The Lantern (21 page)
Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
T
he
terrassier
arrived for the swimming pool excavation. He and his men were soon in consultation with the contractor, and more men arrived on site. Earth, stone, roots, and rubble began to move. Metal claws gouged into the walls of the old pool.
With this added impetus, Dom and I walked around the garden, marking where new walls and landscaping would enhance the setting of the pool. Then, while he played the piano for a few hours, I sat in the warm shelter of the courtyard with my books and notebook and let my thoughts float in counterpoint to the music.
Carefully, I mentioned nothing more about my writing, and he did not ask. While I read in the evenings, Dom developed a new interest. He acquired a telescope. Night after night, he trawled the sky, convinced he was spotting stars few had the chance to see through the orange scrim of city streetlights. Sometimes I joined him, but more often than not, I was happy with my books.
Soon we would be sitting under the bright, burning dome of the summer stars again, the Milky Way pouring a silver arch right over our heads. A long, hot summer when everything would be perfect, from the new swimming pool to the buttered walls and the garden where we would sit with friends, sharing our good fortune.
Life seldom works out as expected.
A
s noise and activity levels rose, I spent the afternoon combing through the various building permits, construction quotes, and contracts. Primarily, this was because Dom’s French was not as good as mine, but also because I had realized by then that he did not relish administrative detail. Left to himself, he would have taken the architect and the builders at their word and never so much as glanced at the fine print. It didn’t seem to square with his experience in business, but I put that out of my mind to concentrate on the job at hand. One of us had to do it.
Determined that every cent should be accounted for and every clause honored, I checked, cross-referenced, and made a file for the sheaves of loose papers.
M
ounds of gravel to drain and stabilize the soil were delivered the next morning. Among hillocks of mud and rubble, groups of men stood in earnest conversation. Engines fired, and stones clattered in the excavator cradle.
Dom was in the music room. I was digging in one of the orchard terraces.
When the rattling and whining over by the pool site ceased for a moment, I took a break from the plum suckers I was trying to uproot, the shoots as strong as wires, stinging even through gloves. Shoulders loosened in the sunshine, I stood up and drew in the relative silence with pleasure and purpose. A break from the noise at last.
It was such a beautiful morning.
As the quiet stretched into a longer calm, I went over to the excavators, intending to offer coffees and trying to remember which fruit juices I had in the fridge.
The men were staring into the hole, arguing respectfully among themselves.
“What is it?” I asked.
Bones, they said.
T
hey had been brought up when the concrete floor of the old pool was lifted. It wasn’t that surprising, in a spot where a farm had stood for centuries; they would be animal bones, I said. The place where a loyal farm dog had been buried, I suggested. Or a favorite horse.
No, they said, these were human bones.
As time came juddering to a sudden stop, it was the small details I noticed: the shard of green printed pottery pointing up from the recently moved soil; the mud caked on a man’s boot; the black rime on another worker’s fingernails; knobbles of rubble; the broken piece of brick; the individual blades of grass.
Piano notes ascended, Dom too intent on his own sounds to register that others had been silenced.
O
ld bones, I repeated.
Almost certainly, said M. Chapelle, the
terrassier
. Human bones.
Old, but perhaps not all that old, others ventured to suggest, offering their countrymen’s wisdom, their instinct for nature and the soil, the seasonal ranges of temperature and probable rate of decomposition.
They were discussing what to do next, as if I weren’t present. Should they leave the discovery there, or investigate further?
“I think you should leave everything exactly as it is,” I said.
“The police will have to be informed,” said M. Chapelle.
“Of course.”
“It is just a formality, Madame. Probably it’s nothing.”
B
y the time I had gone to get Dom, and the two of us had hurried back, several of the men were on their cell phones, and the rest were engaged in urgent debate. Already the theory was gaining currency that, far from nothing, they might have found a link to the missing girl students. It seemed to me a wild assumption, born of the frenzy in the newspapers, though, naturally, my own instincts had immediately taken flight in that direction before I forced myself to think logically.
“Surely it can’t be . . .” I began.
“We don’t know what it is yet,” said Dom, attempting to assert his authority as the owner of the property. He admitted afterward he suspected it was a builders’ ruse to spin out the job and claim daily rates of pay for the apparently unforeseen delay.
One of the men, one of the older ones, stocky, with bandy legs, ignored the shouts and advice of his colleagues and jumped back down into the pit. He picked up a spade and started scraping away at the soil near the muddy exposed ridges that were the cause of all the drama. Soon curiosity overcame all our reservations.
“Anything more?”
“What can you see?”
The scraping stopped.
D
om swore. “This is the last thing we need,” he said.
“I know.”
We were standing within sight of the scene but away from the men, as we all waited for the police and whatever story was about to unfold. I felt a bit shaky and I think Dom did, too. As I relate this now, it seems an absurdly selfish exchange, but that is what we said. We were both shocked, of course, but also resentful that our idyll had been corrupted in such a chilling way. That here, in our paradise, was death, and suffering—the stuff of horror stories. That our privacy was about to be invaded; our hamlet, perhaps even our life here, was about to become public property. It was an honest expression of that, nothing more or less.
In the pit, the exposed outline of a skull grinned atop a mouthful of earth.
A
n hour later, the police were with us, and the work site was cordoned by iron stakes and fluttering plastic tape.
“I am Lieutenant Marc Severan of the judicial police.”
The officer in charge was a tall, solid man in his forties, with wide, slightly pockmarked cheeks and a disconcerting way of looking beyond our shoulders as he spoke. “I have to tell you, as a matter of courtesy, that there will be extensive searches of the house and grounds in addition to the immediate site of the investigation into what has been found.”
Even as he was informing us, a team of men and women in white forensic jumpsuits descended on the pool site.
“We will, of course, need to talk to you,” added Lieutenant Severan.
“We don’t know anything more than anyone else here!” said Dom.
The investigator did not reply immediately, letting Dom’s words and his harassed tone die away, becoming more ridiculous as Severan made a face that suggested suspects do not always tell the truth.
“That is precisely what we are here to find out,
monsieur
,” he said.
A
s the uniformed gendarmerie and detectives from the judicial police invaded, and the curious, alerted by the marked cars and unnecessary sirens, began to arrive from the village and beyond, we sat with M. Chapelle and his men and two gendarmes in the courtyard. Conversation was stilted. Dom stared into space. I tried to read. One by one, we were called into the kitchen to speak to Lieutenant Severan.
I knew we had nothing to fear from speaking, from putting what little we knew into words, but I was fearful. Fearful that, somehow, we—Dom and I—would be misunderstood.
Dom was summoned after M. Chapelle. I worried, even as he went up the steps, that his reasonable but imperfect ability to express himself in another language might leave his words open to misinterpretation and further difficulties. Naturally, I had suggested to Severan that Dom and I be questioned together to enable me to translate.
“I will see everyone individually,” he replied firmly.
After about twenty minutes, Dom emerged pale but composed. He nodded to me but there was no opportunity to say anything. It was my turn.
W
hen Papa used to say, “I know where the treasure is,” it was never in a way that gave us any intimation he would tell us. Perhaps, as young children, we felt it fell into the category of mysteries that adulthood would eventually reveal, such as why the men spent so much time sitting at tables in the bar at the corner of the market square, and why our parents’ bedroom door was locked on a Sunday afternoon.
As I grew up, I came to realize that there was no treasure. What he meant was that the treasure was the magic of the place, the rare atmosphere of calm and the wind sighing in the tall trees that only grew because of the underground river. Or the treasure might have been the underground river that flooded out of the spring in winter and made a stream down the alley between the main farmhouse and the row of cottages, ensuring that we always had water.
It was because of the treasure, in this form, that we knew we could not give up. We were so blessed, it was inconceivable that we could not make a living here, when so many others down the centuries had managed to, had considered themselves rich, even.
So we struggled on with the help of the remaining tenant family, Maman and I. We continued in the old ways, trapping and foraging to supplement what we grew, and bartering with other families in the commune: gathering wild salads—usually dandelion and sorrel, wild asparagus in season—and mushrooms, and, led by Old Marcel’s dog, truffles from a very special place only ever known to two people at a time.
T
he next ghost to appear was not a person but an object. It had never occurred to me before that ghosts could be inanimate, but perhaps that was just prejudice, or lack of understanding. There was another difference, too. It was the first to come to me in darkness.
I have always struggled to cope with the dark, ever since I was a child, but somehow it didn’t occur to me to worry about apparitions at night. When I heard the gate clanging in the wind, iron banging on iron, I went out, unthinking and unafraid of anything but the blackness, to secure it before retiring to bed.
Out beyond the courtyard, on my way to the gate, I paused. The familiar landmarks were picked out in pinpricks of light as usual: the lonely settlement of Castellet across the valley was a string of diamonds, and the constellations winked from the high vaults above. I took a moment to breathe in the scent of slightly damp pines. All was quiet.
And then, I saw it. Low on the ground, riding a rut of the path, a flame flickered through the sparse hedge of firs. I felt the old start of the heart. How could this be? All logic denied the probability that this was real, but there it was. I drew closer, stared, blinked. There it was: the candlelit lantern.
Our signal. In the happiest year of my life, the lantern on the path was the sign that my fiancé, André, was waiting for me. André. I had not thought of him for so many years, and there it was, our sign, about twenty meters beyond the gate, as large as life.
Convinced I was mistaken, or that it was a memory I saw—so clear in my head that it seemed to be real, just like the pictures of the Valensole lavender fields I had trained myself to retain for Marthe—I moved slowly toward the light.
It was cold, and I was shivering. It had been dark for hours. The nights were falling earlier now, and chilling as soon as the sun dropped over the western ridges.
The candle bloomed inside the lantern. I was astounded. It was the very same lantern he once used, with its familiar iron frame and pretty curlicues. The same one in the same place. I had not seen it since the last signal he set. I reached out a hand, wanting to touch. My fingers were almost on the loop on the lid, by which it could be carried, almost touching it, when—
The lantern flew away down the dark path.
I watched as it rose into the air and hung for a moment in the night, floating in the boundless black. Then, in a blur of amber, it shot away from me.
What is uncanny is how, once the mind has accepted the existence of a terror, of fear, it is able to cope. The important thing to say is that, by this stage, I did not think there was anything unusual about a ghostly appearance. Possibly I was less frightened by this one, as I had not been harmed physically by the shades of my brother and sister, and felt that there could be no malice in a simple lantern.
It came to rest soundlessly, this small, metal ghost, another ten meters or so ahead, on a rut in the track.
I shut my eyes and counted to ten. Opened my eyes. The lantern still burned brightly ahead. A sudden squall of wind rifled through the black trees and filled the dark with the sounds of a waterfall. The candle flame did not flicker.
