Fleur De Lies(113)

            “Thanks much.” As I made to leave, he wrapped his hand around my arm, stopping me momentarily.

            “I want to thank you for listening to my dad last night, Emily, and not judging him. We’re obviously going to have a mess to deal with when we get back home, and I have no idea how it’ll all turn out, but at least I know what’s happening now, and can try to put things to right. Dad’s not a bad sort. He’s just guilty of making some of the poorest choices a man can ever make, and he’ll probably have to pay dearly for it.” He shook his head. “I guess no matter how much you think you know a person, they can still end up surprising you.”

            I wondered if one day soon Victor would be making the same statement about Virginia?

            I zigzagged through the crowd and took my place at the back of the queue to tour the house. Several of the second-story windows were thrown open, and since there were no bug screens, visitors were poking their heads and cameras through the openings, shooting the panoramic photos they couldn’t shoot at ground level.

            I kept my eyes on the open windows as I shuffled toward the entrance, and when I arrived at the stairs fronting the main door, I was rewarded with the sight I’d been looking for.

            Rob.

            “Rob!” I shouted, waving my arm in a wild arc over my head.

            He stuck his head out the window and glanced in my direction, looking straight at me without apparent recognition, because in the next instant he drew his head back into the room and disappeared.

            Well, duh? What was wrong with this guy? Did he have face blindness?

            I ascended the stairs close on the heels of the person in front of me and, once inside the door, smiled at the docent who was directing visitors into a room on the left.

            “Could I scoot up the stairs before I see the downstairs? There’s someone up there I need to speak to. It’s really important.”

            “Madame,” he replied, waving me into the downstairs room.

            “No, no, you don’t understand. I need to go up.” I pointed my forefinger toward the ceiling. “Up.”

            He shot me a fierce look. “Down,” he said as he escorted me personally to the first room on the tour.

            Nuts!

            Blue smacked me in the face when I crossed the threshold. I’d entered a small sitting room where the walls were painted robin’s-egg blue, the trim was painted peacock blue, and furniture boasted every color blue from cornflower to periwinkle. A blue pendulum clock stood in one corner on dainty carved feet, looking suspiciously like the clock that had sung and danced in the animated version of Beauty and the Beast.

            I hurried through an adjoining pantry to enter a long studio where light spilled through broad open windows onto the soft wool of Oriental carpets. This was a painter’s room, filled with warmth and brightness and an ambience that might inspire every brushstroke. A chaise lounge sat behind a roped barrier. A bust of the famous painter perched near it. And filling every available space on every available wall were watercolors both large and small, square and rectangular, painted with a brush once held by Claude Monet.

            But Rob wasn’t in Monet’s studio. He was upstairs.

            I rushed back to the pantry and charged up a steep, winding staircase to the second floor. Stepping into the first room on my right, I saw that it was a bedroom modestly appointed with a lemon yellow bedstead with matching wardrobe and night stand, but what it didn’t have was Rob. A docent stood by a door on the opposite side of the bed, funneling visitors into the next room, so I headed in that direction, pausing for just a moment to stick my head out the open window that overlooked the garden—which is when I saw the commotion on the path below me.