A Noël Killing

by M. L. Longworth

“I insisted,” Jennifer Flanagan said. “When we arrived here, there was a stack of plastic ones in the kitchen. Not only are they bad for the environment, but they change the taste of a wine.”

  “Hear, hear!” Jim McGregor said, lifting up his glass. “A very sound investment you’ve made for our little church.”

  “Jamais! Jamais!” Claudie McGregor said, shuddering. “I could never drink wine from plastic, even if it is not a very fine wine, non?”

  “I’d like to thank you for passing the torch to us,” Cole Hainsby said, pointing his glass in the McGregors’ direction, not noticing the red wine swirling dangerously close to the top. “Debra and I are thrilled to be hosting the carol sing this Sunday.”

  “No need to thank us,” Claudie McGregor said, pursing her lips.

  France knew what Claudie meant; the decision had not been theirs. Cole Hainsby had hassled Dave so much that the newly appointed reverend finally conceded. The McGregors had been hosting the service for years.

  “You will be wonderful,” Alain Sorba said, looking at Debra Hainsby.

  Debra smiled and looked up at Sorba, blushing.

  France, mildly embarrassed, began serving the quiche while Dave poured out the wine, or sparkling water for those who preferred. Jennifer stepped up and began helping France, and they chatted about the sister cities as they served. Jennifer commented on how generous the cities were, to both attend the service and then contribute food for the dinner afterward. “Oh, yes,” France said. “The Italians were especially excited.”

  Jennifer laughed. “I wouldn’t have expected anything less than that kind of enthusiasm coming from Italians. Are the Americans helping out?”

  “Yes.”

  Jennifer looked at France, expecting her to say more, but she was simply twirling her glass around in her hand, watching the wine slide down the sides. She certainly was an oddball.

  France finally said, “The Germans were rather reserved, almost as if they were undecided.”

  “I don’t want to say that that sounds very German,” Jennifer said, “the same way I just made a cliché about Italians.”

  “I’ve met very generous, outgoing Germans,” France said.

  “Oh, so have I,” Jennifer said, nodding. “It’s their first time in Aix, isn’t it? Perhaps they’re shy, or they don’t know what to expect.”

  “Yes, I thought the same thing,” France said. “Not everyone likes the idea of going to church, either.”

  “But it’s really more about singing carols, and being together,” Jennifer said.

  “Yes, I know, but sometimes—”

  “Cole!” Debra Hainsby called out. “That’s not your plate!”

  France held tightly on to her own plate and glanced at Jennifer, who returned her look with a gentle smile and a shrug of the shoulders.

  “You really have to be more careful,” Debra Hainsby said, sighing. “You were eating off of Jim McGregor’s plate!”

  “Well, I just set my plate down on the table two seconds ago,” Cole said. “I got them mixed up.”

  “That’s no problem, no problem at all,” Jim McGregor said. “My fault for setting my plate down next to yours, as I was greedy and wanted to pour myself more wine.”

  “Your plate had the quiche Lorraine on it, Jim,” Claudie McGregor said. “You didn’t see it, Cole?”

  Alain Sorba let out a forced laugh and said, “Musical plates!”

  Debra Hainsby set her empty plate down on the table with a loud bang and turned on her heel and fled, sobbing.

  Chapter Seven

  Damien Petit carefully set his bicycle down on what looked like clumps of wild thyme. He could smell its lemony fragrance, or at least he thought he could; it was mixed with pine needles and other wild herbs that made up the garrigue. Taking off his small backpack, he lowered himself onto the dry ground and rested his back against a pine tree. He looked at the looming Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne’s obsession. The craggy white mountain was still about a fifteen-minute bike ride away, but given its size it looked much closer. It was almost as if he could reach out and touch it. He opened his pack and took out a ham sandwich and began eating, thinking of Cézanne and how the artist would walk daily, even into his sixties, the route that Damien had just biked. Damien would like to have such an obsession—sure, he loved sports, and he had figured out how to make a living out of them—but was he consumed like Cézanne? No, he knew he wasn’t.

  As he ate, lamenting the fact that boulangeries never added mustard to their ham sandwiches, he thought of Cézanne’s paintings, and the fact that he had never liked them—or appreciated them—until a former girlfriend dragged him into a small museum in Paris and he found himself in front of a Cézanne landscape. He couldn’t move. Up until then, Damien had seen only a handful of Cézannes, and they were still lifes and portraits. The painting before him—he had continued staring even after his girlfriend had moved on—was a small forest opening onto a grove of dark green pine trees, with the blue sky peeking through and the red earth below. The painting’s label explained that it was a scene in Le Tholonet, the village he had just ridden through, now home to Swiss millionaires and Parisian CEOs. But the view was much like where he now sat. Damien had grown up in Aix, and it was the first time he had seen a landscape so familiar to him but, transformed onto canvas, made different. It was beyond realistic; although the colors and shapes were true enough, they were exaggerated, as they often are in Provence. The greens so green, the blue sky so bright it hurt your eyes. It was majestic.

  And that’s what bothered him so much about working with Cole Hainsby. Cole didn’t have the capacity to see—to really see, or be moved by—art. Damien knew that he was still learning (the girlfriend no longer in his life), and there was still much he didn’t know, or had never seen. But he now knew that he was capable of understanding. Cole was too jumpy; he couldn’t keep still long enough to concentrate. And his head was always racing onto the next idea—usually a bad one, Damien now knew, too. But Damien, much like many of their clients, had been charmed by Cole, taken in by his enthusiasm. That was part of the problem: Cole was enthused by everything. He had no guidelines, no barriers. Once you got to know him, his enthusiasm wore on you. Damien saw that Debra Hainsby was exasperated by her husband. He sighed, knowing that he was, too. His cell phone rang and he looked down at it, annoyed. It was Cole.

  “Hi, Cole,” Damien said as he stared straight ahead at the mountain.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m taking a bike ride around Mont Sainte-Victoire,” Damien said. “Remember? I told you I was going to do that today.”

  “Oh, right. Listen, you need to come back to Aix. I have some ideas about tours in the Languedoc we can do.”

  “Cole,” Damien said, trying to stay calm, “the Languedoc is a beautiful place, but our specialty is Provence. We should stick to one region. It makes us more credible.”

  “No, we’re missing out—”

  “Besides, I can’t come back to Aix now as I haven’t gone around the mountain yet. I’m timing it for our experienced bike tour.”

  “The Cévennes is a really great area, too. Very undiscovered—”

  Damien held his phone out and looked at it. Had Cole just heard any of his points? “Cole, I agree that we need to talk, but not about future tours in regions we know nothing about. We need to talk about the meeting you had last week. I’m still not happy about it.”

  “What meeting?”

  Damien now let out an audible sigh and looked around before he answered. He was about to speak when a sudden paranoia that his cell phone might be tapped made him stop. “You know the one,” he said. “And don’t say their name on the phone!”

  Cole said, “They’re great guys. You have no idea—”

  “No, no, Cole. They are not great guys.”

  “You’ve never met them!”


  “I’ve heard about them,” Damien said. “I grew up in Aix. They’re Corsican, they’re—” Again, he looked around, but no one had driven by for ten minutes. There were no sounds except the birds and the wind. “They’re . . . dangerous. You can’t just go to those kinds of guys and ask for a business loan.”

  “Why didn’t you say something last year, when I told you about it?”

  “Because, Cole, you didn’t tell me you went to the Corsicans for money. You said friends. How was I to know? And now your friends want us to pay, right?” Damien looked at his phone again, now frightened. Could they be listening to the conversation? They were capable of that. They were capable of much worse; he read about their escapades in La Provence all the time. “I told you at the time we should go to our bank for a loan. But you didn’t listen.”

  “Well, you needn’t worry as I’ve calmed down Jean-Paul and Michel—”

  “Idiot! Don’t say their names!” Damien yelled. “Calmed them down? How on earth?” He looked up as he heard a car drive slowly up the road, its tires crunching as they rolled over the dried pine needles.

  “I said we had a new plan—”

  “We?”

  “Yes, they know all about you.”

  Damien’s mouth felt so dry that even if he knew what to say, which he didn’t, the words wouldn’t be able to escape his mouth. The car had now stopped. It was a black BMW two-door sedan. Damien swallowed again, and looked at his bicycle. Could he outrace a BMW? No, as he had brought his road bike and not the mountain bike. He could hear Cole chatting away, but all his concentration was focused on the car, the make and color he had always associated with criminals in Provence. He couldn’t see how many people were in the car, as the windows were tinted. Of course. He reached for his water bottle, his hands shaking. “I’ll call you after I get home and shower,” Damien said, trying not to stutter.

  “Okay, hurry up, then,” Cole answered.

  Damien hung up and started to put his lunch wrappings in his backpack. The BMW driver’s window slowly opened a few inches, not enough for Damien to see inside. He began to whistle, pretending that he hadn’t even noticed the car. The engine was now turned off and the driver slowly opened his door. A black-panted leg with a shiny black dress shoe poked out. Damien began to sweat; this was not the attire of a hiker or a sightseeing tourist. He began to breathe deeply and make a plan. He was in shape, probably much better than the Orezza brothers combined. But that wouldn’t help him if they were armed. The leg hadn’t moved, and he could now hear a voice. A deep male voice.

  Damien was about to stand up when the driver of the BMW finally emerged. He was tall and broad shouldered, wearing a suit and tie, but he looked older than Damien had imagined the Corsican brothers to be. At least twenty years older. It was difficult to make out his features, as Damien was too afraid to stare.

  The man was about to close his door when he stopped and reached back into the car and picked something up off the seat. He closed the door and began walking toward Damien, holding the retrieved item in the crook of his arm. Damien got up, now prepared to run through the woods. He could surely outrun them. He planted his feet, feeling his toes dig into the ground and his calf muscles tighten. When the man was about ten yards away, Damien braced himself, turning his body, prepared to sprint. Then the passenger door opened, and a woman slowly emerged, wiping her brow. An old woman.

  “Excuse me,” the driver called out to Damien in heavily accented French. He held up what he had been so carefully cradling in the crook of his arm. It was a map. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

  Chapter Eight

  Antoine Verlaque sat in the living room, in his favorite armchair, with his feet resting on the coffee table. He stretched, relaxed, thinking about the Sunday lunch he and Marine had just finished and enjoyed very much. They had done the market shopping together early that morning, then come back to their Aix apartment to cook. Each had chosen a dish out of a book of farmhouse recipes that Verlaque had inherited from his grandparents, the pages stained and some slipping away from the binding.

  Marine had chosen a garniture of fresh chestnuts, walnuts, fennel, and onions; it had taken the two of them, and a careful reading of the cookbook, to rid the chestnuts of their tough outer shells. “Passing the bar was easier,” Verlaque had joked. But they found that heating the chestnuts in hot oil separated the shells from the meat in a matter of minutes, and when they had cooled Marine was able to peel them, removing the shell and the inner skin. The result was delicious—Marine had been worried that it would be lacking a strong flavor, but that’s what they both ended up liking so much about the dish: its delicacy. The pearl onions and fennel blended in beautifully—with the help of chicken stock and butter—with the two types of nuts.

  Verlaque’s selection was faster to prepare but, in his opinion, hardly easier: crispy sautéed potatoes fried in duck fat. “I have to rinse the potatoes,” he had complained, adjusting his reading glasses so that he could see the recipe’s small print, “twice.”

  “Mm-hm,” Marine replied as she stirred her walnuts. “Why is that?”

  “To rid of them of their starch, so they won’t stick to the pan.”

  “That’s sounds like a good idea, then,” Marine said.

  “And I salt and pepper them only after they’ve browned,” Verlaque said. “Otherwise they’ll become soggy.”

  “Who would have thought that potatoes could be so complicated?” Marine said, grinning. She had had no idea that her husband could find a cookbook so absorbing. But he always surprised her.

  “That last note is written in by hand,” he went on, holding up the cookbook, “by Emmeline.”

  “How sweet,” Marine said, looking at his English grandmother’s careful cursive penmanship. “She was so refined; she fit in equally well in Paris high society and in the Normandy countryside.”

  “Do you think we’re doing well in the country?”

  “You can hardly compare the Aix countryside to Normandy,” Marine said, setting down her wooden spoon. “There aren’t many farmers here.”

  “Millionaire winegrowers.”

  “Exactly,” Marine said. “It was fun sleeping here in the apartment last night, and walking to the market.”

  “I thought so, too,” Verlaque said. “I miss the apartment. But just wait until the warm weather, we can go swimming every day at the house. During the winter, downtown always seems better. By the way, why am I cooking two dishes, and you only one?”

  “Because it will take you no time at all to fry the pork chops,” Marine answered. “What will you fry them in?”

  Verlaque had shrugged and then picked up the jar of duck fat he had bought at the butcher’s.

  Marine had laughed. “Ask a stupid question . . .”

  The meal had been delicious, and he wished he could now smoke a cigar, but, even as a cigar lover, it would be unfair to Marine given that the windows were closed. He sighed and sat up straight as Marine brought him an espresso and the sugar bowl. “Thank you,” he said, taking some sugar with an impossibly tiny spoon that Marine seemed to love. “Aren’t you having one?”

  “I just did,” Marine said. “You dozed off there.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes, but only for ten minutes or so. We have to go soon—”

  “Where? On this quiet Sunday afternoon?”

  “The Christmas service,” Marine replied. “Don’t tell me you forgot about it.”

  Verlaque groaned.

  * * *

  A stream of people flowed up the pedestrian street leading to the cathedral. Verlaque frowned as Marine took his arm.

  “It’s going to be lovely,” she said. “My mother is looking forward to seeing you. And so is Philomène Joubert. You remember her, my former neighbor, and she sings in the choir with Maman . . .”

  Verlaque snorted. “The wild women of Saint-Jean-de-M
alte.”

  “Behave.”

  “How will I chat up your mother and Philomène if they’re busy singing in the choir?”

  “The dinner afterward,” Marine replied.

  Verlaque stopped. “What dinner?”

  Marine pulled him toward the front doors of the cathedral, where a group of people had formed, waiting to go in. She continued, with artificial glee, “I got us invited to the celebratory dinner after the service!”

  “That’s not even funny.”

  Marine laughed.

  Verlaque said, “I was planning on a nice quiet dinner with you.”

  “Aren’t you sick of being with me all the time?”

  Verlaque kissed her forehead. “Never. I want you all to myself.”

  Marine smiled, but something in her ached. She thought of their olive harvest a few nights earlier, and the nonconversation they had about children. She looked at her husband, who was reading a plaque to the right of the cathedral’s door. “Come on, the line’s moving,” she said. “I want to get a good seat.”

  “All right, Madame Bossy,” Verlaque replied, quickly finishing the plaque’s text. “Did you know this about Cézanne?”

  “Know what?”

  “That toward the end of his life he stood outside the cathedral after Mass on Sundays and gave out money to the poor—”

  “Mmm,” Marine muttered as they walked in. “It surprises me for some reason that Cézanne would go to Mass.”

  “Well it didn’t actually say that he went to the Mass,” Verlaque said. “Only that he gave out money afterward. It also specifies that it was at the end of his life. Maybe he was getting nervous, wanting to get on the good—”

  “Bienvenue!” a cheery voice rang out, and the young woman responsible gave each of them a thin booklet and a small white candle on a paper plate. “Please don’t light the candle until told, and hand the song booklet back to us at the end of the service!”