Murder in Aix (The Maggie Newberry Mystery Series Book 5) (14 page)

“You haven’t
asked me anything about that horrible woman’s visit this afternoon.”

Laurent sighed
and brushed crumbs from the duvet. “Always I am putting up with these things
when you are investigating your little mysteries. A strange woman comes to my
house to threaten my pregnant wife? How can I be surprised?”

“Well, I
certainly did nothing to provoke her visit!”

“Then why did she
come?”

“I have no idea!
Or, I mean—if I were to make a wild guess—it might be because I
spoke with her daughter, that equally horrible Michelle, and before you get
started, Laurent, this was
before
we
agreed that I wouldn’t talk to strangers, although, I’d already met her so technically
she wasn’t really a stranger.”

“The woman today was
Jacques’s ex-wife?”

“Yes, and she
threatened to make life worse for Julia if I talked to Michelle or Lily again.
Can you believe that? She said she knew someone high up in the police
department.”

“As do you.”

“Except
my
contact in the police department
doesn’t talk to me, let alone do special favors for me.”

“Is it too much
to hope it will remain so?”

Maggie snapped
off the bedroom lamp and snuggled down with Laurent in bed. He wrapped his arms
around her.

“I wonder if
there’s something specific she’s afraid I’ll find out?” she mused sleepily.

Laurent yawned.
“Perhaps she is not as uncaring as you think. Perhaps she is trying to protect
the old woman’s peace in her last days.”

Maggie sat up and
snapped the lamp back on. “What do you mean
last
days
?”

“Maggie, the
light…”

“Is Lily sick?”

Laurent rubbed
his face and gave her a long-suffering look. “I heard it from Jean-Luc,” he
said, stifling a yawn, “who heard it from Danielle that Lily has cancer of the
throat. The doctors say she is terminal and it will be not much longer now.”

Maggie stared at
him. “How
much
not longer?”

“Three months.”

The next morning,
Laurent woke Maggie in bed with a kiss and a steaming cup of
café au lait
. She pushed her pillows up
behind her to sit up and see out the bedroom window. From this vantage point,
she could see the pickers combing the vineyard outside like somnolent locusts,
creeping along and methodically stripping the vines as they went.

“Have you been up
long?”

“
Oui
,” he said from the doorway. “Grace
came home early this morning and went back to bed. She said that Zou-zou will
stay with Danielle and Jean-Luc for a little while.”

“I suppose that’s
probably best. She’s not in really great shape.”

“
Non
. Make her a tray before you leave,
yes?
Chocolat
is good for sadness. I
have
des pains au chocolat
for her.”

“I will. Where is
it I’m going?”

Laurent grinned.
“
Je ne sais pas, ch
é
rie
, but I know it’s somewhere.
Fais attention
, eh?”
Be careful.

“I will.” Maggie
took a luxurious sip of her coffee and sank a little further into her pillows.
“Love you, Laurent,” she said as he vanished from sight.

“
Je t’aime aussi
,” he called from the
hall.

Maggie looked out
her window until she saw Laurent’s familiar form moving steadily through the
throng of workers in the field. If this wasn’t his favorite time of the year it
was pretty close. Not only was it the culmination of a year long cultivation of
his grapes—the hours of tending, staking, feeding, watering and weeding—not
to mention the hours of talking and arguing about the grapes with the other
vintners in the area. Just organizing the all-important construction of the best
supports for the vines was an ongoing project.
 
If
a French vineyard was a high school, then harvest time was the prom,
Maggie
thought with a smile. She put a hand on her very pregnant belly and felt the
movements and flutters of the little one inside. Your birthday will probably
come right around harvest time. So your Papa will always be in a state of high
excitement. A little foot seemed to kick her hand in answer.
God, I hope you’re a boy.
As soon as the
thought was in her head her mouth fell open in surprise. She had no idea that
thought was even there.

She never thought
she had a preference one way or the other. And the way Laurent falls all over
Zou-zou, it was clear the man was
born
to have a little girl. So where did the thought come from? Her eyes went out
the window again where she picked out his form again. She saw him clapping a
worker on the back. Laurent was such a man’s man. Was she hoping to give him a
boy to share his passion? A boy to trot at his heels and keep his name? Well,
it’s true, she thought. A girl to wrap him around his little finger, to make
his eyes fill with pride and tears at her strength, her poise, her beauty. A
little girl to sit on his lap and call him
ma
Papa
.

But first, a son.

After a long hot shower,
Maggie pulled on one of the last sundresses she owned that still fit her and
was aghast that she appeared to now be getting larger by the day. The dress
pulled across her bust and her belly making her look like she squeezed into
it—which she had. Before she even made it downstairs she was feeling
tired and hot, and it wasn’t eleven o’clock yet. She tiptoed by Grace’s room
first and confirmed by the sound of soft snoring that she wasn’t up yet. In the
kitchen, she put a tray together containing three
pain au chocolat
and a sliced pear. She debated between a glass of
milk and coffee and finally opted for the milk. She didn’t know how long Grace
would sleep and the coffee would cool too quickly.

She left the tray
and moved into the living room, where she and Laurent kept their desktop
computer on an old battered desk that had belonged to Laurent’s uncle. He had
never met the man but the desk was one of the few pieces of furniture that
hadn’t been rubbish, and Maggie knew Laurent had been pleased to keep something
of his family, his past.

She lay down her
own
pain au chocolat
on the desk and
wiped her fingers on the cloth napkin. Laurent would fuss at her for not using
a plate so she was careful to pick up all the flakes from the delicate
croissant that she left on the desk. She opened up a browser and typed in
“poisonous mushrooms.” It took only a few moments to see that
agaricus
mushrooms were common in the
area and looked not at all deadly. She studied the picture on the website
showing them nestled in a clump at the base of a tree.

She printed out
the picture on their wireless printer, polished off her breakfast and went to
pour Grace’s milk in the glass.

Were the deadly mushrooms really that commonplace? Could
anyone collect them pretty easily?
She picked up the tray and walked carefully upstairs with it.
What I wouldn’t give to see the history on
Michelle’s computer!
She wondered if the police had taken Julia’s computer
and assumed they probably had.

She stood outside
Grace’s door and listened. She didn’t hear snoring anymore, but she didn’t hear
anything else either. She hesitated, wondering if she should knock or just
leave the tray. Finally, she set the tray down. Even if Grace was awake, she
probably wanted to be alone, Maggie reasoned. She tiptoed away from the door
and back downstairs. As she collected her purse, the photo from the printer,
and the car keys from the hook in the mudroom outside the kitchen, she noticed
the mail had been delivered. It had been poked through the mail slot which
perched over an old wicker basket that had probably served the same purpose
since the days when the mail had come by horse and wagon. She glanced in the
basket in passing and saw her name on a long white envelope on top.

A very formal
long white envelope. Curious, she picked it out of the basket and looked at the
return address label. It was from the Aix Police Department.

Whatever in the world?
She quickly opened it and pulled out a short piece of paper
that, in essence, informed her that she was required to show up for a hearing
in two weeks time on a charge of jaywalking. For a moment she just stood in the
mudroom and frowned in confusion.
Was it
a joke?
She looked at the return address again and saw that it was
embossed. It was legitimate.

Jaywalking?

And then it came
to her:
Son of a bitch
.

Roger.

She stuffed the
letter into her purse, refraining from ripping it into two neat pieces first. Whatever
his game was, she couldn’t do anything about it and she would not let it
emotionally derail her in the process.

What a jerk!

Taking deep
breaths to restore her calm, Maggie settled into the driver’s seat of the car
and placed both hands on the steering wheel to steady herself. When she looked
up, she saw Grace standing in the window of her bedroom. As soon as Maggie saw
her, Grace moved away.

Maggie felt a
wave of helplessness wash over her. Grace had come to
Domaine St-Buvard
to heal, to answer questions, to rest before the
big battle—whatever. And she had landed, if not on a rocky bed of disgust
and anger from her best friend, then certainly not in the warm and loving
support of friends. A part of Maggie wanted to rush upstairs and tell Grace
that she loved her no matter what and to beg her to tell her
everything—every horrible, spider-crawling, fantasy-killing confession
she needed to make in order to survive this terrible passage. But the other
part of her just wasn’t sure.

Maggie stared up
at the empty window and realized she wasn’t sure about why she and Grace were
friends. Or why she had chosen Julia to take her place. She wasn’t sure if the
baby was such a great idea, especially as different from each other as she and
Laurent daily proved themselves to be. When it came right down to it, she
wasn’t sure her best guesses weren’t usually just wildly wrong and ultimately
damaging to everyone around her.

Face it,
she thought, as an unbidden image of Julia came to mind,
If you can’t trust your instincts about something so basic as the
people you choose as your friends, what other kinds of mistakes in judgment are
you making?

In the end, she decided
not to go back inside and put the car in reverse and backed up the long drive.
She knew the forest where Julia went most often, and if she had any hope of
getting there and back before dark, she needed to go now. As soon as she was on
the highway, she steered her thoughts away from Grace and Julia as much as she
could and tried to focus on what she hoped to find this afternoon.

First, a clue or
some evidence that proved someone else—Michelle or Annette would work
nicely—had been to the area, possibly to dig up poisonous mushrooms would
be ideal. Failing that, Maggie didn’t really know what to expect beyond the
fact that this was a place that Julia went to. A lot.

So. Three months. Poor Lily. But what a vulture Michelle was!
Michelle, who cursed the timing of her
father’s dying because he failed to hang on long enough to inherit—so
that Michelle could then inherit. Did Lily have any idea of the monsters around
her she called family? And now Florrie was next in line. Well, at least he
seemed like a decent guy. Too bad he was related to such scumbags.

An hour from
St-Buvard and just before the outskirts of Aix, Maggie saw the sign for
Indian Fôret Sud
. Julia had mentioned it
many times to her. She was sorry now that she had never taken the time to come
here with her. The memory of her last conversation with Julia came back to her
as she parked the car.
So much anger. And
fear.
Maggie shook her head. It was like she wasn’t the same person who Maggie
had known and lunched with, gushing on about her mushroom cookbook and teasing
her about how motherhood would leave Maggie with no time for girlfriends.

Maggie tucked her
purse under the seat and grabbed the picture of the poisonous mushrooms she had
printed out from the Internet. The parking lot held three other cars, which surprised
Maggie. All three vehicles looked like they might belong to farmers—they
certainly weren’t rental cars.
Why would
farmers come to the forest?
Making sure her cellphone was in her pocket,
Maggie left the car and took the first path that led from the parking lot into
the woods. The ground was scrubby and brown but punctuated with bright pockets
of rosebay and the pretty yellow Spanish broom. She imagined Julia must have
walked this same path every time she came here. She looked around and she
couldn’t help but think of Julia in this place. This was her world. It was her Zen,
her church, her
milieu
. This was
where she made her discoveries. Maggie could just imagine her friend’s laugher
and squeals of delight as she uncovered this fungal jewel, or that one. Maggie
left the trail, holding on to the long saplings and eased herself down an easy
incline. She was aware that there were wild boars in the area and she hoped
they would react properly to pepper spray—as in
run in the opposite direction
.