The Complete Maggie Newberry Provençal Mysteries 1-4

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

  “And jealousy,” Ted said.

  “Yes, Ted, and jealousy.” Jeremy looked down at his hands. “Can you imagine how I felt when it turned out to be the last interaction I had with him?” He looked up at Maggie and she saw his eyes swimming in tears.

  She took a long breath and deliberately hardened her heart to the sight of his guilt and his grief. She knew he was devastated to lose Stan. But just because he loved him, she reminded herself, didn’t mean he didn’t kill him.

  An hour later, after Bijou and Jeremy had both left, Maggie took a moment to relax with Ted and talk about their separate writing projects. He, too, was using Paris Fashion Week as the theme for his current romance novel.

  “It’s always easier to write what you know,” he said as he paid the bill and gathered up his coat.

  “How is it people write so easily about time-travel and space aliens then?” Maggie said as they emerged from the brasserie onto the cold Parisian street. Le Bal was not close to her apartment and while she had taken the Metro to get here this evening, she was looking forward to walking home. With Ted.

  “Well, writers are notoriously crazy,” Ted said with a straight face. “A few whacked out dreams of space alien invasions is as good as reality for them. Trust me,” he said. “I may know a lot about the catwalk and can write about it easily, but I have never met a heroine in real life as perfect as the ones I create.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “My heroines are feisty and feminine, loyal to a fault and always ready to jump into the sack.”

  “And your heroes, Ted?”

  “Same thing. Total fiction. It’s not possible in real life to be the kind of people that readers want.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “Hate to burst your bubble.” He laughed. “But men who are protective and strong and forceful without being overbearing or downright rapists? They don’t exist.” He shrugged. “I know my readers—who are all women, by the way—don’t want to believe that. But it’s true.”

  “Which one are you?” Maggie asked teasingly.

  “Oh, me? Well, I am a model for my heroes, of course.” He shrugged and took her hand and put it on his arm as they walked down the sidewalk. “I mean, how else could I know so well what my women readers want if not for the fact that I am strong and protective and all that other good shit?”

  Maggie laughed. As they walked, Maggie found her thoughts drifting relentlessly back to Laurent. He would be the brooding hero type, she thought. Or is it just the language barrier that makes me think so? She and Ted walked in companionable silence for a couple blocks and then he stopped abruptly and she felt his hand tighten on her arm.

  “Wha—?” she began to speak.

  “Shhh!” He pulled her quickly into the dark shadows of the street under the shuttered storefronts. Maggie could feel Ted’s body hard and unyielding against her own. She felt a panicked need to remove herself from his grasp—getting tighter by the moment—and was seconds away from bolting back into the light of the nearest streetlamp when he turned her deftly in the direction of a side alley.

  “Look!” he whispered.

  An open door cut a large wedge of light into the darkened alley and she could see two men standing in the entrance. The doorway itself was giant, looking at least fifteen feet tall. She instantly recognized the man standing in the doorway who was greeting his visitor. It was Denny.

  Maggie drew in a sharp breath and Ted held up a finger to his lips. She nodded and looked back over at Denny. She and Ted stood silently watching until her knees began to shake with the effort to remain totally still. Her legs, covered in sheer stockings, were already numb with the night cold. When the man Denny was speaking to began to enter the doorway with Denny, he stopped and turned to look around the alleyway as if to make sure no one saw him. Maggie stifled her gasp when she saw his face.

  It was Jeremy.

  Chapter Eleven

  Maggie pulled the duvet up around her neck and shivered. How could she be surprised? Jeremy had already been caught red-handed trying to get into the apartment—probably for the very thing that Denny was after. The fact that the two of them were working in concert shouldn’t be that big a shock.

  She could tell Ted was surprised, too. Unusually silent on their walk back to Maggie’s apartment, he hadn’t even asked to come up for a nightcap.

  What were the two after on Stan’s laptop? Maggie glanced at it sitting on her bedside table. What was on it that was so important to both Denny and Jeremy? With renewed vigor and determination, she had spent an hour after she returned trying to crack the password on the machine but to no avail. Whatever was there would have to wait. Besides, Maggie wasn’t absolutely sure she would recognize the incriminating information when she saw it. What could it be that both men were willing to go to such measures to retrieve?

  She checked her cellphone for the time and decided to call Laurent again. It was starting to feel deliberate to her as she listened to his phone ring and then finally go to voice mail. While it was true he had never been tethered to his phone like most people were these days, he certainly looked at it more than once every two days. He will have noticed that I am trying to reach him.

  In frustration, she tossed the phone down on the bed and then quickly grabbed it back up again and punched in Jean-Luc and Danielle’s number. If anybody knew anything in the whole of St-Buvard, it would be Danielle.

  “Hello?” Danielle’s breathless voice answered and Maggie had a bad moment thinking she might have caught her friend at an inconvenient time.

  “Danielle?”

  “Maggie!” Danielle’s voice was animated and cheerful. Maggie frowned. Too cheerful for eleven thirty at night on a Tuesday. “I am so glad to hear from you. How is everything in Paris?”

  Now Maggie knew something was wrong. Danielle was too animated to be believable.

  “It’s good, Danielle,” Maggie said. “Listen, I’ve been trying to get a hold of Laurent but no joy. Have you seen him around? He’s alive, right?”

  “Laurent? No, no, I have not seen him.”

  Suddenly, Maggie’s stomach lurched with a roiling nausea. Her friend’s clumsy attempts to dissemble flashed a message as clear as a billboard on the A4: Laurent is done with you.

  “Okay,” Maggie said, now finding herself fighting tears. “Because I’ve not been able to reach him.”

  “Well, I am sure he is just busy, Maggie,” Danielle said with enthusiasm. “There is always so much to do in the vineyard, you know?”

  Not right after the harvest there isn’t, Maggie thought. Even I know that. “That’s true,” she said. “Well, I’m sure I’ve just caught him at a bad time. Everything okay with you and Jean-Luc?”

  “Yes, yes, wonderful,” Danielle said. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Okay, well, that’s great, Danielle,” Maggie said. “Give my best to Jean-Luc.”

  “I will of course,” Danielle said.

  Maggie hung up and sat in bed staring at the cellphone in her hand, her tears finally released and struggling down her face.

  Jean-Luc came up behind his wife and put his hands on her waist.

  “That was Maggie?” he asked.

  Danielle nodded her head, her shoulders sagging with the weight of her worry, her lie. “This is all just so sad,” she said to her husband. “She’s worried and Laurent is not returning her calls.”

  “You did warn her.”

  “I did.” She turned in his arms to face him. “But even I could not imagine he would take another woman into his bed this soon.”

  Jean-Luc shrugged. “You did warn her.”

  The next morning, Maggie decided she would spend the morning shopping and walking. She hoped to exhaust herself physically. Ignoring the work that visibly awaited her in the living room—in fact just about everywhere she cared to look in Stan’s apartment—Maggie dressed warmly in cotton tights and long boots, a snug wool tunic that caressed every curve she had. Where she was going today,
she did not want to look like a tourist or an American. Before leaving, she peeked into the hallway of the apartment building to see if Genevieve was lying in wait for her. Her neighbor was a nice enough lady but Maggie had learned the hard way that she was nearly impossible to get rid of and Maggie was too afraid of offending to drop any effective hints.

  A folded piece of paper was jammed into the hinge of Maggie’s door and she could see a big and looping G on it that could only mean Genevieve. Jamming it into her coat pocket, Maggie bolted for the stairs.

  Deciding against the Metro, she hurried down the Quai Saint Michel, then crossed over Pont Neuf to the Right Bank. She paused as she always did to take a moment to enjoy the sight of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. It never failed to buoy her spirits and remind her where she was.

  On the far side of the Île de la Cité, she decided to walk up the Quai de George Pompidou between the river and the Tuileries. She expected to avoid most of the crowds clustered in the courtyard of the Louvre. Hurrying past the booksellers—most still open for business this late in the year—Maggie halted at the Pont des Art and found herself scanning the bridge as it spanned the Seine. Like many of the bridges across the river that featured chain link railings, this one was covered in locks of every size and shiny finish. As Maggie waited for the traffic light to change in order to cross the street, she found herself watching the lovers on the bridge. One couple, typical of every other couple who was lured to the bridge, held their lock between them and kissed. Maggie watched them as they gazed into each other’s eyes and spoke their private words. They looked so young, so sure that their relationship would be the one to last. She watched as the couple kissed again, snapped their lock to the bridge ties, and then flung the key into the river. She could hear the girl’s squeals of delight.

  Would that it were that easy, sweetie, Maggie thought as she turned her back on the couple, now holding hands and walking across the bridge toward the Louvre. Maggie and Laurent had been to Paris many times but it had never occurred to her to ask him to put a lock on the bridge together. If Laurent was anything, he was a realist, she thought. Although he had never commented on the practice, she was sure he would find the whole idea asinine. She shook herself out of thoughts of him.

  Plenty of time to think later, she told herself as she crossed the street. For now, just work the body. She moved quickly into the Jardin de Tuileries and cross it to the Rue de Rivoli and on to the Rue de Castiglione. Her first official day of playing hooky instead of attending to the tasks of why she was in Paris, Maggie felt free yet at the same time desperately in need of a girlfriend.

  Forcing herself to slow down, she slipped into a patisserie with bistro tables and ordered a café crème and an almond macaron nearly as big as the palm of her hand. She sat by the window and watched the shoppers stream past. Without realizing she was doing it, she pulled a pad of paper and a pen from her purse and started jotting down observations on the people she saw—how they dressed, their pinched or worried expressions—and she tried to imagine if they lived here or were tourists. Were they unhappy because they had some crisis playing out at home? An unruly unwed teen? A wandering husband? Or were they not particularly unhappy at all? Maybe after forty years of living combined with indifferent skincare, their faces had simply relaxed into the visage of frowns which had nothing at all to do with what they were thinking or feeling. She took a relishing bite of he macaron and instantly thought of Laurent. He was always encouraging her to try new things—especially food. He would be pleased to see her eating commes les francais instead of scouting out the nearest Starbucks.

  It was incredible that he wasn’t taking her calls. Had he just stopped caring?

  As she put her pad back in her purse she saw the note from Genevieve sticking out of her coat pocket. It read Please knock on my door. I forgot to tell you something that happened the week before Monsieur Newberry died. I believe you will find it very interesting. G.

  Maggie put the note in her purse and collected her things. It was probably just a ruse to trap Maggie in her apartment for a long hour of chit-chat. As she left the shop, stashing the other half of her macaron wrapped in a paper napkin in her purse, she felt her phone vibrate. She answered it while she walked up the Rue de Castiglione. She could glimpse the Place Vendome straight ahead.

  “Hello, darling,” her father said when she answered. She thought he sounded weary.

  “Hey, Dad. Everything okay?”

  “Your mother sends her love and we got Stan buried,” he said. “It was a lovely service. Private and just lovely.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t be there,” Maggie said. “The will was read?”

  “It was,” her father said. “Not surprisingly, he left his money to some very eccentric characters back in San Francisco.”

  “Anybody we know?”

  “None of that lot in Paris,” her father said. “He left dribs and drabs to charities and organizations he was interested in but the bulk of his estate—which turns out to be considerable, by the way… to a man whose name does not appear anywhere else in Stan’s papers.”

  “Really? Who?”

  Maggie could hear paper rustling on the other end of the line and she stood at the street crossing waiting for the light to change.

  “Stan ever mention a John Newton to you?”

  “Never head of him.”

  “Well, anyway, we’ve contacted his representative…”

  “Aren’t you interested in meeting him?” Maggie interrupted.

  “Meeting him? No. Why?”

  “Well, Stan left everything to him. So obviously the guy was important to him.”

  “If Stan had wanted me to know him, he would have introduced us,” her father said. “Or at the very least, mentioned his name.”

  It occurred to Maggie that her father was hurt by Stan’s secrecy. She understood. It must feel to her father like Stan didn’t trust him to accept him for who he was.

  “How about the Paris flat?” Maggie asked. “He leave it to the San Francisco dude, too?”

  “That’s actually one of the weirdest parts of all about all this.”

  “Really? He left it to someone else? Who?”

  “Me.”

  Maggie laughed. “He left that awesome two-bedroom flat in the heart of the Latin Quarter to you. And you’re not totally flabbergasted?”

  “I am surprised,” her father said. “But not stunned. Your uncle and I once spent a summer living in the Latin Quarter after college.”

  “I never heard about this!”

  “Well, no reason you should. You don’t tell me every single thing you get up to, do you?”

  “Whoa, were you guys involved in white slavery or black market drugs or something?”

  “I hope Laurent understands your sense of humor better than I do. Anyway, as I recall, that summer was a fairly uneventful experience for both of us.”

  “Clearly not, Dad,” Maggie said evenly. “He left you a million dollar apartment in the heart of Paris.”

  “I suppose it might be Stan’s way of telling me how much I meant to him—you know, when we were younger.”

  “Oh, Dad.” Maggie felt the sadness and the lost opportunities welling up inside her father even from this distance.

  Later that afternoon, after a full morning of exploration in both buildings of the Galleries Lafayette, and a studied raid on Ladurée that was bound to leave her a pant size larger, Maggie came back to the apartment to sit in front of her uncle’s laptop with a long list of possible passwords. She tried the birthdates of everyone in the family, Stan’s boyhood dog, anagrams of Stan’s name and the store for which he had worked for thirty years, even the names of his friends here in Paris. Nothing worked.

  She took a break a little after four to have a cup of coffee and sit on the balcony. She tried to make her thoughts float freely, hoping they would reveal the more salient clues of the case, but she just ended up thinking about what she might like for dinner.

  Thinking a
shower might help, she bathed and washed her hair, then sat back down in front of her uncle’s laptop with her wet hair wrapped in a terry cloth turban and a colorful plate of assorted almond, raspberry and kiwi macarons in front of her. She bit into one of the creamy, intensely sweet cookie cakes, then turned back to the laptop and typed in JohnNewton in the password box. She was rewarded with the immediate presentation of her uncle’s desktop.

  Who are you, John Newton? Maggie found herself wondering in her delight as she clicked on a folder on the desktop labeled Published Posts. She had read some of her uncle’s work before by finding it cached as backlinks on other fashion sites and blogs. Now, she scrolled down a series of Word documents, each labeled with a date. Her uncle posted once a week. She opened a few and scanned the posts.

  This can’t be what they were after, she told herself. These posts have been read and are readily available on the Internet. This isn’t the only place to find them. She herself had gone to her uncle’s blog site and skimmed through his archive posts weeks earlier.

  She stared at the desktop. Something about what I’m looking at is very important to the person who killed Stan, she found herself thinking. If I can see it or recognize it for what it is, it must be the evidence that will indict the murderer. She clicked open a folder entitled Musings. It was empty. She opened the photo library application thinking that perhaps it was an incriminating photo and was surprised to see that there were well over a thousand photos on the laptop—none of them organized in any way to allow her to easily view them.

  This is going to take awhile, she thought, getting up to make herself a cup of tea. Her cellphone rang on her way to the kitchen and she glanced at the screen, hoping it was Laurent, but knowing it wasn’t. It was Ted.

  “Hey,” she said. “I got into Stan’s computer.”

  “You’re kidding. How?”

  “My Dad called to tell me that Stan left everything to some guy in California called John Newton. Ever hear of him?”