“I am Maggie MacGowen Flint,” I said.
“Ah, yes. I understand you call yourself Maggie.” Such a pretty little accent, very similar to Isabelle Martin’s. The voices were similar as well. “I am Grand-mère.”
“Isabelle’s mother?”
“She was your mother, chérie,” she said, an edge to the tone in her voice, some reproof. I didn’t hear tears. “I am your grandmother.”
“Yes, of course. I’m very glad that you called. I’m afraid that I know very little about Isabelle, and nothing about her family. You understand that I only learned last night that she existed.”
“We all have much to learn about each other.”
“I am so sorry for your loss.” What should I be saying here? “You spoke with Detective Longshore? He told you what happened?”
“I did,” she said. “He told me what he wanted me to know. But, well, you know the police....”
“My late husband was a police detective,” I said before she got any further. “Detective Longshore was a friend of his, is a friend of mine. He’s a good man. You can trust him.”
“Police? I heard your husband was,” she paused, “avocat. Lawyer?”
“My first husband, Scott MacGowen, was a lawyer. Mike Flint was my second husband.”
“I did not know. Of course, after a while we heard so little about you. When we learned you were called Maggie MacGowen and you were in television, we thought, nom de guerre, as it were.”
“But you know my current married name?”
“Detective Longshore told me.”
Move on, move on, I thought, keep jumping the potholes. “Madame Martin, I am sure that arrangements will be difficult for you to make from a distance. Please let me know if there is anything I can do on this end to help you.”
“Of course, only normal you would wish to help. And please, call me Grand-mère, or I won’t know to whom you are speaking.” Apparently not a shrinking violet, my newly discovered grandmother. “We will get in touch with our consul general in Los Angeles to coordinate arrangements. I believe that, after the police release your mother, under the circumstances cremation is appropriate. I am certain that the consul’s office will contact you when the event is scheduled so that you can attend. Afterward, we will arrange for transport to France.”
“Please let me know how I can help,” I said. “I don’t know what legal details are involved for transporting remains abroad.”
“The consul will take care of all details. Your Uncle Gérard knows his father well.”
So, I had a French uncle, Gérard, the developer.
“You must forgive me, dear,” she said, “but my English is quite rusty.”
“Your English is very good, but my French is beyond rusty.”
“So we shall both practice all week, shall we?”
“All week?”
“Yes, so that when you bring your mother home to Grand-mère next week we will be able to speak together without confusion.”
I had flashes of what my life might have been if Dad hadn’t lifted me out of Isabelle’s arms. Trying to be noncommittal, I said, “I’ll see.”
“Of course. You will need to make arrangements. Your work, perhaps. Your family?”
“Work, yes. My daughter is away at university.”
“You have a daughter?” Clearly, I heard delight in her voice; why had I brought up Casey? “Comment s’appelle?”
“Her name is Katherine Celeste, but we call her Casey.”
“Casey? Oh, I see, K and C, her initials. Charming. Where is she studying?”
“UCLA.”
“In Los Angeles? But you said she was ‘away’ at university. I understood you live in Los Angeles.”
“She lives in a campus residence hall.”
“Of course.” Her tone softened when she asked, “Tell me, dear, how is the woman you know as your mother, Elizabeth, handling things?”
“With grace, as always.” I did not want to talk about Mom with this woman. And I could not bring myself to call her Grand-mère. “I’ll phone you when we know more.”
“I look forward to that, my dear,” she said. “In the meantime, the consulate will make arrangements. What number shall I give them for you?”
I thought about that before I decided to give her my number at the TV studio. The work phone was easier to manage, or avoid, than the home phone.
“À bientôt,” she said, a lilting farewell.
“Until later.” After I hung up, I realized that, except for greeting me formally at the beginning of the call, she had not called me by name, as I had not called her Grand-mère. For both of us, the name thing was going to be awkward. I wanted to ask her what motivated Isabelle to come looking for me, but thought that was best left for another time.
I was still in the kitchen, thinking about the woman’s assumption that I would take Isabelle’s ashes to her in France, when Mom led Max and Guido in through the back door, all of them laden with bags of fresh flowers, bread, and produce.
“Waiting for Detective Longshore to call?” Mom asked, checking her watch.
“Yes.” I glanced at the clock. “I just spoke with Madame Élodie Martin.”
“Élodie?” Mom’s eyebrows rose. “She must be a thousand years old by now. You called her?”
“She called me.”
“And?”
“She expects me to take Isabelle’s ashes to France.”
“Will you?”
“Yes, I think I will, Mom. Unless you have some profound objection.”
“I do, of course, have several,” she said. “But it is your decision to make.”
Max put an arm around her for comfort, and addressed me. “You know this whole situation is damn tough on your mother.” He cleared his throat and amended that suddenly confusing last word, “On Betsy.”
“I’m so sorry, Mom,” I said. “I know all of this has to be painful.”
“It is that,” she said, very matter-of-fact. “But my concerns are for you, honey. No one would tell us what happened to you all those years ago, Margot, before you arrived here. But when you arrived you were one traumatized little girl. Whatever the event or situation, it was dire enough that a competent woman was willing to relinquish custody of her child. And may I add, a bright, beautiful, sweet-tempered child at that.”
“I don’t know about the sweet-tempered part,” Max said, with a wink aimed at me. “How about mulish?”
“Certainly strong-willed,” Mom said. She cupped my face in her hand and squeezed my cheeks giving me what we used to call the fish face when I was a kid, and meant she wanted my undivided attention. “And that’s why I know you’re going to fly over there to meet your other family. Where better than at a funeral?”
Guido said, “Can I come?”
I looked at him for a moment. “I’ll have to think about that.”
“It would be a great project, Mag,” he said, unloading the contents of his bags onto the kitchen table. “Someone hires a hit on filmmaker’s mother, a mother she never knew about, until...”
The telephone rang again. It was Rich.
“I’ve been trying to call, but the phone was busy and you have your mobile turned off.”
“Mom believes call waiting is rude,” I said. “Madame Élodie Martin called me for a chat.”
“She didn’t waste any time, did she? I hung up from talking to her and dialed you right away.”
“Did you give her Mom’s number?”
Max left the room in a hurry. Guido leaned his head near mine, hoping to overhear both parts of the conversation.
“No,” Rich said. “She asked if I had spoken with you, and when I told her I had, she asked where you could be reached. I told her you were at your mother’s house for Thanksgiving. Then I lied and said I didn’t have the number, but I guess she found it. Or had it. I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s all right. I needed to speak with her.” I asked, “How much detail about the death did you give her?”
“Very little. I told her automobile collision, the day, the time, the place. And I gave her the contact info for Public Affairs at the coroner’s so she can get information about getting the body released.”
I asked, “Why didn’t you tell her more?”
“We’re keeping a lid on things until we have a chance to investigate. No press releases for the time being. When something like this happens, we look first at family, friends, co-workers. But because as far as we know all those folks are in France, the job gets tough. Her mother said that other than you, Martin didn’t know anyone in Southern California.”
“She didn’t know me, either.”
“So I have no idea where to begin. Do you?”
“The car?”
“Car was abandoned. Someone ran it over a cliff near Piuma Creek Road. A hiker found it this morning.”
“Piuma Creek isn’t far from my house.” I reconsidered the wisdom of what I had just said. I needed a long nap before I spoke with another person. “I was at home Wednesday night with my daughter and her roommate. And until last night, I had no idea Isabelle existed.”
“Don’t sweat it, Maggie. We already checked you out.”
“Good to hear.” I heard Max breathing on an extension phone somewhere in the house. I said, “My lawyer is listening in.”
“Hey, Max, how’s it hanging?” Rich asked.
“Fine, Detective, and you?”
“Guys,” I said. “Now what?”
“Someone in France needs to look into things,” Rich said. “Because I think that’s where the answer will be.”
“Maggie’s taking the remains to France,” Max said.
“Maggie, you go ahead and go to all their tea parties, or whatever it is they do over there, but promise me when you’re over there you’ll leave the investigation to the French police. We’ll turn over copies of everything we have to them,” Rich said. “Or to Interpol. I don’t know how that will play. But Maggie, I’m telling you to watch six when you get over there, and butt out.”
“Now I think about it,” Max said, “I better go along.”
“You two talk it over,” I said, intending to do as Rich cautioned, to watch my back. “I’m hitting the shower.”
6
I walked through the front door of the network studio early Monday morning ready to be back at work. The long weekend had left me feeling unsettled, oddly unsure of myself. I needed some time, and the distractions of a busy day, to let the various bits of my rewritten history settle in.
“Morning, Miss MacGowen.” Omar, the uniformed guard on duty at the security desk, slid a sign-in sheet on a clipboard across his teak countertop toward me. “How was your holiday?”
“Interesting,” I said, scrawling my name on the sheet. “And you?”
He traded me the sign-in sheet for a sheaf of pink message slips I had asked the switchboard to send over. “A long weekend with the family sure gives new meaning to being loved to death, doesn’t it?”
I nodded, chuckling; if only he knew. I wished him a good day and headed for the elevator, looking through the messages: my producer wanted me to call her the minute I arrived, the French consul general had left his number, as had Élodie Martin, twice, that morning. It was afternoon in France when the sun came up in Los Angeles; I sensed impatience. The switchboard had captured the numbers of several callers who declined to leave messages—one of them had called three times already that Monday morning. Lots of people have issues they want to discuss with me, personally. I don’t return anonymous calls, and the switchboard takes numbers but won’t send those calls through. Too often issues became big trouble. Best to keep a distance.
Behind me, as I punched the Up button for the elevator, the big glass front doors opened and someone walked briskly across the marble floor of the lobby, exchanging greetings with Omar. I glanced over, saw a man in a FedEx uniform drop a padded envelope on the counter. Omar was a bit slow on the uptake—too much holiday?—and the delivery man had turned and walked back across the narrow lobby and out the door before Omar could hand him the delivery log to sign.
“Hey, buddy,” Omar called after him, rising from his stool. “You need to sign....” But FedEx was gone. Omar picked up a phone and called the gate, asked for the courier to be stopped and I.D.’ed before he drove out.
“Damn holiday temps,” Omar swore as he spun the envelope around to look at the address. “Don’t know what they’re doing.”
The elevator dinged, the doors slid open. But before I stepped inside, Omar said, “Miss MacGowen, you expecting a delivery?”
I thought about it, hand holding the door open, said, “Not that I remember.”
“Package is addressed to you.” He picked up the telephone receiver again and punched some buttons.
I walked back toward his counter for a look. Into the receiver, Omar said, “Hand-addressed to Maggie MacGowen, no bar code, no packing slip, no tracking number. Guy didn’t sign in. Miss MacGowen was here in the lobby when it arrived. Yes, she’s still...”
Before Omar finished his sentence, Big Bill Carlisle, head of studio security, burst through his office door at the side of the lobby; I have brought him a few little situations over the years. He held up a hand to stop me from approaching the counter, but as I listened to Omar tell his boss about the package, I retreated back toward the wall, away from the desk. Ordinarily, I might have raced for first look, but remembering that I had biological kin waiting at the coroner for her turn in an autopsy suite, I stayed put as the elevator doors whooshed shut and the car ascended without me.
The desk phone rang; Omar said a few curt words in response to his caller before he looked up at Big Bill. “The guy didn’t drive in through the gate. Didn’t drive out, either.”
“I’m ordering a studio lock-down,” Big Bill said. “No one comes in, no one goes out until we find him.”
Omar got busy with the phone.
“Sorry, Miss MacGowen,” Big Bill said. “If you’ll just wait right there.” I waited.
Big Bill—he was big, an NFL linebacker before a career with Marine MPs—took a digital camera out of a pocket and photographed the envelope, a standard 8½ x 11 bubble mailer, from several angles, moving his body around instead of touching the surface.
Within minutes, I heard sirens, many of them. A film crew from our news department assembled outside the front doors, stopped from entering by Omar. The first uniformed Burbank PD officer through the doors led a pretty beagle on a leash. The beagle sniffed the air, immediately found what she was trained to find, walked straight to the security counter and, standing directly below the envelope, pointed with two sharp barks.
“We have explosives,” the dog’s handler announced into a shoulder mic. The officer looked at the three of us and barked, “Clear the vicinity. Now.”
During the evacuation of the studio, the delivery man, minus the FedEx uniform that he shed in a parking lot planter, managed to slip away. That afternoon, the Burbank PD bomb squad, observed by agents from Homeland Security and the FBI, detonated a homemade bomb—not a big one, but powerful enough to blow the hands and face off whoever opened the envelope—in a vacant field somewhere out near Sunland. The prints taken from the envelope didn’t come up in the system.
Rich Longshore, alerted by Guido, came and fetched me from the studio.
“We aren’t dealing with a ring of master criminals, Maggie,” he said as we sat at my kitchen table that evening eating turkey sandwiches for dinner. “Strictly amateur hour. Any idiot with Internet access can make a mail bomb like that one. Same with the hit-and-run that took out the Martin woman. Sloppy work. Too much TV.”
“But do you think this bomb came from the same people?” I asked.
“The stuff you get involved with, Maggie, who can say?”
I leaned closer to him. “You can. And you usually do. What do you think, Rich?”
“Me?” He grinned his crooked grin. “From what we have so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if
the Martin woman saw something—or some knucklehead thought she saw something, some local mischief—and eliminated her. Then he decided that you might have seen something, too. Sent you a present.”
“If that’s the case, then I’ll be safer if I go to France than if I stay here, right?”
He laughed. “Doesn’t matter what I say, I know you’ve already decided to go.”
For the next few days, I worked from home. And on Thursday, in the afternoon, the French consul general assigned to Los Angeles showed up at my house in the canyon to escort me to LAX. His name was Jean-Paul Bernard and he was extraordinarily handsome, gracious, and solicitous. He may have been fifty—attractive little crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes, silver at his temples—but he was as slender and straight in his beautifully tailored suit as a man half that age. His driver, a young Hispanic, probably an LA local, followed him inside the house but stayed only long enough to fetch my bags, which he carried down the front steps and stowed in the trunk of a sleek black Mercedes parked on the drive.
“May I offer my most sincere condolences?” Bernard said, actually bending over my hand. I was a little disappointed that he didn’t kiss my hand or click his heels, but hoped there might be a next time. “A terrible tragedy has occurred. My office is only too happy to be of assistance to you and your family at this very sad time.”
I thanked him before I asked, “Have the local police told you, in detail, what happened to my mother?” After a week of helping Élodie Martin make arrangements I was getting used to using the word “mother” in reference to Isabelle, and “Grand-mère” to Élodie, because it eased getting the arrangements made.
“Yes,” he said, showing a polite degree of sadness. “I have been in regular communication with the police; a Detective Longshore with the county sheriff is my contact. Indeed, at my request Sergeant Longshore forwarded copies of all reports to our National Police Judiciare and promised to continue sending information as he discovers it. As our National Police are the agency that represents France with Interpol, there will be a coordinated and rigorous investigation on both sides of the Atlantic.”
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