The Lost Carousel of Provence Page 34

  Have you ever toured a scary—or just run-down—old mansion? What was it that made the greatest impression on you? If you could live in a large old house like Fabrice’s, would you? Why or why not?

  Cady feels as though she “fits” better in France than in the United States. Have you ever wound up someplace new or foreign where you felt more at ease, more “yourself”?

  How does Cady’s lack of family history tie into her search for Gus-the-rabbit’s provenance?

  William Tammeus wrote: “You don’t really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around and why his parents will always wave back.” What do you think this suggests about the meaning of being a child? Or of being a parent?

  Fabrice feels a lifelong sense of guilt for something he did as a brave but unthinking teenager. His circumstances were extreme, but have you ever done something similar? (Or maybe you still do!) Is rushing into something, feeling as if one is in a play and not understanding the possible repercussions, something to be restricted to childhood, or does it have a place in the adult world as well?

  Jean-Paul is at a turning point in his own life. Do you think he is more open to helping Cady because of that? Are there times in your life when you’ve been more or less open to allowing someone new—and rather unorthodox—into your life? Is that a positive, or a negative, mind-set?

  Is Jean-Paul wise to consider selling Château Clement to a hotel chain, or should he indulge in the dream of trying to update the mansion and run a small hotel himself? What do you think he will choose to do with his inheritance? What would you like him to do?

  Maëlle makes a series of life choices—as you read, did you characterize her choices as brave or as foolish? As selfless or as selfish? Given her circumstances and the time in which she was living, were other options available to her? What do you think gave her the courage to do what she did?

  Maëlle feels as though she is happiest—and most truly herself—when she is able to coax a form out of a chunk of wood. Have you ever felt that way about a work or craft, or anything that you create? Is it important for everyone to have this kind of passion in life?

  There are many historical precedents to this story, but do you feel it is far-fetched to think two women, Josephine and Maëlle, would hatch the plan they did and carry it out? Under what circumstances is it acceptable to engage in an act of deception of this magnitude? Did the good they accomplish justify the deceit?

  What is the significance of Cady’s riding the carousel at the end of the book?

  Read on for an excerpt from Juliet Blackwell’s

  Letters from Paris

  Available now from Berkley

  CHAPTER ONE

  T his was probably a mistake, Claire thought to herself as she wrestled her luggage cart—why did she always choose the one with a wobbly wheel?—out the exit of the New Orleans airport. The sliding-glass doors whooshed closed behind her, cutting her off from the terminal’s unnatural coolness and leaving her mired in the soupy atmosphere of July, Louisiana-style.

  Louisiana. It occurred to Claire that had she been blindfolded and her ears covered, she would still know where she was. She could feel it, smell something achingly familiar in the air. Humid tendrils of heat reached out and wrapped around her, dampness whispering along her skin, greeting her like an old lover.

  A lover she’d left many years ago with a mix of regret and relief, an abstract fondness tangled up with the fervent desire to move on.

  Claire took a deep breath of the hot, moist air, blew it out slowly, and searched the vehicles vying for curb access outside of baggage claim. When she’d cosigned the loan for her cousin Ty’s new rig, he’d told her it was “huge, black, and shiny.” One good thing about having more cousins in Plaquemines Parish than she could count: There was always someone to give her a ride to or from the airport.

  A small group of already inebriated twenty-something tourists, apparently intent on finding Mardi Gras out of season, jostled Claire on their jocular way to the taxi stand; she barely managed to grab her computer case as it was knocked from her shoulder. A drip of sweat rolled down the small of her back. She stood with one hand on her luggage; other than a few boxes of books and souvenirs she had sent through the mail, the two big suitcases, one duffel bag, and huge purse were all she owned in the world. She’d sold or given away the rest before leaving Chicago.

  This was probably a mistake, Claire thought again. The phrase had become something of a mantra ever since her cousin Jessica had phoned the week before last to say their grandmother was at death’s door.

  “Mammaw needs you, Chance,” Jessica had said. Claire’s relatives knew her as Chance; their grandmother went by Mammaw. “She’s speaking in Cajun; no one can understand her but Uncle Remy. And you know how he is.”

  When Claire received the call, she had been sitting in her climate-controlled office in Chicago, wondering what a person wore to the opera. Was her standard black office garb—perhaps dressed up with some chunky ethnic jewelry and a colorful pashmina—enough, or was this more of a sparkles-and-tulle situation? From the vantage point of her desk she could see acres of taupe carpeting and a maze of cubicles, old brick factory walls chicly renovated with skylights, and steel-and-glass dividers for “No-Miss Systems: A Software Company.” She looked out over the muted officescape, imagining Mammaw’s house and thinking: If Jessica’s was a voice from her past, what was her future? A night at the opera? Really?

  You’re getting pretty big for your britches, Chance Broussard.

  As her newly ex-boyfriend, Sean, would say: In this, as in most things, Claire was just the teensiest bit conflicted.

  Claire finally spotted Ty’s truck, looming large and new in a sea of smaller cars and dented pickups. Ignoring the blare of horns, he double-parked, hopped out, gave Claire a bear hug, then tossed her leaden bags in the bed of the truck like so much kindling.

  Ty drove toward the small town in Plaquemines Parish where they had been raised. They chatted a little about her life in the “big city,” his new truck, the job situation out on the oil rigs, and the precarious state of Mammaw’s health, but further conversation soon fizzled out. Claire’s relatives worked hard, disdained complainers, saluted the flag, and enjoyed their football. When they started drinking, the young men might get raucous and the old folks were prone to spinning long, involved tales in which layers of fact and fiction, history and fantasy merged and overlapped. But unless they were in storytelling mode, her cousins remained largely silent, their thoughts and hopes and dreams kept locked away under sweat-stained New Orleans Saints or Ragin’ Cajuns ball caps.

  So Claire was free to watch the scenery—flat, full of brush and low trees, and crisscrossed by creeks and bayous—and to ponder.

  After hanging up with Jessica, Claire had finished up the day’s work, talked to her team supervisor, and hurried to meet Sean for a drink at the latest trendy lounge, a former dive bar that had been revamped with an ironically 1950s décor à la Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. They ordered craft cocktails made with locally sourced ingredients that took about ten minutes apiece for the bewhiskered “mixologists” to produce and that cost easily four times as much as the drinks had in the bar’s former incarnation.

  After their cocktails arrived, they settled in at a table and Claire told Sean she had given notice at No-Miss and was going home to take care of her grandmother.

  “Just like that?” Sean asked, a stunned look on his handsome face, grapefruit-bitters-inspired cocktail held aloft halfway to his mouth.

  “Well, as soon as they can replace me at work.”

  “But . . . what about me? What about us?”

  “I . . .” Claire trailed off. The sorry truth was, she hadn’t thought much about Sean’s reaction to her sudden news.

&
nbsp; Of course he was important to her. Claire cared for Sean. A lot. They’d met not long after graduating college, and Sean—an Evanston native—had introduced Claire to the wonders of city life. Sean took her to fancy restaurants and cocktail parties; he taught her how to hail a cab and gripe about the El and stroll through the Institute of Art while making the appropriately erudite comments. With Sean by her side, Claire developed a taste for Thai food and Ethiopian food and learned to eat raw fish—who knew?—at sushi bars. She even became accustomed to paying the equivalent of an entire breakfast back home for a simple cup of French roast at the chic café on the corner near her downtown office. They were young and well paid; it was fun.

  But lately Sean had been pushing for more. Their friends were starting to marry, settle down and buy houses, have children. Claire liked Sean and enjoyed being with him. But there was something lacking.

  For years she’d been driven: first to get out of her small hometown, then to finish college, then to get a job, then to make more money. Now what? Sitting hunched over her keyboard ten hours a day, going out to trendy clubs on the weekend, able to afford a nice place to live and new clothes, and getting her hair done in a salon . . . was this what she had worked so hard to attain? Claire used to be able to lose herself down the rabbit hole of her work: writing code, beta testing, and resolving glitches. But now she wondered: Did any of it matter in the long run? Is this all there is?

  And when she tried to picture herself settling down with Sean and starting a family, she felt the waters closing over her head, her lungs screaming for air. She felt like she was drowning.

  “Tell me what’s going on, Claire.” Sean had covered Claire’s hand with his, squeezed gently. “You get one phone call and suddenly you’re ready to give up your whole life here in Chicago? I’m sorry your grandmother’s not doing well, but she’s getting up there in age, right? It’s not unexpected, is it? Couldn’t you just go for a visit, like a . . . ?”

  Like a normal person, Claire finished his thought in her mind. But no matter how much she might enjoy expensive cocktails, Claire had never felt normal in Chicago.

  When she’d first arrived at the University of Chicago, a scholarship kid fresh off the plane from Louisiana, Chance had stuck out like a sore thumb. She wore the wrong clothes, sported a frizzy home perm two decades out of fashion (according to the blunt but sympathetic assessment of her roommate, Zoey, who was from New York City and knew about such things), and spoke with an accent as thick as a cloud of moustiques over the bayou on a warm summer evening.

  At first she had found everything—the chatty students, the scholarly professors, the city traffic—intimidating. Just as she had at home, she spent her nights hiding in her room or studying in the library.

  But after a few lonely weeks Chance had made a decision. After all, she hadn’t fought her way out of Plaquemines Parish just to let life pass her by. So she applied her formidable study skills to observing the behavior of the other girls: their wardrobes, their intonations, the way they giggled and joked about boys, and about life in general. How easily they reneged on promises, how they said yes when they meant no and no when they meant yes. How they never sat down for a full meal but ate only stalks of celery with peanut butter one day, huge bowls of ice cream the next.

  She started introducing herself as Claire instead of Chance, and learned to drink and smoke, to flirt and “party.” She told long, rambling stories about her hometown that her friends found hysterical, and made a feature of her “quaint” bayou accent. For the first time in her life, Claire succeeded socially as well as academically. The poor little Cajun girl managed to make some friends, attract a few boys, and still graduate cum laude. She landed a good job as a software engineer in Chicago with a starting salary that was more than she had ever thought possible, a small fortune by the standards of Plaquemines Parish, where everyone had said: That Chance! Just look at her now! She’s the American Dream, that one—coming from nothing and making something of herself.

  But it had been years now, and Claire no longer felt like she was living the dream.

  Claire used to ask why she hadn’t died alongside her mother when she was little, when Lizzie Broussard’s ten-year-old Ford veered off the road and landed upside down on its roof in the bayou. And Mammaw always said: The Lord’s got something special planned for you, sha—you mark my words. Your mother’s voice reached out to rescue you—it was a miracle.

  But now Claire asked herself: Other than the size of her paycheck, was she really better off than if she had taken that refinery job back home straight out of high school and grabbed a beer with the gang down at Charlie Bob’s after work?

  Claire knew what Sean’s answer would be: a resounding yes.

  And yet.

  “Mammaw isn’t just a grandmother,” Claire found herself saying to Sean. Trying her best to explain. “She raised me. She saved my life.”

  “I know how important she is to you,” he said, his voice gentle. “And, of course, you should absolutely go see her. Take a couple of weeks, claim some family time. In fact, I could do the same and go with you.”

  Claire smiled and sipped her cocktail. “You said my hometown reminded you of that movie Deliverance.”

  Claire had never seen the film but she understood the reference.

  “For you, I’d be willing to risk it,” Sean said with a chuckle.

  Claire knew he was glad to see her smile, that he assumed he’d won the argument. Sean was a nice man, easygoing and thoughtful. But he was used to Claire accommodating his desires. Honestly, she didn’t much care whether they went to the symphony or the opera, or ate Vietnamese or Thai food for dinner, or went to the museum gala or the festival of lights at the harbor. In all these things, Claire was happy to let him choose. But this was different.

  “I’m not happy in Chicago, Sean. It’s not enough, somehow. It’s hard to explain, but . . . I want something else.”

  “So you’re going to move back to Plaquemines Parish?” He was getting angry now, pressing his lips together, his words taking on a clipped edge. “You hate it there. How many times have you told me that you never fit in, that you wanted something more out of life? You worked so hard to escape—how can you even think about going back?”

  “It’s just for a while, so I can be with Mammaw. Jessica says it probably won’t be long now. I’ll figure out something from there. I might even come back to Chicago—I really don’t know. I’m sorry, Sean. You’re a wonderful man. I just—”

  “This is a mistake, Claire,” Sean cut her off. “You’re making a mistake.”

  “You may be right,” she’d conceded.

  Probably it was a mistake. But it was her mistake to make.

  Ten days later Claire boarded a plane and headed to Plaquemines Parish, where they drank cheap coffee laced with chicory, no one even thought about attending the opera, and Claire—with her fancy college education and big-city ways—now stuck out like a sore thumb.

  Photo © Joseph Schell Photography

  Juliet Blackwell was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, the youngest child of a jet pilot and an editor. She graduated with a degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and went on to earn master’s degrees in anthropology and social work. While in graduate school, she published several articles based on her research with immigrant families from Mexico and Vietnam, as well as one full-length translation: Miguel León-Portilla’s seminal work, Endangered Cultures. Juliet taught medical anthropology at SUNY–Albany, was producer for a BBC documentary, and served as an elementary school social worker. Upon her return to California, she became a professional artist and ran her own decorative painting and design studio for more than a decade. In addition to mainstream novels, Juliet pens the New York Times bestselling Witchcraft Mysteries and the Haunted Home Renovation series. As Hailey Lind she wrote the Agatha Award–nominated Art
Lover’s Mystery series. She makes her home in northern California, but spends as much time as possible in Europe and Latin America.

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