Blood trickled down Eve’s side as Charlie half-supported and half-dragged her down the corridor, back to the shadowy kitchen, out to the warm French night. Eve was still shaking with sobs, and the pain in her hand was shattering. “Stay here while I bring the car up,” Charlie said. “You can’t walk that quarter mile—”
But another set of headlights was showing down on the road, next to the Lagonda’s shadowy shape. Headlights bright enough to cut through even Eve’s pain-blurred, tear-blind vision. The police? “P—P—P—P—” Her tongue broke down completely; she couldn’t get out a single word. Clumsily, she wrenched at the linen pads over her wound. She’d bleed out before she went into another prison.
But Charlie cried, “Finn!” and soon a familiar Scottish burr was rattling furious words. A strong arm went around Eve’s waist, taking her weight. Eve slid toward unconsciousness, hoping it was death, hoping to be done.
But still thinking, in some reawakened part of her examining, questioning brain, You didn’t do it.
CHAPTER 45
CHARLIE
Twenty-four hours later, we were in Paris.
“Eve needs a doctor.” It was the first thing I’d said to Finn outside René’s villa, after the initial frenzy of explanations. “But if we take her to a hospital, she’ll be caught. Anyone with a gunshot wound will be looked at when they find—” A glance back at the house.
“I think I can patch her up long enough to get out of Grasse.” Finn soaked the makeshift bandages in more brandy and wrapped them tight around Eve, limp and unconscious in the Lagonda’s backseat. “The bullet doesn’t seem to have broken anything. She’s lost a lot of blood, but with enough strapping . . .”
Caught. It kept echoing through my head. We’ll be caught. As Finn worked on Eve, I’d run back into the blood-stinking study and, wrapping my shirttail around my hand and avoiding the blood so no one would see a woman’s small footprints, tipped the peacock-tail lamp and the gramophone over and yanked the drawers open like someone had ransacked for a cash box. Maybe it would look like a robbery gone bad. Maybe . . . Still using my shirttail, I fumbled in my pocket and found the photograph of René we had been showing all over Grasse, folded and clipped to show just his face. I unclipped it to show the line of swastika-wearing Nazis at his side, and dropped the photograph on the bullet-riddled corpse on the floor.
I’d felt a wave of sickness then, but Finn was shouting for me and there was no more time, so I stuffed both Lugers and the little bust of Baudelaire into Eve’s satchel, quickly wiped the door handles and anything else we might have touched, and ran. I drove the Lagonda back to the hotel with Eve stretched out in the backseat, and Finn followed in the car he had borrowed from the hotel manager to get here.
That first night was the worst. Eve revived long enough to get into the hotel with Finn’s coat hiding her bloodied shoulder, right past the yawning night clerk, but she fainted on the upper stairs. Finn put her to bed, washed and dressed the wound with some sheets swiped from the hotel linen closet, and then all we could do was watch through the night as she lay frighteningly still. I stared at her through blurring eyes, and Finn wrapped me in his arms.
“I could kill her,” he whispered. “Pulling you into danger—”
“I’m the one who followed her,” I whispered back. “I was trying to stop her. It went all wrong. Finn, she could be arrested—”
His arms tightened around me. “We won’t let that happen.”
No. We would not. God knows I’d tried to keep Eve from killing René, but now that it was done, I had no intention of letting the police get their hands on her. She had suffered enough.
I looked at her, frail and unconscious in the bed, and suddenly I was shaking with sobs. “Finn, she tried to k-kill herself.”
He kissed the top of my head. “We won’t let that happen either.”
We checked out at first light, my arm about Eve’s waist keeping her steady. The clerk was yawning, incurious, and we were out of Grasse in an hour, Finn pushing the Lagonda far past her usual pace. “Gardiner,” he muttered as the gears protested, “you owe me a new car. I’m never getting those bloodstains out of the seats, and this engine is never going to be the same.”
All through that long day of driving, Eve never spoke, just huddled in the backseat like a collection of gaunt bones. Even as we drove into Paris, motoring over the dark waters of the Seine, and she watched as I tossed the bust of Baudelaire out the window into the river, she did not say a word. But I saw her shudder convulsively.
God only knew how, but Finn found a doctor willing to give Eve’s wound a look without asking questions. “You can always find men like that,” he said after the man disinfected, stitched, and left. “Disqualified doctors, old army lads. How do you think ex-convicts get patched up if they don’t want a record that they’ve been getting into brawls?”
Now that Eve had her fingers splinted and her shoulder dressed, had pills for pain and pills to keep infection away, we decided to lay low. “She needs time to heal,” I said, because she was still alarmingly apathetic when she wasn’t being foul tempered. “And Paris is big enough to hide in, if anyone . . .”
If anyone comes sniffing after us when René is found, Finn and I both thought. But we didn’t mention René to Eve, or each other. We found cheap rooms in the Montmartre and let Eve sleep and take her pills and call us names for not getting her whiskey. It was a full five days before Finn saw the announcement in the paper.
Former restauranteur dead outside Grasse.
I snatched the paper, devouring the details. René Bordelon’s housekeeper had come for her weekly cleaning, and discovered the corpse. The deceased was a wealthy man living alone; the room had been ransacked. The passage of days made evidence difficult to collect . . .
I rested my head on the paper, feeling suddenly dizzy. No mention that an old woman and her lawyer had been asking all over Grasse after him. Maybe the police knew about that, maybe they didn’t, but no one mentioned inquiries being made. No one was looking to connect a rich American widow and her imposing solicitor with a bed-bound Englishwoman and her disreputable driver in Paris.
“Five days to find him,” Finn said, thoughtful. “If he’d had family or friends, it would have been sooner. Someone would have telephoned, got worried about him. But he didn’t make friends. He didn’t care about anyone, he wasn’t close to anyone.”
“And I left the photograph on his chest. The one with him and his Nazi acquaintances.” I exhaled slowly, reading the short notice again. “I thought if the police saw he’d been a collaborator, they might not look too hard for whoever had killed him. Robbery or retribution, they’d just . . . let it be.”
Finn kissed the back of my neck. “Cunning lassie.”
I shoved the paper away. There was a photograph of René, courtly, smiling—it made my stomach writhe. “I know you didn’t meet him, but please believe me. He was monstrous.” I was the one who dreamed now about green silk rooms filled with screams.