Murder in the South of France: Book 1 of the Maggie Newberry Mysteries (The Maggie Newberry Mystery Series)

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

  She led Maggie to a back room, where a table had been set for tea. The room was obviously used as a sort of sitting room, with a dark red velvet loveseat trimmed in tassels and ropy fringe parked in front of an antique coffee table.

  Zouk gestured for Maggie to sit and she put her hand on the teapot. “You do not look like your sister.”

  “I know. Nor any of the rest of my family. I’m the changeling.”

  “Adopted?”

  “No, no. Just a throwback to an ancestor nobody looks like anymore.”

  Maggie took a sip of tea from the fragile teacup, its roses long faded from the translucent china rim. She waited and watched the French woman. It didn’t seem odd to her at all to discover this exquisite creature was a dear friend of her sister. Elise, who had grown up in old-South Atlanta with white-glove parties and friends whose fathers were either colonels or reverends. And although Elise may have rebelled against the gentility and sterility of a Southern childhood, she’d nonetheless lived it.

  “Your sister was my dearest of friends,” Zouk said, sharing a sad smile with Maggie. “Une amie de coeur, you are familiar?”

  Maggie nodded. Friend of the heart.

  “She lived near here. Do you know that?”

  “I did.”

  “Ah, but you want to hear what it is you do not know.”

  “Madame Zouk,” Maggie said, taking a long breath. “I am trying to find out who killed her.”

  Their eyes met and locked. Zouk’s long lashes fluttered briefly.

  “Please, call me Michelle.”

  “I know this must feel very strange to you for me to turn up like this, but there are a lot of holes in my sister’s life that, if I could fill them, might help me find out why she died.”

  “And you are looking for help from me to fill the holes.”

  “Well, if anybody can tell me what she was doing the last year, I figured it would be you.”

  “Yes, I can tell you.” Michelle folded her hands in her lap, as if that was all she was prepared to say.

  “Did you know I came to Cannes in April and identified a body as hers?”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Well, the body had been in the water too long to really identify it by its face, so I confirmed it based on the fact that Elise’s bracelet was found on the body.”

  “Her charm bracelet?”

  “Yes! You know about her bracelet? When I asked Elise how it was found on an unidentified body fished out of the Cannes harbor, she said she thought she had sold it to someone named Delia. You know, for drug money.”

  Michelle looked like she had been slapped. Her hand flew to her face and her eyes filled with tears.

  Maggie put her teacup down with a clatter. “I am so sorry, Michelle! I thought you…you must have known that Elise…”

  “Yes, yes. She was an addict. I knew.” Michelle took a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. “It’s just that the last time I saw Elise, she was wearing the bracelet.”

  “Oh?”

  “So if she sold it for drugs it would have been after that.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “In January.”

  “In Cannes?”

  “No, my season does not begin down there until April. We met in Lyons.”

  “In Lyons? What was she doing there?”

  Michelle gave a heavy sigh and looked out the doorway to the large picture window at the front of the shop. From there, she could just see the movement of shoppers as they walked down the street.

  “I was older than Elise, but we were both artistes in our own ways. We met when she came into my shop one day after her art classes. When she was still living in Paris. We became friends. She wanted so much to be French, but it was her straightforwardness that I found so beguiling.”

  “She shot from the hip,” Maggie suggested.

  “Exactement. To be so beautiful and so honest is an intoxicating combination.”

  “Except she didn’t always tell the truth.”

  Zouk laughed. “No, of course not. I wasn’t talking of honesty in that way. Elise had many secrets and some of them were very bad. But we resonated, she and I.” She glanced at Maggie to see her reaction. “I loved her very much.”

  “And Gerard?” Maggie prompted.

  “When Elise met Gerard,” Zouk said, her cheeks darkening in anger, “everything started to die for her. We saw less and less of each other until, poof! Nothing. He moved her to his apartment—filthy pigsty!—in Montmartre. She would write me. We lived in the same city, but she would only write me!” Michelle’s eyes were wide and indignant. “Then, he dragged her and the child to the south.”

  “You met Nicole?”

  Michelle got up to rummage through the drawer of a bureau standing against a wall in the cramped little room. She returned holding a small photograph. She examined it carefully and then handed it to Maggie. Maggie felt her heart squeeze to see Elise, a few years younger and smiling sweetly at the camera. In her lap was eight-month-old Nicole, a thin and pallid baby with large eyes and dark hair. Maggie scrutinized the baby’s tiny face in an attempt to see a resemblance to the Nicole now living in Atlanta.

  “May I keep this?”

  Michelle sat back down. “Of course.”

  “I’m particularly interested in Elise’s whereabouts earlier this year,” Maggie said, tucking the photo carefully into her billfold. “Dubois filed a missing persons report on her when I have every reason to believe he knew she wasn’t missing at all.”

  “Why would he do that?” Michelle frowned.

  “Let’s just say he needed an inconveniently dead body to be identified as Elise for his own purposes.”

  “Incroyable.” Michelle tossed a small wadded-up paper napkin at the tea tray. “Monsieur Dubois is a swine and a jackal.”

  “We’re on the same page there, but can you tell me why he felt comfortable reporting her missing?”

  Michelle nodded. “It is because he knew that for several months this year she ceased to exist.”

  “Ceased to exist? What are you talking about?”

  “Elise was in a rehabilitation sanatorium in Lyons under a false name.”

  “What for?”

  “To kick the drugs.”

  “You paid for that?”

  Michelle nodded miserably. “Dubois knew she was there. So, of course, he knew it was safe to report her missing. But he must have come for her. All I was told was that she checked herself out.”

  “And I guess hearing that she sold her bracelet pretty much tells you she never got clean.”

  “Or if she did, it didn’t last long when Gerard Dubois showed up again.”

  “I really would like to get this scumbag. Even if he wasn’t the one who strangled her, he was definitely the one who killed her.”

  By the time Maggie had walked back to her hotel, she was too tired to eat. She had bought a jambon crepe at one of the outdoor kiosks, but it sat uneaten on her bedside table. Laurent hadn’t called all day, but that was just as well. She was exhausted and her mind was spinning from all the things she had learned from Michelle.

  She showered and fell asleep the moment her head hit the pillow.

  The next morning after breakfast, Maggie dropped off her room key at the front desk and left the hotel, heading north again toward Notre-Dame. There seemed to be even more people out this sunny but cool Thursday morning, and Maggie picked up her pace to join them in their hustle. Their hurry and urgency was in sharp contrast to the numerous cafés filled with happily idle coffee drinkers arguing politics and philosophy. As she hurried along, Maggie had another twinge of missing Laurent and wished they were just another couple mooning over each other and a cup of café au lait at one of the crowded tables.

  She hesitated when she reached Notre-Dame and had to fight the impulse to again take a seat on one of the stone benches in the cathedral gardens facing the Seine. The roses, in tender colors of pink and violet, were still in full
bloom in early October, and the air felt cool and invigorating. Even at eight in the morning there were lovers strolling the sidewalk bordering the Seine, and solitaires reading L’Express and munching on crusty baguettes. Maggie forced herself to move on. Hurrying across the Seine on Pont St-Louis, she spotted a Metro sign and jogged down its steep stairs to board the train to Montmartre.

  Maggie emerged from the underground station and entered a seedy world of cheap strip shows, porn cinemas and sex shops. Although still wearing its late-nineteen twenties Bohemian artist’s garb of dark and sooty grays, Montmartre had long since become mired in the oily underworld of drug lords and panderers. The street she came out on was filthy. The few reputable shops sold leather-studded costumes or pizza by the slice, and Ne Rodez Pas signs hung from most doorways. No loitering.

  As Maggie wandered through the squalid avenues, she could see the milky-white dome of the Basilica Sacré-Coeur peeking between the high apartment buildings. Her mother had taken her and Elise to Mass there as well. She wondered if Elise had ever taken her own daughter there.

  Turning away from Sacré-Coeur, Maggie headed west up Rue de Steinkerque, passing two-penny instant portrait artists and paper etchers snipping out a living doing die-cut portraits for the few brave tourists gripping their cameras and fanny bags. Noisome, shabby hucksters flapped the air with “original” Montmartre landscape watercolors and etchings. Maggie kept her eyes on the next street block and trudged ahead.

  She turned north onto Rue des Martyres and continued until it dead-ended into the Rue des 3 Frères, stopping only once to check the address on the slip of paper that Michelle had given her. There, at the intersection, was a small, dilapidated structure held together by what paint had not yet peeled off and the oil and grit of the neighborhood. L’Hôpital de Martyrs. This is where Elise had given birth to Nicole.

  Once inside, Maggie had the feeling she was stepping back in time. The velvet, buttery smell of wood oil permeated throughout the reception room. So strong and pleasant was the scent, in fact, that it succeeded in blotting out any aural hint of medicine or antiseptics in the small hospital. The loose wooden-slatted floor was polished to a satiny gleam. The admitting desk was as tall and forbidding as was the severe-faced nun who manned it. Her eyes were small and unfriendly, and her broad face, though smooth and unlined, was still obviously the face of an old woman.

  “Bonjour,” Maggie said as she approached the woman behind the desk. “Est-ce que je vous demande une question, s’il vous plait?” May I ask you a question?

  The nun, dressed in blue-black capes and a starched white headdress, looked at Maggie as though she did not understand.

  Maggie berated herself for not taking Michelle up on her offer to come along and interpret. She had been so keen to do this alone, almost as if the errand was a crusade for a final understanding of her sister. Maggie took in a determined breath.

  Before she could continue, the nun replied, “Yes, of course.”

  “Oh, thank God, you speak English.” Maggie said, smiling at the face of the stone wall in a habit. “Might I see the files for any American patients giving birth six years ago?”

  The nun looked away from Maggie and flipped through a large book on the desk. Abruptly, the sister left her post altogether, leaving Maggie standing on tiptoe on the other side of the counter not knowing whether she was heard and understood or dismissed. She noted there was very little activity in the waiting room area.

  A young mother sat with her baby, both gazing as if hypnotized out the front window. The waiting room chairs were rickety and wooden, but brutally polished and oiled and topped with handmade green velveteen cushions. Maggie got a mental image of a whole convent full of women sitting around stitching green velour pillows for the hospital waiting room, when it was certainly cheaper to buy pre-fab foam seat pads. Her eyes met those of the young mother.

  After a few moments, the stern-faced sister returned. She looked directly at Maggie. “Which year?”

  “Two thousand five,” Maggie said.

  The nun slapped a piece of paper and a pencil down on the counter and Maggie scrawled out the date and under that, the name “Newberry.” The woman looked at it and then twisted on her heel and disappeared again.

  Maggie turned to look around her and noted the bored young woman in the waiting room was now watching her openly.

  Within moments the nun was back with a folder. She indicated that Maggie was to take the folder to a straight-back wooden chair to the immediate left of the counter, where the nun would be able to keep her in sight at all times. Maggie settled into the uncomfortable chair, smiling gratefully at the sister.

  She opened the folder and found only one slip of paper inside. It was Nicole’s birth certificate. It read: Né l8 May. Mere: Elise Stevenson Newberry. Pere: inconnu. Unknown. Maggie felt a surge of anger at Gerard’s refusal to be accounted as the father and then corrected her emotion. The last thing any child would want was a document that linked her to that creep. Her face lightened into a smile. This meant that Gerard had no legal claim to Nicole!

  In the middle of the certificate was the full name of Elise’s baby, handwritten no doubt by one of the nuns, in full-flowery scroll: Margaret Nicole Newberry. Maggie stared at the words. Elise had named the baby after her.

  25

  Once outside, the sunshine hit her full in the face as the cool breeze of the late morning sent her hair billowing around her shoulders like a loose silk scarf. Elise had never told anyone Nicole’s full name Maggie thought as she hurried away from the shambling old hospital. No one knew and no one would ever have known unless they came to this desolate street in degenerate Montmartre. Even Michelle hadn’t known that Elise had named her only child after Maggie, her only sister.

  Maggie touched the pocket that held the birth certificate she had stolen from the file before slipping out the door unobserved. Her mother would be glad to have this, she thought. She would be glad to safely file this document away in the Newberry archives along with all the other family documents.

  She stopped at a stand-up pizzeria and bought a slice of pizza and a can of Coke and consumed her lunch as she walked down Boulevard de Clichy, a street as cheerless and ugly as any she’d found in Montmartre so far. Pigeons flocked and crowded her until she finally gave up the remainder of her lunch to them, scattering it in handfuls in the air and stepping away from the frenzy of feathers that resulted.

  The address that Michelle had given her for Elise’s old apartment was 1/2 Bijoux in Montmartre. She had been warned that it wasn’t a proper street and didn’t appear on any maps of the neighborhood, so she was prepared to have to hunt for it. Across from the Moulin Rouge, with its gaily-lighted blades, and before Clichy jammed into Rue Caulaincourt, Maggie could see the ghostly spires and columns of Montmartre Cemetery and she knew she was close. Michelle said that Elise would often write of the view of the cemetery from her flat.

  Maggie approached it slowly, looking around, trying to find in the rows and rows of ancient, towering apartment buildings the window that might have been Elise’s perch as she wrote to her friend, Michelle.

  She looked for numbers by the doors but there were none that she could see. The very brick of the buildings seemed to envelop her. She began to feel suffocated, even nervous. Elise lived here? It was just one more wretched street in a whole wretched neighborhood. But the fact that Gerard could bring Elise here—where she would live with her baby, little Nicole—was, in Maggie’s eyes, further evidence of the man’s guilt and general uselessness as a human being.

  The grim, stately stone markers of Montmartre Cemetery spread before her, its few large trees shading the dead, the celebrated and the wretched. Elise would have sat at her window in order to see the cemetery and to write Michelle, and she would have used this light by which to paint. Maggie felt a tremendous sadness and wished there were a place where she could sit down for a moment. To think that Elise had been living for three years in this slum, and her Atlanta famil
y had never had a clue.

  * * *

  “I went by Elise’s Paris flat today.” Maggie sat on her hotel bed, cradling her cellphone, a can of diet soda on the nightstand.

  “Ah, oui?” Laurent seemed in a better mood tonight. She assumed it had to do with the fact she was leaving Paris in two days.

  “It was just depressing.”

  “Your meeting with Michelle Zouk was helpful though, yes?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I learned what Elise was doing this year and how her being in rehab made it possible for Gerard to pass her off as dead, but I haven’t learned anything that relates to why she died in Atlanta, or by whose hand.”

  “I’m sorry, Maggie.”

  “Yeah, you were right. Coming was a mistake. It didn’t help and I’m not sure I don’t feel worse.”

  “You are leaving tomorrow, oui?”

  “No, the day after, unfortunately. But my flight is a morning one so I shouldn’t be in too late.”

  “Ach, I have an appointment in the evening. But I can cancel.”

  “No, Laurent. Is it one of your personal cheffing gigs? Just go. I can take a taxi to the apartment.”

  “If you are sure, chérie. I hate not to see you immediately.”

  “You’ll just have to give me a super warm welcome when you get home.”

  “You will have jet lag.”

  “Well, as long as we’re not talking trapezes or French maid costumes…”

  “Très amusant, Maggie. We will leave those for the weekend, of course.”

  “Oh, I miss you so much, Laurent. I’m so used to processing everything through you, it’s hard to have an independent thought.”

  “As it should be, chérie.”

  “Je t’aime, Laurent.”

  “Come home, chérie.”

  After they’d hung up, Maggie sat holding the phone for a few more minutes. Slowly, she stood up, replaced the phone on the nightstand next to her bed and went into the bathroom to splash cool water on her face. It was only seven in the evening and she didn’t feel like staying in her room, but she had no place she could think of to go. She tidied up her makeup and pulled a comb through her hair. She tied it back in a ponytail and stared at herself in the mirror.