A Rather Charming Invitation (28 page)

I now pictured him, back home with his mum, Great-Aunt Dorothy, who, of all these people, I trusted the least. Dorothy still feels that somehow Jeremy and I had gotten more than our fair share of Great-Aunt Penelope’s inheritance . . . simply because Dorothy can’t bear to think of anyone else having money that she and Rollo might have gotten their hands on first. She never does her own dirty work, either. If she couldn’t get lawyers to do whatever she wanted, the odds were that she’d assign it to Rollo. Yes, she could have pressured him to steal the tapestry to cover his ever-recurring gambling debts.

Still, I didn’t believe that Rollo did it . . . not really . . . simply out of sheer practicality. Rollo likes to travel light. A great big tapestry wasn’t his style. Unless . . . he was in cahoots with some pro who’d done the deed, sold it to a greedy collector, and given him a cut of the action . . .

Jeremy must have been pondering just that, because we’d both fallen silent. Monsieur Felix said rather alertly, “Is there something you wish to tell me about this man?”

“Only that a file on Rollo could end up being hundreds of pages,” Jeremy said dryly.

“It very nearly is,” Monsieur Felix said, with a shadow of a smile. “Various brushes with the law, but very petty incidents. A few unsavory connections. Yet, he does not strike me as a mastermind.”

“No,” Jeremy agreed. “And he’s rather fond of Penny. I don’t see this as one of his operations.”

“
En fin
, there is this person who sells the clocks,” Monsieur Felix said, about Aunt Sheila’s beau.

“Yes?” Jeremy looked up sharply, a bit too ready, I thought, to hear something damning about Guy Ansley.

“It seems he once had a business partner who sued him for not properly distributing the profits,” Felix said bluntly. “They settled out of court. This proves nothing, really.” He closed his notebook. “That is the entire extent of it—except, of course, that we must note that Guy Ansley deals in antiques, and has a demanding clientele.”

I said dolefully, “Monsieur Felix, if you keep this up, nobody will want to come to my wedding.”

He gave me a glance of sympathy. “
Oui, je comprends
,” he said. “It had to be done. So, we continue to search for the thief. And now, the real work begins.”

 

 

In the late afternoon, Aunt Sheila stopped by before she left for London. She accepted the cup of tea I offered her. Guy was waiting back at the hotel, at her request, she said. At first, this struck me as odd, until she got around to telling us why she’d really come.

“So sorry to disturb,” she said, “but, well, all this investigating has gotten Margery upset.”

Oh, hell
, I thought wearily. I was getting a little fed up with Margery and her high-handed attitude. This wasn’t, after all, her drama.

“What’s up?” Jeremy asked, sounding a bit irritated, too.

“Well, darling, it’s like this,” Aunt Sheila drawled, her green eyes bright with surprise. “Your grandmother doesn’t want an investigation of our family to go any further, because she’s petrified that that little man of yours will turn up something she
really
doesn’t want put out there for public consumption. At first she merely hinted at it, and I couldn’t imagine what this could be, until finally she told me something that happened to her, many years ago, which, quite frankly, I was gobsmacked by.”

There was a silence. What could Margery possibly have done? Robbed a bank in her youth? Stolen a pearl necklace from a sorority sister? Forged a check at Harrods?

“It seems,” Aunt Sheila said, as if she still could not quite believe it herself, “that Mum was once married to another man, before she married my dad.”

Not only could you have heard a pin drop. You could have heard a pin drop a thousand miles away; it got that quiet. “
What?
” Jeremy finally said, in a low voice.

Aunt Sheila flushed. “It’s true. When she was only seventeen, Mum was very briefly married to someone else,” Aunt Sheila repeated, still incredulous that, all these years, Margery had managed to keep it a secret from her own children and grandchildren.

“It was a shotgun wedding, you see, to a boyfriend who’d ‘compromised’ her reputation by keeping her out late on a date,” she said delicately. “So, her family forced the man to marry her. But apparently, he thought that ought to be all that was required of him, because he sneaked out of the hotel room on their honeymoon night before they—”

“Don’t say it,” Jeremy interrupted sharply. “Please God, don’t. I get the picture.”

“Whew! What a bounder,” I breathed. “What became of him?”

“He ran off to Australia; so, Mum’s father got the marriage annulled.” Aunt Sheila turned to Jeremy, and said, “Fortunately, the gossip died down before your grandfather returned from military duty. He courted Margery, they got married, and nobody ever mentioned her first brief marriage again.”

“Well, so what? What’s
that
got to do with the price of tea in China, or, for that matter, the tapestry?” Jeremy said incredulously. “Why is she telling us this now?”

“It’s nothing to do with the tapestry at all,” Aunt Sheila said calmly. “But since it’s her deepest, darkest secret, your grandmother is terrified that somehow it will all come out again.”

I tried to picture the cool, aloof Margery, with her cigarette and her reserved attitude, and all her posh social connections, nevertheless still highly—and secretly—emotional over an event that had traumatized her so many years ago. I felt a stab of sympathy for her, finding it touching that she should think of this long-ago guilty secret as something so dark that it bordered on criminal.

“Ohhh,” I said softly, temporarily forgetting about the tapestry as I comprehended something.

“What?” Jeremy said crossly.

“Well,
that’s
why your grandmother is so freaky about doing things ‘right’,” I said. “Imagine how she must feel, after causing a big scandal that made her family ashamed of her. Maybe that’s why she’s been so severe with you and your mom about—” I stopped.

“Morality,” Aunt Sheila said dryly. “Only insofar as the perceived lack of it might stain the family’s reputation. Well, it’s true that her parents made her feel like quite the fallen woman. They saw to it that the world forgot about it, but they never let
her
forget it.”

“How did you get her to tell you all this?” I asked. “Truth serum?”

“In a way, yes. Seeing that she was over-reacting to your detective’s investigations, I knew there must be more to it. So I sat her down and she told me, over a bottle of wine,” Aunt Sheila replied, smiling because I’d guessed correctly.

“Sorry you all had to go through this,” I offered.

“Not your fault, darling!” Aunt Sheila replied. Jeremy shook his head in disbelief.

“Tell Grandmother not to worry. We’ve called off the dogs, where family is concerned,” he said.

Aunt Sheila said, “Glad to hear it. I told her I was fairly certain you’d say that, and her secret would be safe—as long as she didn’t give you and Penny any more trouble about the wedding.”

Startled, Jeremy asked, “You mean you bullied her into cooperating with our wedding plans?”

Aunt Sheila’s eyes sparkled mischievously as she said, “I think you’ll find your grandmother fairly cooperative now.” She rose. “Well, I must dash,” she said.

Jeremy walked her out to the car. I sat very quietly, still reeling from it all. Apparently everyone toddles through life with guilty secrets and quiet shame, fearing that if the truth comes to light, we might not be forgiven, much less understood. While I was still pondering this, Jeremy returned and said, very soberly, “Penny, I feel terrible about the tapestry being stolen. It’s really my fault.”

“How d’ya figure?” I asked, astonished.

“If it weren’t for
my
impossible relations—my pain-in-the-ass grandmother—we never would have taken it out of the château before the ceremony. There would have been no need for the inspection tour, and, possibly, no theft.”

“Nobody’s to blame,” I said briskly. “Margery, in her own funny way, wanted to be involved in our wedding, and I’m glad.” I paused. “Felix didn’t exactly say he had any prime suspects, did he?”

“No, he did not,” Jeremy agreed.

The tea tray was still sitting before us, so Jeremy poured himself another cup. I leaned across the table. “Jeremy,” I said. “I’ve been thinking. There’s got to be more to this tapestry than everybody realizes. I felt so, ever since I saw it, but I thought it was just, you know, an emotional thing. Now I’m totally convinced that there’s some secret about it that we’ve got to figure out.”

I expected him to chide me about going off on a tear that could make things worse, but to my surprise he said simply, “I agree. Let’s have another look at those photographs you took. I think we should lay them out on the dining room table. Let’s go through them one by one. Tell me everything you see, and what you think it means. There must be some clue that’s been overlooked.”

B
ut as it turned out, it was Monsieur Felix who made the first real breakthrough. He stopped by the villa, totally unannounced, arriving in a green car that was different from the one he’d driven before, and dressed in dark glasses and a hat, like a man in disguise. Furthermore, he made us go out in the garden to talk to him. Mystified, we complied, and he made his announcement.

“Mademoiselle, you are being followed!” he declared.

“Me?” I echoed.

“Yes, you,” he replied.

“By whom?” I asked.

“A professional! I’ve been watching for just this sort of thing,” he said with satisfaction, “and yesterday, at last, I spotted him, following you around the market. I was able to track the man back, I think, to the person he reports to, in Monte Carlo. A very rich and powerful man, who is, one might say,
très formidable
.”

“For God’s sake, who is it?” Jeremy demanded.

Felix was watching the two of us closely, and it suddenly occurred to me that if he’d spotted a man following my trail, then Felix himself must have been shadowing me and Jeremy. Which would mean that we were suspects, too. I felt a hot guilty flush, even though I knew I’d done nothing wrong.

“Do you know a man named Parker Drake?” Monsieur Felix asked, still eyeing us carefully.

“Drake!” Jeremy exclaimed.

“Why should he follow us around?” I said rather fecklessly. “He’s not even taking your phone calls anymore.”

Jeremy glowered at me. I forgot how men are, about keeping their own counsel about perfectly ordinary things, like losing a client, or a pending deal. As a single girl, I’d never minded blurting out my business woes (plentiful in the past), my financial status (historically pathetic) and my health issues (occasional allergies). Women routinely discuss their problems. Men are a bit more reluctant.

“Oh? Have you had business dealings with Parker Drake?” Monsieur Felix asked sharply.

Jeremy had to admit we’d been dancing around with Drake, then were inexplicably abandoned by him. “We had a few conversations. My understanding was that we were on the verge of being invited to some big event of his in Switzerland, and then, suddenly nothing,” Jeremy said, still a trifle defensive.

“Think carefully,” Monsieur Felix said. “Can you remember exactly when you stopped hearing from this man?” Jeremy and I just looked at each other.

“Right around the time the tapestry was taken,” Jeremy said. “But that doesn’t really prove much, does it?”

Monsieur Felix shook his head.

“Are Jeremy and I both being followed?” I asked, confused.

“At first, I thought so,” said Felix. “You are together quite often. But this morning, when Monsieur Jeremy went down to the harbor to speak to your yacht captain, and you, mademoiselle, took the car to go to the market, alone, I saw that it was
you
that he was after.”

He looked at me deeply, with utter seriousness in his hound dog face. He said, “Think back, mademoiselle, try to remember anything you can that seemed unusual . . . out of the ordinary . . .”

I was silent. Pretty much everything that had been happening to me lately was out of the ordinary. I was getting married, for heaven’s sake. I’d been to all sorts of places where I normally would not go. And because I’d been finding the whole upheaval so unsettling and disruptive of my usual daily routines, I hadn’t stopped to think about each and every thing that was bothering me.

But now, as I cast my thoughts back over all of it, my mind landed on the incident at the Train Bleu restaurant, when a man had smacked into me like a berserk buffalo on the loose, sending me sprawling on the floor. And, how another stranger had picked up my purse and handed it to me.

When I told Monsieur Felix about this incident, he said abruptly, “Do you have that handbag here in the house, now? Please bring it here, and dump everything in it on the table—but do so without a word. Say nothing, not even you, monsieur,” he said to Jeremy.

I went inside and fetched the bag, then returned and did exactly as he said, spilling its contents onto the table, and both men peered intently at each item. Now, ya know. A woman’s purse is . . . well. It’s filled with lots of things. Stuff that men don’t really fathom, all mixed in with the wallet, keys, lipstick, tissue pack, pens, organizers, medicinal items . . .

So. You can imagine how long it took to examine it all. While the guys were doing so, I was still shaking out the purse, which had a lot of small handy-dandy pockets for things like mobile phone, sunglasses, nail file, et cetera. I stuck my finger in each little pocket, and dug out every hairpin and coin and scrunched-up tissue that got stuck in the seams . . .

And then, out it came. A little chip of a thing, smaller than a fingernail, that made a tiny clatter as it hit the surface of the table.