Paris, Before You Die Read online

  Old-biddy sisters? Mother and daughter? Had to be one or the other.

  Henry had brought the list of fellow travelers’ names into the back bedroom with him, but after another glance at it, he closed the Atlas without looking up anybody else. None of the names or cities suggested anything to him except for the dancing Twyla and the knitting Nettie.

  Knitting Nettie. It made him smile.

  Nettie Tucker, bless her dear old heart, from Sleepy Hollow, Illinois. Somehow, he couldn’t wait to meet her. It was the first spark of interest he’d felt about the tour, and he hoped she wouldn’t turn out to be a spike-heeled dominatrix. No – that’s right – Nettie was from Sleepy Hollow. Surely nobody from a place called Sleepy Hollow wore spike heels?

  He wasn’t the fanciful type, but somehow he was starting to want Nettie to be a stereotypical little old lady, and want Twyla to be a weird old girl in hand-painted fabrics. Irrationally, he was even starting to like them, and forgetting all about the axe murderer profile.

  Oddly, uncharacteristically, he began to have hopes about Nettie and Twyla.

  He turned to boot up his computer, muttering, “I am not a stalker,” but he was compelled to know more; he couldn’t help it. He’d just look up a street view of Sleepy Hollow on the Internet, see what the place looked like. See if anybody was wearing spike heels.

  Chapter 5

  Marguerite Wilson frowned at the names on her passenger list, focusing on one in particular.

  She was glad now that she’d listed herself as Marguerite, and hadn’t used her nickname, Daisy. Maybe she’d just let everybody call her Marguerite on this trip. She was feeling bad about just about everything in her life right now, and maybe it was time to start changing things. To start changing everything, in fact, beginning with her name. She was turning 40 in a couple of years, for God’s sake. It was about time to grow up and start using a name with a little class instead of Daisy, which would have been very nice for either a 5-year old child or a Yorkshire Terrier. For a paralegal falling head-long into middle age, not so much.

  Oh, who was she kidding? Middle age was here already.

  She sniffled a little and took a pause in her downward spiral. She was still a size 4 and damn good-looking, tall, blond and mostly green-eyed. She quirked a smile. The “mostly” was because while her right eye was completely green, her left eye was half green and half blue, a fact that gave men an excuse to gaze a little longer, a little deeper into a pretty face they wanted to look at anyway. But middle age had been upon her for some time now, and it was about time she admitted it. Middle means halfway, and she was nearly halfway to 80. She was 38. Halfway to dead.

  “Oh, why did I think it was a good idea to take this trip?” she said, throwing her favorite skinny sheath into her suitcase vengefully. After venting herself on the dress, she took it out again and carefully folded it. “I look like a million bucks in this dress,” she said in a quavery voice. “I don’t want it wrinkled. Maybe somebody really interesting will be on this tour. Anyway, I paid for this trip and dammit, I’m taking it.”

  Once she had the dress carefully settled in a packing cube along with a well-engineered push-up bra, she sat herself down on the edge of the bed and looked at the notice from the tour company again. They were putting her in a room with a stranger, one Hannah Sorensen from White Bear Lake, Minnesota. Well, that was the risk you took when you booked a single, but she’d always lucked out before and had a room to herself.

  Hannah Sorenson irritated her already. She was probably one of those cheerful milkmaid types who are too friendly, too nice, too forgiving, and burst into tears after the first martini and tell you how lonely they are. Gimme a break. The only thing that kept her from hating Hannah before even meeting her was the fact that after the first martini, Daisy might just burst into tears herself, and she was definitely lonely. Could she really be as pathetic as Hannah?

  That made her laugh out loud. “I haven’t even met Hannah yet. Be nice, Daisy. You might even like her. You might just find a forever friend and meet the man of your dreams on this trip – there seem to be enough of them traveling alone.”

  She set the list aside and gazed at her reflection in the dresser mirror, just beside the bed. “What guy wouldn’t want to buy a drink for a pretty girl like you?” she asked the woman in the mirror. “And there are three men travelling alone on this trip.” She gazed at her own pretty face a moment longer and finally said, “They’re probably all gay,” and got up off the bed to force herself to finish packing.

  Chapter 6

  “Are you sure you don’t mind me stealing Charley for this trip?” Jack Bartlett asked after they had toasted Paris.

  Jack, Charley, and Charley’s wife, Madelyn, were sitting on the lanai of Jack’s bungalow the evening before the men were scheduled to leave for Paris. The presence of Jack’s dead wife, Bette, was almost palpable; the two couples had been close friends since their college days, and Bette’s death had been a shock to them all. After getting home from Bette’s funeral, Charley and Madelyn had resolved to keep Jack engaged in things. So often, widows and widowers were left out when they lost their spouses – when they weren’t part of a couple anymore. Well, Charley and Madelyn weren’t going to let that happen to Jack.

  It had been nearly a year since Bette’s fatal car wreck, and when Jack had begun to talk about a travelogue he’d seen on Paris, somehow it had been decided that the men would take a tour together, since Madelyn went to Paris a couple of times a year on business.

  “I’d just feel like I was working,” she had joked, but really, she thought a “boys only” trip would do Jack more good than one where he was traveling with another couple. Bette’s absence would have cast a shadow over everything.

  They’d looked over the names of the others on the tour, but no one had commented that any of the names rang a bell. Madelyn’s job took her to Schaumburg a lot. Many times, when people said they were going to Chicago on business, they were really going to Schaumburg. And wasn’t White Bear Lake really close to Minneapolis? Her company had offices in Minneapolis. Great airport. Lucky Hannah, whoever she was, starting off the trip in such a first-class airport. The men laughed; neither one of them had ever been to Minnesota.

  “Leave it to you to think of a city in terms of its airport,” her husband said. “You never see much else while you’re there, do you? What are you looking forward to the most on this trip, Jack?”

  “The Louvre, I guess. Or Versailles. Heck, all of it. I’m going to try escargot and foie gras and anything else they put in front of me. I’m ready for anything, you know?”

  With a soft smile, Madelyn thought for the first time that there might even be a nice, fifty-something lady for Jack on the tour. Too bad the passenger list didn’t include ages as well as home cities, not that age was such a big deal. Reading her mind, her husband Charley gave her a look and she gave him a blink, their signal that said, “Message received.” After so many years together, they could read one another’s minds, and he was thinking the same thing. She wouldn’t get her hopes up, and she would never have suggested any such thing to Jack, himself.

  But really, she thought as the conversation percolated on, Jack would be a catch for any lady – even somebody younger than he. He was such a nice guy, hardworking, not too much overweight, and very outgoing. He was always the one at the social gatherings with the slightly-off-color jokes and lots of funny anecdotes about his career in sales. So what if he was kind of bald, he laughed a little too loudly and tended to dominate any conversation he was part of? Men like Jack attracted quiet women, like Bette had been. And there were a lot more single women around than single men. Did quiet, reserved, unattached women take solo trips to Paris? She frowned a little but didn’t let the thought discourage her.

  Jack was telling one of his patented jokes now (she’d actually heard this one before, more than once), and she went ahead and laughed at the punchline. Jack really was a fun guy. Maybe in Paris, the city of love . . . ?<
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  Chapter 7

  Friday, June 15 – the tour begins on Sunday.

  At Charlotte Douglas International Airport, Audrey Cramer stood still in the middle of a busy aisle squinting hard into the distance. Before she could make up her mind that the small, trim woman in the dress that was far too young for her, cannonballing through the crowd in her direction was really her old high school buddy, Katrina Carney was all over her like wallpaper. Conscious that they were in a busy airport, Audrey kept half her attention riveted on her pickpocket-proof, unslashable travel purse with the locking zippers. Kat, on the other hand, had thrown her carry-on down at their feet and was paying no attention to it at all.

  When the wallpaper peeled back a tad and took a misty gaze upwards, Audrey finally melted. After all, she had those zippers locked. She forgot about the pickpockets and gave Kat a swimmy smile. Kat bounced up and kissed her cheek.

  “Oh, Kat,” she gushed, “it really is good to see you. Even if you didn’t get fat since the last time I saw you.”

  The pretty sixty-something got a tad prettier. “Sam says I don’t look a day over thirty.”

  “If Sam is our age, he’s probably got cataracts and can’t really see you.”

  “Oh, stop. He sees just fine. So you’re really glad to see me? In spite of everything?”

  “In spite of everything.”

  “I’m forgiven for hijacking you?”

  “For now. Ask me in five days when I’ve seen so much Paris fabulousness I can’t tell the statues from the fireplugs anymore.”

  “You’re going to love it. I’m going to have you eating escargot yet.”

  “You will definitely not have me eating escargot. You know I’m a vegetarian.”

  Kat cocked her head. “Snails aren’t meat.”

  “Oy, you’re starting already. Forget the snails. Either way, I’m not eating them. We’d better find our gate.” She glanced at the designer carry-on that Kat had so artlessly thrown down on the floor and said, “Do you really think you’re getting that thing into the overhead bins? It’s huge.”

  Kat shook her dark little head and said, “You’re starting already. God I’ve missed you all these years.”

  “Yeah, well, I missed you, too,” Audrey said grudgingly, almost bewilderedly. “In a lot of ways.”

  * * * * *

  On the airplane, Audrey waited for Kat to settle down. While not being particularly afraid to fly, Audrey didn’t much like it. What she really liked to do was read a book and forget she was even on an airplane. Early in the flight, while Kat had played with the in-flight monitor in front of her, going over the list of movies, Audrey had smoothly slipped her e-reader out of her purse and held it in her lap. She would hold it for the next three hours without flipping the cover open as Kat declared that first she was going to watch this movie, then, no, she was going to watch that one, and in fact never watched any at all.

  As other passengers dropped off to sleep for the overnight flight, Kat burbled on. Finally, glassy-eyed, Audrey put the e-reader back into her purse when Kat handed her a map of Paris. Audrey gave it bleary look, then frowned. “Everything goes around in circles,” she said. She turned her head to look at Kat. “Is this right?”

  “Those are districts. They’re called Arrondissements. It’s how Paris is laid out.”

  “In circles?”

  “It’s a very old city,” Kat said complacently.

  “Obviously. I’ve never seen a city before that made no sense at all. Even London has streets that go in a straight line every now and then.”

  “Paris has straight lines. See?” Kat pointed at the map.

  “They’re all aimed at the middles of the circles. They don’t go anywhere else. And look – the circles aren’t even concentric. The circles go around in circles.” She threw her head back against the headrest and popped her eyes. “Haven’t they ever heard of the grid plan?”

  “That came later,” Kat said knowingly. “Don’t worry. We’re going to have a guide. And if we get lost, that might be fun too.”

  Audrey’s head became limp against the headrest. “I don’t like to be lost,” she said weakly.

  “You’re going to love it. It’s . . . evocative. It gets your imagination going. Look,” she said, pointing at the map that was laying loosely in Audrey’s lap now. “Picture each Arrondissement as a little village, back in prehistoric times. Smoke is rising from little campfires and cavewomen and children are running around in the wild wearing animal skins, and then the cavemen come back to camp from the hunt with the kill. Oh, sorry Audrey, they come back with the snails, not some adorable prehistoric Parisian cows or anything. These little villages are all spread out a nice, comfortable distance away from one another,” (she pointed to successive Arrondissements on the map), “and each one has a different clan, and they all have their own language and religion and customs and stuff. They keep themselves to themselves. But over the eons, the clans get bigger and they begin to grow into one another’s territories. Boundaries get loose, and the cavemen and women begin to wander over to the other side.”

  “Oh la la,” Audrey said in spite of herself.

  “Exactly. And the Clan of the First Arrondissement seeps into the Clan of the Second Arrondissement and so on and so forth until they all become one big clan of Parisians under Louis IV. That’s how I think it all happened, anyway.”

  “Makes as much sense as anything else,” Audrey said. “Nobody would deliberately lay out a city like this. Where’s our hotel?”

  “Right here,” Kat said, stabbing the map, which was still in Audrey’s lap, “in the Seventh Arrondissement. It’s adorable. Only six stories high. The tour group is probably going to fill up most of the hotel. Didn’t you follow the link I sent you and look at the pictures? It’s very historic. It once housed the workers who had come to Paris to build the Eiffel Tower. Isn’t that romantic?”

  Audrey thought about it. “Does it have air conditioning?”

  Chapter 8

  At the Charles de Gaulle Airport, Twyla and Nettie got through customs, found their bags without any trouble and walked out into the soft Parisian morning.

  Having been assured by all her friends that everybody in Paris had at least a smattering of English and the language barrier wouldn’t be a problem, Twyla protectively led her aunt to the line waiting for taxis, feeling confident. When their turn came, they were handed over to a very nice driver who couldn’t understand a word Twyla was saying.

  Undaunted, Aunt Nettie showed the driver an itinerary sheet with the hotel’s name and address on it, and they were off.

  Inside the taxi, Nettie gave her niece a smile and patted her hand. Twyla could be thrown off by the smallest things, and after failing to communicate with the driver, she had started to look a little shaky.

  At Nettie’s touch, Twyla gave her aunt a tentative smile and then looked away out the taxi’s window. Paris didn’t look so romantic from where they were at that moment, still near the airport. There weren’t any skyscrapers blocking the view, but still, it just looked like a big city. Everything was kind of gray in the cold morning light.

  “We’re going to have fun,” Nettie said quietly. So quietly that Twyla might not have heard, because she didn’t answer or look away from the window.

  * * * * *

  Grayson and Lauren Pimm stepped out of their taxi in front of the boutique hotel.

  “Oh, look, it’s adorable,” Lauren said, first looking up the face of the hotel and then up and down the street it was on. It was a short block, and it seemed even shorter than it was because it dead-ended at a cross-street close to the hotel and curved out of sight in the other direction. It was one of the things Lauren loved about Paris – every neighborhood was intimately self-contained, almost walled off from the rest of the world. Everything you needed was only a few steps from your door.

  Grayson glared around with disdain. The air felt clammy and smelled faintly of old vegetables. He sniffed and looked suspiciously at t
he opening to a small, damp passage between the hotel and a vacant storefront on the other side. Then, rotating slowly, he surveyed the other side of the street, giving a long hard stare to a no-frills laundromat directly across from the hotel.

  “Nice view,” he muttered.

  With a disgruntled sigh, he paid the taxi driver and knowingly refrained from tipping the man. Only Americans that had never been out of their own country gave lavish tips to everybody while they were in Europe, and Grayson was no two-bit tourist, up from the farm for the first time. Conscious of his own worldliness, he rolled his suitcase away from the taxi and entered the lobby of the hotel, prepared to deal with the arrogance you could always expect from Frenchmen.

  When the desk clerk turned out to be friendly (but not too friendly), knowledgeable and efficient, speaking impeccable English, Grayson glared at him, too, as if disappointed.

  They were given a room on the top floor.

  When the desk clerk opened the elevator door and bowed them in, Lauren gave an amused little laugh. The elevator car was the width of a telephone booth and about twice as long. The two of them with their bags would just barely fit in.

  After the elevator door slid closed, Grayson said, “There better not be any fat-asses on this tour, or the staff is going to have to carry them upstairs on their backs.”

  Lauren’s smile faded.

  Chapter 9

  The desk clerk looked up at the new arrivals and somehow managed to become more polished, more elegant. He even became a bit taller. Two beautiful blond women were coming towards him, in step with another and walking like models on the runway. Unseen by him, they had gotten out of separate taxis, but they seemed to belong together.