---

There was a brief period in the early 1990s when a person could become fabulously wealthy without anybody, including the person becoming fabulously wealthy, being entirely certain why. Computers were beginning to talk to one another. The Internet was still something most people in Fort Stockton vaguely associated with universities, the Pentagon and teenage boys who knew how to set the clock on a VCR. Companies were appearing whose principal assets consisted of rented office space, three young men with bad haircuts and a promise that someday every American would want to do something electronically that he was already perfectly capable of doing without electricity.

Preston Carruthers got in early.

He didn’t understand computers. He didn’t understand modems, servers, networks or much of anything else involving a blinking cursor. He had trouble programming the timer on the sprinkler system at his house. What Preston did understand was money, and at a cocktail party in Dallas in 1990 he met a twenty-seven-year-old fellow wearing sneakers with a sport coat who said the word “connectivity” eleven times in fifteen minutes.

Preston wrote him a check.

Six months later, Preston wrote somebody else a check because that fellow kept talking about the “information superhighway,” although neither man could satisfactorily explain where it went, what drove on it or whether there would be toll booths.

Then came another investment. And another.

By 1993, Preston and his wife, Muffy, had accumulated the sort of money that allowed them to stop wondering whether something was worth what it cost. That is an important threshold in American wealth. Below it, a man considering a $900 toaster asks what the toaster does. Above it, he asks whether they have it in black.

The Carrutherses crossed that threshold at speed.

They bought several acres in Morningwood Estates and built a house large enough that visitors entering through the front door could briefly lose sight of one another. It was an architectural confection containing elements of Mediterranean villa, Texas ranch, California contemporary and whatever the architect had seen in Architectural Digest while sitting in the dentist’s office. There were four bedrooms, six bathrooms, a formal living room nobody was permitted to live in, a media room before anybody in Fort Stockton knew what a media room was, a wet bar, a dry bar, a greenhouse, a three-car garage, a porte-cochere and a kitchen island approximately the size of Delaware.

Then Muffy painted the brick white.

Every brick.

The trim went black.

Fort Stockton had never seen anything quite like it.

For the first month, people slowed down on purpose when they passed the Carruthers place. Several assumed the primer had been applied and the Carrutherses were waiting for the actual color. When no actual color appeared, it gradually became clear that white was the color.

Angus Hopper studied the house one morning from his pickup.

“Why’d they paint the brick?”

Rex Hall explained that Muffy wanted it white.

“Then why didn’t they build it outta white stuff?”

Rex had no answer for that.

Within five years, however, another white brick house with black trim appeared. Then another. Then several more. Eventually the style escaped Morningwood Estates and began spreading through West Texas, and people who had once whispered that the Carruthers house looked like somebody had primered a funeral home began doing precisely the same thing to their own houses.

Muffy never mentioned that she’d been ahead of the trend.

Unless someone was within earshot.

The Carrutherses enjoyed their money enormously. Preston installed a cellular telephone in his Mercedes, a marvelous contraption mounted between the seats with a handset, curly cord and enough electronics hidden in the trunk to communicate with Apollo 11. The telephone cost several thousand dollars, and airtime was expensive enough that an eight-minute conversation with Midland could have been financed.

Preston called people from the driveway.

There was no reason to.

He just could.

Muffy bought one of the new portable cellular phones, a gray plastic brick with a rubber antenna and a battery that weighed roughly the same as a premature calf. She carried it into restaurants and placed it conspicuously on the table. Nobody ever called her on it, but this was beside the point. The telephone’s primary function was not communication. Its primary function was being seen possessing a telephone in a place where telephones ordinarily weren’t.

They bought computers, too. Preston’s home office contained a top-of-the-line IBM-compatible desktop with a color monitor, a CD-ROM drive, a 2400-baud modem and enough memory, the salesman assured him, to handle virtually anything.

Preston used it to play solitaire.

Muffy bought a laptop. It weighed seventeen pounds and came with a padded carrying case that made it indistinguishable from medical equipment. She took it on one trip to Dallas, carried it from the Mercedes into the hotel, carried it back to the Mercedes two days later and thereafter left it on a desk.

They owned a camcorder that required one hand to hold the camera and another to support the battery. They had a satellite dish in the backyard large enough to receive television signals from planets not yet discovered. Their two dogs attended a private canine day-care facility in Midland twice a week because apparently being left alone in a 7,000-square-foot house had begun to stunt them emotionally.

A van came for them.

The van had air conditioning.

The dogs had appointments.

---

---

Muffy also embraced the new minimalist fashion that had begun replacing the label-heavy excesses of the 1980s. She discovered that genuine wealth could now be demonstrated by purchasing clothing so plain nobody could tell it was expensive. She owned Italian black handbags without visible logos, severe little dresses, austere shoes and cashmere sweaters in oatmeal, stone, fog, ash, taupe and winter wheat.

Angus saw her wearing one at the Bluebonnet Loan & Trust Christmas party and asked Rex what color it was.

“Greige.”

“That’s not a color.”

“It is if the sweater costs nine hundred dollars.”

Preston developed an interest in wine. Like most newly wealthy men who developed an interest in wine, his interest initially consisted of learning what other wealthy men had paid for theirs. He bought French Bordeaux at auction, installed a climate-controlled wine room and once paid $1,800 for a bottle he was afraid to drink because drinking it would transform an $1,800 asset into urine.

They were enjoying themselves.

There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with that. Preston had invested well, Muffy had supported him when several of those investments looked insane, and now the insanity was paying dividends. They gave generously to local charities, tipped outrageously, employed people around town and never pretended they’d earned the money by digging post holes.

But eventually they arrived at the point where another Mercedes wasn’t going to change anything.

So they hired a French maid.

An actual French one.

Her name was Colette Moreau.

Colette was twenty-eight years old and came from a town outside Paris, although after six months in Texas she discovered that telling people she was “from Paris” eliminated approximately fourteen minutes from every introductory conversation. She had come to the United States through a Dallas domestic staffing agency specializing in placing highly trained household employees with families whose houses contained rooms specifically intended for activities normal people performed in other rooms.

She was very good at her job.

This was fortunate, because it took Fort Stockton approximately three days to stop discussing her qualifications.

Colette was five-foot-six, slender but unmistakably feminine, with a narrow waist, graceful hips and long legs that made the simple black skirts she favored seem considerably less simple than their manufacturer had intended. Her dark chestnut hair fell in soft waves to her shoulders, usually pinned back loosely while she worked, although several rebellious strands had a habit of escaping by afternoon. She had warm brown eyes, high cheekbones, full lips and the composed, faintly amused expression of a woman who had spent several months observing Americans at close range and had wisely decided not to interrupt.

Her accent did the rest.

She could ask where Preston wanted his shirts and make shirts sound vaguely indecent.

The Carrutherses did not require her to wear the ridiculous black dress, white apron and little cap Americans associated with French maids in old movies. Colette dressed professionally, usually in a crisp white blouse, fitted black skirt or trousers and practical black shoes. This concession to dignity did absolutely nothing to diminish her effect on the male tradesmen who began discovering an unprecedented number of reasons to visit the Carruthers residence.

The Culligan man became exceptionally conscientious.

The UPS driver checked for signatures twice.

The pool man would have been a problem had the Carrutherses owned a pool.

The new gardener was named Kyle.

---

---

Kyle was twenty-four, six-foot-two and had arrived in Fort Stockton from San Angelo with a pickup, a mower, three credit cards and shoulders that suggested God had originally intended him for moving furniture.

Colette took an interest in horticulture.

Kyle took an interest in France.

The greenhouse flourished.

For the first several months, Colette loved Texas. She photographed tumbleweeds. She bought boots. She thought jackrabbits were charming until she nearly hit one at night and discovered they were apparently assembled from leftover deer parts. She laughed at the distances Texans considered reasonable for lunch and was astonished that a person could drive from Fort Stockton to El Paso for three hours without arriving anywhere else along the way.

She also encountered chicken-fried steak.

Colette stared at it.

“What is this?”

Preston explained that it was steak fried like chicken.

“But it is beef?”

“Yes.”

“And you cook it like chicken?”

“Yes.”

“And then put cream on it?”

“Gravy.”

Colette looked at him.

“You people have survived this?”

“We’re tougher than we look.”

But by autumn, the novelty had begun to wear thin. Colette missed her family. She missed hearing French spoken around her without having to provide the French herself. She missed cafés, bakeries, trains, old buildings, crowded sidewalks and the ability to walk three blocks without somebody pulling over to ask if her car had broken down.

Muffy noticed.

Preston did not.

Preston noticed when Muffy told him.

They decided to cheer her up.

Naturally, they went to the Piggly Wiggly.

The Carrutherses spent the better part of Saturday afternoon attempting to purchase France one aisle at a time. They bought Brie, Camembert and blue cheese. They found baguettes. They found Dijon mustard. They found cornichons, pâté and canned escargots. Muffy bought imported butter. Preston located several bottles of French wine. Somewhere near the dairy case he proudly produced a tub of French onion dip and was intercepted before it reached the cart.

They arranged everything across the Carrutherses’ enormous kitchen island that evening. Preston even found a little French flag and stuck it into the cheese.

---

---

Colette walked in.

She stopped.

She laughed.

Then she cried.

For a while, it worked. They had French evenings. Colette cooked dishes from home. Preston opened one of his expensive Bordeaux bottles and spent the entire meal calculating the cost per swallow. Muffy found French music on the satellite system. Colette told stories about her family and Paris and the little Renault her father had owned when she was a girl.

But homesickness is stubborn.

You can distract it.

You can feed it cheese.

Eventually it comes back.

Preston began thinking.

This was often expensive.

One evening he told Muffy he had solved the problem.

“She’s homesick for France.”

“I know.”

“So we’ll buy her something French.”

“We’ve done that.”

“No. Something really French.”

Muffy looked at him.

“A car.”

The following Friday they drove to Austin.

At Le Capital Peugeot, they met Laurent Beaumont, whose business card identified him not as a salesman but as a Sales Consultant. Laurent was trim, immaculate and possessed the extraordinary ability to make a customer feel slightly provincial while simultaneously selling him an automobile.

Preston explained the situation.

French maid.

Homesick.

Wanted something to remind her of home.

Laurent nodded solemnly.

He understood.

Then he showed them the Peugeot.

It was a brand-new 1992 Peugeot 505 SW8 station wagon, finished in Alpine White over Charcoal Grey velour. The 505 had been designed in an era when French automobile manufacturers still regarded American tastes as an interesting but ultimately foreign problem. It was long, narrow, upright and wonderfully devoid of anything that had been focus-grouped in Detroit.

Muffy walked around it.

“It’s sort of…”

“French,” Laurent said.

That was precisely the point.

The wagon’s Alpine White body was relieved by broad black side moldings and black bumper accents. Roof rails ran the length of the top. There was a power antenna, a rear-window wiper and fifteen-inch steel wheels wearing silver covers and Yokohama YK-GTX tires. The rear quarter windows had those distinctive black vertical trim bars that made the Peugeot instantly recognizable to the seven Americans who knew what one was.

The interior was Charcoal Grey velour.

Lots of it.

The front seats were broad and deeply padded, upholstered in the sort of gray fabric that suggested French engineers believed automobiles should contain at least one comfortable place to contemplate existentialism. There was seating for eight passengers, which Preston found remarkable.

“Eight?”

Laurent nodded.

“In this?”

“Oui.”

Preston peered toward the rear.

He had seen cattle trailers with less ambitious capacity.

---

---

The dashboard was an angular black collection of vents, gauges and square buttons identified by symbols that seemed to have been selected during an especially difficult evening at the Louvre. The steering wheel carried the Peugeot lion. There were power windows, air conditioning, heated front seats, cruise control and a cassette stereo.

Under the hood sat the 2,165cc Douvrin inline-four with Bosch Jetronic fuel injection, coupled to a four-speed ZF automatic transmission. The engine compartment contained an extraordinary collection of black hoses, wiring, reservoirs and fittings apparently routed according to French national boundaries established before the Franco-Prussian War.

Preston studied it.

“How much horsepower?”

Laurent told him.

Preston waited for the rest.

There wasn’t any.

“It seats eight?”

“Oui.”

“With that engine?”

Laurent smiled.

“Eventually.”

Preston liked him.

There were, Laurent explained, a few minor items the dealership intended to address. The glove compartment door sagged. The stereo volume was low. The left rear power door lock did not work. Neither did the heated front seats. The cruise control had also apparently decided that maintaining a constant speed was philosophically inconsistent with the French national character.

Preston stared at him.

“This is a new car.”

“Yes.”

“And those things don’t work.”

Laurent considered the question.

“It is a Peugeot.”

That seemed to cover it.

Preston bought the car.

He and Muffy arranged for Laurent to have it delivered to Fort Stockton several days later. They told Colette nothing. When the transporter arrived, Preston had the Peugeot unloaded in the circular driveway while Colette was occupied at the rear of the house.

Muffy produced a large red bow.

They put it on the roof.

Then Muffy went inside.

“Colette?”

“Yes, Madame?”

“Come outside.”

Colette followed her through the front door.

The Alpine White Peugeot sat in the driveway beneath the enormous West Texas sky.

She stopped dead.

For several seconds, she didn’t say anything. Her eyes moved from the familiar lion on the grille to the rectangular headlights, the long white body, the black moldings and the roof rails.

Then she looked at Muffy.

“No.”

Muffy smiled.

“Yes.”

Colette put both hands over her mouth.

Preston was standing beside the driver’s door grinning like a man who had just personally liberated Paris.

“It’s yours.”

Colette began to cry.

---

---

She walked around the Peugeot slowly, touching it as though confirming that it was real. She opened the driver’s door and slid behind the steering wheel. The black dashboard, the square switches, the Peugeot lion, the gray velour, even the peculiar smell of the interior were familiar in ways neither Preston nor Muffy could have understood.

She ran her hand across the steering wheel.

Then she got back out and hugged Muffy.

She hugged Preston.

She cried harder.

Preston cried a little himself, although he later claimed something had blown into his eye.

Colette had not been this excited since the afternoon she first met the new young gardener behind the hothouse so he could hose down her holly bush.

Kyle had proven unusually thorough.

By sunset, Colette had sat in every seat, examined every compartment and discovered that the left rear door lock didn’t work.

She smiled.

“Just like home.”

They decided she would take the Peugeot out the following afternoon. Colette wanted to drive west, perhaps toward Balmorhea, maybe farther. She had already selected several French cassettes and placed them beside the stereo. Preston reminded her that the volume was a little low.

She shrugged.

“Also French.”

That evening they parked the Peugeot beneath the porte-cochere where Colette could see it from one of the upstairs windows.

She went to bed happy.

---

---

The next morning began like most mornings at the Carruthers house. Colette was downstairs early. She made coffee, fed the dogs, opened the drapes and started a load of laundry. The house was quiet. Morning sunlight spilled across the white brick and black trim, and beneath the porte-cochere the Peugeot waited for its first proper drive across West Texas.

Colette glanced at it every time she passed the window.

Around nine-thirty, the telephone rang.

She answered it in the kitchen.

“Hello?”

A man’s voice spoke.

“Is my wife home?”

Colette glanced toward the stairs.

“Yes.”

“Can I speak to her?”

Colette hesitated.

The man noticed.

“Is something wrong?”

Colette looked toward the second floor.

“Monsieur, I am not sure how to say this.”

“Say what?”

Another hesitation.

“Your wife is upstairs.”

“Yes?”

“She is in bed with a man.”

There was silence on the telephone.

Colette added, somewhat apologetically, “I thought the man was you.”

The silence became considerably longer.

“What?”

“I am sorry.”

The man erupted. Colette held the receiver slightly away from her ear while he exhausted several combinations of words that required no knowledge of English grammar to understand.

Eventually he stopped.

When he spoke again, his voice had changed.

“Listen to me.”

“Yes?”

“How would you like to make fifty thousand dollars?”

Colette blinked.

This was 1992.

Fifty thousand dollars remained sufficient money to command a person’s attention.

“What would I have to do?”

“Go into my study.”

Colette listened.

“There’s a gun in the top drawer of my desk.”

She said nothing.

“Take it.”

A pause.

“Then go upstairs.”

Colette looked toward the staircase.

“And shoot them both.”

There was another silence.

Outside the window, the new Peugeot sat beneath the porte-cochere with the red bow still resting on its Alpine White roof.

Fifty thousand dollars would buy quite a lot of gasoline.

Even premium.

Colette swallowed.

“All right.”

She placed the receiver on the counter.

The man waited.

Through the telephone he heard footsteps crossing the room.

A door opened.

Then a drawer.

A moment later he heard footsteps again.

This time they were climbing stairs.

The house became quiet.

Several seconds passed.

Then two gunshots shattered the silence.

Colette’s footsteps returned.

Down the stairs.

Across the room.

She picked up the telephone.

“It is done.”

The man exhaled.

For the first time in several minutes, he seemed almost calm.

Colette wasn’t.

“What do I do with the bodies?”

“Throw them in the swimming pool.”

Colette frowned.

“The swimming pool?”

“Yes. Throw them in the pool.”

She looked through the kitchen window.

Then toward the back of the house.

Then down the hallway.

There was a long pause.

“Monsieur?”

“What?”

“What swimming pool?”

Nothing came from the other end.

Not a word.

Then:

“Ummm…”

Another pause.

“Is this 555-1212?”

---

---