherited at their parents' death. That was now Dotty's house. Roz's mother, as a proper southern debutante and then southern matron, had not had a career, but she'd always done charity work and had established a neighborhood center in Hampden, a working-class area not far from the family home. After graduating summa cum laude from Sweet Briar, Roz had earned her master's in social work at Princeton, where she met her husband, Harry. When they settled in Baltimore, Roz took up her mother's work, but on a professional level, seeking grants for the neighborhood center, getting her mother and her friends to raise money to fund programs that there weren't grants for, and making the center the local hub for social work, day care, and after-school education.

“That sounds like worthwhile work,” I said. “Baltimore has had its challenges, with drugs and gangs, I hear. How has that affected your work at the center?”

“We've had the same type of problems since my mother's day,” she replied calmly. “But now the percentage of the population involved is higher, and the children are affected at a younger age. That's why I've worked so hard to ensure the future of the neighborhood center.” She suddenly looked worried.

“Are you afraid it won't survive?”

“I'm not sure. We were in the middle of a capital campaign to buy the building we're in when my brother Tom died, and his gift was the anchor of the whole campaign. There's a dispute with my sister-in-law over whether his pledge will be honored by the estate. Dotty keeps saying it's not worth fussing over, but the lawyers are at work on that even as we speak.”

Dessert arrived to distract us from this touchy topic. Madame Mazière herself came to assist the young waitress (her daughter, it appeared) in serving
oeufs à la neige
, Périgord style. Eight rounds of soft meringue were nestled, as usual, in a silver tureen filled with crème anglaise. The local difference was that each meringue was drizzled with caramel syrup and powdered with minced walnuts. Even with all that to savor, I mused a bit privately, thinking about what Roz had told me. She and Dotty had a good deal at stake between them, now that Roz's brother had passed away. What would happen to the pledge for the neighborhood center? Perhaps it was a good instinct that had sent the sisters-in-law off on a pleasure trip together before a battle could break out at home.

The silence over dessert gave me an opening to connect again with Lily. Earlier I had asked how she was feeling, but she had remained quiet, concentrating on her meal. Now I thought it was only polite to bring her into the conversation.