The Complete Maggie Newberry Provençal Mysteries 1-4

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

  “You mean, that you're ready to go home?”

  Grace nodded sadly.

  “Maggie still can't adjust to living here,” she said. “How do you think she'd feel if she knew that St-Buvard wasn't my first choice as a permanent address either?”

  Windsor took his wife's hand in his.

  “You're a good friend, Grace, “ he said, kissing her hand. “And I should know.”

  3

  The olive grove was terraced steeply. The gnarled and dark olive trees studded the grassy shelves in broodish array, their haphazard silver leaves giving the grove a quiet elegance. Brigitte had deliberately chosen the spot for its remoteness--a good fifty kilometers from Nîmes, even further from Arles, and not a village or petrol stand for five or seven kilometers.

  She spread the tablecloth out under the olive trees, wondering why she had bothered to iron it and knowing, of course, why she had. Thick bushes of hollyhocks and lavender bordered the picnic area. The lavender gave a strong floral perfume that would serve as ambiance. This pleased her.

  Carefully, she unpacked the picnic, looking--from time to time--to see if she could see the approach of a car from down the terraced grove. She laid out a china dish of stuffed olives--dark and purple in their briny juices. A long baguette was placed on the tablecloth next to a large bowl of radishes. Next to this, she set the pissaladière, a creamy onion tart dotted with anchovies and black olives. She wiped her hands on a cloth napkin and frowned into the sun. It was hot. Really, too hot for a picnic of all things. But she couldn't bear the thought of meeting in a café somewhere, over drinks, over chipped ashtrays and pedestrian glances. It felt so much cleaner to meet here. Perhaps she would even relax a little bit. She tucked her feet under her and took a deep breath. Perhaps the sweet scent of the lavender and the soft grass beneath her smartly pressed tablecloth would help her just let go. For one afternoon. For one hour.

  4

  Dr. Yves Genet climbed onto the nurse, brushing away her mild, but nonetheless real, protestations and labored briefly and noisily. When he had finished, he pushed her away and dressed quickly. He chatted lightly with the woman--who was shaking and haltingly readjusting her clothing--even teasingly. He stayed with her in the examination room long enough to inspect himself in the mirror for a razor burn on the left side of his face, to comb his hair and reposition the pens in the pocket of his white jacket and to smile gently at the nameless, nearly faceless nurse still seated on the examination table. He kissed her, squeezed her knee and left her to her inevitable tears.

  5

  Uncle August was the first to arrive. Brigitte could see his ancient Saab chugging up the hill and knew he would be charmed but annoyed at the thought of conducting the interview outside in the blazing heat of a summer midday. She looked at her pissaladière and hoped it wouldn't be too salty this time. She waved to him as he climbed out of his car and squinted up the terrace grove. Behind him, she could see a shiny black Mercedes slowly snaking its way toward them. She pulled her hand down slowly and watched the large car as it pulled in beside Uncle August's Saab. She had wanted to make the introductions, but perhaps it was better this way. Maggie seemed a little intimidated by great chefs in general, and after hearing his pedigree, August Schworm in particular. She watched with a smile as the figures of Grace and Maggie exited the black Mercedes and began the trudge up the hill with her uncle. Yes, she thought, as their pleasant voices drifted up to her, perhaps this is best.

  “Bonjour, Brigitte!” Grace called to her. “We've brought the wine and your uncle too!”

  Brigitte grinned down at her new friends and waved. Grace was really quite beautiful, she thought, an effortless beauty that looked easy, thrown together but absolutely was not. Maggie, on the other hand, had the more enduring looks, Brigitte decided. Her style was quirky and unsure and it suited her. She had a flawless complexion, unusual for someone her age. Her curtain of dark hair swung against her shoulders, her blue eyes seemed to see so much--for all her affect of insecurity.

  Brigitte feared Maggie most of all.

  “My God,” Grace gasped as the three reached the picnic spot. “Is this some sort of trial? Because I'm terrible at aerobic sorts of things. Much better at cocktail sorts of things.” She sank gracefully onto the picnic tablecloth, her linen skirt ballooning gently around her.

  “Brigitte! I should have known you would pull a picnic out of the air! And such air! Ninety degrees!” Uncle August kissed her heartily and squeezed both of her hands before turning his attention to the presentation of food on the tablecloth.

  Brigitte welcomed Maggie, noting that she looked fresh and unfazed by the steep climb. The American's eyes sparkled with interest as she quickly scanned the picnic offerings. It was true, Brigitte thought, Americans are like little children--always ready to be surprised, to be delighted.

  “Maggie, bonjour,” she said, taking Maggie's hand. “Ahh, you have brought the rosé, I see.”

  “It's from Laurent's stock,” Maggie said, holding out three bottles.

  “Yes, I see. Excellent. Uncle August, have you...?”

  “I have tried the St-Buvard label. Some of it is good.” He smiled at Maggie. “Even quite good.”

  “Don't worry, Maggie,” Brigitte said, motioning her to sit down next to Grace. “His bite is as boring as his bark.” She turned to her uncle and wagged a finger. “Arf! Arf!”

  “Brigitte, this is all lovely!” Grace said. “This spot is enchanting...the lavender...the beautiful flowers...the perfect spot for a picnic.”

  “I thought you might bring your children, Grace,” Brigitte said, handing out little china plates. “Or at least the baby.”

  “No, no,” Grace said, as she spooned a few olives onto her plate. “It's Daddy's day to be with the children.” She laughed. “He practically begged me to leave them home with him.”

  “Yeah, I'll bet,” Maggie said, grinning. “What do you call this dish, Brigitte?”

  “I call it olives and bread,” Brigitte said, laughing. “Don't worry, Maggie, we will get into all that. But this is nothing.” She waved a dismissing hand at the picnic. “Uncle August will tell you what true French food really is.”

  “Brigitte, you underrate yourself, as usual,” August said somewhat gruffly. “True French food is simplicity itself. A crust of fresh bread, rubbed with a cut clove of garlic and dipped in the sweetest virgin olive oil. That is cooking at its most perfect, its most evolved.”

  Maggie pulled out a spiral notebook and a pen.

  “I guess the creams and butters and scallops and stuff gets tossed in later, huh?”

  Everyone laughed.

  “What is it you want to know, Madame?” August sliced a clean wedge of the pissaladière onto his plate. He was a handsome, apple-faced man in his late sixties. His eyes were bright blue, his cheeks rosy and his lips full. He had a full head of gray-white hair which curled around the top of his collar. He had a face that appeared to have experienced much joy, especially of the sensual variety. He wiped his pristine mustache with a clean cloth napkin and gave Maggie his full attention.

  Maggie thought for a minute and looked uncertainly at Grace who was cutting her own piece of onion tart and licking her fingers.

  “We should have brought music,” Grace said. “I could have brought Taylor's little battery-operated boom box. Maybe some Enya?”

  “I'm not really sure,” Maggie said to August. “I guess I assumed I'd collect...you know...a bunch of local recipes....?” She looked helplessly at Brigitte who smiled encouragingly at her.

  “That seems like a good idea,” Brigitte said.

  “That is all you want from me?” August frowned.

  “What else can you give me?” Maggie said without thinking. “I mean, what else is a cookbook but recipes?”

  “Ahhh,” August nodded as if finally satisfied with Maggie's answer. He took a full bite of the pie and nodded again, this time at Brigitte. “Excellent, my dear,” he murmured. “Perfection.” He quickly
ate the rest of the piece and cut himself another.

  “Yes, it's really delicious, Brigitte,” Grace said, now fanning herself with a rolled up speeding ticket she'd found in her purse. “It's pissaladière, right?”

  Maggie began to write.

  “How do you spell that?” she asked.

  August reached over and put his heavy bronze hand on top of her notepad.

  “This will be much better,” he said, breathing garlic and onions into the warm air around Maggie's face, “if you take the notes after the experience. It's like making love, no? It spoils the mood to be jotting down tips while your lover is still tightly lodged--”

  “Uncle August...” Brigitte winced.

  “Ahh, yes, well, you understand, no?”

  Grace burst out laughing, dropping her fan in the process.

  “Perfectly,” Maggie said and settled back for a very interesting lunch.

  6

  Later that same evening, Maggie watched her husband open a tin of goose confit, place the goose under the grill and sauté baby new potatoes in the goose fat. She prepared a simple green salad and brought up a chilled rosé from their basement or cave as she was learning to call it. For the first time in months, they worked together companionably and quietly to prepare their evening meal. Maggie asked him no questions about the meal or the preparation of it. She made no notations in her notebook. Laurent did not raise his voice or tune her out when she did speak. He did not appear to be shielding his activities at the stove or waiting for the phone to ring.

  They sat down together at the dining room table and Maggie spoke of her afternoon with Brigitte and Grace and she listened without rancor or resentment as Laurent told of his day in the vineyards with Jean-Luc.

  It was a truly miraculous meal.

  “And so you like Brigitte?” he asked.

  “She's fabulous. Treated me as warmly as if she'd known me for years.”

  “Perhaps she's in the market for a friend.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It sounds like she's chosen you to be her friend.”

  Maggie chewed thoughtfully and took a sip of the wine. It was still a bit tannic. She hadn't let it breathe long enough.

  “From what you say of your afternoon...” Laurent shrugged.

  “She's an extraordinary person,” Maggie said slowly. “She's beautiful and intelligent-”

  “And married to a clod.”

  “Yes, there's that.”

  They ate quietly for a moment.

  “Do you think she could help take the place of Grace for you?”

  Maggie looked up from her dinner at Laurent. It hadn't occurred to her before that her crisis of losing Grace was an equal crisis for Laurent. In his mind, Grace was what helped make it bearable for Maggie in St-Buvard. Without her, the pressure to leave France could become very heavy.

  “Grace and I finally talked about her leaving...a little bit,” Maggie said. “She was sorry she hadn't told me sooner, blah blah blah. And where Windsor goes she must go too blah blah blah...”

  “What is this 'blah blah blah'?”

  “I guess it just doesn't sound like a very good reason to leave.”

  “Windsor's happiness, you mean?”

  “What about Grace's happiness? Or the children’s?”

  Laurent pushed his empty dinner plate away. He stared into the bowl of his wine glass.

  “Grace was pretty unhappy about it all, I suppose?” he said.

  Maggie shrugged.

  “Not all that unhappy, I guess,” she said.

  “Grace wants to go too,” Laurent said.

  Maggie said nothing. Laurent poured more wine into her glass.

  The sound of Laurent’s sole hunting dog could be heard baying in the distance. It was a ghostly sound; painful and harsh in the still evening air.

  “I wish you could have seen Brigitte today, Laurent,” Maggie said, pushing her own plate away. “She wasn't at all like she was the other night when Yves was there. She was really relaxed and laughing and so charming. You would've loved her.”

  “I liked her well enough the other night.”

  “But she was so changed, today,” Maggie insisted. “I felt close to her. Isn't that weird? I've only known her a few days and yet I really feel like she's going to be someone very, very special in my life.”

  “I, for one, am very glad to hear this.”

  Laurent smiled and then leaned across the table and kissed Maggie.

  “I've missed you, Maggie,” he whispered into her ear.

  She kissed him back and then moved over to his side of the table where she slipped into his lap and put her arms around him.

  She kissed him deeply and at length.

  “That must have been a hell of a lunch,” Laurent said nuzzling his face into her neck and hair.

  “It was. August Schworm is an amazing man. You’ve got to meet him, Laurent. And he’s already taught me a lot and helped show me what I need to do next. With the book, I mean.” Maggie toyed with the long curls against Laurent’s collar. “I've got Brigitte to thank for that too, in a way.”

  Laurent stood, still holding Maggie in his arms and nudged his chair out of the way with his foot.

  “I will thank each of them one by one for this incredible transformation,” he said as he moved with her in his arms toward the staircase. “But first things first, as you Americans would say.”

  7

  Marie stared out to the Roman gates of the city. Two massive columns each hosting a massive stone lion lounging atop. The chills came every time she imagined the Roman soldiers directing the Provençal villagers of 400 AD to build the gates.

  Tonight the gates looked ghostly, even sinister in the dark and fog-cloaked night. She stared out at them from across the Rhone, itself inky and malevolent.

  “Do watch where you step, Marie. There's dog shit everywhere.” René clucked softly to their little poodle and gave it a brisk tug of the leash.

  “It's a beautiful night,” Marie said, still looking over the river. She wore a heavy cotton tablier over her usual dancer's black ensemble and she'd tucked her hair into a thin gauzy scarf. The cool evening breeze off the river gently but firmly flipped the wispy ties against her face.

  “As long as one holds one's nose,” René said, squinting across the river.

  Marie sighed heavily and turned to her husband. She tucked her hand into the pocket of his light cardigan. The heat of the uncomfortable August days had left only a dull ache in the air to show that it had ever been. The evening air was refreshed by the river and cooled.

  “Brigitte called today,” she said.

  René looked up.

  “Yes? Everything is well?” he asked.

  “She had that picnic with August and....”

  “Oh, yes, I remember they talked about it at the dinner party. How was it, then? Everyone have a good time? Genvieve! Stop that you naughty dog! Little beast would roll in the muck if we let her...”

  “She's a dog, after all.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Seemed she felt a special connection with Maggie, Grace's friend.”

  “You are disappointed it was not Grace to whom your beloved daughter, as you say, 'connected'?”

  Marie laughed.

  “How well you know me! I know it’s silly, but it’s just that I thought the two of them...since I've come to care so much for Grace...and I've found so many similarities between the two...”

  “Maggie seemed very nice, too.”

  “Yes, of course, she is, René,” Marie said impatiently. “And I'm delighted Brigitte wants to pursue a friendship with Madame Derniere...Maggie...”

  “Especially with your darling Grace about to fuck off back to the U.S.”

  “René!”

  “Well? I am wrong? Some friend! Genvieve! No!”

  “And she hadn't even told her good friend, Maggie, that she was leaving. You could see what an awful shock it was to her.” Marie shook her head.
<
br />   “And to you.”

  “Yes. And to me.” Marie shoved both her hands into the pockets of her tablier as if to warm them. The night was not that cold. “But no one could see that.”

  “Because no one was looking...but me, of course.”

  “Of course.” Marie smiled at him.

  “And that bastard, Yves? Did Brigitte mention where that scum-bag was tonight? I assume he was not home.”

  “Working late at the hospital.”

  “How I would like to murder that shit!”

  “I doesn't help, René.”

  “It helps me. Just thinking of the sorry bastard lying in a pool of his own vital fluids helps me quite a bit! Why they just do not divorce--”

  “You know why.”

  “Even if she's miserable, Marie? You would have our Brigitte stay in a marriage of pain and degradation?”

  “She is married to him. Before God...she made a vow before God to be his wife. Nothing on Earth can break what God has blessed.”

  “Ridiculous! Why would a loving God bless such a union? Why would he want our Brigitte to be miserable?”

  “Don't you think it hurts me to see her like this?” Marie turned to face her husband. “She is Catholic. We, in case I must remind you, are Catholic.”

  “This, about being Catholic, I do not accept,” René said stubbornly.

  “Cafeteria Catholics.”

  “What?”

  “That's what His Holiness called the Americans who pick and choose the teachings they like and don't like in Catholicism. It doesn't work that way, René.”

  “It works that way for me.”

  “Because you are a man.” Marie's voice softened and she put her hand back into his pocket. “Woman was created to remind you of the rules. Now, come on, bring that bad dog away from the wall. She's done enough damage. Let's go home.”

  “Brigitte could move back home into her old bedroom. Wouldn't that be wonderful?”

  “Yes, my dear. It truly would.” Marie clucked to the little dog and the three of them left the damp parapet and began the long, winding walk through the quiet cobblestone streets to their apartment.