Cady
There was no taxi service in town, but Hubert knew a man who drove people to the train station for a set fee, so Cady got a ride into Avignon. She had planned on catching the next train to Paris, but then reconsidered and asked him to drop her at a decent hotel near the Gare d’Avignon, which turned out to be a beautiful Best Western.
There was one more thing she wanted to do before she left Provence.
Cady had intended to rent a car the next morning, but wound up staying in her hotel room for two full days. She snuck out to a corner grocery to buy a bottle of wine, a bag of chips, and a package of Petit Écolier cookies, and tried to re-create the debauched retreat that had helped soothe her wounds in Oakland, but was disappointed to discover that there was no French version ofHoardersshowing on the television. She didn’t have the heart to watch anything, anyway. But neither was she ready to face the outside world.
Cady looked again and again at the photograph and the note that had brought her to Château Clement:Je t’aime toujours, et encore.Souviens-toi de moi.
I love you always, and still. Remember me.
As she lay on her bed, becoming far too well acquainted with her hotel room ceiling, she reviewed her recent actions in her head.
And realized something.
What had she done in Saint-Veran that was so awful? She’d helped an old man, however briefly, and befriended a troubled teenager. She had even made a few inroads with some of the villagers, enough to think that, with time, she could have built some relationships. At least she had made an effort.
Cady had always been an awkward kid, unlikable. But... was she really all that bad? She might be gruff or abrupt, she might have a few boundary issues, but she wasn’tmalicious. She had never deliberately set out to hurt another person.
And after all, who said a bad seed couldn’t sometimes grow into a decent tree?
• • •
The next morning Cady rented a car and drove to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. She wanted to see the home of the dragon for herself.
The village was located in a dead-end valley, closed in by an enormous limestone cliff. Parking was plentiful and a lot of the shops and restaurants weren’t yet open for the season; clearly this once-sleepy town had become a tourist destination, but it was probably overrun with visitors in the height of the summer. She thought about Fabrice’s suspicions regarding his family’s motives concerning Château Clement; did they really want a similar fate for their sweet little village of Saint-Véran?
It’s none of your business, Drake,she told herself. Not anymore. It never had been, actually, but at this point... it was depressing to realize that Cady’s sojourn in Provence would be relegated to a tiny footnote in her life. Before long the complex interwoven web of stories, of Fabrice and Paulette, Marc-Antoine, Yves and Josephine, Johnny, Léon, and the anonymous woman who worked on the carousel—and of Jean-Paul—would recede in her memory, as surely as the tide on a moonless night.
Still. Olivia had been right. Coming to France hadn’t been running away, but runningtosomething. And Cady would carry it with her the rest of her life.
She walked past the crude stony bulk of the tenth-century Church of Saint Véran, complete with a rough-hewn statue of the dragon at its entrance. A man at a crepe stand directed Cady to walk up a trail called the Chemin de Gouffre, beside the river Sorgue, to find the source of the water—and the supposedly fathomless home of the mythical beast. She passed bistros and ice cream vendors, most still shuttered, awaiting tourist season. Sun filtered through the leaves, dappling the scene with a kaleidoscope of light and shadow.
The air still held a cool April crispness, and church bells chimed eleven as she climbed. Mallards quacked and warblers flitted through the overhanging plane trees. Despite her misery, Cady felt a kind of peace manifest in the calming murmur of the Sorgue and the stillness of the giant ferns along its banks. The waters were crystal clear, a beautiful bright green over waving weeds and a brilliant turquoise when pooling in eddies over white sands. As she progressed up the hill, huge white streams poured over boulders down toward the valley.
Higher up, the river disappeared under rock and brush, but Cady kept going, determined to find the famed well from which the Sorgue sprang.
Finally she arrived at the mouth of a cave in a dramatic granite escarpment, at the base of which was a swirling green pool. The font, the source.
The home of the dragon.
“Unfathomable,” Cady said aloud.
“But beautiful,” replied a man’s voice.
She turned around to see Jean-Paul.
“What—what are you doing here?” she demanded. “How did you know where I was?”
“The man who drove you to Avignon is a Clement cousin. He told me the hotel he dropped you at, and the woman at the front desk let meknow when you were leaving and told me you asked for directions to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse.”
“Let me guess—she’s yet another Clement cousin?”
He shook his head. “But I can be convincing when I put my mind to it.”
“You’re quite the detective.”
He inclined his head, just slightly. “Somehow I knew you wouldn’t just run away. Not like that.”
