Murder in the Latin Quarter (6 page)

“I'm afraid I'm keeping you up,” Maggie said as she gently removed the baby from Delphine's lap. As the loss of warmth of Mila's body registered, Delphine's eyes widened.

Maggie patted Mila's back and then switched her to one hip and held a hand out to Delphine.

“Can I help you to your bedroom?” she asked.

Delphine gratefully took her hand and Maggie eased the older woman to her feet. The long day seemed to be having its effect on Delphine. Her face sagged with weariness—or perhaps from the conversation about the war? Maggie cursed herself for upsetting her.

Maybe Laurent is right. I can't open my mouth without traumatizing people
.

“I have enjoyed our talk this evening,” Delphine said, surprising Maggie. “It was good to talk of it. I never do. Though I think of it often.”

“Well, it was a fascinating time in history,” Maggie said. “And you lived it.”

Delphine shuffled across the dining room and then turned. “Do you have all you need for tonight?” she asked.

“I do. Mila and I will be in the guest room right down the hall if you need me.”

Maggie watched Delphine's face clear and she knew staying with her had been the right decision.

Even if she
had
done her best to give the old dear nightmares about invading Nazis in hobnail boots.

T
he next morning
Maggie plugged in the coffee maker and pulled a plate of stale croissants out of the breadbox. She knew there was a decent looking
boulangerie
across the street but she was hesitant to leave Mila with Delphine long enough to run down and pick up rolls. Perhaps by tomorrow, Laurent's aunt would be comfortable enough to watch the baby for a few moments.

The housekeeper, Amelie, had arrived early so clearly there appeared to be no set time for the woman to show up. Delphine didn't seem concerned with the woman's odd hours but, combined with Amelie's sour mien, Maggie still thought it strange.

Delphine entered the kitchen with a vague look on her face until she saw Mila in her stroller eating a bun. Delphine's face cleared and her eyes sparkled.

“We need to get the little one
une chaise d'enfant
,” she said.

Wow
, Maggie thought.
Wait until I tell Laurent his aunt is so in love with Mila she wants to buy a high chair for her.

“There are too many people in the kitchen,” Amelie snarled, her back to all of them as she wiped down the already perfectly clean counters.

Maggie's phone vibrated loudly against the kitchen table. She could see it was her mother.

“You must take it, Maggie?” Delphine asked, frowning at the phone. “Mademoiselle Mila will be fine with her Aunt Delphine,
si
?” Delphine leaned over and patted Mila's knee.

“Okay,” Maggie said. “I won't be long.”

Eight a.m. in Paris meant it was two in the morning in Atlanta. Maggie hit
Accept
and went into the living room.

“Mom?”

“Maggie, you know I wouldn't hound you if I weren't absolutely at the end of my rope. I need you to come home. Please. Next week would be fine.”

“Mom—”

“
No
. I have been patient. I don't believe I am asking too much.”

“You've got Dad there. Can't he—?”

“Maggie, no. I need you to come home with the children! Just say you will.”

“Yes, fine. I'll come.”

“With the children.”

“Mom, you are acting a little nuts. I said I'd come. What is going on there?”

“Ben has moved back home.”

“And why do you need me there too?”

“Because…if you come…if you are here…”

Maggie heard her mother take a long ragged breath as if she were attempting to collect herself.

“If you're here with the children, I believe your brother will make a stronger attempt to pull himself together.”

“In what way is he not together? Is he drinking?”

“No, dear. He's not drinking.”

“Well, what…?”

“He's weeping, Maggie. Nearly all the time. And if you come, you can talk to him.”

“Mom, I'm not good at this. Ben needs professional help. He—”

“He is seeing someone, Maggie. And he has appropriate medicine that he's taking. He needs his family. He needs all of us.”

Maggie heard a shriek of delight coming from the kitchen and she smiled in spite of the phone conversation. Amelie had left the kitchen at the same time that Maggie did, leaving just Delphine and Mila together.

“I'll come home, Mom,” Maggie said.

“For the whole summer.”

Maggie sighed. “For as long as I can.”

“Thank you, darling,” Elspeth Newberry said with a long sigh. “I knew your brother could count on you.”

When Maggie walked back into the kitchen, Mila was on Delphine's lap gumming a sweet roll. Delphine looked ten years younger than when she'd walked into the kitchen that morning.

“That is your mother? You are looking unhappy.”

“It's nothing. She wants me to come home.”

“You do not want to see your mother?”

“It's not her. My brother has a nightmare he's attempting to unravel with my poor parents in the middle. She wants the distraction of me there.”

Delphine smiled and looked at Mila. “Children are certainly distracting, are they not?”

“Yeah, they so are.” Maggie sat down next to Delphine and noticed there was a small metal box on the kitchen table in front of her. “What's this?”

“Open it and see.”

Maggie pushed open the lid. The hinges were rusty and the lid was stubborn but she finally pried it open. Inside was a stack of old black and white photos with white crenelated borders.

“After our talk last night, I began to think of the time during the war. Of my sisters. Of many things.”

Maggie drew the stack of photos out of the box.

“I do not think of the past often,” Delphine said. “It is not good, I think, to visit there too much.”

Maggie cycled through the photographs, most of which were of the three sisters. In one they appeared to be in their teens and were seated around a café table with their hands held primly in they laps and their ankles crossed. Georgette was the pretty one, that was clear. She had wavy dark hair and large eyes and full lips. Perhaps because Maggie knew a little something about Georgette's story, she didn't appear all that bright to her. Her eyes looked vacant.

Jacqueline, on the other hand, was easy to pick out as the oldest. She looked as sharp as Georgette looked dull. She was also the least handsome of the three sisters, although not totally plain. Maggie examined her face closely for any trace of Laurent but found none. She tried to imagine how Jacqueline might look if she smiled.

It's the traditional lot of the older sister
, Maggie thought.
Always trying to keep the others in line, to be a role model.

That is unless the older sister was Elise Newberry.

Maggie shook off the memory of her sister and picked up a photo of Delphine—her hair dark and wavy around her shoulders, her eyes bright, missing nothing. She was standing on a beach with another girl. Their arms were wrapped around each other's waists. The other girl was blonde with an upturned nose. Although the photo was black and white, Maggie imagined the girl had blue eyes to go with her blonde hair.

“I forgot I had that picture,” Delphine said hoarsely, reaching for it.

“Who is it?”

“Nobody. Just a friend.” Delphine plucked the photo from Maggie's hand, glanced briefly at the back of it and then tucked it away in a drawer in the kitchen table.

“I have told you how much our little Mila resembles her great grand aunt Georgette?” Delphine said almost too brightly.

“You have,” Maggie said, noting the drawer where Delphine put the photo. “I'm surprised Laurent never mentioned it.”

Delphine snorted. “Men do not notice these things.”

In my experience,
Maggie thought,
there is very little that gets past Laurent
. But she held her tongue.

“Georgette of course shamed the family not long after that photo was taken,” Delphine said.

“By getting pregnant with Noel,” Maggie said.

“
C'est ça
.”

“Was this during the war?”

“Just after.”

“And Noel was given to a family in Switzerland but y'all stayed in touch.”

Delphine smiled sadly at Maggie. “It was different in those days. Today, perhaps Georgette would have kept the baby.”

“And all these years Noel has known that Georgette was his real mother?”

“Of course.”

“What happened to Georgette?”

Delphine frowned. “Eventually she married. She had no more children. She lived in Paris with her husband Stefan. He died in a car accident in 1955. She died of breast cancer in 1968.”

“Gosh. Pretty bleak.”

Delphine knitted her brows as if she didn't understand Maggie's words.

“Were you not close? You and Georgette?” Maggie asked.

Delphine picked up the photo of the three sisters. “
Non
,” she said.

It was clear she didn't want to go any further down that road. Maggie pointed to the photo of Jacqueline.

“That's Laurent's grandmother, right?”

“
Oui
.”

“What was she like?”

Delphine shrugged. “She was on the board of many charitable organizations in Paris. Her husband was wealthy and widely respected. As his wife, she commanded a highly esteemed position in society.”

“What was she like as a sister?”

“Rigid. Very strict.”

“So you two weren't close.”

“Do you have a sister, Maggie?”

“I did.”

“And were you close?”

Maggie sucked in a breath. “I wanted to be.”

“But you weren't.”

“We were too different.”

“It was the same with me and my sisters. We were too different.”

Maggie studied Jacqueline Fouquet's face in the picture and again tried to imagine her smiling. She tried to imagine Jacqueline rolling her eyes or laughing. She tried to imagine her baking cookies or hugging a young boy to her bosom.

The image wouldn't gel.

“Did she see her grandsons much as they grew up?” Maggie asked. “I mean, they all lived in the same city. Were they in contact with each other?”

Delphine looked at her with surprise. “You did not know?”

“I can guarantee you, Delphine,” Maggie said firmly, “I know next to nothing. Tell me.”

Delphine placed the photo of the sisters back in the box.

“Laurent and Gerard were raised by their grandmother,” she said.

A
melie watched
the door close behind Delphine and the American. As soon as they were gone, it seemed as if the tension in the room began to dissipate. The old woman never looked at her any more. And the American treated her as most Americans treated their servants—as if she wasn't even there. Oh, she made the obvious attempts at being friendly. But Amelie felt only revulsion towards her.

Whatever the American thought she was doing with Madame, it wouldn't matter. It wouldn't help.

As Amelie's sainted mother had always said to her:
The road is long and curving but the end always comes.

The road for Delphine Normand had been long—too long and much longer than she deserved.

But the end was finally coming.

That was one thing Amelie—invisible though she may be—knew better than anyone else.

M
aggie put
Mila into her stroller and touched the hall light switch as Delphine carefully negotiated the landing outside her door. Maggie wasn't sure a walk in the park was a great idea but Delphine had been so excited at the prospect that Maggie hadn't had the heart to say no. It was a cool spring morning—but sunny—and they'd all bundled up for it.

As Maggie pushed the button for the elevator, regretting that she'd have to somehow maneuver the stroller
and
Delphine with her cane into it, she allowed a moment to digest the bombshell Delphine had dropped at breakfast.

Laurent was raised by his grandmother!

How could he not mention such a thing? Was he embarrassed that his parents didn't stay together? Is that the reason they didn't raise him? What happened to them? Why had Laurent never mentioned Jacqueline? Not once. The woman who raised him? Who tucked him in at night, read him stories, looked over his homework? How could he just erase her as if she'd never existed?

She glanced at Delphine as the older woman braced herself in a corner of the narrow elevator.

There was definitely a story there and Maggie intended to get to the bottom of it.

Outside the apartment building, Maggie pretended to straighten out Mila's stroller blanket to give Delphine a moment to catch her breath. Even walking across the lobby seemed to have tired her.

The apartment faced the busy rue du Bac and while Maggie waited she noticed dents and holes in the facade of the building.

They looked like bullet holes.

Maggie imagined they might be evidence of the street battles that had come to the Latin Quarter in the last days of the city's liberation in 1944. She had already seen plaques on several buildings in Grace's neighborhood that announced that some young person had died on that spot at the hand of retreating Germans. She shivered.

“Are you warm enough,
chérie
?” Delphine asked. Her cheeks were tinged with pink and Maggie thought the air must have revived her because she looked much more restored.

“I'm good.”

“We must cross here to get to the park.”

Maggie put a hand on the stroller and another on Delphine's elbow as they maneuvered down the sidewalk to the nearest side street. It was cobblestoned and Mila squealed with delight as they bumped roughly over the stones. The noise from the Boulevard Saint-Germain was loud even from this distance.

They emerged from the alley and saw the entrance to the park before them. “It's beautiful,” Maggie said.

“When I was young I would often come to this park from the old neighborhood with my friends.”

They entered the park and Maggie looked around at the benches, the pigeons, the young women minding their toddlers as they played in the grass.

“What did you used to do here?”

Delphine laughed. “I am sure it would sound very old-fashioned to you.”

“I like to imagine you at eighteen walking through this same park,” Maggie said as she rearranged Mila in her stroller and re-tucked in her blanket. “In the States, nothing stays the same. My mom was raised in Atlanta same as I was but there's very little that's still there from her time.”

“Perhaps that is the better way.”

Maggie gave her a skeptical look. “Do you really think so?”

Delphine smiled. “
Non
. It helps, I think, to have some things stay the same.” She waved an arm at the park. “That I would stroll this same park with my great-grand niece in 2016 and also have memories of sitting on that bench with Camille, gossiping and smoking cigarettes—” Delphine's face softened and tears gathered in her eyes.

“Was Camille your best friend?” Maggie asked.

Delphine gazed at the park as if she was seeing a different time unfold before her.

“She was,” she said softly.

“That was the girl in the picture with you, wasn't it?” Maggie asked. “The one where you're standing with your arms around each other?”

Delphine nodded, still gazing outward. “
Oui
.”

“You looked close, like sisters.”

Delphine wiped her eyes with the back of her hand before smiling at Mila. Whatever had just happened, the spell was broken.

“She was much better than that,” Delphine said. “I
had
three sisters and we fought all the time. Georgette was forever stealing my clothes and using up what little makeup I had. Jacqueline was prim and stern—not someone you felt comfortable confiding in. No, Camille was the best of all imaginable friends. I don't know what I would have done without her.”

“Where is she now?” Immediately Maggie bit her tongue for asking the question. There weren't many who made it to Delphine's age. At best, Camille was in a nursing home somewhere. At worst…

Delphine took in a long breath as if steeling herself to answer. “She was arrested,” she said.

“Oh my gosh, that's terrible. Was she Jewish?”

“No, Maggie,” Delphine said. She put a hand on the stroller handle as if to support herself. “She wasn't arrested by the Germans.”

Maggie's knowledge of the war was sketchy but even she knew the wartime French government was considered nearly as bad as the Nazis.

“The Vichy?”

Delphine snorted as if even the mention of the name was cause for scorn.

“
Non
,
chérie
,” she said. “Camille was arrested after Paris was liberated.”

Maggie felt a needle of anxiety invade her chest. She could see the shame in Delphine's face as she recalled her dear friend. Arrest
after
Paris was liberated could only mean that Camille had committed a crime in the eyes of the Resistance.

“Did she collaborate with the Germans?” Maggie asked in a whisper.

“She was not a
collabo
,” Delphine said fiercely. “She was
in love
. She passed no secrets. She betrayed no vow. She simply fell in love with the wrong man.”

They walked in silence down the curving asphalt walkway. A knee-high wrought-iron fence separated them from the green pond that meandered through the park. A squad of ducks skimmed along the surface, then scooted under a low cement footbridge.

Maggie couldn't even imagine how awful that must have been—to have your best friend arrested for such a publicly loathed crime. Maggie glanced at Delphine out of the corner of her eye and tried to decipher her mood.

“Shall we sit?” Maggie asked as she parked the stroller in front of a bench. “It's so beautiful here.”

They sat and Maggie pulled Mila from her stroller and settled her on her lap. The baby clapped her hands, her large blue eyes wide, as if trying to see everything at once.

“So much like little Georgette,” Delphine said wistfully. She reached out a tentative hand to Mila and the little girl grabbed her finger. Delphine and Maggie both laughed.

“I can't believe how fast she's growing,” Maggie said. “So much has happened so quickly. Half the time I can't even believe I'm a mom.”

“And you say my nephew is a good husband to you?”

“He is,” Maggie said, wondering if it was possible to change Delphine's mind about Laurent. “It sounds like he's not the man you knew.”

“He was always so much like his father. In so many ways.”

“That's Robert, right? What happened to him? Laurent never talks of him.”

Delphine shook her head. “That the son could be ashamed of the father is believable but only from fifteen years distance. Jacqueline always said Laurent was different. I admit I never saw it.”

A small boy ran down the walkway in front of them pushing his empty stroller. A young woman walked close behind—
just like any harried mother in any mall in America
, Maggie thought with a smile.

“Sometimes when I fall asleep at night,” Delphine said, still holding Mila's hand, “I can still hear the police sirens or the airplane engines so close overhead. Otherwise it was so quiet during the occupation. There were no cars, no radios, no people. The city was like a vacant movie set.”

“It's hard to imagine,” Maggie said.

“My family didn't evacuate as so many did. It was terrifying to be left behind. But Camille's family stayed too.”

“Why didn't you leave?”

“My father owned a dress shop.” Delphine shrugged. “He said he would rather die than leave it to the Germans. So we stayed.”

“That's gutsy.”

Delphine glanced at Maggie as if trying to determine her meaning. Maggie reached into her bag and drew out a cookie. She gave a piece of it to Mila.

“She will make a mess,” Delphine said as Mila promptly smeared chocolate across her face and blouse.

“It'll wash,” Maggie said.

“I suppose so.”

A movement by one of the nearby sycamore trees caught Maggie's attention. She squinted and for a moment thought she saw someone peeking from behind the large trunk. It was an odd place for anyone to stand, far from the pathway and on the lawn with its multiple signs warning people not to stand on the grass. Mila squealed and Maggie looked to see that the baby was happily shredding a paper napkin. When Maggie looked back at the tree she saw noone.

“Are you still in touch with Camille?” Maggie asked as she began to clean Mila's sticky fingers with a fresh napkin.

Delphine noticeably stiffened and for a moment Maggie thought she wouldn't answer.

Finally, Delphine said, “I'm afraid Camille's crime was quite serious. Her lover was no ordinary German, you see. He was a member of the Gestapo.”

Ouch
, Maggie thought.
Even I know that's bad.

A silence settled between them. Maggie could see the longing in Delphine's eyes as she remembered her friend. When Delphine bent to touch Mila's blanket, her hands shook. But a look of resolution came over her. Maggie imagined how strong Delphine would have to be to have lived the terrible tale she was now remembering.

“This little one must be kept warm,” Delphine said, gently touching Mila's arm. “It is easy to catch a chill.”

Maggie tucked the blanket up around the baby. Delphine tore her gaze away from the baby to look out at a small flock of pigeons on the lawn. The air had gotten cooler. The leaves trembled in the trees above them.

“I am not in touch with her, no,” Delphine said, her voice unwavering but with tears gathered in her eyes.

“On the day of her arrest, Camille was dragged screaming from our apartment building and hanged in the public square.”