I tried to appear as though this was old news to me. “Which pieces were those?” I asked. “Maybe the, uh, Caravaggio?”
The Italian Renaissance artist was the first who came to mind, probably because I’d read an article on the train on the way to Saint-Malo. One of his works had recently been auctioned for more than a hundred million euros. Danny, ever the expert, had always told me that specificity sells. When you’re trying to convince someone you know what you’re talking about, you have to employ some pertinent details. Freewheeling wouldn’t cut it.
In this case, I apparently oversold my insider status.
“Monsieur Vetault had a Caravaggio?” Madame Moreau gawked at me.
Quickly, I backpedaled. “It’s so hard to keep track of all the artists, isn’t it? I’ll confess, I’m not an expert.”
Fabrice Poyet was. Nathalie had confided earlier that along with being wealthy, successful, caring, multilingual, and punctual, her fiancé also had been educated at the prestigious Sorbonne in Paris. I was probably fortunate he wasn’t there.
I didn’t need anyone else eyeing me in the pitying way that Madame Moreau was doing just then. Feebly, I waved my hands.
“I’m simply, uh, trying to take care of some unfinished business for the family,” I said. “Any information would help.”
“Ah, oui. I see. Well, I am afraid I cannot tell you anything more. I was sadly unable to keep my appointment with Monsieur Vetault, so I do not know what he was interested in offering.”
I kept pushing. “Do you have any guesses? As an expert?”
Danny had also mentioned that well-placed flattery was good. I’m afraid I don’t have his easy amiability, though—at least not when I’m trying to wheedle information from someone.
“As an expert? Non.” Charlotte gazed around her flawlessly curated shop and its myriad objets d’art. “As a friend? Peut-être.” Maybe. She leaned nearer to me while Capucine and Nathalie browsed her wares an aisle away. “You must know that Monsieur Vetault was planning to leave Saint-Malo, n’est-ce pas?”
I’d been right. I wanted to offer a celebratory fist pump. I settled for a sage, composed nod. “Of course, but . . .”
Helpfully, I left that sentence unfinished, as a prompt.
Charlotte took my starter and ran with it. “But I don’t believe he was planning to bring Madame Vetault along with him. Vous comprenez, oui?” You understand, yes? “Yet he did not want to leave so much of his family heritage at the château. Some, he wanted to take with him. Other items, he wished to sell. Monsieur Vetault believed he had one or two valuable pieces. He did not mention to me a Caravaggio, however. I am very interested.”
Whoops. Like Travis, I was terrible at subterfuge. I already regretted my improvised “detail” about Monsieur’s items for sale. For all I knew, all his artwork was paint-by-number.
Or whatever the old-time equivalent of it was.
For evasion’s sake, I tried some misdirection. “Do many people in Saint-Malo have valuable things to sell?” I asked, trying to appear as though my day depended on hearing the answer. “Is that where most of your pieces come from? Locally?”
“Some are local. Others come from Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, and elsewhere,” Madame Moreau told me cheerfully. “All over the world. I do keep a few pieces on hand for the tourists.”
She indicated some colorful Breton Quimper pottery nearby, displayed on a prominent shelf. You’d probably recognize its stylized “petite bretonne.” She’s often shown in profile, with her traditional headpiece and aproned dress. Made in Bretagne, Quimper pottery is known worldwide and has been for centuries.
“We are all fiercely proud of our patrimoine, of course. But that does not mean a few pieces cannot be sold here or there, to make ends meet. I offer fair prices to everyone.”
I nodded. That sense of patrimoine (heritage) had most likely killed Monsieur. I didn’t particularly want to hear any more about it.
But Charlotte Moreau didn’t require my continued interest. She was off and running by then, telling me about ancient wars fought on Breton soil—and world wars fought there, too. She spun stories about soldiers with battle spoils, grandmothers with diamond jewelry squirreled away in cake tins, and relatives inheriting fortunes. To me, it all sounded like nonsense—modern fairy tales designed to separate customers from their money, especially since I had the feeling Madame Moreau had told these stories many times before. By the time she was finished, even Capucine and Nathalie had joined us. They listened raptly.
Danny would have been the same way, I had to admit. You might not expect it, but his guilty pleasure is Antiques Roadshow. He loves it, especially when times are tough and he wants to zone out for a while. I was pretty sure he kept a few episodes downloaded to his laptop at all times for emergencies.
But even Danny would have been skeptical of Madame Moreau’s stories. To hear her talk, antiques were societal superglue.
“That is why it is so critical to honor our patrimoine,” Charlotte was saying. “Without our traditions—without the treasured items that go along with them—we are rootless as a people. If we allow everything to change, who will we be? Once lost, the memory of the past is gone forever, n’est-ce pas?”
Nathalie and Capucine nearly applauded at her rousing finish, making me realize that you apparently needed a few French genes to appreciate patrimoine and all its subtleties.
I felt far less impressed than that—especially once it occurred to me that I still didn’t know what type of weapon had killed Monsieur. I’d been assuming a garden implement, given the descriptions I’d heard, but it could have been anything.
Even something like the old tools, kitchen implements, and gilt-edged, overpriced knickknacks found at Antiquités Moreau.
I gave Madame Moreau a suspicious look and got on with my next task: lining up my speaking engagement at the next day’s small business club meeting. Travis hadn’t left me with much time to prepare. While I’m an acknowledged expert in il cioccolato, I’m not a proficient public speaker. I wanted to know what types of things Charlotte’s group might be interested in learning about.
Chocolate? Traveling? Entrepreneurship? Strictly speaking, I’m a small-business owner myself, so I figured I could come up with something useful. We confirmed that the meeting was scheduled for ten o’clock in the morning—how French, to close all the shops once per month for their meeting—and then Nathalie, Capucine, and I said our au revoirs to Charlotte.
Outside in the bustling cobblestone street, I tried to steer the three of us in the opposite direction from La Maison des Petits Bonheurs, hoping to avoid stirring up more memories for Nathalie. But instead, Philippe’s daughter seemed to deliberately veer toward the chocolaterie. Her footsteps slowed as she neared the shop. I doubted it was a conscious decision.
As it turned out, I did the same thing. That’s how we all came to be standing in the shadow of an old French church, next to some potted flowers, gazing wistfully at my mentor’s shop.
The scene was almost too idyllic. Shoppers and seaside residents went about their business, exchanging greetings of bonjour! Merchants stocked their wares; more flowers bloomed at the sides of the stone buildings, climbing upward on vines.
I glimpsed burly Mathieu, his bald head crowned by a cook’s head kerchief, hard at work inside the chocolaterie. If Philippe had been beside him working on a fondant or dipping chocolates, this would have seemed like any other weekday in Brittany.
Next door, the jam shop’s door opened. I took a reflexive step back, wary of another confrontation with Clotilde Renouf. But it was Travis’s favorite policière, Mélanie Flamant, who emerged, notebook in hand as she jotted down what I assumed were case notes. About Monsieur’s murder or another crime?
I didn’t know. But I did know I was irked that Mélanie had only just now decided to interview Madame Renouf. I’d gotten there a full day earlier, and I wasn’t a professional police officer.
Her apparent laxity didn’t exactly endear
her to me. I wanted the full force of the law to come down on whoever had killed my mentor. I wanted an investigation that never slept.
Madame l’agent saw us and offered a curt wave. We all returned it, me (possibly) with slightly less enthusiasm than my friends.
“Poor Mélanie,” Nathalie said as we watched the uniformed gendarme walk away. “I feel quite sorry for her, to be honest.”
I hadn’t expected that. I frowned. “Why is that?”
Maybe because she’s so slipshod about her work, I thought. But Philippe’s daughter had a different reason in mind.
“Because Saint-Malo is still a provincial town in many ways,” she explained. “Here, progress moves slowly. Mélanie Flamant used to be a teacher in primary school, a position she left to become a police officer a few years ago. It is difficult for her to prove herself. Some of her colleagues harass her.”
Oh. For the first time, I felt a glimmer of solidarity with the gendarme. In many ways, the professional kitchens and other places I work in are still a man’s world, full of machismo and bawdy jokes. I didn’t doubt the same applied to law enforcement.
“Well, she should arrest them!” Capucine stated, indignant.
“Nastiness is not a crime. Malheureusement.” Unfortunately.
We stood across from the chocolaterie, united in our outrage. It wasn’t fair that Mélanie Flamant—or any of us—weren’t allowed to do our work in peace . . . which only reminded me of Mathieu’s intolerant attitude toward women and business.
He glowered at us from the shop’s window. We scattered.
“He is a prickly one!” Nathalie said as she tossed one final glance at Mathieu. “Now, it is time we returned to the château, non? Fabrice will be wondering where I am.” As we walked toward the city walls, she confided, “Ever since he arrived to meet me, mon amour has been so kind with me.”
That was sweet. I said so, feeling pleased that at least Nathalie had someone to care for her at this traumatic time.
Then, motivated by another, less altruistic impulse, I pushed further. “The two of you didn’t arrive at the same time?” I strived for an informal, interested tone. “I thought you had.”
Because after all, establishing alibis began with dates and times, right? I’d learned that much during my other exploits. I didn’t have a police badge to help me get answers, but I had guile—and also, I reflected with regret, a bit of shamelessness.
I shouldn’t have been questioning Nathalie at all. Yet she might be the key to Fabrice, as well. It was a two-for-one deal.
“Oh no. I arrived home almost immediately after Maman phoned me. I didn’t come downstairs to mingle with our guests right away, but I dropped everything to come for poor Papa.”
Capucine and I murmured our regrets again. It was so sad.
“I wished I’d already been here for his retirement fête,” Nathalie added in a remorseful tone. She glanced at us while we dodged pedestrians near the city hall. “It is funny how quickly priorities return when a tragedy strikes. Until Papa died, I—”
Nathalie broke down in tears. We stopped at the edge of the street so that Capucine and I could do our best to comfort her.
A short while later, she wiped her eyes. She sniffed, then gave a weak smile. “You are both so kind. Thank you. If not for you both, Fabrice, and everyone . . . I do not know what I would do.”
I hated myself for doing it, but I still wanted to know when her fiancé had arrived. “Then Fabrice is helpful for you?”
“Mais, bien sûr!” But of course! “That is what is so lovable about him. He has comforted me every step of the way.” Her earnest gaze met mine. “The first night was difficult—”
“Without him?” I guessed in my gentlest voice.
Nathalie nodded. “But since then, and as soon as he could, Fabrice has been by my side.” Another smile. “Except for shopping, of course! Like most men, he does not enjoy that!”
We all laughed and piled into my Citroën for the drive back to château Vetault. Along the way, I was able to glean a few more details about Nathalie and Fabrice—enough to convince me, at least, that neither of them had plotted Monsieur’s murder.
As awful as it sounded, it had to be considered. If I suspected my mentor’s wife, then I also had to suspect his daughter and his future beau fils, too. But since neither of them had arrived in Saint-Malo until after Philippe’s death, they were both cleared. That left Hélène, Hubert, Clotilde, Mathieu (I shuddered, remembering the dark look he’d given us from the shop’s window), and (maybe) Charlotte Moreau.
Travis wouldn’t have agreed with my suspicion of the seductive antiques shop owner, but I knew someone who might.
It was time to call Danny and compare notes again.
Fourteen
In the hours between my shopping expedition with Capucine and Nathalie and the earliest acceptable time to call Danny (given the time-zone difference between our two locations), I did what I usually did when at loose ends: make chocolates.
I began with truffles, even though they weren’t a specialty of Brittany. I felt in a Parisian state of mind after hanging around cool indie director Capucine. Let me tell you: the French capital city is bursting with exquisite chocolates, including truffles, in all kinds of exotic and scrumptious flavors. Some contained liqueur; others, hand-harvested vanilla beans or toasted hazelnuts; others, salted butter caramel. A few I dipped; others, I rolled in cocoa powder or flaked coconut.
I sampled a couple, of course—strictly for the sake of quality control—and found myself feeling better right away. Partly that was because of the inevitable rush of sugar and cacao. Partly it was because I’d put Lucas Lefebvre’s music on my phone, so it was ready when I donned my headphones. Partly it was because I was working in Monsieur’s barn-atelier and therefore felt close to him again, especially after I swapped my new knit cap for Philippe’s favorite Breton fisherman’s hat.
Feeling nostalgic, I snapped a selfie to remember it by. It would have been nicer to have a photo of me and Monsieur together, but when we’d shared that afternoon, I’d had every reason to think we’d have all the time in the world for photos.
I decided right then and there to treasure every single photo op that came my way in the future. With everyone. After all, I reasoned, you never knew when it would be your last chance to capture a moment with someone you cared about.
I double-checked my selfie to make sure it had turned out—because it wouldn’t do to remember my mentor and his atelier with a blurry, useless snapshot—and noticed another notification on my phone. I’d silenced it while shopping with Nathalie and Capucine, so I hadn’t realized I’d missed a text from Danny.
I opened it, looking forward to hearing from him. Aside from sharing useful information with me while I was sleuthing, Danny also often sent me funny texts—acerbic observations about whatever he was up to. My old pal had a flair for seeing through the ridiculousness of everyday life. Like me, he liked to share.
I wasn’t prepared for what he shared this time, though.
It was a photo of the murder weapon in Monsieur’s case—an official one, judging by the looks of it. I had no idea how Danny had gotten a hold of it. Unlike Travis, he didn’t have prominent, well-connected friends . . . but he did have friends.
One of them—maybe someone from the bad old days—had passed along this piece of gendarmerie evidence to Danny, and to me.
Beneath the photo, he’d texted two words: Any guesses?
I was startled to realize (now that I could see that horrible object in its entirety) that I did have a few guesses what it was—including one I was sure was right. Because the thing someone had stabbed Philippe with wasn’t a gardening tool or an antiquated knickknack. It was an implement for working with chocolate—specifically, a huge, multipronged fork called a “chocolate chipper,” used for (you guessed it) making chocolate chips from a massive, multikilo confectioner’s block of cacao.
Had another chocolatier killed Philippe?
&nb
sp; I couldn’t be sure. The weapon wasn’t as damning as it might seem. I, for instance, was one chocolatier who’d only used a chocolate chipper once or twice. I’d found it unwieldly and had reverted to chopping my chocolate with a meticulously sharpened chef’s knife instead. But my methods weren’t every chocolatier’s methods. Were they Mathieu’s methods? I wondered.
Had Monsieur’s other protégé stabbed him that night?
At the snail’s pace the policiers were investigating, it might be weeks before anyone found out. In the meantime, Mathieu Camara was still working in my mentor’s chocolaterie, daring to toss dirty looks at Nathalie Vetault, me, and Capucine Roux. For all I knew, Mathieu was planning to target one of us next.
If he’d somehow sneaked into the château’s garden last night and switched off the landscape lights, he might have been the one who’d grabbed me. That man’s grip had been very strong.
I didn’t know anyone more muscle-bound than Mathieu, except for Danny. But I stopped myself before I could get carried away.
The logical thing to do was to find out if Mathieu could even identify a chocolate chipper. It was possible that, here in Brittany, chocolate makers didn’t use such tools. It wasn’t a universal craft, practiced the same way everywhere. I had to give Monsieur’s chosen trainee the benefit of the doubt, right?
I took another glance at that incriminating photo. Nope.
I texted Danny a thank-you note, along with a few more questions. Then, in the time it would take for my bodyguard pal to wake up and answer me, I took myself back to the walled city.
* * *
The thing about conducting an amateur murder investigation is that, well, you’re an amateur. Although the word can translate variably to “admirer, fan, or enthusiast” in French, I wasn’t a native French speaker or in any way a “fan” of untimely death. That meant that, in this case, I was just what you’d expect: someone who was decidedly unprofessional at something.
So I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to wend my way through the picturesque vieille ville (old town) and arrive at the Vetaults’ chocolaterie, only to find that someone else had gotten there before me. But if you’re thinking it was Mélanie Flamant and her fellow gendarmes, you’re a serious optimist.
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