“Merci. If it’s relevant I’m sure the police will discover it,” he said, hesitating for the first time. “Listen, there’s another problem.”
She looked up from the report. “What do you mean?”
“A Nathalie Gagnard has filed a civil suit against Laure,” he said.
Aimée remembered Jacques’s last name. “His wife?”
“Ex-wife. Charging Laure with murder.”
Great.
“She’s also complaining in an interview in tomorrow’s edition of Le Parisien.”
“Can’t you stop the interview from appearing?”
She heard a clock chime in the background, measured and slow.
“Too late.”
AIMÉE SHOWED her pass and authorization to the two young police guards at Hôtel Dieu. Instead of the trouble she expected, they waved her on to the hospital’s criminal ward. Nurses scurried, their footsteps slapping on the chipped Art Nouveau tiles pleated by strips of the light coming through the window blinds. She usually avoided hospitals yet here she stood, in the second one in as many days.
And then she froze, confronted by a white-faced Laure who lay hooked up to machines dripping fluids through clear tubes. Monitors beeped. Rubbing alcohol and pine disinfectant smells clung in the corners.
Aimée’s mind traveled back to an afternoon in the Jardin du Luxembourg under the sun-dappled trees, shadows dancing over the gravel. Her father and Georges, Laure’s father, were reading the paper as they sat on the green slatted benches, partners who depended on each other when their lives were on the line, sharing a joke. The gurgle and spray of the fountain, so welcome in the humid heat. It had been two summers after her American mother had left them. Ten-year-old Laure had confided, in the playground, that she intended to follow her papa into police work.
The beep and click of the bedside machines brought Aimée back to the present. She made her legs move. Could Laure talk? Was she well enough?
“Ça va? How do you feel?” she asked, rubbing Laure’s chilled fingers, careful to avoid the intravenous lines taped to her wrist and the top of her hand.
Laure’s eyes fluttered open. Her pupils were dilated. Recognition slowly dawned in her face. “The report . . . you’ve read the report . . . that’s why you’re here, bibiche?”
“Laure, which report?”
“It’s so cold. Where am I?” Laure asked, bewildered.
“In the hospital.” Aimée pulled the blanket up to Laure’s chin.
Laure’s eyes wandered. “Why?”
Had the concussion wiped out her memory?
“Take it easy, Laure,” she said. “Don’t worry. Can you remember what happened?”
Laure tried to put her finger to her lips but missed. “It’s . . . it’s a secret.”
Aimée’s spine prickled. “Secret?”
“Non, I’m not supposed . . .” Laure tried to prop herself up on her elbow and slipped. With an exhausted sigh, she gave up and fell back, her matted brown hair fanning out on the pillow. “No . . . not right . . . the report.”
“Jacques’s report?”
Laure blinked, shook her head, and then grimaced in pain.
“You asked for my help, remember,” said Aimée. “If you keep things from me, I can’t help you. Even if you promised him to keep quiet, now it’s all right to speak. You won’t help him by keeping it inside.”
Nothing could help Jacques now. Aimée hated pressing Laure while she was disoriented, but, with any luck, she might mention a sound, a detail, that would identify her attacker.
Aimée placed a small pot of hothouse violets next to the water carafe on Laure’s bedside table. Say it with flowers—hadn’t René recommended that for Morbier? “Too bad they don’t have any fragrance.”
“Violets in winter! Merci.”
En route, Aimée had spent an off-season fortune at the Marché aux Fleurs behind Hôtel Dieu. She’d asked the red-cheeked flower seller, a stout woman wearing layers of sweaters under her smock, how the flowers survived in such cold. “But the flowers like it here, Mademoiselle!” she’d answered.
Laure gave a weak smile. “So thoughtful. You always watch out for me.”
“Laure, what do you remember?”
Pain crossed Laure’s face. The thin white scar creasing her upper lip caught the light.
“My head’s throbbing. It feels like it’s full of cotton.”
“Please try, Laure. Try to picture going up on the scaffolding and tell me what you heard.”
Laure’s hands balled into fists. But her eyes widened as though she remembered something.
“Stay calm, Laure,” Aimée said, unfurling Laure’s clenched fingers.
“So hard . . . yes, Jacques called me. Screaming. The men . . .”
Hadn’t Zoe Tardou said she’d heard male voices? “You said he was meeting an informer.”
Laure’s eyes brightened. “He needed my back-up. Now I remember but . . . my head’s throbbing.”
“You saw these men?” Aimée leaned forward, gripped the metal bed rail. “You were set up! What did they look like?”
“I heard men’s voices. That’s all I remember.”
“Raised in anger?”
Laure rubbed her head. “Can’t they give me something to stop the pain?”
“Like an argument? Low or deep voices?”
“Not speaking French,” she said. “I didn’t understand them.”
Zoe Tardou had said the same thing.
“What did it sound like?”
Laure closed her eyes.
“Try to think, Laure,” she said. “What language did they speak?”
“I just remember the stale smell of sweat, a quick whiff from the rooftop,” she said, her voice fading. “And thinking it was Jacques and he had to be scared. Maybe . . . I don’t know . . . the way he called out.”
A scared man because a deal had fallen through? Or was there something else?
“Were you afraid for Jacques? Did you feel that he needed help? Why did you enter the apartment, Laure?”
Tears streaked down her pale cheeks. “What else could I do? I couldn’t even pass the exam . . . Jacques fixed it for me. . . .”
Her police exam, the one Laure had spent nights studying for? “Don’t worry about that,” Aimée said, wiping away the tears with a cloth, stroking Laure’s arm.
If Laure had surprised the men meeting Jacques, they could have attacked her, taken her gun, and used it to shoot Jacques. But Aimée didn’t see how to account for the gun residue on Laure’s hands.
“Papa made me promise . . . not to tell you. . . .” Laure’s voice trailed off.
“Not to tell me what?” Aimée demanded.
Georges had passed away several years earlier. Had the concussion returned her to the past, so she was reliving a memory? A feeling of foreboding filled Aimée.
“What do you mean, Laure?” She tried to avoid the exasperated tone she’d used with the younger Laure when she had tagged after Aimée and dogged her movements.
Laure’s eyelids fluttered.
“That pile of Carambar, remember? I didn’t tell you. I took them from the concierge.”
Carambar, the candy caramels Aimée loved. Still did.
“He didn’t mean to, Aimée. Neither of them did,” Laure gasped in pain.
Aimée’s spine stiffened. The way Laure spoke indicated that something more than stolen candy was on her mind.
“Who didn’t mean to?”
“When we came home from school . . . that day I stole the Carambar . . . the envelope . . . on the concierge’s table. Remember, I imitated her?”
The high-pitched beeps from one of the monitors alarmed Aimée.
“Laure, I don’t understand.”