Little Death by the Sea (34 page)

Darla cleared her throat. “Anything about
Dierdre in the paper?”

Gerry shook his head. “Guess they got tired
of it,” he said. “There’s so much happening these days, you can’t
expect one little ol’ murder to occupy more than a day or two of
media time.” He flipped the paper deliberately to the back to read
the “Far Side” cartoon.

“Gerry.” She spoke his name and touched his
hand and he was forced to look at her. Her face was soft and sad.
He hated to think he had contributed to that look but he couldn’t
weaken now. He couldn’t ease up on her when they were so close.

“What?” he said flatly.

“What do the police think? I mean, why do
they think poor Dierdre—“

“Darla, I honestly don’t know, okay? Is there
any more coffee in the pot?”

“But they think it’s the same guy, right? I
mean, the guy who killed Maggie’s sister? Isn’t that right?”

“Look, Darla, you obviously seem to know more
about it than I do so why are you—“

“No, why are you acting like this?” Her face
dissolved into an expression of frustration and despair. “I feel
like I’m all alone in this, Ger,” she whispered, reaching for his
hand again.

Gerry put the paper down and tried to show
her a face of firmness and pity. He wished he didn’t have to act,
but he was afraid to let his guard down. He knew that if he were
honest with her, she’d back out. She’d start rationalizing why it
all happened. She’d find a toe-hold in it all and then the battle
to stay would continue. No, he couldn’t let her backslide now.

“I guess when it comes to dying, we’re all
alone,” he said.

“Gerry!” She spilled her coffee in the saucer
and he noticed that her hand was shaking. “Is that all you can
muster for poor Dierdre? That we’re all alone when it’s our turn to
die?”

“I’m sorry,” Gerry said, pushing his own
coffee away. “I didn’t realize it was my reaction to Dierdre’s
death we were talking about. I thought we were talking about how
alone you felt in dealing with it.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks and he
physically steeled himself against the table to avoid comforting
her. Didn’t she know he was doing this for her and Haley? That
emigrating was the only way he knew to save them?

“It could’ve been us, Darla,” he said. “It
could’ve been Haley, just as easily.”

“What are you talking about?” She was crying
now, but he knew she knew what he was talking about. She was afraid
too.

4

“You are not going to see Gerard?”

Maggie caught her reflection in her hotel
room mirror and frowned.

“I said I wouldn’t, Laurent,” she said.

“You promised,
cherie
.”

His voice sounded strong yet sweet. If he
weren’t in the process of irritating her, Maggie would have smiled
just to hear his dear insistence, his loving, low rumble of a
voice, all guttural r’s and sliding z’s. So excitingly French, she
thought, and wondered, not for the first time, how much of her
attraction for him had to do with his foreignness.

“Yes, yes, yes. Honestly, Laurent, give up
the grip on this, would you?
Je suis
bored with it, okay? I
won’t talk to him. Enough already.
Finis
. Done.”

“
Et Madame
Zouk,” he continued. “You
trust her?”

“Yes, of course. What’s not to trust? I mean,
she was Elise’s friend. She’s not the enemy or anything. In fact,
she’s being a big help.”

“I miss you. I do not understand what is this
stuff you cannot know here in Atlanta.”

“Have the cops come out with a line on
Dierdre’s killing yet?” Maggie ran a hand through her tangled hair
and tried to remember the last time she’d washed it. Atlanta?

“Nothing.”

“Figures.”

“Maggie, will you be long in Paris?”

She heard the exasperation that had been
hovering in his tone for the full conversation. “I miss you too,
sweetheart,” she said, looking again at her reflection in the
mirror that hung opposite her bed. She sat on the edge of the bed
and pulled the phone onto her knees. She knew this call was costing
a fortune.

“Then why not come home?”

“I am coming home. Just as soon as I talk to
a few more people.”

“Who know nothing.” His voice came across the
transatlantic line without emotion or energy. In fact, it occurred
to Maggie that his whole attitude since she’d arrived in Paris had
been pretty unsupportive. It was clear that Laurent was beginning
to lose patience with Maggie’s search for Elise’s killer. She
turned away from her own reflection.

“Who probably know nothing,” she agreed. They
were both silent for a long moment. “I’ll call tomorrow,” she said,
finally. “And be home probably the day after that. I love you,
Laurent.”

“
Et moi aussi
,” he said, almost
sullenly.

After they’d hung up Maggie sat holding the
phone for a few more minutes. Slowly, she stood up, replaced the
phone on the nightstand next to her bed and went into the bathroom
to splash cool water on her face. It was only seven in the evening
and she didn’t feel like staying in her room, but she had no place
she could think of to go. She tidied up her make-up and pulled a
comb through her black hair. Mindlessly, she tied it back in a
single ponytail with a dark blue ribbon and stared at herself in
the mirror.

She wore a black cotton turtleneck and a
long, pleated navy skirt. Very French, she had thought when she had
packed them. Now, she just shook her head. She had circles under
her eyes and the lipstick she’d brought made her look too corporate
in spite of her dramatic outfit. Naturally, Elise could’ve pulled
it off, she thought with a sad smile. Elise could’ve pulled off
looking sultry and exotic in clown shoes.

Maggie sat down at the writing table crowded
into one corner of her room and shook out a few postcards from a
tissue-thin paper sack. She addressed one of the cards to Brownie
and one to her parents. She wrote cheery, generic sentences on
them, stamped the cards and placed them into her handbag for
posting the next day. She wanted to call her mother to talk about
Elise and to talk about herself and Paris, but decided against it.
She’d be home in a few days. Plenty of time to tell her everything
then.

She picked up a blank postcard and thought of
her office back in Atlanta. She thought of Pokey and Patti and Bob
and Jenny and Gerry and the rest of them and how they must have
reacted to the news of Dierdre. She imagined the look on each of
their faces when they realized that little Dierdsie wouldn’t be
showing up for traffic meeting any more. She pushed the postcard
away, with its familiar image of Notre-Dame, and thought, sadly,
how far away she felt tonight from the people she cared about. I
should be with them. I should be sharing their grief in the office.
My God, Gerry is probably having a full-blown, living-color nervous
breakdown about now. I was mad to think he would take it okay. She
looked again at the postcard and let the full weight of her
melancholy envelop her.

When the ringing of the phone interrupted her
satisfyingly sad mood, she jumped and then snatched it up hoping it
was Laurent again.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Maggie? It’s Michele. I’m
downstairs.”

Michele?

“Michele Zouk,” the voice said. “I’m here to
take you to dinner. You don’t have plans, do you,
cherie
?”

The restaurant was a short walk down the
street from Maggie’s hotel. It featured polished wooden floors,
deeply recessed paneling and mouldings, offset by the dramatic
Brunschwig & Fils wallpaper pattern, ecru lace café curtains
and all of it lit by candlelight.

The menu was equal to its setting. It
featured a simple, but well-planned French cuisine of roast meats
and fish at a fixed-price of only 32f, wine included. Maggie made a
mental note to eat there for the rest of her stay in Paris.

Talking herself into believing that the
French were kinder to their young cows than the Americans, Maggie
ordered the veal with a salad, an eggplant dish of some kind, and
crème brulée
. Michele Zouk ordered a Cabernet Sauvignon.

Michele looked wonderful. Her hair fell like
a dark curtain to her shoulders, framing the face that even made
other Frenchwomen pause and admire her. Surprising Maggie, and
overturning one of her fashion theories, Michele wore a one-piece
lemon-yellow catsuit. Anyone else in the outfit would look like a
big, wingless canary, Maggie thought. Zouk still looked
enigmatic.

Maggie was beginning to feel at home with the
Frenchwoman.

“I saw Nicole’s birth certificate,” Maggie
said. “Gerard wouldn’t give his name as the father.”

Michele cut into her crudité. Like all the
French, Maggie noted, food was a serious business with her.

“I think I got an idea of how she lived when
I saw where she lived in Montmartre. Michele, it was disgusting.
It’s hard to believe my sister lived there. I mean, she was always
a little, you know, artsy...even a little sloppy, but this place
was a real dump. My mother would’ve wept.”

“Monsieur Gerard put your sister through many
changes, I’m afraid.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s just what he did.”
Maggie toyed with her food for a moment. Zouk had nearly finished
her meal. “You know, Michele, I don’t know whether or not Gerard
really killed my sister—“

“He is absolutely capable of it.”

Maggie hesitated, watching the other woman.
“Yeah, I believe that,” she said finally. “But there has been
another murder that the police think is connected with
Elise’s.”

Zouk stopped eating and looked at Maggie.
“Oui?”

“It happened the night before I came to
Paris. She was a friend of mine.” Maggie felt hot tears spring to
her eyes and she was surprised. Wasn’t Dierdre a friend of hers?
It’s true they never went out for drinks together. She hadn’t had
her over for dinner, nor had she met her boyfriend, Kevin, ever.
But she mourned her. She would miss her.

“You knew another victim?” Michele gave
Maggie a look of pity and caring. “I am sorry, Maggie. This is very
hard on you.”

Not half as hard as it is on Dierdre, Maggie
thought, concentrating on her plate again. Or Elise.

“Anyway,” she said, taking a ragged breath
and reaching for her wine. “I’m open to believing that Gerard might
not be involved in Elise’s death.”

“Yes, of course, I see.” Michele said. She
caught the eye of their waiter and asked him to bring their
desserts. “And why are you in Paris, then, Maggie?”

“Funny, that’s just what my boyfriend asked
me tonight.”

“You have a boyfriend in America? He supports
your...what are you calling it..?”

“My investigation. Yes, mostly. He’s losing
steam with it though. He’s French too.”

“Yes?”

“Yeah, I met him through all this, as a
matter of fact. When I came to Cannes to find Nicole, he helped me
get her.”

“And how did you know him?” Their custards
came and Michele ordered coffees for both of them too.

“Well, he was a surprise, really. I met him
through another guy, an Englishman, that my father had contact
with. Anyway, Laurent was helping this Englishman find my
niece.”

Michele nodded and spooned into her
crème
brulée
. Maggie noted that Michele ate delicately, almost
theatrically, holding the spoon in front of her after each dip into
the pudding as if she expected to be photographed for Paris
Vogue.

“Gerard has a brother named Laurent,” Michele
said.

Maggie felt her stomach tighten. What an odd
thing for her to say, she thought. “Well, I guess it’s a common
name, huh?” she said lightly. “Laurent’s last name is Dernier, not
Dubois.” Maggie watched Michele and her reaction came slowly,
almost as if a video had been slowed down. Maybe, on some level,
Maggie had already known what Michele would say. Why else would she
have watched her so closely, waiting for her response? Why wouldn’t
she just have dug into her own egg custard without another thought
to the topic?

“Your boyfriend’s name is Laurent Dernier?”
Michele was not eating her custard either.

Maggie didn’t answer. She watched Zouk’s
mouth as the words tumbled relentlessly out.

“Oh,
cherie
, is this possible?”
Michele whispered. “That is the name of Gerard’s brother.”

Chapter Nineteen

1

Maggie rubbed the sleep from her eyes but
remained in bed. She had slept badly, finally falling asleep,
miserable and exhausted, in the early hours of the morning. As she
drifted off, she had heard the slow, snarling rumble of a Parisian
delivery truck as it began its early morning route.

Laurent was Gerard’s brother. She felt a dull
cramp in her chest as the words formed and images of him unfolded:
Laurent lying to her, Laurent being “helpful” during her
investigation, Laurent feigning ignorance about Elise and the
child, Nicole. When she thought of his passive, sweetly
uncomprehending eyes during her frustrating months of questions and
tortured bafflement, she wanted to smash his dear, familiar face
with both her fists.

Bastard! Liar!

She swung her legs out of bed with no
intention of going any further. Finally, she forced herself to
stumble to the tile-cracked bathroom to splash water onto her face.
For a minute she wasn’t sure she wasn’t going to throw up into the
hand-painted ceramic basin.

Suddenly, she ran into the bedroom and
snatched up her purse. She pulled out the picture of Elise and Baby
Nicole. It had been there all along and Maggie had refused to see
it. The birthmark across the baby’s cheek extended into her hair
line. Elise’s daughter had been born with a significant birthmark.
An identifying one. Maggie stared at the picture and thought of the
little girl living with Maggie’s parents. In her mind, she saw
Nicole’s face as she sat at Elspeth’s dinner table. She saw her
mother’s bright and loving face as she bent over the little girl in
a conspiring, happy moment. She saw the birth certificate of the
child that Elise had given birth to. She saw an image of Laurent
holding Nicole on his knee and murmuring to her in French. So it’s
true, she thought. She isn’t ours.