Free Murder in the Latin Quarter by Susan Kiernan-Lewis Page A

close?”
    Maggie sucked in a breath. “I wanted to be.”
    â€œBut you weren’t.”
    â€œWe were too different.”
    â€œIt 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.
    â€œDid 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?”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œLaurent and Gerard were raised by their grandmother,” she said.

12
    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.
    â€œAre 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.
    â€œI’m good.”
    â€œWe must cross here to get to the park.”
    Maggie