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descended them at an alarming pace, leaving a perplexed and disgruntled carpenter on the landing behind her.
    Where the worn wooden stairs ended, a tiled floor began. Thérèse led him through two sets of doors and down several more steps before they entered the kitchen. Beck looked around in surprise. “This is pretty modern,” he said.
    Thérèse nodded. “It was remodeled—rebuilt, really—in the sixties, when some Swedish entrepreneur thought he could turn the château into a conference center, but he ran out of funds before he got much farther than the dining halls. That phase of the castle’s history only lasted for about a year.”
    Beck scanned the modernized space. The appliances were dated but far from derelict. The walls were fairly clean. The tile floor just needed a good scrubbing. There was mold, of course, and oil stainsabove the stoves, but the space reassured Beck nonetheless. There was one room—one room—in the castle that wouldn’t require as much work as all the others.

    Fallon found them in the fruit cellar, a cave carved out of a raised mound just outside the kitchen’s entrance. It smelled of earth and decay.
    “Getting the grand tour, are you?” came a jovial, loud, regal-sounding voice from the top of the stairs leading to the cellar.
    Thérèse threw her hands up in the air. “Monsieur Fallon!” she shrilled, as if the Messiah himself had appeared before her. She hurried up the stairs, exchanging a kiss on each cheek with the owner of the château. Beck followed and held out his hand. No kissing for him. He didn’t care how customary it was in France. Fallon shook his hand with a firm and friendly grip. He was a tall, burly man, though his girth was somewhat mitigated by the well-cut suit he wore. He’d lost the majority of the once-red hair on his head, but his mustache showed no signs of imminent graying or thinning. It did handlebars proud.
    “Mr. Becker, I presume?”
    “Beck.”
    “Welcome to France, my lad.”
    Beck resisted the impulse to cringe at the loudness of the Brit’s voice.
    “Has Thérèse introduced you to the project of your lifetime?” There was a twinkle in his eye that Beck found disconcerting. “It’s going to be smashing, isn’t it? Just smashing.”
    Beck didn’t want to dampen the man’s enthusiasm, but he felt that honesty was the best approach. “Well, sir, it probably can be, eventually. But it’s the time factor we might have trouble with.”
    “Come on inside,” Fallon said, smacking Beck on the shoulder and motioning him back into the kitchen. “It sounds like we’ve got some negotiating to do!”
    The three of them passed through the kitchen and returned to the bottom of the stairs, where a door led into what must have been a small drawing room at some time. It was on the same level as the château’s entrance hall, though on the opposite end of the north wing, so the ceilings were tall and the windows elegant. This space too had been scrubbed down and emptied, except for a large desk, a couch, and two upholstered chairs.
    “Welcome to your office,” Fallon said, his voice just shy of a bellow.
    Beck cut Thérèse a glance. “I thought the office upstairs was the only one in the castle,” he said.
    “It’s the only one with a phone,” Thérèse answered with more petulance than was entirely necessary.
    “Nonsense,” Fallon said, pointing to a small table next to the window, where a wireless phone sat in its cradle. “We’re also trying to have high-speed Internet installed, but it appears that’s a little more complicated than I thought. Small-town technology, you know? And installing a satellite dish on top of the town’s most visible landmark is apparently a matter for much discussion! Sorry we couldn’t have it up and running by the time you arrived. Still, if you’ll be needing the Internet—” he paused, and Beck nodded—“you’ll be able to connect using dial-up, at least until we get the other worked