“Watch your tone, miss. She’s an old lady, and she deserves a rest if she wants one.”
“This car is not actually alive, Finn.”
“Says you, lass.” Finn eased the car off onto one of the side roads as we bickered. Who knew bickering could be so enjoyable? Green hills rose in the distance on all sides, and the air had some heady fragrance I didn’t recognize. Not far south was the sea, I thought. The lazy influence of the Mediterranean was rising fast in the air.
Then I gave a breathless “Oh . . .” as the Lagonda finished the turn on the off-road and coasted to a stop. For a moment all three of us stared. The slope below was a dazzling carpet of blue-purple spires, and the smell rose into the wind, intoxicatingly sweet. Hyacinths—thousands upon thousands of hyacinths.
I leaned so far over the door I nearly fell out, inhaling deeply. “We must have driven onto one of the flower farms.” Grasse was a capital for perfume makers, I already knew that, but I’d never seen the local flower fields that supplied the trade. I scrambled out of the car, leaving the door gaping, and leaned down to bury my nose in the nearest bank of blooms. The scent dizzied me. Farther down the slope I could see swells of pink, rolling masses of roses. From even farther came the rich waft of jasmine. I looked back and saw Eve sitting very still, breathing in the scents, saw Finn smiling as he fetched his toolbox. I couldn’t resist plunging into the waves of blue, running my fingertips along the spires. It was like wading into a fragrant sapphire lake.
Finn was closing up the hood by the time I came running back. “Eve!” I called, and leaning over, I deposited an armload of hyacinths into her lap. “For you.”
Eve looked at the mass of flowers, her tortured hands moving gently through the soft petals, and I felt my eyes prickle. You testy, stubborn, goddamn old bat, I do love you, I thought.
She looked up at me, smiling a rather rusty smile, and I wondered if she was about to say something similarly affectionate. “Here’s the plan once we g-get to Grasse,” she said instead.
I laughed. Should have known better than to expect a sentimental moment from Eve. Finn came up beside me, and she nodded at him. “You’ll need a sharp suit, Scotsman, and some business cards. You, Yank, will need to play my devoted granddaughter. And we’ll all need patience, because this is going to take time.”
She outlined the rest in a few sentences. The two of us listened, nodding. “Could work,” Finn said. “If Bordelon is in Grasse to begin with.”
“And if we find him?” I asked.
Eve smiled, blandly. “Why do you ask?”
“Humor me.” I was thinking of the conversation on the bridge last night, my gnawing fear that Eve wanted blood. I was not going to be a party to a murder. “What are you going to do when you find him?”
Eve quoted in French. “‘I shall come back to your bedroom and silently glide toward you with the shadows of the night . . . I shall give you kisses frigid as the moon and the caresses of a serpent that slithers around a grave.’”
I groaned. “Let me guess. Baudelaire?”
“My f-favorite poem, ‘Le Revenant,’ ‘The Ghost,’ but it sounds better in French. Revenant comes from the verb revenir.”
To come back.
“He never thought I’d come back. He’s going to be very wrong.” Finn and I exchanged glances, and Eve turned brisk again. “Back in the car, children. We can’t gawp at the flowers all day.”
We motored into Grasse at twilight: a place of square towers, narrow twisting roads, apricot roofs and Mediterranean colors, and over everything the scent of the flower fields. Eve strode up to the hotel clerk and opened her mouth, but I forestalled her. “Two rooms,” I said, looking up at Finn. “One for Grandmaman and one for us, don’t you think, dear?”
I said it without a hitch, laying a casual hand on his arm so the clerk would see my wedding ring. As Eve had said, selling a story is done by reciting the little details without any flubs.
“Two rooms,” Finn confirmed, slightly strangled. The clerk didn’t bat an eye. Later I put in a telephone call to Violette in Roubaix, letting her know where to reach me. We were in Grasse, and the hunt was on.
Finn’s new cards were embossed and expensive looking. “Pass them over with a patronizing air,” Eve instructed. “And for God’s sake, will you two quit giggling?”
But Finn and I went on howling with laughter. The cards, in their impressive-looking script, read:
Donald McGowan, Solicitor
“My Donald!” I managed to say at last. “Well, my mother always did want me to catch a lawyer.”
“Solicitor,” Eve corrected. “Limeys have solicitors, and very supercilious they are too. You’ll have to work up a good frown, Finn.” He had an impressive frown indeed as he handed his card across the ma?tre d’s desk about four days later. By then he’d had some practice. “I am making inquiries on behalf of a lady,” he murmured. “A matter of some delicacy.”
The ma?tre d’ appraised him in a glance. Finn Kilgore in his rumpled shirt and tousled hair wouldn’t have gotten the time of day in Les Trois Cloches, one of Grasse’s finest restaurants—but Donald McGowan in his charcoal gray suit and narrow striped tie rated a subtle straightening in posture. “How may I be of assistance, monsieur?”
It was the slow hour between lunch and dinner when diners were few; Eve always timed our arrival carefully so the staff had time to gossip. Or answer questions.
“My client, Mrs. Knight.” Finn glanced back to where Eve stood in a black silk dress and broad-brimmed hat, her hands hidden by kid gloves, leaning on my arm, looking frail as she dabbed her eyes with a black-bordered handkerchief. “She emigrated to New York years ago, but much of her family remained in France,” Finn explained. “And with so many dead in the war . . .”
The ma?tre d’ crossed himself. “So many.”
“I have found death records for her father, her aunt, two uncles. But a cousin is still missing.”
If you can traipse all over France looking for your missing cousin, then so can I, Eve had said when she told us where she got the idea. Who in Europe doesn’t have a missing cousin or two these days?
“We discovered he fled Limoges for Grasse in ’44, just ahead of the Gestapo . . .” Finn lowered his voice, dropping a few vague hints about Resistance activity and enemies in Vichy. Painting a vision of Eve’s childhood companion (brave patriot narrowly escaping arrest), now yearned for by Eve (lonely survivor of a massacred family).
“Will anyone fall for that?” I’d asked back in the hyacinth field. “It’s very Hollywood.”
“They’ll fall for it because it’s Hollywood. After a war like this one, everyone w-wants a happy ending, even if it’s not their own.”