Last to Know: A Novel(18)

Mal listened while he told the whole story. Then, “Tell me something, Harry Jordan.” She signaled the waiter to bring another glass of the champagne with which she had been celebrating Harry’s imminent arrival. Now she might as well drown her sorrows in it.

She said, “Tell me, Harry, do you find trouble? Or does it always just find you? And anyway, since you’ve already rescued the female swimmer with her hair on fire and I assume the house has burned down, what’s stopping you getting on that flight to Paris?”

Harry held the phone away from his ear; he knew he should just get on a flight to Paris, that’s what he should do. But, “Her mother burned to a crisp,” he said flatly.

“Oh, oh.” Mal was crushed, she felt small in the face of such disaster. “I hope the girl will be all right.”

“She’s a survivor,” Harry said.

It wasn’t what he said but the tone of voice when he said it that raised Mal’s female antennae. “I’ll bet she’s blond and nineteen,” she said, taking a swig of the fresh champagne, suddenly very much aware of being a woman alone in Paris, again. For a while, knowing Harry was coming to join her, she had lost that feeling. Now it was back in full force.

“Twenty-one,” Harry told her.

The cute guy she’d noticed earlier at the next table caught Mal’s eye and smiled. He looked so attractively French: lean, dark, mid-thirties, in jeans and an impeccable tweedy jacket, it even had leather elbow patches; and with a scarf tied that certain way all Frenchmen tied their scarves. Fuck it, she didn’t have to sit here and wait for Harry Jordan to get his ass on a flight, to join her in her petite Left Bank hotel room, to make love to her … she could trade him in for this French guy right now.

“You’ve broken my heart, Harry Jordan,” she said, quietly so the Frenchman would not hear, if indeed he spoke English, which she guessed he did because somehow all foreigners did. Tears stood in her eyes and she blinked them away, turning her head, careful not to grab a tissue and blot them. She wanted no one to see her cry over a man.

She had to shuffle in her bag for that tissue because those tears simply had to come out, and the Frenchman was gazing sympathetically, leaning toward her, offering a fresh supply, calling to the waiter for more champagne.

“Please,” the Frenchman said, looking into Mal’s teary blue eyes with his concerned brown ones. “Allow me to help.”

Mal thought maybe she should.

At the same time, though, she was thinking if she wanted to hold on to Harry, she had better find out who exactly the new competition was. Harry had not mentioned the girl’s name but Mal was not a TV detective for nothing. She immediately texted her office. Her assistant, Lulu, would know what to do. Within hours, Mal would bet, she would know more about her new “rival” than Harry. Even sooner perhaps because she wasn’t caught up in “helping” the poor burned girl, though it was actually the poor mother who had, as Harry so succinctly put it, “burned to a crisp.”

Mal’s sharp woman’s mind couldn’t help but wonder, among all the other questions currently crowding her head, how much the burned-to-the-ground house was insured for. It didn’t take a genius to know the poor-twenty-one-year-old-homeless blonde would inherit it.

It was, Mal thought, smiling back at the attractive French guy and accepting that glass of champagne, a classic situation. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was just that she was acting like a jealous bitch, which truthfully, right now was exactly what she was. And what woman wouldn’t be, who’d just been dumped, alone, in Paris, for a young and now homeless fire victim who had lost her mother in the blaze and who now Mal’s lover felt compelled to take care of.

She sipped her champagne and, leaning closer, smiled at the French guy. “Bon jour,” she said. Adding silently c’est la vie.





14


Back at Evening Lake, Len Doutzer was the first person Harry questioned.

Len was the eyes and ears of the lake. Unlike young Diz, who saw only what was going on from his tree, Len missed nothing. He lived up on a hill in a fifties A-frame painted mud-green, “to blend into the background like me,” he angrily told the curious who came panting up the slope to take a look at the view and also at the man known locally as “the janitor” because he kept his small compound under meticulously “green” conditions. No insecticides, no sprays of any kind. It was said real worms actually existed under his earth, which was the reason his vegetables grew so prolifically, especially zucchini, which once it got a grip was hard even for an experienced gardener to control. Still, its yellow blossoms looked lovely in spring, and Len’s single apple tree gave a goodly crop of crabapples, which he never seemed to mind the kids pinching, though he kept his plums for himself, swathed in netting to keep the birds off.

Should you ask any of the locals, that is, the people who lived there year-round, of which there were not that many since Evening Lake was mainly a resort area, but should you bump into them on the High Street, or in the Red Sails Bar or Tweedies Coffee Shop, or any of the small stores or takeout places, and ask about Len, all you’d get was that he’d been there forever, kept himself to himself, and that he drove an ’80s Chevy woodie, which he maintained himself. Len was the kind of guy, they said, who could turn his hand to anything. He lived alone with not even a dog for company on the long silent winter nights. No family had ever surfaced for a visit, certainly no wife or grandkids.