Author: Anne Stuart
Category: Suspense
Go to read content：https://readnovelfree.com/p/26005_2
So she’d said nothing. She’d broken off with Brian, holed up in her apartment, and turned off her telephone, waiting for the child to die, knowing that if that happened she would have to go to the police.
But when the newspapers reported that the child’s six-week coma ended, not in death, but in a murmured word of recognition, Claire had given in to her friend Joyce’s suspicious demands, given up her guilt-plagued vigil, and gone with her to a party in Boston.
She’d had every intention of leaving early. Now that she knew the girl would live, might even live a normal, healthy life, a huge weight had left her. All she felt was a great, empty exhaustion. But she drank the imported champagne, smiled a huge, insincere smile, and wondered how quickly she could leave.
Joyce worked for the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a managerial capacity that Claire never quite understood. This particular party was to honor Le Théâtre du Mime at the conclusion of their first American tour. Joyce had charge of the arrangements, and Claire followed in her efficient friend’s wake, smiling blindly at the French artists. Until she met Marc Bonnard. And then her smile was no longer blind.
He was very handsome, but then, the room was full of handsome men. He hadn’t been an inch taller than her own five feet eight inches, and his lean, graceful body probably didn’t weigh much more than hers. He looked very French, with a sensual mouth, a strong nose, sleepy, laughing eyes, and a thick wave of black hair that tumbled enchantingly down his high forehead. He had taken one look at her and made up his mind, he told her later. Learning that she couldn’t, and would never, speak French didn’t deter him in the slightest. It added to the mystery, he said. He had enough English for both of them. Besides, he was a mime. What did they need with words?
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She fascinated him, he said. With her huge, sorrowful eyes, her narrow, elegant face and hands, her untamed mane of red gold hair. What secrets lay behind those sad, haunted eyes?
She didn’t tell him. She went back to his hotel room with him, back to his bed with him, where she found she didn’t have to think, didn’t have to remember. One week later she flew over to Paris to live with him in the huge old apartment he’d inherited on the left bank of the Seine. One month later she met his daughter Nicole.
Claire took another sip of coffee. It was cooling now, no longer the hot comfort it had first been. Maybe she should brew another pot, just to warm her up. The chill, heavy rain could reach inside your bones. It must be hell to be old in such a climate.
She’d known about Nicole, of course. If she’d stopped to consider, if she hadn’t been so mesmerized by Marc and his seemingly inexhaustible passion, she would have known the lure of a motherless nine-year-old was part of her abrupt decision to leave. She had kept silent when her lover had almost killed one young girl. Perhaps she could redeem herself with another.
Nicole wouldn’t have any part of it. She’d taken one look at the interloper, the American who thought she’d take her mother’s place, and her response had been politely contemptuous. And for once Claire was glad that she couldn’t speak French.
That hadn’t helped an already tense situation. A bilingual nine-year-old couldn’t comprehend that an intelligent thirty-year-old could have learning disabilities that kept her from understanding even the rudiments of a language Nicole considered far superior to English. The first two months of Claire’s stay in Paris were a kaleidoscope of frustration, irritation, guilt, and an almost mindless pleasure. And the omnipresent second thoughts.
Things had settled down, of course. Nicole began to accept her, grudgingly. With her beloved grand-mère on an extended visit to her elderly sister in Los Angeles, Nicole had no one else to turn to.
Because her hostility extended to Marc. She eyed her father out of solemn, bespectacled eyes, her sallow face blank when he exerted all his charm to tease her out of her sulks. She was polite, too polite, to him, to Claire. It was only when she finally screamed at Claire, her stolid self-control vanishing, that Claire felt she was getting somewhere.
And then Marc had sent her away to school, removing her from the day school she’d been attending. Claire had fought him on it, but she had no leverage. Even Nicole seemed resigned to it, packing her clothes with her usual sober demeanor, giving Claire a chaste kiss on the cheek before following her handsome father out the door.
Marc and Claire had been left alone in the huge old apartment, lovers on holiday in Paris. The Théâtre du Mime was on sabbatical. All Marc had to do was make love to Claire, and he applied himself to the task quite diligently.
He wanted to marry her. Claire looked down at the dark, oily dregs of her coffee and felt her stomach knot. She could think of no reason not to. She loved him, she loved him to distraction. When he was around she couldn’t think of anything but him, of the hours they spent together, of the fiendishly clever ways he had of arousing and teasing and ultimately satisfying her. Her sex life with Brian had been mundane, almost boring, a small part of her life. With Marc, it became the focus of everything, so much so that it sometimes frightened her.
And when Marc was gone, the doubts began to build, as they were building right now, doubts that she tried to push away. He was handsome, he was gentle, he was marvelous in bed, and he loved her. He was even wealthy—his wife had left him a great deal of money when her car had plunged over an embankment on the way to one of his performances in Nice. What more could she ask from life?
She stood, and the scraping of the chair on the parquet floor scraped along her nerves. It was early April, and it was raining. It seemed as if it had been raining for months, that the fabled Paris spring was a figment of some travel agent’s imagination. Who could help but be depressed? The sordid, distressing news made things worse. The situation in Lebanon, in Central America, the politics of her homeland seemed as out of control as ever. And another old woman was found murdered. That brought the number to thirty-eight. Thirty-eight women over the age of seventy-five found murdered in their apartments. The Grandmother Murders, they called them. Claire found herself grateful that she couldn’t understand French, couldn’t find out the gory details. She’d seen the blurred news photo and known more than she wanted to.
Maybe that was her problem. When she’d flown over to join Marc she’d blithely assumed that most people spoke English. Marc, in his eagerness to have her come, had encouraged that arrogant assumption.
But the street signs and magazines and newspapers and television shows were in French, and they might just as well have been in Swahili. Claire was like a deaf-mute, unable to hear, to communicate with most of the people around her. That sense of isolation was probably to blame for her depression, her anxiety, her sudden, unreasoning longing for the narrow streets of Brockton. Streets where she’d seen a child struck down, seen and said nothing, she reminded herself with a stray shiver, rinsing her coffee cup out in the sink.
She looked around the kitchen. It was spotless, of course. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that Marc was scrupulously neat, and that the only way she could be happy was to alter her cheerfully sloppy ways and be as compulsive as he was. She set the mug on the draining board, resisting the impulse to dry it and put it away. Marc wouldn’t be back till late. He was a careful driver—he wouldn’t take risks in this sort of weather. She’d have time to clean everything.
She leaned against the iron sink, staring out into the silver gray rain. She was going to have to give Marc an answer before long. And she knew, without his saying so, that there was only one answer that was acceptable. And her fingers clutched the edge of the sink, her knuckles white with strain.
Chief Inspector Louis Malgreave of Homicide swore fluently under his breath. God damn the murdering bastards! Another one, another helpless old lady found stabbed to death in her pitiful little apartment.
This time it was Felice Champêtre, an eighty-year
-old widow. Three weeks ago it had been Marthe Bernard, a week before that Hélène Mersot. And thirty-five other women in the last two and a half years.
Two hundred extra policemen had been assigned to areas frequented by the elderly. A small fortune had been budgeted in the quest for the killers. They had come close, so very close. And still the death toll rises, he thought wearily.
There had to be more than one murderer. While he had no proof, he was certain that rotten little punk Rocco Guillère had been responsible for Marguerite Debenet and the nun in Notre Dame. Not to mention the ninety-year-old twins in La Défense.
But he couldn’t have killed the Comtesse de Tourney—his alibi was airtight. And three more women were killed while Malgreave tried to keep him in custody. It was a lost cause. No sooner had Rocco’s defense lawyer gotten wind of the latest murders than Rocco was a free man. And Malgreave was faced with more questions than answers.
The official theory, one that Malgreave grudgingly accepted, was that it was a copycat killer. The United States had dealt with the same sort of sickness. One person poisoned a box of medicine and suddenly dozens of people were poisoning medicine. One man with a hatred of old women started killing, and everyone who was ever spanked by a grandmother began to get murderous ideas.
He stared out into the pouring rain, reaching for his cigarettes. He was trying to give them up, but so far he hadn’t had any luck. The city was gray and cold, and he shivered in his fourth-floor office. He hated the rain. It had been almost eighteen months, almost twenty victims before they noticed that the women always died on a rainy day. Malgreave found himself praying for a drought.