Death in the Vines: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provençal Mystery (2 page)

Chapter Twenty-nine: Bruno Paulik Breaks a Door

Chapter Thirty: Antoine Verlaque's Gift

Epilogue

O
livier Bonnard sat on the bottom stone step of his cellar, his hands gathered around his head as if he were attempting to soothe a migraine. He ran his callused fingers up through his thick graying hair and groaned. He glanced over at the embedded fossil in the cellar's stone wall—it was in the form of a scallop shell—and leaned over and carefully touched it. This was his secret ritual; he had been doing it each time he entered the cellar since he was old enough to remember. It was a reminder that millions of years ago much of the south of France had been under the sea, salt water covering the earth where vines now grew. His friends had aquatic fossils in their cellar walls too, in vineyards as far north as the Lubéron and the Rhône Valley, but this perfect little scallop was his favorite. He rubbed his hands through his hair once more and tried not to cry. The last time he had cried was eight years ago, at his mother's funeral.

He sighed and forced himself to look up at the wine racks. He
slowly took out a pencil and a piece of paper from his quilted jacket—the cellar's temperature was a constant sixteen degrees Celsius, hence the jacket, even in early September—and began writing. The list included two magnums of 1989 red; one magnum of 1975 white; three bottles of 1954 red (which happened to be Olivier's favorite); two bottles of 1978 white (that was old for a white, and they had probably gone off now); three bottles of 1946 red (the first vintage after six years of war and his father's favorite); and a 1929 magnum that was the very last from his grand father's first bottling.

He continued his list for some minutes and then put his pen down and stopped: there were other bottles missing, but he needed to take a break. Even though they were his family's wines, Bonnard couldn't begin to put a value on the 1929 or the 1946; both were now collector's items. His insurance agent in Aix would help with the estimates—he had the catalogs from Sotheby's and Christie's wine sales in his office. Paul was an old high-school friend and wouldn't nickel-and-dime Olivier.

Bonnard was devastated by the loss of the wines, many of them bottled by his father and his grandfather, but tears came to his eyes when he realized that the thief must be someone very close to him. Though the cellar was always locked, everyone in Olivier's family knew where to find the key: it hung to the right of the kitchen door, as it had since Olivier was a small boy. Who else knew where the key was kept? He felt himself flush, despite the fact that his hands and feet were almost numb with cold—as he thought of each person's face. Friends, neighbors, acquaintances—he felt awful imagining them as suspects in a police lineup. There was the postman, Rémy, who liked to pull his ancient Mobylette, or, when he was not working, his dilapidated van, right up to the kitchen door; Hélène, the manager of his estate and his chief winemaker—her
husband was a policeman, and so he immediately took her off his list; Cyril, his only other full-time paid employee, who helped him year-round at the winery; and Sandrine, a local university student who hosted in the tasting room on weekends and holidays and whom he had hired, if truth be told, more for her beauty than for her wine knowledge or ability to count change. Every year there were a slew of North Africans who picked grapes at harvesttime, but they rarely came near the house, and he felt racist thinking of them as thieves—they were so eager to work during the
vendange,
a backbreaking job that Olivier had gladly done as a student but that nowadays so many young French refused.

Olivier then thought of his immediate family, only their heads weren't in a lineup at the Palais de Justice but sitting around at dinner—not in the bastide's elegant dining room, where his wife liked to eat, but at the long wooden kitchen table before a roaring fire. It was a comforting image and one that usually made him smile, but today it only gave him a knot in his stomach. There could be no reason why Élise, his wife of twenty years, would move the wines. Although she fully supported the Bonnard winery, she was a teetotaler, and her interests lay more in the design shop that she owned with a friend in Aix than in Syrah, Grenache, and Mourvèdre. He couldn't fathom why Victor, his eighteen-year-old son, who had been fascinated by the earth and vines since he could walk, would steal the precious bottles; nor his pride and joy, the thirteen-year-old Clara, always with a book under her nose, and the best student in her class every year since kindergarten. Olivier's father lived with the family, on the ground floor in a separate wing of their large eighteenth-century house. Albert Bonnard was eighty-three years old and though in good physical health was beginning to tire easily and lose his memory. Last week Olivier found his father slowly walking along the rows of
vines, talking to the plants, thanking them for this year's generous bounty.

Olivier stood up and stretched his sore legs—he had been sitting on the step, in a daze, for nearly an hour now. He turned around with a jolt as someone came down the cellar stairs. He half expected to come face-to-face with the thief, back to pick up some of the 1960s that he or she—Olivier didn't want to be sexist—had missed.

“I saw the light on; are you picking out some wines for our dinner tomorrow night?” Élise Bonnard asked her husband. “Uh-oh,” she continued. “I can tell from that stunned look on your face that you have forgotten all about the dinner with the Poyers!”

Olivier was always pleased to see his wife—even after so many years of marriage—and that afternoon even more so. Though she didn't drink alcohol, she was a fine taster; and she loved to travel around France, and sometimes abroad, with Olivier, on his wine tours. Last year they had been to Argentina, on an exchange between South American growers and French ones. Today, seeing Élise, Olivier realized just how lucky he was, and how much he needed her. His eyes filled up with tears, and his shoulders fell forward and began to shake.

Élise Bonnard looked again at her normally very composed husband, the smile now gone from her face, and she ran down the rest of the steps to put her arms around him.

“
Mon amour?
”

At that moment, every inch of Olivier Bonnard's almost two-meter frame collapsed, and the tears began to flow, interrupted by huge sobs. Élise Bonnard took some Kleenexes out of her pocket and gave them to her husband. Olivier whispered a thank-you, blew his nose repeatedly, and sighed. He breathed in and out a few times to calm himself down, as they had always taught the kids to
do when they had fallen or were upset. Only then did Olivier turn his body, revealing the empty racks of wine.

“What the…?” Élise gasped. She walked closer to the racks, as if her eyes were playing a game on her. Four generations of Bonnards had been making wine on this same estate, near Rognes, thirty minutes north of Aix-en-Provence, since Olivier's great-grandfather had purchased the land and the crumbling bastide at the end of the nineteenth century. It was now fully restored and historically listed. Many of their early wines were praised by top wine critics, and Mr. Colter came from America once a year to taste and rate the Bonnard wines. Élise thought for a moment about that critic—famous the world over, and incredibly powerful, as Olivier always reminded her—and yet he was so modest, so easy to talk to, and interested and passionate about everything having to do with their region. Once, he had even asked Élise for her
gougère
recipe.

“How many bottles are missing?” Élise finally asked her husband. She closed her eyes for a second or two and said a silent prayer of thanks. Upon seeing her husband weeping, she had been worried that he had cancer or that they were penniless. The wine couldn't be replaced, it's true—but they would make more, there would be other stellar vintages. What frightened her was that someone had intruded, unseen.

“I stopped counting at twenty-three; some of them were magnums. When I calm down a bit, I'll need to keep going through the bottles. They are randomly missing, that's the weird thing: one bottle here, two there.”

“Could someone have left the cellar door unlocked?” Élise suggested.

“It was locked when I came in about an hour ago; and the key was on its hook by the kitchen. Would a thief bother to relock the
door and hang the key back up? Besides, I've been working in the yard all morning, trying to fix that damn tractor. The doors are in plain sight from where I was working.”

Élise sighed but remained silent. They owned an estate worth millions, and yet her husband still insisted on repairing motors and machines himself.

“But when were you last in this section of the cellar?” she asked.

Bonnard winced. “Good question. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but it's been months.” The Bonnard cellars ran for meters and meters under their stone house. Olivier could normally be found in the winemaking section of the estate, located in a series of renovated stables beside the barn. Its vast rooms held enormous stainless-steel tanks and, in the inner chambers, row after row of oak barrels. The “
ancienne cave
,” as they had always called it, and where they now stood, held the family's prestigious wines, and it was located under the kitchen. It had an earth floor, covered in small pebbles, and an old barrel that had been used by Olivier's grandfather and served as a table. Élise had bought four stools from the La Redoute catalog that they used as seating. They had strung white party lights up as well, and had spent many evenings wrapped in woolen sweaters, tasting wines with their friends.

“There must be a reasonable explanation for this,” Élise said, her hands on her hips.

“Like what? Evaporation?”

“Listen, honey, I'll call Victor and have him help you take inventory—he's had these bottles memorized since he was five years old.” Élise laughed then, and, trying to lighten up the atmosphere a bit, she added: “Victor can't count at school, but in the cellar he's a mastermind!” She turned to go and Olivier stopped her, holding on to her sleeve.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Victor,” her husband said, with a look that was half terrified and half as if he would explode in anger. Élise shuddered. The last time she had seen that look also involved Victor—when he was fourteen and had sneaked their car into the village for fun.

Élise now understood her husband's fear. “Victor? You don't think? Why would he take those bottles?”

“Money,” her husband said, shrugging. The fear crept back on his face. “I don't like some of those kids from Aix he's been hanging out with; maybe they put him up to it? Maybe he was forced to do it—you know, threatened? He's always been a follower, not a leader.” He was careful not to add that Clara was the leader in the family.

Élise bit her bottom lip, as she always did when she was nervous. “I don't much like those new friends either, but Victor hasn't been seeing much of them lately. I think it was a phase. He's going out tonight to the movies with Jérôme and Thomas.” Jérôme and Thomas Clergue were brothers, sons of the Bonnards' closest neighbors; the Clergue family also made wine. Jean-Jacques Clergue had bought the land as a gift to himself for his early retirement. He had made a bundle working for Goldman Sachs in London and had “cashed in,” as the locals called it, and retired to Provence at the young age of thirty-seven, when his sons were still toddlers. The two families had become instant friends. Élise had been convinced that Jean-Jacques's English wife, Lucy, who had been born and raised in London, would last two months in the French countryside. But it was Lucy who showed Élise how to cook apricot pies with shortbread crusts, and it was Lucy who helped Olivier prune the olive trees every winter. And the best surprise of all: after taking an intensive enology course, Jean-Jacques Clergue made fantastic wines. Clergue, along with Olivier's winemaker Hélène Paulik, and Marc Nagel from the Var, had raised the standards of wines from southeastern France. Other winemakers in the
area learned from the trio, and the local appellations just kept getting better and better.

Olivier and Élise froze as a pair of black Converse sneakers came pounding down the cellar steps, leaving a cloud of dust in their wake. “Speak of the devil,” Olivier Bonnard muttered to himself.

“Hey! I've been looking all over for you two!” Victor Bonnard said. “When's dinner, Mom? The movie's at eight p.m. in Aix. We have to catch the seven-ten bus.” Victor looked at his mother, who said nothing. He then looked at his father, who also remained silent. The boy's first thought was that his parents had been arguing. He felt a lump in his throat. Perhaps they were talking about getting a divorce, like his friend Luc's parents.

His father turned toward the racks of wines and, with a sweeping motion of his hand, invited Victor to look at the partly empty racks.