The Complete Maggie Newberry Provençal Mysteries 1-4

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

  “Don’t you think you ought to give your marriage a little attention?”

  “I can’t do anything about Laurent’s obsession,” Maggie said, looking over her shoulder toward the bedroom in case they were talking too loudly.

  “Well, you could do a little something about your reaction to what you perceive as his obsession.”

  “Now you’re starting to sound like your shrink.”

  Maggie heard a muffled shriek in the background on Grace’s end and she saw Grace turn her head and listen.

  “I think Taylor’s trying to brush Zou-zou’s hair,” she said. “Last time she did that blood was involved.”

  “Guess you better go,” Maggie said.

  “Guess I’d better. Maggie, talk to your husband, please. Laurent is such a good guy and he adores you. Talk to him.”

  “Yeah, okay, I will,” Maggie said. “Go tend your babies, Grace. Love to Win.”

  “I’ll tell him. Let me know what happens next, darling.”

  “You know I will. Bye, Grace.”

  Maggie clicked out of the application and sat on the couch for a quiet moment with the warm laptop on her knee and dog nestled in her arms. She had a very strong feeling that something big was just about to happen.

  And that it was she who would make it happen.

  Chapter Four

  Laurent drove the Renault through the village of St-Buvard in the direction of the wine co-op on the far side of Aix. It was an hour’s drive but he was lucky to have it at all, he knew. Being able to sort and crush his grapes at the co-op, and to bottle and distribute the wine from there made his livelihood possible. Without the co-op, his life’s work simply could not happen.

  It was distressing to see Maggie unhappy but he had learned long ago that what he did or didn’t do had little effect on that. A pity that Grace had to leave France last year. While, on the face of it, one might never meet two more different women, the two had found a common connection that was as inviolate and resolute as any two best friends could have. When Maggie had Grace to turn to, she was happier with her life with him.

  He wished Maggie would find a hobby, like Danielle and her quilt-making! He wished she did not turn to him to fulfill every moment of her desires, or look to him to relieve her boredom. She once told him: “I wish we could always act like we just met.” For himself, he was relieved that that time-consuming and often confusing part of their courtship was behind them.

  His phone rang and he scooped it up.

  “You are at the co-op?” Jean-Luc asked without preamble.

  “Not yet,” Laurent said, watching the last of the bright red leaves drift down from the trees that lined the two-lane road. “Nearly.”

  “Bernard has a contact in Lyons who may be interested in contracting with you for a dozen cases a week.”

  “Does he state terms?”

  “No, he didn’t want to overstep.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  “It would be good, Laurent,” Jean-Luc said. “It’s a restaurant. Could open the door in Lyons for you.”

  “I am fine as I am, my friend,” Laurent said.

  “But you’ll call him.”

  “I said I would.”

  “Bien.” Jean-Luc disconnected and Laurent couldn’t help smiling as he tossed the phone back onto the seat. The man would always be looking out for him. If Laurent ever allowed himself to feel the kind of affection one man felt for a beloved uncle, that would be how he felt toward Jean-Luc. The thought reminded him of Maggie’s uncle and her recent shock. Perhaps he had not been attentive enough to her in this. In his experience, if he did not anticipate the emotional heights to be reached before Maggie reached them, there was always trouble.

  When she finally dragged herself out of bed Maggie found both Laurent and Petit-Four had abandoned her. The first thing she did was go to the French doors off the bedroom that led to the small stone balcony which afforded a panoramic view of the vineyard. Pulling on a thick wool sweater against the chilly autumn morning, she stood barefoot on the balcony and scanned the horizon for any sign of Laurent. The vines snaked across their stakes and poles, stripped of their fruit, and looking as depressing and barren as a thousand naked crucifixes. Laurent was nowhere to be seen. Of course, she reminded herself, he would be at the co-op, triaging the harvest and getting the grapes ready to be crushed. The co-op winery had no mechanical sorting equipment, which was fine with Laurent, Maggie knew. His wine was not a mass-produced product. It was lovingly hand-created, grape by perfect grape.

  She sighed and retreated into the bedroom to change clothes for the day. He would be gone until past dark and then he would probably go straight to the café to drink and talk with the other vignerons—as if he hadn’t seen enough of them all day. Maggie tried to imagine having a difficult child like Taylor to battle with all day long—and the child’s father never home to help out, like Grace’s husband Win was always doing. What are the odds I’d get a good one? She found herself thinking as she made her breakfast. And if I didn’t, it’d be too late to do anything about it. Just forge ahead with eighteen years of misery until the blighter finally left home. Maggie sat on a kitchen stool and ate a piece of buttered toast with Laurent’s homemade jam.

  The day stretched long and empty before her. She washed her coffee cup and put it away in the cabinet and then looked at the kitchen. It was absolutely pristine. Scrubbed until it sparkled with every dish linen and cooking spoon in its place. Laurent liked his kitchen just so. Like his vineyard. Like his life. She found herself marveling again at how he had turned his life around from when she first met him. Had he always been this precise kind of person? Is that even possible in the kind of life he had lived?

  As she passed through the living room looking for a New Yorker magazine she hadn’t read yet, her cell phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number but the calling code said Paris. Maybe those idiot police had decided to talk with her after all?

  “Allo?” she said.

  “Maggie?” It was a woman’s voice. “This is Bijou, oui?”

  “Oh, Bijou! How are you?”

  “Oh, not very well at all, Maggie. Not at all. We are none of us doing well. Are you coming back to Paris?”

  Maggie sat down in the living room and watched the vineyard as it was pelted by a sudden downpour.

  “I wasn’t thinking about it,” Maggie said. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized that she had, on some level, been thinking of little else.

  “Jeremy is so fucked up over Stan. We all are. We thought you might be coming back.”

  “Now that Paris Week is over,” Maggie said. “What is it y’all normally do? Shouldn’t Jeremy be heading back to California?”

  “He says he won’t go. He says Stan died in Paris and so he will stay in Paris.”

  “Well, he’s emotional, is all,” Maggie said. “Might do him good to stay on a little longer until he processes it better.”

  “What means processes it?”

  “Nothing. Just a stupid American phrase I shouldn’t have used.”

  “So, will you come back? You could stay at Stan’s apartment.”

  I could, couldn’t I?

  “I don’t know, Bijou, I’ll think about it.”

  “Ted asked me to call you. Although we all want you to come.”

  “I gotta go, Bijou,” Maggie said. “I’ll let you know if I come, okay?”

  “Okay. Maggie?”

  “Yes?”

  “The funeral is today?”

  Maggie didn’t have the heart to tell her it was really more of a graveside memorial service with just her parents in attendance. When she thought of all the friends Stan had—all the people who loved him—to think of him being sent to his final resting place with just two people to pray over him—and them virtual strangers—was just impossibly sad.

  “It is,” she said.

  “I loved him so much,” Bijou said, her voice thick with emotion.

  “I know, Bijou.
Take care of yourself, okay? I’ll call if I come.”

  “Ciao, Maggie.”

  Maggie disconnected and sat staring out the window hearing the high whistle of the Mistral seeming to invade the very bones of the house.

  She was going back to Paris.

  He surprised her.

  Not only did he not go straight to the café after the co-op, he’d picked up takeout at her favorite Indian restaurant in Aix and was busy warming up the vindaloo and uncorking the wine when she came back from her late afternoon walk with Petit-Four. As soon as she rounded the last bend in the long and looping gravel driveway of Domaine St-Buvard, she saw his car parked in the garage and knew he had chosen to spend the evening with her. It had rained on the last half of her walk to the village and since going back to the village or forging ahead home both afforded the same degree of drenching, she just put up her collar and trudged home in the downpour. When she entered the house through the kitchen door, Petit-Four instantly shook herself, spraying water everywhere.

  “Why does she wait until she is inside to do that?” Laurent growled as he grabbed a towel.

  Assuming he was going to wipe down the mess the dog had created, Maggie was surprised when her husband draped it around her shoulders and, using it to draw her closer to him. Then he gave her a long kiss on the mouth.

  “Drowned rodent?” Laurent said, his face still near hers.

  “Rat,” Maggie said, grinning and pulling back to dry some of the rain from her hair.

  “There is time before dinner if you want to take your bath,” Laurent said. “I’ll bring a glass of wine up to you.”

  “Did I misread my calendar?” Maggie said, moving through the spicy aromas in the kitchen. “Is it my birthday?” She dropped the towel on a table in the hallway and trotted upstairs to her bedroom. After she’d stripped off her wet clothes, leaving them in a pile on the bathroom floor, she slipped into a hot bubble bath. The fragrance of lavender wafted pleasantly in the now steamy bathroom. When Laurent appeared ten minutes later with a glass of red wine, she had already relaxed nearly to the point of dozing off.

  “Don’t drown,” he said, setting the wine on a small table next to the tub.

  She reached out and touched his hand. “Help keep me awake,” she said slyly.

  He leaned over and kissed her, his hand reaching into the bath to draw her to him.

  “You’re getting all wet,” Maggie murmured. “Either get in or help me out.”

  “Lady’s choice,” he said, this deep brown eyes glittering with intent.

  An hour later, they sat in bed wrapped in bathrobes and duvets and dining on chicken vindaloo and samosas.

  “When was the last time we actually ate in bed?” Maggie said, licking her fingers.

  Laurent topped off her glass of wine and leaned back against the headboard.

  “It’s always too much trouble,” he said, taking a sip of his wine.

  Maggie gave him an inquisitive look. “But it wasn’t too much trouble tonight,” she said.

  “It was worth the trouble tonight,” he replied.

  Maggie reached for her own wine and said nothing.

  “Have you heard from your father today?” Laurent asked.

  She shook her head. “I’m assuming it’s done. The time difference makes it impossible to know real time.”

  “Are you sorry you didn’t go back for it?”

  “To Atlanta?” Maggie looked at him. “It would’ve cost a fortune to go back without a week’s advance purchase.”

  “Even with a week’s advance purchase,” Laurent said. “But we have the money.”

  Maggie was trying to figure out where, if anywhere, this was going.

  “I didn’t need to go back,” she said. “We’re still going home at Christmas, right?”

  “If you want.”

  “If I want? Laurent, you promised!”

  “Of course, which is why we are going back.”

  “For a month.”

  Laurent sighed and put his wine down. “I cannot be gone for that long,” he said.

  “I don’t believe this.” Maggie wrenched her bathrobe tight around her. “You’re not staying the whole time?”

  “Not if the whole time is a month, no.”

  “May I ask why not? The harvest is done, the planting won’t start for months. What possible reason could you have?”

  “It is too long for a visit,” he said. “My life is here, my home is here. I would ask that you come back with me, cherie, but I understand if you cannot.”

  “You know how there’s nothing for you in Atlanta? Nothing for you to do?”

  Laurent nodded warily.

  “Well, that’s what St-Buvard is for me.”

  “St-Buvard is your home,” Laurent said. Maggie thought she detected a dangerous tone under the words. For a moment, she caught a glimpse of the man Laurent used to be.

  It was on the tip of her tongue to retort that Atlanta was her home but something stopped her. Maybe it was the look in his eye, or maybe it was the knowledge of what she needed to tell him next that made her not poke around too energetically into any snake holes.

  “I want you to do what you feel comfortable doing, Laurent,” she said, trying to sound as reasonable and mature as she could.

  “Merci,” he said, sipping his wine and watching her warily over the rim of his glass.

  “Same as I must do with regards to the botched investigation into my uncle’s death in Paris.”

  He sat up quickly. “No,” he said.

  “Well, I would hope you would let me go with your blessing since it means so much to me…” Maggie said, her heart pounding through her words. Had she ever directly defied him? There were times she worked around him without his knowledge but she had never engaged in open warfare with him.

  “That is logique idiote,” he said. “Would I let you drink petrol if you were convinced it would help you to fly?”

  “There is no real reason I shouldn’t do this and every reason I should, even if it just helps me to better adjust to what happened.”

  “You barely knew him!”

  “That’s only part of what I’m talking about, Laurent. Besides, you don’t need me here.”

  “You are my wife. I want you here!”

  This was a first. She had never heard him yell before, least of all at her. She found it extremely unnerving.

  “Why do you want me here? You’re gone all day long and half the time the evenings too.”

  “If I had an office job in Atlanta, I would be just as gone and you would not complain.”

  Did he have a point? Was it not the time he spent from her that bothered her? Was her real problem that he was so happy doing it?

  “Does it matter that I think I need to do it?” she said.

  “No. You think many things. Often they are just silly.”

  “Dear God, do you even care how offensive you sound?”

  “You will not go, Maggie. You will accept the police ruling and you will stop turning our lives upside down.”

  “Well, none of that is true,” Maggie said, feeling stronger and more resolute by the minute. “I am definitely going, in fact, first thing in the morning, and I will not accept the police ruling because it’s bullshit and as for turning out lives upside down, you’re never here so I can’t believe I have that power.”

  The two of them stared at each other, both fuming.

  Maggie began to slowly collect their dishes from the bed. She decided she needed to stop talking and let him come round in his own time. The more she talked, the greater chance she would say something she was sorry for that had nothing to do with her wanting to go to Paris.

  “If you go…” Laurent said slowly raising Maggie’s hopes that he was allowing the possibility of her leaving, “I will consider it an informal separation.”

  Maggie froze. “What do you mean, informal?”

  “I will consider us separated,” Laurent said flatly, his eyes cold and hooded as he regard
ed her.

  “Why do you have to do that?” Maggie said, sagging onto the bed, the dishes in her hands. “Why can’t you just let me take a few weeks to investigate this on my own up there, satisfy my doubts and come home, no damage done?”

  “Because I have been down this road with you before,” Laurent said, looking away. “You investigating always ends up with you getting stitches in your head or standing in front of madmen holding pistols in your face.”

  “This won’t be like that,” Maggie said.

  “Are we adding lying to the list of new things we are doing, Maggie?” Laurent asked redirecting his gaze at her. “Or have I just not noticed up until now?”

  “Do I ask you to live a totally risk-free life?” Maggie asked. “Weren’t there times when you did what you had to do in spite of the consequences?”

  “Quoi que,” Laurent said, grabbing his pillow and standing up to signal that they would not sleep together tonight. Whatever.

  “Laurent, please don’t,” Maggie said moving to grab his arm.

  He pulled it from her grasp. “You want to have your way and Laurent smiling, too,” he said. “But you can only have one, Maggie. I think I know which one you will choose.”

  He stared at her for a moment and when she didn’t answer, Maggie thought the fire went out of his eyes and he only looked sad. He turned and left the room, leaving her alone with the dirty Indian dishes and the little dog looking expectantly from Maggie to the doorway.

  Chapter Five

  The view from Stan’s balcony off the rue Galande was nothing short of breathtaking. Maggie marveled that she had been so busy with her uncle during her week with him that she hadn’t noticed before. Situated on the Île de la Cité and less than a block from the Cathédrale Notre Dame, his Saint Germain apartment building in the Latin Quarter had been built in the 17th century during the time when the street was alive with infamous cabarets. Now it was full of bustling shops and cafés. Her first night staying there with Stan she had trouble sleeping due to the noise from the street life.

  From where she sat this morning at the tiny bistro table on her uncle’s balcony, she could see the famous Gothic cathedral with its flying buttresses. She had arrived midmorning, her legs shaky from the three-floor walk up to Stan’s apartment and her mood unsettled by the gravity of what she was doing. Laurent had driven her to the train station early. But instead of a kiss goodbye at the platform, he offered only a hurt and resolute stare as she dragged her bags from the car and into the station.