Paris, Before You Die Read online

  Contents

  Characters

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part 2

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  * * * * *

  For Bill Bowers, my father-in-law, with love.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Paris, Before You Die

  Copyright © 2018 by Moebooks

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any way without the express written permission of the author.

  Cover art by Custom Covers, www.coverkicks.com

  * * * * *

  Characters

  Grayson Pimm – wealthy investment advisor who can’t get enough money or women.

  Lauren Pimm – Grayson’s wife, struggling to make a bad marriage work.

  Audrey Cramer – self-proclaimed psychic. That doesn’t make her crazy. Does it?

  Kat Carney – Audrey’s friend, a 60-something cougar looking for a little action in Paris.

  Nettie Tucker – retired widow, seeing Paris with her beloved niece, Twyla.

  Twyla Staples – middle-aged and lonely, ready to be swept off her feet. By anybody.

  Henry Dawson – retired cop, jaded and lonely, looking for a reason to live.

  Jack Bartlett – recently widowed. Loud, gauche, but essentially harmless . . . maybe.

  Charley Leeper – left his wife Madelyn behind so he could keep Jack company on the trip.

  Hannah Sorenson – beautiful blond, traveling alone.

  Daisy Wilson – beautiful blond, traveling alone; could be Hannah’s sister, but says she isn’t.

  Eric Handler – accomplished chef and restauranteur.

  Ashley Handler – Eric’s wife; she’d rather have a tearoom than Eric’s experimental kitchen.

  Margery Rowe – widow, traveling alone. Nosey, gossipy, a troublemaker.

  Danny Carter – novice tour guide who’s in over his head with this group.

  Claude, Andre – desk clerks of the boutique hotel in Paris.

  Jeanne – dead for over 200 years and still causing trouble.

  Prologue

  Grayson Pimm stumbled into the hotel’s elevator, muttering angrily.

  “Go on up to your room and get some rest,” the other man said patiently, reaching in to push the button for Grayson’s floor. “Try to cool off.”

  “You go to hell.”

  Behind him, Grayson heard the elevator door closing. The car gave an unwilling bounce and began to rise.

  Struck by the bitter irony of it all, he cackled, but it came out sounding foolish. Womanish. Even to his own ears it was as if it were coming from somebody else. He was a man of consequence; he was a man who moved forward while others stepped aside. That idiotic giggle didn’t fit him, but what the hell, no one could hear. He was alone inside the little box – these Parisian elevators were as close-fitting as coffins.

  It was unraveling. He’d planned it all out so carefully, and bit by bit, without even knowing what they were doing, the goddamn broads were screwing up everything in every possible way.

  A weariness dropped over him and he groaned. He couldn’t go home like this. Not with things as they stood tonight. He had looked forward to the trip home as a champagne flight full of plans for the future, leaving all his problems behind in Paris. Could he face taking them all home again, when nothing had really changed? Everyone had let him down; everyone seemed to be working against him.

  He was still facing the back of the elevator car as it slowly moved upward, cranking as if it were about to stall. Piece of crap machinery – all gilded and painted up like a whore and chugging along like a potato farmer’s pick-up. What floor had he gotten to, anyway?

  He turned around to check, then groaned again. The weariness was beginning to crush him. It was all wrong. He was tired of being confused, tired of being contradicted, tired of having things go haywire.

  As he became aware of the knife, his grimace faded and his expression became almost childish. He wanted to control his hands but they were heavy, disconnected. The tip of the knife was moving in on him fast, and all he could think was, “Wait!”

  Something was very wrong here, he thought foolishly, it was all happening too fast, and it was outside his control. Which was strange, because Grayson Pimm was a man who controlled things.

  Disbelieving, knowing his eyes had to be wrong about this, he watched the tip of the knife drive forward and penetrate his body. It happened quickly, easily, too fast for his stronger self to make it stop.

  Mouth agape, staring stupidly, he slid down the back wall of the elevator car and sat on the floor, holding the handle of the knife that couldn’t be there and wondering why it didn’t hurt yet. He felt the cold of it, he felt the pressure; his eyes dazzled and grew dim. The weariness pressed him hard, going through him all the way down to the floor beneath him. In the last moment, all he really knew was that the elevator was moving.

  Up he rose, neatly contained in a little box as close-fitting as a coffin.

  Part 1

  Monday, May 21 – one month earlier.

  Chapter 1

  “But it’s Paris, Audrey! The city of light. The city of love. Everyone should go to Paris at least once in their lives.”

  “I’m all set in the love department,” the tall brunette said, gazing contentedly at the trim man with the warm green eyes who was currently preparing breakfast in their apartment’s little kitchen. She was sitting on the other side of the counter on a high-boy chair, staying out of the way and admiring her lover’s backside.

  “Well, I’m not,” the woman on the phone said.

  “Kat, that’s at least fifty percent of the reason I don’t want to go with you. I’ve seen you fall in love before, and you’re always so . . . loud about it. My nerves can only take so much.”

  “You have the nerves of an ox,” Kat said mercilessly. “I’ve been watching you handle pressure since we were in high school together, fifty years ago. If they’d taken women into the military back then, you would have been a drill sergeant. A commando. In fact, some of those pranks we played probably qualified as commando raids, and you were always the ringleader.”

  “Those were not pranks. They were necessary object lessons. Besides, I hate to travel. I just got the schedule for the senior living center, and I’m down for Wednesdays and Fridays for the whole month. They’re having a hard time getting volunteers now that the kids are on summer break; they depend on us retirees. And Jackson said he might take me to Fernandina Beach for a day or two next week.”

  The man in the kitchen began to wave big negative gestures at her with a spatula, while the woman on the other end of the line said, “You’d rather go to Fernandina than Paris?”

  “Frankly, yes. Besides, when I travel abroad, I’m always so con
scious of my American-ness. I feel like they’re all looking at the Yanks and thinking, ‘Sacre bleu, zeez, Americaans! Always in jeans and sneak-airs. No-no! It is not chic, that.’”

  “Stop it. Your accent is embarrassing. And don’t pack any jeans or sneakers. We’re going to be in metropolitan Paris, about two blocks from the Eiffel Tower. Bring things that are elegant. In fact, go buy some new stuff. Go to that boutique near you and throw yourself on the owner’s mercy; she knows what she’s doing. Just buy whatever she tells you to buy. Do not bring your usual I-got-this-free tee shirts.”

  “I’m not packing anything, because I’m not going.”

  “But you have to go! Pearl can’t go, and it’s already paid for.”

  Audrey Cramer shifted the handset to her other ear and closed her eyes. “I’m really sorry about Pearl. It scared the heck out of me when I heard about the accident, but she’s going to be all right, isn’t she? She was able to talk to me on the phone the next day.”

  “She’s not going to be all right enough, fast enough to take a walking tour of Paris. You have to go in her place.”

  “Why me? What about your sister? Didn’t you move to Charleston to be closer to her?”

  “I’ve been seeing all of Judy I can handle, thank you very much.”

  “I was afraid of that. When you told me you were moving to Charleston, didn’t I tell you – ”

  “Never mind what you told me. Judy can’t go anyway. She has grandkids to babysit. Besides, you haven’t seen me in person for at least five years. How do you know I haven’t let myself go and gained eighty pounds?”

  “Now that I would like to see,” Audrey said, grinning.

  “Well forget about it, because I haven’t. I still fit into my old cheerleading outfit and I look exactly the same in it. Sam said so.”

  “Sam?”

  “I told you about Sam.”

  “Oh, yeah. He was the one after Peter. Or was it Paul?”

  “Neither, and don’t try to change the subject. You’re going to Paris with me or I’ll never forgive you. I’ll cut your picture out of all my yearbooks and X out all the stuff you wrote on the inside covers. All that ‘friends forever’ stuff, because you didn’t really mean it. Really, Audrey, why wouldn’t you go? It’s all paid for, and the tour company said we could substitute another warm body if we can scrounge one up in time.”

  “I am not cheap enough to let Pearl take a loss on this; of course I’d pay her for the cost of the tour if I went in her place. Money isn’t the problem, Kat.”

  “That’s another thing – you’d really be doing Pearl a favor if you helped her get her cash back. We didn’t get travel insurance, and they don’t give refunds, only a partial credit to use for another tour.”

  “So? Wait till she’s better and take another tour.”

  “I want to go on this one! You qualify as a warm body, even if you make up your mind to be a pill for the whole trip. You’re going. Just get used to the idea.”

  Audrey turned her head. “Just a minute, Jackson, I’m almost finished.”

  “Is Jackson there? He thinks you should go too, doesn’t he?”

  Jackson was standing in front of Audrey, smiling and nodding like a bobblehead.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be golfing?” she said over the edge of the phone.

  “Hi, Kat,” he called out, loud enough for her to hear.

  “Oh, give him a kiss for me, Audrey,” Kat said with a thicker voice.

  “You keep your lips off him.”

  “Paris?” Jackson asked. “As in Paris, France? With Kat and Pearl? Go, Audrey.”

  “Just Kat. Pearl’s still recovering from that accident. She’ll be okay. But it leaves a vacancy on this guided tour they got themselves into, and Kat wants a warm body.”

  “If you won’t come, can Jackson come instead?” Kat asked.

  “Put it on speaker,” Jackson was saying at the same time.

  “Not on your life.” Back into the phone, Audrey said, “Okay, I’ll think about it, Kat, but don’t get your hopes up.”

  “Put it on speaker, Audrey,” Jackson insisted. “Does she want me to come instead? I don’t have anything important on my calendar for the next couple of weeks.”

  “Cute,” Audrey said, making a face at him. “I’ll go to Fernandina by myself and you can go to Paris and share a room with Kat.”

  “We can go to Fernandina anytime.”

  “Fine with me,” Kat said. “Tell him to come on ahead. You can stay home, eat frozen dinners and volunteer at the old folks’ home.”

  “Knock it off, both of you,” Audrey said.

  Jackson’s face softened. “Go on, honey. You’ll enjoy it. I’ll stay home and take care of things. You go have fun with your girlfriend.”

  “Tell Jackson I’d rather have him.”

  “I’m sure you would. All right, exactly when is this tour and what’s on the agenda?”

  Kat told her quickly, glamorizing all the details and finishing up with, “It won’t be one of those tours where you’re always packing and getting back on the bus. One hotel. That’s it. Eight days only. You won’t be washing out your clothes in a hotel sink and hanging them up to dry every night. You can pack everything you need in one suitcase. Hardly worth the flight to France, but it was all I could talk Pearl into, and now she’s not even going.”

  In the end, Audrey relented. Her only hope by then was that she wouldn’t be able to get a flight, but the airline was just lovely about it, even giving her Pearl’s seat for the flight from Charlotte to Paris, next to Kat, which was going to be a trial all by itself. Then she suddenly remembered her passport – hadn’t it expired? “Yes!” she thought excitedly, by this time it must have expired. Hope sprang through her like a refreshing stream, but no, dammit, she found that the stupid thing was good for another whole year. In fact, all the fates seemed to be conspiring against her. If she’d actually wanted to go, it would have been roadblocks all the way.

  Audrey Cramer, a Chicago transplant who reveled in the Florida sunshine and took her service to the senior community very seriously, was going to Paris in June, where it would probably rain every day and Kat would fall in love three times.

  Chapter 2

  “Here’s the list, Aunt Nettie!” Twyla Staples said, looking up from the computer screen excitedly as the other lady came into her apartment. Nettie visited her niece often; she had her own key.

  “I know,” said the dear old thing with her gray hair in a bun and granny glasses on her nose. She walked into the kitchen to set her things down and added, “I opened the email earlier on my cellphone, but they sent it as a PDF. As long as you’ve got it up on your computer, would you download it and print out a copy for me too? I’ll just get busy in the kitchen and plate the food.”

  Twyla’s Aunt Nettie was too considerate to simply drop in on her favorite niece when she got home from work, tired and hungry, but with the Paris trip coming up, they were both so excited that they were seeing one another almost every night now. Nettie, always thoughtful, had sent Twyla a text earlier in the day saying she’d bring dinner that night. Twyla had texted back that she had the wine to go with it. How lovely to have such good relations between the generations. Nettie felt so lucky to have a niece like Twyla living nearby. They sincerely enjoyed one another’s company and looked forward to these little dinners together, just the two of them.

  Nettie Tucker went straight to the kitchen cabinet and took down two dinner plates. She knew her way around this kitchen as if it were her own home. Glancing across at the little table-for-four outside the open-ended kitchen, she noticed that her niece hadn’t set the table for dinner, and it just made her smile and shake her head. These modern girls with their office jobs, always rushing around. Except Twyla only seemed to go back and forth to work, and didn’t have much of a social life to keep her busy otherwise.

  She was secretly flattered that her niece had suggested that they take a special trip together this year. They usually
just went to Door County, up in Wisconsin, or spent a couple of nights in downtown Milwaukee or Chicago, but this year, Twyla had said, let’s do something special. The fact that Twyla didn’t suddenly run off to Aruba from time to time with a bunch of girls her own age – well, middle-aged women, really – was something that troubled Nettie, but she tried not to let herself think about it. Twyla had never been a run-around. She’d never been boy-crazy. That had been a source of pride when she’d been a teenager, but now that she was 45, it was getting a little . . . sad?

  Still, it was sweet that she enjoyed spending time with her old Aunt Nettie, she told herself, and she tried to let it go at that. Picking up the finished plates, she went to the table to set them down, then made one more trip to the kitchen for silverware and napkins. Twyla wasn’t eating out of bags and boxes, using plastic forks while her Aunt Nettie was around.

  Meanwhile, Twyla was pouring the wine. The fellow-traveler lists were already sitting next to the plates, and aunt and niece settled down to say grace. Fast food it might be, but they were still civilized enough to be grateful for it.

  “Amen,” they said together, and then they both picked up the lists. When they glanced up again, they saw that they were both holding wineglasses in their right hands and the passenger lists in their left, and they laughed. More like mother and daughter than aunt and niece.

  “There she is, just like she said she’d be,” Twyla said with a little rush of excitement. “Lauren Pimm, nee Zimbalist, prom queen of the class of ’97. Last in the yearbook but first in our hearts. It’s going to be so much fun seeing her again, and in Paris! I’m so glad she mentioned she was going there before we booked anyplace else. It’ll make our special trip all the more special, being able to see her again. And her bigshot husband, Grayson, of course,” she added grudgingly.

  Nettie tried not to wince. Didn’t the prettiest girls in high school always end up with the best boys? And girls like Twyla . . . .

  “And here I am,” Twyla went on, swilling her glass, “a good old-fashioned spinster. Leave it to Lauren to go out into the big old world and find herself a tycoon. She always was a winner.”