Murder à la Carte (15 page)

“And Maggie, you’ve really made it a home,” Elspeth said as she examined one of the original watercolors Maggie had picked up with Grace at an art festival in Arles. Tall oak bookcases flanked the French doors. Maggie had filled them with books and momentos from Atlanta and her week in Paris with Laurent before they had arrived in St-Buvard. A Sheffield candlestick, found by Grace in one of their Saturday morning trips to the Avignon flea market, had been turned into a lamp. Four heavy chairs, mismatched in damask and cotton fabrics of blue and rose and ochre, crowded the large couch that faced the enormous fireplace. Maggie had piled pillows from Lyons and Paris in all the chairs, pillows in colorful cottons, braided and tasseled and fringed. Every side table and coffee table held at least one vase of flowers from the Aix flower market―roses, petunias, zinnias, sunflowers. A worn, but still regal, Oriental rug stretched from the kitchen to the French doors.

“Honestly,” her mother said, appreciatively. “It all looks straight out of
Maison Marie-Claire!"

Everyone laughed.

“I have to admit,” Maggie said, looking about the room, “it’s been fun scouting out stuff for this place.” She looked at Laurent as he settled in one of the large, overstuffed chairs and took Nicole onto his lap. Nicole curled up in the crook of his arm and laid her head on his shoulder. 

"Est-ce que Nicole est fatiguée?"
Elspeth said softly to the child.

Nicole murmured an unconvincing
"non"
and closed her eyes.

“She misses you both,” Elspeth said, watching the two in the chair together.

"Où est la petite amie?"
Laurent asked, looking around the floor and then up at Maggie.
Where is the little pet?

“Outside. I thought I’d wait until hellos were over before I brought her in.” She turned to her Mother. “We have a new addition to the family.”

“It’s not a goat or something, I hope,” her mother said pleasantly, her eyes sparkling.

“Perhaps it’s a pig, dear,” John said with a straight face.

“Thank you, both of you,” Maggie said. “It’s neither. It’s a ground sloth and it’s indigenous to the region. A perfectly Provençal pet. In fact,” she said brightly, “it’s a gift for you!”

“What time does our train leave, dear?” John made a show of checking his watch to laughter from Maggie and Elspeth.

Laurent stood up with the child in his arms. “I think the ground sloth must wait. Will it upset her to awake in a strange bed?” he asked Elspeth.

Elspeth got up from the couch. “I’ll go with you, Laurent, to put her down,” she said, “Although, I’m sure she’ll be fine.” She gave Maggie a quick kiss. “I want to freshen up a little anyway, darling.” Elspeth followed Laurent up the wide marble stairs.

Maggie joined her father on the couch. She took his hand. “Mom didn’t leave us here alone because you’ve got some sort of bad news for me, did she?” 

Her father laughed. “I swear,” he said, “I have no news, good or bad, to report, except that I am very glad to see you looking so happy, darling. And you do look so happy.”

“Do I?” Maggie asked. “I am, but listen, how is Nicole doing? She looks great...”

John Newberry leaned back into an oversized quilted pillow on the couch. “She’s doing very well,” he said. “The problem comes because she sometimes does too well.” He looked back at Maggie and smiled sadly.

“Like how?” Maggie frowned.

“Well, we sometimes tend to forget her history and all she has had to overcome. I mean, she’s so smart, Maggie!” He looked eagerly at his daughter. “You can’t even tell she has a French accent, can you?”

Maggie shook her head and watched her father closely to try and determine if he was painting a rosier picture than was accurate.

“And she’s so damn cheerful all the time. Just like you were when you were her age...”

“And then, what?” Maggie motioned with her hand to indicate she was ready to hear the other shoe drop.

He sighed heavily and laid his hands palms downwards upon his knees. Maggie noticed he looked tired. In fact, she noticed, really for the first time, that he was looking old.

“And then she does or says something which reminds us all that she’s not a normal little seven-year-old with a happy, unblemished memory of her first years.”

“She’s not in therapy?” It wasn’t really a question. Maggie knew her niece wasn’t being seen by anyone.

“You know the answer to that,” her father said.

“Mother won’t allow it.”

“I’m not sure she’s wrong, darling. Nicole really is doing quite well.”

“Except for a few little mishaps here and there.”

“Which,” her father held up a finger and pointed at Maggie, “I’m not sure she wouldn’t suffer even in the hands of the finest psychotherapist.” He shrugged and flicked away dust from his pants cuffs. “We’re happy with her progress, darling. Quite happy.”

Maggie nodded with understanding and some resignation. Her niece did have a lot to overcome, from heartless first-graders who could hear that faint, tell-tale foreign accent in her voice, to the memory of the abuse she suffered as a toddler from strangers and relatives in her first home in France. Nicole had never known, nor would she ever know, her real mother. That’s a big bundle for a little kid, Maggie thought as she watched her father glance overhead to the sounds of Laurent and Elspeth’s footsteps upstairs.

“Come on, Dad,” Maggie said, tapping her father on the knee. “Give me a hand pulling the hors d’oeuvres out of the oven?” She stood up and smoothed out the lap of her knit cotton pants. “Laurent will undoubtedly tell you their per-bite value when he returns.”

“He said truffles were involved,” her father said, standing up.

“That’s what I mean. I’ll have to get a part-time job to cover the costs if I burn them.” Impulsively, Maggie turned and gave her father a tight hug. “Oh, Dad,” she said, smelling his familiar scent of tweed and soap, “I’m so glad y’all are here. It’s going to be a wonderful Thanksgiving.”

Laurent pulled the corks out of two bottles and looked at Maggie questioningly.

“Is that all?” he asked quietly.

She knew what he meant. He wasn’t belittling her fears by the question. He was asking if she had told him everything.

She hadn’t.

In the hour before Laurent had arrived with her parents and niece Maggie had decided, with Grace’s help, to keep Gaston’s earlier assault of two weeks ago to herself. The incident would only enrage Laurent, and the last thing she needed during her parents’ visit was to have Laurent off trying to murder some rat-bag grape-picker.

“I don’t want him here, Laurent.” Maggie pulled the second batch of truffle pies out of the oven and scrutinized their golden tops. “He was rude. He broke our flower pots.” She looked up at her lover and he was watching her. “He scared me.”

“He will not be here tomorrow,
chérie,"
he said, his deep brown eyes probing hers.
"Je te le promets." I promise you
.

3

The dates were circled on the calendar, it seemed to Grace, like angry red ovums. Indicting, mocking, nasty circles, blood-red, menses-red. She stood in the cold, stainless steel kitchen and slowly counted the days since ovulation as she had counted them nearly every morning for the last two weeks. Then she counted the days since her last period. Both of these goal dates were also circled. Days of shame and failure should she reach them and then bleed. Days of agonizing hope and distrustfulness should she reach them with no tell-tale verdict on her mini-pad. She shifted from one bare foot to the other and again counted the days, this time counting since the last time she and Windsor had made love. She tapped the end calendar date with her finger. Impossible, she thought. She shook her head and went to the refrigerator, careful not to make any noise. One wrong step, one creaking wooden slat, and Taylor would awaken and descend upon her.

Grace took a pitcher of orange juice from the refrigerator and poured herself a tall tumbler full. If sperm can live up to seventy-six hours, she reasoned, and the egg (or eggs) hadn’t spring boarded itself into the fallopian tubes until...she returned to the calendar and squinted at the circled dates...until, when? seventy hours later...She stood with her index finger pressed against yet another calendar date.
This is ridiculous. I’m banking on a seven-hour window of opportunity? Is that nuts? 

She sighed and drank the orange juice. Above her head, she could hear the rustling and then thumping noises that meant Taylor was awake.

She rinsed out her juice glass and, pulling her full-length silk dressing gown shut around her slim waist, went to the bottom of the stairs and listened. She had hoped to get a cup of coffee to herself before her day began, but that was not to be. The sounds of water thundering in the overhead pipes meant that Windsor was up too.

“Mommy!” The voice shrieked plaintively down the broad, winding staircase. “Mommy, come here!”

Grace continued to look up the stairs and wondered when they had skipped the part in Taylor’s education where she learned to say “please” and “thank you.” Before Grace had children, she had sat around her friends’ homes observing their little horrors, confident that these friends―although wonderful enough conversationalists and people―were completely useless as parents. She wondered, briefly, if Maggie thought that about her.

“I need you!” the little voice howled, the last word stretched out to nearly inhuman proportions. Grace was sure Windsor hid in the shower in the morning in order to avoid the duties of parenting Taylor, taking sometimes up to twenty or thirty minutes to wash and shampoo his hair. The coward, she thought, then felt suddenly uncharitable. After all, she reminded herself, he does drive her to and from school most days.

 Grace moved slowly up the stairs toward her screaming daughter. She resisted the urge to cover her ears as she approached the child’s bedroom, and instead swung open the door as if the sudden motion might shock the girl into silence.

“Mommy!” Taylor sat in the middle of her four-poster bed under a canopy of pink and white lace and chiffon. Her little hands lay calmly in her lap as if the screaming were simply a device, a tool to be dredged from her bag of parental manipulations, but had nothing to do with how the child actually felt at any particular time.

“Darling, what is all this shouting about?” Grace frowned and then began picking up last night’s frock, crumpled socks and underwear.

“I’m ready to get up,” the girl said, pouting.

“Well, sweetheart, you know you don’t have to―”

“And I want you to get my blue velvet dress for today.”

“Taylor, you don’t want to eat your breakfast in your good dress, do you?” Grace stooped and picked up the stack of magnetic blocks that had not been played with in weeks.

“Yes, I do.”

When will I learn to tell, not ask?
Grace looked at Taylor with resignation and fatigue. She was a beautiful child, all tumbling gold curls and large green eyes fringed with thick brown lashes. Her skin was as perfect as a porcelain doll’s. 

Grace continued to watch Taylor as the child leaned back on her lace pillows. She forced a smile for the child that she didn’t feel. Did she really have the energy to start this day― of all days―with a battle? And yet, if she didn’t, if she gave into her daughter this early, how did that bode for the rest of the day? Grace thought of all the excitement of the Thanksgiving Days of her girlhood. The wonderful aromas of foods cooking and baking, the anticipation of the big meal― so touted and mythologized for weeks in school via construction paper turkeys and silhouetted pilgrims―the family gathered, your best pinafore pressed and starched. She looked at her bad-tempered daughter and smiled.

“Well, okay,” Grace said. “We’ll just tuck lots of napkins around you, how’s that?”

The child scampered out of bed, flinging back her bedcovers to form a mountainous lump on the bed.

“I want pancakes!” she said, almost happily, pulling off her nightgown. Then she stopped and held it in her hands. “Where’s the puppy?” she asked, looking around as if it might be lurking somewhere within nipping range.

“Oh, he’s in Mommy and Daddy’s―”

“Well, I want to play with him. Bring him out.”

“Taylor, darling, you must say ‘please.’” Grace dropped her armful of dirty clothes into a nearby clothes hamper. “We’re going to Monsieur and Madame Dernier’s house for―”

“Please, bring me the puppy, Mommy.” Taylor dropped her nightgown on the floor at Grace’s feet and turned to rummage in one of the drawers of her antique French Country dresser.

“In a moment, Taylor,” Grace said, scooping up the discarded nightgown. “Now, you know the rules of behavior when you go visiting, right?”

“Mommy, I want my pink panties and they’re not here.”

“Taylor, what did I just tell you―?”

“Please, get me my pink panties.” Taylor turned and frowned at Grace. “Pleeeeease, Mommy? Pleeeeease! Nowwwwww!”

For someone who’s supposed to have perfect pitch, it was an amazingly awful sound, Grace thought, as she stood in her nude and howling daughter’s bedroom. As she listened to it and the sounds of Windsor’s never-ending shower, she felt a heavy sadness creep over her. It certainly looked to be the beginning of a Thanksgiving Day that all of them would long remember as a cherished family holiday.

4

The baker stood at Maggie’s front door, her cheeks flushed red with the cold. She wore a dark woolen cape and held a basket of small olive loaves, still steaming and fragrant through their cloth cover.

“You are Madame’s
maman, n’est-ce pas?"
she said to Elspeth as the front door swung open to her.
"Je suis Madame Renoir
. A friend.” 

Elspeth, who wore dark lavender wool trousers and a heavy cotton cardigan in the same shade over a pink turtleneck, smiled at the rotund woman, who was enshrouded in dark blues and black.

“
Veuillez, Madame,"
Elspeth said, in impeccable French as she invited the woman into the house.
"Ma fille aimerait que vous veniez, je suis sûr.
”
I am sure my daughter would want you to come in.