Murder à la Carte (The Maggie Newberry Mystery Series)

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

  Were there no grownups, she wondered? Who drove these cars? A noise came from one of the trailers. The children were quickly back and pulling at her again.

  Maggie spoke over the din: “Où est Madame Lasalle? Où habite Madame Lasalle?” Where is Madame Lasalle?

  The children began singing, “Où habite Madame Lasalle!” in imitation of her bad accent, and Maggie looked at the trailer that had shown some sign of life. Surely, the ruckus these children were creating would interest one of their parents?

  “Je suis Madame Lasalle.” A voice came across the small dirt clearing from one of the trailers behind Maggie. The voice was reedy and thin, like the woman herself, who stood smiling broadly at Maggie from the step of her trailer. Tall and covered in bangles and jangling gold-tone bracelets, Madame Lasalle was an imposing hag in full gypsy dress. Maggie could see the hand-painted lettering on the side of the trailer: Diseuse de bonne aventure―Madame Zen. Watching Maggie read the advertisement, the gypsy grinned and waved to it. “Donc, je suis Madame Zen, n’est-ce pas?” She laughed and came down the steps toward Maggie. The children disappeared as quickly as smoke in front of a fan. “Voulez-vous me dire la bonne aventure?” Do you want your fortune told? She pointed to Maggie’s hand as if to indicate she would tell her her fortune right here and now.

  Maggie glanced at one of her cue cards and spoke in an even voice to the advancing gypsy.

  “Puis-je poser des questions, Madame?” May I ask you some questions?

  The woman stopped in front of Maggie and crossed her arms. Not counting the less than pristine turban she wore over her orange and gray hair, she stood at least a foot taller than Maggie.

  “Ne parlez-vous pas français, Madame?” the gypsy asked Maggie. You don’t speak French? Her voice was softer now. Her eyes seemed to be trying to judge Maggie while giving nothing away.

  “Non, Madame, je m’excuse.” Maggie repeated her first question. Would the woman answer some questions for her?

  Madame Lasalle smiled, her eyes large and dark. Maggie guessed Gaston’s mother’s age to be closer to fifty-five than the eighty she looked. The pungent smell of woodsmoke filled the clearing. The gypsy tugged her colorful red and green shawl tightly around her. It had grown quickly colder. Suddenly, she gestured for Maggie to come into her trailer, pausing only briefly to ask if she would be paid for the answers she gave.

  “Bien sûr,” Maggie replied, her heart beating in doubletime.

  This was madness.

  She was asking questions she only really knew how to ask because she’d marked the foreign words out phonetically on her cards. She was receiving answers that could just as easily be ingredients to a paella recipe as true responses to her questions. The gypsy knew Maggie didn’t know her language. And Maggie knew she was dealing with a professional liar. Madness.

  The trailer was cramped and jammed with every kind of colored glass and trinket Maggie had ever seen and passed up in junk shops, garage sales, or dump heaps. The tiny space jingled with the glittering bits of rubbish the woman had made into her home. She offered Maggie a cup of herb tea in a surprisingly clean cup and, afraid to refuse, Maggie drank the sweet brew with visions of leprosy and oral herpes swarming in her mind.

  Carefully, one by one, Maggie read the cue cards to the woman, placing a ten franc coin down on the table with each question. Just as methodically―showing no surprise or emotion at all save the same pleasant, not-to-be-believed smile―Madame Lasalle answered the questions by speaking into Maggie’s small tape recorder. When Maggie asked about her son, Gaston, no cloud of cunning crept into the woman’s eyes, no hint of guile or perjury showed itself in her pleasant, ravaged face.

  “Why was your father where the murders took place?” Maggie asked from her little white cards. Madame Lasalle shrugged as if this story had been told and retold too many times to be painful. She spoke quickly. Her eyes watched Maggie’s fingers as they released the ten franc coin onto the table between them. Maggie caught the words “Ricardo,” which was, apparently, the murdered gypsy’s first name and “anchois,” which she knew meant anchovy.

  Suddenly, Madame Lasalle acted out a little scenario of someone screaming: “Au secours! Au secours!” She then made sound effects like a gun firing. She looked solemnly into Maggie’s eyes and spoke directly to her and, for the first time, Maggie thought, earnestly. Maggie watched the gypsy’s face as she spoke and tried to will herself to understand the words. At the end of the woman’s statement, the only phrase Maggie could be sure of was “les gendarmes.” Madame Lasalle reached for a cigarette as if to show she had no real interest over the incident. Certainly, no regret.

  Not knowing what more to ask and figuring that, true or false, she had as much on tape as she could hope to have anyway, Maggie gave the gypsy a twenty franc note and thanked her. Maggie rose to leave. Gently, with a touch that surprised Maggie for it’s softness, Madame Lasalle held Maggie’s wrist as Maggie was withdrawing her hand, and turned it palm side up. She spoke questioningly to Maggie, her eyes smiling, not relinquishing her hand.

  “I have no more money,” Maggie said, trying to pull her hand away. Having her palm read was the last thing she felt in the mood for. “Je n’ai plus d’argent,” she repeated.

  The woman nodded her head at the twenty franc note and held Maggie’s hand firmly in front of her.

  Oh, what the hell, Maggie thought, and turned the recorder back on.

  Keeping her eyes on the road, Maggie raced homeward at a neat 130 kilometers per hour. Normally, she allowed the speedier French drivers to zoom by her. Tonight, she was anxious to be off the main highway. A sign for Arles flashed by, also giving distances for Marseille and Aix. Even at this speed, she was still a good forty-five minutes from the exit that would lead her to St-Buvard, and it was already past eight o’clock.

  She hadn’t been at all surprised to learn that Gaston had grown up in filth and poverty. Many of the children she had seen were physically deformed in some way―either with crossed eyes or cleft palates or both. The defects were a living-color testimony to the careless inbreeding she had been told was common among the gypsies. Father lying with daughter, brother with sister.

  Maggie made a face and pulled the lever that activated the heat in the little car. Grace had told her a story about an old gypsy trick that was supposedly still practiced in Avignon and Arles. An old beggar woman, clutching a baby, would wait along a relatively remote pedestrian walkway or alley until a shopper (ideally, with both hands full of bags) approached. The gypsy woman would then toss the baby at the victim and hope that the shopper would attempt to catch the baby. If he did so (thereby dropping his parcels), a pair of gypsy urchins would appear, snatch the dropped shopping bags, and promptly disappear. The baby was supposedly sedated. Maggie remembered Connor joking about how he would react if someone tried tossing a baby at him. She couldn’t remember what he’d said, exactly. She tried to remember if she had laughed.

  Straining to recollect if she’d ever seen the French equivalent to the Highway Patrol along this stretch of the A7, Maggie pushed the little Renault to 140 km. No, these gypsies, these gitanes, were definitely like no group she’d ever heard of in the States. Did the U.S. even have gypsies? If they existed outside of the movies, they certainly received little press. She recalled Madame Lasalle’s eyes, which were piercing, dark, virtually without pupils. She wondered if those eyes had ever spoken love to a young Gaston? If they had ever held tenderness for a small son? Maggie tried to imagine the two of them together: Madame Lasalle and Gaston. There was a slight family resemblance but, it seemed to Maggie, only in as much as there was among all gypsies. Madame Lasalle was tall whereas Gaston was a short man, probably no more than five foot six or seven inches tall. Both were dark, with sharp, angular features and full, passionate mouths. This last realization surprised Maggie, but it was true. Gaston wasn’t really ugly. In fact, his features were becoming, in a raffish sort of way. It was only his anger, she thought, and his predatory affect tha
t made him grotesque.

  Partially because she didn’t want to believe she had wasted her day, Maggie decided to believe, until proven otherwise, that what Madame Lasalle had told her on the tape was the truth. Or, if not the whole truth, then enough of it to enable Maggie to ferret out the answers for herself. The gypsy gained nothing by lying, Maggie reasoned. Her manner had been neither ingratiating nor cagey as she spoke into the recorder. She had simply talked. Without obvious interest, it was true, but also without apparent reservation or evidence of invention.

  Maggie checked the digital clock on the car’s dashboard. Eight-thirty-five. Plenty of time to get home, have a nice dinner and share a bottle of wine with Laurent before getting him to translate the taped interview.

  By the time she turned off A7 onto 543, Maggie’s thoughts had left Madame Lasalle and Gaston, and had settled around the curious lack of care that the newly-pregnant Grace seemed to be taking of herself. It didn’t make sense, Maggie thought as she steered her speeding car down the narrow two-lane country road, the ghostly sycamores with their pale, spotty trunks looming over her like protective phantoms. Grace had been desperate to get pregnant; her home had been full of books on pregnancy as well as infertility. And after she’d confessed her secret to Maggie― that she was having trouble conceiving―Grace had then talked freely about her need and desire to be pregnant again. Now, Grace rarely spoke of her condition. She continued to smoke and drink―although, granted, not as much as before―and there was not a book, not a pamphlet, not a matchbook’s worth of information about pregnancy visible anywhere in her home. Maggie had even commented on it once and gotten a cool shrug from Grace. “What’s there to know?” she’d responded.

  But it didn’t fit. The lack of interest was too sudden, too abrupt, too unlike Grace. This was not the woman who had had books sent over from the States on the proper care of stucco façades. This was not the same woman who had read so much about infertility and its causes that she bragged to Maggie that she had practically diagnosed herself to the Aix-en-Provence fertility specialists. No, when Grace was interested in something, she researched and read up on it until she knew every angle, every shred of possibility and detail about the thing.

  Grace was simply unenthusiastic about her new condition. And Maggie couldn’t figure it out.

  Slowing to leave the 543, Maggie braced herself for the bumpy village road that led through St-Buvard and past it to the surrounding vineyards, cottages and farmhouses. Home was ten minutes away. It was that reassuring thought, occurring as she passed the quiet St-Buvard church and its sleepy, spooky grounds, that made Maggie impulsively pull off the road and into the tight clearing where she and Grace had parked several hours earlier.

  Not entirely sure why she’d stopped, she sat quietly in the car, listening to the engine’s subtle death groans. The old, stone church looked vacant and foreboding, although she thought she caught a vague glimmer of a light in some recess of the interior. Was someone inside, she wondered, praying? Was there a priest lurking about this darkened dungeon of a place on such a cold, gray evening? Perhaps preparing the bleak, stony altar for early morning services tomorrow? Somehow, it didn’t seem likely, and Maggie decided that she’d imagined the light.

  Maggie quickly opened the glove box and found the flashlight Laurent kept there. She snapped it on and off, satisfied that the battery was strong, and then braced herself for the cold air outside the car. She was determined to find Patrick Alexandre, by God, and this time―freezing cold or not, pitch black or no, she would locate his grave once and for all.

  She hurried to the front gate of the cemetery and shivered against the harsh wind. Graveyards, typically, didn’t unnerve her. Never had. She had been a boring victim on Halloweens in the past. To her, if a thing was dead, it stayed dead and that was the end of it. There had never been a question of a thing being maybe dead, or dead right now but perhaps in some fashion not dead later. Her sister, Elise, had always seen it as a lack of imagination that Maggie couldn’t be terrorized by the thought of ghosts and goblins.

  Even to a nonbeliever, however, the St-Buvard cemetery looked very unwelcoming tonight. The gravestones and obelisks jerked out of the hard ground like frozen screams. Maggie tugged at the rusting gate, then jumped at the sound of its unwilling screech as it moved in her hand. She directed the flashlight beam into the middle of the graveyard until she found Mireille Alexandre’s grave. She couldn’t read the inscription from where she stood, but she knew what it said: Beloved wife and mother, 1900-l930. Funny, she never heard how Mireille died, Maggie thought, frowning as she moved the light over to some of the surrounding gravestones. Mireille had died five years before her husband took up with Mrs. Fitzpatrick, so it wasn’t like Patrick had been running around on her or anything. But dying at thirty years old was dying young, even in those days.

  The wind picked up a muffled noise and tossed it into the graveyard. Maggie couldn’t make out the origin of the noise, but she turned in the direction of it. It sounded like a soft moaning, the kind of sound the wind makes between the shutters of an abandoned house. Irrationally, an image of Gaston Lasalle came to Maggie’s mind as she turned off her flashlight and stood silently by the gate, listening. She strained to hear anything on the wind besides the sound of dead leaves rustling and scuttling across the stonehard ground. Nothing. She snapped the flashlight back on and jogged in place for a minute to warm up, but this made the beam bounce uselessly, creating an eerie strobe light effect against the large sycamore trees overhead.

  It was then, while her unstable light jerked, that she saw it. Positioned outside the high stone walls of the cemetery, she could see the tip of a large, almost neon-white gravestone. Maggie backed out of the graveyard and ran through the gate to the other side where the gravestone stood. She approached slowly and shone her flashlight on the lone grave, planted well outside the sanctity of the churchyard.

  It was Patrick Alexandre’s headstone.

  The carved inscription read simply, Patrick Alexandre, 1900-1947. The grave was crude, inexpensive and crumbling, yet a fresh bouquet of white carnations lay against the stone. Someone still cared.

  Maggie stared at the grave, trying to understand what it meant. Why was it not inside the village churchyard? Why was it not positioned next to Mireille’s grave? What was this, a sort of banishment after death? The ultimate eff-you, française-style? As she was about to turn away, Maggie saw the second grave. Smaller, and positioned slightly behind Patrick’s, as if to share his banishment.

  Excited, Maggie moved closer to focus the beam of her flashlight on the grave’s brief inscription. Suddenly, she heard the eerie sound again. This time, it was very near. Maggie snapped off her light and listened, her heart beginning to beat faster. More growl than moan, the noise seemed to come up at Maggie from the pits of the grave itself.

  Chapter Fifteen

  1

  The dog sprang at her with a strength that brought her down hard to the ground. She grabbed its fur and held it at arm’s length, her forearms shaking violently with the effort. The slathering jaws and angry, yellow eyes thrust near her face.

  Then, for no obvious reason, the dog wrenched itself away and stood over her, panting and dreadful, its coat still raised in aggression and threat. Maggie covered her face and rolled away from the dog, trying to scramble to her feet. An arm reached out to help her. The voice she heard was unintelligible. Maggie allowed the stranger to pull her to her feet.

  2

  He was small, no taller that her own five foot five inches. With thinning, brown hair and light blue eyes, his lips were full and pink, making Maggie think, irrationally, of Gaston or one of his gypsy brothers. But this man’s eyes were not dull and confused. They were lively and intelligent. He was dressed all in black save for the bright ring of white of his clerical collar.

  Maggie had finally stopped shaking and now sat, pale as a corpse, in Father Bardot’s tiny, rectory living room. Hidden from view to passersby on the road, the smal
l stone house was ill-lighted and cold, in spite of the small woodstove in the center of the room. Maggie held a chipped mug of strong coffee between her hands. The priest had even come up with some brandy. His dog, seemingly forgiving of her trespass, waited patiently outside the rectory door.

  The young French priest, who had spent two years in Kalamazoo, Michigan, spoke English well.

  “You are feeling better now, Madame?” the priest leaned forward towards Maggie and peered into her face as if to inspect her coloring.

  Maggie nodded. “What the...kind of dog is that?” she asked, barely escaping swearing in her benefactor’s living room.

  Father Bardot smiled. “A good dog,” he said. “A protective friend.”

  “I’ll say.” Maggie dabbed at her pant leg where she’d spilled a drop of coffee. “I thought he was something from beyond the grave. Did you teach him to go lurking about the headstones like that? Very effective, Father.”

  The priest smiled again but said nothing. His own coffee rested on the small wooden side table beside his chair.

  Maggie glanced at her watch and was shocked to realize that it was nearly eleven. Far from being curious about her whereabouts, Laurent would be apoplectic with worry. She finished off her coffee with a long draught and set the cup down.

  “I’d better go,” she said. “You must be frantic with preparations for Christmas.” Although, she had to admit, he didn’t look frantic. He looked relaxed and remarkably unperturbed. “Will there be a big Mass tomorrow night?” she asked. “Christmas Eve and all?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” he said happily. “As always, n’est-ce pas? You and the Monsieur will come, perhaps?”

  “I’d like that,” Maggie said, getting to her feet. “Do you get much of a turnout?”

  He laughed. “It is the only time most of them do come,” he said. “The rest of the year...” He shrugged good-naturedly.