After this, he vowed, I will totally back off and be the ultimate guy pal, if that’s what she wants. I’ll just hang with her and not try to kiss those luscious lips or feel that bottom held in both my hands…that incredible ass that sways so provocatively in those tight knit skirts and leggings she always wears … Stop it, Gilbert, he growled to himself and reached over to wake up the laptop. Yeah, this friends-only thing is gonna be a little tougher than I thought.
Maggie brought out the bottle of wine and placed it on the tray with the two glasses and the plate of cheese, crackers and fruit. She had made a significant decision at the end of her long confusing day and she was looking forward to telling Ted. She would miss his input, his brotherly support and good natured humor. During this whole unpleasant experience over Stan’s death, she knew he had tried to be a good friend to her in spite of hoping for more.
She peeked out into the living room where he sat staring at something on the laptop and gnawing a fingernail. It wasn’t going to be possible to really stay friends, she thought as she watched him. As good looking and infatuated as he was, even someone as secure as Laurent would not stand for a continued friendship.
Laurent.
For better or worse, she had decided to take the train back to Arles first thing in the morning. There was no point in calling or texting Laurent to meet her. He had long since stopped all communications. She would call Danielle at the station and just wait, like a collection of forgotten luggage, until someone came and got her. And what would her reception be at Domaine St-Buvard? Maggie took a quick sip from her glass of Pinot Noir.
Whatever it was, it was. She deserved the worst, she would pray for a middle ground. If Laurent’s girlfriend hadn’t actually moved in, she might be able to worm her way back into Laurent’s life—and their marriage. If she had moved in, well. Maggie would just have to take it a step at a time. While she consciously could not blame Laurent if he had thrown up his hands in disgust with her, the larger part of her couldn’t really believe that she couldn’t make him hers again.
Somehow. Some way.
“You coming with that vino?” Ted called to her, breaking into her thoughts. “I can guarantee you’re going to need it if you’re going to read my latest chapter. We’re talking rough, baby. But I know you’ll be gentle.”
Maggie smiled and picked up the tray. “Coming,” she said. “And bringing the love juice to make both our manuscripts look better.” The phone in the living room rang as she walked in and she set the tray down on the coffee table.
“That’ll be the phone,” Ted said, taking his glass of wine and turning back to the laptop screen.
“Yeah, no kidding,” Maggie said, laughing. She picked up. “Hello?”
“Hi, Maggie, it’s me,” Diane said timidly. “Bet you’re surprised to hear from me so soon?”
“Surprised but delighted,” Maggie said, reaching for her own wineglass. “What’s up?”
“Nothing really,” Diane said. “I just wanted to know if tomorrow morning would be good for me to come by and look for some of the things of Stan’s I was telling you about.”
“Yeah, tomorrow’s good,” Maggie said. “I’m leaving pretty early, myself, so I might just leave you a key, if that’s okay.”
Ted turned to look at her and gave her a questioning look. She waved a hand at him. Tell you in a sec.
“I appreciate that, Maggie. I’m heading back to California tomorrow. But I wanted to say, since I know I didn’t at lunch today, how glad I am that we’ve connected and how sorry I am that I didn’t reach out sooner.”
“Oh, Diane, I feel the same way!”
“It’s just that my relationship with Stan was always so complicated and I guess I started to get a complex about his family, like they didn’t want to know me, or something when, of course, how could they? They didn’t even know I existed.”
“Well, we know now, Diane. When you come tomorrow, let’s make plans for all of us getting together, John, too, either in Atlanta or San Francisco.”
Ted drank his wine and gave Maggie his full attention. What’s going on?
“I’d like that, Maggie. By the way, what did I interrupt you doing tonight?”
“I’m having a writer’s critique session with Ted.”
“Oh, is that what they’re calling it now?”
Maggie grinned. Diane was actually teasing her. Maggie considered that a very good sign for the long term prospect of their relationship.
“We’re just friends,” Maggie said. He’s decided to stay and work in Paris.”
“Paris is a far cry from Juneau.”
“It’s Nome.”
“What?”
“Ted’s from Nome.”
“Well, I don’t know him hardly at all but I do know that he is from Juneau.”
“That’s not what he told me.”
“Then he lied to you.”
“Why in heaven’s name would he lie to me about where he’s from?”
Ted came and stood in front of her. He put his wine glass down. Maggie thought he had a strange look on his face but she rolled her eyes and pointed to the phone as if to say: crazy lady.
“All I know is that in his blog,” Diane said, “Stan always referred to Ted as Le Juneau Jambon. You know, the ham from Juneau? I suppose Stan might’ve stretched the truth for the sake of the alliteration. That sounds like him so you’re probably right.”
As soon as Diane spoke the words, Maggie felt the room start to sway just the tiniest bit.
Jambon.
Maggie looked up from the floor and into Ted’s eyes. Ted’s flat, dead, cold eyes.
Diane was saying: “I mean, it was no secret that Stan thought Ted should retire from modeling. You’ve read his blog posts, right? Stan told me he had one coming up –well, it would’ve been this week—that was going to destroy Ted’s career. Stan could be very harsh when he was in the mood.”
An image of Stan’s laptop desktop came to her with the folder Published Posts. Which posed the obvious question that hadn’t occurred to Maggie: Where then, was the folder, Unpublished Posts?
Not Jimbo, but jambon.
Le Juneau Jambon.
“Maggie? You still there?”
So that was why Ted always wanted so badly to meet with her in Stan’s apartment. It wasn’t to be with her, it was to get to her uncle’s hard drive. And while he had no way of knowing what Stan’s last words to her were he had every reason to believe that eventually Maggie would find the unpublished posts and put it all together.
“Diane—”
Before she could say another word, Ted stepped quietly forward and ripped the phone cord out of the wall.
“Bad wiring in these seventeenth century Paris apartments,” he said throwing the phone down on the couch. “They’re constantly going out on you.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Anything you do,” Maggie said, “will implicate you in my death. If you bind my hands, they’ll know it wasn’t suicide. If you grab me and try to throw me off the balcony, they’ll see the bruises and know I fought for my life.”
“Why would the police think of me in the first place?”
“I told a friend I suspected you.”
“You’re lying. You never suspected me.”
“I did. From the beginning.”
He actually laughed but Maggie saw his eyes dart to the front door as if he had heard a noise. He wasn’t really sure if she were lying or not.
“If I turn up dead, she’ll tell the police my suspicions.”
“This only works if I believe you, Maggie,” Ted said reasonably. “Which I don’t. It honestly kills me that you would not let all this go.”
“By all this, you mean Stan’s murder.”
“Do not take another step back into the kitchen, Maggie. Not another step. Bruises or not, I will stop you and I will not bother to mop up the mess later.”
“I knew you were lying to me from the beginning,” she said, stalling for time.
Maggie’s stomach heaved as he spoke. He is confessing. I'm getting my damn confession! She forced herself not to look at the voice-activated recorder left under the couch from last week’s dinner party, its red record light glowing.
“You can’t get away with this, Ted. Don’t you see that?”
“Give me a break. You’ve seen the French cops. They don’t care. You said yourself that they didn’t even question you about Genevieve and you found the body.”
Maggie’s expression betrayed a sudden understanding and then a look of nausea flitted across her features.
“You killed Genevieve?”
“She was at the station one of the times I was there being questioned. I couldn’t have her confide that little gem to you when I hadn’t mentioned it to you, now could I?”
“You were questioned by the cops?”
“Shocking, isn’t it? Turns out the French cops aren’t quite as useless as we thought, sweetheart. They checked out my alibi and it didn’t hold up. Seems my date for the evening couldn’t confirm I was with her during the time of the murder. She’d passed out too soon to remember.”
“You came back to the party.”
“As it happens, I did.” He moved a step closer to her and held his hands out in front of him like she was a skittish filly he needed to calm before he could capture her. “I came back to get a little bit more of you, if you want to know. My heart was totally captured, cherie, literally since the moment I laid eyes on you.”
“And you ran into Stan,” she said. Her throat felt dry and raw as if she had been screaming. It occurred to her that screaming right now would probably escalate this little drama to its inevitable conclusion. But he might also be spotted fleeing the scene if she created a ruckus.
“And one thing led to another,” he said, watching her eyes.
“But why?”
“Well, if you truly suspected me as you told your friend,” he said with a smile, “then you must know the answer to that.”
Maggie said nothing.
“I thought so. Well, there was a blog post that Stan had written that was going to end my career, if you must know. He was an evil, self-serving old bastard.”
“The Juneau Jambon.”
“Maybe you do know after all. In any event, he sent me a preview copy of the post the day before. To rub it in, to gloat, to taunt me with the impending doom of my income, my life. And all because I rejected him a few weeks earlier, if you know what I mean.”
“That’s a lie,” she said.
“Well, we’ll never know, will we?” He took another step toward her and glanced into the kitchen to telegraph to her that he knew what she was up to and he wasn’t worried.
“Tell me,” he said, his eyes wild and mad, “it was my name he whispered to you with his last breath, wasn’t it?”
Maggie slowly shook her head. “No,” she said. “If you want to know, he said Tell Diane I love her.”
“Liar! I know he said my name! I know he did!”
“Nope. Not even close,” she said, watching him disintegrate before her eyes.
“Fuck you!” he roared as he lunged at her with his arms outstretched. Maggie swiveled toward the kitchen, her own hands reaching wildly for the knife she knew was on the counter. Her fingers touched the handle when she felt a terrible pressure on her back and her breath knocked out of her in one harsh gasp. She fell to the floor of the kitchen, the knife clattering away from her and Ted’s knee grinding into her hips from above. He grabbed her hair and jerked her head off the floor until she thought her neck would break. He brought his face down to hers and whispered harshly into her ear. “Got any last words, bitch?” he snarled. “I promise to report them faithfully to your grieving husband who, by the way, I had the pleasure of speaking to not two days ago when you were in the bathroom and he called. I’m afraid I had to tell him that I was your lover and you were not in any condition to come to the phone. The French are so sensible about these things," he said. "He actually thanked me for telling him." ”
Maggie could barely register his words through the veil of screaming pain shooting through her back and neck. She gave an incomprehensible gurgle in reply and he climbed off her.
“I’m afraid there will be quite a bit of bruising after all,” he said, panting as he yanked her off the floor in one movement. The relief of the removal of his weight was obliterated by the loud crack of her upper arm breaking in his hands. She groaned as he wrapped his fist around her long hair and used it to leverage her to her knees. She looked up into his face and saw only single-minded madness. The pain in her arm vanished as quickly as it had gripped her and it occurred to her to be grateful for the shock she was almost certainly slipping into.
“On your feet now, Maggie,” he said in a normal tone of voice. “There you go, sweetheart. I can carry you but I promise you it’ll hurt if you make me do that. Just walk on your own steam to the balcony. You know how much you love Stan’s balcony? Didn’t we have our first date on that balcony?” He pulled back his hand and slapped her hard across the face. “Wakey-wakey, Maggie,” he said. “You want to be conscious for the way the story ends, don’t you?” He pulled her by her broken arm to her feet and Maggie gasped with the fresh onslaught of pain. It was as if the rest of the apartment disappeared and all she could see looming before her was the magnificent presence of Notre Dame. As she took halting steps toward it and the balcony, Ted guiding and pulling her, she remembered how special the church had always been to her, how personal, even from childhood. A part of her realized she had been heading toward this point, toward this final communion with the church and what it meant to her since she was a little girl.
Ted reached the French doors, pulled them open and prodded her though them onto the balcony. Without bothering to close the doors, he grabbed Maggie by the back of her shoulders and then looped his arm under her knees and lifted her up and stood next to the balcony railing. He paused for just a moment, like a proud father might to show his toddler a better view of something amazing.
“If you see Stan,” he said, his voice rasping with his exertion and his emotion, “tell him Ted says rot in hell.”
Maggie’s vision was filled with the specter of the cathedral, filling up every bit of her sight, as complete and as glorious as an angel’s chimera. She knew she was losing consciousness but when the moment finally came, it came as a searing bolt of pain that sprang from her shoulder and shot directly through her hips and her legs. And then the blue sky surrounding Notre Dame turned blessedly black.
Laurent heard the voice. Only one. He stood on the landing outside her door, his hand raised to knock, his expectation of the look on her face already in tiresome re-runs in his head. And then he heard the voice. Unlike his very American wife, Laurent was not accustomed to analyzing a situation for long. In his nefarious not-too-distant past, he had had to make dramatic decisions—often life and death decisions—in the time it takes to light a cigarette. Up to this moment, that ability had served him well. Today, he never got to the point where he thought that he might embarrass them both. He never considered the what ifs. It wasn’t his way. When he heard the voice, he acted.
The door was unlocked, although he was prepared to break it down. It swung open to present a full-stage view of the drama unfolding within. A man held Maggie in his arms at the balcony railing. Laurent didn’t stop to note if Maggie was alive or even if it was Maggie. In three long, silent strides, he was through the apartment and onto the balcony. The man was so intent on hoisting Maggie over the railing that he didn’t notice that Laurent was beside him until Laurent had grabbed his wife’s shoulder and wrenched her from the man’s grasp. When Maggie tumbled senselessly to the floor of the balcony, Laurent turned to the man and slammed his fist into his face. The punch propelled him backwards into
the living room where he fell and cracked his head on the edge of the coffee table. He grabbed a candlestick off the table and hurled it at Laurent who easily dodged it as he advanced.
Don’t kill him, Laurent said to himself as he grabbed the man and hauled him up to a standing position. Try not to kill him.
The man brought his arm up and down against Laurent’s chest. He held a knife in the hand and Laurent felt the blade go into his flesh in a sudden electric shock. He flinched but never dropped his hands from the man. Without breaking his gaze on the man’s fevered eyes, Laurent grabbed the man’s knife hand and twisted it until he snapped the bones his wrist. The man screamed and dropped the knife but Laurent didn’t let go. He moved his hands from the man’s shoulders to his neck.
Try not to kill him, he reminded himself.
* * * * *
Maggie and Laurent stood on the lock bridge of Pont des Arts gazing down at the green and choppy Seine below them. Maggie’s mind was whirling with the events of the last few hours. The police had taken Ted—ranting and wild-eyed, his hand dangling useless from his wrist—into custody. Maggie’s recording of his confession, combined with the recent collapse of his alibi after a second police interview with the blonde model he was supposed to have been with, finally concluded the sad case of the murder of Stanley Newberry. It had all happened so quickly—from the complete confusion that Maggie had faced not twelve hours earlier over who could possibly have benefited from Stan’s death to the heartbreaking question of her continued status as Mrs. Laurent Dernier. Maggie now found herself befogged and numb trying to place the recent events in proper sequence.
And the emergency room painkillers hadn’t helped.
Maggie’s arm was in a cast and hung in a sling snugly to her chest. Laurent’s knife wound had required ten stitches but it was a shallow cut and didn’t seem to bother him at all. As she looked at him, she still found it hard to believe that he was with her, and that he had come to Paris. There were many questions to ask—not the least of them about the woman who answered his phone that night—but Maggie found she wasn’t worried about Laurent’s answers. Although she had no memory of his rescue of her from the balcony, just knowing that he had come for her in the end gave her the strength and resolution she needed to face the worst if it came.
The Complete Maggie Newberry Provençal Mysteries 1-4 Page 103
