Aaron Elkins: Old Bones

On the other side of the room Jules du Rocher had watched this domestic scene with amused, piggy eyes. "Did you hear that?" he asked through a mouthful of pate de foie gras and bread. "Wait until she gets him alone. She’ll eat him alive." He snickered at this witticism and glanced at his mother, who busily aligned her rings.

Jules’ words, coming as they did in a moment of silence, carried further than he had intended. Claude Fougeray jumped out of his chair, brushed away his daughter’s hesitantly restraining hand, and marched quickly to the du Rochers.

"Do you want to repeat that?" he said flatly, staring down at Jules, his thick fists held at his sides.

Superficially they were somewhat alike, short and stubby-limbed, with torsos like beach balls, but Claude, older by thirty-five years than his distant cousin, was tense and compact while Jules was soft, flaccid, and spreading.

"Apologize," Claude said.

Jules coughed and blinked. Uneven streaks of red mottled his round cheeks.

"I apologize."

"Louder."

Jules glanced dartingly at the others in the room: at his parents; at Claire Fougeray, who looked utterly miserable; at the dark, grave servant who stood against the wall watching impassively; at another threesome that sat looking on silently from a grouping of carved wooden chairs on the other side of the Louis XIV billiard table.

"I apologize," he repeated, his eyes on Claude’s belt buckle.

"Louder," Claude said again.

"Really," Mathilde said, pulling at her pearl choker.

Rene du Rocher echoed his wife weakly, reflecting her gesture with a tug at his little moustache. "Really…really, my dear man, this is really-"

"No one’s talking to you," Claude said savagely.

"Well…well, I was only-"

"Don’t encourage him," Mathilde said under her breath in German, her face stiff. "Ignore him. He doesn’t know any better, the-"

"Speak French!" Claude shouted suddenly enough to make the three of them jump. "You’re in France. Don’t give me any of that damned Boche! Ik-bik-blik-bluk!"

"Who in hell are you to say that to anyone, you collaborationist bastard?" The speaker was one of the three people on the other side of the table, a square, big-boned woman of fifty in a functional tweed suit. She had observed quietly until that moment, then leaped to her feet and shouted, her husky voice strained with emotion.

Claude turned on her. "Don’t you ever say that to me!"

The woman was on the edge of angry tears, but her voice held steady. "I just said it." She lifted a trembling chin. "Do you want to hear it again? Collaborationist bastard!"

"And-and what do you know about it, Sophie?" Claude shouted. "You were a baby; you don’t know anything. Why don’t you go back to America where you belong, where everything is so wonderful? You and your-your cowboy husband."

He was losing his momentum. Jules, who had been sitting rigidly, sank inconspicuously back, flowing into the crevices of his soft chair like melting butter, as if he thought he might escape Claude’s notice altogether.

Claude stared menacingly around the room, as if to ward off attack, and leveled a stubby finger at the woman. "You know how much worse it would have been around here if I hadn’t gone along with the Boches? Sure, all the heroes were running around the hills singing songs with the Maquis, but I was the one kissing Nazi asses and saving lives. If not for me-"

"If not for you," the woman said, "Alain would still be alive."

An electric silence gripped the room. Mathilde jerked sharply and gasped.

Claude stared at Sophie, paralyzed with rage or shock; it was impossible to say which.

Sophie began to speak again, then closed her mouth as her eyes filmed over with tears. "Oh, the hell with it," she said in English, and then turned away from him and strode out of the room.

Her two companions, still seated, looked uncomfortably at each other. After a moment, the older man stood up, grayhaired, and rawboned like his wife, and went quietly out after her. The younger man continued to sit, embarrassed by the intensity of a scene he had imperfectly comprehended. Then he too stood up, and the eyes of the others swung to him. Uneasy at being the sudden focus of attention, he cleared his throat softly, nodded to the room at large, and self-consciously followed the other man out, his eyes on the floor.

Once he’d pulled the heavy door shut behind him to stand outside in the graveled courtyard, he released the breath that had stopped up his chest. His bland, freckled, good-natured face was set, his pale-blue eyes tense.

What had he gotten himself into? Why wasn’t he back in his cozy, cluttered office at Northern California State University getting ready for his spring-quarter seminar on comic dramatists of the Restoration? There was plenty of prep time needed, God knows, and when was he going to find it?

Although the March air was chilly, he patted beads of perspiration from his forehead with a clean, folded handkerchief. Emotional explosions and disorder were as unsuited to the nature of Raymond Alphonse Schaefer as-well, as propriety and order were to the early comedies of Congreve. He smiled at the thought, feeling a little better. Perhaps he could work it into the seminar. Omitting the personal reference, of course.

He stood in the clear, gray Breton light, his reddish eyebrows knit; a man of thirty-four whose stooped shoulders and air of dusty, bookish abstraction made him seem ten years older than he was, and wondered what he was doing in this place, with these strange, fervid people. Well, he knew, of course, in a literal sense. In January, a few days after his mother’s death, one of Guillaume du Rocher’s lordly summons to a family council had arrived for her. The letter had been characteristically terse.

"I have reached a decision on a matter of singular family importance," it had said in his blunt yet oblique style. "We will discuss it at Rochebonne on 16 March." That was all.

Ray, who had visited Guillaume at Rochebonne but had never been to a family council, had written to his elderly relative, informing him of his mother’s death and saying he would be pleased to attend in her place. Guillaume had scrawled the briefest of replies, curtly expressing condolence and telling him that he could come if he wished; it was up to him. And so he had. Rather impulsively, it now seemed.

He folded the handkerchief into a neat square and placed it in his pocket, peering around in search of his Aunt Sophie, the only du Rocher he had known as a child, aside from his mother. Living in Texas as she did with her husband, he had seen her no more than once every two or three years, but from the earliest times he had looked forward to their visits as welcome lulls in the unending war of bickering and veiled provocation his parents waged. As a youngster he had fantasized about how it would have been if the gentle, humorous Ben Butts had been his father and the comfortably starchy, rocklike Sophie his mother; Sophie, unprovokable and serenely equal to any emergency.

That’s what was worrying him now. He had never seen her shout before, never seen her cry, or curse, or lose control. And here, in the space of a few seconds she’d done them all.

He walked across the courtyard to the tall stone gateposts and looked both ways down the tree-lined country lane, right towards Ploujean, left towards Guissand and the road to Dinan. No sign of Ben and Sophie. They might be walking along one of the nearby forest paths, in which case he’d be unlikely to find them. Or perhaps they were behind the house; there was a pond back there with swans in it and benches beside it.

They were there, on a white-painted wrought-iron bench facing the pond. Ray rounded a clump of smoothly sculptured bushes and came upon them from behind, deep in conversation.