The Complete Maggie Newberry Provençal Mysteries 1-4

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

  “I will pay for the silly thing,” Laurent said, quietly.

  She snapped her head up to look at him.

  “It was a gift from my parents, you cretin,” she said hotly. Will you pay to have the sentimentality restored? To have the moment re-lived? Or am I to be falling all over myself with gratitude that I’ll have a glued-together facsimile in its place?”

  “Perhaps you are too sentimental,” Laurent said, hoisting the rifle with one hand and nudging the dog out of the door with the heel of his boot.

  “What are you doing with that damn gun?!” Maggie felt she could physically attack Laurent at this moment. Her anger made her clutch her fist, the biting shards of the broken sculpture lightly lanced her palm.

  “I will be hunting this season,” Laurent said over his shoulder to her.

  “We talked about this...”

  “We did not come to the conclusion that I would not hunt,” Laurent said.

  “You know how I feel about this...”

  “I know how you feel about a great many things, Maggie,” Laurent said, affecting a tiredness in his voice. “How can I avoid knowing so much about your wants? What you don’t have? What you need? What you won’t put up with, eh?”

  “You’re a total bastard.”

  “Perhaps,” Laurent said, smiling meanly now. “But I will hunt.”

  “Hunt then.” Maggie jerked her robe tightly around her and planted her feet in front of him. She brought her face close to his own, seemingly impassive, one. “Hunt until you blow a few toes off and I hope you do. Hunt for food we don’t need, hunt to be a big man with all the other--”

  “I have heard this all before,” Laurent interrupted. “I’m going to clean up for dinner.” Without a backward glance, he turned and left the house, leaving Maggie fuming with impotent rage.

  He had deliberately come to provoke her! He’d come to let her know he’d decided to shoot and she would just have to deal with it. She walked to the French door and watched him as he jerked open the door to the garden shed and placed the gun inside. She watched him run his hand through his hair and then stand, his hands on his hips, staring contemplatively at the ground, his dog sniffing at the door of the shed.

  All at once, it seemed childishly clear to Maggie that Laurent had made his aggressive presentation to her because he wanted the fact that he would be hunting this season out in the open and done with. And as stubborn as he obviously intended to be about it, he clearly did not take her reaction lightly--else why stage this overdrawn confrontation to bring it to a head? It didn’t make her feel any better about the idea of a gun in the house--as if he intended to keep it in the garden shed! -- but at least he had treated her reaction with dread, and so, respect. Maggie backed away from the window to avoid being seen as Laurent walked back to the house.

  She’d lost this important battle, she thought, as she watched him approach-- his face set in a grim mask -- but the war, she found herself thinking with surprise. Perhaps that was another thing.

  Chapter Eight

  1

  She died here.

  Maggie stood at the edge of the highway and looked into the shallow ditch that cradled the road. Amazingly, after eight days, the spot where Brigitte’s body was found was still matted and scarred. It had rained hard only once since then, Maggie remembered. The day of the funeral.

  The ground felt hard and ungiving beneath her sneakered feet. It was the first of September. The day after Laurent’s announcement that he would hunt. The first day of hunting season. Maggie had left him cooking in the kitchen, preparing for the dinner party they would give that evening. He would not be hunting today.

  It was a fine balance of forgiveness and frigidity that had met Laurent on his return from the garden shed. Maggie had found a nugget of comfort in his apprehension of her reaction to the guns, yet she felt the need to remind him--in whatever form she could--that she was not happy about the hunting. She was not happy about the gun. And so they did not make love last night, but she kissed him good-bye this morning before she left him, and she felt him relax some of the tension he’d been holding himself with, and she didn’t begrudge him that.

  Now, as she stood at the site of Brigitte’s last terrified moments on earth, Maggie felt slightly bewildered. Why, here? Had she been tortured elsewhere and dumped here? If so, had she still been alive, even if only feebly, when she’d been thrown from the car?

  Maggie walked down into the ditch, to the matted-down spot. She was careful not to step on it, as if it were a grave. The police had obviously combed the area very well. Maggie walked to the far side of the ditch and looked down. It descended another three feet to a stand of ancient sycamores, sickly and spindly-looking, as if the Provençal rain and sparse soil were not enough to sustain them for very much longer. With no real reason in mind, Maggie locked her knees and slid to the bottom of the small hill, leaving Brigitte’s gravesite above her.

  A series of high cypresses flanked the sycamores and Maggie walked toward them. She stopped, thinking she could actually smell the growing Provençal herbs baking in the late summer sun. She closed her eyes, and, taking a deep breath, tried to pick out lavender, at least.

  Grace will miss the lavender, Maggie thought, feeling the sun gently touch her face. She’ll miss the constant, relentless beauty of this place, too. Maggie opened her eyes and smiled. She’ll make up for it with all the great, exaggerated stories she’ll be able to spin. The smile vanished as Maggie thought of Connor. And some not so exaggerated.

  Turning away from the cypresses, Maggie prepared to hike back up the steep incline when her eye caught something glint in the sunlight. Vaguely mindful of the region’s pit-vipers that liked to sleep in tall grasses, Maggie picked her way to the spot directly below where Brigitte had lain. She pushed the amber, burnt grasses away with her foot at first, and then, forgetting her concern about snakes, reached into the undergrowth and snatched up the shining, gold tube of lipstick.

  Clarins, to be exact.

  2

  “So does this mean Madeleine killed her?”

  Maggie turned uncomfortably in the hospital phone booth and peered through its window at the group of hospital personnel scurrying past her.

  “I guess a lot of people use Clarins lipstick,” Maggie said.

  “I have done,” Grace admitted on her end of the phone. “But I didn’t kill Brigitte.”

  “Thanks, Gracie. Always helpful to eliminate the field.”

  “You going to tell Bedard?”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh, you are naughty, Maggie! Isn’t that withholding evidence, or something?”

  “Screw ‘im,” Maggie said, spying Yves walk by. “His men should have done a better job of looking at the murder site. Bunch of incompetents!”

  “He’s not going to like this.”

  “I care less than I did,” Maggie said. “Listen, there’s Yves. I gotta go. Wish me luck.”

  “I do, darling, but be careful. You need to be alive to hostess tonight’s party. Laurent would be furious.”

  “See you tonight! Bye!”

  Maggie hung up quickly and stepped out of the phone booth.

  “Excusez-moi, Yves? Yves...”

  Yves stopped and turned slowly to face Maggie. Without looking at him, he dismissed a young doctor who attempted to intercept him, and gave the young American his full attention. He smiled at her.

  Maggie swallowed hard. It suddenly occurred to her that she’d never really talked to Yves alone. It occurred to her that there was a good possibility he was a murderer.

  “Mademoiselle Dernier?” he said, now walking toward her.

  “Madame,” Maggie corrected, and found herself blushing.

  “Ah, yes, but of course, you are married. How can I forget it?”

  Maggie felt an irresistible tug in the man’s direction.

  He was trying to charm her! Like a snake hypnotizes its victims.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Brigitte,” Maggie sai
d.

  Yves rolled his eyes and took Maggie by the arm, his fingers pressed tightly against the inside of her breast.

  “Let us be alone with this talk,” he said, briskly.

  Maggie allowed herself to be steered into a small room off the nurse’s station. She noticed several nurses deliberately averting their eyes as she and Yves passed. Inside, she could see the room had obviously been used as an examination room at once time, it still held a paper-cloaked table. But with stacks of white hospital linens piled up in the corner and on a tall floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, it seemed it was now used mostly for storage.

  Yves released her and sat down, resting one hip on the table. He clasped his hands together and smiled at her. Maggie half expected him to lick his lips.

  “Now,” he said. “What do you have to say about Brigitte?”

  Maggie forced herself to smile back at him. After all, he would tell her nothing if he didn’t want to.

  “Actually, I have more asking than saying,” she said. “I was hoping you would tell me the last time you saw Brigitte.”

  Yves raised an eyebrow.

  “René believes that the last time I saw his daughter,” he said. “was when I held the knife to her throat.”

  Maggie cleared her own throat.

  “Brigitte wasn’t killed with a knife.”

  Yves smiled a little unpleasantly now.

  “Just so,” he said.

  “She was...battered to death.”

  “And I knew this, of course.”

  “It’s not a secret,” Maggie said. “If it were, then I wouldn’t know it. The police have released this information.” She looked carefully into Yves’ eyes, trying to find the thing that had, at one time, made Brigitte love him. “As far as René goes, I don’t know what he thinks. But I haven’t heard any evidence yet to back up the theory that you killed her.”

  “You are cold-blooded, Madame!” Yves laughed. “People think Americans are so emotional, you know? Yes? Such push-overs. But it’s not so. Really, I find Americans can see the idea of death so much easier than the rest of us. You are inured, I think...you are understanding me? Your American TV makes a little death here and there, so much more... bearable.”

  Maggie waited.

  “We met here, in this room,” he said, waving his arm toward the examining table. “We screwed. Deliciously, you know? And intended to meet later that evening for dinner with friends.”

  Maggie felt her stomach heave. She could not get around the idea of Brigitte loving this man.

  “What friends?” she said.

  “Madeleine and Richard,” Yves said, looking at his watch.

  “But you didn’t meet them.”

  “No, Brigitte died instead.”

  Maggie forced herself not to respond to it.

  “When did you know the evening would not happen?”

  “The three of us met at the restaurant. Brigitte never showed up.”

  “Did you eat anyway?”

  Yves shrugged. Quoi que? Why not?

  “What restaurant was it?”

  Yves grinned at her.

  “What a funny little American you are,” he said. “L’aubergine.”

  ‘L’aubergine’ was Uncle August’s restaurant.

  “One last question, please,” Maggie said. “I know you’re busy.” Maggie dug into her handbag.

  “Not too busy, really, for a quick one, as you Americans say.” Yves said, patting the top of the examining table. “Brigitte, I’m sure, would not mind.”

  Ignoring his offer, Maggie pulled out the Clarins lipstick.

  “Would you know if this were Brigitte’s?” she asked.

  “It is not. Are we finished? I really do have a job around here.” Yves opened the door and strode out.

  “Are you sure about the lipstick?” Maggie called after him. She watched as four nurse’s faces looked up abruptly from the front desk as she emerged from the room.

  “Brigitte never wore make-up,” Yves said over his shoulder. “She didn’t need it.”

  3

  Surely, that’s not unusual that Brigitte was to have dined at her uncle August’s restaurant. Do the police know this? Had August Schworm even been questioned? Yves had told Maggie straight-forwardly enough. He probably did the same with the cops. On the other hand, the cops had missed a lot. Maybe that didn’t know. Maggie pushed the elevator down button and rode to the main floor of the hospital. If only Marie were more available to talk! Or if Bedard weren’t being such a horse’s ass.

  The elevator doors opened and Maggie stepped out. Straight ahead of her was the hospital pharmacy. And there, standing hunched over a tray of rolling pink pills, was Jean-Paul. Without hesitation, Maggie marched into the pharmacy and up to where Jean-Paul was standing as the pharmacist’s desk.

  “Docteur Remey?” Maggie asked politely. “I am Maggie Dernier. I was here before to ask you a few questions about Brigitte Genet?”

  Jean-Paul lifted his tragically pocked face to Maggie and she watched him rearrange his awkward features into an angry grimace.

  “Get out of here,” he growled. “Get out or I will have hospital security throw you out!”

  “Your English is very good,” Maggie said cheerfully. “I just wanted to ask you one little question about your relationship with Madame Genet?”

  “Get out!” Jean-Paul shrieked. He pounded his fist onto the counter in front of him and the little pink pills jumped in their plastic dish.

  Maggie noticed a couple people in the pharmacy back out of the drugstore and scurry away. She wasn’t sure why she was baiting this man. He certainly wasn’t going to tell her anything deliberately. But perhaps he just might let something slip in a temper?

  “Look, I just want to know if you were sleeping with her, okay? I felt--?”

  Without warning, the man vaulted over the counter and pushed Maggie down into one of the store aisles. He screamed at her in incomprehensible French, spittle forming in foamy pockets in the corners of his mouth. Maggie rolled away from him, knocking over a tall magazine display which caught the enraged pharmacist across the brow. A gash of blood jetted across Maggie’s cotton sweater. Maggie grabbed up a wooden crutch but Jean-Paul wrenched it from her hands and threw it behind him. He reached down and grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her violently, screaming into her face like a madman.

  Maggie knew she was about to black out when the horrible shaking stopped and she was suddenly dropped to the floor. Not able to get her vision steady for several seconds, she lay there, panting, listening to the cacophony of people talking and yelling. Over the din she heard a loud siren begin to wail and more people seemed to crowd into the small drug store. A man knelt down and gently touched her face. Maggie’s eyes focused slowly.

  “Are you all right, Maggie?” the voice said, soft yet anxious. The man’s hands touched her neck and probed her back. “Can you see me, Maggie? Madame Dernier? Can you see me?”

  It was Madeleine’s husband, Richard, looking worriedly into her eyes.

  “I see you,” Maggie said, her voice sounding to her own ears like a whisper.

  “Dieu merci,” he said softly.

  Richard pulled her gently to a sitting position. Within seconds, he was placing a bottle of spring water in her hands that someone had handed him.

  “Drink a little,” he said.

  “Where is Jean-Paul?”

  Richard made a sound of disgust.

  “The man belongs in an asylum,” he said. “He’s being taken away.”

  “Mon dieu! What has happened?” Yves knelt down next to Richard and Maggie. “You should have told me you wanted to talk to Jean-Paul, Madame Dernier,” Yves said shaking a finger at Maggie. “I could have saved you a concussion! The man’s a lunatic! What happened?”

  Richard spoke quietly and quickly to Yves in French. Finally, Yves whistled, then laughed.

  “I wish I could have seen that!” he said. “You pulling Remey off Madame Dernier and punching him in the n
ose!? Incredible!”

  Maggie looked up at Richard and found herself grinning.

  “You punched him in the nose?” she asked.

  “He’s being lucky I did not grind his head with his own pestle!” The three of them laughed, and Maggie allowed herself to be helped to her feet. For a moment, when reflected in Richard’s simple charity and grace, she had gotten a strong, if brief, feeling for why Brigitte may have been able to tolerate Yves. Richard brought out the human in him. And she could see how that could be nice.

  “I don’t know how I can thank you,” she said to Richard. “I had no idea he was unstable.”

  “Il ne pas de quoi,” Richard said, dusting off his slacks. “It gives me a little something to brag about to Madeleine, eh?”

  “Have her call me,” Maggie said. “I’ll brag plenty about you.”

  Richard looked up at Yves.

  “Un appel d’urgence?”

  Yves shrugged.

  “Emergency Room.”

  “We should go.”

  Yves was already on his way when a young nurse rushed into the pharmacy.

  “Docteur Genet?”

  Yves turned. He squinted at the girl as if trying to remember her name.

  “Oui? Je viens.”

  “Le coda sex, Docteur,” the nurse said in quick French, her voice breathless with her terrible news. “C’est ta belle-soeur, Pijou Pernon. Elle est arrivé en ambulance.” She has just been brought into emergency.

  Maggie gasped.

  Yves stared at the trembling young nurse, her voice giving away to tears and mounting hysteria.

  “The doctor on duty says she will not live.”

  Chapter Nine

  1

  Laurent ladled the bourride onto the fish fillet and handed the bowl to Maggie.

  “Parsley would be good,” he murmured.

  Ignoring his suggestion, Maggie took the bowl and walked it to the dining room table where she placed it with the others on the table.