He looked back at the bush, at the flurry of little pollinatingwings, and then shook his head. “Pollinators are dying out, you know.”
“I’ve heard. Just one more sign we’re staring down the barrel of our own demise. It’s pretty bleak.”
He looked at me deeply as if trying to figure out the answer to a riddle, and then I detected a strange shift in his demeanor. “You’ve heard of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, right?”
“The oil rig that exploded a while back?”
He nodded. “Do you know how much oil spilled into the ocean? Five million barrels. Think of the devastation to marine life that caused, not to mention the workers who were killed in the blast. It was months before they were able to cap the broken well.”
“That’s awful,” I said uneasily. I noticed a particularly large insect that was crawling along the balustrade. “Is that a wasp?”
“Yep. They grow pretty big up here.”
I had an uncanny feeling that this had all happened before.
“Do you know the difference between bees and wasps?” he asked.
“Bees make honey and wasps don’t,” I said. “Bees are pollinators and wasps aren’t.”
He shook his head. “Wasps are pollinators, too. Very important for our ecosystem. No,” he said. “The real difference is that wasps don’t die when they sting.”
He held my gaze a moment and then cheerfully went back to collecting the lavender.
I spent most of the rest of the day and early evening reading in the cabana before quickly hopping on the Zoom I had scheduled with Guillaume. Thankfully, the connection wasn’t too bad.
“You are pretty,” he said, and I flinched. He was young, maybe twenty, with floppy reddish-brown hair. Immediately I disliked him. He seemed to be set up in the tavern, because I could see empty barstools lined up behind him. “My manager is afraid of the bad press, but he isn’t here now.” He scooted forward on his chair, or maybe it was a barstool. “Now, what do you want to know about Sabine?”
“Well,” I said, looking down at my notepad, “I’ve read the newspaper accounts of what happened, but is there anything else you can tell me? Anything that might not have made it into the papers?”
“Like what?” He squinted at me.
“Just in general, is there anything you can tell me about her. What was she like?”
Guillaume seemed to be thinking for a moment. “She was a good girl. Dressed properly. Not like some girls. You know the kind—trashy girls. My sister was not trashy.”
I tried not to show the revulsion I was feeling. “Did she have any particular interests?”
“Interests? How should I know? My grandmother, Jeanne, knew her best. You should talk to her probably. Mostly Sabine was, what’s the word?… stubborn. If Sabine decided something, there was no use trying to tell her something different.”
“Stubborn how? Can you give me an example?”
“No. Just stubborn. She did what she wanted, didn’t listen to my parents. She was different from most girls. Not looking for romance.”
I raised an exhausted eyebrow. “I think a lot of young women are looking for things other than romance.”
“Okay, but Sabine, all she cared about was money and power.”
I felt a strange chill. “What kind of power?”
Frowning as if searching for the right words, he gesticulated. “Power. You know. Control. Jeanne told me things.”
“What kind of things?”
“She was obsessed with royalty. And with Hildegard.”
So there definitely was a connection. There was a silent moment where I tried to process that. I must have been very still because Guillaume thought my screen had frozen.
“Are you still there?”
