Meet Me in Venice (19 page)

“And what do you do?” she added, suddenly curious.

“I’m a writer.”

“So what do you write?”

“Novels.”

“Really?” She eyed him respectfully. “Should I know you?”

He threw her a withering glance. “Why?”

“I mean, well, know your name?”

“It depends on whether your taste runs to mysteries.”

“So what
is
your name?”

“Sam Knight.”

Of course.
He was well known. “My best friend Daria’s your biggest fan,” she said.

“And what about you?”

“Oh, I never have time to read.” It was his turn to grin. Of course it wasn’t true but mysteries were simply not her style.

“Just what every author wants to hear,” he quipped, refilling his glass. He lifted it in a toast. “To the solving of the Lily mystery,” he said with a smile that lifted his face from the lines of bitterness into a sudden boyishness. “And anyhow, what’s your name?” When she told him, he laughed. “I could never call any woman ‘Precious,’ “ he said. “And besides, you don’t look like one. You’re definitely a Rafferty.”

“Okay,” she agreed, pleased that he didn’t see her as a wimpy Preshy. She wondered how old he was. In his forties obviously, but which end of forty? “And here’s to your stay in Paris,” she said with a smile that she hoped lit up her own face with a new girlish-ness she certainly didn’t feel.

“A stay I could live without.”

“At least you have to admit we have good wine.”

He laughed again, a deep throaty laugh that made her join in. “I should never have come here in the first place,” he said.

“Then why did you?”

His eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses searched hers for a moment. He was not laughing now. “I was looking for the past,” he said quietly.

Then he got up abruptly, said he was off to the bar to have a cigarette in peace, and left her sitting there, as alone as when she came in, and wondering what on earth he could have meant.

She finished the glass of wine, which was as good as it gets, and when Sam Knight came back, knowing there would be no taxis, she offered him a lift to his hotel. “It’s on my way,” she said when he told her it was on the rue de Rennes.

She noticed him grin when she put on the ancient sheepskin
coat, and she felt sure he was still grinning behind her as she clomped her way out in her gigantic furry boots. Embarrassed, she thought he might at least have done it to her face.

Outside, Sam Knight stared at her little Smart car. “This is it?” he said in a stunned voice. And it was her turn to snigger as he attempted to fold his lanky frame into it. He didn’t grumble though,
and
he waited patiently while she checked her messages again. Nothing. If Lily was in Frankfurt she certainly wasn’t telling her about it.

“No luck?” he asked, as she crawled and slid in low gear down the empty boulevard, and onto the rue de Rennes.

“No
Lily.
And therefore no solution to the mystery,” she added with a grin. She knew she would never see Sam Knight again but she was glad she’d met him. He’d helped take her mind off Lily and also off her awful sense of “aloneness.” If she stretched things a little she could even tell Aunt G and Mimi she’d had a date tonight.

She felt sorry for Sam, though, when she stopped the car outside his seedy hotel. Almost sorry enough to offer him the sofa at her place, but then she told herself quickly she didn’t even know the guy. It flashed through her mind again that it was odd he’d come to sit right next to her in the half-empty restaurant. He might be another Bennett after all.

Sam got out of the car. He leaned back in to her, looking into her eyes, almost as weary as his own by now.

“Thanks a lot, Rafferty,” he said. “I appreciate the lift. Without you, I’d have had to walk all the way back.”

“You’re welcome. And thanks for the company.”

“Good luck with the mysterious Lily Song.” He straightened up to close the car door. Then he bent back in again. “Why don’t you give me your phone number?” he said, coolly. And Preshy thought if ever a man was cool it was Sam Knight.
Impenetrable
might have been a better word. “Just in case, ever get back to Paris,” he added. “Then you’ll be able to fill me in on the Lily story.”

“Everybody’s got a story,” she said, and he smiled.

Still, he had a good smile, Preshy thought as she scrambled in the general chaos of the car looking for something to write on. She found an old card from the local florist and wrote her name and number on the back of it. He put it in his pocket, slammed the door and with a brisk wave was gone.

BACK HOME AND IN BED
with Maow snuggled on her pillow, she called Sylvie and told her all about her evening.

“About time you met a guy” was her friend’s tired response.

But Preshy knew Sam Knight was only a traveler, passing through on a snowy winter’s evening.

S
HE
was awakened by the sullen gray light filtering through the curtains. Struggling from sleep, she remembered Lily and immediately called the airline. She was getting pretty fed up with the whole thing by this time. She was told the flight had landed in Frankfurt the previous evening and that all the passengers had disembarked there. Charles de Gaulle had now reopened but there was a backlog due to the canceled flights and it was complete chaos. And no, Ms. Song had not contacted the airline to try to reestablish her flight to Paris.

As she put down the phone, Maow leapt onto the bed, making the little grunting sounds that meant she was hungry, so she got up and filled her dish—an Hermès dish, a gift, of course, from Aunt Grizelda. Then she showered, dressed and went out for her
coffee, slushing through the piled snow, smiling and feeling like a little kid on a no-school day. She expected Lily would contact her sometime soon. Lily did not, but Sam Knight did.

SAM WAS LYING ON THE
narrow hotel bed, a half -empty bottle of vodka on the nightstand next to him.

He groaned, turning to the look at the limp orange curtains and the glimpse of steel gray sky behind them. He thought about his beach house on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, raked by cold winds and storms at this time of year, but always beautiful.

It was the place where he used to do his writing, away from the social whirl of New York where he had an apartment on Gramercy Park. But he had not written anything in three years, and who knew if he ever would again.

He reached for the vodka and took a long drink. Another long, empty day in Paris—a city he had no rapport for—stretched interminably in front of him. Except now he had made contact with Precious Rafferty. He thought about her, in her ancient green sheepskin overcoat and big boots, blond hair tangling over her eyes, which he was surprised to find he also remembered were an icy aquamarine blue. He remembered her direct questions, her big hands and her high girlish laugh, and . . . He thought for a minute, searching for the exact word. The
innocence.
That was it. But was she as innocent as she looked? That was the question.

Retrieving the florist’s card from his jacket pocket, he dialed the number she’d scribbled on it.

She picked up on the first ring. “Lily?” she demanded breathlessly.

“Rafferty, you’re not still waiting for the mystery woman are you?” he said.

“Yeah.” She obviously recognized his voice. “I’m getting sick of it though. Anyhow, why are you still here?”

“I can’t get a flight out to New York. How about I take you for lunch instead? After all, it’s Sunday.”

Preshy didn’t hesitate. “Pick me up in half an hour,” she said. “I know just the place for a day like this.”

T
HE
snow was pure and crisp underfoot and there were flurries in the air, whispering past Sam’s face as he walked to the rue Jacob. The golden city of Paris had turned to silver, sparkling with a magical icy refracted light, but Sam did not notice. In fact he would rather have been anywhere else with or without snow.

He found Preshy’s place easily enough and stopped to look in her shop window. He thought the place looked like a grotto with its soft light and faded pink walls, though he did admire the marble head of a boy. He looked innocent, the way he had himself when he was that age, he supposed with a wry smile. Now he was forty-two, not old yet, but the years and life experience had left their mark on him in the tight lines that ran from nose to mouth,
the creases around his eyes, the weariness. It seemed a long time since he was young. Was it really only three years?

Shrugging off the past, he pressed Preshy’s bell and was buzzed into the courtyard. She was waiting for him at the top of a flight of stone stairs that he guessed led to her apartment.

“Look,” she called joyously, pointing to the paulownia tree. Every branch was rimed with a line of snow and thin icicles dripped like candles from the tips. “Did you ever see anything so beautiful?” she asked reverently. “I wish I could preserve it like that forever.” Then she laughed and said with a little shrug, “But I say that every spring when the buds are bursting, and then again when the petals fall. I just love my tree.”

He stood looking at it for a long moment. “It is,” he said finally, “the loveliest thing I’ve seen in Paris.”

“Hmm.” She surveyed him from the top of the steps, arms folded over her pale-blue-sweatered chest. “Then perhaps you ought to try looking a little harder. After all, you’re in the most beautiful city in the world.”

He climbed the steps toward her. “Oh? And who says so?”

She laughed. “I do, of course. Who else’s opinion would you trust?”

He found himself laughing with her. “Okay, so what if I buy you lunch and you show me some of your particular bits of Paris that you think are so beautiful.”

“It’s a deal.” Preshy beamed. He was a bit of a downer but he had possibilities and that beat “charm” anytime. No chance of being swept off her feet here. “Meanwhile come in and meet Maow while I get my coat.”

The cat was sleeping in her usual place on the window seat overlooking the street. She opened an indifferent eye and she and Sam surveyed each other for a brief moment before she closed it again. He was equally indifferent. He was a dog man himself and in his opinion cats were alien beings, too cool for their own good. He helped Preshy on with the sheepskin coat that weighed, he said, astonished, about a ton.

She explained that it was her grandfather’s, and that he had been as tall as Sam but much heavier. “He wore it every winter of his life, as far back as I can remember,” she said. “But it’s still the best coat for weather like this.” She smoothed it doubtfully with her fingers. “I hope you don’t think I look too scruffy.”

Sam laughed out loud. He couldn’t remember a woman ever saying anything like that. Usually they just wanted to know how good they looked. “Not too,” he said, still grinning, “but we’d better not go anywhere smart just in case they want to throw you out.

She laughed then too, wrapping a long blue woolen muffler jauntily twice around her neck, leaving the ends to dangle to her knees. She noticed he was still wearing the turtleneck and jeans and leather jacket from the night before. “Anyway, you don’t look so hot yourself,” she said, inspecting his stubbled jaw.

He ran his hand across it, apologizing. “They threw me off the plane but my luggage stayed on. All I have is what was in my carry-on, enough to get me through an unexpected stopover, but I forgot the razor.”

She studied him again for a long moment, head to one side, making him wonder uneasily what she was thinking.

“It’s cute,” she said. “You might want to think about growing a beard.”

“Hah!” he said. “It’s obvious you’ve never read any of my novels, otherwise you’d have noticed the author photograph. The one with the beard?”

“Ohh, well . . .” She beamed at him. “There you go. That’s why I didn’t recognize you in La Coupole.”

He took her arm protectively as they walked down the icy steps and across the courtyard. “I get the feeling,” he said, “that you have an excuse for everything.”

“You’re probably right. Daria says I lack a sense of reality, that’s why I ended up . . .” She stopped suddenly. She’d been about to say, “that’s why I ended up dumped at the altar in Venice,” but she suddenly remembered she was talking to a stranger and it was none of his business.

“Ended up . . . what?”

“Oh, ended up with an antiques store. I guess it’s easier dealing with the past.”

“Not always,” he said curtly.

It was her turn to stare. He’d mentioned the past last night, said he’d been looking for it in Paris. She wondered again what he meant.

“I thought we’d go to a little place I know on the He St. Louis,” she said. “It’s a bit of a walk but it’s so lovely, and it’s a treat to see a traffic-free Paris.”

“As long as they have good wine.”

“They do, as long as you promise not to drink a good Bordeaux with your fish.”

“But I like red wine with my fish,” he protested. “Whenever I’d go fishing off the Outer Banks, I’d grill my catch on the beach and we’d share a bottle of good Carolina red. They make some pretty decent wines in Carolina now, you know. Maybe not like Bordeaux, but good.”

They lingered on the Pont de la Tournelle, watching the barges and the strollers along the edge of the slow-moving brown river. It reminded Preshy of the tour boat and the night she’d met Bennett.

“Have you ever taken a tour of Paris on a
bateau mouche?
” she asked Sam abruptly.

He gave her a withering glance. “Isn’t that for tourists?”

She’d had this conversation before—only with the roles reversed. “And you’re
not
a tourist?”

“Not exactly. I am—no, I
was
—a man on a mission.”

He was watching the boats emerging from under the bridge and she stared at his profile, wondering what he was all about. He was surely not giving anything away. In fact all she knew was that he was a mystery writer and that he liked good red wine.

“It’s fun to be a tourist sometimes,” she said wistfully.

He turned his head and their eyes met. “I remember,” he said. “I was a tourist, once upon a time.” He took her arm. “Come on, it’s too cold to linger here. Where’s this restaurant you like so much?”