The Complete Maggie Newberry Provençal Mysteries 1-4

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

  “You must stay hopeful, Paulette.”

  She detected a certain unease entering into their conversations. This always happened sooner or later. Laurent’s eventual eagerness to leave was always telegraphed through his manner and his voice a good half an hour before he would be able to convince his feet to move. She couldn’t blame him. She’d leave too, if she could.

  “If it’s a matter of money....” he said.

  She smiled, the effort of it weighing like sixty-pound sacks of grain on each corner of her mouth. “Eduard is helping us.”

  What more was there to say? Eduard was helping them. Had helped them. She looked at Laurent with surprise, then realized that the look of disgust on his face was, of course, not meant for her.

  3

  Maggie accelerated rapidly, narrowly missing a rabbit inspecting some morsel of greenery in the road. Grace had dropped Maggie off in town where her car was parked in the village and then taken her queasy, pregnant self home to a hot bath and tea, having had quite enough sleuthing for one day, thank you. Maggie couldn’t blame her.

  The canopy of tall sycamores lined the ancient road that Maggie took toward Nîmes. In her opinion, the countryside was far less impressive in winter. The ruddy scrubbiness of the bushes and sparse trees, the variegated, haphazard fields of dormant lavender and grapes of September and October had given way to barren, flat lands, colorless and dull. Only the side roads that sought out the older villages were at all picturesque or enticing. It seemed impossible to Maggie that Van Gogh could have chosen this grim, unembellished part of the world in which to await inspiration.

  Madame Dulcie had mentioned that Gaston’s family came from Veneoux. The village, over two hundred kilometers from St-Buvard, was really too far to drive comfortably in an afternoon, but, she had little else to do with her afternoon. Laurent had made it clear he would be busy well into the evening with his public degustations. The signs of On Vend du Vin Ici had stayed up. Laurent would sell his wine right from their front doorstep...like a grown-up Kool-aid stand, Maggie thought with an involuntary smile. She turned off the quaint, tree-lined road onto the A7.

  Shaking thoughts of Laurent and his energies toward his budding winery out of her mind, Maggie concentrated on what she might find in Veneoux. Grace had been astounded that she intended to go at all.

  “You’re going to have a conversation with Gaston Lasalle’s mother?” she’d asked. Her small, delicate mouth, always so carefully painted, had fallen open in surprise.

  “I thought it was as good a place as any to start.”

  “Maggie, you’ve been screwing your hair curlers in too tight at night.”

  “I take it you don’t want to come with me.”

  “Just promise me you won’t use the toilet there. Or you’ll be writing a completely different kind of book.”

  Was she nuts to do this? To talk to the woman who had spawned such nastiness? What was she hoping to find out, really? That Gaston had ranted against foreigners as a child? That he’d harbored a burning, lifelong ambition to avenge his grandfather’s humiliating death? For that matter, Gaston’s mother had certainly been old enough to know what was going on when they hung her father. Perhaps she was even angrier than Gaston? How would she react to Maggie’s probing?

  Maggie glanced at the position of the sun and cursed herself for not taking into account the short winter days in Provence. It was only three o’clock but she knew the light would be waning by the time she reached Gaston’s family village and would be gone completely before she could begin her way back home. A small tug of satisfaction as she thought of Laurent’s worry made her forge ahead.

  Veneoux was a charming, hilltop village of narrow, winding roads that barely afforded two small cars room to pass. The familiar orange tiled roofs were in varying degrees of disrepair, and the façades of all the homes were the same sandy bland color that Maggie had grown accustomed to seeing all over Provence. The afternoon sun was disappearing behind the village church steeple as Maggie drove into the town, its streets deserted and forbidding. In her rearview mirror, she caught a glimpse of the stone-white sign announcing the boundary of Veneoux. An angry red slash crossed through the name as if to blot it out, renounce it. Maggie concentrated on the road ahead, hoping the sign wasn’t an omen.

  Madame Dulcie had insisted that Gaston’s people could be found where all gypsies in Provence could be found― living in compact trailers and minibuses on the outskirts of town or under the largest bridge.

  “Follow the trail of garbage,” the butcher’s wife had said in disgust.

  Maggie drove slowly past the tidy village church of Veneoux and down the narrow main street. It was five o’clock. Two sets of bright blue shutters slammed shut as she drove by, and a scowling man with an oversized mustache watched her as he carried a small table and two chairs inside his shop. The boulangerie looked closed, the hotel, as if it had been bombed in the last war.

  Suddenly, Maggie wished that her interview was over and that she was on her way back to her own living room. Her language skills were embarrassingly bad. She had brought a set of index cards on which she’d written excerpts from phrase books and dictionaries in order to help in framing her questions. She reached in her purse and felt for the small, hand-held tape recorder that she hoped Gaston’s mother would allow her to use.

  The last few town houses drifted away to reveal decaying barns and scraggly gardens that looked like they had been abandoned long ago. Unusual, Maggie thought, for the typically, garden-mad French. And there, just outside town, she found the circle of caravans. Four trailers and two Mercedes Benz sedans served as the backdrops for the seven or eight children playing noisily in the dying afternoon sunlight. Maggie parked on a grassy verge, locked the car and walked toward the group of children. She held her stack of homemade cue cards in one hand and a small sack of centime coins in the other.

  The children spotted her immediately. One girl, about eight years old and fiercely cross-eyed, leaped toward her and began tugging at her jacket. The child was soon joined by the rest, each dirty, dull-eyed and chattering, each pulling at Maggie and holding out a grimy palm.

  “Un moment!” Maggie said, uselessly, hating the feeling of so many gripping tentacles on her arms and clothing. She flung the handful of coins into the dirt. The children abandoned her to scramble after the money, pushing and kicking each other in the process. Knowing they’d be back and that she had no more tricks up her chemise, Maggie looked frantically around the yard and at the darkened trailers.

  Were there no grownups, she wondered? Who drove these cars? A noise came from one of the trailers. The children were quickly back and pulling at her again.

  Maggie spoke over the din: “Où est Madame Lasalle? Où habite Madame Lasalle?” Where is Madame Lasalle?

  The children began singing, “Où habite Madame Lasalle!” in imitation of her bad accent, and Maggie looked at the trailer that had shown some sign of life. Surely, the ruckus these children were creating would interest one of their parents?

  “Je suis Madame Lasalle.” A voice came across the small dirt clearing from one of the trailers behind Maggie. The voice was reedy and thin, like the woman herself, who stood smiling broadly at Maggie from the step of her trailer. Tall and covered in bangles and jangling gold-tone bracelets, Madame Lasalle was an imposing hag in full gypsy dress. Maggie could see the hand-painted lettering on the side of the trailer: Diseuse de bonne aventure―Madame Zen. Watching Maggie read the advertisement, the gypsy grinned and waved to it. “Donc, je suis Madame Zen, n’est-ce pas?” She laughed and came down the steps toward Maggie. The children disappeared as quickly as smoke in front of a fan. “Voulez-vous me dire la bonne aventure?” Do you want your fortune told? She pointed to Maggie’s hand as if to indicate she would tell her her fortune right here and now.

  Maggie glanced at one of her cue cards and spoke in an even voice to the advancing gypsy.

  “Puis-je poser des questions, Madame?” May I ask you some quest
ions?

  The woman stopped in front of Maggie and crossed her arms. Not counting the less than pristine turban she wore over her orange and gray hair, she stood at least a foot taller than Maggie.

  “Ne parlez-vous pas français, Madame?” the gypsy asked Maggie. You don’t speak French? Her voice was softer now. Her eyes seemed to be trying to judge Maggie while giving nothing away.

  “Non, Madame, je m’excuse.” Maggie repeated her first question. Would the woman answer some questions for her?

  Madame Lasalle smiled, her eyes large and dark. Maggie guessed Gaston’s mother’s age to be closer to fifty-five than the eighty she looked. The pungent smell of woodsmoke filled the clearing. The gypsy tugged her colorful red and green shawl tightly around her. It had grown quickly colder. Suddenly, she gestured for Maggie to come into her trailer, pausing only briefly to ask if she would be paid for the answers she gave.

  “Bien sûr,” Maggie replied, her heart beating in doubletime.

  This was madness.

  She was asking questions she only really knew how to ask because she’d marked the foreign words out phonetically on her cards. She was receiving answers that could just as easily be ingredients to a paella recipe as true responses to her questions. The gypsy knew Maggie didn’t know her language. And Maggie knew she was dealing with a professional liar. Madness.

  The trailer was cramped and jammed with every kind of colored glass and trinket Maggie had ever seen and passed up in junk shops, garage sales, or dump heaps. The tiny space jingled with the glittering bits of rubbish the woman had made into her home. She offered Maggie a cup of herb tea in a surprisingly clean cup and, afraid to refuse, Maggie drank the sweet brew with visions of leprosy and oral herpes swarming in her mind.

  Carefully, one by one, Maggie read the cue cards to the woman, placing a ten franc coin down on the table with each question. Just as methodically―showing no surprise or emotion at all save the same pleasant, not-to-be-believed smile―Madame Lasalle answered the questions by speaking into Maggie’s small tape recorder. When Maggie asked about her son, Gaston, no cloud of cunning crept into the woman’s eyes, no hint of guile or perjury showed itself in her pleasant, ravaged face.

  “Why was your father where the murders took place?” Maggie asked from her little white cards. Madame Lasalle shrugged as if this story had been told and retold too many times to be painful. She spoke quickly. Her eyes watched Maggie’s fingers as they released the ten franc coin onto the table between them. Maggie caught the words “Ricardo,” which was, apparently, the murdered gypsy’s first name and “anchois,” which she knew meant anchovy.

  Suddenly, Madame Lasalle acted out a little scenario of someone screaming: “Au secours! Au secours!” She then made sound effects like a gun firing. She looked solemnly into Maggie’s eyes and spoke directly to her and, for the first time, Maggie thought, earnestly. Maggie watched the gypsy’s face as she spoke and tried to will herself to understand the words. At the end of the woman’s statement, the only phrase Maggie could be sure of was “les gendarmes.” Madame Lasalle reached for a cigarette as if to show she had no real interest over the incident. Certainly, no regret.

  Not knowing what more to ask and figuring that, true or false, she had as much on tape as she could hope to have anyway, Maggie gave the gypsy a twenty franc note and thanked her. Maggie rose to leave. Gently, with a touch that surprised Maggie for it’s softness, Madame Lasalle held Maggie’s wrist as Maggie was withdrawing her hand, and turned it palm side up. She spoke questioningly to Maggie, her eyes smiling, not relinquishing her hand.

  “I have no more money,” Maggie said, trying to pull her hand away. Having her palm read was the last thing she felt in the mood for. “Je n’ai plus d’argent,” she repeated.

  The woman nodded her head at the twenty franc note and held Maggie’s hand firmly in front of her.

  Oh, what the hell, Maggie thought, and turned the recorder back on.

  Keeping her eyes on the road, Maggie raced homeward at a neat 130 kilometers per hour. Normally, she allowed the speedier French drivers to zoom by her. Tonight, she was anxious to be off the main highway. A sign for Arles flashed by, also giving distances for Marseille and Aix. Even at this speed, she was still a good forty-five minutes from the exit that would lead her to St-Buvard, and it was already past eight o’clock.

  She hadn’t been at all surprised to learn that Gaston had grown up in filth and poverty. Many of the children she had seen were physically deformed in some way―either with crossed eyes or cleft palates or both. The defects were a living-color testimony to the careless inbreeding she had been told was common among the gypsies. Father lying with daughter, brother with sister.

  Maggie made a face and pulled the lever that activated the heat in the little car. Grace had told her a story about an old gypsy trick that was supposedly still practiced in Avignon and Arles. An old beggar woman, clutching a baby, would wait along a relatively remote pedestrian walkway or alley until a shopper (ideally, with both hands full of bags) approached. The gypsy woman would then toss the baby at the victim and hope that the shopper would attempt to catch the baby. If he did so (thereby dropping his parcels), a pair of gypsy urchins would appear, snatch the dropped shopping bags, and promptly disappear. The baby was supposedly sedated. Maggie remembered Connor joking about how he would react if someone tried tossing a baby at him. She couldn’t remember what he’d said, exactly. She tried to remember if she had laughed.

  Straining to recollect if she’d ever seen the French equivalent to the Highway Patrol along this stretch of the A7, Maggie pushed the little Renault to 140 km. No, these gypsies, these gitanes, were definitely like no group she’d ever heard of in the States. Did the U.S. even have gypsies? If they existed outside of the movies, they certainly received little press. She recalled Madame Lasalle’s eyes, which were piercing, dark, virtually without pupils. She wondered if those eyes had ever spoken love to a young Gaston? If they had ever held tenderness for a small son? Maggie tried to imagine the two of them together: Madame Lasalle and Gaston. There was a slight family resemblance but, it seemed to Maggie, only in as much as there was among all gypsies. Madame Lasalle was tall whereas Gaston was a short man, probably no more than five foot six or seven inches tall. Both were dark, with sharp, angular features and full, passionate mouths. This last realization surprised Maggie, but it was true. Gaston wasn’t really ugly. In fact, his features were becoming, in a raffish sort of way. It was only his anger, she thought, and his predatory affect that made him grotesque.

  Partially because she didn’t want to believe she had wasted her day, Maggie decided to believe, until proven otherwise, that what Madame Lasalle had told her on the tape was the truth. Or, if not the whole truth, then enough of it to enable Maggie to ferret out the answers for herself. The gypsy gained nothing by lying, Maggie reasoned. Her manner had been neither ingratiating nor cagey as she spoke into the recorder. She had simply talked. Without obvious interest, it was true, but also without apparent reservation or evidence of invention.

  Maggie checked the digital clock on the car’s dashboard. Eight-thirty-five. Plenty of time to get home, have a nice dinner and share a bottle of wine with Laurent before getting him to translate the taped interview.

  By the time she turned off A7 onto 543, Maggie’s thoughts had left Madame Lasalle and Gaston, and had settled around the curious lack of care that the newly-pregnant Grace seemed to be taking of herself. It didn’t make sense, Maggie thought as she steered her speeding car down the narrow two-lane country road, the ghostly sycamores with their pale, spotty trunks looming over her like protective phantoms. Grace had been desperate to get pregnant; her home had been full of books on pregnancy as well as infertility. And after she’d confessed her secret to Maggie― that she was having trouble conceiving―Grace had then talked freely about her need and desire to be pregnant again. Now, Grace rarely spoke of her condition. She continued to smoke and drink―although, granted, not as much as before―
and there was not a book, not a pamphlet, not a matchbook’s worth of information about pregnancy visible anywhere in her home. Maggie had even commented on it once and gotten a cool shrug from Grace. “What’s there to know?” she’d responded.

  But it didn’t fit. The lack of interest was too sudden, too abrupt, too unlike Grace. This was not the woman who had had books sent over from the States on the proper care of stucco façades. This was not the same woman who had read so much about infertility and its causes that she bragged to Maggie that she had practically diagnosed herself to the Aix-en-Provence fertility specialists. No, when Grace was interested in something, she researched and read up on it until she knew every angle, every shred of possibility and detail about the thing.

  Grace was simply unenthusiastic about her new condition. And Maggie couldn’t figure it out.

  Slowing to leave the 543, Maggie braced herself for the bumpy village road that led through St-Buvard and past it to the surrounding vineyards, cottages and farmhouses. Home was ten minutes away. It was that reassuring thought, occurring as she passed the quiet St-Buvard church and its sleepy, spooky grounds, that made Maggie impulsively pull off the road and into the tight clearing where she and Grace had parked several hours earlier.

  Not entirely sure why she’d stopped, she sat quietly in the car, listening to the engine’s subtle death groans. The old, stone church looked vacant and foreboding, although she thought she caught a vague glimmer of a light in some recess of the interior. Was someone inside, she wondered, praying? Was there a priest lurking about this darkened dungeon of a place on such a cold, gray evening? Perhaps preparing the bleak, stony altar for early morning services tomorrow? Somehow, it didn’t seem likely, and Maggie decided that she’d imagined the light.

  Maggie quickly opened the glove box and found the flashlight Laurent kept there. She snapped it on and off, satisfied that the battery was strong, and then braced herself for the cold air outside the car. She was determined to find Patrick Alexandre, by God, and this time―freezing cold or not, pitch black or no, she would locate his grave once and for all.