A Rather Lovely Inheritance (27 page)

“You’ve now got eleven minutes,” I gulped. He flung open his bag of tricks and set to work, expertly painting with green makeup, and blue, which at first alarmed me because it looked far more monstrous, but then came the next layers of ivory, yellow, and white.

“Go easy on the face,” I warned.“I don’t want to look like a clown.”

“No clowns in this circus,” he assured me. “And while I’m at it, I’ll get rid of those dark circles under your eyes.”When he was done, it actually looked so miraculously normal and healthy that I ended up buying the green and blue and other paints.

“Not that I expect to break out into hives like this again anytime soon,” I mumbled.

“Be prepared.That’s my motto,” he said crisply.

I stumbled into the reception area and elevator with all my shopping bags of new clothes for a calmer life, trying not to sneeze at the mingled strong scents of hair dye, nail glue, chemical peel, and aroma-therapy with wafting patchouli, fake lavender, rosemary, and camphor. There is, after all, a rather fine line between being pampered and being embalmed.

Down on the street a nice wind whipped up, all full of soot, dust, and the first plops of rain. It had been deceptively sunny when I’d gone out without my umbrella. So now I stood there while my expensive hair blow-dry wilted and I tried to shield my face-camouflage from being washed off. Mercifully my new clothes were in plastic garment bags, so they were more sheltered than I was.

Jeremy had, of course, neglected to tell me that he would be in a company car that looked like everybody else’s wet black company car. He had to bellow out the window, “Penny! Yoo-hoo!” and I had to slosh through some rapidly forming puddles and take one last splashy leap into the backseat, where I landed half across his lap.

“Marvelous. Do you jump through hoops of flame as well?” he inquired, trying to help me right myself. He sniffed. “Wow.You smell like you’ve plunged into a barrel of patchouli,” he said. “You’re late. Why didn’t you tell me you were at The Scarlet Plume, instead of being so mysterious with building numbers? Were you considered a hard-core case? What exactly have you been up to this afternoon?”

“Nothing,” I muttered. “A man who doesn’t return phone calls and then suddenly shows up with an emergency flight plan really doesn’t have any business asking a lot of nosy questions no man should ask a woman.And how do you know about this place? Have you been there yourself?”

“My secretary swears by it,” he said with a straight face that required absolute control.

“Oh, shit,” I said wearily, and I thought I saw the driver grin to himself.

“Very well. I won’t ask,” Jeremy assured me, but he peered at me curiously. “Did you have a rendezvous with a suitor tonight that I inadvertently interfered with?”

“Again, it’s not the sort of inquiry a gentleman makes,” I said.

“Have you been reading old English novels or something?” he guessed. “You sound funny.”

At this point I felt I ought to abandon my half-baked attempts to make my life more elegant and dignified. I simply didn’t have enough criteria to know what to do first. It would be a massive job, I now saw, to resist the many frenzied tugs and sand traps of the twenty-first century. I’d have to postpone the task until I’d researched it more thoroughly.

Changing the subject usually works with men. So I turned to him and said, “Did Denby say anything more than what you told me on the telephone?”

He shook his head. “No. I haven’t a clue what he’s up to, but his clients are pretty wealthy, paranoid people who are fanatical about discretion, so he prefers to err on the side of caution. Still, from his tone it sounded pretty big.”

I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject of Simon and, more important, Aunt Penelope’s chauffeur-lover. I certainly wasn’t going to do it in a London limousine with a nosey-parker eavesdropping driver who was desperately threading his way through a maze of traffic to Heathrow but was still listening to every word, or so it seemed. I thought ahead and still couldn’t see myself saying, while seated in an airplane soaring over France, “Oh, by the way, did you know that Aunt Penelope was so madly in love with your great-grandfather that she may have talked your mother into marrying her nephew Peter just to keep you under her wing?”

Yet it was information I felt he truly needed to know. Unless, of course, it was all gossip. I didn’t think so, but I ought to be careful. While I’d been lying on the massage table trying to figure out my next move, it occurred to me that I ought to pay another little call on Aunt Sheila, and I’d been planning to do just that until Jeremy whisked me away so unceremoniously.

“Jeremy,” I said cautiously, “when was the last time you talked to your mother?”

He glanced up, slightly annoyed. “She left a message for me yesterday,” he said. “She’s gone to Italy on holiday. She goes there often, whenever she feels ‘a bit stressed out,’ she says.” He tried unsuccessfully to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

“I’ve been doing a little research into Aunt Penelope’s life,” I said quietly, “and I think we should talk when we’re somewhere private.”

The car was pulling up to the terminal now, and he was slightly distracted. “Hmm? Talk? About what?” But then the glare of lights from the terminal came spilling into the car and washed over us when we started sliding out of the vehicle. He stared at me in sudden shock and said,“What on earth is the matter with your legs? What’s that red stuff all over them?”

My skirt had gotten pushed up while I was struggling to follow him out. He actually stopped sliding across the seat. Aghast, I saw that a few more hives had emerged.

“Oh, that,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Just hives. I was having a skin treatment and my skin’s a bit sensitive.”

“A bit!” he said, with fascinated horror. “Whoa, those are the biggest hives I’ve ever seen. My God, they’re positively tremendous! Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, yes,” I said irritably, pushing him out of the car, glancing worriedly at the skycap who was on the lookout to collect luggage. “Now shut up before someone overhears you and thinks I’ve got a communicable disease and shouldn’t be let on the plane,” I hissed.

“It’s a good thing that I came along and broke your dinner date,” he said with mock sincerity. “Your fortune hunter might have taken one look at those hives and decided that, heiress or not, you would be too much trouble.”

W
ELL, I CHICKENED OUT AND DIDN’T TELL HIM ON THE AIRPLANE. He’s the type of man that stewardesses hover around, and I couldn’t exactly say, “Guess what? Your great-grandfather was Aunt Penelope’s lover and chauffeur.” I felt certain he’d strangle the messenger who gave him such shocking news and, having gone berserk, be mistaken for a terrorist.We were flying business class this time, and Jeremy spent the entire flight frowning into his computer and clicking away, which was a bore.

When we landed, he glanced up briskly and said, “Severine sent a message that she’s back in town, so either she or Louis will pick us up and drop us at the villa.” I was momentarily distracted by that queer little feeling in the pit of my stomach at the mention of Severine; and what’s more, when I saw Louis waving at us, I felt an embarrassing but involuntary surge of relief that it was he who’d showed up and not Severine.

Louis was his usual calm, polite self, but I had a nagging feeling that something serious was going to happen, even before we reached the narrow road that led to the villa. It doesn’t occur often, but sometimes I get a slight premonition that starts with a cold chill on the back of my neck and makes my hair stand on end. Sure enough, we turned down the road leading to Aunt Penelope’s street, swung around the curve—and there was an ambulance and flashing lights and medical attendants and a stretcher, and Denby’s dashing red sports car with the side smashed in.

Louis had to do a lot of rapid-fire translating for us and for the French emergency team. Everybody seemed to be talking all at once, but somehow we managed to piece together what had happened, especially since the female medic spoke enough patchy English to help us out. Some truck had sideswiped Denby. It was a hit-and-run job. Happened so fast in the blinding afternoon sunlight that he couldn’t really describe it, except to say vaguely that it was a black truck, the kind landscapers and builders use, and he never saw the driver’s face. Pretty bad description for a mechanic, but Denby was dazed, and his face was bruised from the rearview mirror, which had broken off at the impact and whacked him in the head.

The medic got really fussy at that point and told us to get out of the way because they had to take him to the hospital. Louis arranged to have Denby’s car towed; then he drove us to the villa, where Jeremy and I and all my parcels got into Jeremy’s car, which Denby had left all fixed up and waiting for us in the villa turnaround.Then we followed Louis’s car to the hospital.

“Bloody bastards!” Jeremy kept saying with feeling, and “Poor old Denby.”

When we reached the hospital, they were unloading the stretcher, and Louis had to deal with most of the bureaucratic stuff and the cops. A nurse asked if Denby had any family she should call. Jeremy managed to extract from Denby several phone numbers for his wife, and he left messages at all of them. Louis had to go back to the office, but told us to call him if we needed him again.

When Denby’s wife called the emergency room, Jeremy was summoned to the telephone to explain things to her in English. Denby motioned to me to bend down near his face so I could hear him.

“There was something in the door of your auntie’s car, love,” he whispered. “ ’At’s why she hung a bit crooked. A painting, packed real careful. I took it out and put it on the car seat, then locked up the garage. ’Twas a Virgin and Child, like the Catholics do.” He spoke in a tired, muffled voice.The nurse came over and gave me the fish-eye and told me that the patient must be kept quiet and I should wait in the waiting room until summoned by the doctor; then she whisked Denby away behind the swinging doors of the emergency examining rooms.

Mercifully, the doctor spoke some English, and after he examined Denby he told Jeremy about fractures, bruises, etc., and he said that more tests and X-rays would have to be done, but he thought Denby had lucked out and was in pretty good shape, considering. The doctor expected him to remain stable, but he must be kept under observation for possible concussion. We were not allowed back to talk to Denby, who’d already been sent off for his X-rays. Jeremy conferred more with the nurse and then the cops.They were singularly unfazed by the whole event, and said that now that the summer season had begun, it was all too common during
les vacances
to have these hit-and-run crashes.

“Jeremy,” I said urgently, as soon as I could talk to him alone, “we’ve got to get back to the villa. Denby said he found a painting hidden inside the door of the car. And he left it in the car. Oh, my God!” I said suddenly.

“What is it?” he said.

“
That’s
why the photograph was stolen from Aunt Penny’s photo album!” I whispered.“It wasn’t because of the necklace she was wearing. It was because of that painting hanging behind her. Jeremy. Did you ever see a painting of a Madonna and Child listed anywhere on Aunt Penelope’s list of possessions? I sure didn’t. And there isn’t any such painting hanging now on the library wall.”

A
LL THE REST OF THE WAY TO THE VILLA, JEREMY FIRED OFF QUESTIONS at me about the painting. What did it look like? How big was it? Could I tell who the artist might be, what style, what country of origin? What time period? Did I know anything about the artist?

I shook my head. I’d never seen the painting up close, only in the background of the snapshot. But something else occurred to me.“You know, there’s a later photo of Aunt Penelope sitting in the same chair in the same spot—looking older, wiser, sadder—and I don’t think the painting was still on the wall in that one.That means she either took it down and put it somewhere else or sold it—or somebody else took it.”

Jeremy absorbed this. “I never saw any insurance claims filed for stolen art, or any bills of sale.And she kept every scrap of paper regarding money.When were these pictures taken?”

“The first one, with the painting on the wall behind her, was in the thirties, judging by her age and the clothes,” I said.“The later one, taken in the exact same spot in the library, without the painting, was much later, like the nineties.”

We had reached the driveway of the villa by now, and there was a light on in the garage.“Denby could have left it on, I suppose,” Jeremy muttered. I could hardly bear to wait for him to pull up to the garage, jump out, and open the combination lock so we could get inside.

We rushed to the old Dragonetta. The right-side door had been taken off and laid on the floor. Denby, with the skill of a surgeon, had carefully taken it apart, removing the leather padding. On the inside of the car door, there was space for something big and flat and slim to be nestled, well-protected by the upholstery. But nothing was there now.

“He said he left the painting for us on the seat of the car,” I remembered. “Then he locked up the garage.” Eagerly we peered into the car.

Nothing was on the seat.We searched the whole garage, and there was no painting at all, let alone a Madonna and Child.

“Are you sure you heard him right?” Jeremy asked, for lack of any other explanation. I nodded vigorously, then shivered, feeling a strange cool draft on my skin. Then I saw why. The evening breeze was wafting in through the garage window. Which was wide open. I pointed to it.

“Would Denby leave a window open like that after being so careful to lock this place up for us?” I asked. “I mean, he thought it was valuable.”

“No,” said Jeremy. “He wouldn’t leave a window open. Somebody’s been here. And might still be. Stay here, Penny. I’m going to look around. Keep your phone on.”