She smiled in commiseration, while feeling a complete fraud. She hadn’t been to church since last Christmas Eve in Atlanta.
He stood up with Maggie. “Pedro will not bother you,” he said, gesturing towards the door.
Maggie turned to face him. “Listen, I’m sorry about tromping about your yards so late at night. I didn’t know anybody lived here.”
“Cela ne fait rien,” he said pleasantly. It doesn’t matter. His eyes looked into hers kindly, and Maggie found herself liking the man very much.
“Could I ask you one question?”
“A question?” He stood, still holding her flashlight, looking a little like a usher at a movie house, Maggie thought.
“Why is Patrick Alexandre’s grave not buried with the others? Why is he outside the walls of the cemetery?”
“Ah....” Father Bardot’s pleasant face opened up in an expression of understanding and bemusement. “The Church will not allow suicides to be buried on consecrated ground, Madame.” He shrugged, as if the rule was nothing to be seriously unhappy about.
“Suicide?” Maggie was surprised. She’d been told that Patrick had died in prison but no one had mentioned suicide.
“Oui, Maggie,” the priest said. “By his own hand, yes?”
“And the grave next to Patrick’s? I couldn’t read the inscription before Pedro tried to take my face off...”
Father Bardot looked puzzled and directed his gaze in the direction of the graveyard.
“Do you know which one I mean? It’s smaller and positioned right behind, and sort of next to Patrick’s.”
“Ah! Louise’s grave, I believe.”
“Louise?”
“A dear friend of Monsieur Alexandre’s, I am told.”
“You don’t know for sure?” she asked.
“It was many years ago. Before my time.”
“Well, why is she buried outside the graveyard? Did she kill herself too?”
“Maggie, I believe Louise was a beloved hunting dog of Monsieur Alexandre’s. It is not unusual,” he continued, “and the Church would certainly not allow the animal to be buried in consecrated ground.”
“No, I can see that.”
“Have I answered all your questions?”
“Thank you, mon Père. You’ve been a big help.” Maggie shook the young priest’s hand. “We’ll come, Father,” she said. “For Christmas Mass. And do you think I could come back now and then? Your English is so good and I’d really like that.”
Obviously pleased with the praise and the idea, Father Bardot beamed back at Maggie and nodded.
“Je vous en prie, Maggie,” he said, his handsome blue eyes sparkling in the dim light. You are very welcome.
3
“You are running...parcourir...all everywhere and speaking with the gypsies and the time is going and going. Cinq minutes, Maggie! And I was calling les gendarmes, comprends-tu? Five minutes more.”
“Laurent, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get attacked by a crazed dog. It took up more time than I―”
“Don’t be sarcastique! I have been with worry and thinking you are in the ditch now. I am very angry with you, Maggie. Very, very angry.”
Laurent stood in the center of the living room, his arms crossed in front of his barrel chest like a cartoon figure. She sat on the couch in front of him, her legs pulled under her, little Petit-Four curled up in her lap, licking her hand.
“Look, Laurent, I’m sorry, I―”
“And the gypsies!” Laurent looked at her in horror and incredulity. “Do you know what the gypsies do?”
“I’ve heard stories...”
“You have heard nothing!” Laurent turned to the cold fireplace and kicked at a crumbling remnant of log. “They are dangereux. Une peuple diabolique.”
A few days earlier and Laurent himself would have called that racist, Maggie knew. Wisely, she did not mention this to him now.
“I’m sorry, Laurent, I―”
“Bof!” He kept his back to her, comfortable in his anger and not ready to be appeased. It had been a long evening of worry.
Guessing correctly that the timing was not good for revealing her evening’s worth of investigative work, Maggie set down the little dog and moved toward Laurent, who was still standing by the fireplace, his back to her.
“I’m sorry, chéri,” she said, putting her arms around his waist.
Laurent turned and put his arms around her. Maggie felt the harder squeeze in his hands and cursed herself for her thoughtlessness. Worse than that, because up until the moment when time had really gotten away from her, she’d actually harvested a small desire to make him worry a little about her.
“Let me prostrate myself at your feet, O forgiving one.”
“It would be a good start,” he admitted, the tension already leaving his hands as he held her.
“In fact,” she said, “let me prostrate you, big fella.”
“Perhaps I could grow to forgive you,” he said. Then, scooping her up into his arms, he kissed her. “In time, of course.” She laughed as he carried her upstairs.
An hour later, Maggie sat in their rumpled bed picking at a wedge of blue cheese and eating a juicy pear. She fed bits of the cheese to a polite but subtly begging Petit-Four.
“It is a bad habit, this feeding the dog,” Laurent said. He lay on his back, an arm thrown over his face, his eyes closed. It always filled her with a touch of awe for him when he demonstrated some of his ability to see without appearing to see.
“I’ll get right to work on breaking it,” Maggie said, offering the animal a crust of bread. “And what did you do today?” she asked, without looking at him.
“Bernard was formally charged this afternoon,” he said.
Maggie wiped her fingers on a cloth napkin and turned to look at Laurent.
“Oh, Laurent,” she said.
Laurent sighed and sat up in bed. She snuggled under his arm and he kissed the top of her dark head.
“They’re moving him to outside Paris,” he said. “There is a prison there.”
“Poor Bernard,” Maggie murmured.
“Eduard has volunteered to testify against his brother.”
“What? Eduard Marceau? He did?”
Laurent nodded. “He said he heard Bernard threaten Connor with his life.” Laurent looked at Maggie. “Eduard is helping to convict his brother.”
4
The tall sycamore trees loomed over Maggie’s café table. The bases of the trees were bricked into the cement-blocked terrace, causing the tile pattern of the café floor to buckle wildly in spots, although the waiters stepped over and around each one so nimbly that it was clear the irregularities were as familiar to them as the floor of their own living rooms.
Maggie glanced at her watch. Grace was nearly twenty minutes late. This morning sickness must be diabolical, Maggie decided, nodding at the waiter to bring her the check. Grace didn’t easily pass up a morning out of the house. Maggie settled back into her seat, enjoying the heat of the sun on her face. The weather was always cold now but the southern sun allowed a few hours of comfort in the morning when one could take one’s petit-déjeuner on the terrace. Maggie cupped her hands around her bowl of café crème to feel its warmth.
“Madame Dernier?”
Maggie looked up and blinked into the sun. Madame Dulcie, the butcher’s wife, stood in front of her, a heavy shopping bag in one hand, an outlandishly outdated black purse with a long loopy handle tucked under her other forearm.
“Madame Dulcie,” Maggie said brightly. “Joyeux Noël.”
“Joyeux Noël,” the older woman responded, heaving her shopping bag onto one of the empty chairs at Maggie’s table. “Madame does not breakfast at home this morning?” Madame Dulcie twisted the wrist of her lightly frayed cardigan to check her watch, as if to decide if it could possibly be considered still morning.
“Uh, no,” Maggie said, wondering why she was beginning to feel guilty, as she sat in front of a cooling café au lait bo
wl with the crumbs of her pain-beurre still evident on the table of this Christmas Eve morning. “You are going shopping, Madame?” she asked, hoping to distract the nosy old dear.
Madame Dulcie looked at her as if shocked. “I am been shopping,” she corrected.
Naturally, Maggie thought to herself. It’s nearly eleven. She’s probably done all the family shopping, delivered Christmas baskets to the poor, and had a goose browning in the oven all morning.
The waiter approached and tucked Maggie’s bill under a small saucer. On impulse, Maggie detained him. She turned to Madame Dulcie. “Do you have time for a Christmas café this morning?” she asked.
Surprised and obviously delighted, Madame Dulcie turned to the waiter and stuck out two fingers.
“Deux cafés,” she said.
It was true, Maggie decided as she sipped her fourth cup of coffee of the morning. The light was different here in the South of France. It was bright and illuminating―oddly so, for this time of year―but it wasn’t so bright it hurt the eyes. Maggie looked at the surrounding planton trees, their pale trunks looking like they had been tossed with bits of yellow and bone-white confetti. How very impressionistic, she mused.
“And so you spoke to the gypsy, n’est-ce pas?” Madame Dulcie asked.
Maggie was dragged back to her conversation. “Yes,” she said. “She seemed very nice but it was all in French so until I get the tape I made of her translated, I’m not sure what she said.”
Madame Dulcie grimaced.
She sure doesn’t care for gypsies, Maggie noted for a second time.
Madame Dulcie took a long sip from her demitasse. She had explained to Maggie that, in France, one doesn’t drink café créme once breakfast is over. And breakfast, she made it clear, was long, stone-cold over.
“I am sure the old woman’s story will be lies,” she said, raking the last of Maggie’s breakfast crumbs onto the stone floor of the outdoor café. “You will not hear the truth from her.”
“Do you know the truth?” Maggie asked, hoping it didn’t sound too challenging.
“I lived it, n’est-ce pas?” Madame Dulcie narrowed her eyes and focused on Maggie. “I was a young girl when it happened.”
“Yes, well, what exactly did happen, Madame Dulcie?” Maggie wrapped her blue-jean jacket tighter around her, sorry she hadn’t worn her wool cigarette coat. The morning sun was definitely on the wane. “I mean, I think I know the facts of the case? But I don’t really know much about the people involved. Did you know Patrick Alexandre personally?”
The visible effect of the question on the butcher’s wife was dramatic. The hard lines of her face softened, the unforgiving twist to her mouth disappeared. It was a transformation that Maggie wouldn’t have believed if she hadn’t seen it for herself.
“Patrick Alexandre was our hero,” Madame Dulcie said. She looked at Maggie and shook her head. “I am not just talking about his work in la Resistance. That was fine and good. We were proud that he fought the Nazis, yes?” She gazed over Maggie’s shoulder as if expecting to catch sight of Monsieur Alexandre at any moment. “Everyone loved him,” she said simply.
“Some more so than others,” Maggie reminded her.
Madame Dulcie looked at her sharply. “It’s true,” she said. “When Jennifer Fitzpatrick came to St-Buvard, it was as if all the characters of Paris-Match had come to life in postwar France, you know? She was vogue, she was beautiful, she was exotique, you see? I remember the first time I ever saw her. She was sitting in this very café. She was sitting with her husband and they were smoking and drinking wine, and the laughter...” She looked again over Maggie’s shoulder in a hazy, dreamy sort of way. “We had not heard such laughter. A laughter of not caring, you understand?” She looked back at Maggie. “The war had been very hard. For all of us. But Madame Fitzpatrick, she laughed as loudly as the men, she spoke as readily as they. Her French was good. There seemed to be nothing she could not do...and do very easily. And everything she did or said was heard by all.” She smiled at Maggie apologetically. “It is a small village, you understand,” she said.
Tell me about it, Maggie thought.
“Her husband was dull.” Madame Dulcie shrugged as if the truth simply had to be said and sugarcoating the fact wasn’t possible. “He was, perhaps, a good man, I don’t know. He was polite, he smiled easily. He clearly loved his wife. But she sparkled and dazzled wherever she went. He was merely the setting to the bright jewel, you understand?”
Maggie nodded. “And then Jennifer fell in love with Patrick?” she asked.
“They were very discret...you understand? No one ever saw them together. Patrick was too, how do you say?...noble, yes?” Madame Dulcie’s eyes misted over.
“Yeah, tell me about Patrick. What did he look like? Why was the whole world in love with him?”
Madame Dulcie pushed her small, heavy, ceramic coffee cup away from her and reshifted in her seat. She tightened the loose skin of her throat with the back of her hand, almost as if to show Maggie that she too had once been young and attractive.
“Patrick was married when he was a young man. Before the war...”
“To Mireille, right?”
“C’est vrai. Mireille. They were a love story, yes? Very much so. She was a local girl, the daughter of le charbonnier.” She wrung her hands to try to explain it. “For the fuel in the stoves, yes?”
“He was the coal-man?”
“Oui. The coal-man. So, Patrick and Mireille are married and they are happy. They have a daughter but no more children. The war is coming and Patrick must leave, must hide to fight with the other men. He leaves St-Buvard to protect the village from Nazi...how do you say?”
“Reprisals?”
“Exactement. But Mireille is proud to have him go even if she is enceinte...with their second child.”
“Bummer.”
“To answer your question, Madame Dernier, Patrick was a big man, with dark, brown hair, curly, too...as I remember it, although perhaps that is not right. His eyes were a light green, like seafoam. And they laughed and danced when he spoke. A handsome man. A man who cared about so much, so many.” She looked angrily at Maggie. “There is not a farm, not a shop, not a family in all of St-Buvard,” she said fiercely, “who has not received help or kindness from Patrick Alexandre. He was here for this village. To help us, to love us...” The woman stopped, overwhelmed with the emotion of her story.
Maggie found herself wondering if Madame Dulcie had ever been the intimate recipient of some of Patrick Alexandre’s “kindness.”
“What happened to Mireille?” she asked, gently.
“Eh?”
“Mireille. How did she die? I’ve seen her grave.”
“Giving birth to a son who was stillborn. She died before Patrick returned from the war. Three years before.”
“How awful.”
“Oui,” the old woman said tiredly.
“And then he took up with Jennifer Fitzpatrick?”
“It was later. The Fitzpatricks came to St-Buvard from England after the war was over.” She looked directly at Maggie. “Patrick Alexandre was a passionate man,” she said. “A man of courage and good faith and strong love.”
“You don’t think he killed the family.”
“It is preposterous to think it,” Madame Dulcie replied, the conviction of the last forty-five years still strong in her voice.
“Any ideas of who might have done it?”
Madame Dulcie’s eyes became hooded and opaque. “I have an idea or two,” she said bitterly.
After her morning with Madame Dulcie, Maggie returned to the graveyard of St-Buvard and stood watching the graveyard from the safety of her car door, even though Pedro was nowhere in sight. She could just see the gentle mound of Patrick’s grave on the other side of the wrought-iron fence that enclosed the old cemetery.
Why had this noble, good man begun carrying on with a married woman in the first place? she wondered. And a foreigner, to boot―unthinkable in
such a xenophobic village as St-Buvard.
I don’t care if this Jennifer Fitzpatrick-person looked and acted like Grace Kelly, Maggie thought. Would noble, good, kind Patrick really betray the trust of his family and the village to take up with her? The man who had hidden from Nazis, lost comrades to SS torture, risked his life over and over again for the honor of his country―would he flush it all for the turn of a foreign ankle?
Maggie sighed. Well, he was French, after all.
But to kill the object of his desire? And her two little boys? Is that what the war had done to Patrick? Made killing easier―as Eduard Marceau had hinted at once―turned him into a machine that destroyed once disappointed? once foiled? Was it the war that made him do it? The inability―so necessary in wartime―to accept defeat, the talent for fighting back against all odds, for never acknowledging you were down and the cause was dead. Maggie tried to imagine the long years of hiding in the woods, the abandoned cottages and caves. She tried to envision Patrick and his compatriots keeping the faith against the odds of disease and hunger and betrayal and their numbers diminishing―violently―every day. How does one reconcile that? she wondered. And Patrick had left a beautiful young bride, his Mireille, in order to live in mortal fear in the countryside of France. Perhaps, she thought, like some of America’s Vietnam vets, the experience hadn’t make Patrick stronger and more the hero. Perhaps the years of hiding and killing and terror had damaged Patrick in a way that one would not immediately see behind his medals of honor, his broad and brave chest, his dancing blue eyes.
The two men stood watching the static fields, a long knee-high wall separated them from the row upon row of grapevines. Where the old wall stopped, at the southern most point of the vineyard as it dead-ended into the village road that lead to St-Buvard, an unkempt but healthy hedge surged on ahead until the whole of the forty hectares of Laurent’s vineyard was completely enclosed.
Laurent kept his eyes on the horizon as he inhaled the scents of woodsmoke and sun-bleached hay. He waited patiently for the old man to continue talking.
Murder à la Carte (The Maggie Newberry Mystery Series) Page 28