There's Something About St. Tropez (6 page)

The “sparkler” certainly was not sparkling now. She slumped in her chair, a vacant look on her face, as though she were not there. Or, Sunny thought, more likely didn't want to be.

“Better join us at the table too, Billy,” Nate said. “It's time for a little storytelling of our own.”

It turned out Billy was another fully-paid-up member of the rental scam.
By the time things were straightened out, explanations made, more instant coffee and brandy drunk, and a firm decision made to talk things over at an early breakfast in St. Tropez, they were all exhausted.

Night had disappeared and the sky had turned a dark luminous gray. Bertrand knew it was time to go. Anything might happen; the girl might decide to come outside, explore the gardens and he'd be caught. Yet he lingered, fascinated.

What kind of a girl dressed like that? he wondered. Was she a dancer? And the man in the cowboy hat, who he guessed was her father, looked like those American country singers you saw on TV.

The cowboy laughed a lot too, yet when Bertrand focused his binoculars on him, he saw that his eyes were not smiling.

In fact Bertrand was concentrating so hard on the scene inside that he never heard the taxi crunching up the wet gravel drive.

 

The rain stopped, turned off like a faucet as suddenly as it had arrived. The clouds parted, pushed across the gray sky by the final gasps of the mistral as a petite young woman with heavy brown hair that swung when she walked, got out of the taxi. She paid the driver then, dragging her suitcase, walked into the house.

She stood framed at the arched entrance to the kitchen that Sunny thought had become like the proscenium arch of a theater, with different actors flitting on and off the stage. The young woman looked at them, brown eyes bugging, her expression somewhere between anger and despair. Tesoro growled, showing surprisingly large teeth.

“The hotels in town are full,” she said. “Somebody told me you might be renting rooms here.”

Faced with silence, a growling Chihuahua, and four pairs of astonished eyes and one indifferent—Little Laureen's—she shrugged, embarrassed. “Oh, well, I guess you don't. I mean this is, like, a private house, isn't it? And I've blundered in on you. Serves me right for jumping ship like that. . . . I mean, I just got off, you know, I'd had enough, enough of him—”

Nate held up his hand to stop her. “It's okay,” he said. “We're all just glad to know you haven't rented this place for the month of June.”

Her round brown eyes were bewildered and she looked as though she might burst into tears any second.

Jesus, Sunny thought, it's malcontents' paradise here.

Belinda Lord shunted her chair to one side to make room. “Come on in and join the gang. No coffee left but we're planning on heading into St. Tropez soon for breakfast. Anyhow, what's your name?”

“Sara Strange.”

Belinda sniggered. “A name straight out of a porn movie, though I must admit you don't look the type.”

Sara Strange frowned. “I've been getting comments about my name all my life,” she said, wearily. “Even at school the kids used to say I was ‘strange,' meaning weird. And anyhow I've never even seen a porn movie.”

Belinda looked surprised. She said, “Trust me, you're not missing much.”

Billy Bashford lumbered to his feet. “Pleased to know you, Miss Strange,” he said, taking her hand and bending over it in a courtly fashion.

“Thank you.” She stared uncertainly after him as Billy went round the table, introducing her to what he called his “new friends,” and then his daughter, who refused even to look Sara's way.

Fatigue suddenly painted Little Laureen's face a minor shade of green and Sunny wondered if she was about to throw up.

“Little Laureen,” she said, calling her by that title because her father referred to her like that, “it's been a long night. How about you and I go find the bathroom and freshen up?”

Without replying Laureen got up and went with Sunny, who carried Tesoro.

“You okay?” Sunny asked a few minutes later when the child emerged from the bathroom. “I thought for a while there you were going to be sick.”

“I was, but I changed my mind.”

So she could talk after all. “Feeling better now?”

“Yup.” Laureen smoothed her battered pink tutu. She wore a white T-shirt under the too-tight satin bodice and the tulle skirt stuck out like a ruffle over the tops of her plump thighs. Her pink ballet slippers were spattered with mud. She glanced up at Sunny, who stood with her hands on her hips, watching her. “Thank you anyway.”

“Hey, that's okay. You had a long flight, and then the drive. I know exactly how you felt. I did it myself.”

“You did? Where did you come from?”

“California.”

“Did you fly in your own Gulfstream?”

It was Sunny's turn to be astonished. “I flew commercial,” she said. “With my dog.”

“Your dog is cute.”

“Do you have a dog?”

Laureen adjusted the princess tiara. “Nope.”

Sunny sighed. The child simply wasn't letting her in. She wished she would not say just “yup” and “nope” but then she remembered there was no mother around to correct her, and Billy Bashford did not seem the kind of man to be aware of small things like proper speech. Laureen was wearing a necklace of fine silver mesh strands centered with a silver heart, that sat exactly in the fragile hollow of her throat.

“Pretty necklace,” she said.

Laureen put up a hand to touch it, but said nothing.

“We're planning on going into town for breakfast,” Sunny said. “I'll bet they make delicious crepes there.”

“What's crepes?” Laureen crouched; her small pudgy fingers fiddled with the ribbons on her pink ballet shoes.

“Pancakes,” Sunny said.

“I like pancakes.”

“Well, that's good then, isn't it?”

“I guess so.” Laureen glanced at Sunny's feet in the furry pink slippers. “You like pink too.”

“I certainly do.” Sunny felt at least she was gaining some rapport. “Better go back, they'll be waiting for us.” She took Laureen's unexpectedly hot little hand in hers.

Sara Strange was sitting quietly at the table now. She was petite and kind of scrawny. Her hair cut in a deep fringe hung low over her dark brown eyes then straight as a die to her shoulders. She was not pretty but with her skinny ankles and twiggy arms there was a vulnerable air about her, as though she desperately needed someone to take care of her.

“It's like this,” she was saying, leaning exhaustedly on the table. “I was on a seven-day cruise of the Mediterranean with my fiancé. Well, boyfriend really. I mean, like he still hadn't gotten around to buying me a ring. I thought it would be wonderful, y'know what I mean? Like, glamorous, all hot summer nights, champagne, that sort of thing, and when you're from a small town in Kansas that sounds, like, just plain out of this world. Especially when you've saved for a whole year for it. Not even a morning Starbucks if you know what I mean. And you'd be surprised how much you can save by just cutting that out.”

She pushed her fringe out of her eyes looking at them. “Except my boyfriend thinks he's the playboy of the Western world, good-looking, a charmer, the kind who stares too deeply into every woman's eyes, like he really fancies them and he's passing on the message. Y'know what I mean?

“Anyway, I kept losing him on the ship, and on those shore excursions. I never knew where he was. Turns out he's been carrying on with this woman behind my back for the entire five days we were on the boat. Oh, everybody knew about it of course, the ship wasn't that big. Except me that is, until some of the other passengers felt they had to put me straight.

“Anyhow, last night he never even came back to our stateroom. I found out where the woman's room was, and of course he was there, in bed with her. So . . . I just threw my things into my suitcase and left the ship on the first tender.”

She paused dramatically, then she said, “And the bastard had the nerve to stand there, on deck, begging me to come back, while the other passengers lined the rails, cheering me on.”

She sniffed back a threatening tear.
“The bastard,”
she said again. “So that's why I'm looking for a room, and it can't be expensive because I don't have very much money.”

Sunny shook her head, looking at the little crowd of misfits. She thought Mac was never going to believe what was going on here.

 

The night and the storm were over. Bertrand Olivier knew it was time to leave.

A short while later, back at his lair, he spread out his oilskin cape then lay down on it. He slept like a dead man on his rocky hillside, oblivious to the tiny lizards that, made bold by his stillness, slithered over and around him. One even rested for a moment, basking in the newly emerged sunlight on the pocket of Bertrand's blue cotton polo shirt, beneath which could be felt his beating heart.

It had been the best night of Bertrand's eleven-year-old life.

 

5.

 

 

It was morning. Still groggy from lack of sleep, Sunny stood with the others on the terrace at Chez La Violette, final mug of instant in hand, staring, disbelieving, at the devastation. In the dark and the storm they had not been able to see that the house looked nothing like the photographs. The terraces were overgrown with weeds, the trees and shrubs had gone wild, the unkempt lawns were a sea of mud, and the empty swimming pool was a wreck of broken tiles, awash in debris and stagnant water.

“Looks to me as though Madame Lariot has a lot to answer for,” Nate said grimly.

“But what do we do now?” Sunny said. “We're too tired to go looking for her.”

“And homeless,” Belinda added bitterly.

“Well, I have to admit ‘homeless' is a new feeling for me,” Billy Bashford said, bewildered.

“Oh dear, oh dear, and I'm broke,” Sara Strange wailed. “I should never have left that ship.”

“Yes you should,” Sunny said firmly. “You should never stay with a cheating bastard.”

“That's cussin',” Little Laureen said loudly.

They turned to look at her, surprised that she actually spoke.

“I apologize,” Sunny said. “I forgot myself.”

“Laureen doesn't like cussin',” Billy said. “She hears it from the ranch hands though, it's just second nature to them, talking like that.”

Little Laureen spoke again. “When are we going for pancakes?”

Billy's doubtful glance took in the group. “Guess I could probably fit y'all in the Hummer. Be the devil to park though, in them tight little streets, but I'll manage.”

Sunlight streamed down from a suddenly clear blue sky and they turned grateful faces up to it.

“
Now
I'm in St. Tropez,” Sunny said, hugging Tesoro closer. But to her surprise Tesoro gave a throaty warning growl, then flung a few high-pitched yelps into the air for good measure.

“What's with her?” Belinda complained, but Sunny was staring down the driveway.

From where they were standing they could not see the gates, but halfway to the house the drive curved past the terrace. And trotting up that drive came a dog. Ears perked, it paused here and there to sniff the exciting French aromas. Then it loped toward them. A familiar three-legged bouncing lope.

“Pirate?”
Sunny shook her head. She must be delusional. She had been up for thirty-six hours. Or was it more? Apart from a nap on the plane she'd had no sleep, and she was beginning to feel a little woozy and as though her legs didn't quite belong to her. But Tesoro certainly wasn't hallucinating. That dog knew her enemy when she saw him.

Pirate spotted them, wuffed joyfully, galloped jerkily toward Sunny and flung himself on her.

“Baby,” Sunny whispered. “Oh baby, how did
you
get here?”

“He came with me, of course.” Mac strolled across the terrace, cool in white jeans and a black T-shirt. He set down his duffel and stopped in front of her, smiling.

Sunny did not return his smile. Nor did she throw herself into his arms. Instead she stared accusingly at him. “How did
you
get here?”

“We finished early. I hitched a ride on Ron Perrin's plane. He still has one you know, despite the jail time.”

But Sunny wasn't interested in Ron Perrin right now. “You've no idea what I've been through.”

Mac looked warily at her. She was definitely frazzled, not to say upset, and she was wearing her pink fuzzy slippers and a bathrobe. He took in the rest of the group: the athletic-looking guy in the workout pants; the tall, tearstained, good-looking blonde in bare feet and creased white pants suit; the brown-haired skinny waif with the serious eyes; the Texan with the cowboy hat; and the miniature ballerina, complete with tutu.