Dead and Ganache

by Colette London

  “It’s generous,” I insisted. “Don’t you see? This is perfectly in keeping with Monsieur’s character. He was always giving. It makes sense he’d want Hélène to be happy.” I thought of her distress over losing him. “It’s obvious they had a strong connection, whatever their other problems might have been.”

  Travis frowned at me. “That’s not rational.”

  “Love never is.”

  He seemed puzzled. “And you believe this . . . why?”

  For a second, I was tempted to confide in him about my three ex-fiancés and the stories behind them. But then I remembered that my financial advisor had access to much of my personal information. He had to know about that, too, didn’t he?

  “This just strengthens my theory that Monsieur was moving on,” I told him instead. “Sometimes in life, you reach a crossroads, right? This was my mentor’s. He knew his marriage was over—”

  “It must have been over for quite some time.”

  “And with Nathalie’s future secured with Fabrice and her life in Paris, Philippe had no reason to stay in Saint-Malo.”

  Travis appeared intent. “Is that what he told you?”

  “No,” I admitted. My heart lurched. There was a lot Monsieur hadn’t told me about. “But we didn’t have much time together. Only an afternoon, mostly spent with chocolate.”

  Travis’s expression gentled. “Try to view this objectively. You might give away an entire château to your estranged spouse someday, but you’re famously profligate with your money.”

  That’s what Danny always said. I frowned. “Why not? I can afford to share.” And I did. “I don’t see you turning down the deluxe accommodations and fancy meals we’ve been enjoying.”

  “It’s my job to be with you. For the moment, at least.” Travis adjusted his glasses, then got back to the subject at hand. “That doesn’t mean Philippe Vetault would do the same thing, purely out of the kindness of his heart.” He lowered his deep, rumbly voice. “Someone did want to kill him, remember?”

  I remembered that all too well. “All right, then maybe someone forced Philippe to sign away the château—maybe using the same leverage about Nathalie’s parentage as Madame Renouf.” All signs pointed to Hubert Bernard or Hélène, in that case. “Even so, that’s all the more reason for Monsieur to leave town. He wouldn’t have wanted to stay here, all brokenhearted.”

  “You’re not giving up on this theory, are you?”

  “Would you believe me if I said I was?”

  This time, Travis almost laughed. “I can see why your muscle-bound pal finds you so tough to deal with sometimes.”

  “Because I’m stubborn? Hey, I have to be.”

  “No, because you’re determined to view everything through a lens of emotion. But feelings are unreliable. Logic isn’t.”

  I pooh-poohed. “Emotion is a better motive for murder,” I told Travis. “Sooner or later, I’m going to prove it to you.”

  I folded my linen napkin and got ready to leave. We’d already lingered too long over breakfast. I had things to do—starting with paying an exploratory visit to Antiquités Moreau.

  “Well, while you’re doing that,” Travis said as he, too, prepared to leave the dining room, “try to avoid taking advantage of the local gendarmes’ gullibility, all right?”

  I gave him a smart-alecky look. “I will if you will.”

  “Very funny. I’m not taking advantage of Mélanie.”

  “Hey, if you feel guilty, that’s not my problem,” I joked, echoing his earlier comment. “Just keep me informed, okay?”

  Travis returned my smile. “I will if you will.”

  We parted ways at the dining room doorway—me, to finagle a trip to Charlotte Moreau’s antiques shop, and him, to do further research on Fabrice Poyet and (at my request) the housekeeper, Jeannette Farges. I felt paranoid asking Travis to perform a background check on her—but less so as I spied her hurrying past the château’s rear windows. Intrigued, I slipped outside.

  Feeling slightly ridiculous for employing stealth against a professional housekeeper, I tracked Jeannette across the terrace. I sneaked behind a topiary and watched her light a cigarette while (obviously) on a break—une pause, to the French.

  That’s what Jeannette had been in a hurry to do. Smoke.

  I was about to admit (temporary) defeat and grab my Citroën for the drive to town when, across the grounds, Lucas Lefebvre’s music kicked in on the video crew’s loudspeakers. I lingered to listen and maybe watch some sexy couture-pirate action, too.

  An instant later, the drone camera buzzed Jeannette.

  The poor housekeeper shrieked and fled, looking positively terrified. I frowned as I watched her go. Either her reaction to the drone camera was extreme, or Jeannette was anxious for another reason altogether. My money was on the latter option.

  I’d already been buzzed by the drone cam. It had been startling, not petrifying. If I was right, there was more than met the eye here, with Jeannette. But before I figured out how to get to the bottom of it, I would have to figure out how to gracefully leave my hiding place. Someone had just come outside.

  I peeked around the sculpted topiary. Fabrice Poyet had just stepped onto the château terrace for what I would bet was the same reason Jeannette had: to sneak a forbidden cigarette.

  I didn’t want to be seen slinking around from behind a topiary, but I didn’t have time to dawdle. That left your favorite expert in chocolat, Schokolade, cicolata, and chokora (yep, those are all names for chocolate) only one choice.

  That’s right. I stepped out from behind the bushes, tossed my hair, then gave Fabrice a jaunty wave. “Salut!” I called.

  “Salut,” he returned courteously, unfazed. Hello!

  Then he resumed his forbidden smoking (I presumed), and I got on my way. Masterfully, too, I had to say. You couldn’t keep a good chocolate whisperer down—not even behind some topiaries.

  Thirteen

  I’d arranged to meet Nathalie in Saint-Malo’s centre-ville that morning. It only required a minor (chocolaty) bribe to convince Capucine Roux, Lucas’s indie video director, to postpone filming and join us for a while to hunt set dressings—especially since, as it turned out, she and Nathalie knew one another. Their acquaintance had led to Capucine’s booking château Vetault and its surroundings for Lucas’s video filming.

  It was a small world in Brittany. Thanks to Lucas, it even included real-life (sexy) corsairs, too. The two of us shared another friendly bilingual encounter after I left Travis.

  French pop stars aside, though, my get-together with Nathalie and Capucine almost felt to me like a genuine morning out with girlfriends. While exploring the town with them, I could almost forget my real mission: finding out who might have wanted my mentor dead, especially in such a gruesome fashion.

  In the meantime, though, there were shops to browse and shoes to try on, home furnishings to peruse and souvenirs to consider. I bought something nice to bring home to Danny; my two friends both accumulated shopping bags with a vengeance.

  You would have thought that all that activity would have kept us toasty warm, but instead, I spent much of the morning freezing. My light jacket wasn’t sufficient for the brisk autumn temperatures at the seaside. I shivered in one shop after another, most of which seemed only marginally heated beyond the natural insulation offered by their ancient stone walls.

  Unsurprisingly enough, Nathalie and Capucine tried to help me with my “problem,” but I balked. Too much shopping—at least for myself—isn’t my thing. I never pack more than my wheelie bag and a duffel, remember? It’s impossible to grid-skip with a lot of unnecessary clothing. Ordinarily, I dealt with fluctuating weather by layering, but that morning I’d been too distracted by Jeannette Farges’ skittish behavior to grab my pashmina.

  I still wondered what had the housekeeper so on edge. She didn’t seem like the murderous type, but I could (now) name a few people who’d struck me the same way and had proven me wrong.

  “Here, H
ayden.” Capucine handed me something. “Try this.”

  I looked at what she’d offered. A knit cap in creamy white.

  “It will go well with your coloring,” Capucine urged, looking just as chic as usual in her own outfit. “Go ahead.”

  With that recommendation, there was no way I’d say no. Offered a chance to hijack some of Capucine’s French coolness, I’d have been a fool to refuse. I pulled on the hat and posed.

  “Parfait!” Capucine decreed. “It suits you. You must buy it, non? Otherwise, you will make us feel bad for spending.”

  At her side, Nathalie nodded. She lifted her own packed-full shopping bags. “Capucine has the excuse of getting things for set dressing, but this is retail therapy for me,” she said in French-accented English. “Maybe for you, too, Hayden?”

  At that reminder of missing Monsieur, I relented. I wound up much snugger, too, thanks to my knit hat. I was impatient to get to Antiquités Moreau and question Charlotte Moreau, but my two friends wanted to treat themselves first. We found a local café and sat on its terrace under a burgundy-colored awning, sipping chocolat chaud (hot chocolate) with soft crème Chantilly (sweet whipped cream) and shavings of rapidly melting chocolate.

  “Sublime!” Capucine licked whipped cream from her lips and gave a contented sigh. “With my job, I almost never have time to spend with mes copines—my girlfriends. I am having such fun!”

  Nathalie looked a little hollow-eyed, but she agreed. She reached over to squeeze my hand. Worryingly, she hadn’t touched her own hot chocolate or the butter cookie served with it.

  “Moi, non plus,” she said. Me, neither. “This is nice.”

  I wasn’t so sure that Nathalie’s idea to go shopping had been the best strategy, given her gloomy demeanor. But she’d perked up while in the boutiques and magasins (stores) we’d visited.

  Maybe Nathalie just didn’t enjoy chocolate? It seemed inconceivable to me. “Yes, it is. Thanks for coming with me, both of you.” I smiled at them. “With my work, I don’t see my friends very often.” They were scattered all throughout the world, living mementos of the many places I’d lived, either with my globe-trotting parents or on my own. “I do my best to stay in touch, but texting and phone calls just aren’t the same.”

  I hadn’t fully realized that would be one of the costs of accepting my inheritance from Uncle Ross. By now, some of my longtime friends were getting married. A few were even having children. Our lives diverged more every year, yet my life was much the same—full of chocolate, traveling, and (now) murder.

  How much lonelier might I be, if this continued?

  Uh-oh. Before my occasional longings for hearth and home could assert themselves, I changed the subject. Capucine and Nathalie and I talked about work and the challenges involved in it, about music and films we liked, about men and our troubles understanding them. That was something I couldn’t bend Danny’s ear about—or Travis’s, either. My guys would have probably been sympathetic to relationship woes or dating horror stories, but I wasn’t sure I wanted our time together spent that way.

  “It is difficult sometimes, non?” Nathalie stirred her chocolat chaud, showing no signs of doing anything except toy with it. “Fabrice, he is wonderful, of course. But he does not know what it is to be a woman—what it means to feel as a woman.”

  Capucine agreed. Our conversation swerved from emotions to racier territory and then further. These women would have had no trouble believing that murders were emotionally based, I thought. But there was no way I could broach the subject.

  “But some beautiful lingerie usually solves the problem,” Capucine was saying with a sassy wink as I tuned back in to our conversation. “If I feel nice wearing it, he will recognize that. Not that I wear such things for a man, of course. Non.”

  Nathalie and I rushed to agree. In France, pretty underthings were available at all price points. Faced with them, I sometimes had a hard time sticking to my no-shopping guns.

  Self-consciously, I touched my new knit cap. Oh well. You needed an exception to prove the rule, right? I felt stylish. Surely that was worth finding extra room in my carry-on bags.

  Anyway, it wasn’t every day you got to shop with a riotously chic French woman to advise you, was it? But we needed to get on with things, I realized, if I intended to make it to Charlotte Moreau’s local antiques shop before it closed.

  I finished my hot chocolate, then turned to Capucine and Nathalie. “So, where can a girl get some antiques around here?”

  “Everyplace,” Nathalie said dismissively. “Take your pick.”

  “Spoken like a true Saint-Malo native,” I joked. It would have been easy to become bored with all the touristy shops.

  “Only one place that is any good,” Capucine argued with authority. “Come with me. I will show you Antiquités Moreau.”

  * * *

  Capucine was right. Antiquités Moreau was clearly the best stocked and most discerning shop in the centre-ville. Whereas other antiques stores existed, they’d seemed to me more like flea markets—places that sold items of unknown provenance for low prices. At Charlotte Moreau’s shop, on the other hand, the quality of the wares was evident and the prices matched that.

  “Oh, la la.” With that dismayed utterance, Nathalie let go of the handwritten price tag she’d been examining on a vase. “At these prices, I think I would prefer shopping in Paris.”

  “Non! It is impossible to find pieces like these in Paris.” Capucine already had her arms full of a lamp and a silk shawl. She studied a necklace on display in a glass case. “Madame Moreau has been very generous in lending me items for set dressing.”

  I wondered what kinds of sets needed antique lamps and shawls. “Doesn’t Lucas’s label provide things like that?”

  “Our budget is extremely limited.” Capucine pursed her lips. “That is why we could not return to the château at a better time. We have to use the time we have booked.” Her gaze skittered to Nathalie. “Thanks to you, Nathalie. It is so kind.”

  They went on discussing the château. It was odd to hear them speak English to one another, but I knew they were doing so for my benefit. That consideration didn’t last our entire time inside Antiquités Moreau, however. As soon as Charlotte Moreau emerged to consult with Capucine, all pretense of helping me communicate vanished in a torrent of rapid-fire français.

  As it turned out, that was all right with me. Being (slightly) excluded from their French conversation let me observe the proprietress of the antiques shop in my own time, with no one the wiser. There was a lot to take in, too.

  I instantly understood why mentioning Charlotte Moreau had made Travis blush. The antiques shop owner was a curvaceous brunette with a coquettish manner and the clothes to match. In her perfectly fitted feminine dress and stiletto heels, she was the personification of French va-va-voom. Beside her, I felt instantaneously underdressed. At best, I gave off a tomboyish vibe in my casual clothes and sneakers. No one would have called me seductive and made it believable—not even Danny, who had a talent for (or at least a history of) credible con artistry.

  I’d have liked a few encouraging words from my buddy as I officially made Madame Moreau’s acquaintance, but I had to make do with trading les bises with her. Charlotte’s magnetism was undeniable. Still, as I watched her chatting with Nathalie and Capucine a few minutes later, I reminded myself that they were all contemporaries—each in their early thirties at the utmost.

  It seemed unlikely that Charlotte would have had a wild affair with Monsieur—not when he was thirty years her senior.

  I chalked up Travis’s theory to his own attraction to the antiques shop owner. Probably, since he found Charlotte sexy and appealing (obviously, judging by his blushing), he couldn’t conceive of anyone not feeling the same way, including my mentor.

  I still didn’t want to believe that Philippe had been a rampant philanderer, sowing his wild oats throughout the town. There had to be another explanation. Maybe Clotilde Renouf was simply inventing thr
eats to gain the chocolaterie’s real estate through force. Maybe she was repeating idle gossip. Either way, I remained unconvinced she’d been telling the truth about Monsieur or about Nathalie’s parentage—although she had been unerringly correct about Hélène’s affair with Hubert Bernard.

  Thinking about the château’s gardener reminded me of my frightening episode last night when the landscape lights had gone out. If he’d been faster—or I’d been slower—I might have been stabbed to death with a trowel by now. I hadn’t told Travis about it. Or Danny, for that matter. I was okay. It was over.

  Until the next time, my sense of self-preservation whispered, but I shut it up by transferring my attention to Charlotte Moreau. There was more to her than a beautiful face, a beautiful figure, a beautiful wardrobe, and a beautiful shop.

  She had a beautiful French speaking voice, too.

  Kidding. You had to laugh, right?

  I reminded myself that Madame Moreau was a person first and foremost, with feelings and vulnerabilities just like mine. Nobody was perfect—not even (or maybe especially) when they seemed to be. Which only served to jog loose some questions: primarily, why had Charlotte nixed Monsieur’s banner? What did she really feel about his sponsorship of the Fest-Noz? Was she the one who’d scrawled that ugly graffiti on his chocolaterie?

  Traître. Had she stabbed Philippe in the back because she believed Monsieur Vetault had betrayed her? Or for another reason?

  The next twenty minutes’ conversation convinced me that she hadn’t. For one thing, I doubted Madame Moreau would have risked spoiling her outfit by scrawling graffiti in the dark. For another, she was petite—probably five feet two or so—and much too slight to have stabbed Philippe, especially at the angle someone had. For another, she’d had everything to gain by my mentor staying alive and nothing to benefit from if he died.

  “Oui, we had an appointment,” Charlotte told me genially. I’d explained that I, as a friend of the Vetault family, was taking care of a few loose ends. “Monsieur Vetault asked me to look at some pieces from his family estate and determine their value.”