Deadly Camargue--A Provence Mystery by Cay Rademacher

Author:Cay Rademacher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Missing Years

Blanc was on his feet at daybreak. He pulled on just a pair of sneakers and shorts and ran out bare-chested into the woods behind the oil mill. The temperature before 6:00 A.M. was still tolerable and he wanted to be back before Fuligni and his men arrived to remove the second half of the roof. He took a deep breath of the spicy scent of thyme and rosemary. The dew had collected on the spiderwebs that spread like gauze curtains between the bushes. A dead snake no longer than his index finger lay on the path. The tracks on the ground suggested some fat, tired cyclist on a mountain bike had broken its back. The animal doesn’t always win, Blanc reflected. The ocher-colored sand absorbed the sound of his footsteps and with the birds still asleep and the cicadas silent it was as still as on the third day of creation.

Until he got over a mile deep into the woods.

Even before he could see it, he heard the rattling clanking of a diesel motor in idle mode. There was a buzz of voices above the engine noise. He made out Douchy’s rough bass. He couldn’t make out a word he was saying but he didn’t sound friendly.

Blanc walked across a path where slabs of gray stone shimmered in the morning light between the sand. Douchy was sitting on a dented green tractor.

One of its rear tires had dragged one of the stones a way out of the ground. In front of the tractor stood the Michelettis—Blanc’s neighbors and the owners of the Domaine du Bernard winery. Bruno and Sylvie were wearing lightweight walking shoes, T-shirts, and Bermuda shorts that looked as if they’d been patched together from old cloth bags. They each had a pair of modern aluminum walking poles in their hands. Bruno was swinging his back and forth like samurai swords while Sylvie had pushed the points of hers into the ground and was leaning on them. She was the first of the quarreling threesome to notice Blanc and greeted him with an apologetic smile. Blanc felt like some half-naked anthropologist who’d stumbled on a native quarrel.

“This guy and his tractor are destroying an ancient Roman road,” Bruno Micheletti called out when he, too, finally noticed Blanc.

“To hell with the Romans! The woods belong to the commune, not you!” Douchy grumbled.

“There’s a Roman road that runs over the top of the hill,” Bruno explained, looking to Blanc for support. “That stone has been lying here for two thousand years. And now look at it!” The weight of the tractor had either pushed some stones out of position or broken them.

Blanc wished he could disappear into thin air and to hell with both ancient roads and tractors. But as a captain in the gendarmerie he was here and now more or less the personification of state authority, even if his naked belly was on display. Douchy, who hated everything and anything that stank of authority, was staring at him viciously.

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