Murder in the South of France, Book 1 of the Maggie Newberry Mysteries

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

  Chapter Seven

 

  The headline across the front page read: Intruder Robs and Rapes 2nd Victim. Deirdre smoothed the page flat with her hands. When are they going to get this guy? She moved her mug of decaffeinated coffee closer to her and started to read the story.

  “Maggie in yet?”

  She looked up and nodded to Gary as he was coming in the door. “Are you on the front desk today?” he asked. “Where’s Jenny?”

  “Sick, I guess.” Deirdre shrugged and managed a smile for Gary’s scowl.

  “Again?” He snapped his daily paper against his thigh. “What’s the deal here? She’s always sick. What’s the point of having a receptionist if she’s never here to receive? Oh, never mind.” He turned on his heel and stomped into the recesses of the office, presumably to wind his way down the corridor to the kitchen where Deirdre had a fresh pot of coffee perking away.

  She looked back down at the newspaper article. “An unidentified woman at the Claymore Apartments was awakened in the middle of the night by an intruder, who told her to put a pillowcase over her head...”

  “Hey, Dierds, is Gary in yet?”

  Maggie leaned over the receptionist’s desk to sign the agency attendance sheet.

  Deirdre nodded. “He just got here.”

  “Where’s Jenny? That girl is hopeless. What is it this time?”

  “I don’t know. Just sick.”

  “Gary’s in, did you say?” Maggie hurried down the corridor not waiting for a reply.

  Deirdre sighed and straightened the newspaper. “...after which she was sexually assaulted by the man, said to be in his early thirties. Detective Lieutenant John Burton revealed that the woman was forced to...”

  The phone rang and Deirdre gave another sigh, pushed the paper away and picked up the receiver before it could ring again.

  “Selby & Parkers Advertising. Good morning,” she said, wondering if this day was going to be as long as it felt.

  “Have I got news for you.” Maggie pulled a chair up to Gary’s desk and settled her briefcase on the floor.

  “I hate it when people tell me that.”

  “Guess what.”

  “I don’t like guessing. Just tell me.”

  “Elise is back.”

  “What are you talking about? Your sister? What do you mean ‘back’?”

  “I mean, she’s here. In my apartment. Gary, she’s alive!”

  “Maggie, that’s wonderful!” Gary stood up and squeezed her arm. “But how? How is she—”

  “It’s a long story. She was trying to protect my parents by dropping out, I guess because some of the things she was involved in at the time. She thought it was for the best. Can you believe it?”

  Gary shook his head slowly. “Wow,” he said. “But then who was the woman in France you said was her?”

  “I don’t know. I think my father was planning on running a DNA test on the ashes, so we would’ve found out soon enough that she wasn’t Elise.”

  Maggie looked so happy, so beamingly, foolishly happy, that Gary could only sit and smile at her. “Man, that’s great, Maggie. Your parents must’ve flipped.”

  Maggie hesitated. “I haven’t told them yet.”

  “You haven’t?”

  “Gary, she looks like hell right now. She looks like a junkie, okay?”

  “Sure, Maggie. It’s just that, I don’t know, your parents thinking she’s still dead when she’s sitting in your apartment drinking Perrier and making tuna salad sandwiches just feels wrong to me.”

  “It’s just until the weekend. I’ll call them Friday and tell them the news and then we’ll both go over on Saturday. If I was to call them now, they’d be over at my place and, I don’t know, Elise can be sort of funny. I want things to go as well as they possibly can.”

  “I’m sure you know what you’re doing. That’s great news that she’s back. How is she at answering phones? We need a new receptionist.” Gary began shuffling through the papers on his desk.

  “I’m not finished. I also met the famous Gerard last night.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “That’s how I got Elise. Gerard called and demanded five thousand dollars or else he’d cause trouble with Nicole—”

  “He called to blackmail you?” Gary was incredulous.

  “Well, I guess he did blackmail me, because I got a hold of my Dad and he scraped up the money—”

  “You paid him blackmail money?”

  “Gary, he was going to cause a stink about Nicole. I brought her into the country illegally, you know.”

  “You did?” Gary stared at Maggie as if he were seeing her for the first time.

  “I told you all this!”

  “You most certainly did not.”

  “Well, that confirms that you don’t listen to me. Anyway, I handed over the money to him—”

  “When?”

  “Last night, Gary. All this happened last night.”

  “When last night?”

  “Around midnight in the parking lot at Lenox Square.”

  “I cannot believe you were running around after midnight. I won’t even let Darla take the garbage out because of all the crime in this town!” He tossed a newspaper in her lap. “Read any headline. Read the funny pages. Nothing but murder and rape in lovely ATL.”

  Media director, Patti Stump, stuck her head in Gary’s office doorway. “Are we still meeting on Hi-Jinks, Gary?”

  Gary ran a hand through his hair in exasperation. “Oh, God, I don’t know. I don’t really want to.”

  “But we need to.”

  “I know. Okay, five minutes in the conference room. Maggie, you need to be a part of this too. That is, if you’re not busy committing any felonies between now and then.”

  “What is your problem, Gary?”

  “My problem, Maggie, my problem is...” He looked at Patti, still hovering in the doorway and smiled artificially at her. “Why don’t you go on ahead, Patti, and we’ll be right there.” She shrugged and left. “My problem is that I worry about you and you don’t have the sense God gave lettuce.”

  “Thank you for that vote of—”

  “Here I am worried sick about Darla and Haley, and I have to worry about you too because you haven’t got brains enough to stay inside behind locked doors when the city’s crawling with maniacs and psychos. I swear, I feel like the whole world is squatting right on my shoulders.”

  “Gary, I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t be sorry. Be smarter. Please. I worry about everything, you know? I mean, give me a break, Maggie. I would greatly appreciate it.”

  She stood up to leave. “Gary, are you sure you can handle all this?” She waved her hand to take in the office. “I mean, it’s not worth having a stroke over.”

  “Five minutes. The conference room. And...I am glad your sister’s back.”

  She picked up her briefcase and walked to his doorway. She turned to look at him but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. She made a mental note to call Darla later. Maybe Darla could give her a better idea of what was going on with him. She walked down the corridor to her office, where she was startled to find Patti sitting at her desk.

  “Hello. This is a surprise.” Maggie forced a smile. She wanted to oust the woman from her swivel chair and spend her five-minute grace period getting a mug of coffee. That didn’t seem likely now.

  “Hey, Maggie, I wondered if you have a minute.”

  “The same as you.” Maggie dumped her briefcase on the desk. “Five of them.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. Well, I wondered if you might have some time to talk with me about a situation I’ve got. Maybe you could give me some advice on how to handle it.”

  “Well, sure, what can I do for you, Patti?” She perched on the edge of her desk, hoping it was hint enough to the media director to relinquish Maggie’s chair.

  “It’s a guy.” Patti blushed and smiled.

  Maggie was surprised. Before this minute it hadn’t occur
red to her that Dr. Stump might have a softer side to her.

  “He’s very special and I’m hoping he will become a more permanent fixture in my life.”

  Maggie should have guessed Stump wouldn’t have a normal affair of the heart. It already sounded less like a love affair and more like she was shopping for a towel rack. “That’s great, Patti. So what seems to be the problem?”

  “How do I get him out of neutral gear? I mean, he seems content to keep things as they are. That is unacceptable to me.” She shrugged. “I want more from him.”

  Maggie shifted uncomfortably on the desk edge. “How long have you known this guy?”

  “About six months. We’ve gotten pretty close.”

  “Are you thinking marriage at some point? Is that what we’re talking about here?”

  “Marriage would be very agreeable,” Patti said, smiling almost shyly.

  “Well, in that case, I’d just tell him what you want.” Maggie hopped down from the desk corner and began to pick out the materials she would need for the meeting. “I mean, just say, ‘I’m hoping this leads to marriage. That’s what I’m looking for with you.’ Be direct and then see how he reacts.”

  Patti stood up slowly. “Right. Well, thanks, Maggie,” she said coldly.

  “Does that help?” Why does she always make me feel so uncomfortable?

  “What do you think, Maggie? A man is acting reluctant to advance a stagnant relationship and you suggest I torch the whole project by pushing him to the point where he has no alternative but to reject me? What sort of help do you think that qualifies as?”

  Maggie reddened and gathered up her notebook and schedules. “Well, look, I’m sorry you don’t like my advice. But that’s what I’d do,” she said defensively, although a little voice in her knew it wasn’t at all.

  “Sure you would, Maggie.” The smile had returned to Patti’s lips, but it was not a nice one.

 

  The day was dragging on interminably. After a long and essentially unproductive product meeting with Gary and Patti—where Patti refused to look at or speak to her for most of the meeting—Maggie came back to her desk to find the cellphone she’d left in the drawer full of urgent text messages and voice mails from Brownie.

  Crap. She’d forgotten she’d called him last night.

  She dumped her notebook on the desk and dialed him. “Hey, Brownie.”

  “I cannot believe you went out last night!”

  Maggie closed her eyes and rested her chin on her hand on the desk. “Funnily enough, I’ve already been yelled at today for this infraction, Brownie.”

  “Not by me, you haven’t! I could throttle you, Maggie. Do you have any idea—”

  “I called you at eleven-thirty last night and you weren’t home. I mean, unless you were screening my call?”

  “I left my phone in the car.”

  “All night?”

  “Damn it, Maggie—”

  “Oh, well, I’m sure it’s none of my business where you spent the night with your phone sitting out in your car.”

  “Will you just tell me what the hell happened last night? I talked to your dad and he said he gave you five thousand dollars and never heard back from you.”

  Crap. She’d forgotten to call her dad back, too.

  “Well, if you’d calm down for a minute, I’ll tell you.”

  “There was a rape committed yesterday! In your neighborhood. Are you totally insane? Should I talk to your father about the wisdom of letting you have responsibility for yourself? Are you not old enough to have your own apartment?”

  “I’m hanging up now.”

  “No, don’t! Just...look, just tell me what happened, okay?”

  “If you’ll shut up for five minutes, I will.”

  “I’ll shut up. Talk.”

  “Okay. Gerard Dubois called last night around ten o’clock—”

  “Oh my God...”

  “He said I had to come up with five thousand dollars immediately or he’d make trouble about Nicole. I couldn’t have him going to the police, Brownie!”

  “Are you crazy? He’s probably a convicted felon back in France! He’d no sooner go to the police over here than—”

  “Well, then he might call up my mother or something. He could harass us, Brownie. Do you want to hear my story or not?”

  “Go on.”

  “So I got the money from my dad.”

  “Did you tell your father?”

  “No, but I think he had an idea of what I wanted the money for.”

  “Are you serious? And he didn’t stop you?”

  “Well, maybe he’s just not as good a father as you’d be, Brownie.”

  “I apologize for that remark. Please, go on.”

  “So I met Gerard at the parking lot over at Lenox Square. And don’t tell me the woman was raped right across the road from there because I already read all about it. I gave him the money and he gave me Elise.”

  “He gave you Elise? As in your sister Elise? She’s alive?”

  “I know, isn’t it great?”

  “And you haven’t told your parents?”

  “She asked me not to. She looks pretty rough.”

  “Well you could at least tell them she’s alive, Maggie. You don’t have to—”

  “Brownie, I promised Elise I wouldn’t call them.”

  “Okay. Can I come over?”

  “I think that’d be great, Brownie. But can you make it nine? I’m clothes shopping for Elise right after work.”

  “Fine. Nine, then.”

  “Sorry about the squabble.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  Maggie hung up and stood and stretched, working the knots out of her neck by rolling it from side to side and letting it flop--chin down onto her chest—as she’d done hundreds of times before during the cool-down segment of her gym workouts. She had been trying to get Elspeth to try aerobics for the benefits of stress relief.

  She hated not telling her parents about Elise. It felt wrong on every level. But she had promised Elise she would wait. On the other hand, it might well be an awful shock to both her parents just springing Elise on them out of the blue. Perhaps Elise could at least talk with them on the phone.

  Satisfied with this plan, Maggie called her apartment. She waited for ten rings before hanging up. She had talked with Elise two hours ago and knew she was spending most of the day sleeping. She looked at her watch. It was two thirty. Rest was probably the best remedy for Elise right now. She imagined her mother’s face animated by rapture at reclaiming her daughter. She saw her father, with tears of unrestrained joy as he embraced his oldest child. Maggie felt a thrill run through her.

  How many times in your life can you actually anticipate the happiest of all moments to be lived? For, surely, that is what Saturday will be for her unsuspecting mother and father, Maggie thought.

  As she was toying with idea of running downstairs to the lobby delicatessen for a sandwich she could eat at her desk, Deirdre came into her office and dumped a pile of mail on her desk. “Merry Christmas,” she said grumpily. “It’s come.”

  Assuming Deirdre was getting tired of taking on the roles of both the receptionist and the traffic manager, Maggie didn’t process the meaning of her words until she’d sorted through the pile of industry magazines, artist portfolio postcards, a computer software catalog, and one small aqua-blue airmail envelope.

  Maggie hesitated as she looked at the letter, then picked it up as she registered that the slick magazines were tumbling to the floor. Deirdre had already opened it for her. Her fingers were trembling as she extricated the tissue-thin wafer of paper with her name written at the top.

  Maggie,

  I miss you very much and think of you. I will see you in a little time.

  Very soon, ma chérie.

  Laurent Dernier

  If Elise’s reappearance hadn’t officially made today the happiest day of her life, then Deirdre just had by delivering the few brief words that Ma
ggie had hungered to hear, to read, to see, for nearly five months now. She sat holding the small page and memorized the words, ran her finger over the ink and committed the artwork of his cursive hand to her heart.

  Was she really going to let him just waltz back into her life after five months of no word?

  She closed her eyes and clasped the now mangled note to her breast and let the joy radiate through her.