Paris, Before You Die

by Mary Bowers

  “Jason and the Argonauts?” Nettie said, perking up. “Where?” She couldn’t see Danny anymore, through all the people flowing around them. Henry, who was tall enough to see over most heads, pointed for her, and she looked directly across at the painting occupying the large arch over a fireplace. It showed grandiose figures making the usual grandiose gestures, and she was ashamed of herself because she’d half-expected to see a scene from the Harryhausen movie. Now that had been great stuff – sword-fighting skeletons and flying harpies. This painting just had people in it. It looked pretty much like all the others.

  Things were beginning to get mashed up together in her mind, and she thought she should be appreciating it all on a higher level, but honestly, how many guys in cloaks and helmets were there in this place? She would have liked to take in more of the details but they were moving again, and people kept closing in in front of her.

  “It’s rather breathtaking, isn’t it?” she said. “Both ways: beautiful, and it’s getting hard to breathe.”

  “Out in the gardens we can spread out,” Henry said complacently.

  She looked up and gave him a grateful smile. Then she looked around. “Where is everybody? From our group, I mean.”

  “We’re bound to get separated in here. We’ll regroup when we get back outside.”

  What a comfort the man was. If she hadn’t been so firmly taught to behave like a lady, she would have taken his hand like a little child.

  They entered the hall of mirrors and looked far away down into the blinding brightness.

  “Oh,” Nettie said, “I’ve been forgetting to take pictures. With everybody around us constantly snapping away at every little thing, all I’ve been thinking was they’re all too busy taking pictures to really look at things. And it never occurred to me to take a few pictures of my own.”

  Henry grinned. “Not even a selfie?”

  “How about the two of us?” she said briskly, determined to make up for lost time. Then she stared hard at her cellphone, frowned, and looked up at Henry. “It’s locked. It says . . .” she pulled her head down instead of lifting the device up, “‘New sim card detected. System locked for your protection.’ What does that mean?”

  Henry was getting his own cellphone out by then, and his said the same thing. “Somebody’s been using a scanner to try to hijack our phones. Fortunately, we both have good security, and before they could get in, our phones locked down. Just follow the directions and it’ll unlock for you again, but until we get out of here, I think we should just put them away.”

  “Great,” Nettie mumbled, but somehow she didn’t mind. It was enough to try to take all this in without the extra work of trying to document it. After all, there were masses of pictures of every interesting (and uninteresting) thing in the world on the Internet by now. Excluding family get-togethers and children’s birthday parties, no further pictures needed to be taken. Ever.

  That burden lifted, Nettie looked across the mirror-walled football field seething with tourist-running backs and boldly took Henry’s arm. “Shall we?” she said, and they plunged ahead.

  She enjoyed herself much more after that. Even Danny wasn’t bothering her anymore. In fact, Danny didn’t seem to be speaking at all anymore, which was fine with her.

  At the farther end, Nettie’s spirits rose even more, and she turned to Henry and said, “Touchdown.”

  He laughed. He really laughed. Remembering the morose man who had introduced himself that first day as the survivor of a mostly-dead family, Nettie felt as if she’d accomplished something that really mattered.

  Then she felt somebody tap her on the shoulder and turned around to find herself facing Audrey and Kat. Their faces were solemn, and for a moment Nettie had the wild urge to tell them to just go away, she was finally having fun.

  “Hey guys,” she made herself say after a hesitation. She didn’t know if Audrey could really read minds, but she was pretty sure they’d both been able to read her face, and she felt a little ashamed. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “Didn’t you hear Danny?” Audrey said.

  “I took my earbuds out a long time ago,” Henry said.

  “I guess mine fell out.” Nettie fumbled with them, getting ready to jam them back in again. “I didn’t notice. So much going on.”

  “Don’t bother,” Audrey said. “He stopped broadcasting, but if he says anything, I’ll let you know. We’re just supposed to meet up with the rest of the group back where we came in.”

  “We know. Then we do the gardens. I didn’t realize our time in the palace was up.”

  “It isn’t. We have to stop what we’re doing and go back. There’s been an accident.”

  “What kind of an accident?” Henry asked. “To who?”

  “I think it’s Hannah.”

  “Is she badly hurt?”

  “I think so.”

  * * * * *

  Henry tried to get more information out of Audrey as they moved back through the crowd, but she didn’t know anything. A gendarme, on the lookout for blue boxes, locked eyes with them as they came out the exit to the back area between the palace and the gardens, where they had formed up before entering.

  “Carmichael Global Tours?” he asked. “M. Danny Carter’s group?”

  “What’s going on, Officer?” Henry asked, as the ladies nodded.

  The young man pointed. “Over there if you please.” He went back to looking for people with blue boxes.

  They saw the rest of their group and walked toward them, with Danny urgently staring them onward. Before he could say anything, what was obviously a plain-clothes detective stepped forward and intercepted them.

  “Have you been together with each other during the tour today?” he asked them.

  “This lady and I were together, but we got separated from the rest of the group,” Henry said. He turned to Audrey and Kat to let them speak for themselves.

  “We stuck together,” Audrey said, indicating herself and Kat. “How’s Hannah?”

  “The entire time, since entering the palace?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were not with Mlle. Hannah Sorenson at any time?”

  They all shook their heads.

  “You will rejoin your group, please.”

  Obviously, he wasn’t going to give them any information, so they went forward quickly to see what the others knew.

  Jack and Twyla had come out of the ether and were huddling protectively over Lauren. Eric and Ashley stood near them, and Charley was standing behind Jack.

  Margery seemed to be comforting Daisy, who turned and stared at them, her parti-colored eyes looking vividly different in the strong sunlight. “I was with her. Almost the whole time, I was with her.”

  “It’s all right, Daisy,” Margery crooned. Looking up at them, she quietly said, “Hannah’s dead. She fell from a staircase. It was . . . I guess it was a long fall.”

  “What happened?” Henry asked.

  “I don’t know,” Daisy cried. “I went ahead while she started taking pictures, but I didn’t go very far. When she didn’t catch up with me, I turned to go back, but everybody was coming at me and I couldn’t move quickly. And then I heard people screaming, calling for help. I looked down over the bannister, and I saw myself.” Her eyes went blank.

  Nettie caught her breath, remembering how the two blonds had dressed alike that day. How horrible for her! In that first moment, looking down and seeing a dead woman who looked almost exactly like herself.

  “And nobody else was near her – nobody else from the group?”

  Daisy looked around and said, “Everybody seems to have spread out. Even Eric wasn’t there, for a change.”

  Eric? Nettie thought. Why Eric? But the poor girl was in shock. Nettie decided to chalk it up to that.

  The group was standing close enough to one another for them all to hear, and Eric, his arm around his wife, told them, “Ashley and I were together the whole time. And I never lost sight of Lauren. She was just ahead
of us.”

  “I didn’t see her,” Ashley said.

  “I’m taller than you. And I tend to keep track of people. Call it an occupational hazard. In the kitchen I have to have eyes on everybody, all the time, no matter how busy we get. Lauren is my buddy. I automatically got into the habit of keeping track of her. I didn’t see you guys, though,” he said mildly, turning to look at Jack and Twyla.

  Twyla looked ashamed. “She’s the only reason we came today, and somehow we still managed to lose track of her. I can’t believe it.”

  Everybody else could. But the poor woman felt bad enough already, so nobody said anything about Twyla having eyes only for Jack.

  “Are your phones working?” Charley asked them.

  “No. Somebody tried to hijack them,” Henry said, turning to him. “Yours too?”

  “Everybody’s.” He gave an uneasy shrug. “It must have happened before we even came in, because I haven’t been able to take any pictures here. You say she stopped to take a picture on the stairs?”

  Daisy hesitated with her mouth open. “I thought that was what she was doing. She had her cellphone out. Maybe she had just noticed that her phone wasn’t working either and she was trying to fix it.”

  “Right then and there?” Nettie asked. “Standing on a staircase with people streaming all around her?”

  “Well,” Daisy said doubtfully, “she wanted to be able to take pictures. Of Versailles.”

  “Maybe that’s why she lost her balance and fell,” Charley said. “She was concentrating on unlocking her phone, trying to remember the right password. Somebody bumped into her . . . .”

  Nettie looked up at Henry to see what he thought, but he had a faraway look. “What?” she asked him.

  Quietly, so only Nettie could hear, he murmured, “The cops aren’t going to be too happy about that cellphone. Unlocking a dead person’s records can take forever, and a cellphone is a pretty good resource at a crime scene.”

  “This isn’t a crime.”

  Moving closer and lowering his voice even further, he said, “Neither was Grayson Pimm’s death.”

  Chapter 15

  Like Henry, the Paris detectives were not so quick to decide that this death, the second one in a small group of travelers, wasn’t suspicious. This time, the group was subjected to a much more thorough interrogation. Jack argued vigorously for them to lay off the new widow, but Lauren was put through the same kind of questioning as all the rest of them.

  Daisy had developed the unshakeable conviction that somebody had intended to kill her, not Hannah. After all, they looked so much alike, especially from behind.

  “But who would want to kill either one of you?” Ashley asked reasonably, trying to settle her down.

  They were standing in the little lobby of their hotel, having just returned from the police station. “I think the police are being ridiculous,” Ashley went on. “Grayson was obviously the kind of man who couldn’t handle failure, and he was heading for divorce. And as for Hannah falling, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often at Versailles, with those crowds, and everybody looking at their cellphones and not where they’re going. For all we know, it does happen all the time.”

  Henry said nothing.

  Nettie looked at Audrey, wondering what she felt, if anything, but Audrey wasn’t talking. She had a troubled look on her face, and every now and then she’d look behind her, as if someone had tapped her on the shoulder. But nobody was there.

  They’d had a long, confusing day in a French police station, and they were exhausted. For reasons that escaped most of them, they’d all been fingerprinted. It made them feel like suspects. Most of the time they were just kept waiting around, and when it came her turn to be questioned, the only clear memories Nettie could bring up were ones involving marble statues and Technicolor ceilings.

  “We really didn’t see anybody else from the group, pretty much after the first staircase.”

  “But you could hear your guide?”

  “Well, most of the time. My earbuds fell out, and I’m afraid I didn’t notice. We must have all been in the same general area, though. We had to be, in order to hear Danny. That’s right, isn’t it? What’s the range on his transmitter?”

  Her interrogators ignored the question.

  By the time they were allowed to return to their hotel, they all felt wrung out and muddleheaded.

  They began to break up into small, dejected groups, some deciding to go down the street for a meal, some just wanting to get back to their rooms.

  With Henry by her side, Nettie went to Audrey and asked her to come to her room. They needed to talk, she murmured.

  “Sure,” Audrey said with a shrug, “Your place or mine? I seem to have been ditched by Kat. Again.”

  “I saw her go out with Charley, right after Twyla and Jack took Lauren off for dinner,” Henry said.

  “So it’s just the three of us,” Nettie said. “Why don’t you come to my room for a change. Henry, come on.”

  Without so much as a glance at the elevator, they headed for the stairs.

  * * * * *

  “The police were counting on the fact that none of us spoke French,” Henry said, once they were seated in Nettie’s room. It was vaguely like Audrey’s but a different shape. It had exactly the same size window, and exactly the same type of flowerbox with red geraniums in it. The identical windows gave the outside of the hotel a uniform, tidy look.

  “And you do?” Nettie asked hopefully.

  He shrugged. “I know a little of the basic terminology. Anyway, I understand that empreinte digitale means fingerprints. If I got it right, they found Eric’s fingerprints on some of the things in Hannah’s purse, including her cellphone.”

  “Well, of course they did,” Nettie said testily. “Did you tell them about the man that grabbed Hanna’s purse and ran off with it? Eric said he checked to see if her wallet and cellphone were still in there, after he got it back.”

  “I mentioned it, at the risk of letting them know I understood at least part of what they were saying. I was pretty sure they didn’t know about the purse-snatcher, and with this new thing, other people in the group might not have mentioned it. It happened after they were done questioning us the first time, about Grayson Pimm.”

  “Did they clam up after that?” Audrey asked.

  “They nixed the français, anyway.”

  “Were you able to figure out anything they were saying before that?”

  “Only that all their witnesses had been looking down at the lady who fell and not looking up to see who had been around her on the stairs before that. Naturally.”

  “Yes, naturally,” Nettie said frowning. “Anything else?”

  “Only that I found it interesting that they only fingerprinted us today, and not after Grayson died. There must have just been his own fingerprints on the knife.”

  “That’s no surprise,” Audrey said, almost growling. “Everybody knows about fingerprints these days. It’s, like, Rule No. 1: when committing a murder, always wear gloves. If possible, throw on a rain poncho, so your DNA doesn’t fly around.”

  “So you suspect that Grayson was murdered?” Nettie asked her.

  “I didn’t say that. But if he was, the killer had time to think it through and make a plan. As for Hannah, if she was murdered too, it could have been because she knew something about Grayson’s death and the killer had to work fast.” Audrey rubbed her forehead.

  “Did your headache come back?” Nettie asked gently.

  Audrey’s gaze settled on her for a long moment. Then she said, “Did you tell Henry about Jeanne the friendly ghost?”

  “I mentioned that you heard voices. That’s all.”

  “May as well give him the whole gruesome story. It’ll give him a laugh.” She turned to Henry and told him about her visit to the catacombs, while he listened stoically. “So basically,” she finished, “I’m nuts.”

  “Aren’t we all,” he said easily. “What’s she telling you no
w?”

  “I wish you could hear for yourself. You apparently understand le français at least a little bit. Anyway, she’s upset.” With a return to her usual sardonic delivery, she added, “I can tell by the way she’s shrieking.”

  Henry and Nettie regarded her quietly. Then Nettie offered to get her some aspirin.

  Audrey burst out laughing and said yeah, sure. After swallowing the two that Nettie had given her, she asked for a third and said, “You two have been sniffing around right from the beginning of this. You’re both detectives.”

  “And you’re psychic,” Nettie said.

  Audrey muttered unintelligibly, nodded, then said, “Yeah, right, I forgot we were a team. Okay, let’s put our heads together.”

  Chapter 16

  “Before we begin, I’ve got a little inside information that may change everything,” Henry said. “Hannah’s last name wasn’t Sorenson, at least not anymore. Maybe that was her maiden name, or a family name, but it wasn’t the one on her passport. Danny asked about it the first night of the tour, when we were at dinner. His company warned him that the name on her passport wasn’t Sorenson, it would be Garden. I was at the table with Daisy, Hannah, Danny and Margery. Danny asked Daisy if she and Hannah were cousins, and if Garden was her maiden name, too.”

  “So her name was Hannah Garden,” Audrey said, distracted from her ghost and reenergized. “You’re right, that changes everything. I searched her name on the Internet yesterday, but I got nothing.” She dug into her enormous crossbody bag and pulled out a small tablet device.

  “Why did you decide to search her name yesterday?” Nettie asked.

  “There was something going on between her and Grayson Pimm. An affair, most likely, but given his job, handling other people’s money, it could have been anything. I get these little feelings about people. After he died, I wanted to know exactly what their connection was.”

  “Good thinking,” Nettie said, surprised she hadn’t thought of it herself.

  “Wow.” Audrey sat back, staring at her tablet, speechless for a moment. Then she looked up and said, “She was a detective, too.”