They hurried around to the back of the building.
A teenage boy was throwing rocks at a high window of a barnlike structure. He was tall and skinny, dressed in jeans and an oversized hoodie. He would have fit in well on the streets of Oakland.
“Hey!”Cady yelled in English, before realizing she wasn’t sure of the equivalent in French. The kinds of informal utterances that were so important to actual communication were rarely taught in language class. At least she knew how to demand: “What are you doing here?”
She yelled: “Qu’est-ce que tu faites ici?”
The boy whirled around in her direction, slapped one hand on the opposite bicep and raised his arm into a fist, then ran.
“Little pissant vandal!”Cady yelled, again in English. She figuredthat her words, like his rude gesture, would need no translation. “Come back here and clean this up!”
The dog just stood there, wagging her tail.
Cady looked at her askance. “A lot of help you are.”
Lucy’s only response was to wag her tail with more enthusiasm.
“I’m going to assume you’re not exactly of the guard dog variety.”
Lucy sat very erect and licked her chops.
“Let me explain something to you, Lucy. Just because you’re big doesn’t mean you don’t need to show your teeth every once in a while. For instance, when some little idiot is vandalizing your master’s property.”
Lucy wagged her tail some more.
Cady continued her explorations, peeking into other windows. The first building seemed locked up tight, but the door on another outbuilding stood ajar, and within was a very old black car that looked like something out of a movie about World War II. Next she found a small square stone building, two stories high, its original purpose unknowable. It was unlocked, so she and Lucy walked in and climbed the stairs, Lucy sniffing the old wood, checking for mice. From the arched windows of the second floor—with two broken panes—Cady could see that the garden had once been laid out in a formal fashion, with a greenhouse-looking building at one end, a sunken garden surrounded by statuary, and a small pond at the end. A waterwheel still turned in the lazy current.
Cady took Lucy out to explore the remnants of the garden, finding shallow pools and fountains that no longer spewed. Statuary—an enormous pelican, a ball atop an elongated pyramid, an obelisk—was studded with orange and pale green lichen. Stone benches and trees were fuzzy with moss.
A soggy newspaper sat by the front gates. She picked it up, then gathered a few wildflowers in Olivia’s honor—it was the sort of thing her friend was forever doing: slowing down and appreciating nature.
Shaggy hedges along the walkways had probably once been manicured into topiary. Cady wondered what shapes they might have takenthen—geometrical or whimsical? Animals, or maybe spirals? Who were Yves and Josephine Clement, and what had their château been like in its heyday? Did they have a fleet of gardeners, or might Josephine have come out and snipped the trees into shapes, while Yves snapped his photos?
Cady remembered watching such a tree, in California.
Not the tree so much as the artist who tended to it: an old man. Impossibly old, it had seemed to Cady at the time. He was small but seemed uncomfortable with his body, as though accustomed to being a larger man. Or taller, at least. He used to stand before that tree, sometimes for hours, as if he were praying to an idol. Some days he would do nothing at all besides simply studying and assessing. Most times he took his clippers from his pocket and snipped, sprigs so small that Cady could hardly see them as he flicked them aside.
From his labors emerged a Chinese-style dragon, like the ones in the Chinatown parades: flared nostrils and ears and all, wrapping around the trunk of the stunted tree.
Cady used to spend long stretches, sometimes hours, hiding behind the hedge, watching that old man as he sculpted the tree, conjuring his dragon.
One day the old man stopped coming. Soon the dragon grew ragged. Long, haphazard shoots sprang from its back, sprouted from its claws. The man returned and clipped it into submission again, but eventually he stopped coming altogether. The tree stood, still, but not the man.
When the shoots emerged again, there was no one to stop them. Eventually the tree came to look like any other, betraying no trace of the fierce dragon lurking within.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
PRESENT DAY
CHÂTEAU CLEMENT
Cady
Cady brought the flowers into the kitchen, filled an old Perrier bottle with tap water, and placed the bouquet on the table in front of the fireplace. She filled Lucy’s water bowl and petted the mellow dog while deciding what to do next.
Peeking into windows was one thing, but breaking into buildings was a step too far. Cady had left her miscreant days behind her. What she needed to do was to persuade Fabrice to speak with her about his family’s history in general, and about the carousel in particular. He must know something.
Fabrice had responded well to the idea of her walking the dog and taking over the cooking. And if she was going to stay here, she wanted to dust and vacuum her room and clean the bathroom. All the living quarters seemed to be in need of a good scrubbing.
