Suspects(25)
Theo got home at nine o’clock that night. The housekeeper had left the lights on for her on the first floor of the apartment, which was the second floor to Americans. There was an imposing marble entrance hall, and the large living room they had used to entertain. Matthieu loved giving grand parties, as he knew his grandparents had done in their days of grandeur. There were billowing satin drapes that framed the long French windows, high ceilings, and beautiful floors. There was a spectacular oval dining room with marble columns, where they could seat up to forty people for dinner, and a big, sunny highly efficient kitchen, an office for Matthieu, which he seldom used when he was at home. She used it for meetings of her own office staff occasionally.
Her office was next to his, lined with books and framed pieces that related to Theo.com, a big antique desk and red leather chairs. It was a room where she was comfortable and liked to work on new ideas she wanted to develop. She had spent many long nights there in the last year.
There was a large guest room next to her office that she had made her own in the last year. Their living quarters, and the magnificent bedroom Matthieu had had decorated to look like Marie-Antoinette’s boudoir for her, was on the floor above. She hadn’t used it since he died. She had a dressing room beside it full of the elegant clothes she no longer wore. She had worn her simplest plain black clothes for the last year, mostly black jeans and sweaters. There was a bathroom with a deep marble tub, and Matthieu’s wood-paneled dressing room, with Axel’s bedroom beyond it, which was closed now, with all his belongings still there. There were six guest bedrooms on that floor, used by the bodyguards now, and Matthieu’s gym. There was nothing on the second floor of the apartment that she needed, and she never went upstairs herself anymore. In addition, there was a pantry with a microwave, refrigerator, and small stove, which the bodyguards used, and a laundry room, a luggage room, and a suite for the housekeeper and maid. In fact, she only used her office and newly adopted bedroom and the kitchen now. The rest was either out of sight upstairs, or the curtains were drawn as in the living and dining rooms that hadn’t been used in over a year.
In the last few years, she was too busy to entertain on the grand scale Matthieu enjoyed. She had never really liked it. She marveled at times at how much the apartment looked like his grandparents’ old apartment from photographs she’d seen. He had achieved just the effect he wanted long before Theo came along. She had always felt it was his home, or his family’s, more than hers, but it didn’t bother her.
The chateau was equally grand, and restored to exactly how it had looked when his grandparents were alive and owned it in their heyday, before the war that took everything from them because of their own bad judgment and the country they had betrayed. As a boy, he had frequently been reminded by people who knew that they had been collaborators. It was something no one had forgotten in France, even seventy-five years later. His family name was well known.
Theo walked into her office, set her bag down and looked around. She glanced at her mail and knew that her assistant had come from the office and taken all the urgent mail that had to be dealt with and paid the bills for her.
The bodyguard had set her suitcase down in her bedroom before he left, and the next one on duty was in the kitchen, in case she needed him. Some of them were more pleasant than others, and she chatted with them occasionally in the car, but she was tired of never being alone anywhere anymore, not even in her own home. There was a coffee station in the pantry for the staff, and a refrigerator for their use, with a small sitting area and table, so she didn’t have to run into them in the kitchen, and there was a small living room for them, used by the bodyguards and the two housekeeping women, with a TV. The bodyguards were always there now. Matthieu would have hated it. He had liked his privacy, and so did she, which was why they had dispensed with employees at the chateau on the weekends, and why Axel and Matthieu were so easily kidnapped. But with six armed, hooded men, their house staff at the chateau wouldn’t have been able to stop them, and Matthieu had never felt the need for security.
Theo glanced out the windows at the familiar streetlamps and the trees. She liked the view from her windows. From the living room, they could see the Eiffel Tower when it sparkled on the hour. It looked like a lovely toy when it did. Axel had loved seeing it and so did she on nights when she couldn’t sleep. She had been nocturnal for most of the past year and was getting back to normal hours now.
She unpacked her suitcase in the small guest room she had taken over for racks of the plain black clothes she wore all the time now. She had worn black for all of the past year, and had only recently added some color. It was a relief to wear white again, and pastels. She had done what Matthieu would have expected of her and she felt herself. But the year anniversary had come almost a month ago, and she had taken a few colored clothes on her trip. They felt foreign to her now, as though they had belonged to someone else.
She looked into the refrigerator, didn’t see anything she wanted to eat, poured herself a glass of juice, and went back to her office to set up the laptop she’d taken with her. It made her think of Mike again. There was no message from him, and she didn’t expect there to be. He was just a nice person she had met on her trip. She had almost convinced herself of it by the time she had gone through all her mail, which was mostly invitations she wouldn’t accept. She was surprised that people still invited her after a year. It was too painful to see their old friends and the pity in their eyes. It made her feel even worse. Solitude was easier.