“Weren’t the other two victims also your students?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about this,” she said, her voice quavering. “Désolée. I want to help, but I can’t now.”
“The investigators told you that, Madame?”
“I’m teaching. Must go.”
Strains of a violin rose in the background.
“Can we meet when your lessons finish, Madame?”
“I can talk tomorrow.”
Aimée had to persist. “Madame, it’s important. Another girl has disappeared. Just a few minutes of your time.”
A sigh. “Call me later.” Then Aimée heard a click. She’d hung up.
She wanted to throw the damn phone. Crucial time passed with no leads to Zazie.
Frustrated, she studied the map again. The location dots formed a pattern, like the facets of an eight-carat stone. Zazie had to be in this hexagon. She felt it in the marrow of her bones.
A child’s crying interrupted her thoughts. The red balloons had become untied, escaping. “Maman!” The balloons hovered above the toddler in the yellow dress, floating out of her reach.
Aimée caught two, reached and caught another that was stuck in the lime-tree branches.
“Merci, Madame,” said the mother. “You saved the birthday party from disaster.”
“Good exercise.” Aimée’s eyes caught on the tiny pink toes peeping from the stroller. A little ball in an orange onesie.
The woman sat down next to her on the bench. She was brunette, thin with tan legs. “I’m Sybille. Your first?”
“That obvious?” Aimée patted her stomach.
“You have the look.” Sybille grinned. “Boy or girl?”
“Doctor couldn’t tell.” And she wanted to share it with this smiling mother. Yearned for a moment to forget Zazie, the horror, yearned to bask in the baby smells of fresh laundry and talcum coming from the stroller. Admire those pink toes.
Aimée pulled out the sonogram image. It took her breath away. This little thing growing inside her.
“Ah, fifty-fifty either way.” Sybille pointed to the whitish blob Aimée had seen pulse on the screen. “Strong heart. My two looked like alien pods, big heads but full of brains.” Her toddler daughter tugged her sleeve. “Oui, mon petit chou. But look how beautiful they turned out.”
“People give me advice about the birth …” She hesitated but figured why not ask a stranger something she’d always wanted to ask a woman? “So it really hurts?”
“No picnic.” Sybille leaned closer. “Far as I’m concerned there’s a reason drugs were invented, alors!”
Aimée smiled.
“Take all the help you can get. Like letting other people bake for you,” Sybille said, pointing to a basket with a boulangerie purchase glistening with apricots. “You think I made this tart?”
A woman after her own heart. Hunger lapped in her stomach. She needed to eat.
“I’m a resto critic. Work at night when they’re asleep,” Sybille said. “Her father,” she said, indicating the baby in the stroller, “left when I was six months along. Babette”—she nodded to the toddler—“her father takes her every other weekend. Those bobochic Left Bank mamans who look like they have it all, with six kids and a career? They neglect to say they’ve got staff, an army of nannies and cleaners.”
“I’m raising mine on my own, too,” said Aimée. “I run a business. Try to, at least.”
“Then you need a posse. Never too early to get one in place. I wish someone had told me that.”
Aimée took out her red notebook. “Go on.”
“And I wish someone had warned me about breast milk leaking at meetings,” Sybille said. “Never wear white silk, at least for the first six months.”
Aimée wrote that down. The little girl handed her a curled, green ginkgo leaf with a dust of lemon pollen. “For you,” said the toddler.
“My little Babette loves leaves. You’re special.” Sybille, still smiling, turned to Aimée. “Here’s free advice. On télé talk shows they gloss over what it’s really like for a woman to work and raise a family. But I did hear one woman from Toulouse who was interviewed on the radio in the hypermarché speak about how it feels being a maman. Cela, it felt real. She’d lost her son in the aisles for three minutes, but it felt like three years. What mother can’t relate to that? That’s daily life, three minutes feeling like three years, because you worry so much and love them so much and feel so alone being responsible for their world. Don’t picture motherhood as those perfect, coiffed career mamans jogging. They aren’t real people. They never breast-feed.”
Reaching people, real people. Now she knew what to do. How to kick-start this investigation into high gear. She needed to reach lots of people, like the woman on the radio.
“You’ve given me an idea,” said Aimée, putting her notebook in her bag. And she’d catch the Métro at Saint-Georges, by the theatre … all good exercise. “Merci for the great advice.” She stood up, adrenaline coursing. “Enjoy the birthday party.”
“I see it in your eyes,” said Sybille.
“And what’s that?”
“Like you want to turn vinegar into honey,” Sybille laughed. “Bonne chance.”
On the way she called Martine.
Tuesday, noon
“LUNCH AT PRINTEMPS, your treat? That’s an EMERGENCY?”
Across the table from her at the Printemps rooftop café, Martine speared a yellow beet with her fork. Martine, a journalist and Aimée’s best friend since the lycée, wore vanilla gauze layers that offset her tan. The vista from the department store’s roof terrasse spread from the Grands Boulevards to the tour Eiffel to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont.
Starving, Aimée ignored the view. She gulped down the shooter of cold leek vichyssoise then started on the grapefruit, avocado and shrimp salad before attacking the saumon fumé.