The early evening light was soft, full of lush pink tones. A doe and two fawns leaped out of a thicket to graze on the meadow. They looked up, saw us, and decided we were no threat. I pulled a little digital camera out of my pocket and stopped to take some pictures.
Jean-Paul rode up beside me. Watching the deer, he said, “It is so wonderful here. We could be anywhere in the world, except Los Angeles.”
I held up the camera, and asked, “May I?”
He put his right hand flat on his chest and folded some sweatshirt over it, and with a properly serious expression on his face, posed like Napoleon. LAPD BUNCO-FORGERY ANNUAL STEAK-FRY was emblazoned across the front of his shirt.
“Très débonnaire,” I said.
When he relaxed his pose and laughed, I took another shot.
We headed up a trail that wound around a knob and came out with a great view of the valley below. There were estate-size homes along both sides of the narrow valley. One of the recent landscaping fads in the area was planting rows of trellised wine grapes, so the area looked very much like Provence.
Jean-Paul surveyed the view and said, again, “Anywhere but Los Angeles.”
“We should get back down before dark,” I said.
Jean-Paul helped me get the horses rubbed down and settled for the night. We put the tack in the shed and changed out of the Wellies we slipped on for the clean-up. I looked at him as he sat on a bale of alfalfa hay to tie the laces of his trainers. He had mud on his chin. I wiped it off with a clean horse towel.
He reached up for the towel and took my hand with it.
“I planned to ask you to dinner,” he said as he spread our arms wide and assessed the mud we wore. “But…”
“I stopped by the market on my way home and picked up some nice-looking sea bass,” I said. “How about, we get cleaned up and eat here?”
He thought that was a fine idea. He got his gym bag from his car, some essentials, he said, and carried it upstairs to the guest room where he had changed earlier. Twenty minutes later, both of us showered and hair freshly brushed, we met in the kitchen. He wore his suit pants and a V-neck cashmere sweater over a white T-shirt. I had pulled on sweats and tube socks.
The telephone rang. Caller ID listed Early, my neighbor, so I picked up.
“Yes, Early.”
“I just had a call from Ida,” he said, referring to the producer of the evening news broadcast where he worked as a technical director. “Thought I’d give you a heads-up.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “She wanted to know if I’d told you anything about Park Holloway.”
“She wanted to know if I knew where you were. She said you weren’t answering your phone.”
I glanced at the phone’s message light and saw that there had been ten calls made to the house between the time I went out to feed the horses until now, but no one left messages. I pushed the incoming call log button and two familiar numbers, each repeated several times, scrolled across the ID screen. Ida, from network news, and Lana Howard, my former executive producer-the network boss who had given me my walking papers-had taken turns trying to reach me for the last few hours. There were probably messages on my mobile phone as well; I had left it upstairs.
“Thanks,” I told Early. “Sorry she interrupted your weekend.”
I put the phone in its base and turned to Jean-Paul. “Sorry about that.”
“A problem?”
“Not for me. Looks like folks at my former network think I have something to tell them about that poor man last night. But I don’t.”
He shrugged; such is the way of things.
I said, “Let’s see what we can find to eat.”
Because we were having fish, we chose a Pinot Gris to drink. Holding glasses of wine, we stood in front of the open refrigerator and talked about putting together a meal from the contents. He volunteered to make risotto with grilled asparagus, and that left me to take care of salad and fish.
I picked up the wrapped fish and weighed it in my hands.
“I still don’t know how to cook for one person,” I said. “There’s probably enough here to feed half the neighborhood.”
“Were you married for a long time?” He was bending down, checking the height of the flame under the sauté pan he’d chosen. He dropped butter into the pan to melt.
“Legally married, not very long,” I said, washing salad greens. “But we were together for a long time before we got around to the legalities.”
I put the grater attachment in the food processor and dropped in the chunk of Parmesan he needed for his risotto.
“When we met, Mike was already talking about retirement, and I wasn’t. Wasn’t even close.”
I whirled the cheese. “He’d bought land way up on the north coast and built a little house, getting ready. A couple more years, he said, and he was going. But I couldn’t work from up there, and I had to work. He thought we should marry, but I told him we couldn’t until we figured out the geography. So we just stayed happily together in the meantime.”
“But you did marry,” he said, pouring Arborio rice into the melted butter.
“We got married the day the doctors told him he had cancer.”
“So that you could take care of him?”
“So that we could take care of each other.” I started slicing avocado. “And you? Were you married for a long time?”
“I knew Marian all of my life,” he said, stirring white wine into the browned rice. “We grew up together; she was my best friend. From the time we were children, we knew-everyone knew-that we would always be together.”
He looked up at me. “She was the first girl I ever kissed.”
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“Aneurysm,” he said. “She was fine one minute, the next she was gone. Someone at her office heard her say, ‘Oh!’ and that was all.”
For a long moment, we were both quiet. He had his back to me, adding hot chicken stock a bit at a time while he stirred the rice. I went over and stood behind him, put a hand on his shoulder. When he turned, he had the same shy smile that I had seen earlier.
“I have a terrible confession for a Frenchman to make,” he said. “May I tell you?”
“If you think it’s necessary.”
“Yes, I think that it might be,” he said. He took a sip of wine.
“This is an excellent wine,” he said. “And I hope to enjoy a bit more of it. But, when I consider driving back home down that crazy road I drove up on, I think it would be a good idea to say something now, instead of later, when it might be too late. A little too much wine and I might never get home again.”
“Then I’d better hear your confession.”
“Everyone expects French men to be magnificent lovers.”
“Are you saying you’re not?”
“No, no. Not that.” He chuckled. “My wife never complained. In fact, she was quite enthusiastic.”
“But?”
“I told you she was the first girl I ever kissed?” When I nodded, he said, “And she was the only woman I have ever slept with.”
He watched for my reaction. The only thing I could think to do or say was to refill his wineglass. That seemed to be sufficient answer for him.
It was a sweet moment, until the telephone rang.
I glanced at the caller ID screen: Lana Howard, my former boss.
“Damn,” I muttered.
“Them again?”
“Yes, them.”
“Do you need to take the call?”
I reached for the phone. “Only to put a stop to it.”
I didn’t bother with hello.
“So, Lana, what’s up?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d take my call, Maggie.”