by M. M. Mayle
“Please don’t be that way,” Laurel says. “If anything, I should apologize for disrupting the plans—”
“Don’t worry about it. I mean you were surprised, weren’t you? That’s all Colin wanted to accomplish and that worked, didn’t it?” Amanda retreats a few steps, then turns back. “Increased security notwithstanding, you really shouldn’t stand around in a hotel lobby unless you want to attract attention, and you’d be wise to put that report in your purse before Colin sees it and starts asking questions.”
Thin-lipped and frowning, Amanda waves a halfhearted goodbye to the others and leaves.
Laurel stuffs the report into her bag and nudges the others in the direction of the courtyard restaurant. As soon as their party is seated at a niche table near a water feature, she cuts into the celebratory mood by asking the last time a family member visited their Glen Abbey home. “Have any of you been there in the last few weeks?”
They react as though she’s asked a trick question, eyeing each other uneasily until Benjie volunteers as spokesperson.
“Uh . . . no,” he says. “But we did go to Mrs. Floss’s funeral like you asked, and one of us visits Dad every week. You can verify that with the nursing home.”
“I’m not checking up on you, sweetie. I trust you to do what I’ve asked. I only wondered if you had stopped by the house . . . perhaps spent some time there. If I seem surprised that you haven’t, it’s because you had such strong objection to—”
“I know what you’re gettin’ at,” Mike says. “We did object when you first said you wanted to sell the place. But now, with you gone and Dad out of the picture, nobody wants to go there anymore.”
“So we don’t,” Emily says with a catch in her voice.
“I see. Thank you, that’s all I need to know.”
It isn’t all she needs to know, it’s only the beginning of what she needs to know.
Generous pourings of champagne restore the party mood. The others offer toasts and take sips, but Laurel can’t swallow even a drop because to her, the bubbly smells like industrial-strength cleaning compound.
FORTY
Midday, June 23, 1987
Yesterday’s Concorde flight was an expensive tradeoff. Although flying time was greatly reduced, and flying during daylight hours relieved the strain of trying to sleep, arriving in Paris eighteen hours ahead of Amanda’s ETA left Nate insomniac in a hotel instead of a plane.
Today, after a cold shower, a pot of strong coffee, a calorie-laden breakfast and a brisk walk—the usual means of emergency invigoration—he’s still thirty minutes away from the earliest he can expect to see Amanda enter the majestic lobby of the George V.
“Patience, hell,” he mumbles, abandoning his seat in the lobby and the newspaper he was pretending to read. Within minutes he’s in a cab moving along the Champs-Elysées, his destination a small hotel on the Left Bank, where he’s willing to risk a confrontation with Colin if only to get the endless wait over with.
The impulse pays off when the cab edges up to the porte-cochère entrance on Rue Dauphine and Amanda appears as though on cue. If he believed in signs, this would be seen as a good one—an outstanding one. Then again, maybe not, because when he tells the driver to wait, and steps out of the cab to intercept her, she shows no surprise. She doesn’t reciprocate with any energy when he embraces her; she doesn’t say anything intelligible when he hustles her into the cab and climbs in after her.
“George Cinque,” he says to the driver and turns to Amanda, justifiably afraid to hear what’s wrong when he flashes back on the disaster that marred their last reunion.
“I am so glad to see you.” She brightens a little and takes his hand, laces her fingers through his in the hokey visual metaphor for sexual congress used by all soap operas and too many movies.
He eats it right up. Forgets that she seemed disconnected a moment ago, concentrates on kissing her—investigating the more graphic metaphor within her mouth—and ignores the jaded voyeurism of the driver as registered in the rearview mirror.
“All the suites were booked,” he explains when he leads her into a standard room on the third floor of his hotel. “And I had to settle for an inner courtyard view. I hope that’s all right.”
“Like I’m going to be looking out the window.” She strips off the jacket to her smart linen suit and wriggles out of the skirt.
“Good point. The view’s definitely better inside,” he says and relieves her of a flimsy bra and the briefest of briefs before he sheds his own clothes and they fall together on the bed.
Two extended finger-lacings later, he should be snoring and she should be ready to describe whatever was bothering her when she left the other hotel. But he’s wide awake and she’s garrulous about every little thing except today’s events.
He’s treated to a complete rundown of the tour even though he’s been kept in the loop via their daily phone calls. She speaks of triumphs and tragedies, glorious weather in Scandinavia, substandard hotels along the way, container packs that wound up in Rotterdam instead of Amsterdam and Frankfurt instead of Hamburg, larky reunions with venue personnel from the old days, inevitable hostilities inflamed by too much togetherness. She covers everything from gate receipts, to relentless demand for additional concert dates, to projected sales and charting of Rayce Vaughn’s posthumously released live album. She marvels at the spontaneous tributes to Rayce that sprang up at every venue and wonders aloud what the potential is for Verge to remain together. She extols the high caliber of the various bands that have opened for Verge and the expertise of a veteran road crew that made everything work.
She rattles on in her usual breathless way, draws him in on the subject of what they’ll do and see in Paris during the break. He’s all but convinced that whatever happened earlier was unimportant when she suddenly sits up and pulls the sheet up to her chin, signaling a sharp turn in the narrative.
“You remember that Laurel went running to David with the information we put together about the Jakeway guy. I know I told you about it the minute she let me know what she’d done.”
“Yes, you did . . . and?” He props himself up on one elbow.
“And it seems that David hired an independent testing laboratory to check out the contaminant—that’s what he called it—in Laurel’s attic.”
“I hope that’s not what’s bothering you. I would have done the same in David’s place.”
“What’s bothering me is there was no contaminant when the lab people checked the specified area.”
“Wait a minute. Are you saying the evidence was tampered with?”
“It wasn’t tampered with, it was freakin’ destroyed. I’m saying that someone deliberately got rid of it. Washed it away with a commercial cleaning product.”
Full comprehension takes a while. “Jesus, Jesus . . . Jesus,” he then says, sits all the way up and yanks a corner of the sheet over himself. “Are you sure? How did you hear about this?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I heard about it directly from David this morning when he asked me to pass the written report of the aborted test on to Laurel. I’ll dare say he enjoyed filling me in, if you get what I mean.”
“I do. Where is he now?”
“Rome, ironing out some labor problem. He gave me the envelope at the airport this morning just before he left.”
Nate gets out of bed. “Listen to me please,” he says and begins dressing. “First of all . . . David may still enjoy making me look bad, but he’s no amateur and he’s no fool. He would never resort to a stunt like this. Way beneath him and way too much to lose if he was caught. Second of all, he has absolutely nothing to gain. With Laurel in the equation, David will never be a serious contender for—”
“Never mind all that. I wasn’t accusing David of doing the actual tampering.”
“Then who are you accusing? Laurel? Do you think she had her brothers clean up after themselves before anything could be proven?”
“I’m accusing the Jakeway creep, you ninny! I
think he found out you were asking around, went back to cover his tracks and—”
“Wait just a minute. Hold on there!”
“No! Nothing says the Floss woman didn’t tell Jakeway you were looking for him. Didn’t you describe her as eager to babble on about anything to anybody? Isn’t that so?”
“It is, but she didn’t even know my name.”
“Your name wouldn’t have mattered. Didn’t matter who was interested in his whereabouts and what he was up to, only that someone was interested.”
“You’re relying too much on probability . . . chance . . . happenstance.”
“No more than you were only a few weeks ago.”
“I won’t argue that. A few weeks ago I was as borderline bat-shit about this effort as you are now, but I was made to see the futility of the effort and what it was doing to me. So that’s why I can consider it extremely unlikely Hoople Jakeway—if that’s who he really is—went to the trouble of disinfecting Laurel’s attic.”
“But how can you be so sure?”
“I can’t. But I can’t let it rule me. And I don’t want it ruling you either. Didn’t we agree before you left New York last time that we weren’t going to play detective anymore? I thought when Laurel threw up the roadblock, that was it—despite your handwritten note to the contrary. I thought when you returned to London we’d resigned ourselves to live with the things we can’t control.”
“I’m not. Resigned, I mean. I can’t be. Not when something like this happens. Not when it’s so . . . so obvious. And the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that’s exactly what happened. For whatever reason, Jakeway showed up at Laurel’s house sometime after you were last there, Mrs. Floss intercepted him, told him about you and that spurred him to action. That has to explain it. It simply must. And you know what? If the medical examiner hadn’t ruled Mrs. Floss’s death an accident, I could start wondering if Jakeway had something to do with—”
“Please do not! This has to stop. It’s over with, Amanda. It’s a dead issue. As Laurel once implored the press about Aurora, I’m asking you to leave it buried. Okay? Okay?”
“I’m . . . I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it. And I couldn’t help it when I was hard on Laurel for running to David to make it all better and tricking Colin into accepting around-the-clock bodyguards and looking the other way so she won’t see the threat and . . . and pretty much spoiled the surprise reunion with her family even though she was the one who made it impossible for me to get them seated in the hotel restaurant before she went in and then I had to go confirm baggage distribution so I didn’t have the chance to make amends . . . omigod, I forgot my baggage. Godness Agnes, can you believe I left my own bags sitting there after I made sure everyone else had theirs?”
“Yeah, I can because that’s what this sudden relapse has done to you—screwed with everything you’re best at.”
He turns away to avoid the wide-eyed little-girl contrition he knows will be in her gaze; he feels like the worst kind of patronizing s.o.b. when he advises her to take a nice long soak in the tub while he goes to get her bags.
“Can’t I call and have them sent over?” she says.
“That could take too long. I’ll go, I don’t mind.”
I don’t mind at all, he thinks during the short elevator ride and sees nothing but opportunity when he reaches the lobby.
Call it a vote in Amanda’s favor, a testimonial to the beliefs he just berated her for; call it a recanting of everything he just avowed; call it the second impulse of the day that has him prickling with anticipation when he heads for the outside doors.
Call it a flashback of hallucinogenic proportions when he stops short of the doors, backtracks to the chair where he waited earlier, and sits down with the intention of outlasting this wrongheaded urge that’s gripping him.
He vividly relives a trip to Jersey when indecisiveness was his closest companion with ambivalence set to become his main character trait. Has he learned nothing? Has he made any progress at all? He questions himself the way he did that day, and to expand on a theme, questions why he now thinks a showdown with Colin would make a difference when nothing else has worked so far. What makes him think Colin can ever be shaken out of his selfish complacency?
Reference to the taboo subject of Aurora’s actual means of decapitation might not even do the trick. And if it did accomplish anything, what then? What more could be done that’s not already being done? How many bodyguards are enough? Are there ever enough?
Giving no outward sign of the debate waging within, he stays put a little longer—until he’s sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that when he goes for Amanda’s bags he won’t be going for anything else.
FORTY-ONE
Evening, June 23, 1987
At dinner, Laurel remains distracted by the nagging need to know exactly what went on in her New Jersey attic, who is responsible, and what it portends. Distraction becomes obsession, need becomes urge; she can think of little else.
The small talk that got her through lunch and a long afternoon with Colin and her siblings, fails her now. She’s a marginal participant when the same group, plus Rachel, raves on and on about the present venue.
True, the view from a window table at the fabled restaurant on the second level of the Eiffel Tower is something to rave about—especially at sunset—if the viewer’s field of vision isn’t overcast with uneasiness.
Her taste buds are affected too. Now it’s not just the wine she imagines is caustic; the entire tasting menu is suspect—from tiny purple artichokes and roasted prawns to citrus sorbet and delicate peach-colored macarons.
As gloaming yields to darkness, all eyes are on the controlled explosion of light from below. This could be an attenuated fireworks display with spectator response accordingly toned down to mimed expressions.
She displays near-genuine awe at the spectacle and laughs with Emily, who claims to have discovered why Paris is called the “City of Light”—that, or be considered a killjoy.
The choice table is theirs for the evening. They can linger longer, but Laurel is eager to leave before Colin is recognized, if that hasn’t already happened. The other diners strike her as tourists on best behavior and who knows how long that behavior will last. Especially with wine flowing the way it is.
Colin may be having the same thought when he abruptly settles the bill and leads the way to the exit.
Although their group is alone in the private elevator for restaurant patrons, the ride down doesn’t last long enough to afford any real relief. And when they reach street level, they could all be targets while waiting a few short minutes for Bemus and Tom Jensen to arrive.
Within the relative safety of a chauffeur-driven stretch limousine, no one objects when she asks if they can postpone the next planned event. Unless they had a bateau mouche to themselves, there’s no way she could withstand a river cruise in her present state of mind. Not with all the opportunities a boat provides for ambush. She’d feel no less trapped than she did at dinner.
When they reach the nearby St. Germain district and the hotel, her brothers and Emily aren’t ready to call it a night. No big surprise there. She wouldn’t be either, if all she had on her mind was absorbing as much of Paris as possible in a few day’s time.
In giving her blessing and admonishing them to be cautious in all things, she stops just short of telling them to look both ways when crossing streets and revealing herself as the hopelessly unreconstructed mother hen she is.
While Colin tells Rachel and the bodyguards a longwinded goodnight in the lobby, Laurel hurries on ahead to relieve the professional child minder Amanda thought to have on standby.
Simon is sleeping soundly when she kisses his forehead and straightens the bedclothes; Anthony may be playing possum when she does the same for him. Colin comes in as she’s descending the spiral staircase from the loft portion of the duplex suite.
“Let’s have it, then,” Colin says without warning.
“Have what? Th
e boys are fine—très bon, as the sitter put it.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I want to know what’s got into you.” He moves to the foot of the staircase and scowls up at her.
“Nothing,” she says and stays where she is, several steps from the bottom.
“I wouldn’t call this—this numbness, this tuned out thing of yours nothing.”
“I guess the tour’s finally caught up with me.”
“Don’t give me that. On the plane this morning you were chief trouper. You were up for anathing. Then, at the hotel, all the sparkle went out. I wanna know why. I wanna know what the bloody hell happened between the time we got here and the time you were met with the surprise. I think I fucking deserve to know what it was that pissed in the champagne at lunch and cast a pall over a special dinner that was arranged for over a month ago.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“No I’m not.”
It’s nothing. I’m in overload, that’s all. Being in Paris, the excitement of being with my family and—”
“And that’s supposed to account for your lackluster reaction to any of it?”
“I’m sorry. Everything’s been lovely. Incredibly so. And you’ve been so incredibly thoughtful and generous . . . what can I say? I can never thank you enough.”
“Yeh you can. You can thank me by explaining what’s going on.”
“I’d rather not.”
“There! You see? You’ve just admitted something is—”
“But it’s nothing, as I keep telling you. I’ll work it out on my own.”
“I do not fancy a row with you, but that’s what’s coming if you don’t fill me in straightaway!”