*****
The house was a good house.
Maggie stood in the front drive while Laurent and Jean-Luc toured the vineyard. A large stone terrace splayed out from the front door in three tiers to the curving gravel drive. Oleander and ivy clustered against the fieldstone walls of the farmhouse in thick tangles of dark green. A black wrought-iron railing framed a second-story balcony that jutted out over the front door. The three bedroom windows upstairs were tall and mullioned with bright blue shutters.
The house looked sturdy. Towering Italian cypress and Tatarian dogwood flanked the front door. Hollyhocks pushed out of the tangle of bushes lining the driveway. A stone lion stood guard at the edge of the terrace, his head bowed, one ear mauled.
Laurent was so eager to see the vineyard, she thought with amazement, that he didn’t even stop to see where we would be living. She pushed open the heavy, wooden door of the house and stepped into a large foyer flooded with light on a floor of pale, yellowing stone tiles. A large marble staircase emptied into the foyer.
The downstairs comprised of only two rooms. The living room covered almost the entire ground level. It was forty feet square anchored by a massive fireplace on one wall, and French doors on the opposite wall that led to the garden. The other room downstairs was the kitchen. Not terribly modern, Maggie noted, when she found no dishwasher or disposal, but the sink didn’t appear as if it had seen any world wars and the cooking stove was large and capable-looking.
Leave it to the French to have a stove as large as a minibus but no automatic dishwasher.
Behind what Maggie initially thought was the door of a broom closet was a steep staircase that led to the basement. Maggie peered down the stairs into the dark and could make out three odd-shaped pieces of machinery. They stood in the corners like hulking spaceships. Old, stained oaken barrels lined the basement’s limestone walls. Each of the three bedrooms upstairs was large, airy and, of course, had no closets. As Maggie stood at one of the upstairs windows, as far as she could see, there were grapevines. Row upon row of grapevines.
My God, is all this Laurent’s?
From this height she could easily see Laurent and Jean-Luc as they walked back to the house through the vineyard.
She knew Jean-Luc and the Marceaus thought of them as visitors, foreigners―even Laurent, in a way. She tried to imagine what it felt like to be a visitor in your own country, to see it in all its beauty and familiarity and to know you would leave it to go back to someone else’s country.
She scanned the horizon—studded with clumps of rusty brown that she guessed were more grapevines. She wondered whose fields those were.
For this year, she thought resolutely, Domaine St-Buvard is going to be ours. But for whatever reason, as she watched Jean-Luc walking with Laurent, she felt a vague cloud of doubt descend upon her.
Murder in the South of France, Book 1 of the Maggie Newberry Mysteries Page 64