Murder à la Carte (The Maggie Newberry Mystery Series)

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

“So he shot her?” Maggie screwed up her face and looked to Grace for confirmation.

  “She was rejecting him, I guess,” Connor responded. “She was found, all bloody and untidy, clutching this note that her lover had given to her just before he offed her and it was all about how he was sorry it had to come to this and how he forgave her and stuff―”

  “That still doesn’t explain why he―”

  “The family was leaving to go back to England.”

  “Oh.”

  “And he was all cross and bothered that she was, you know, rejecting him by leaving.”

  “I see.”

  “And so he killed the whole family,” Windsor said. “Even the little boys. They were five and seven years old.”

  “How awful,” Maggie said, reaching for her gâteau again.

  “Yeah, not everybody believes that the famous and decorated hero―by Charles DeGaulle himself, they’re quick to point out―”

  “Believes what?” Laurent asked impatiently, his interest in the story evident for the first time.

  “Well, not everybody believes that he did it,” Connor said. “I mean, he confessed and all, and the note was in his handwriting, but he was the village favorite son, you know? St-Buvard didn’t want to believe it.”

  “But he confessed?” Maggie asked. She accepted a cup of cappuccino from the waiter although she knew it meant little sleep for her that night.

  Connor nodded, his mouth full of cake.

  “You didn’t tell the best part, Connor.” Grace said. She took a dainty sip from her own tiny cup of espresso. Her lips left pink tattoos against the white ceramic. “Monsieur Alexandre was sent to prison―”

  “Alexandre?” Laurent lit a cigarette. His first of the night, Maggie noticed with amazement. He really was trying to cut down.

  “As in ‘Jean-Luc’ Alexandre?” Laurent asked.

  Grace nodded.

  “He was Jean-Luc’s half-brother.”

  “See what we mean about everyone being related?” Connor said.

  “But that’s not the best part,” Grace repeated.

  “Isn’t Jean-Luc, like, hideously embarrassed to be related to this mass murderer?” Maggie was fascinated with the story. “I mean, this must have been a big deal to this little village, having a family of four―”

  “It is, it was,” Grace said. “But Jean-Luc hardly knew his brother. They had different mothers and Jean-Luc was just a small boy when Patrick was sent to prison for the murders.”

  “Where he died,” Windsor said with some satisfaction.

  “Yes,” Grace said, a little vexed. “But that’s still not the best―”

  “Oh, out with it, Grace!” Connor clapped her on the back. “What is the best part?”

  “The best part is the gypsy, Connor, whom you completely forgot to tell―”

  “Oh, yeah! The gypsy―”

  “Forget it, buster. I’m telling this part.” Grace smiled at Connor who leaned back in his chair with mock resignation.

  “What gypsy?” Maggie asked, forcing her hands to stay in her lap and not pull that last créme de coca thing over to her barren plate.

  “Before Patrick confessed, the villagers found a passing gypsy. A classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Oh, no,” Maggie said, cutting the chocolate rectangle with the side of her fork.

  “They hung the poor man―in your vineyards―for the family’s murder.”

  Again, the forkful stopped before it reached Maggie’s mouth. “Our vineyard?” she said unhappily.

  “There used to be this great cypress tree on the property,” Grace said. “Your uncle, Laurent, had it taken down. He said it was because it took up precious planting space in the field, but it’s understood he did it because of the group guilt St-Buvard felt about stringing up the wrong cow-poke.”

  “God,” Maggie said, looking at Laurent. “This all happened at our cozy little bungalow of a home, dearest.”

  Laurent gave her a don’t-be-ridiculous look and finished off his Calvados. “Perhaps,” he said to Connor, “you would be a welcome sight to Lydie, about now.”

  “God, I forgot all about her,” Connor said, jumping up.

  Grace and Windsor shared a bemused look and touched hands on top of the table. Then Grace Van Sant leaned over the clutter of glasses, bread crusts and ruined dishes and smiled at Maggie.

  “Let’s get together tomorrow for...I don’t know, how about...?”

  Maggie laughed and finished for her, “...anything but lunch.”

  Chapter Three

  1

  She picked up the used syringe, careful not to stick her fingers with the tip, and tossed it into a square cardboard box she kept in the bathroom. She touched a tentative finger to her left hip. The area was still sore and bruised from last night’s injection. Carefully, she sponged up the drops of spilled dilutant, and cleared away the filter needle and the empty syringe packaging. It had hurt last night. It always hurt. Not just a sting or a pinch like the nurses had suggested, but insistent and cruel like a little hook embedded in her delicate flesh, pulling and pulling.

  Grace finished wiping the sink surface and then straightened to look into the mirror. Last night had been fun but had taken its toll. Her eyes looked sunken, her mouth was pulled downward in tiny and not-so-tiny lines. She brought a hand to her face and felt a wave of hopelessness sift gently through her body. Three years and no pregnancy, she thought as she stared at her own sad reflection. Three years of hoping and trying and crying and resenting each other. Two years of injections and special trips into Aix to the clinic for ultrasound sessions and blood tests. Three years of failure. Now the French doctors at the fertility clinic (such an unamusing euphemism, she thought ruefully) were suggesting that they seriously consider artificial insemination. Grace turned from the mirror and rested her unbruised hip against the sink. The way things had been going between her and Windsor lately, she had actually felt relief at the thought of no more forced lovemaking schedules. Just let the docs do it, she thought, miserably. Let Win jack off into a bottle and let the docs just shoot it up there. She wasn’t sure Windsor would ever agree to it, for the same reason he refused to consider “in vitro” or any of the other options that were open to them.

  “It isn’t natural, Grace,” he had said stiffly.

  “And having three amps of menopausal nun urine injected into my rump every night is?”

  “At least the drugs you take aren’t artificial,” he’d said. “I don’t feel there’s anything foreign or unnatural going on...”

  “How wonderful for you.”

  But in the end, she had capitulated. He had been adamant about not going further than this stage with infertility treatment. And, finally, she had stopped arguing with him. After all, nightly shots of Pergonal and timed intercourse were better than nothing. And without some kind of treatment that’s exactly what Grace was convinced they’d end up with.

  She glanced at her watch. It was a little after nine a.m. Windsor would just be dropping Taylor off at her school in Aix. It was a long drive to make twice a day, but worth it, they both felt. She winced at the memory of breakfast with Taylor.

  The child had been impossible.

  And you want more of these? Windsor’s look had said to her as he herded a crying, red-faced four-year old out the door and into the car. Grace swallowed hard at the thought that had rushed, uninvited, to her mind as they left. No, I want to get it right next time. It was just anger, she told herself. A mother’s vexation at her dearest little one. A human being reacting in a normal, understandable, human way.

  She tossed the sponge into the sink and left the bathroom. It adjoined the master bedroom suite―an unusual feature in French country homes, but she and Windsor had done extensive remodeling on their not-so-modest château. And château it certainly was. All forty-one rooms of it, complete with turrets, dungeon basement and stone watch tower. They’d first seen it looming up over the stark, surrounding f
ields―a purplish-gray apparition, like a falling-down version of Cinderella’s Castle, and they had known it would be more work than warmth to try to live in it. They bought it from the county agent within sixty days.

  The château no longer had land connected to it; all of that had long been sold off to neighboring vignerons. And a castle with no acreage―no obvious means of supporting itself―was a white elephant in this part of Provence. A tad too remote to attract tourists as a summer rental―and too dilapidated to do it had it been better located―the château had cost them less than half of what they’d expected to pay. The remodeling, on the other hand, had cost nearly ten times the purchase price. It didn’t really matter. They had the money, and little else to do but worry about plumbing and wallpaper and thirteenth century heating ducts.

  Grace sat gingerly on the king size bed and began peeling off her robe and filmy nightgown. She never bothered to dress before Windsor had left in the morning with Taylor. In fact, there had been little else to do, period. Life in St-Buvard was downright dull, what with her difficult daughter in school from seven until seven at night―and many times staying in Aix in a boarding situation if weather or circumstances prevented the Van Sants from retrieving her. Windsor was usually embroiled in writing his memoirs up in his study. Even more so now that the château had finally snapped into shape and seemed to require little more attention than cleaning, something which Grace, of course, had never had to do.

  She turned on the shower and tested the temperature of the water with her hand. Imagine, she thought as she stepped under the fountain of warm water, a waterfall faucet and a Jacuzzi tub in the garden room―in a thirteenth century French castle in the middle of the French countryside. She sudsed her entire body with a rough washcloth and enjoyed the sweet, soapy smell as the steam engulfed her in a penumbra of warmth.

  The muffled sound of the phone ringing penetrated the soft drumming of the shower as she poured shampoo into her wet, shoulder-length hair. I hope it’s Maggie, she thought, as she closed her eyes and massaged her scalp and tried to remember if she’d left the answering machine on. The days could be so long, so uneventful. The reality of her life in St-Buvard just didn’t live up to the colorful letters about living in the South of France she liked to write home to her jealous friends.

  She finished her shower and turned off the water, cocking an ear to try to hear if the machine was recording a voice even through she knew the bedroom was too far from Windsor’s study, where the answering machine was kept, to be able to hear. She toweled off briskly and inspected her nakedness in the large gilt-framed mirror that dominated the bathroom. Not bad for forty-one, she thought, holding her stomach in just a bit. Still plenty of baby-making material here. She stole a glance out the one small window in the room to the fields below. Already, the workers from the village had been picking for several hours. She shook her head and returned to the steamy mirror. She squinted into her reflection again and then quickly smoothed away the creases she had caused by squinting. Windsor had put his foot down at the idea of restoring the small moat that once ringed the château. She tugged gently at a gray hair sprouting from her perfect brow line and sighed heavily. Too bad. She had had some wonderful ideas for a moat.

  2

  Awaiting the retrieval truck of Cortier & Fils, the baskets of dark grapes lined the front driveway at Domaine St-Buvard. One hundred and fifty baskets in all, each one filled to the brim with the large, juicy grape of his own vineyard. Laurent stood next to a large, rough-hewn man named Bernard Delacort. He was one of the pickers from the village. Laurent selected a bunch of grapes and hefted them in his hand.

  “And the stems?” he asked Bernard. “How do they get the stems off?”

  The older man shrugged, his grimy shirt and vest jerking with his motion. He jabbed a hand downward as if a bomber airplane were diving.

  “Into the crusher, bien sûr," he said. “It will spit out the stems...” He demonstrated this, neatly avoiding Laurent’s shirtfront. “...and squeeze the juice from the grape.” To illustrate, he clapped his hands together to form a vice.

  Laurent nodded and plopped the grapes back into their basket. It was a good haul. He’d harvested the hundred and fifty baskets for Cortier for a neat little profit, with enough grapes left over to press his own wine under his own label. He glanced out to his fields and watched the variations of blue shirts and overalls of the pickers. How much was left? Another hundred baskets? He felt very good. His own wine. He would be making his own label. After all, how difficult can it be? The hard part is done: the months of sun and rain and careful pruning. The wine he bottled would be as good as the grapes. And the grapes were good.

  In the distance, Laurent could hear the slow rumbling of a large truck as it approached. He clapped Bernard on the shoulder and got an amiable grunt from the man in reply.

  “You did well, Monsieur,” Bernard said, shifting his filthy cloth cap from his filthy head to his no less filthy hands.

  “You mean, my uncle did well. I did nothing to grow these grapes.” Laurent spread his hands in the direction of the grape baskets.

  “You did well by him,” Bernard said again. Delacort wasn’t the kind of man to soften a truth by lying or restructuring it.

  Laurent moved a step toward the sound of the truck as it began its slow, lumbering assault up his winding driveway.

  And next year, Laurent thought, as he gestured to the driver and began directing the truck’s approach with his hands, the credit for the wine―good or bad, drinkable or merde, will be mine and mine alone.

  3

  “She’s pregnant, you know...Babette. The girl that Lydie was going on about last night?” Grace waited for the point to register as she sipped her café au laît and pushed her sunglasses back onto her nose. Even in early November, the glare from the morning Provençal sun was brutal.

  “The girl who works in the boulangerie," Maggie said, helping herself to another croissant and then daintily wiped the buttery flakes from her fingers with her napkin.

  “The one, yes.” Grace smiled. “Pretty little thing if you’ve seen her.”

  “Just a glance. Why was Lydie busting a gut over Babette being the niece of Madame and Monsieur Marceau?”

  Grace laughed, her merriment like a little bell ringing pleasantly in the quiet café. It had been Maggie on the phone during her morning shower and the answering machine had been on. Arrangements for coffee that same day were as easy as pulling on respectable clothes. No need to ask where― there was only Le Canard, no need to ask how to get there ―they were both within biking distance―even walking distance, if one had to. For Grace, the sheer pleasure of having a new friend so close, so accessible, had taken the sting out of this morning’s parting with Taylor, had helped muffle the memory of the harsh words with Windsor the night before.

  “Maggie,” Grace said. “Lydie doesn’t care who Babette is related to.”

  “But she―”

  “No, she was rubbing Connor’s nose in something.”

  “Well, that Connor had slept with this Babette-person, right?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Are Lydie and Connor, like, a match? Engaged?”

  Grace shook her head, her soft blonde curls bouncing gently. “No, no, nothing like that.” Grace grinned and stirred more sugar into her coffee, “But see, Lydie isn’t from around here. She’s from Marseille. So to have Connor take up―even briefly―with a village girl, well...it’s embarrassing, you see.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud.”

  Grace laughed again. “I never said she was brilliant.”

  “She sounds like an idiot.”

  “Ahh, but her winning personality makes up for her lack of brain cells, don’t you think?”

  This time, they both laughed.

  “And so, I guess, the baby’s Connor’s, right?” Maggie said, more seriously.

  “That’s the general consensus,” Grace said, stirring more sugar into her coffee. “I’ve not actually approached
him on the subject.”

  “Do you intend to?”

  Grace stopped stirring her coffee cup. “Poor little peasant girl victimized by big, bad Yank, you mean?”

  “Something like that.”

  Grace sipped her coffee and grimaced. “Why do they all make it industrial strength?” She smoothed out her napkin and eyed the plate of croissants. “I don’t know, Maggie. I kind of thought it was none of my business, I guess.”

  Maggie thought about this for a moment and drank her own café au laît from a bright blue bowl. She and Grace Van Sant sat outside, their wicker-backed chairs making wonderful woven-basket designs of shadow against the flagstone terrace. A clot of dead leaves scuttled across the café floor as a cool breeze softened the sun’s glare.

  “Will she have it?” Maggie asked, pushing her unopened copy of Nice-Matin away from her plate. “Do you know?”

  Grace shook her head and looked at Maggie.

  “Look, don’t think too badly of Connor...”

  “No, no, I don’t.” Maggie smiled. “I like Connor. He’s funny and I get a sense from him that he’s authentic, you know? That he’s not a fake.”

  “It’s true.” Grace nodded. “He really is. This Babette thing included, you know? I mean, I can’t imagine our Connor having a go at the local talent under false pretenses, you know? I mean, why should he bother? He’s rich.”

  “Is he?” Maggie noticed a couple of the village workmen in their dark blue caps, shirts and baggy trousers, settling down at one of the other tables. The café had belonged only to the American women up until now. Each of the men had a large meat pie―their morning casse-croûte―and a small jar of pastis. “He mentioned he had a trust...” Maggie said absently.

  “Yeah, no kidding. He not only has a trust, he has access to heap-biggum investment funds for just about whatever kind of project he’d like to involve himself with. Millions at his disposal, I take it.”

  “Is he into that sort of thing? Investing and commerce and stuff?

  Grace made a face, as if the thought of Connor and business intertwined was too ludicrous to imagine. “Right now he’s into being the biggest, most charming goof-off in the northern hemisphere, you know?”