Paris, Before You Die

by Mary Bowers

  “Come on, everybody,” Daisy said. “This is all speculation, and it’s getting downright mean. Why don’t we just leave it to the police?”

  Henry gestured broadly. “Fine with me. But first I want to make sure you understand this, Daisy: if her plan to frame me had failed, she always had her original plan to fall back on – the one to frame you.”

  “Me?”

  “Use your head, Daisy. Obviously, Lauren was aware of who her husband’s mistress was. Do you really think she didn’t know your first name was Marguerite? Grayson may have forgotten it, if he ever knew, but a woman would have remembered it. The moment she saw your name on the passenger list was probably the moment she started to come up with a plan to kill her husband. She didn’t know yet that your affair was over, and the outrage she must have felt, realizing he was bringing you along on their ‘healing’ trip must have pushed her over the edge. She now had the perfect patsy: you, and what poetic justice, killing him and framing you. Even if she did know the affair was over, being dumped would give you an excellent motive. Do you really think she would have gone so far as to bring Eric along to help her commit murder without having a solid plan worked out, complete with fall guy? You were supposed to be arrested for Grayson’s murder, if the suicide scenario didn’t work out. Then she realized who I was and decided I had an even better motive, but if I ended up with some kind of ironclad alibi, she always had another victim in mind: you.”

  Daisy stared at Lauren, almost comically aghast. She opened her mouth, but no words came out.

  “Daisy,” Lauren said gently, “don’t listen to him. You’re right – he’s got no proof, and he’s got a better motive than any of us.”

  Calmly, like one talking to a naïve child, Henry told Lauren, “You do realize that the Paris detectives will get into Hannah’s cellphone records eventually and find out what was really going on between you and Eric? Your husband was probably careful about deleting anything suggestive from his phone, but there was no reason why Hannah would have. The police have probably already been in touch with her co-workers at her agency to get the password to her computer. She was already writing up her report, you know. Your affair with Eric is no secret any longer.”

  For the first time, Lauren’s confidence seemed to be shaken.

  “If you think about it,” Henry went on, “you were the one with the best opportunity to kill Eric, when the time came. You were alone in your room, and you’d asked the hotel staff, and even Daisy, not to let anybody disturb you. You arranged to meet your co-conspirator secretly, in the alley, and when he showed up, you killed him and then went back up the stairs and slipped into your room again.”

  “She took a heck of a risk,” Nettie commented.

  “Not really,” he said. “At least she didn’t think so at the time. Everybody else on the tour had left the hotel. As far as she knew, we were off looking at waterlilies, and Danny said everybody else left after we did. She had no idea we’d come back, but as it happened her luck held: we didn’t see her, coming or going. The hotel staff has been using the elevator, since none of the guests wanted to, so she was reasonably sure she wouldn’t meet anybody on the stairs.”

  “Why on earth would I want Eric to meet me in the alley at a time like that?” Lauren asked flatly.

  “Ah, yes – Nettie and I have a theory about that, too. Would you like to tell them, Nettie?”

  “Sure, if you want me to. It was a question of the knives. We wondered why on earth there were two knives taken from the same restaurant. After all, at that time you only wanted to murder one person. We figure you and Eric must have agreed to try to slip a steak knife out of the restaurant if you got the chance – either one of you, either that night or some other night – and you were both so enterprising, you both managed to get knives the very first night. So now you had two. Grayson had been murdered with one of them. You didn’t need the second one to kill Hannah. You told Eric the second knife was going to be a problem if anybody found it in your room, and you asked him to meet you in the alley, take the knife and get rid of it. Eric had no idea what you really meant when you asked him to take the knife.”

  “You killed him,” Ashley said. “You realized you really meant nothing to him, and so you killed him.”

  “Oh, she meant something to him,” Henry said. “Money. This time, Ashley, I’m afraid he might really have left you. Had he been talking about opening another restaurant?”

  Ashley shuddered and blinked. “Fine dining – something really important. Michelin stars. It was his dream. He was already looking for retail space, and I thought he was going too large. I kept telling him it was my turn, and I’d rather have a tearoom.”

  “With Grayson’s money, his dreams would have come true.” Henry looked back at Lauren. “And at the same time you began to suspect he was only after your money, you figured out he wasn’t going to be any more faithful to you than he was to Ashley. Once you killed your husband, he had you where he wanted you – forever. You’d never dare deny him anything. You’re a murderer. Not him, you. You’d killed two people, and he knew how you did it. You’d gone into this thinking he loved you madly, and now you realized he was a menace to you.”

  Lauren’s face had been getting grayer and older, but she also seemed to be growing harder. “Prove it,” she challenged.

  “Oh, I think you’ve already proved it yourself,” Henry said.

  “What do you mean?” she asked furiously.

  “The knife. The second one. The one you used to kill Eric. You only admitted to finding one knife in your room. After your husband died, your room was searched, but there was no reason they would be looking for a second knife. There was only one place you could have hidden the second knife: in the flowerbox outside your window. If you slid it down against the near side of the box, nobody would have noticed it was there, even a maid, watering the flowers. But there’s no way you can hide the fact that something long and thin had been jammed down in there. There’s no way you could remove all traces of the potting soil from that knife, even if you rinsed it in the sink, and if you did, there will be potting soil in the sink’s drain. The police are already checking as we speak.”

  Lauren glanced upwards involuntarily, looking trapped. She worked her lips, but no words came out.

  Henry went on. “And then the fingerprints: there was a reason why they would have been on the knife that was used to kill Grayson, but why should they also be on the knife you used to kill Eric? Because they are, you know.”

  “They are not,” she blurted. “I mean – they can’t be. I don’t know anything about that knife.”

  “You never touched that knife?” Henry asked softly. She shook her head. “You knew nothing about a second knife, even when you found the first one?”

  “I did not,” she said defiantly.

  Henry sat back as if it were all over. Quietly, relentlessly, he said, “Actually, there is a fingerprint on the knife you used to kill Eric – just one little one, at the bottom of the blade, near the handle. And where there’s a fingerprint, there’s DNA. Potting soil – only you could have gotten to the knife in the flowerbox of your room. And of course, motive.”

  “Evidence that Eric left behind that you don’t even know about,” Nettie said in the same tone of voice. “Rental agents he told that he was coming into big money soon. Love notes, with hints at your future together. Who knows? Even the old ‘To be opened in the case of my death’ letter, explaining everything. A bit hackneyed, but did he really trust you? Are you sure? The receipt for the device he used to hijack our phones in Versailles. Now that the police know how you two did it and why, they’ll know where to look. And when they look, they will find, won’t they?”

  Lauren began to say that there was nothing to find, but she seemed to realize it was hopeless. Grasping at the last shred of self-respect, she said, “Eric loved me, not my money.”

  “If you really believed that,” Ashley said, “you wouldn’t have killed him.”


  Henry exhaled heavily and looked to the back of the room. Calling to the detectives, he said, “I think that’s all we’re going to get for now.”

  The Parisian detectives came forward while Lauren shrank back in her chair.

  Chapter 21

  The morning of the day they were finally allowed to leave Paris, Nettie and Henry calculated that they would have plenty of time to finally do that one last thing: see the waterlilies at The Orangerie Museum.

  Once there, they sat without speaking, embraced by panoramic visions. Two entire rooms of the Impressionist museum were taken up with Monet’s gigantic panels. Within those rooms, viewers had the illusion of sitting before quiet waters, strewn with flowers.

  Nettie, in a reverie, found a painted oval of spring green resting on the pond’s surface, bright and clean amid deep blue water and stark reflections of sunlight. Letting go of her senses as best she could, she submerged, letting the dashes and streaks of paint form a watery world around her.

  Margery hadn’t really been interested in the museum after all, and Henry and Nettie had come alone, without a guide. Nobody to tell them what they were seeing, nobody to tell them it was time to move on to the next room. Just the two of them, sitting quietly on a bench. In a little while, they changed their view, moving to another area, and then the next room. When they were ready, they smiled at one another and went on to the other galleries.

  “Will Audrey be bringing her ghost home with her?” Henry asked as they walked along.

  “No. That morning when the police arrested Lauren, Jeanne seems to have left her. Even with all the police interviews, Audrey hasn’t had any more headaches.”

  “I see. So even Jeanne thinks we got it right.”

  “Was there ever any doubt?”

  “Nah. You know, we work well together.”

  She regarded him with a lifted eyebrow. “We held onto our secrets, though, didn’t we?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh please, Henry. You must have figured out right away how she did it. After all, you were the one who asked for a room on a lower floor and found out that the second floor was being remodeled. Nobody would be there. It was a perfect set-up for an attack nobody could possibly witness. Why didn’t you go ahead and say it, when we were brainstorming? Didn’t you think I could figure it out for myself?”

  “Let’s put it this way: I was afraid you’d figure it out for yourself. I didn’t want you to get too involved. Call me a chauvinist, but I was worried about you. I won’t be, next time. I see you can take care of yourself.”

  “Next time? Next time we get involved in a murder?”

  “Or whatever,” he said airily. “You do have a detective agency, don’t you? If you ever need help with a case . . . Sleepy Hollow is just a 2-hour drive down I-90 from Reedsburg. I’m free any time. You know, I’ve been kicking myself for not asking you for a date while you still had a bun on your head and granny glasses on your nose. Now you just think I’m interested because without them, you’re gorgeous. I like your hair like that. But however you’ve worn it, I always liked you, right from the very beginning.”

  She leered up at him, then said, “How am I supposed to think about things like that when that man Jack has practically kidnapped my niece and is making away with her to California?”

  “That was sudden, wasn’t it?”

  “Hmm, not really. I wasn’t surprised when she told me. Were you?”

  “Nah. And you’re not really worried about her. They’ll be all right. They both want to be in love, and they’re basically both nice people. Dull, but nice.”

  “He’s a lout.”

  “And she’s a drip. So they’re just right for one another. Are you ready? We seem to have reached the weird room.”

  “I’m sure the guide we were supposed to have would have been able to make us appreciate these timeless works of art.”

  “Even that one?”

  She looked at the painting he’d discretely pointed out and blinked. “Whatever are they supposed to be doing?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “No,” she said decisively. “I can’t even sort out the body parts. We’d better go catch that plane, but first, I think there’s still time for a cappuccino. It’ll be our last one in Paris together.”

  He took her by the arm, smiled, and said, “You never know.”

  * * * * *

  Later that day, all the guests were preparing to leave, to the obvious relief of the entire hotel staff. By ones and twos, they said their good-byes in the lobby, their suitcases standing up beside them.

  When Kat saw Charley coming out of the elevator, she went to him. “Here, honey, I want you to have this for your wife. I only wore it the one time. Say you bought it for her here.” She handed the peach scarf to him. “Think of me when she wears it.”

  “Kat,” Audrey said, taking the scarf before Charley could react, “that’s more than a little creepy. Let Charley buy a scarf with the Eiffel Tower on it at the airport.”

  “Thanks anyway,” Charley told Kat, “I appreciate the thought.”

  “Which one?” Audrey asked. “The one where your wife gets a gift, or the one where you feel guilty every time she wears it, remembering that you were too lazy to buy something for her yourself while you were here?”

  “I did buy something for her,” he said, remaining good-natured. “As a matter of fact, it’s a scarf with the Eiffel Tower on it, and I will think of you, Kat, every time she wears it. I’ve been telling her all about you. After all, the time we had together was completely innocent, wasn’t it?”

  “Of course,” she said, but it didn’t take a psychic to figure out that she didn’t quite agree.

  Charley lifted his chin in acknowledgement as Jack signaled to him through the hotel window; their taxi had arrived. Jack, puffed up like a cavalier, was already handing Twyla into the backseat. As Charley rolled his suitcase out the door, Kat watched him go, seeming to be trying to memorize him.

  Audrey gazed at her with sympathy for a moment, shook her head, then said, “Come on, kid, I’ll get you to the airport, but from then on, you’re on your own. I’m flying back directly to Jacksonville.”

  “Oh, I won’t be alone. Lots of the others are on the same flight to O’Hare with me. They’re all making connections from there. In fact,” she added deliciously, “Jack is taking Twyla on to San Diego with him.”

  Audrey regarded her childhood friend thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “You’re a good sport. It was worth the sacrifice, wasn’t it – letting Jack and Twyla have their romance while you came home alone. So this one got away. You didn’t really want him, did you?”

  “I always seem to end up alone,” Kat whimpered. “And I’m so good at attracting men. I just can’t seem to keep them.” Dreamily, she added, “I am going to miss his smile.”

  “Remember these words of wisdom, my friend: chasing men is a lot more fun than actually catching them. You only end up washing their underwear.”

  * * * * *

  On the floor above, Henry was knocking on Nettie’s door. She opened it immediately, saying, “I’m ready.” Coming out with her suitcase, she closed the door behind her and looked down the short hall to the elevator. Nobody on the tour had used it since the night Grayson had died in it, but with their suitcases, they all had to use it that last day.

  “Think it’s haunted?” he asked lightly as they approached it.

  “I’m not afraid if it is. I’ve got a big brave chauvinist with me.”

  Henry guffawed. “That and a bun on the back of your head might fool other people, but you don’t fool me, Nettie Tucker from Sleepy Hollow.”

  THE END

 

 

 
cale(100%); -moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share