Free A Provençal Mystery by Ann Elwood

unbuttoned; his ironed white shirt was tucked neatly into the elegant flat waistband of his elegant pants. Jack, a cigarette smoldering in his hand, stood next to him. When I turned back to Agatha and Madeleine, I saw that Madeleine had stiffened and gone pale. She tapped Agatha on the shoulder to say something, then tripped swiftly back down the Rue de la Republique. I wondered what it was about Fitroy that seemed to frighten Madeleine—they must have known each other somewhere. What had he done to her?
    Agatha climbed few steps into the midst of the students.
    “What’s the nun up to?” Fitzroy asked me.
    “Exhorting the high school kids not to have sex,” I replied.
    “She’s incorrigible,” said Jack Leach, attached, as usual, to his mentor. “She has no idea of how to mind her own business.”
    “You’re right there,” said Fitzroy. “I can vouch for that.”
    “How so?” I asked.
    “It’s a long story. Some other time,” he replied. Why not now? I thought, but saw that his face was adamant.
    “I saw her passing out abstinence pamphlets to the passersby at the Place Pie Tuesday night,” Jack said, taking a drag on a cigarette. It was as if he said she was defecating on the street.
    “She’s a Catholic nun,” I said, annoyed at his judgmental attitude and wondering at it. Was he just being a sycophant, agreeing with Fitzroy about everything? “And it’s her job to save fallen women. Why not save them before they fall?”
    “You can’t even begin to understand,” Jack said.
    “Let’s go to lunch,” Fitzroy said to Jack, as Agatha came down the steps toward us “Who wants to get into a discussion without having some sustenance first?” The two of them disappeared around the corner.
    I waited for Agatha, and when she had finished her encounter with the students, she and I continued on to the café. When we arrived, we saw Fitzroy, Jack, Griset, and Rachel Marchand seated at a table in the back. I watched Fitzroy talking to Jack. Quivering with excitement at being the great man’s focus, Jack was waving his hand anxiously as he tried to explain something.
    “Look at that guy, that mec ,” I said to Agatha, as we sat down at a table near the window. “See how he sucks up to Fitzroy.” In spite of what I said, I felt a little sorry for Jack, who looked like a boy with his thin body and curly blond hair, even though he was dressed, like Fitzroy, in slacks and an ironed shirt, and even though he was nearly thirty-five years old. “He’s like a little child, the way he plays up to the big man. Yet he’s married. His wife’s putting him through school.”
    “Is that why she isn’t with him? She’s back in America making money?” asked Agatha.
    “So he says. He brags about it—how she sacrifices for him. What a weasel he is!”
    “Less of a weasel than his mentor,” Agatha said.
    I considered her. “You don’t like Fitzroy, and he doesn’t like you. How come? Do you know him from somewhere? Where? I know he hangs out sometimes in Aix. That he teaches at the university there.”
    She tightened her lips in a kind of grimace and evaded my question: “He’s a type.”
    “You’re not one to categorize people, Agatha.”
    “He thinks he’s an aristocrat.” Her tone was flat.
    “Like Chateaublanc?”
    “In an American way.”
    “And you don’t like aristocrats?”
    “You could say that. They’re arrogant and lazy. And Fitzroy’s anti-Catholic.” It was as if Agatha heard herself and didn’t like what she heard, because she added quickly, “Forget that I  said that. I am being uncharitable.”
    I wondered again how Agatha knew about Fitzroy’s anti-Catholicism. Consumed with curiosity about all of them, I said, “Let’s go join them.”
    Agatha shrugged and said, “All right. We must be polite. It will be my penance.”
    With ill grace, Jack pushed another table up to theirs and moved chairs around. We sat down and switched to speaking French—Griset’s grip on