The Orchid Shroud Read online

  Events had not improved Pierre’s temper.

  “This fountain thing still goes,” the brother pronounced with vicious satisfaction. He was seated at his table in the pavilion, having peered at the new plan and Julian’s reduced budget. “In fact, in light of present circumstances”—he craned about to squint at the broken window—“I’m inclined to scrap this whole landscaping thing.”

  “In light of present circumstances,” Denise mimicked him, punching viciously at her cell-phone keypad on her way past. “You’d do better to pull your brains up from around your ankles and realize that we have to make everything look extra good, and that includes the damned water feature. I’ve just talked with Papa, Julian. He says do it. Everything. And don’t mind old Mouth-Breather here. He’s too busy peering up his backside to see daylight.”

  Julian’s landscaping operations consisted of a front end and a butt end. Julian did the front end—the client relations, garden design, stock purchasing, plus a fair amount of the actual digging, planting, mulching, and so on. The butt end was borne by Bernard. As needed, and when he wasn’t having a smoke or scratching his crotch, the slow, easy-going youth served as Julian’s heavy equipment. He made a good bulldozer and an equally effective power digger. Bernard was the grandson of Madame Léon, the sweet old thing whose walnut orchard adjoined Julian’s bit of land.

  It was now four hours after the scene at the pavilion. Julian had made his point with Pierre, and work had finally begun. At the moment, Bernard was strolling behind a rototiller that coughed out blue fumes as it churned up the area fronting the pavilion. He guided the machine casually, aiming it more or less at a piece of string that Julian had extended between two stakes. When he reached the string, he tipped the rototiller back, pivoted it around, and walked it in the reverse direction, trailing a pale wake of stones.

  The sun overhead was hot. Bernard completed a couple more turns and throttled down. The machine shuddered to a halt. Scratching his stomach, he gazed around. Julian was now over in the car-park area, doing more things with stakes and string. Bernard walked down to Julian’s van, raising a meaty arm in passing.

  “Oi! Lunch.” From the back of the van he dragged out a battered tin box the size of a small foot locker. Granny Léon made Bernard’s lunches. On mornings when Bernard worked with him, Julian first picked up the box from Madame Léon next door, after which he went to get Bernard, who lived with his girlfriend, a paramedic who did not make lunches, in a neighboring village. Every evening, Julian returned the box empty. It was a service that he was happy to provide, since Madame Léon always included enough food for five. Bernard flipped open the foot locker and poked around in its contents. Ham sandwiches. Hard-boiled eggs. Fruit. Cheese. Flan.

  At this point, a dusty, yellow Twingo that Bernard recognized as the winery runabout came speeding up the dirt lane connecting the pavilion with the road below. It braked hard alongside them. The driver was the dark-haired woman Bernard had seen going in and out of the pavilion earlier in the day. Good-looking nana. A bit on the stringy side for his taste, though, and a mouth like a sewer, forever effing this and effing that. The workmen around the place seemed scared to death of her.

  “Hello,” she called to Julian, ignoring Bernard. “Get in. I brought a picnic. Pâté de foie gras. Crab mousse. Champagne.”

  At Julian’s questioning glance, Bernard grinned again and gave a thumbs-up.

  “Why not?” said Julian and climbed in the car.

  The Twingo swung about and shot off, racing down the lane back to the road. Bernard watched the car cut across the valley. He walked to the rear of the van and pulled the doors open. He set his lunch box on the van floor, hopped his bottom up beside it, and sat there, legs dangling out the back. So much the better, he thought, pulling out a sandwich as thick as a brick. All the more for him.

  The road ran through the middle of the vineyard. Denise turned off it onto a dirt track that wound up the face of a hill. They parked in a grove of chestnuts at the top. From there, they had a wide-angle view of the valley: sunshine and rows of vines radiating away in all directions.

  “Well, this is great,” Julian said enthusiastically. He watched in fascination as she spread a checkered tablecloth on the grass and unpacked their meal, including the pâté and the crab mousse that she had promised. Her movements were quick. Her head, as she turned this way and that, reminded him somehow of a crow, sleek, black, and acquisitive. She wore a skimpy red elasticized top that molded to her hard little breasts, a short tight black skirt, and yellow canvas shoes.

  She jerked her chin at the cold chest. “You can do the champagne.”

  Obediently, he applied himself to working the cork out of the bottle and tipping the foaming contents into the flutes she provided.

  “Tchin-tchin,” he toasted her. They touched glasses. “Any idea who vandalized the pavilion?”

  She took a gulp and frowned. “I’m sure Michel and his toad of a son were behind it. They generally are when there’s trouble.”

  “Who are they?”

  “You saw the son. Guy Verdier. My cousin. Oozy little con. His father, Michel, was hanging around somewhere, old guy in a black beret. He owns the vineyard next to us. Papa’s been trying to buy him out for years because we want to expand, but he won’t sell. It’s the Verdiers’ way of getting their own back.”

  “Did you report it to the police?”

  “A quoi bon? It wouldn’t discourage the next jerk with a grudge and an aerosol can.” She snapped off plastic container lids. “The Sigoulanese are long on grudges. Help yourself.”

  He chewed an olive, tossed away the pit, and dug into the mousse with a spoon. It was light and creamy and flecked with pinkish shreds of crab meat.

  “Against the de Bonfonds? What’s their problem?”

  Denise fixed him with a long, unfathomable gaze. It was, he thought, the first time he’d seen her motionless. Her eyes were large, curiously flat, and almost lidless. Julian felt disconcertingly like a rabbit being mesmerized by a snake. Then she shrugged, drained her glass, and held it out to Julian for a refill.

  “Disputes over land.” Kicking off her shoes, Denise stretched out well-muscled but shapely legs. “And our success. They take the work we offer and hate us for it. You tell me.” She tore off a piece of baguette, loaded it with a heavy daub of rich pâté that was already beginning to sweat with the warmth of the day, and fell to eating, hungrily but with no apparent enjoyment. All business, Julian summed her up. He began to wonder what this outing was about.

  She waved a knife at the surrounding landscape. “The de Bonfonds have had vineyards here since the 1800s. We’ve been hit by phylloxera, frost, drought, and war. We’ve lost most of our vines at one time or other. In 1980, Papa tore everything out and replanted with imported rootstock. ‘It’s my legacy to both of you,’ he said. It took us fifteen hard years to re-establish, but we succeeded. That’s what the other growers won’t forgive.”

  “This is about jealousy?”

  “Why not? All of them still work the land like they did in the Middle Ages. None of them, including Michel, has ever gone beyond producing for the local market and their own consumption, while we’ve turned Coteaux de Bonfond into a prestige winery with its own appellation. We’re the sole producers of Domaine de la Source. Our 2000 grande cuvée won a médaille d’or in Paris. Most of the people in the valley, the Verdiers more than any, would love to see us cut down to size. Michel’s usually behind most of the labor problems we routinely have. Steals our workers, says we treat them badly. Of course, that didn’t stop him, when he heard we were expanding our facilities, from organizing the other growers in the valley to propose that we build on enough capacity to handle their production as well. We have our own chai, you see, but they don’t. They have to take their grapes to Bergerac for processing. They said they’d pay us for our services but we—we, mind you—were supposed to lay out the capital cost. Papa told them to get lost. And now Christophe’s damned bastard is giving
them their chance to do their worst.”

  She stretched out full-length on her side, facing him, leaning on her elbow. Her dark hair fell seductively over her cheek. Julian found himself concentrating on her right breast, pushed up against her arm into an appealing mound of flesh.

  “Look, Julian, we all know he’s done a bunk because he’s terrified of the media. Come on. I really need to know where he’s hiding.”

  So this was what the charade with food and drink was all about. She hadn’t believed him when he told her he didn’t know, and she thought she could worm the information out of him with a déjeuner sur l’herbe. Julian felt slightly irritated and not a little let down. Figuratively he kicked himself for wanting to believe that the picnic, this tête-à-tête, was somehow about him. He held up both hands. “Sorry. I told you. I haven’t a clue. Anyway, why are you so keen to have him back?”

  “You can ask?” Denise left off being seductive and sat bolt upright, stiff with anger. “The media are all over me like flies on meat because they can’t stick into him. I want him back to deal with it. After all, it’s his house, his baby, his problem.”

  “Then leave it to him.”

  “Leave it to him!” She fairly spat the words out. “In case you didn’t know, Christophe is a genius at ducking trouble. He plays the charming old-world aristo when really he’s a spoiled, crazy old con who dabbles in publishing, who’s never had to do a real day’s work in his sod-all lazy life, and whose only reason for existence is to spend the fortune his parents left him. You think he’s going to come out of hiding voluntarily to deal with Baby Blue?”

  Julian was a little shaken by her vehemence. He had never thought of his friend in this light. He supposed in some respects she might be right.

  “Okay.” He tried to shrug it off. “You got a stone through a window and some spray paint because the villagers don’t like you. But Baby Blue is hardly going to affect your sale of wine.”

  She flashed him a poisonous smile. “That’s where you’re wrong, sweetums. The media adore the idea that someone in the family was a child-killer. They love the broken glass, the graffiti, the animosity between honest villagers and nasty seigneurs. Worst of all, they’re repeating the predictions of a poor harvest, linking it to the feral-dog attacks and some kind of curse Baby Blue is supposed to have unleashed in the valley. All this at a time when I’m trying to profile our label.”

  Julian rallied. “It’s even worse for Christophe. He’s somehow got to account for a murdered child in his glorious history of the de Bonfonds.”

  She gave a shout of scornful laughter. “If anybody even reads the dead-in-the-water drivel Cousin Christophe publishes.”

  Julian took great personal exception to her “dead-in-the-water drivel.”

  “You’re overreacting,” he replied coldly. “After all, it’s people like Perry Pufnel, not Baby Blue, you’ve got to worry about. Pufnel’s ratings are what sell your wine, and he goes by what he tastes, not what he hears.”

  “Des conneries!” She fairly crackled. “Bergerac sits in the shadow of Bordeaux, not because our wines aren’t grand cru, but because Bordeaux is what people recognize, and that includes monstres sacrés like Pufnel. We’re new kids on the block, as far as he’s concerned. Eighty-four lousy points he gave us this year, and this year’s vintage is as good as or better than our gold-medalist!” She stabbed a knife into a slab of pâté with a viciousness that made him blink. Even Julian, who had only a vague understanding of the point ratings of wines, supposed that this was less than Coteaux de Bonfond Domaine de la Source deserved. Perhaps Denise’s concerns were justified after all.

  “I say screw the lot of them.” She looked murderous. “The French wine industry is going down the toilet anyway. We’re being out-marketed and underpriced by New World wines. Well, Coteaux de Bonfond isn’t getting flushed with the rest of them. If marketing is about brand recognition and giving consumers what they want, that’s what we’ll do. Right now, we depend on local consumption. In five years, I want us in every top restaurant from New York to Hong Kong. This isn’t just about a new pavilion and your landscaping, Julian. This is about shaping our product to international tastes.”

  Julian thought about Antoine de Bonfond. A genius winemaker, but a man with soil under his fingernails. “What does your father think of all this?”

  Denise shrugged. “As long as quality isn’t compromised, Papa has no problem. Always provided,” she added darkly, “the effort pays for itself.”

  “And will it?”

  “It has to. We’ve invested everything we’ve got in remaking Coteaux de Bonfond. If replanting was phase one, going international is phase two. And if Cousin Christophe spoils it for me”—she paused, breathing hard—“I’ll have his entrails.”

  Abruptly, she turned to look out over the valley. Julian studied her curiously. From some angles she looked hard and haggard. How old was she? Late thirties? Early forties? From others, she appeared vulnerable and just a little bit scared. In that moment, Julian felt he understood her. She cared passionately about the winery, the success of Domaine de la Source. Her father had spent a lifetime building the label, and she was prepared to take on the world to sell the name. He wondered if she had much of a life outside the business. He already knew from Christophe that both she and Pierre still lived at home in the big family house at the edge of the winery. Neither was married. Where Pierre was concerned, it figured. Who would want him? But Denise? She was stunning, electric, intensely sexy. Also rude and undoubtedly ruthless, but Julian suspected she could be very nice when she wanted. Then he recalled the dynamics between brother and sister and wondered if they behaved as nastily to each other in private as they did in public. Was there a mother? Maybe they fought over Antoine’s favor and who would eventually control the winery. For a moment he almost felt sorry for the Mouth-Breather.

  Mara was feeling guilty and irritated. Guilty because Julian had sounded hurt when they had last parted. Irritated with herself for feeling guilty.

  “It’s not like there’s any commitment between us,” she complained aloud to Jazz as she drove out of Bergerac. She’d had a fairly successful morning, procuring an old set of cupboards that, with some retouching, would do fabulously for one client, and lining up another stonemason to finish off Christophe’s project. The only trouble was, the man couldn’t start until next month.

  “Nor is there likely to be, the way we’re going,” she added grimly. Jazz sat in the passenger seat, enjoying the scenery, perfectly unconcerned.

  She made the decision to swing north toward Sigoulane on the spur of the moment. She would stop by to see how Julian’s work at Coteaux de Bonfond was going, suggest dinner that evening, his choice of restaurant, her treat. Eating out was a necessity rather than an option. Mara, although she did many things well, was an awful cook.

  Sigoulane Village was drowsy with midday heat. In the little square, a dog slept in a narrow strip of shade at the base of a monument honoring Sigoulane’s heroes of the Resistance. Mara drove through the village, past the smallholdings of local growers, and into the expansive terrain of Coteaux de Bonfond. Across the valley, the new pavilion, an imposing structure of glass and stone, winked in the sun. She turned off the main road toward it and pulled up in front of the entrance, where a man was replacing a window and someone else was scrubbing down one of the exterior walls.

  Bernard appeared from the side of the building. Mara knew Bernard as Julian’s helper, but mainly in another capacity, when he served with surprising agility as garçon on busy weekends at Chez Nous. She got out of her car.

  “Ça va, Bernard?”

  “Salut.” He shook her hand and waggled a finger at Jazz.

  “Julian around?”

  “Sure.” Bernard gazed around him, as if this would produce his patron. “Thing is”—the young man clawed in a leisurely fashion at his right armpit—“he was. But he went off a couple of hours ago. With her.” He jerked his chin, signifying a spot somewhere to
the north.

  Mara frowned. “Her? Who?”

  “Her of the winery. Denise. Brought a picnic, she did. Foie gras, crab mousse, champagne. Sexy chick,” he added as an afterthought.

  “Oh,” said Mara, as a yellow car came racing up from the main road. It came to a rocking halt near them. A slim, dark-haired woman jumped out on one side, Julian the other.

  “Ah, Mara,” Julian called, looking surprised and uncomfortable. “Er—meet Denise. Denise, Mara Dunn. She’s doing Christophe’s—”

  “I know, sweetums,” Denise broke in, sizing Mara up. With a slow smile and great deliberation, she turned to Julian.

  “Lovely afternoon, chéri,” she murmured softly but loudly enough for Mara to hear. “Let’s do it again sometime soon.” Then she embraced him with a display of intimacy that made Mara instantly reconsider her offer of dinner. Before Julian could free himself from Denise’s stranglehold, Mara was back in her car and roaring away in a cloud of dust.

  14

  WEDNESDAY EVENING, 5 MAY

  That night a wolf expert was interviewed on the eight o’clock news. Professor Lise Voisin had studied wolves for thirty years and headed a group of wolf rights activists known as Le Cri Sauvage, Call of the Wild. She was a grizzled woman past middle age with a long, deeply lined face, rather resembling a wolf herself. The male interviewer, a popular television personality with large white teeth and a widow’s peak, addressed his broadcast audience:

  “In four short weeks, the Sigoulane Valley, a normally peaceful wine-growing area in the Bergerac zone, has been transformed into an epicenter of terror. There has been one death and now a serious mauling, to say nothing of loss of livestock and family pets, by some kind of dangerous predator. People who have seen it describe it as an enormous wolf, a very large dog, or”—pause for effect—“something worse. Ask the most recent victim, Madame Clémentine Dupuy of Les Ronces, who was attacked outside her home last night, and she might tell you it was a creature from hell. Professor Voisin, what do you think of the suggestion that this thing is some kind of unknown or even supernatural beast?”