It’s a terrible feeling knowing there is nobody to worry about you, she suddenly thought as she began walking in the direction of Denny’s neighborhood.
Terrible and freeing.
Maggie walked quickly to the le Marais neighborhood. She had lost track of time sitting at the café and it was now well after nine. He might be out. He might have company. She hurried. A cold finger of dread traced down her spine as she became aware that there were fewer people on the streets here than she was used to in the Latin Quarter. The alleyways in the fifth were quaint, cobblestoned and full of jostling, laughing students and tourists. These narrow alleyways felt dark and sinister. On top of that, she had the very definite feeling that she was being followed.
Chapter Twelve
“You have every bit as much to lose as the rest of us.”
“In what way?”
“You know very well, Bijou,” Jeremy said, trying to stay calm. “You wouldn’t have this apartment, your couture wardrobe, that spiffy new car, none of it without—”
“Shut up! Don’t say it!”
“And you’ll lose it all just as fast. Worse, you’ll go to prison.”
“Goddamn Stan! Damn him to hell!”
“Not helpful, but I echo your sentiments. The problem is Maggie. You see that, right?”
Jeremy was exhausted with trying to make this stupid creature see reason. It almost made as much sense to strangle her, than to work this hard to bring her around.
“I think so,” Bijou said, her shoulders slumping, her head drooping in defeat.
“Finally. Have you spoke with Denny recently?”
Ahh, there it was. She looked at him hungrily, her need filling her big blue eyes. He had been right to tell Denny to stop being available to her. Amazing how blind heterosexual men were to their own power with women when it was so clear to anyone else with half a brain.
“Have you?” she asked, her breath quickening with her longing.
“It was Denny who suggested we talk,” Jeremy said. “He and I have looked at this from every possible angle. Now we need you. Denny needs you.”
“Why doesn’t he talk to me, himself?”
“He will, cherie. Just as soon as you and I nail down the basics of what we need to do. It won’t be pretty. But will you do it? For Denny, if not for yourself?”
“Denny wants me to do this?”
“Told me with his own words.”
“If I must, then I must,” she said.
Jeremy sat next to her on the couch. “That’s my girl.” He took a long breath and reached out to pick up her flaccid hand in her lap. “It will be over before you know it and all will go back to the way it was before.”
“Except that Stan is gone.”
“Yes, except for that. But you’ll be with Denny and that will be lovely, won’t it? No more hiding? No more lying to Stan or having to endure his disappointment in you?”
Bijou hands were limp and her face seemed to sag before him. She nodded without emotion and gave a long exhalation.
“I am going to drug her drink sometime during the dinner party,” Jeremy said.
Bijou snapped her eyes to his face and he thought he could see her lips tremble.
“She will appear drunk, which won’t be unusual for a dinner party.”
“Ted—”
“Don’t worry about Ted,” Jeremy said, patting her hand. “Ted wants to seduce her. Once he sees that his chances are ruined for the night, he will be eager to see her collapsed in her own little beddy-bye so he can find sport elsewhere. You, perhaps?”
Bijou blinked her eyes at him in surprise. “You want me to sleep with Ted?”
“Only if it looks like he won’t leave or has some gallant notion of spending the night on the couch so he can be perceived as an honorable knight mixing her orange juice and hair of the dog in the morning.”
“You need him to leave.”
“On his own or with your help. That’s all you have to do. Make sure Ted leaves the apartment.”
“What will you do?”
“Denny and I will take her, bundled in a rug, to a low point on the steps off Pont—”
“I don’t want to know!”
Jeremy smiled. “No reason you should,” he said. “It will be quickly done and all of us will awaken the next morning to a better day, a brighter future.”
“You’ll murder her like Stan was murdered.”
“I suppose,” Jeremy said, patting her hand. “Yes.”
Maggie stood on the doorstep her finger poised to press the button next to Denny’s name on the apartment roster of mailboxes and stopped herself. Was this madness? Was the horrible breathless feeling of her heart pounding in her chest an indication that she shouldn’t be doing this? Paying an unannounced house call on the man who broke into her apartment less than a week ago?
Oddly, it was the memory of her terror that night that galvanized Maggie to finally press the button. She actually found the need to restrain herself from tapping her foot in impatience as she waited for Denny to respond.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Maggie Dernier. Let me in, please.”
There was a pause and then the sound of a loud buzz as Denny unlocked the front door.
While grand and imposing from the outside as many Paris apartments were, the hallway in Denny’s building looked downright dilapidated. Maggie stepped carefully over a large pile of garbage shoved up against the wall. Worried that things might start crawling in her direction, she took the ancient steps—smooth and steep from centuries of climbers—two and a time.
Denny was waiting for her in the doorway to his apartment. Maggie slowed her steps not to appear too eager and as she approached him down the hall, she could see as well as smell the cloud of cannabis wafting around him.
“Well, this is a surprise,” he said, smiling at her and making a grand sweeping gesture with his arm to indicate she should enter his apartment in front of him. If she had hoped to catch him off guard, she could see he had quickly recovered.
“Thought we should talk,” she said, entering his apartment with every warning alarm bell in her mind going off at full tilt. “Since you were in such a hurry last time we met.”
“Hope that lamp wasn’t valuable,” Denny said and closed the door behind them. “May I offer you a drink? I’m sure I have a clean glass somewhere.”
Dear God, what did Bijou see in this guy?
“No, thanks.”
“Sit?”
Maggie didn’t see any place that wouldn’t take major rearranging and housecleaning to make a possible seat.
“I won’t be here that long,” she said.
Denny walked over to the coffee table and picked a cigarette butt out of the ashtray. He put it between his lips and lit it with a lighter before Maggie realized it was the pot she smelled from the hallway.
“Okay, shoot,” he said.
“What were you looking for that night at Stan’s apartment?”
“A favorite baseball cap I’d left over there.”
“The French cops don’t see it as a B and E?”
He shrugged. “As you see.”
“Why not?”
“They might have thought there was something between you and me.”
Maggie frowned in confusion.
“You know,” he said. “Like a past sexual relationship.”
“Why would they think that?”
“I may have given them the idea.”
That made sense. With the French, sex either explained everything or was at least a suitable alternative explanation.
“Did you push Stan off that balcony?”
“Not that I remember.”
“What are you and Jeremy up to?”
She caught him there. For a moment his easy insouciance faltered.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I saw the two of you together. I was led to believe you hated each other.”
“I don’t give a shit what you were led to
believe.”
She stared at him and then eased her heavy book bag to the floor of the living room.
“How about we strike a little bargain, you and me, Denny,” she said, pulling Stan’s laptop out of the bag. She could see he was watching her carefully and she wondered just how stoned he was. “It’s pretty simple, really. I give you something I think you want…” She nodded at the laptop. “And you give me something I want. Sound good?”
He licked his lips, not taking his eyes off the laptop. She wondered for one bad moment if he might just hit her on the head and take it.
“What do you want?” he asked, his former studied casualness gone.
“I want you to come to dinner at my apartment in two days time,” she said. “Stan’s apartment. The laptop won’t be there then so you’ll have to just come for the food and whatever else I have on the menu.”
He looked at her and then back to the computer.
“And what do I get?”
She handed him the laptop.
“You get two minutes alone with this right now. Whatever you need to do, whatever you need to delete, I don’t care. Two minutes. Do we have a deal?”
He reached for the laptop and kicked a pile of clothes and newspapers off the couch so he could sit down. He put the laptop on the coffee table and opened it up.
“Password?”
“JohnNewton.”
Maggie turned away and walked to the one window in the room and looked out. The view was of the interior courtyard. The trees were leafless and the stones were grey and slick with this morning’s rain. It didn’t look romantic as so many Paris courtyards could. It looked depressing.
In less than a minute she heard him stand up and approach her. He handed her the laptop and smiled.
“So will it be black tie or can I just wear jeans?” he said.
That bitch! What game was she playing at? Inviting her to dinner? What were they, friends? Diane sat in her Marriott hotel room off the Rue Lincoln one street off the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and willed her hands to stop trembling. She glanced at her reflection in the mirror over the dresser and winced. She was too old for any of this shit. She had been born too old. She deleted Maggie’s voice message and immediately wondered why she felt the need to do that. Was even her voice an affront to her? Or was it all just evidence of a terrible experiment gone terribly wrong now needing expunging?
Diane crossed to the window with its barely visible view of the famous boulevard. Is there any way to believe that this isn’t Maggie’s fault? Maggie and her goddamn family’s? As irrational as that sounded even to her ears, Diane couldn’t help but take some comfort in it. It had been coming for a long time, she realized. The showdown, the face off. All the implied rejection and self-righteous judgments, all of it, had been building to a head for years. Until now. Until this moment when she would finally be able to reveal all, avenge all.
Starting with Maggie Newberry, she thought fiercely.
She sat down on the bed and felt her anger settle in her chest like a lodged infection. Damn you, Stan, she thought staring out into the Parisian night, the glow from the beacon lights on the Arc de Triomphe visible from streets away.
If you weren’t already dead, I’d be forced to kill you all over again.
The first thing Maggie did when she locked herself into her apartment that night was to pour herself a large glass of Pinot Noir and compare the hard drive history after Denny had deleted his email to the duplicate copy she had put on her iPad, using it as a portable external hard drive. It took less than fifteen minutes to see what he had deleted. It was an email from over a year ago. Maggie hadn’t read that far back yet. It was a reference to a very detailed and obviously successful exercise in embezzlement involving Stan’s last employer, Gumps department store in San Francisco. In the email, Stan appeared ashamed of his involvement and refused to take the money they had stolen. Jeremy, Bijou and Denny took their share and divided up his. Denny reminded Stan to delete the email. Nice, Uncle Stan, Maggie thought wearily. But was it a motive enough to kill?
After a solid three hours of scrolling through her uncle’s emails, Maggie didn’t feel like she knew him much better than before. She had run across a comment in one of his later blog posts which alluded to his love of the handwritten note for communications with his friends and so she wasn’t surprised to find mostly business-related emails on his laptop. His Facebook page—she was mildly surprised to discover he had one—was infrequently visited and his Twitter account reduced to one or two tweets a month. She noticed several zingers from Denny via Twitter—none of which Stan had bothered to respond to.
There was a brief email exchange between Jeremy and Stan that ended with Stan reminding Jeremy he considered email the vilest form of communication and unless his phone dialing finger was broken, would not be amused to see more from him.
So strange, Maggie thought. Stan obviously spent a lot of time on the computer. His history cache showed he kept tight tabs on Denny’s blog and often visited certain designer’s websites for news. A few of the emails he received were from dressers and photography assistants who sent him unposed photographs of models with no make up on, designers in sweat pants and haute couture gowns that were safety-pinned to their living mannequins to make them appear better fitting than they were. None of it was particularly flattering, Maggie thought. But hardly worth killing for. While he was clearly a good writer—animated and playful in his word choice—and he definitely knew everybody in the business, it was also pretty clear that her upright and proper uncle could easily be defined as the TMZ of the fashion world. Not pretty.
But worth killing for?
Later that night, unable to sleep, Maggie sat at the little bistro table in the kitchen and sipped a cup of peppermint tea. Giving weight to the fact that it was after two in the morning and so contributing to her feelings of loneliness, Maggie couldn't remember a time when she felt more alone. Not even that first year in Provence when she was assured by Laurent that it was all temporary even though everything else she heard and felt told her otherwise. She glanced out the window at the ghostly outline of the cathedral, spotlighted by flood lights that illuminated all of its architectural details. When she visited over three years ago, she thought she missed home and Atlanta and her friends then to the point she was sure she would never be able to stay in France. From her present vantage point and this point in time, that younger Maggie seemed very immature.
She sighed, rinsed out her cup and placed it in the dish drainer. At least then she had Laurent. She had the promise of the best relationship of her life—the love of her life. But what she had wanted then was drive-through banking and the convenience of parking at Lenox Square to do her shopping. While she had agreed to stay on in France, she had never really agreed to it in her heart. All of a sudden she felt a wave of guilt over what must have felt like a lie to Laurent. For her to say "I do," but really still be waiting for the loophole and the opportunity to go back was dishonest. It had always been "I do, but..." And Laurent had known that all along, lived with it and hoped against it getting worse. But the threat had always been there: the moment Maggie would choose to go back.
She stood in the doorway of the kitchen, her eyes full of unshed tears and her heart breaking. He had been right. This was a separation. Maggie was choosing her old life over her new one with him. He saw that. And she really hadn’t until now. Her heart heavy with despair and realization of her responsibility of her own misery, she flicked off the kitchen light and turned toward the bedroom when she heard Stan's cat meowing in the hallway. The beast came and went and rarely actually entered the apartment, preferring to eat his meals in a dish in the hall. It was unusual for him to call attention to himself except for those moments he was demanding food. Frowning, Maggie went to the door, unlatched the chain, pulled the door open and fumbled for the hall light. The cat sat perfectly still, staring at her from the middle of the hallway.
Maggie wasn't sure whether to shoo him away or
try to lure him in. She glanced up and down the hall but the cat was the only thing visible.
"What is it, you stupid cat? Go away. Or come in."
The cat stood, arched its back, and moved to sit in front of Genevieve's door. He turned to look at Maggie and let out a long howl that had Maggie bolting from her apartment to chase him away. Damn cat would wake everyone! As Maggie tried to shoo him back down the hall, she noticed that Genevieve's door was ajar.
What the hell? Maggie watched the cat scamper down the hall then turn and watch her as she stared at Genevieve's open door. Tentatively, Maggie pushed the door open with her foot.
"Genevieve?" There was no answer. Should she just close the door? Was the poor woman passed out on the couch? Had she forgotten to lock up for the night?
Or to even shut the door?
Maggie glanced at the cat again and noticed something she had failed to see before. The cat was making faint little pink tracks on the worn hallway carpet. Maggie felt her stomach clench before she even leaned down to confirm what she thought was seeing.
The cat's paws were bloody.
Maggie stood frozen in the hallway, trying to decide whether she should retreat to her own apartment and call the police or enter Genevieve's apartment, when the hall lights went out.
With panic rising in her throat, Maggie fumbled for the light switch again. When the lights snapped back on, she instinctively pushed open Genevieve's door. The wedge of light from the hallway illuminated the woman's foyer where the trail of blood was easily visible and the trail of tiny cat prints led from the living room to the front door.
"Genevieve?" Maggie said again, louder. Two steps into the apartment, she saw her, slumped on the rug in front of the couch. The rug that was soaked black with blood.
Chapter Thirteen
Laurent leaned down to examine the withered rootstock. The cold air of mid November cut into his windbreaker as he knelt in the dirt. He looked down the long line of trussed and desiccated vines and felt a bleakness that matched the landscape. Never before had his land failed to lift and sustain him. Never before had he walked its perimeter or surveyed his kingdom without a sense of pride and satisfaction. This morning, he felt like his vineyard had betrayed him. The very thing that had given him so much pleasure--a purpose in this world--was now, clearly the very thing that was making it impossible to keep his wife.
The Complete Maggie Newberry Provençal Mysteries 1-4 Page 98
