Murder in Nice

by Kiernan-Lewis, Susan

  “I heard you crying this morning,” Grace said quietly, her eyes still watching her daughter in the field.

  Haley sucked in a quick breath. “It’s not what you think.”

  Grace looked at her. “I’m not an idiot, Haley. Ben’s hurting you.” She held up a hand as if to stop any protest on Haley’s part. “Even if he’s not physically hitting you, although I wouldn’t put it past him. If Laurent hears him do it, Ben will walk with a limp for the rest of his life, brother-in-law or not.”

  Haley pulled Jemmy up onto her lap and hugged him close. Grace saw she was fighting tears.

  “I always thought if we could just have children, everything would be fine. Ben would calm down and not be so angry all the time. But I just can’t make it happen.” A single tear trickled down her cheek and she rubbed it away.

  “I’m so sorry, Haley,” Grace said, reaching out to take Haley’s hand in hers. “And I know you don’t want to hear this, but trying to fix an unhappy marriage by adding kids to the mix is always and without exception a bad idea.”

  “I know,” Haley said, kissing Jem. “But at least I’d have the kids, you know? It wouldn’t matter then what Ben did.”

  “I’m almost positive it doesn’t work like that,” Grace said sadly.

  *****

  Maggie sat in her hotel room. The window faced the sea, and while the interior was rudimentary and bare with linens that had certainly seen the last world war, the view was incomparable. She watched it now, the intense blue of the Mediterranean, speckled with the copious white sails of the rich and idle.

  The others in the tour had already walked to the little seaside restaurant they’d scouted out earlier in the day and Maggie was edgy from the combination of anticipating what she knew was going to be a difficult phone call and a nearly constant state of hunger.

  “Hi, sweetie,” she said as soon as Laurent picked up. “Everything okay there?”

  “What have you been drinking?”

  “That is so rude, Laurent. Why would you say that?”

  “Because you sound like you’re cranked up on a six-pack of Red Bull and it is seven o’clock at night.”

  “I am a little tense, Laurent, if you want to know. I’m sure you think this is a vacation for me but it’s a gigantic pain and most of these people are horrible. It is not a pleasant experience at any level.”

  “So I am assured you will be home tomorrow as you promised.”

  He was not going to make this easy for her.

  “Look,” she said, “it turns out I have to take the train to Nice in the morning. I forgot something and want to check to see if it’s at the hotel.”

  “They have phones in that part of Nice.”

  “I did call and the concierge said he couldn’t give me that information over the phone.”

  “If you are stalling, Maggie…”

  Surprised, Maggie sucked in a quick breath. Laurent never called her by her first name; he always called her chérie.

  “I said I’d be home by lunch time and I will.”

  “By way of Nice.”

  “Yes, but so what? That doesn’t affect my deadline.”

  A moment of tension passed between them. She had tried to circumvent him about the reason she was going to Nice and he’d called her on it. Usually she suspected he knew when she was playing fast and easy with the truth—but he’d never said anything before.

  Everything was different these days.

  Besides, she had forgotten something in Nice and it was at the hotel. And she had called and been told a telephone interview wouldn’t be possible. She was sure, however, that these sorts of details would not assuage Laurent.

  “Is everything okay there?” she asked suddenly.

  “Non,” he said. “You are not here.”

  “I mean besides that. Is everything okay with the harvest?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s just that you’re acting strangely lately.”

  “Impossible.”

  Maggie had to suppress a grin. “Well, not very impossible if I’ve noticed it.”

  “Everything is fine. Just come home and be a hostess to your guests.”

  “Laurent, please let me finish what I started out to do.”

  “Lunchtime.”

  “Yes, dearest. And I must say, after all this fuss I’ll expect nothing short of a six-course meal to explain your absolutely panic to have me back home. Is my brother being a pain?”

  “Oui, but he’s not bothering anyone but his wife.”

  “Poor Haley. Have you talked to her at all?”

  Laurent snorted and again Maggie was surprised she knew what the sound meant without words. Translation: Why would I talk to your brother’s wife?

  “She and Grace went into the village,” he said. “For tonight’s bread.”

  Due to an unfortunate series of murders early in their tenure at St-Buvard, the village boulangerie had been shuttered, although it was unthinkable for any self-respecting French village not to have a bakery and a daily supply of fresh bread. Since that time, most of the people living in St-Buvard had depended on the bi-weekly arrival of the traveling bread truck. Laurent usually just drove to Aix.

  “I’m glad Grace is there,” Maggie said.

  “Especially since you are not.”

  “Okay, Laurent, I get it. You’re annoyed. I owe you.”

  “You do. But I will settle for seeing you at the Arles train station at precisely thirteen hundred hours.”

  Damn. Was he looking at a train schedule? She wouldn’t put it past him.

  “I’ll be there,” she said sweetly.

  *****

  The walk from the restaurant back to her hotel was only ten-minutes, but it was all uphill. As usual, Maggie had eaten more than she’d planned to and now she was uncomfortable and seriously annoyed with herself.

  Like everywhere in France during the summer, it was still light out at ten o’clock at night. Maggie heard the voices of the others in the tour group as they headed in the opposite direction of the hotel—toward town—for drinks. How they could eat and drink as much as they did was the big mystery, Maggie thought as she picked her way across the cobblestone street.

  “Hello there, Maggie, hold up!”

  She turned to see Bob Randall trotting over to her. Behind him, Desiree waited on the curb. Even from the twenty yards that separated them, Maggie could feel the woman’s irritation barreling down the road toward her.

  “Hey, Bob,” Maggie said when he reached her. “You not going with the others?”

  He looked a little winded from trying to catch up, but she knew the florid face and panting could just as easily be the result of the two bottles of wine he appeared to consume single-handedly at dinner. She noticed purple splotches down the front of his shirt.

  “Oh, I am. I just wanted to make sure you got back to the hotel safe and sound. You sure I can’t convince you to stay out a little longer?”

  Maggie smiled and turned to resume her walk. “Positive. I’m beat.”

  “You’re leaving us in the morning?”

  “I am. I’m going briefly back to Nice and then from there, home.”

  “I hate that you’re going to miss the rest of the tour.”

  Maggie stole a glance at him. He hadn’t spent much time talking with her since she’d joined the group two days ago so this attention was a surprise. “I enjoyed it,” she said. “Although you’ll have your hands full deciding between Desiree and Dee-Dee.”

  “Oh, I’ve already decided.”

  Maggie stopped walking. “Really?”

  “It was always going to be Desiree,” Randall said, shrugging. “Well, after Lanie dropped out of the running.”

  You mean dropped dead, Maggie couldn’t help but think.

  “Then why do all this?”

  “My production company insisted. We want it to look all above board.” He waved his hand in the air. “No, it is all above board. We just want to dot all the i’s is all. We
have to go through the process.”

  “So Dee-Dee is giving her presentations but she doesn’t stand a chance?”

  Randall peered at Maggie and grinned. “You were on the boat when the crazy bitch killed a duck, right?”

  Maggie suppressed a laugh. “Yes. Although I understand the duck lived.”

  “She’s totally mental,” Randall said. “Can you imagine her being co-host? We’d be sued in every city we shot in.”

  “I can see your point.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” Randall said, his voice dropping a level as he looked over his shoulder to where Desiree was still standing on the curb. “But we had an issue with her at the start of the tour.”

  “An issue how?”

  “Seems she came on to Lanie’s boyfriend while we were in Orange, and not only did he turn her down, but he told Lanie about it.”

  Maggie gave him her full attention.

  “Lanie basically laughed it off,” Randall said, “but unfortunately she did it in a very public way.”

  “She humiliated Dee-Dee.”

  “Yeah. Well…” He leaned in closely, as if his next words were extremely important and covert. “You saw how Dee-Dee went off on a poor duck, right?”

  “What are you saying? You think Dee-Dee might have wanted to kill Lanie?”

  Randall held up his hands as if to defend himself. “I’m just saying she’s crazy and Lanie did a number on her. Someone else might want to connect the dots on that one.”

  Especially someone trying to deflect suspicion from himself?

  “Anyway, I just wanted to mention it because I saw the two of you chatting in the car earlier and I wanted to put a bug in your ear.”

  “Sure. Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “Listen, if you can walk yourself the rest of the way from here, I’d better get back. Desiree is definitely hot-blooded, and while sometimes that can be a good thing—if you know what I mean?” He grinned lasciviously at Maggie. She worked to keep her lamb vindaloo from coming up.

  “No problem,” Maggie said. “You probably won’t see me in the morning. I’m catching the seven o’clock train.”

  “Well, good travels,” he said as he turned to head back up the street. “And thank you for filling in. The company will send you an online eval to fill out.”

  He jogged back up the street to where Desiree stood on the corner, smoking and waiting. As Maggie turned to head back to the hotel, she tried to imagine what Randall was up to throwing Dee-Dee under the bus like that. And why to Maggie? Because she was Lanie’s friend? Was he covering for Desiree?

  As Maggie reached the hotel, her phone vibrated and she checked the screen. It was Grace. For the first time in her friendship with her, Maggie pushed Decline.

  She knew something was going on with Grace. She had been hinting at needing to talk about it but tonight was not the night. Maggie didn’t have the emotional or physical energy to hear it, let alone help with it.

  She would call first thing in the morning after she’d gotten a decent night’s sleep. She quickly texted Laurent to tell him goodnight and to kiss their baby for her, then found her way to her hotel room on the ground floor.

  Was there something in the wine? She couldn’t remember ever feeling this exhausted. She set the alarm on her phone, stripped her clothes off and left them on the floor then slipped between the sheets of the bed, groaning when she did. She was asleep in seconds.

  Some time in the middle of the night she awoke, her senses tingling with the scent of a man’s aftershave mixed with sweat thick in her nostrils.

  Someone was in the room with her.

  Eleven

  Maggie flung the bedcovers back to scramble out of bed when she realized she wasn’t wearing a nightgown. She grabbed the sheet and lurched to her feet.

  She saw a dark form hunched by her bed, as if ready to climb into it.

  “Who are you?” she cried out, hating the tremor she heard in her voice. “I’m American so I’m armed.” She backed away from the bed toward the door.

  The form stood up slowly from the shadows and she saw him raise his arms in her direction. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “It’s only me.”

  Maggie turned to the lamp on the dresser and snapped on the light.

  Bob Randall stood before her totally nude. He was grinning.

  “What the hell are you doing in my room?” Maggie sputtered. She spotted Randall’s jeans and t-shirt in a crumpled heap on the floor next to her own clothes.

  “I would have thought that was obvious,” he said, reaching for the duvet on the bed and winding the fabric around his waist.

  “How did you get in here?” Maggie’s heart was still racing from being awoken so abruptly. She clutched the sheet across her breasts, twisting it in her hands.

  “Well, this is my rodeo, isn’t it, darlin’? I have access to all the rooms. Sorry about this. Guess I misread our little conversation earlier.”

  “Are you demented? You thought I wanted you to show up in my room in the middle of the night? Is that what you figured Lanie wanted? Did you show up in her room uninvited too?”

  “Whoa, whoa! I did not visit Lanie in her room in the middle of the night, or any other time.” The smile fell from Randall’s face. He went to his pile of clothes and snatched up his pants.

  Maggie backed up to the door, ready to bolt if she had to. He dropped the duvet and pulled on his jeans.

  “Maybe you had the same crap sense of communication then that you do now,” Maggie said. “Only instead of leaving peacefully you got mad and hit Lanie across the head with a wine bottle.”

  Randall stopped dressing. “That’s how she died? She was hit with a wine bottle?”

  “Like you don’t know.”

  “Did the police find the bottle?”

  “We’re not having this conversation. Get out of my room this minute before I call the cops.”

  “Trust me, the French police don’t care about two consenting adults in a hotel room.”

  “I’m not consenting, you moron. That’s kind of the whole point.”

  “Well, how was I to know that? I thought I got the green light from you.”

  “By what possible stretch of the imagination did you think that?”

  “You said you enjoyed your trip with us and then you licked your lips and looked right into my eyes.”

  “You are seriously deranged. Get the hell out. Now.”

  “And for your information I have an alibi for the night Lanie died. I was with Desiree and she’ll confirm that.”

  Maggie jerked open the door and stepped aside as he passed her. He walked into the hallway.

  “I hope this little miscommunication doesn’t ruin what I thought was a very—”

  Maggie slammed the door and latched it. She stood with her back to the door listening to her heart pound in her ears.

  After a moment, she walked to the dresser and turned on her cell phone. Three a.m. Too early to get up for the day, too late to even think about trying to go back to sleep. She dragged a desk chair over to the door and wedged it under the doorknob and then went to take a shower and begin her day.

  *****

  Ben stood in the hallway of the old house and listened. He knew Laurent was usually up before anyone else. He glanced at his wristwatch. Four in the morning. He glanced at Haley’s sleeping form in the bed. He was fully dressed. He went to the door and moved quietly down the slick, wide stairs to the living room. The two big dogs lifted their heads when he passed through the room. They knew him and so didn’t bark. But they watched him as he opened the exterior French doors.

  He slipped out onto the terrace just as his cell phone began to vibrate. He closed the door behind him, glancing up at Laurent’s bedroom window above the doors. It was dark.

  “Newberry,” he said into the phone as he moved silently to the edge of the terrace. He didn’t expect his voice to carry into the house but it sounded loud in his ears in the otherwise still night.

>   “Have you talked to him?”

  “He speaks French, you know,” Ben said acidly. “Which I don’t speak, if I have to remind you.”

  “Strange you didn’t mention that fact when you insisted you were the man for the job,” his caller said, a tone of menace lacing every word.

  “I am still the man for the job,” Ben said. “It’s just taking time to win his trust.”

  “What do you know at this point?”

  Ben was ready to give his report but was surprised to realize he was experiencing a twinge of discomfort. Except for that first day, Laurent had been okay with him. Almost friendly. He shook off the feeling. He was doing this for everybody’s sake.

  “I know he’s just about given up recruiting any takers to restarting the co-op. Except for one old geezer, they’re all either selling out or signing with us.”

  “So what’s his next move?”

  “He…I…you have no idea how secretive he is. I found out through my wife, who found out through my sister’s best friend, that she doesn’t even know where his money comes from.”

  “We know he’s secretive, Ben. We knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Can you not get him to change his mind?”

  “Of course I can. I just need you to appreciate the difficulties.”

  “We don’t give a shit about the difficulties. If you want your little problem back here to be resolved you need to get him to fall in step with his neighbors and get him to sign the papers.”

  “I just need a little more time.”

  “No can do. It’s all going down the middle of next week. If you can’t talk him out of this little act of rebellion of his, you’re going to need to bring pressure on your sister and get her to sign the contract. Jesus. Can you handle it or not?”

  “I can. Yes.”

  The line disconnected and Ben realized he’d been holding himself rigid for the duration of it. He let out a long breath.

  Remember why you’re doing this. He turned back to the house. This is the hard part. He wiped a line of sweat off his forehead although the chill of the early morning had produced goose bumps on his arms and legs.