Murder in Aix (The Maggie Newberry Mystery Series Book 5) (21 page)

After a pleasant
evening watching old Masterpiece Theatre reruns with Grace, Maggie felt more relaxed
than she had in weeks, and certainly more relaxed than she had any right to
imagine she would after a day which saw the invasion of her home, the near loss
of her beloved
petit-ami
, and the
stark realization that she and Laurent had probably taken a severe financial
hit during the last year—meaning at the very least that Laurent was up to
his old tricks of not sharing with her when there was something to worry about
money-wise.

Even so, after
Grace had gone up to bed and Laurent still wasn’t home from whatever mysterious
outing he was on, but which almost certainly included drinking vast amounts of
wine or
pastis
and then winding his
way home on the narrow and precarious back roads from the village, Maggie found
herself too edgy to sleep. Envying the easy sleep that Grace always
found—even in the midst of her trials—and Laurent, too, for that
matter, Maggie put a small pan on the stove and filled it with milk.

Petit-Four
followed her from couch to kitchen and back again as Maggie settled in with her
warm cup of milk. It tasted terrible but was the best she could do this late in
the pregnancy.
God! How much longer?
She
rubbed her belly.
Hurry it up, Chico
.
Mummy has things to do and your papa
won’t be happy until he’s the one carrying you around.

As she sat in the
comfort and warmth of her living room—even sans the wool area rug that
Roger’s thugs had taken—Maggie couldn’t help but wonder what Julia was
doing tonight.
Was she afraid? Was she
able to sleep? Were people hurting her in there?

She had to admit
that her so-called investigation into Jacques’s murder and her attempt to clear
Julia was at a dead-end. Not only did Maggie have no idea who might have done
it but Laurent had finally put his foot down and there would be no edging
around
that
fact, no “reinterpreting”
what he said in order to go her own way. She had to face it: her involvement in
helping Julia was finished at least until after the baby was born. And if what
Grace said was true, even then.

A muffled sound
from the small anteroom between the kitchen and the mudroom snagged her
attention. Petit-Four lifted her head too and looked in that direction. Maggie
frowned and put her cup down on the coffee table. She had put seed in the
little lovebird’s bowl last night, but in all the excitement hadn’t checked on
him since then. The least she could do for Julia at this point was take care of
her little bird. She padded into the kitchen, picking up her vibrating
cellphone as she went.

It was Laurent.
“Hey, lover,” she said. “On your way home?”

“
Oui
. You are still up?”

“I can’t sleep.”

“I have some news
for you,
ch
é
rie
, and it’s not good. Are you okay to hear
it?”

Maggie stopped
walking. “What is it? Is it Jules? Is she dead?”

“
Non, non
,
ch
é
rie
. She is fine. Will you wait to hear it
from me in person?”

“No, tell me now,
Laurent.”
Whatever it is, at least she’s
alive
. She walked into the anteroom where the noise had come from.

“I’m sorry,
ch
é
rie
,”
he said. “The murder case
est fini
.”

“Finished? How is
that poss—” Maggie stopped with her hand frozen on the wall switch as she
snapped on the light in the anteroom.

“Julia confessed
today,” Laurent said.

Maggie heard him at
the same time she saw the motionless little body of Julia’s lovebird at the
bottom of the brass cage.

Chapter Eighteen

Laurent decided that telling Maggie over
the phone last night had been one of the truly bad miscalculations of his life.
Sometimes she acted so calm and composed that he forgot she was also a hormonal,
pregnant woman prone to exaggeration and over simplification from years of too-stimulating
American television. She had been nearly hysterical when he walked into his
house, the dead bird in her lap, and more tears than he remembered seeing from
her in the whole time that he’d known her.

He figured it had to be the pregnancy.

This morning he brought her a tray of tea
and toast. Although he would never understand the American and English
fascination with rough, scratchy toasted bread when
beignets
and
croissants
were available, he’d compromised by slicing and toasting
brioche
, buttering it and serving it with a little pot of fresh
raspberry jam.

“Any chance you will stay in bed today?”
he asked as he set the tray down on the bed.

“I’m not sick, Laurent,” she said, eyeing
the tray but making no move to reach for the teacup.

“
Je
sais
.”
I know
. He stood next to
the bed and placed a hand on her cheek. “I’m sorry,
ch
é
rie
,” he said.

“I don’t suppose it matters,” she said.
“The confession. The lovebird.”

“Ah, Maggie.” He lifted her chin in his
fingers but she pulled away.

“I guess you’re happy, though,” she said.
“There’s definitely no murder case to distract me now.”

“Okay,” he said, moving to the door.
“Grace is up when you want company. I’ll be back around dinnertime.”

“Sure,” Maggie said, looking away as he
left.

No,
whether he’d told her on the phone or told her in person would probably have
made no real difference in the end. She will have to come to her own happy
ending with it all in her own time. Or not.

Maggie bit into the toast and watched
Laurent through the bedroom window as he maneuvered their Renault down the
driveway and disappeared around the stand of the tall hundred-year-old cypress
trees that lined the opening to their property. She sighed. He was probably
happy to escape, she thought, and she could hardly blame him.

Just thinking of that tiny, vulnerable
little body at the bottom of the cage was enough to bring tears to her eyes.
She sniffled and the sound brought Petit-Four out from under the covers where
she’d been patiently waiting for Maggie to get up.

It was worse because the little bird was
so beautiful, so colorful with its pale peach head and bright green and pink
wings. It was hard to see something so gaily colored, just lying there. Dead
things should be brown or grey, she thought inanely. They shouldn’t be so beautiful
even in death.

She sipped the tea and felt a wave of
guilt at how she had treated Laurent. He always took such good care of her. He
couldn’t help that he didn’t want her to get hurt or kidnapped or whatever
crazy scenario he had dreamed up if she continued to try to help Julia.

Julia
. Maggie felt the tears threatening again
and she took a quick restorative sip of the tea and leaned back into her
pillows. She heard Petit-Four sigh and relax when she did.

So
Julia had given up.
Maggie had been wrong not to press the issue with her after Julia had hung up
on her that time. Why didn’t she push it? Had Maggie’s feelings been hurt?
Maggie frowned and pulled the duvet back to swing her legs out of bed.
Well, it didn’t matter now
. Nothing did.
Julia was going to prison for a murder she did, or didn’t commit, and Maggie
was going to have this baby in any event. Preferably sooner rather than later.

She showered, dressed and carried her
breakfast tray downstairs. It was a little past eleven but she wasn’t surprised
not to hear Zou-zou’s high pitched laugher ringing through the house. Grace had
obviously shifted the child to Danielle’s house in order to give Maggie a quiet
morning. Downstairs was silent except for the sound of Petit-Four’s nails
against the hardwood floors of the hallway.

Suddenly, the little dog barked and ran to
the front door.

What
the hell, dog?
Maggie
thought with annoyance, realizing how pleasant the silence had been up to now.
She walked to the front door and pulled it open expecting to see nothing and was
startled to see a large man in uniform with a huge roll of carpet over his
shoulder.

“Special
delivery for Madame Dernier,” the young officer said, hesitating only long
enough to nod a brief salute to her before pushing his way past her to the
living room.

The lavender
fields were not totally spent. Annette could see how they would have been
glorious a few months earlier, but the late cold snap that had delayed the
grape harvest this year had also extended the beautiful vistas of dramatic
lavender just a little bit longer. The neat mounds of purple positioned against
the golden autumn trees were as pretty as a tourist’s postcard. She threw her
cigarette out the car window, blowing smoke against the inside of the
windshield.

“Can you smell
the scent from here? It’s faint, but it’s there.”

She sighed and
turned to him in the passenger’s seat. “I can’t smell the fucking lavender,
Florrie,” she said.

“Well, it’s a
ways off,” he said, fumbling for the crank on his door to lower the window a
little more.

As sunny as the
day looked, the Mistral had settled around the morning like a death shroud. It
was cold and windy outside of the car.

“Roll up the
window, for God’s sake,” she said. “I’m freezing.”

“We could do this
at my place,” he said easily, cracking his knuckles and making her want to
shoot him where he sat.

If she only had a
gun.

“It’s a lot
warmer there. And I made a
ratatouille
.”

“Are you insane?
You are talking about
ratatouilles
?
We are meeting here, Florrie, because of the disaster of our last meeting. You
do remember that, do you not?”

He shrugged. “Now
that everyone knows…”

“Everyone does
not know! Nobody knows!” She fished another cigarette out of her purse and
tapped its filter against the steering wheel. “I must have been mad to even
think about doing this.”

“You hated him
more than anyone,” Florrie said quietly. “It is fitting.”

“Fitting,” she
spat. “Tell me again how it is to my benefit? Because you can trust me about
this, widowhood suits me very well.”

“You were no
longer married to him, Annette,” Florrie said.

“Whatever.”

“I have, of
course, a sizable fortune of my own to offer you.”

“As sizable as
Lily’s?”

She noticed he
shifted uncomfortably and that made her smile. Just a little.

“Perhaps not,” he
admitted. “But not inconsequential, I assure you. Let me ask you, is it true
you had no idea that Lily intended for you to have it after Jacques?”

“You hate that,
don’t you?”

“Not at all. Lily
knows I am comfortable. It makes sense that she would want to take care of …”
Florrie groped for words.

“The
widow
of her beloved nephew?” Annette
said, grinning at him. She lit her cigarette and blew out a thin jet of smoke
into the car’s interior. Florrie cranked down his window again. “What do
you
think? Do
you
think I knew before he died that I was next in line?”

Florrie was
watching her carefully. “I really don’t know,” he said. “Did you?”

Annette turned
away to stare back out at the picture postcard view. Her smile grew as she
thought of the money that would soon be hers. It grew as she imagined the home
she would build. Finally. The home she had always dreamed of owning. The laugh
was bubbling up inside her and she let it come. She heard herself cawing with
mirth—a most unladylike sound—but it didn’t matter. She was rich!
And she didn’t need Florrie’s pathetic fortune or anyone else’s patronage ever
again. She could do what she wanted, when she wanted. As her laughter eased,
she turned to see Florrie’s face with its expression of horror and, yes,
revulsion, and she didn’t care. She didn’t care! She was rich enough now that
she need never care.

“Oh, yes,” she
said to him, blowing smoke between them, her lips stretched tightly over her
teeth in a predatory grin. “I knew.”

*
                          
*
                                 
*

Maggie poured her
tea and brought the mug with her into the living room to curl up with an afghan
and Petit-Four on the couch. She usually loved to watch the weather from the
French doors that opened off the terrace and gave a sweeping view of the
vineyards. Today the vineyards look like naked crosses in a cemetery—one where
massive casualties have resulted in a homogenous attempt to honor and remember
everyone because there’s too much death to do it one at a time. The rows of
staked vines looked desiccated and creepy, the wooden structures holding only
stripped black branches if anything at all.

The terrace, with
its brittle canopy of yellow linden leaves, had enjoyed afternoon relief from
the autumn sun all month. Now the leaves lay scattered on the stone tiles, not
a single one left on the branches, allowing the sun drill relentlessly onto the
patio.

Maggie sipped her
tea and felt the weight of her failure. She touched her stomach as the baby
moved restlessly inside her.
It’s so
unfair
.
This should be a time of
amazing anticipation and excitement for me. And for Laurent.

Her eyes strayed again
to the ugly rows of stripped vines. The phone rang. She leaned across her dog
to reach it on the side table.

“Hello?”

The voice that
answered hesitated, and then was clipped and businesslike.
“Hello, Maggie. Is your husband home?”

“Nope.
Just me, Roger.” Maggie put her hand on Petit-Four’s head, feeling her silky
curls between her fingers. “Why are you calling? Did you get a complaint about someone
loosening the bolts on the wheelchairs down at the hospital? Are you calling to
fine me for burning the soufflé this morning?”

 
“Look, Maggie…” There was a pause that
Maggie didn’t try to fill. “I’m sorry…about all that,” he said.

Maggie
didn’t answer immediately. Finally, she said, “Your guy delivered our rugs and
stuff back. Thank you.”
 

 
“You’re welcome. Look, I’m calling to say
I got some information about Julia Patrick’s case and I told Der—your husband
,
that I would keep him informed. I want
you to know, Maggie, that I take no pleasure in telling you that Madame Patrick
was arraigned this morning on the charge of first-degree murder…”

Maggie
felt like she had been punched in the stomach.

“…and
is being moved tomorrow to a more…secure facility.”

More secure
.
He’s
trying to make it sound like it’s for her safety or something.

“Anyway,
if you want to see her, I can arrange that,” he said. “But it will have to be
tomorrow morning.”

Maggie’s
eyes were swimming with tears. The one thing she thought never in a million
years would happen, was happening.
Julia
was going to prison.

“Maggie?
Will you come?”

“Yes,”
Maggie said, her weariness so bone deep she had to sit down on one of the
barstools before she fell down. “Yes, I’ll come.”

*
                    
*
                
*
                
*

The streets in
the old part of Aix were never more beautiful in Michelle’s opinion than early
in the morning. The tourists weren’t up, the shops weren’t open, so all the
people with more money than need weren’t lining up yet to buy more useless
things than they could never use.

Had Michelle
ever
felt like she had enough?

Even when her
parents were still together, there had been no money. She could remember them
when they were together. She had been young, but not so young. There had been
few treats, she remembered that. But there had been enough for her mother to
dress and have her hair done. Yes, there had been enough for that.

Michelle sat on
the park bench in
Parc Rambot
, a
white paper bag of day-old rolls next to her. Two pigeons stared at her from
the pavement in front of her. She’d made the mistake of throwing a piece of
bread to them. Now, nothing short of death would release them from their focus
on her as their benefactor. She thought of the chickens she had killed last
month and smiled. She had hidden behind a farmer’s truck to witness the bitch’s
reaction to the car’s damage and the note. She hadn’t been disappointed.