Murder in Nice (31 page)

Hearing Laurent use the
word
prison
so
casually made Grace’s fingertips tingle unpleasantly.
Would Laurent really go to prison? Dear God!
Maggie would come unglued.

“
What did Ben do to have a
possible prison sentence hanging over his head?”

“
I do not know the
details.”

“
Laurent, sign the damn
contract.”

He didn’t answer, just brought the cigarette
to his lips and stared out the door at his vineyard.

“
Screw the vineyard,
Laurent,” Grace said heatedly. “Maggie doesn’t care about that if
it means she loses you.”

“
I
care that the vineyard is safe for Jean-Michael,” Laurent
said, using Jemmy’s full name. “I will not bequeath to him a
gîte
…a bed and breakfast,
when I die.”

“
I’m probably the last
person to give advice on happy, non-dysfunctional families,” Grace
said, standing and grabbing Laurent by the arm to get his
attention, “but I’m almost positive Jemmy would rather have his
papa with him
now
than a profitable vineyard when he’s fifty.”

Laurent grunted but didn’t answer. The tip
of his cigarette glowed in the gloom of the room. Just when Grace
thought he was about to say something, she heard the muffled sound
of her taxi’s horn outside in the drive.

“
Time to go,” Laurent said,
opening the French doors and flicking his cigarette onto the
terrace. “I’ll get your bag.”

*****

The darkness was the worst.

Almost.

Maggie forced herself not to move. The pain
vibrated down her arm and her first instinct was to try to shift
position to relieve it. She took in a long breath, her eyes closed,
and carefully, slowly, moved her left leg and then her right. Thank
God she didn’t seem to have broken anything. She opened her eyes,
but she may as well not have bothered. There was no moonlit window
down here. There was no flashlight, feeble beam or not.

Her breath came to her ears in jagged rasps
and Maggie fought to accept the fact she could not orient herself
by sight. The terror was like another person in the room:
malevolent, focused, and always there.

Very slowly, Maggie tried to sit up and then
gasped as pain shot through her left hand like a careening
thunderbolt. She stopped moving and gingerly touched her left wrist
with her hand. It was already swelling up.

A wave of hopelessness crashed down on her
shoulders. How far had she fallen? Where was she now? A horrible
thought that she was in the crypt slithered quick as a snake into
her head. Olivier had said it was beneath the cloister. She began
to shake, the cold bone-deep now as if she’d walked into a freezer.
She shook harder, involuntarily, and at first it helped so she gave
herself over to it. But within seconds it started to feel more like
convulsions and she tried to resist the sensation, her teeth
chattering loudly in her ears.

Is this retribution?
Is God punishing me for trying to escape from my
own child?

Her wrist was throbbing now. She was sure
she’d broken it. Sitting up among a pile of boards and rock that
had fallen from the floor above, she used her other hand to feel
behind her. Was she anywhere near a wall? Was she sitting in the
middle of a room?

When the tears came, she was almost grateful
for their warmth against her cheeks. Reaching out a little bit
further, she touched what felt like the base of a cement statue or
obelisk.

Or sarcophagus.

She snatched her hand away
and held it with her injured wrist to her breast. She bent her
head.
Dear Lord, if I ever get out of here
I promise things will be different. I swear they will.
An image came to her of Laurent’s face asking
about the cut on her forehead: a picture of him smiling
tolerantly—knowingly?—at her while she told the truth, but not the
whole truth. And how many times had she done that—lied by omission
but refused to call it that?

She had gotten so use to believing that
Laurent had secrets and that he would lie to her that, until this
moment, it hadn’t dawned on her that she lied to him too.

What is the matter with me? I’m telling lies
to the person I love most in the world. I’m sitting in a medieval
crypt with a broken wrist preparing to freeze to death and
everything I’ve done, every action I’ve taken, every effort I’ve
made, has pushed me inevitably to this moment.

I made this happen. I made every bit of this
happen.

When the tears came, Maggie knew they
weren’t totally for herself. They were also for the two people in
her life, her husband and child, who had the serious misfortune to
care for her when she didn’t have the sense not to throw her life
the hell away—and for what?

For Annie?

Isn’t that why I lied to
Laurent? Because that’s not believable even to me, and it certainly
wouldn’t pass his bullshit detector.
It
wasn’t for Annie she realized as she leaned back against the cement
block.
It was for me, because of what a
crap job I felt I was doing at home.

I swear, God, I swear to you with my life if
you give me a chance for a redo, I’ll never again create an excuse
to keep me from the people I love. I’ll stand firm to try to be the
person they think I am. I’ll try to be deserving of their love.

She bowed her head and wept beyond care or
hope of relief, her sobs echoing softly in the dungeon until it
sounded as if a chorus of mourners, as if the dead themselves, had
awakened to join in her grief.

She didn’t know how long she sat there. She
must have fallen asleep, which was a surprise in itself, but when
she awoke, Maggie felt a little better, a little stronger. She
touched her wrist and found it was hot and tender and extremely
puffy. She stretched out her legs, groaning as she did since she
was still sitting on boards and rocks that had fallen with her.
Although she couldn’t see for sure, she thought she felt a long
gash in her calf through her jeans. The blood felt sticky inside
her pant leg.

She pulled her legs back up under her and
gripped her left arm tightly to her chest, hoping to stabilize the
wrist enough to assuage the constant pain radiating down her arm.
When she did, she realized she’d had a dream. Whether she’d been
out for fifteen minutes or an hour—and she didn’t think it was much
longer than an hour—she had experienced a full-blown dream that had
taken her a long way away from this cold, evil place. She’d dreamt
it was Christmas morning and she was sitting at the top of the
stairs in her pajamas with her brother and her sister. In the
dream, she remembered the joy and anticipation she’d felt, and the
camaraderie with her two older siblings. She could even smell the
cinnamon and pine in the air. Somehow there was bacon, too. Her
mother must have already been downstairs getting a jump on
Christmas breakfast.

She blinked back tears, thinking of Elise
gone and dead now these last five years. Murdered by someone who
was insane enough to think she was really killing Maggie. Although
for all intents and purposes, poor Elise and her addictions had
died many years before.

But it was the memory of Ben that was the
sharpest. Maggie remembered how as children he was always in
charge. As the eldest and the only son, that was hardly surprising.
And Maggie had worshipped him. She’d forgotten that. In many ways,
Ben was her first crush.

Whoever that boy was all those years ago, he
had morphed into someone Maggie had never gotten to know. And the
man he became—as foreign as a changeling left by the fairies—was
not just someone who didn’t share her interests or tax bracket.
Maggie, and her parents, too, had refused to see it for way too
long now.

I don’t know what Olivier’s
role is in all this,
she thought, her
shivering faltering and giving away to a static apathy as her core
body temperature continued to drop,
but it
wasn’t his baby.

Haven’t I always known in my gut that it was
Ben’s?

Ben lied about being with Lanie. Not just on
the tour, but knowing her in high school, too. Why would he do that
unless he was hiding a bigger, more horrific secret? And Ben was
the only one besides Olivier without an alibi. Haley said she’d
taken a pill and gone to bed early that night with a headache.

If the baby
was
Ben’s, Maggie
realized, it was the final, damning piece of evidence that finally
triggered the up-to-now missing motive. In her heart, she’d always
believed the identity of the murderer hinged on the paternity of
Lanie’s unborn baby.

Ben’s baby.

It was all so clear now. As if pain and fear
had sharpened her vision, and the panoply of images showed Ben’s
true colors in living, breathing high-definition.

If Lanie threatened to go public with the
pregnancy, it wasn’t just Ben’s marriage on the line. It was Ben’s
whole way of life in Atlanta—his country club, his parish, his
circle of friends, his job.

All the pieces finally came together and the
picture was ruthlessly clear: Lanie was pregnant with Ben’s child.
Lanie was a blackmailer. And Ben is a ruthless bastard. For anyone
with eyes to see, there was no other way around it.

Ben was Lanie’s murderer.

Nineteen

In the dream, she was still cold, which was annoying.
Strangely, Ben was there, too, all in black, the features of his
face hard to distinguish from the ghouls and trolls carved in the
stone columns that lined the main hall.

Was she dreaming? Maggie shook her head and
felt the sharp pinch of a rock pressing into her thigh.

“
I thought the guy said
you’d freeze to death down here if you hung around.”

Maggie watched the dark form that may or may
not be Ben move around the room.

“
Ben?” The sound of her
voice, ragged and hoarse, was terrifying. It was not her voice. It
was not any Earthly sound.

“
Since you know you’re
going to die if you just lay there,” the voice said, “why are you
just laying there?” A peevish matter-of-factness entered his
voice.

Were spirits supposed to be sarcastic?

“
I’m cold…and I’m tired,”
she whimpered.

“
You were always whiny,
even as a kid.”

Maggie hauled herself to a crouching
position, ignoring the broken board she’d been sitting on. She
pulled a rock out from under her.

“
Are you dead?” she asked.
“Am I dead?”

“
Don’t be an idiot,
Maggot,” the voice said. “Someone’s waiting for you. So please move
your ass.”

Maggie shook her head and the sensation of
dizziness made her reach out for support. Her hand struck the rough
wall in front of her. It was wet.

Someone’s waiting for
you
.

A tremor of dread laced through her
chest.

Jemmy
.
I can’t not come back to
Jemmy.

She tucked her injured hand, throbbing with
pain, to her chest and turned her head to stare into the darkness
but the form was gone.

“
Ben?”

Her voice lilted in the room until its echo
faded softly away.

I’m not cold any
more,
she realized suddenly.
That’s probably not a good thing.

She bent her head and closed her eyes. She
couldn’t see anything anyway. What was it she was hearing? She
blocked out all thoughts, pushing the pain in her wrist to the back
recesses of her mind, and concentrated on listening.

It was the sound of water, either moving or
lapping or dripping. She felt a sudden, irresistible
compulsion.

Go to the
water
.

She sat perfectly still, one hand on the
wall. Her legs wouldn’t obey her. The thought of rising from her
knees seemed insurmountably impossible. She was so tired. She was
cemented to the floor.

Maggot
. The voice had called her by Ben’s pet name for her as a
child. She opened her eyes.

Someone’s waiting for
you
.

She brought Jemmy’s face to mind, and when
she did he was laughing. He was always laughing. He was the picture
of Laurent as a baby, she knew, with his thick brown hair tousled
around his cherubic face, his deep set brown eyes squeezed into
merriment. That is, if Laurent had been loved as a child. If
Laurent’s mother had cuddled him and kissed him and read to him at
night.

Maggie groaned loudly as she clawed her way
from her knees to her feet, leaning heavily against the wall,
feeling the slime of whatever coated it against her hand and face.
She had been so focused on the wall that when she turned from it,
she was surprised to see she was no longer in total darkness. Her
eyes adjusted and the terror of seeing her surroundings was
replaced with a thought that bulldozed all other fears.

I need to get back to my baby.

She could see now that the walls were not
smooth stone but stacked, both on the floor and the sides. She
looked up to try to see the hole she’d made when she’d fallen but
the ceiling dissolved into blackness and there was only a hint of
moonlight from the upstairs room.

She heard a light rustling sound and her
stomach twisted. Of course there were probably snakes and spiders
down here, she thought, fighting down a building panic. But if that
was the case, then there was a way out and in, too. She turned her
head to where she thought she heard the sound and, fighting every
natural instinct she had, went toward it.