Paris, Before You Die

by Mary Bowers

  “Now, Twyla, don’t let yourself think that way,” Nettie said. “It’ll show when you see her again. It’s been, what, twenty years? You said yourself, she was always nice to you. Not like those mean girls everybody ran into in high school – the ones who went around stealing the other girls’ boyfriends. You always liked Lauren.”

  She didn’t like chiding her niece, and as she spoke she stared down at the sushi that she’d lovingly arranged on the plates. How intelligent the Japanese were, she thought, inventing this edible art, laboriously created to exist for just a few moments. Meant to be admired, to slow you down, to lend elegance to dining. Americans, Nettie thought, looking at her niece, were so prone to gulping down their food just to clean their plates.

  Twyla finished off a mouthful without seeming to taste it and then took a big gulp of wine. “I don’t know, Aunt Nettie. Do you ever really like somebody who totally outclasses you? I mean, Lauren was nice, but I always knew she was just being polite, like she was polite to everybody, even the dorks. Girls like me didn’t really exist at Jefferson High, not to the boys, and definitely not to the girls who were . . . play-yahs. Prom queens. I didn’t even go to the prom.”

  “I hate to hear you talking like this, Twyla. When your 20th reunion came up, you were happy to join the Jefferson Class of ’97 Facebook page, and I remember how thrilled you were to get all those personal messages from Lauren. I thought you’d been good friends. It gave you a chance to reconnect.”

  “Oh, yeah, it was nice to hear from all the old classmates, especially Lauren. I moved away from the old ‘hood so soon after I graduated, I lost touch with all of them. We hadn’t even been close enough for Christmas cards. So it was fun finding out what they were all doing and how their lives were going. How many children . . . how many marriages. How many had died – that was a shock. And I was flattered, at first, that Lauren showed so much interest in me. But after she started telling me about all the problems in her life . . . I think she just wanted somebody safe to tell her troubles to.”

  Nettie nodded. “Well, you may be right. But you always had a reputation for being loyal. That probably has more to do with why she lets her hair down with you. She knows you won’t be talking behind her back with old friends, or anybody she knows.”

  “I don’t have any old friends,” Twyla said, “and I don’t know anybody that she knows. She moved away from the old neighborhood too, remember? She’s up there somewhere outside of Manhattan now, where south-siders from Chicago don’t end up. I never even made it out of Cook County. Her friends are probably all fashionistas – like her. Her husband is one of those titans of Wall Street, and she lives in the kind of brownstone mansion that I only see in movies. Trust me, I won’t be visiting her for high tea in the morning room any time soon.”

  “You’re making too big a deal of her husband. I’d be willing to bet he’s a mid-level broker at best. He’s doing well, I’m sure, but titans of Wall Street don’t take guided tours with the hoi palloi. And I bet they’re renting that mansion. Appearances are everything in their world. Anyway, I think it’s lovely you two girls are going to see one another again. You’ll have a lot of memories to share.”

  As soon as she said it, she knew she’d made a mistake. There wouldn’t be a lot of intimate memories. They hadn’t really been close friends. Lauren had been nice to Twyla, that’s all, and for a lonely girl like Twyla, it meant far more than it had to Lauren

  “She remembers you,” Twyla said, looking fondly at her aunt. “But then everybody always remembers you. A lot better than they remember me.”

  “Now you’re just being silly,” Nettie said. She never knew exactly how to handle her niece when she started getting like this. If only Twyla took more after her mother’s side of the family. Nettie’s sister had been a lot like Nettie. She never sank. She bobbed right up like a cork. But Twyla was more like her father that way, and a little wine and a few memories were enough get her down. She watched quietly as Twyla refilled her own glass and topped up Nettie’s without asking.

  “But I’m really glad you’re going, anyway,” Twyla said after an uncomfortable pause. “Not just for me. For Lauren. You’re so good at people’s problems. You’ll be able to help her, I know it.”

  Nettie blinked, disconcerted. “I’ll do my best, of course, if I think I can help,” she said, sounding faintly uneasy. “One doesn’t like to be nosey, but if she should to talk, I’ll be happy to listen, though there’s not much I can actually do.”

  Twyla gave her a secretive smile. “Don’t be modest. You’ve got a lot of unusual talents, and I was glad when you finally started using them. You’re lucky enough to have special skills, and it would’ve been a sin not to use them.”

  “Well, it’s our duty to use whatever abilities we have, I’ve always thought, and I always strive to stay on the side of the angels. The confusing thing, sometimes,” she added, “is knowing the angels from the devils.”

  Chapter 3

  The pretty blond woman frowned when she saw him lift the lid of the humidor.

  Grayson Pimm noticed and paused, cocking his head slightly, as if listening. No, he decided, after giving it some concentrated thought, I really don’t care; go ahead and frown. He selected a cigar and replaced the lid.

  I haven’t cared what she feels or thinks about anything for quite some time now, he told himself. It gave him a cocky feeling. Smug, actually – he searched his sympathetic nerve system all the way down to the red zone and found that nothing at all was going on. Her frown meant nothing to him.

  And why should it? She turned out to be just another dumb blond after all. At one time, he thought she’d be more than that, but her effervescent wit had turned out to be just that – bubbles on the surface; nothing much underneath.

  But even her frown was a work of art, he had to admit. She was beautiful. “No wonder I decided to seduce her,” Grayson Pimm thought, feeling like a detached observer as she went off on a rant – the same old rant – making all those artful gestures and sending her girly voice up the register. In fact, she was doing all the things that had once made him go brain-dead.

  He clipped the end of the cigar and gave it a loving roll between the flats of his hands. Then he slowly lit it, keeping the heart of the flame away from the delicate tobacco, working his lips as he sucked. The puff-puff-puffs were satisfying, wet little smacks that expressed his feelings perfectly. He was watching her, but she might as well have been speaking Hungarian, for all that registered with Grayson Pimm.

  He was done with the broad. In fact, he decided with world-weary bemusement, he was done with both of the broads. They’d been waging war over him for nearly a year now, and he suddenly realized that they had both lost. He just wasn’t interested anymore.

  After a few longer draws on the cigar, he set it aside in the dinner plate-sized Chinois ashtray, just within arm’s reach on the surface of his well-buffed, antique desk. Then his gaze wandered from the pretty blond’s face to the screen of his computer’s monitor. His email list had opened automatically, and something there caught his interest. He clicked into it.

  She started putting up a bigger fuss. Her precise words escaped him, but she rose up in kittenish fury the moment she heard the click of the mouse.

  Ah. More information on his Paris tour. He clicked the download button in the email and waited. Correction: their Paris tour. He wasn’t, after all, going alone, and neither, dammit, was his wife. They were going together. The email contained a PDF with the list of fellow travelers. Yep, there it was: the name he was looking for. The pro he’d hired had made it on the tour, as arranged. The marital hitman, he thought, smiling in a way that signaled to the blond that he wasn’t listening to a word she was saying. Her voice immediately began to quaver. Ah, shit, she was going to cry now.

  It made him even more glad that he’d decided to be proactive when his wife had suggested a “healing” trip together – maybe someplace “romantic,” like Paris – a guided tour, where they woul
dn’t have to do much “thinking.”

  At the time he’d wondered if the stupid tour might just be a way to regain control of his personal situation. He’d had his doubts then, but not anymore. The last few weeks had convinced him. Things were becoming intolerable.

  When all the dust settled after the trip, there shouldn’t be an unacceptable amount of damage. He trusted himself: he was a man who planned carefully and executed perfectly. It would all go off without a hitch, and then he’d be free. And no more broads for a while. That was a promise. Not even that new counselor in the Atlanta branch office with the hot-librarian glasses and the hooker boots.

  Oh, look, she was crying now. Sweet Jesus.

  He scanned the list again, then stopped and scowled. Did he know that name? He frowned harder, focusing on one line in the list. Suddenly she shrieked, “Are you even listening to me?”

  He looked at her as if she’d just crawled out of one of the 4-foot Chinese vases flanking his paired, 10-foot office doors. After that fleeting glance, he gave his head a tiny shake and went back to the list, asking himself again about that strangely familiar name, but with her yowling like a cat, he couldn’t think.

  No. Nobody I know, he thought. Pretty sure I don’t know that name.

  She rushed the desk and began to pound her dainty little fists right in front of him, knocking the lit cigar onto the fine satin finish of the desktop.

  He quickly grabbed the cigar and put it back into the ashtray, stood up, trapped both her hands in one of his and slapped her face with the other one.

  Chapter 4

  Thursday, June 14 – the tour begins in two days.

  Henry Dawson would be travelling alone. He was always alone.

  It hadn’t always been like that. He’d been a husband once, and a dad. He’d had lots of friends – at least he’d though he had – but it wasn’t just his imagination; they’d all begun to drop away.

  It wasn’t his looks. At 68, Henry was still fit and active, and some would have called him handsome. A widower, there had been definite interest from the widows in the neighborhood for a while. That is, until he had managed to finally discourage every last one of them.

  Oh, hell, he could hardly blame them. Who wanted to be around somebody as depressing as he was? Depressing and depressed. Always talking about people who were dead.

  When Stella died, it had been a blow. She’d been a good wife, even if he’d been an erratic husband. With his job, he couldn’t help it. Cops did and saw things they didn’t want to come home and discuss with their wives. But when their son, Aaron died, it had sliced off a part of him and he couldn’t seem to get it back. It was as if he’d lost a leg, and without it he couldn’t catch his balance anymore. After a certain amount of time had passed, his friends had stopped trying to prop him up again.

  And now he was leaving on this damn trip. What the hell had he been thinking, booking a solo trip to Europe?

  At first it had seemed like a good idea. Bring some kind of purpose back into his life. But now, when it was suddenly time to go, it seemed like just another job he had to do, and he was so weary. Was it all really . . . right? He had been so sure, at first, but now he didn’t feel sure of anything anymore.

  He’d put off packing for as long as he could, and as the hour of departure neared, he had to force himself to get started on it.

  Stella was the one that had always wanted to go to Paris. At first, going there had seemed like a way of honoring her, even of including her, but suddenly it didn’t make sense anymore. He, himself, didn’t give a damn about one square inch of Europe, and Stella was never going to go there. Why did it have to be Paris? He was going to see all the things she was never going to see, eat all the strange food that had seemed interesting to her and just plain weird to Henry, and look at all the artwork he could see any time he wanted on a vast array of candy boxes, umbrellas and green bags.

  As he packed, he uncovered the handgun in his dresser drawer. He stood quite still and stared at it. Aaron had used a gun. He hadn’t even known Aaron had a gun. The kid had never been interested in guns. He’d always been so different from his father – so good with math, a whiz with modern tech – hell, when people asked Henry what his son did for a living, he’d never known exactly how to answer. Something to do with computers and money, and he was really, really good at it, whatever it was.

  Now Henry looked at the gun in his dresser drawer and the only clear thought he had was that he’d never get it into Paris, what with airline security being so tight, even for people who had been in law enforcement.

  He shut the drawer quickly. He’d try to remember to put it in the gun safe before he left on the trip, but right now, he knew he’d better not even look at it. Guns had their uses, and he didn’t want to think about what he could use a gun for here at home, alone.

  His mind was so blank now that if the tour company hadn’t sent out a suggested packing list, he wouldn’t have been able to figure out what to bring. He took hold of the list as if it were a lifeline and looked for the next item, packing it carelessly.

  When he got to the bottom of the list, he flipped over to the next page and stopped, bewildered for a moment. Then he almost laughed, a wild, screaming, out-of-control laugh when he saw what was next up on the list, but he stopped himself by slapping his free hand over his mouth.

  People. Let’s start packing people now. Put ‘em in the suitcase and bring ‘em right along with you. Into the side-pockets, ladies and gents.

  It was the list of other people on the tour, and he hadn’t given it much more than a glance up until now. May as well give it a look, he thought, sitting down on the end of his bed next to his open suitcase and forcing himself to read through the whole list for the first time.

  Twyla Staples, Schaumburg Illinois. What kind of a name was Twyla? Wasn’t that a dancer or something? Probably her birth-certificate name was Linda or Jane, and she’d changed it because she wanted to be a dancer. Arty type with handmade clothes and noisy jewelry.

  Nettie Tucker. You’ve got to be kidding. And she lives in a town in Illinois called Sleepy Hollow? Seriously? If he’d still been a cop, he would have done a background check on her immediately, especially if dead bodies were turning up in her vicinity. Nettie Tucker from Sleepy Hollow could only be a serial killer with innocent eyes and her hair in a bun. If she sat down at the first group meeting and started knitting baby things, he’d be sure: she was a really cute little axe murderer.

  He was beginning to enjoy himself. He scanned the list for other evocative names but the rest of them were pretty run-of-the-mill.

  Katrina Carney, Charleston, South Carolina. Easy-breezy southern belle, half-tipsy all the time with her hands all over the gentlemen friends. Avoid her at all cost.

  There were two other men travelling by themselves: Jack Bartlett and Charley Leeper, both from San Diego. Friends travelling together, probably. Henry had paid for a single, with the warning from the tour company that if he didn’t pay for the double room, he might be paired up with a stranger. He’d already been notified that he had a room all to himself, so there would be no other single males on this trip. Charley and Jack were from the same city, so it was a pretty sure bet they were together.

  Hannah Sorenson, White Bear Lake, Minnesota. Viking type. Muscular blond with her hair in braids.

  Ashley and Eric Handler, San Antonio, Texas. Plain vanilla husband and wife. No vibes.

  Margery Rowe, Newark, New Jersey. No vibes there either.

  Audrey Cramer, Daytona Beach, Florida. The name didn’t mean much to him, but the city did. He and Stella had honeymooned in Daytona Beach, a long, long time ago. They’d been just out of high school when they married and had to delay taking a honeymoon at all until he got a job and made some money. That had taken nearly two years, and Daytona had been their first time traveling together, and the first time on an airplane for either one of them. An adventure – heck, a trip into a parallel universe. Florida was nothing like Wisconsin. Sand
and water and booze, and trying to find something that really worked to cool down Stella’s sunburn, which there wasn’t any such thing back then.

  A year later, he’d quit his job at the paper factory and become a cop. And Stella had quit her job at the paper factory and become a mom. Aaron had come to them, a perfect baby boy.

  Henry had spent the next thirty years dealing with perfection at home and a world full of imperfections aimlessly wandering around outside his front door, streaming in and out of his jurisdiction, most of them needing to be locked up whether they broke the law or not. Over the years, his ability to adapt and be wise had gotten sadly brittle. For too many decades, humanity in all its glorious forms had been his to deal with; his first, youthful surprise had turned to bemusement, then cynicism and finally, fatigue. By the time he retired, those glorious forms of humanity just made him want to go home and be left alone.

  He shook himself out of it. He couldn’t slip into the darkness again. The list. He refocused on it, thinking, where was I?

  Right. Audrey. Audrey was probably traveling alone or with a long-distance friend somewhere else on the list. He paused and waited for an impression to come. Pass on Audrey, for the moment.

  Marguerite Wilson, Atlanta, Georgia. Another woman travelling alone, but not from the same states as Kat, Margery, Hannah or Audrey. Lots of ladies on this trip, and tough luck, girls, you’re all getting roommates you’ve never seen before in your life, unless some of them turned out to be long-distance pals. Old high school buddies or something. His girls Twyla and Nettie were both from Illinois, but not the same city. Were they travelling together?

  The thought piqued his interest, and with energy he didn’t remember having, he got up and went to the bookshelf in the back bedroom and pulled out a United States Atlas. He knew that Schaumburg was just west of Chicago, and when he found Sleepy Hollow he said, “Yes!” out loud, drawing his finger across the map between the two cities, just a tiny distance on paper. Just a stone’s throw farther off to the west. Dollars to donuts they were travelling together.