Pursuit in Provence (A Jordan Mayfair Mystery)

by Phyllis Gobbell

  I was becoming as nosy as Millie O’Neill. What I would’ve given to be able to translate the lyrical French that the patron spoke, smiling his kind smile at Bettina, before she turned to the board of miniature yellow tennis shoes and handed him his key. Not even the patron of the museum was allowed to keep his own key when he wasn’t in his room.

  As he passed from Réception to the stairs, he gave me the benefit of his generous smile, as well. “Good evening,” I said.

  It seemed the courteous thing to say, given that his eyes were fixed on me, but for a moment there when he paused and said, “Good evening,” I thought he might be going to stop. Silly, but I felt a lift, followed by a little letdown when he went up the stairs. Something about Monsieur Broussard—one didn’t have to be nineteen to be taken by him.

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  Middle-of-the-night calls make my blood run cold. My travel clock on the table beside my bed read 1:45 A.M. when the jingle of the phone beside my bed jarred me from a deep sleep. In the few seconds it took to fumble for the receiver, the old-fashioned type, the notion flashed through my mind that someone at home was being inconsiderate of the time difference, though I knew my children would have called my cell.

  “I’m sorry to wake you, Jordan . . .” It was Alex’s voice, weak and tremulous. “Would you mind terribly . . . I need some help.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I said.

  “Wait—my door is locked. I can’t—” he struggled to get his breath—“can’t get to it.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll get in. Hang on, Alex.” Immediately I wished I hadn’t said Hang on. It sounded too much like I thought he was dying, and he couldn’t be. Not Alex. But he wouldn’t have called me at 1:45 A.M. if it weren’t something serious.

  I used the room phone, trying to reach the front desk, but no one answered. Come on, come on! I willed Bettina to pick up, but she didn’t. I ran out of my room, remembering only as I hit the stairs that I hadn’t grabbed my robe—Oh, I didn’t have a robe. That wasn’t one of the essential items of clothing I’d bought in Paris. Under the circumstances, what did it matter if I was seen racing through the hotel in my white silky Parisian pajamas?

  No one was at Réception. I went behind the front desk, glanced at the pegboard which was empty of the key to room eight because Alex had it. I jerked open the only drawer in sight and found a jumble of keys. Marked with room numbers, thank God. Thank God again that L’hôtel du Soleil was a small hotel, and room eight was an easy find. So much for hotel security.

  In my bare feet, I probably didn’t make any noise, and they never knew I was there. I wouldn’t have known they were there if I hadn’t heard the bell-like notes of laughter, a girlish giggle. My brief glance before I hurried back up the stairs etched the moment like a photo. Later, when the image developed, it was clear enough, however implausible. The man with Bettina was Gerard Llorca.

  Alex was lying on top of the covers, clad in blue pajamas. Though the light from his bedside lamp was faint, I could tell his cheeks were flushed.

  “Oh, there you are,” he said. His breathing was short and ragged. He rubbed his chest. Except for that small movement, he was lying as still as a rock.

  “What’s wrong, Alex?”

  “A chronic, very annoying problem,” he said. “Angina.”

  “You have a problem with your heart? Why didn’t you tell me?” I caught myself and moderated my tone. “What can I do?

  I’ll get a doctor.”

  He shook his head. “My pills—the shelf in the bathroom.”

  I found the bottle and returned to Alex’s bedside. “Nitroglycerine tablets?”

  He nodded. I struggled with removing the top, remembering that Stuart used to say the tamper-proof caps weren’t necessarily childproof; they just ensured that no one with arthritis could get them off. Alex put a small tablet under his tongue, and for a moment we waited in silence. Then I couldn’t stay quiet any longer.

  “Here, let’s prop you up so you can breathe a little better,” I said, reaching for the other pillow on the bed. Alex raised his head and shoulders, with my help. I stuffed the extra pillow behind him. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this problem,” I said.

  Alex managed a weak smile. “It’s more of a nuisance than anything. The pills should do the trick.” The furrows in his damp brow had not smoothed out; clearly, he was still in pain.

  “Maybe a cold washcloth will help.” I headed back to the bathroom.

  “Couldn’t hurt.” Alex’s voice was sounding a bit stronger. When I put the wet cloth on his forehead, he said, “Sorry I had to disturb you. I woke in such pain, I couldn’t sit up. Couldn’t get to my pills.”

  “You would’ve been in more trouble with me than you’re already in if you hadn’t called,” I scolded. I didn’t know much about angina. Stuart had been a pediatrician. His patients had croup, ear infections, and the like. But anything heart-related could not be shrugged off. “I still think you need a doctor. What if it’s—not what you think?” I couldn’t bring myself to say heart attack, but I couldn’t ignore that possibility, either.

  “I would know,” Alex said. “If the little magic pill failed to work, we would consider another plan.” It appeared the pill was working. His breathing was no longer jerky. He had stopped rubbing his chest—his heart. I sat down on the side of his bed.

  “My mistake was not having my tablets close by,” he said. “If I had, this would all be over, and you’d still be in your bed snoring.”

  “I don’t snore,” I said.

  “Of course not.” A twist of his lips passed as a smile.

  “The climb up to Daudet’s Mill was just too much,” I said, as much to myself as to him. Why hadn’t I taken charge when I’d seen how he was struggling? As difficult as Alex was, he might have listened to me if I’d been more assertive. I hadn’t wanted to believe anything was terribly wrong with Alex. Classic case of denial.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” He handed me the damp cloth from his forehead. “Sometimes I attribute these incidents to something I’ve done, sometimes not.” He smiled, this time with his eyes, too. “Don’t say I shouldn’t have had my afternoon at Daudet’s Mill. It was unforgettable.”

  “Well, yes. It was,” I said.

  He closed his eyes. I watched him, the way I used to watch my children when they were sick. His blue-veined eyelids fluttered. His breathing was slow and steady. After a few minutes, he opened his eyes and gave me a stern look. “Why are you still here?”

  “If you won’t let me get a doctor, I need to stay until I’m sure you’re all right,” I said.

  “I can assure you I’m all right.” He sounded enough like the stubborn Alex I knew and loved. “I know more about my condition than any doctor you could find. I’ve lived with it.”

  He was convincing. Angina was neither life-threatening nor debilitating, he argued, just excruciatingly painful—until the nitroglycerine kicked in. He’d experienced attacks like this for a while, though he wouldn’t say exactly how long, but if I cared to place a call to his doctor in Atlanta, he was sure Reuben would confirm everything Alex knew from his own experience.

  “So that’s why he didn’t want you traveling alone,” I said. Alex made a sound like a low growl. I said, “You could have been straightforward with me, you know.”

  “I’d like to sleep now, if you don’t mind.”

  I scowled at him. “You’re a terrible patient, Alex. I’ll leave only if you promise you’ll go to your doctor for a complete workup as soon as you get back to Atlanta.”

  “Considering the hour and the fact that we both need our rest, you give me no choice.” He managed a smile and reached for my hand. “Thank you, dear,” he said, with a gentle squeeze.

  Leaving the bedside lamp on, making sure I had the key from the front desk which would never be missed, I slipped out of the room. It was two forty, and I was wide awake. As I closed Alex’s door, the door of room ten opened a crack. Milli
e O’Neill was awake, too.

  Millie’s nightshirt was emblazoned with Chicago Cubs insignia. She might have been contemplating sleep, but nothing about her appearance suggested I had awakened her. She didn’t even look surprised to see me.

  “Have you seen the ghost tonight?” I asked.

  “I’ve been watching,” she said. “Is your uncle all right?”

  “I think so.” I gave her a quizzical look.

  “I heard noises. The walls are thin,” she said.

  I wondered if we were waking everyone on the hall. I lowered my voice. “He had an attack of angina.”

  “Oh, the poor man! Does he need medical attention? I can get Betty Scruggs.”

  “Who’s Betty Scruggs?”

  “Retired nurse. One of the women on our tour. Not as silly as some of the others.”

  I couldn’t imagine that Alex would let Betty Scruggs examine him.

  “Let’s just see how he’s feeling in the morning,” I said.

  “In that case, why are we standing out here? Want a cup of tea?” Millie opened her door for me to come in.

  I hesitated. “Alex might call my room again. But he was resting when I left him. I could probably come in for a few minutes.”

  “I’ll get the goodies,” she said, sounding like a schoolgirl hosting a slumber party.

  Her room was similar to mine, with a low table in the sitting area, except that she had a balcony. “See how my room overlooks the pool and the grounds?” she said, gathering up brochures and clearing away a few items of clothing from the backs of chairs. Millie wasn’t as fastidious as I would’ve expected. She was more like me in the way she kept her room.

  She produced a tin of butter cookies, all the makings for tea, and a device for heating water. “My secretary gave me a stash of teabags and this contraption,” she said, submerging the heating coil in one of the china cups. “It’s been grand to have a cup of tea in my room and not have to take out a loan to pay for it.”

  Amusing, the frugality of Miss Assistant Director of Finance of Chicago Schools.

  The water was steaming in no time. I chose a Green Apple Zinger tea bag from the box that assured the tea was Caffeine Free. “Did you swipe these cups from downstairs?” I asked.

  “Didn’t have to swipe them. I asked Jean-Claude for a cup the first day I was here, and he gave me two. Winked at me and said, ‘Now you can entertain.’ That’s the French for you, always thinking along that line.”

  “Which reminds me,” I said. “Jean-Claude would have a stroke if he knew who his daughter was seeing tonight when I was downstairs, trying to find a key to Alex’s room.”

  I recalled the scene for Millie: The window of the sitting room was open, carrying the murmur of their voices.They stood close together in a haze of cigarette smoke. The light from the parking lot was just bright enough to illuminate them. No doubt of their identities.

  Millie was appropriately shocked by the idea of a romantic liaison between nineteen-year-old Bettina and Gerard Llorca. “I’ve seen the guy in the dining room. You can’t miss him. Tall and skinny, sour-looking, not much of a dresser, and a mop of wild white hair,” she said. “I’ll bet he’s a lot older than Jean-Claude.”

  “Did you ever hear the saying the French have, that a man’s mistress should never be younger than half his age plus seven?” I asked.

  Millie puzzled over a few possibilities, all the way from a man of twenty and girl of seventeen, to a sixty-year-old man and thirty-seven-year-old woman. “It works,” she said. “Bettina and Llorca are way off.”

  The unlikely pair and their love life were not uppermost in my mind. “I hope Alex doesn’t try to call my room,” I said.

  A sympathetic smile formed on Millie’s lips. “You’re very fond of him, aren’t you?”

  The picture flashed across my mind of Alex sitting on that low wall at Daudet’s Mill, listening to the music the sails of the windmill made. “He’s a terrific uncle. Somewhat eccentric, but my brother and I have always been close to Alex. He introduced me to the man I married.”

  And for a moment I was back at Alex’s house in Atlanta, at the dinner party he was hosting during the Christmas season, with glittering lights and the strains of holiday songs in the air. The guests included mostly friends from his prominent Buck-head neighborhood, but one guest was closer to my age, one of Alex’s former students, Stuart Mayfair. Only years later—five children later—had I learned that the main purpose of the party was so Alex could play Cupid. That from a man who’d never married, but one whose own romances were legendary.

  Before I’d drained the last drop of my tea, I had told Millie about Stuart’s car accident on a rainy night, as he was coming home after attending to newborn twins. He never got home to our own twins, two years old at the time, and our stairstep girls, six, seven, and nine.

  Unlike most people who are supposed to be good listeners, who make the requisite eye contact and supply nods and grunts of affirmation, Millie simply drank her tea, her relaxed manner suggesting she had nothing better to do than to let me run on until I ran out.

  “In the spring, with Michael and Catherine graduating from high school and Julie graduating from college, and my fiftieth birthday looming large, I needed a trip,” I said. “By sheer coincidence, Alex was already planning this trip, and his doctor didn’t want him traveling alone. Now I guess I know why.” At this point Millie did respond with a slow, thoughtful nod.

  I had come full circle—back to Alex and his angina, back to L’hôtel du Soleil and my new acquaintance who had her own story, but I hadn’t given her a chance to tell it. “Sorry I went on and on about my family,” I said.

  She gave a wave of dismissal. “If I hadn’t wanted to hear, I would have found a way out. Believe me, I get enough practice.”

  “If the women on your tour knew more about you, they’d be impressed,” I said.

  I must have embarrassed her. She stood up and said, “Sure, sure. How about a refill?”

  “No, I should get back to my room.” I stood up, too. “Can I wash cups?”

  “Goodness, no!” Millie walked over to her balcony doors, opened them, and went out. “I wonder if we’ll ever know what I saw out there. If I have to go home, not knowing—” she shook her head as if that would be a dreadful possibility.

  “So many curious things going on,” I said, joining her on the balcony. The night was crisp. There was a bright moon, still close to three-quarters full. The pool and grounds were lit only by the silver moonlight, but they looked like a stage set. It seemed impossible that anything sinister could be going on in this setting.

  “I guess you heard about the sketches missing from the Château de Montauban,” I said.

  “Yes, indeedy.” Of course. Millie heard all the gossip. “We had to change our schedule so we can go to the Château tomorrow. No one knows when the museum might close.”

  “That’s what Alex and I decided,” I said. “Assuming he feels like it. I’m really going to my room now. Thanks for the tea, Millie.”

  I left her on the balcony, staring out into the night, as if intense concentration might allow her to see the ghost again.

  CHAPTER 18

  * * *

  In the edges of my dreams, someone was pounding on my door, shouting my name. I shook myself awake. I heard my name again and recognized Alex’s voice. He was not shouting, and when he knocked, it was scarcely more than a gentle rap.

  “I’m here,” I called back, stumbling out of bed. I checked the clock—8:20. I didn’t know exactly how I looked when I answered the door, but from Alex’s expression as he studied my face, I would guess hangover was an apt description.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “I dialed your number and kept getting the busy signal.”

  I glanced at the room phone and knew why. Somehow in my fitful sleep, I had knocked the phone off the hook.

  “I’m fine. The question is, how are you?” I asked.

  “Fine as old wine,” he declared.
“Ready for our trip to the Château. Did you forget?”

  “Oh.” I rubbed my eyes. Apparently he had forgotten that I was jerked from my REMs in the middle of the night. “I didn’t set my alarm. Sorry.”

  “I worried that you missed breakfast,” he said, “but we need to leave for the museum.”

  “What time does it open?”

  “Nine, but there will be a line. People are saying a huge crowd is expected today.”

  “Give me a few minutes to get myself together,” I said. “In the meantime, do you think you could charm someone in the dining room out of a cup of coffee to go?”

  There was a crowd, all right. The Museum de Château was doing a brisk business on this Saturday morning, the parking lot dotted with tour buses. Without lines marking off parking spaces, cars had pulled in helter-skelter. I would’ve had trouble parking if our Peugeot hadn’t been so small. Apparently, the word had reached tourists throughout the region that the museum might be closing while the investigation into the valuable missing sketches was underway.

  The Château was actually an addition to a much older farmhouse—stone, of course. Built in 1897, according to a plaque at the entrance, the grand house boasted a formal design with heavy Italian influence.

  “Don’t you think this is amusing?” I said, as we stood in line to pay for admittance. “Tourists flocking in droves to this museum in this little town, simply because they might miss this one sight on their itinerary if they didn’t visit today?”

  “That’s what we’re doing, my dear,” Alex said.

  I lowered my voice. “But we might not make such an effort if we had to go to another town. These tourists can’t all be staying in Fontvieille.”

  “Of course not. The missing sketches have made the Château one of those not-to-miss sights.” Alex raised his eyebrows. “Believe me, I’ll make the most of this in my book.”

  When it was our turn at last, we paid for a guided tour in English. I’ve never been keen on guided tours of museums. I’d rather be moving at my own pace, and there at the Château, for half the price, we could’ve looked around on our own. But Alex insisted on the tour. “We can’t read the French texts that give information about the paintings,” he’d said.