The Ghosts of Kerfol (12 page)

But Juliet’s grace and confidence were eliciting a sort of grudging respect in Meg. The eyes of nearly everyone in their larger group followed their fearless leader across the shocking, unnatural green of the manor lawn. She was leggy and navigated the hedges and squishy grass cranelike, steps high and slow and elegant in stylish heels.

Their picnic blankets made of the vast lawn a bright, unfinished crazy quilt, and Juliet paused by each smaller group, speaking sometimes in English, sometimes French or German. There was a Japanese couple who may have felt slighted, but Juliet had a knack for making everyone feel special and at ease, even the uptight widow from Boston, who was too polite to play token ugly American.

That must be me,
Meg thought, picking at the boxed lunch of chunky bread and cheese, dried ham, and oily olives that had come with their ticket price. The plain white boxes had filled the far rear seat in the van in two teetering piles, and since she and Nick weren’t speaking, Meg had spent most of the ride speculating about lunch. The real draw of the French countryside — or the Spanish or Italian, for that matter — was food, and she and Nick spent the better part of each day strategizing their next meal. How middle-aged was that?

Well, they had money to burn, thanks to Nick’s parents, who wanted the Promising One to enjoy this post-graduation summer for all it was worth, get freedom out of his system. Get Meg out of his system, too, maybe. Lila would cheer that, Meg knew, though Nick’s mother was too proper to say it outright.

“Like the baron’s, Susanna Cole’s murder was never solved,” Juliet was saying. “They found her floating in the moat the next morning — you’ll see when we walk around that it’s long since been drained. Police were baffled by strange holes and mounds that had appeared all over the grounds in the night, as if every rabbit in France had gone to work on the property.”

Meg laughed along with the others, though she wasn’t sure what they were laughing
at.
Was that funny? Weird, yes, and probably false, but funny?

“The necklace that had very likely strangled her was never found, though a boy in the village, a suspect, confessed to trying to steal the piece. Something frightened him badly before he could get out with it. In the end, there was little viable evidence, forensic or otherwise.” The wards of the estate had issued a reward for the necklace, Juliet explained, which as far as she knew was still on offer.

In halting English, the Japanese man said that he would keep his eyes peeled. He enjoyed the phrase so much that everyone laughed.

There was another, larger English-speaking group on the blanket beside theirs, so Juliet hovered between them awhile, trying to meet each tourist’s eyes without making anyone ill at ease. Another of her many talents. “So together with his grief and the need to conceal from the press that his murdered daughter was also pregnant,” Juliet said, her gaze sluicing over Nick like water, “Jack Cole had the embarrassment of the missing necklace, which he’d removed from a safe he was given access to in the master bedroom.”

She glided away across the lawn again, all European grace and Chanel No. 5, to repeat her spiel in German. The name was pretentious — what parents in their right mind named their kid after a character in a play who stabs herself to death? But she spoke
at least
four languages, Meg had noted. Nick must have noticed, too. Juliet was not only good-looking; she was also polished and well bred. She was wearing stockings, for Christ’s sake, and classy Italian shoes on this swampy lawn, which was the only maintained thing about this spook house. And let’s not forget, she had the good sense and smarts to be working for an historical society in the first place, even if her job was telling sensationalized ghost stories to stupid tourists.

Meg might have earned a scholarship to Berkeley, where she and Nick were both heading in the fall, but she’d felt worse than stupid this entire trip, as if her mind had wandered out of range. When you got right down to it, she’d rather be in Amsterdam, getting stoned, or drinking margaritas in Tijuana. She wasn’t ready for this. For college and couplehood and real life. Maybe it was Nick she (suddenly) wasn’t ready for. Clever, charming Nick, who’d recrafted her application essays and cover letters to get her accepted to
not just any college,
but the right one. A good one. So they could be together. Little adults, Ethan would say.

Ethan, who was not skulking around the French countryside with a tour bus full of old ladies, but probably at a bullfight or drinking sherry in some tapas bar in Spain by now. No, not sherry. Beer. Bad, watery American beer, probably. Sherry would be too much like a grown-up. A little adult, yes, which
was
more and more what Meg felt like.

Come to think of it, Nick hadn’t spoken to her
in any language
for almost twenty-four hours — a cold war she only half-remembered the origins of — and she was tired of trying to meet his eye, of how attentive he was to everyone but her.

Was it just this feeling of being alone in a foreign land with no language, next-to-no money of her own, and Nick being a dick — all imperious and mature — that was bothering her? Nick the Dick, she might have joked back home, but not here. Not now, when a rift had ripped so splendidly between them — splendidly because underneath lived a pulse, surprising and shameful:
freedom.
It was not Ethan’s voice, though it had to be his favorite word. How long had it taken her to figure that out? A week in Europe? Six days? Did it surprise her? The last time she’d seen Nick’s twin, home in L.A. sophomore year, he was being shipped off to their father’s old boarding school in England. How do you get expelled from public school in California?

Everyone stood to resume the tour as Juliet circulated a trash bag, but Meg hung back. That house was oppressive in a way she couldn’t explain, the way storm clouds are oppressive, but she was
supposed
to feel that way about it. That was the point, which made her feel manipulated, which annoyed her even more.

When that German guy at the hostel mentioned Kerfol the day before, it had sounded fun in a Halloween-hayride sort of way, though she scoffed when Nick fished the listing from his
Road Less Taken
guidebook. This trip had made her cruel. But maybe she’d been right to resist coming. She sensed it right away, how hollow and bleak Kerfol was; the avenue in had seemed a gray tunnel leading further into their silence.

She had wanted to tell him something Friday night in that quiet vineyard row under the moon, and he had wanted to ask. The wanting hung between them like a blade, and for every glass of wine Nick refused, Meg had two. By the time he was ready to talk, she could barely stand up and was crooning about moonlight and screaming some Patti Smith song. Maybe he’d laughed at her, with her, and maybe he hadn’t. That part of the night was lost. Erased. Meg didn’t even know how they got back to the hostel and into those colorless, cold sheets, though she did remember reeling at the edge of their narrow cot-bed with Nick’s arm limp over her collarbone, vomit pressing up from some fathomless emptiness inside her.

I have to ask,
he had said.
I have to ask you something.

“Don’t speak,” she’d roared back, playfully holding a palm up in front of Nick’s face. Because
she
had something to say. Something unspeakable. It would change everything for him. For her, it already had.

So she’d been nervous, drunk too much wine, though she never drank. Nick thought it was stupid the way kids their age got loaded as if that were an end in itself. The strong vineyard wine had gone straight to her head, and they’d headed back to the hostel with her wobbling and lurching, colliding with his crisp white shirt. The bone in her nose bending on his collarbone, that smooth rise she loved to trace with her fingers, her stinging nose and the sudden smell of him, a woody soap smell, taming all her complaints. Taming her. How did he keep his shirts so crisp on the road in hostels and rented rooms? He put up with uncertainty for her sake, but before you knew it, he’d have his degree and a network to the perfect position at a socially conscious nonprofit that would also pay. Wasn’t that the plan?

There was always a plan.

He would have let her kiss him, Meg knew, even in that state. Even reeking and senseless. He had dignity and grand intentions — more than any guy she’d ever known, and she’d known a few — but she could still disable all that with a simple, catlike rise and press of breast against his shoulder blade. She brought it out in him, the worst, and that was the best part of her power, the only reason she could hold her head up in his company. Nick was too good for her, and she knew it, and how could she forgive that?

Sometimes, young as they were, they seemed like some old couple on a park bench, chained ankle to ankle by habit. On the other hand, she hoped never to be as free as Ethan. As carefree.

Juliet led them inside and into what she called the west wing, her voice echoing under high ceilings. The checkered wood floors had been recently waxed and reflected a phantom procession in bright tourist clothes. The great hall, as Juliet called it, was full of furniture draped in dusty cloth, and Meg sighed in the face of more relics. This trip was as much Nick’s graduation present to her as his parents’ to him, since she had no money to pay for it, but whose idea was this ruin rising out of the ground like a stone ogre? And these dusty cloths? Wasn’t this trip supposed to be about beginnings? Why didn’t they just end the cold war, shove and shriek and end up a tangle of tongue and raw hairline? Nick had it in him to do that. Never mind his bad-boy twin — Nick had his own dark side, his own wildness, Meg knew, but it was bleak and private, like the moors near where he and Ethan had grown up in the north of England.

Nick hated to show this side, admit to it even, but Meg knew it was there. She knew how to access it. It was what attracted him to her, despite their obvious incompatibility where most everything else was concerned. They had a good raw, physical attraction, but only when she pushed him. Pushed him.

Juliet’s voice droned on, but Meg had focused on the music. Somebody was playing a radio far off, either some historian up in another wing of the house or some neighbor out in the countryside. She imagined a carload of lanky Breton boys heading home from the beach with tans and a cooler in the backseat. How did she get invited on
that
field trip?

With a dramatic sweep of her arm, Juliet pulled a sheet off a large gilt-framed painting, and Meg snapped to. Susanna Cole. There was the necklace Juliet kept talking about, though no flapper hairstyle. No beads. And what about the pout you’d expect from a poor little rich girl in exile? The one in the picture looked like she’d lived centuries ago, not as recently as 1926. Meg thought to ask this question, but refrained when she noticed Nick’s shoulder touching the tour guide’s. He was drawn in, standing close to see what she unveiled next.

“Curators have tried to identify the artist with no luck. The painting was damaged when they found it in the attic back around the turn of the last century. Layered over. They had to scrape down and restore the image underneath.” She reached out. “You can still see a bit of the red paint here. And here.”

After they’d all had a good ponder, Juliet covered the painting again and led them up a staircase, turning back to Nick. “A minor or at least unknown artist, and the same one . . .”

The group followed into a small anteroom. “. . . who did the handsome drawing of Anne de Barrigan hanging over that desk.”

Nick peered up at the faded color sketch in a simple frame.

“She looks sad,” he whispered when Meg arrived by him.

She felt her eyes tear up involuntarily. It was the first real thing he’d said to her all day, apart from where to, and how much, and what time. Maybe he wasn’t addressing her at all, but the group, himself, the air. For the rest of the tour, Meg hardly registered anything except that she was tired and her head hurt and she wanted a cup of coffee, nothing fancy. Just comforting. Dunkin’ Donuts.

They lingered in the baron’s chamber, which had French doors overlooking a courtyard. While the others tuned in to the spiel, Meg looked out at the sun playing off cracked urns and overgrown roses and longed to be out there with her face raised to the sun. What she most wanted was a cigarette. But Nick would kill her if he knew she’d taken one from Ethan before they all went their separate ways at the hostel that morning. Whenever she had a moment to herself, she fished out the bent cigarette to breathe the sweet smell of tobacco, and it reminded her, and made her ashamed again, and she stowed it away once more in her backpack.

The baron’s room was large, imposing, dark in the corners, so she kept by those French doors and watched butterflies inspect the half-restored garden in the courtyard. She studied the orchards beyond, fruit trees with their distorted limbs.

Finally it was time to go.

They had pondered the last ancient object, heard the last bloody spook tale, clutched tight the last waxy banister. The last old lady had ducked out under the servants’ exit at the rear of the house, and Juliet had eased the door closed on its rusty hinges and snapped the decayed lock into place. They were allowed to stand in the sun and contemplate the grounds from the rear of the estate — the stables and abandoned dovecote, the distant chapel.

Nick stood alone by a trellis that was sinking into the earth and swallowed in vines. Meg walked over, took a breath for courage, and hugged him from behind, hugged him in that nervous, goofy way she used to when they first met back in the seventh grade and she had to hold him still, had to have that subtle, restless energy in her arms without the responsibility of facing it head on.

“We should come back,” she told the nape of his neck, a challenge, a plea. “At night. When no one’s here.
Really
get off the beaten path. . . .”

When he didn’t reply, she whispered suggestively, “I’m bored, Nick.”

“We should catch up,” he said. The others had followed in single file across and alongside the moat circling the building.