Aaron Elkins: Old Bones

"That rat!" Sophie Butts was saying. "That turd!" (He was most certainly going to have to revise his assessment of her if this kept up.) "That little toad! Can you believe that Guillaume actually asked him here? Someone ought to shoot him! Claude, I mean."

"Now, honey," her husband said soothingly, "you don’t mean all that. You know what my daddy used to say about revenge?"

She smiled weakly. "What?"

Behind them, Ray smiled too. One could always trust Ben to pull a rustic aphorism out of his pocket when things needed smoothing over.

"My daddy," said Ben, his Texas accent thickening, as it did whenever a homily was in process, "he said ain’t nothin’ costs more nor pays less’n revenge."

REE-venge was what he said, and Sophie smiled a little more bravely. He reached for her hand and squeezed it. "It was a long way back, Sophie. Time to forget."

"Forget Alain? Oh, Ben, if you’d known him…Do you know," she said, her voice trembling, "I haven’t seen Claude Fougeray in over forty years, not since I was ten years old. But I’d gladly shoot him myself, today, right now-"

"I know, I know." Ben held her hand in his and slowly stroked the back of it.

Ray’s instinctive tendency was to quietly go away, but something in him also wanted to go to Sophie. While he dithered, Ben looked up and saw him.

"Come on over, Ray."

"Sophie?" Ray said hesitantly. "Are you all right?"

"Yes, of course." She sniffed, pulled herself together, and patted the arm of a garden chair next to the bench. "Sit," she said, her throaty, pleasant voice more controlled.

Obediently he sat. His thin legs, not overly long, seemed nonetheless to wrap themselves around each other three times, with his left ankle ending up behind his right foot.

Sophie appraised him with her lips pursed. "Poor man, you must think we’re all crazy."

"No," he said quickly, "not at all." He smiled tentatively. "Perhaps a bit, er, histrionic?"

She fixed him with a candid eye. "Raymond, just how much do you know about went on here during the war?"

"Here at the domaine? Almost nothing. I know Guillaume was a hero in the Resistance, but that’s about all. You know the way he is, and Mom never had much to say about it either."

"Yes, she was in Paris then with Aunt Louise, but I think it’s time you learned. Wouldn’t you agree, Ben?"

"I would, hon. Looks like we’re choosing up sides in there, and we may as well have Ray on our side. Better to have him inside the tent pissin’ out than outside the tent pissin’ in. So my Uncle Floyd used to say."

Having made his contribution, he leaned back and away, against an arm of the bench, giving center stage to Sophie. He held out one hand, trying to attract the attention of a swan that had glided over.

"All right, then," Sophie said. "Raymond, do you know who Alain was?" There was a tremor at her mention of the name.

"My uncle?" Ray asked uncertainly. "That is, your brother?"

"Yes, or rather my half-brother. Rene and I are full brother and sister. Which means," she added out of the side of her mouth, "that the unmentionable Jules is my nephew. And your cousin. In any case, my brother Alain was a product of my father’s first marriage; he was quite a bit older than Rene and me, almost as old as Guillaume."

"Ah," Ray said, already lost. He swallowed and sat up straighter, knitting his sandy eyebrows to improve his concentration.

"Early in the war, our parents were killed and our home was destroyed. All of us-Alain, Rene, and I-came here, to the domaine, to live with Guillaume. That was in the days when there were three hundred acres, before it got sold off piece by piece, as if Guillaume weren’t rich enough already. Rene and I were children, of course, but Alain was grown."

She dug in her purse and came up with an old locket, its filigreed pattern tarnished and sad. She clicked it open and handed it to Ray. "My brother Alain," she said simply. Ray noted with a surge of sympathy that she avoided looking inside it.

On one side was a flattened, dun-colored lock of hair, possibly once chestnut. On the other a sepia photograph from the 1930’s of two elegant, athletic-looking men in their twenties, wearing white duck trousers and open-throated shirts with the cuffs folded casually back on their forearms. One sat on a simple wooden bench looking up at the other, who stood beside him, one foot on the bench, smiling directly into the camera. Both held old-fashioned wooden tennis rackets with long handles and small, round heads.

"He’s the one standing up," Sophie said. "He had a moustache, but you can hardly see it."

Ray was reminded of old photographs taken in Palm Springs of Gary Cooper, or Gilbert Roland, or Robert Taylor in much the same sort of pose, with similar rackets and identical clothing, except perhaps for the addition of tennis sweaters draped over their shoulders, the sleeves knotted casually around their necks. No, on second look, the sweaters were here too, tossed in a jumble onto the bench.

"He’s very handsome," Ray said, not sure what was expected of him. "And he looks nice."

Sophie smiled at him gratefully. "Oh, I wish you’d known him. I wish," she said, looking at her husband, "you’d both known him. He was so-so very-I thought he was the most wonderful man in the world. Rene adored him too. Everyone did. And he-he thought I was a princess, a little queen."

"Who’s that with him?" Ray asked, a little embarrassed. This was another new side of Sophie. "Rene?"

"Rene!" Sophie laughed. "No, Rene always looked like a little butterball, even when he was a boy. Besides, Rene’s only two years older than I am. He wouldn’t have been more than seven when this was taken. You haven’t been paying attention. No, that’s Guillaume."

"Guillaume?" Ray echoed with surprise. There wasn’t the faintest intimation of this dashing, good-looking youth in the bleak, coldly meticulous old man he knew, with his single grim eye and crippled limbs.

"Indeed. Guillaume was quite attractive in his day, and a marvelous athlete. He had problems with his legs even then, you know-some sort of mineral deficiency or some such thing as a child, but you’d never know it on the tennis court. I remember a time when he and Alain went at it for seven hours… Ah, well." She smiled to herself. "They look a great deal alike, don’t they? The du Rocher look; you have it too-the long nose and the skinny legs."

"Thank you," he said dryly, examining the two lithe, aristocratic figures again, "but I’m afraid there must be more to it than that. I seem to be missing something."

"Well, it’s nothing but your terrible posture," Sophie said from force of old habit. "How many times must I tell you? Look at you, scrunched up in your chair like an accordion."

"Come on, Sophie, let him be," Ben said. "He’s grown up now."

"I suppose that’s true," she said, eyeing Ray doubtfully.

Ray wiggled uncomfortably and unknotted his legs a little. He handed the locket back to her. "They were close, then?"

"Tremendously close. They lived for each other. But as unlike as can be. Guillaume was very much the way he is now. Domineering, aloof, cold…but Alain-Alain was like the sunshine, like…This is ridiculous," she said with some surprise. "I’m becoming positively maudlin."

She snapped the locket shut with a no-nonsense click and arranged her stocky body more squarely on the bench. "Now let me get on with it. I want to tell you what happened." She put the locket in her purse and zipped it up, then took a deep breath with her eyes closed.

Ben had been sitting motionless, his fingertips out to the reluctant swan. He let his hand drift back to Sophie’s shoulder and squeezed it. "Honey, I know the story pretty near as well as you do, even if I wasn’t there. I can tell him if you want."