“Thank you.” He took my hand. “And I wish you good fortune in your search for your friends. I pray that nothing happens to them. I could not bear to lose my newly found cousin. I too will ask and search for them everywhere most diligently.”
As I left Le Bateau-Lavoir I sensed, rather than saw, a small dark figure slip in through the front door. So Jojo, the mistress, had been hiding outside until I left. Obviously he didn’t want to give a bad impression to a potential buyer from America.
Twenty-one
An attractive boy, I thought as I picked my way down the flights of steps back to the Rue des Martyrs. Dashing and magnetic, if a little on the tragic side. I could see why Sid was excited to have discovered this long-lost cousin. Perhaps she’d take him back to New York with her and introduce him to her family, if … And I broke off the thought at that if. If she was still in Paris and was all right. I knew I’d have to visit the hospitals and the morgue and I dreaded the thought of it.
I retrieved Liam, clearly not anxious to leave Madeleine, who had now introduced him to the delights of French pastries, and stopped to pick up supplies for our evening meal before I carried him back across the street. As I opened the front door Madame Hetreau darted out of her hiding place—the spider once more catching the fly.
“Ah. So you return,” she said. “You have been enjoying yourself, I suppose. They tell me you leave your child with the baker’s wife and you’re off on your own chatting with men in cafés.”
I bristled at this suggestion that I was ignoring my child because I was off having a good time, but I controlled my voice before I said, “Because I’ve been searching for Miss Goldfarb and Miss Walcott, naturally, and I couldn’t take a child with me all over Paris.” Luckily my rusty French had improved during two days of speaking it constantly so that I no longer had to search for words and the sentence came out with the right amount of force.
She recoiled a little at this. “And you still haven’t found them, I take it.”
“Unfortunately no. Miss Goldfarb’s cousin suggested that they might have taken ill after eating bad food—oysters, maybe.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she shrugged, giving me the impression that she wouldn’t be concerned if they had died of bubonic plague as long as it didn’t in any way affect her.
“I can’t think of any other reason that they would have vanished leaving no word for me,” I said. “So I’m afraid my next task will be to visit the hospitals and morgues in the city. Perhaps you can suggest where I should start if my friends were taken ill in this place.”
“I think I would have heard if your friends came down with poisoning,” she said. “And I heard nothing. One minute they were here and the next they were gone. Me, I still think they decided to take a jaunt and left the city. Perhaps they decided to return to New York.”
“Not leaving all their clothing behind.”
Liam squirmed and I attempted to hang onto the bag of groceries. “I must take him upstairs. He’s getting heavy.”
As I turned away she called after me. “One minute, madame. I believe a postcard might have come for you.” She reached into Sid and Gus’s mail slot and held it out to me. “I can think of no one else to whom this might apply.”
I put down the bag of groceries and took it from her. The front was a painting of a woman drinking tea. I turned it over. It was addressed in an elegant hand I didn’t recognize. I was able to translate that it was addressed “To the Lady from New York staying at 35 Rue des Martyrs.…”
The message area was left blank.
I looked up, puzzled, to see Madame Hetreau staring at me. “Is it from the American ladies?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve no idea who it is from. I don’t recognize the writing. And there’s no message. What can it mean? Did it arrive today?”
“This morning. Right after you went out.”
I held it out to her. “You’ve seen it—why would someone send me a blank postcard?”
“I have no idea, madame.”
Liam made a grab for it, and I had to hang onto him lest he tumble from my arms. “I have to take him upstairs,” I said. “Thank you for alerting me to the postcard.”