A Tangled Web (58 page)

“Yes,” Stephanie said. She was remembering a shop Max had shown her, filled with antique maps. She would buy one for Léon. She had not yet given him a gift and suddenly, urgently, she wanted to.

“I'll pick you up at one,” Léon said, but when he arrived at the shop the next afternoon Stephanie was still inside, helping a customer. He watched through the window as she appeared and disappeared, moving from the front of the shop to the back. Seen through the glass and the cluttered window display, she seemed dreamlike, a beautiful woman wearing a white summer dress, drifting among fragile antiques. Nothing lasts, Léon thought. He gripped the steering wheel. The hell it doesn't. This will last. What we create will last.

Stephanie opened the car door and leaned across to kiss him. “I'm sorry; we were so busy. Jacqueline was wonderful. I hope we can ask her to visit us in Vézelay. Do you think she'll come?”

“Someday. I went to your house today. Madame Besset and I packed your clothes and I paid her for September. I told her you'd left town.”

“What did she say?”

“That she'd always thought you and monsieur had many secrets and she would not be surprised at anything you did. She hopes you remember her fondly.”

“She knows I will. She taught me to drive.”

“And Robert taught you to cook.”

“And you taught me to love. How long will we be in Avignon?”

“Not long. And tomorrow we go home to Vézelay.”

Stephanie sighed. “Once I thought I should live alone for a while before coming to you. I thought I needed to learn how to do that.”

“And now?”

“I want to be with you. I like to hear you say
home.
And I don't know what all the tomorrows will be like.”

“Whatever they're like, we'll face them together.” They drove in the hazy heat through villages with a row of shops, a church, and a square where men in black played
boules,
rolling the silver balls across the smoothly swept dirt while families watched and applauded, and then they were driving through one of the gates in the old stone wall that encircled Avignon. In the distance they saw the great towers and domes of the Palace of the Popes. Léon found a parking place near the river and got out, stretching his legs. Stephanie reached into the back seat and put on a wide-brimmed straw hat with a long red and orange scarf tied around the crown. Léon drew in his breath. “So lovely . . . I'll paint you like that, in Vézelay, beside a wall of bougainvillaea. Is the hat new?”

“I just bought it; I loved the colors. Where are we going?”

“To Monet Fournitures Artistiques. This way.” They walked to the Place de l'Horloge, and stopped for a moment beside the carousel of brightly painted horses and elephants and great thronelike seats, turning to the accompaniment of hurdy-gurdy music. Stephanie gazed at it, unable to tear herself away. “Isn't it wonderful? Such a happy place for children.”

Léon took her arm and they moved on. The heat built up in the square; people took off their jackets and draped them over their arms. Stephanie took off her hat, combed her hair with her fingers, and put it on again. They left the square and came to a cobbled street along the Sorgue River, the air cooler here, mossy waterwheels turning lazily at the river's edge and, on the other side of the Rue des Teinturiers, a row of antique shops.

Stephanie recognized one of them. “Léon, we have to go in here. I want to buy you something.”

Inside, she moved around a large table, lifting heavy folios, each one holding a map encased in protective sheets of plastic. “Oh, this one. Do you like it?”

Léon's eyebrows rose. “It's quite wonderful. Very rare. A Tavernier. But do you have any idea what it costs?”

“It doesn't matter. I want to buy you a present. I want to buy you this.”

A small man, stooped over a cane, came through the doorway. His white hair was in disarray; his white beard was trimmed to a neat point. “Yes, madame?” He quoted a price.

“Fine,” Stephanie said.

Léon was poring over the map. “Superb. I've always looked for one.” He and the shop owner compared the map to others; Léon said that he was a painter and looked at ancient maps as works of art. They talked for a long time, answering Stephanie's questions, enjoying each other. Then Léon said to Stephanie, “I'd like to wait. Do you mind very much if we don't buy it today? I'd like to be sure where we'll be living before I start dragging it around. It could be sent to us later.”

“Oh. If that's the reason . . . yes, of course. But I do want to buy it for you. And I won't forget. We'll wait,” Stephanie said to the owner of the shop.

“I can hold it for you. If you have a card, monsieur . . . ?”

“No, plenty of canvases, but no cards.”

“We'll call you,” Stephanie said, and as they left,
Léon took a final glance at the map, lovingly put back in its case by the little man with white hair.

“You're wonderful,” he said as they walked to Monet Fournitures Artistiques, the art supply shop. “I've wanted one of those all my life.” Inside, Léon greeted a tall woman with broad shoulders, round cheeks and oversize glasses that made her look like an amiable owl. They talked about oils and watercolors while Stephanie wandered around the shop, enjoying the riot of colors, the display of brushes lined up by size like a military formation, stacks of canvases in graduated sizes, and palettes hanging from long rods. When the woman went in back to find some gesso, Léon put his arm around Stephanie. “My darling Sabrina, you are very patient.”

“I'm having a good time. Max never liked to browse in shops. He just looked in windows.”

“Husbands aren't supposed to love shopping.”

“Some husbands might.”

He smiled. “Perhaps we'll come across one.”

The woman came back and wrapped Léon's order. “Thank you, monsieur. I hope to see you again soon.”

“I hope so. But the next shop will be in Paris,” he said to Stephanie when they were outside again. “I'll have to find a whole new set of shopkeepers.”

Stephanie stopped in the street. “You're turning your life upside down because of me.”

“There is no better reason in all the world.”

They kissed beneath the trees of Avignon, and then they walked on, arm in arm, in love, free of the tentacles that seemed to reach for them in Cavaillon. “Soon,” Léon murmured. “A new life. I feel like an explorer beginning a new adventure.”

Two adventures, Stephanie thought. The one we make together and the one I still travel alone: finding the other half of myself. And I will. Soon. Léon will help me. And who knows what I'll find in Vézelay or Paris that will be the key I've been looking for all this time?

I
n Avignon, on a hot October afternoon, Sabrina stood at the counter of Monet Fournitures Artistiques. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat with a long red and orange scarf tied around the crown, and she spoke with the owner of the shop about two people who had been there a few weeks before.

“The woman did not tell me her name,” the owner said. “But when I was in the other room, she and her friend were talking together and he called her by her name. And she spoke her husband's name.”

Sabrina looked at her, waiting.

“Her name was Sabrina,” the woman said. “And the husband's name was Max.”

The colorful shelves seemed to tilt around her and Sabrina put a hand on the counter to steady herself.
Sabrina and Max.
She had come to Avignon looking for a ghost. And she had found two of them.

It could not be coincidence. Someone was deliberately impersonating Sabrina Longworth, even going so far as to create a man named Max. But why? Everyone thought
Sabrina Longworth was dead; why would anyone impersonate a dead woman? It made no sense. Unless . . .

Unless . . .

Unless she was Stephanie. Stephanie Andersen, still playing the role of her sister Sabrina. Stephanie . . . alive.

She couldn't be. There was no way . . .

But who else would look exactly like her and be named Sabrina and be with a man named Max?

What if she hadn't been killed? What if she was alive?

Oh, my God, Stephanie, if you really could be . . .

“Madame,” said the woman, and Sabrina saw that she was offering a glass of water.

“Thank you.” The glass was heavy and deeply ridged, a bistro glass, comforting in the hand. “I need to know more about them. Please believe me, I was not that woman.”

“Then, madame, she could only have been your twin sister; such an astonishing resemblance—”

“I must know more about them. Please, is there nothing else you can tell me?”

“Nothing, madame. I had not seen them before. The man, the painter, most likely does not live in Avignon; otherwise, I am sure he would have been in my shop many times. I would guess he is from a nearby town, perhaps Les Baux; many artists live there.”

“And . . . the woman? Where might she live?”

“I cannot say. But even though they spoke of a husband, they seemed to me like two people who live together. Or perhaps . . .”

“Yes?”

“I did think that perhaps they were running away together. There was a kind of urgency—” A customer came into the shop and the woman put her hand briefly on Sabrina's. “That is all I can tell you, madame; I wish I could be more helpful.”

“Yes. Thank you.” And then she was in the street again, in the early afternoon heat. Crowds walked past, heading purposefully to cafés; shopkeepers hung Closed
signs in doors and windows. Lunchtime, Sabrina thought vaguely. One o'clock. My flight from Marseilles to London. And tomorrow, to Chicago.

But she could not move. She stood in the shade of a plane tree, her thoughts chasing each other.

Her name was Sabrina. And the husband's name was Max.

Sabrina and Max. Not so many miles from Monte Carlo, where there had been an explosion . . .

The street emptied. She leaned against the tree, breathing rapidly.

To live another life.
Stephanie in Hong Kong, one year ago.
An adventure, Sabrina! A week. Just one incredible week.

And Sabrina hesitating:
You might get greedy.

Was that what had happened? Had she wanted more? Had she wanted a lifetime, and so she and Max had arranged to disappear?

Stephanie would never do that.

Her name was Sabrina. And the husband's name was Max. Not so many miles from Monte Carlo.

And the man in the map store, angry because she insisted she had never been there, had said,
I understand that you are not especially interested in maps—that you deal with antique furniture instead . . .

“Dear God,” Sabrina said aloud. “I don't understand.”

But . . . if Stephanie was alive . . .

Stephanie. Alive.

Her other half, the part of her that she had lost a year earlier and still mourned, still ached for, even in the midst of the greatest happiness she had ever known.

Stephanie. Stephanie. Stephanie.

She had to find her. Whatever she found, whatever it meant, whoever that woman was, she had to find her.

You deal with antique furniture.

Almost running, she retraced her steps through the sun-baked streets to the shaded stone courtyard of L'Europe.
Lunch was being served to well-dressed guests who looked up in surprise at Sabrina's flushed face and hurried footsteps, and she walked more slowly into the lobby and upstairs to her room.

I'll call, she thought. I haven't time to run all over the countryside from one antique shop to another—

Time. The flight from Marseilles to London. And tomorrow morning, from London to Chicago.

She looked at her watch. One-thirty in Avignon. Seven-thirty in Evanston. They'll be at breakfast. My family will be at breakfast. My husband and children will be at breakfast.