As they rejoined Emile in the living room, Rook asked, “Did Nicole keep a computer here?” When Mme. Bernardin said no, he continued, “What about mail? Did she get any mail here?”
M. Bernardin said, “Nothing, no mail.” But when he said it, both Heat and Rook noticed something unsettled in the way he lingered on the thought.
“You seem unsure about the mail,” said Nikki.
“No, I am quite sure she got no mail here. But when you asked me, it reminded me that someone else had recently asked the same thing.”
Heat got out her notepad, making complete her transition from houseguest to cop. “Who asked you that, M. Bernardin?”
“A telephone caller. Let me think. He said it so quickly. An American voice, I think he said … Sea—crest, yes, Mr. Seacrest. He said he was a business associate of my daughter’s. He called me by my first name, so I had no reason to doubt him.”
“Of course not. And what exactly did this Mr. Seacrest ask you?”
“He was concerned a package of Nicole’s might have been misdirected here by error. I told him nothing had arrived for her here.”
Rook asked, “Did he describe what kind of package or what might be in it?”
“Mm, no. As soon as I said nothing had come, he got off the line quickly.”
Heat quizzed him about the caller and any characteristics about his voice—age, accent, pitch—but the old man came up at a loss. “Do you remember when the call came?”
“Yes, a few days ago. Sunday. In the evening.” She made a note and he asked, “Do you think it is suspicious?”
“It’s hard to know, but we’ll check it out.” Nikki handed him one of her business cards. “If you think of anything else, and especially if anyone contacts you again to ask about Nicole, please call that number.”
Lysette said, “It has been a pleasure to meet you, Nikki.”
“And you,” she said. “I feel like you gave me a glimpse into a big part of my mother’s life that I missed. I wish I could have learned more about it from her.”
Mme. Bernardin got up. “Do you know what I want to do, Nikki? I have something I’d like to share with you that you may find enlightening.
Excusez-moi.
”
Heat sat again, and in Lysette’s absence Emile topped their glasses, even though neither had gone beyond the toast sip. Nikki said, “My father met my mother when she was playing at a cocktail party in Cannes. He said she had been getting by doing that and giving piano lessons. Did she start that here during the summer she visited you?”
“Oh, yes. And I am proud to say that I was instrumental in finding her employment.”
“Were you involved in music?” she asked.
“Only to sing in the shower,” he said. “No, no, my business was commercial and corporate insurance. Through that work I developed a relationship with an investment banker—an American who was living here who became a dear friend of the family. Nicole adored him so much she called him Oncle Tyler.”
“Uncle Tyler,” said Rook.
“Very good,” said Emile with a wink at Nikki. For no reason other than instinct she asked his name. “Tyler Wynn. A charming man. I got a lot of business through him over the years. He was very well connected to international investors and knew anyone who mattered in Paris. And Tyler’s generosity of referrals didn’t just extend to me. No, no. Whenever Nicole was home from Boston, he would find her summer work as a music tutor for the children of some of his wealthy acquaintances. It was good experience for her and paid very well.”
“And kept her out of trouble,” said Rook.
Emile pointed a forefinger to the air. “Best of all.”
Nikki had done the math and urged him on. “So this Tyler Wynn also found tutoring clients for my mother that summer?”
“Exactly. And Cindy was so good at it, soon she had appointments every day. Tyler made more referrals and one job led to another. Some of her patrons who had vacation homes would even hire your mother to come along with their family on
les vacances
to continue the tutoring. A week in Portofino, another in Monte Carlo, then Zurich or the Amalfi coast. Travel, room and board, all first class. Not a bad life for a woman of twenty-one, eh?”
“Unless your life was supposed to be something else,” she said.
“Ah, once again, Nikki, so much like your mother. Both dutiful and beautiful.” He took a sip of wine. “Remember what one of our philosophers once said, ‘In the human heart there is a perpetual generation of passions, such that the ruin of one is almost always the foundation of another.’”
Lysette seemed newly invigorated by her mission and hurried back into the room carrying a keepsake container about the size of a shoebox covered in burgundy and white toile fabric with matching burgundy ribbon ties done into bows. “I can see I’ve been gone too long. Emile’s quoting maxims again.” She stood before Nikki’s chair and said, “In this box are old photos I kept of Cynthia from her times with Nicole and also of your mother’s travels. Cindy was a wonderful correspondent. If you please, I am not going to look through them with you now. I don’t think I am able to endure seeing them at the moment.” Then she offered the box. “Here.”
Nikki reached out hesitantly and cradled it in both her hands. “Thank you, Mme. Bernardin. I’ll be careful with them and return them tomorrow.”
“No, Nikki, these are yours to keep. I have my memories in here.” She placed a hand over her heart. “Yours are in there yet to be discovered. I hope they bring you closer to your mother.”
It was a struggle. Even for the self-proclaimed queen of delayed gratification, who so wanted to rip the lid off the keepsake box in the taxi back to the hotel. But she held firm. Her fear of losing a single photo trumped her aching curiosity.
Rook gave Heat some space. He set out to find a zinc bar to serve him a stand-up double espresso to supply a much-needed caffeine bounce at the far reaches of the afternoon; she stayed in the room and pored over the unexpected treasure from the Bernardins. He returned to the hotel a half hour later with an icy can of her favorite San Pellegrino Orange and found Nikki cross-legged on their bed with rows of neatly arranged snapshots and postcards radiating out from her like beams from the sun. “Finding anything useful?”
“Useful?” she asked. “Hard to know what’s useful. Interesting? Absolutely. Check out this one. She was so cute.” Nikki held up a shot of her mom, striking a ditzy, laughing pose while she squeezed the bicep of a gondolier under the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. “Turn it over, she wrote on the back.”
Rook flipped the snapshot and read it aloud. “Dear Lysette, Sigh!”
“My mom was a babe, wasn’t she?”
He handed it back. “I’m too smart to answer a question like that about your mother. At least until we appear on Jerry Springer.”
“I think you did just answer.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to upset her sorting. “What’s your take from all this?”
“Mostly that she had one hell of a good time. You know how in
Vanity Fair
and
First Press
you see all those photo layouts of the European rich and privileged and wonder what it must be like to live like that? My mom lived like that. At least she did one job at a time. Look at some of these.” Nikki dealt out the photos like playing cards, one after another, each showing young Cynthia in a posh surrounding: on the sweeping lawn of a country estate out of
Downton Abbey
; at a lacquered grand piano with the rocky coast of the Mediterranean out the picture window behind her; on the private terrace of a hilltop manor overlooking Florence; in Paris with an Asian family under the marquee for the visiting Bolshoi Ballet; and on and on. “Apparently, for her, tutor-in-residence was like a fairy tale dream you had to wake up from, but when you did, the butler came and got your bags.”
There were also pictures of Nicole and other young friends her mom’s age, plus a bunch of snapshots of her mom and her pals standing individually in various locales around Europe, grinning and gesturing grandly like
Price Is Right
spokesmodels, obviously their shared joke. But Nikki remained fixated on her mom and the frozen record of her bopping around in France, Italy, Austria, and Germany. In a number of photographs she appeared posed with her host families. Most of Cindy’s patrons had that look of old money, standing pompously in a circular drive or in private gardens, but mostly in predictable small-to-tall groupings of moms, dads, and impatient young musicians in bow ties or ruffled dresses in front of a Steinway grand. There was one other person in all those group pictures. A tall, handsome man, and in most of them, her mother stood close beside him.
“Who’s the William Holden knockoff?” asked Rook, tapping a shot of just the man and Cynthia together outside the Louvre. He was older than Nikki’s mother by twenty years and did give off the former leading man’s gritty attractiveness.
“I’m not sure. There is something familiar about him I can’t place.” She snatched the picture from him and put it back in the proper pile.
“Whoa, not so fast.” He picked it right back up. “Maybe it’s the William Holden thing you recognize…. Or is it something else?”
“Like what?” Nikki tried to grab it away again, but he dodged her. She said, “I don’t see William Holden.”
“I do. I see William Holden and Audrey Hepburn. They’re both straight off the movie poster for
Paris When It Sizzles
.” He held the photo up to her nose. “Check it out. His weathered good looks paired with her refined innocence masking the sexy tigress inside. You know, that could be us.”
Nikki looked away. “There is no sizzle in those pictures. He’s too old for her.”
“Know who I bet this is?” he said. “He’s that Oncle Tyler who set up her tutoring clients. Yeah, this is Tyler Wynn. Am I right?”
Ignoring him, she plucked another shot from the stack and held it up. “Hey, here’s one of just Mom taken right here in Paris.” The developer’s time stamp on the reverse read “May 1975.” The photo was of her mother balanced on one foot with a hand shading her eyes, comically peering into the future. It was snapped in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. “I want to go there,” said Nikki. “Right now.”
They left the keepsake box with the hotel manager to lock in the safe and took a taxi to Ile de la Cite. Darkness had fallen and the gray stoneworks of the edifice were bathed in white light, which also cast a spooky glow upon the gargoyles observing from above.
Rook knew what this was all about; she didn’t have to say it. They left the taxi and hurried along silently, walking around the back of a tour group that encircled nighttime street performers who juggled flaming batons. They made their way to their destination: the center of the square that faced the front entrance of the massive cathedral. They paused, patiently waiting for a high school field trip to clear away and then approached a small piece of metal embedded in the paving stones, a shiny octagon of brass rubbed smooth by years of wear. This was the exact location in the photo of Nikki’s mom. She took the picture out of her pocket to prepare herself and did what she’d come to do. A month shy of thirty-five years later, Nikki Heat stood in her mother’s footsteps. Then, raising one foot off the ground, she shielded her eyes in the identical hammy pose, which Rook captured with the flash of his iPhone.
This spot of her reenactment was the famous Point Zero, the Paris milestone outward from which all distances are measured in France. This, the saying went, was where all roads began. Nikki hoped so. She just didn’t know where it would lead yet.
They ate at Mon Vieil Ami, a ten-minute stroll to Ile Saint-Louis. Over dinner they talked some more about their visit with Nicole’s parents, which gave Rook a chance to say he didn’t buy Lysette and Emile’s whole theory about Cindy’s taking a break from the rigors of pursuing her passion as the explanation for why she quit her dream. “You have a better theory?” Heat asked. “And does it involve UFOs, cranial needle probes, or memory-erasing light flashes from men in dark suits?”
“You know you hurt me when you mock my outside-the-box approach to case solving. Chide me if you must, but chide me gently. I’m as tender as a fawn.”
“OK, Bambi,” she said, “but don’t look at the chalkboard, venison is the special.”
After they placed their orders, Rook came right back to it. “It’s still the odd sock,” he said. “If someone’s going to prepare her whole life like your mother did for a concert career, she doesn’t just drop it. It’s like an athlete training for the Olympics only to walk away from the starting blocks to become a personal trainer. Great gig, but after all that sacrifice and training?”
“I hear you, but what about what Emile said about changing passions?”
“Uh, with all due respect?
Merde
. I refer you back to my Olympics versus personal trainer theory. One’s a passion, the other is a J-O-B job.”
Heat said, “All right, maybe it wasn’t necessarily a passion, but you saw her face in those pictures. My mom was having a ball. And probably earning just enough money to make it hard to quit. Maybe the work got to become golden handcuffs.”
“Not that the subject of handcuffs doesn’t titillate me, but that’s also a hard sell. Responsible young woman turns into Paris Hilton in one summer? Doubtful.” His salad and her soup arrived. He took a bite of tender lentils and then continued, “Do you think she had something going with this Tyler Wynn?”
Heat put her fork down and leaned over her plate toward him. “You are talking about my mother.”