Murder in Nice (15 page)

“
Darling, I
live
here, remember?
Laurent never yells at you.”

“
That may be true, but he
has a raised eyebrow that can scorch.”

“
But as far as whatever’s
going on with him, I really think you need to grab this
particular
toro
by
the horns.”

“
Laurent doesn’t respond
well to the direct approach.”

“
He responds very well
to
your
approach,
dear. You need to talk to him.”

“
It’s a
thought.”

“
Darling, I’ll put this in
plain language for you:
Come home, your
husband needs you
.”

Maggie laughed.

“
I’m serious,
Maggie.”

“
Grace, trust me, he
wouldn’t welcome me trying to butt into his business.”

“
It’s your business too.
The vineyard is what supports your house, your groceries, your
lifestyle. You can’t let him manage it alone.”

“
He prefers to.”

“
Zouzou prefers to eat ice
cream at every meal,” Grace said. “Doesn’t mean she
should.”

“
Laurent needing me…huh,
that’s a new one. What next? The Earth orbiting around the
sun?”

“
I believe the Earth
does
orbit around the sun,
dearest.”

“
You know what I
mean.”

“
Alright, before I hand you
over to your hunky hubby, whom I hear climbing the stairs, tell me
in one sentence or less what you’ve found out in your elongated
stakeout thus far.”

“
I’ve found out that
Desiree—one of the tour guides who was competing with Lanie for the
TV job—is sleeping with the boss
and
she hated Lanie.”

“
Well, that’s motive.
Anything else?”

“
Since I don’t have access
to the police records on the case, I don’t know if she has an alibi
for the time of death or anything. I’ll have to find that out on my
own.”

“
I don’t suppose just
asking her…?”

“
She’s not very nice. I try
not to ask her for the salt when she’s sitting right in front of
it.”

“
Too bad.”

“
Then there’s Olivier. He
had motive for killing Lanie because of the baby not being his and
we all know he had opportunity.”

“
Not exactly what Annie was
hoping to hear.”

“
Well, I’m hoping what she
really wants to hear is the truth.”

“
Anybody else look
suspicious to you?”

“
Not really. They’re all
pretty horrible, but it takes a special kind of horrible to kill
someone in cold blood.”

“
This is true. Oh darling,
Laurent is here and he has a sleepy baby in his arms whom I know
you are going to want to FaceTime with. Promise you’re not taking
chances and that you’ll come home on schedule. I have a special
reason for asking you that.”

“
I will, Grace.
Thanks.”

*****

After dinner on the walk back to the hotel
it began to rain.

“
So, this must be a nice
break for you. Are you friends with Randall?” a slurred voice asked
close to Maggie’s ear. Maggie turned to see Janet by her elbow. The
woman had been solidly drunk all during dinner. Maggie had no idea
how she was able to stay upright for the two-block walk back to the
hotel.

“
I wasn’t needed at home
and just thought I’d finish up with y’all.”

“
You’re from the South? How
come your brother doesn’t have an accent like you do?”

“
I have no idea.” Maggie
noticed that Janet didn’t really seem to be waiting for a reply but
was looking around, distractedly, as drunks do.

“
You know about my husband
I suppose,” Janet said, moving alongside Maggie and gripping her
arm for support.

Maggie turned her head to see Jim trudging
along behind them. Although not quite as inebriated as his wife, he
walked with his head down, as if carefully, single-mindedly
watching every footstep that would lead him to his bed.

“
I’m not sure what
you—”

“
About him sleeping with
that slut. I’m sure you know. Everyone knows.”

I know you’re the first
person I’ve heard call her that
, Maggie
thought, her stomach tensing,
and I know
the word “slut” was written on her dead face.

“
She came on to
him
. Did you know
that?”

“
I did not.”

“
Well, she did. You know
why?”

Maggie didn’t answer. Janet was leaning
heavily on her now, which slowed their progress. A few feet ahead
of them, an equally drunk Dee-Dee was trying to walk without
falling. Randall and Desiree had left the table an hour ago.

“
Because she thought we
were rich, that’s why.”

“
You’re not rich?”
This was news.

“
Ha! You thought so, too.
Everyone thinks so. You know why?”

This guessing game was getting tiresome. But
the last thing she wanted to do was shut off the flow of
information.

“
No, why?”

“
Because Bob told everyone
we were. Truth is we’re only here because Bob’s mother is Jim’s
sister. She made him take us.”

“
Shut up, you stupid
bitch,” Jim snarled.

Maggie jumped at the intensity and the
closeness of his interjection. He had obviously been listening to
every word.

“
And when Lanie the slut
found
that
out,”
Janet continued, unperturbed, “she told the world what up to then
only
I
knew—”

“
If you say one more word,
you disgusting bitch,” Jim said, grabbing his wife’s arm and
jerking her away from Maggie, “I will divorce you the minute we
return to the States.”

Janet cackled and her laughter brought her
to her knees. “Promise?” she said from her position on the
sidewalk. Maggie held back to allow Jim plenty of time to jerk
Janet to her feet and guide her in the direction of the hotel.

She couldn’t help but wonder what Janet had
been about to say before she collapsed.

What had Lanie told the whole world that up
to then only Janet knew?

*****

The next morning, Maggie found herself
crammed up against the window in the middle seat of the tour SUV as
the group left Fréjus and headed toward Marseille. She was
scheduled to leave the group to head back to St-Buvard tomorrow
morning so she knew she needed to make today count.

Squished inside a seven-person vehicle with
all the suspects ought to do it.

The drive down the coast to St-Tropez was
nothing short of breathtaking. Minus the notorious hairpin turns
found around Menton and Villefranche-sur-Mer, the coastal drive
ambled alongside carefully placed stone knee walls, the
heart-stopping beauty of the Mediterranean laid out before them
like an undulating carpet of azure blue. White sailboats dotted the
bays and inlets, making Maggie think the whole world must be on
vacation.

Who owns these boats? Are they here all year
long? Is life just one long party to some people?

Sage had reluctantly agreed to continue on
with the group but even Maggie had picked up on an attitude that
hadn’t been there before. Surely, Randall was paying him? She
glanced in the back seat where Sage sat hunched over his camera
equipment, his gaze seaward but not seeing. Dee-Dee was staring out
the other side of the car where the view was a long series of
bushes and cement bulwarks edging the southern side of the E80.

“
Ben said your husband owns
a vineyard in the Languedoc area?” Jim said abruptly to
Maggie.

She hesitated before answering. Jim Anderson
hadn’t said a word to her before now. Was this because of his
wife’s drunken revelation to Maggie last night?

“
Well, yes,” she said. “But
it’s Provence. Not Languedoc.”

“
And your husband runs it
and produces wine, does he?”

Why don’t I like
you?
Maggie thought as she tried to smile
in response.

“
He does. His label
is
Domaine St-Buvard
. Mostly reds but he’s starting to experiment with rosés
now.”

“
Your brother was asking me
if I knew anything about vineyards.”

Janet snorted and Maggie looked at her but
Janet kept her focus out the window. It occurred to Maggie that
last night was the second time Janet had tried to cast suspicion on
someone in the tour group—first Randall and then her own husband.
Might that be a logical ploy if you were trying to divert suspicion
away from yourself? She hadn’t forgotten that Dee-Dee believed
Janet had plenty of animosity against Lanie.

“
I told him,” Jim said, “I
own several, but was never really interested in the
day-to-day.”

Maggie shot a covert glance at Janet but the
older woman didn’t turn around. Clearly Jim was fully committed to
maintaining the fiction that he and Janet had money.

It was strange that Ben would talk about
Maggie and Laurent—even if all he did was mention their vineyard.
After so many years of disinterest on his part in anything that had
to do with them, it was startling and vaguely unbelievable to
imagine him talking to a stranger about her. She looked at the sea
and hoped they were going to stop soon for lunch. Breakfast had
been nonexistent, as usual.

“
I got the impression he
was about to invest in one here in France,” Jim said. “I told him
that was a frankly idiotic idea. Well, if one hoped to make money,
that is.”

Maggie stared at
him.
Ben was thinking of investing in a
vineyard
? She looked away and tried to
remember how her brother acted at dinner at Domaine
St-Buvard.
Was he thinking of investing in
Laurent’s vineyard? Does that even make sense?

“
He hits her, you know,”
Janet said, still staring out at the unbroken canvas of
interminable blue water.

Maggie snapped her attention back to the
interior of the car. “What?”

“
Now, we don’t know that
for sure,” Randall said from the front seat. “Let’s don’t pass on
rumors.”

“
I
heard
them,” Dee-Dee said from the
back, her voice high and whiny. “I heard the slaps, and I heard the
cries.”

Maggie felt her face flush with heat. Her
mind whirled as she tried to take in what they were saying. She
clawed for the window opener.

Even without breakfast, she could feel an
oily nausea creep up her throat.

Ten

Grace watched Laurent pull out of the driveway.
The man had been downright evasive this morning—even for Laurent.
As taciturn and phlegmatic as he normally was, the difference was
just noticeable enough to cause alarm.

Maggie was right.
There
was
something
going on. A queasy, hard ball formed in the pit of her
stomach.
Am I right, too, though that it
couldn’t possibly be another woman?

Just because Windsor
dropped the ball
…Grace quickly did a mental
shout of
Stop
! when
the thought formed in her mind. It was one of the tricks she
discovered in a magazine while waiting to get her hair done in
Aix.
If you have an unwelcome thought pop
into your head, just scream Stop! in your thoughts and it kills the
thought
. Too often, if one thinks of
something unpleasant, Grace reasoned, it feels as if you’re meant
to hold it up to the light, dissect it, probe it…and that never
ends well.

After all, what was the point? Windsor found
someone else and remembering or thinking or analyzing the whys of
how that happened wasn’t going to improve her day.

Her mind flashed a memory of the smile from
her lunch companion the day before in Aix and she was surprised
that her first instinct was to use her thought-stopping trick on
that too. No, she didn’t want to overthink that lunch and she had
enough on her plate to allow herself to get distracted by such
things. It was enough that she’d shown up since there was a moment
there when she wasn’t at all sure she would.

Grace approached the bicycle propped up
against the house and frowned. She hadn’t ridden one since she was
a teenager. She looked in the direction Laurent had gone. She
certainly wasn’t walking the two miles to the village and back. She
pulled the bike away from the house and pointed it in the direction
of the main road. Besides, a woman on a bicycle? Laurent would
never in a million years think it was her.

Within five minutes, Grace was coasting down
the incline of the road outside Domaine St-Buvard toward the
village. There was very little traffic. She knew she’d have to
navigate the single hairpin turn at the little cement bridge just
before the village, but she’d already tested the brakes—several
times—and was sure she could manage it. The surprise was how much
fun it was—sailing, coasting, drifting down the road, her hair
flying out behind her, her cotton skirt flapping against her
legs.