Fleur De Lies(22)

            Osmond threw me a pleading look. “Emily, please, I can’t leave Solange like this.”

            “Well, you can’t stay here,” said Tilly as she pulled him unceremoniously to his feet. “And you know you can’t.”

            Woody backpedaled away from the sofa, a sheepish look on his face. “How about I leave the brochure here for you?” he suggested, dropping it on the coffee table in his hasty retreat. “Maybe you can check it out when you’re in a better frame of mind.”

            Solange stabbed a damning finger at him as he rushed out the door. “C’est toi!” she scolded in a high-pitched shriek that bristled with venom. “C’est toi!”

            The bus horn blared long and loudly, causing a wave of panic to ripple down my spine. “C’mon, Osmond.” I grabbed his arm. “We’ve gotta go. I can guarantee you won’t want to be anywhere around me if I have to walk back to the boat in five-inch wedges.”

            “Solange?” He reached out his knobby fingers to touch her, but she was collapsed in Madeleine’s arms, seemingly inconsolable as she broke out in anguished tears, the sounds of her tormented wails filling the room. He took a step back, bowing his head with a remembered sadness. “She cried just like that the day she found her brother.” He tried to catch Madeleine’s eye, but she was so fixated on soothing her grandmother that she no longer seemed aware of the presence of other people in the room.

            “I guess maybe we should go,” he rasped, looking utterly bereft.

            Once outside, we hurried down the front path in a footrace to the waiting coach.

            “What was wrong with her?” Osmond puzzled. “What was she yelling at him? Does anyone know what say twah means?”

            “It means, ‘it’s you,’” I said, dredging up a few remnants of my high school French. Solange had screamed It’s you as if in that moment she had somehow recognized him.





                     five

            “My suggestion about the makeup demonstration was such a hit.” Jackie sat at the mirrored vanity in my cabin, applying gloss with a Mona Michelle lipstick wand. “If we could figure out a way to have more home visits, I’d make a killing. And you know what that would mean. Hel-looo, pink Porsche.”

            I slid into the strappy heels that elevated my little black dress to dinnerwear status. “Goes to show what I know. I take back what I said about your idea being tacky.”

            “You’re forgiven. I don’t expect someone who specializes in old people to know anything about product testing on upwardly mobile target groups.”

            Our boat was moored in a tidal estuary of the Seine, tied up alongside a granite quay in the river port of Honfleur, a picturesque town whose architectural design illustrated the passage of time from the Middle Ages—with its half-timber houses, cobbled lanes, and cramped alleyways—to the Renaissance, with its tall, slate-fronted tenements shouldered rooftop to rooftop around an inner harbor that had been “newly” excavated a brief four hundred years ago. My balcony faced Honfleur’s main boulevard—a long stretch of road flanked by upscale wood and brick apartments on one side, a grassy esplanade on the other, and a noisy stream of horn-tooting traffic in between.

            “So what products did you showcase in your demonstration?” I asked, surprised that the toothsome trio had given their blessing to anything Jackie had suggested.

            “Everything! We did makeovers. Complete makeovers! When our hostess found out what the four of us did for a living, she begged us to share our expertise with her family, so we gave all the Roussel women miracle makeovers. Really, Emily, properly applied face powder can make all the difference in a woman’s life.”