“Jean-Luc!” she screamed. “Why is Zou-zou sleeping so much? What’s wrong with her?” She was up the stairs before she even thought to put her drink down first and spilled most of its contents down her forearm and the front of her dry cotton sweater. Jean-Luc was behind her on the stairs and the two of them burst into Zou-zou’s room, knocking a lamp over in the process and breaking a small picture frame that had been hung too close to the light switch.
The child lay immobile and oblivious to the noise.
“Zou-zou! Zou-zou!” Grace cried, reaching into the bed and pulling the dead weight of the baby into her arms. She turned to Jean-Luc, her face a mask of terror and disbelief. “What’s the matter with her?”
“It’s nothing, Madame!” Jean-Luc said, starting between the two in horror and biting his lip. Grace could see he was blinking rapidly and rubbing his face with a trembling tic. “There was a problem…”
“What kind of problem?” Grace roared. “Zou-zou, baby, Zou-zou, sweetheart, wake up now, lambie, wake up, honey.”
“She…I…she was so hungry and she cried so pitifully that I could not send her to bed hungry,” Jean-Luc said, his face full of misery and shame.
“What did you do?” Grace shrieked, clutching her unresponsive child.
“The milk was bad!” Jean-Luc said. “I had to give her something so I gave her a glass of Laurent’s chocolat liqueur. She was starving!”
Grace looked at Jean-Luc and then Zou-zou, who was beginning to rouse herself.
“Laurent’s chocolat liqueur,” she said. “That’s like ninety proof or something, isn’t it?”
“I cut it with water,” Jean-Luc said, “but I couldn’t give her just water and there was nothing else. She cried so bitterly, Madame.”
Grace sagged onto a chair at the foot of the bed, little Zou-zou yawning and stretching in her lap. “So, the little sot’s drunk?”
“Not at all, Madame!” Jean-Luc said indignantly. “She is just…very relaxed.”
“Maman?” Zou-zou looked up at Grace and grinned. “Zou-zou wants Oncle Laurent’s chocolate milk!”
Grace felt the hysterical laughter welling up inside her, and when Zou-zou turned to Jean-Luc and held out her arms to him, she released her daughter to the adoring grandpère who had just coordinated her first bender and sat in the chair, laughing and crying into her hands.
* * * *
“I killed Jacques,” Florrie said. “And then I was forced to kill Annette, too. But of course, you knew that, didn’t you?” He looked at Maggie and smiled as if he’d just asked her for her assessment of his latest soup special at the bar.
“Well,” Maggie said, the exhaustion of dealing with and waiting for each contraction sapping her strength to the point where she knew she didn’t have the energy to open her own door, let alone rescue herself, “all I can say is it must be a boatload of money for you to go through all this.”
Florrie slapped the steering wheel with his hand, but when Maggie looked at him she saw that he was laughing. “That’s the absurdity of it, don’t you see? It isn’t a boatload at all. It’s the opposite of a boatload.” He shook his head but continued to grin as if the joke was just too good.
Maggie stared at him for a moment before it hit her. “Lily was broke.”
“C’est ca.”
“And you were handling her money.”
He wasn’t laughing now. In fact, his face took on a fierce intensity as if he had had this argument in the mirror many times over. “There was this amazing opportunity last year. It was virtually a guarantee.”
The Mistral Promise.
“I would have been rich.” He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe that it didn’t turn out like that. “I borrowed the money from Lily’s estate. I fully intended to return it when I won. No one would ever know. When I lost, I thought, no problem, I have plenty of time to replace it before anyone discovers it.”
“And then you learned that she was going to die sooner rather than later.”
“Not only that, I discovered that I was not the one to inherit. The theft would be discovered in a matter of weeks. Can you imagine anyone in the world more likely to prosecute me for embezzlement than Jacques? I would go to jail!”
“After all you’d done for Lily, you must have been bitter.”
“Let’s just say I won’t mourn her. I wasted enough time on her while she lived.”
Maggie thought it had been several minutes since her last contraction. She wondered if labor had stopped. Is that possible? Maybe it was another false labor? But her water broke. To answer the question once and for all, she was seized by the beginning build of another monstrous spasm. She grabbed the door handle and bit her lip as the pain charged her.
When it was over, she felt like she was seeing her situation with a startling clarity that had eluded her before, had eluded her, in fact, for the last three months of her pregnancy. It was clear to her now: Talking was not going to save her from this madman—as reasonable and measured as he sounded. If she and her baby were going to survive this terrible day, Maggie was going to have to actually escape.
“So that’s why it was important for Lily to die after Annette,” she said. “So that Michelle won’t inherit.”
“Yes, but in the end it doesn’t really matter. I’d hope we could all go back to the way we were but I can see now we can’t. With me in exile it will all default to Michelle.”
“Who’ll inherit a big pile of nothing.”
“At least she can’t sue me. I’ll be unreachable by then.”
“Why…why did you come after me?”
“I told you. Annette told me that you knew that I’d killed Jacques. Frankly, she and Michelle had become pretty obsessed with you.”
Annette must have just been talking out of her ass to try to delay the inevitable.
I know how she feels.
“I needed to explain to you what really happened. Then, once I’m gone, you’re welcome to tell the police everything you know.” Florrie said, looking over at her. If the cold, forced smile he gave her was supposed to be reassuring, it failed. “I was impressed, you know. Even Annette didn’t guess until the end.”
Neither did I, Maggie admitted. “And by the end, you mean...”
“I gave her every opportunity to share the wealth with me.”
“The nonexistent wealth.”
“Yes, well Annette didn’t know that.”
“You asked her to marry you so she couldn’t testify against you?”
“C’est ca.”
“I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have stopped her.”
“All the more reason why she had to die. Frankly, I’d originally hoped they would pin Jacques’s murder on her. She was with him that night, too.”
“The night he died? Well, they wouldn’t do that because she had a special connection inside the police force.”
“What? Annette was sleeping with someone on the police force? Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“The head of the police, yes.” She was totally blowing smoke right now but until she came up with a plan, she would need to keep him talking. “Why else do you think she was never considered a serious suspect in his murder?”
“I wondered about that.”
“So you framed Julia for it.”
He shrugged again. “It was easy because of her obsession with mushrooms, and besides, she’s English. What did Jacques want with an Englishwoman? He certainly couldn’t marry her.”
“Oh, right. That would’ve totally tainted the gene pool. Are we stopping?”
Not good.
Maggie put her hands on the dashboard to prevent herself from sliding forward as Florrie steered the car off the road. The light was dying now. Maggie could see by the dashboard clock that it was 5:45 p.m. She should have realized that they were not heading in the direction of Aix and the hospital. She’d been so busy alternately screaming in agony and chatting with a killer that she’d hadn’t noticed.
It was a dark stretch of road, and as Maggie sat there with Florrie and the pings and clunks of the dying engine sounding in the quiet, she realized that there were no other cars on the road. The bushes and trees on the opposite side of the road grew tall and dense and blocked out what light there had been from the waning day. There were a few scrub bushes on the side of the road where the car was stopped, but no trees.
They were poised at the lip of a cliff.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Laurent arrived at the Alexandre home gasping and out of breath. A mile by road, he had vaulted over dry stone walls and cut between the vines in the vineyard to make it to the front steps in under ten minutes. The house was dark, so there was only the hope now that the phone worked. He entered, absently greeted the two Pyrenean Shepherds that Jean-Luc doted on like children, and pushed his way to the comfortable French country kitchen. He snatched up the phone hanging on the wall and immediately got a dial tone.
As he was racing over to the house, he had put together in his mind as many scenarios as he could process, discarding them one after the other as they refused to fit the puzzle. There was no sense in trying to recreate when he last had his phone or where he might have left it. He hadn’t seen it in days.
Someone had texted Maggie three hours earlier using his phone and lured her to Florrie’s bar. Why there? It was remote and often empty, but there could be no guarantee of privacy. Someone had disabled the Renault in order to ensure that Grace was taken out of the picture. The stretch of road that she traveled was notorious for no cellular service. Even if she had tried to use her phone she would not have been able to alert anyone in time to prevent…Laurent dialed the number and waited impatiently for the other line to pick up.
Maggie was alone at Florrie’s bar. If it was the crazy woman who tried to attack her with the cricket bat last week, perhaps today she had graduated to a knife or a gun. He glanced at his watch. It was a quarter to six. She wouldn’t need a two-hour window to kill Maggie.
But that was what she had.
“Allo?”
Laurent spoke in brief, abrupt Parisian French. He tended to alter his speech for the general comfort of the prickly natives from this region, but today he had no patience or time for such courtesies.
“I’m sorry, but due to the Aix-en-Provence Policemen’s Ball tonight, there is only a skeleton staff of officers on patrol this evening and all complaints must be triaged. A tourist’s complaint—I assume, Monsieur that you are from Paris? —of a wife lost in a bar would be relatively low on the priority list even with a full staff of—”
Laurent slammed the phone down and dug out the business card from the front pocket of his jeans. Quickly he punched in the number and stood by the kitchen window watching as the light faded and the rain came down.
The call went straight to voice mail.
He left an abrupt message, hung up then turned to jerk open the front door. He plunged into the sheet of rain pouring off the roof eaves and ran up the long dark driveway toward the main road and the village, sheltered from the worst of the storm by the tunnel of hovering trees.
* * *
When she emerged naked and dripping from the shower and snapped her fingers at him to get his attention, Roger had just picked up his phone to check to see if he’d gotten any messages. It had been four hours since Annette Tatois’s body had been found. He’d agreed to let that moron, Manet, handle it for the experience—plus Roger’s attendance at the ball was mandatory—but he would need to stay on top of it.
“A towel, chérie?” he said as he stood up, mesmerized by her confidence and audacity as she stood before him dripping water on the carpet.
“Later,” she said, crooking a finger at him and smiling lasciviously.
Roger dropped the phone on the bed and began unbuttoning his dress shirt.
After all, the ball isn’t for another hour and Manet can probably handle a lot more than I give him credit for.
* * *
“Something appears to be wrong with the car,” Florrie said, sitting in his seat and staring straight ahead. He turned to look at her and shrugged. “It just stalled.”
“You know, Florrie…” Maggie tried to keep her voice as casual and nonthreatening as possible. “I have to tell you that when my friend gets home, Laurent will know that the text was fake.”
He shrugged. “Haven’t you wondered why no one has called before now?”
Maggie was not going to tell him it was because her phone was dead.
“I punctured the gas tank of your car,” he said, matter of factly. “At this moment your friend is either on the side of the road somewhere in the pouring rain—I must apologize for the poor cellular reception in this part of the country—or she’s lost control of her vehicle on the D7 and is in the city morgue. In any case, she won’t be bringing help. Your husband is not worried or waiting for you to return, as he has no reason to believe anything is amiss.”
Maggie felt her chest hitch painfully. She pulled at the collar of her tunic as if that might help her breathe easier. She felt the perspiration pop up across her forehead.
Not coming? Was it possible that nobody was coming?
Her stomach lurched in nausea and she felt her hands start to shake as she watched as Florrie twist in his seat and pull a backpack from the back, and then jam the car keys into his jacket pocket. Something was about to happen. Something bad.
“Surely you don’t think you can get away with killing two people,” she said, hearing the fear and desperation in her voice. Or three or four...? Maggie didn’t know if he was going to strangle her in the car or leave her to deliver her own child before she died of massive blood loss, but either way the prospect wasn’t good.
“I told you, I just need to delay things long enough to slip away. There’s a steamer leaving Marseille tonight. I’ll be in Oujda before the cops even think to look for me.”
“Morocco doesn’t have a reciprocal arrangement with France?”
“Let’s just say I’ll be able to live out my life there in comfort and anonymity.”
“Look, if you’re looking for a head start, I can promise not to speak to the police until you’re well and truly gone. Trust me, I have many hours ahead of me where I’ll be sufficiently distracted by other things.” She put both hands on her stomach.
He hesitated. “I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that I would hurt you,” he said. “I’m not a killer, you know.”
Of course not! Psycho!
“Of course not,” she said. “Can you get me to the emergency room in Aix?”
“I would, but the car is broken down.”
“Oh, right.” Maggie began to feel the beginnings of the next powerful contraction.
“Do you have a cell phone?” he asked gently.
“I—I do, but it’s…it’s dead.”
“May I see it?”
She handed it to him so he could confirm it was useless.
“Too bad,” he said. “I was going to take it and call an ambulance for you.”
“Don’t you have a phone?”
How about Laurent’s phone? Don’t you still have that, you disgusting rodent?
“Oh, sure!” he said, patting a pocket that didn’t have a bulge large enough to conceal a cellphone. “So that’s what I’ll do. I’ll call as soon as I’m down the road a ways. The reception here is very bad. Well, Madame, I am sorry again, for everything that’s happened, but I wish you and Laurent and the little one every possible health and happiness.
Unbelievable!
“Yeah, okay, thanks,” Maggie said as she felt the next contraction gaining ground on her. “Can I just ask you, before you go…?” She held her breath—like that was going to be any good in mitigating the tsunami of pain bearing down on her.
“Of course. Anything.”
“How did…how did you kill Jacques?” Maggie knew she wouldn’t be lucid to hear the answer. Her mind had gone somewhere safe while her body worked to destroy her from the inside
out. But the words rang in the car even so. They embedded themselves in the very vinyl and plastic and metal of the car’s interior—her own private torture chamber. And somehow, she heard.
“We met for drinks every Saturday,” he said pleasantly, as if remembering a happier time. “For the six weeks before he died, I coated his glass with ground dust from the agaricus mushrooms that I acquired online.
“Jacques sickened immediately, but took six weeks to actually die. The police never looked at my computer. They never examined my glassware. In fact, if not for you, Madame—a little terrier with a bone!—I think I could have called this the perfect crime.”
As Maggie pawed at the dashboard to try to get back her equilibrium, Florrie opened his car door and heaved out his backpack. “I can see you’re busy trying to get this baby born,” he said jovially, “so I’ll leave you to it and make that phone call. Good luck!”
He exited the car and slammed the door.
It wasn’t until after Maggie fought her way through another mammoth contraction that left her sweating and weak that she felt the car moving.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Maggie twisted to look through the back window to see Florrie, his face straining purple with exertion, as he heaved his body against the back end of the car. She whirled around to the gearshift to see it had been put into neutral. The car made another lurch forward and Maggie screamed as she saw the ground disappear in front of the car hood and felt the vehicle fall into a dramatic slant forward as if falling into a ditch, slamming her against the dashboard. She thought she could actually hear Florrie grunting with effort as the car’s nose dropped steeply, its front tires spinning free and revealing nothing but sky and encroaching darkness before her.
She grappled frantically for the car door but it was locked. She fumbled for the auto lock on the handle but it wasn’t there. She couldn’t help turning again to look at Florrie, whose only focus appeared to be pushing as if his life depended on it. She saw a glimpse of satisfaction cross his features as he gave a loud expulsion and heaved against the car. Maggie screamed, and for one mad moment had a memory of her first roller coaster ride where she was suspended high above a theme park only to drop in a blinding squeal to the next death-defying peak.
Murder in Aix (The Maggie Newberry Mystery Series Book 5) Page 25