City of Light (City of Mystery)

City
of Light

City
of Mystery, Book 2

By
Kim Wright

To my mother,
Doris Biggers Wright Mitchell,

Who always
encouraged me to read.

PROLOGUE

Paris

April 12, 1889  

6:24 AM

When he first
noticed her on the bank of the Seine, he thought that she was sleeping.  

This was not
uncommon.  Paris served as a beacon for any number of young runaways from the
country, boys and girls alike drawn there by what they imagined to be the
excitement of the city.  Or at least its anonymity.   The chance to reinvent
oneself, to begin again on a clean white sheet of paper, to escape the banal
brutalities of the rural life.  What they found instead were the banal
brutalities of city life, which often necessitated spending the night in
alleys, on benches, or down by the river.

But even when the officer
drew close enough to see that the girl’s sleep was of the eternal kind, he was
still not unduly alarmed.  Suicides were common in the Seine.  Bridges
crisscrossed the river in steady patterned intervals, slanted like the laces of
a woman’s corset, serving as a constant temptation to the unhappy.  And young
girls are so often unhappy, are they not?  They grow restless and bored, they
fight against the fates their parents have planned for them.  They love boys
who do not love them back…or sometimes it is more the case of boys who love too
ardently, who demand things that the girls are not prepared to give, things
they do not yet fully understand.  And this, of course, opens the door to a
whole new set of problems. The sort of problems that an inexperienced girl
might imagine could only be ended with plunge into the river.  Down to the
water, that great absolver of so many sins.

Her eyes were open,
which distressed the flic, who was new to the police force and had not yet
become accustomed to the blank and accusatory stare of the recently dead.  He
moved quickly to push down her lids.  The flecks of dried foam around her mouth
suggested death by drowning, the realities of which are not nearly as romantic
as unhappy young girls sometimes imagine them to be.  She was still pretty,
despite the film of spittle around her lips, the knotted tousle of her hair,
the ill-fitting satin jacket which she had undoubtedly considered the finest thing
she owned.  But it gave her away, even in death.  Showed her gaucherie, how
desperate she must have been for glamour and how thoroughly she had failed to
understand what Parisian glamour truly was.

The flic sighed and
prepared to climb back up the bank to summon help.  Drowning it surely was, and
most probably by her own will.   But there was still a ride to the morgue to be
arranged, a quick autopsy, and paperwork.  Always the paperwork.  It bothered
him to leave her like this on the bank, so pitifully alone, with her skirts
snarled around her waist and her legs splayed rudely in the mud.  Touching her
went against procedure.  Ever since the establishment of the forensics unit,
the policy of the Parisian police was to leave bodies precisely as they were
found.  Evidence must be made available in case the detectives deemed it worth
collecting, even when the story of the death was as short and plain as this one
appeared to be.  In truth, he shouldn’t even have closed her eyes.

But she was just a
girl.  Pretty, and dead, and not that far from his own age and although it was
early now, the slow rise of the sun was beginning to splash the city with a
rose-gold light.  Within an hour the streets would be full of pedestrians. They
would stop along the sidewalks and bridges to gawk down at the girl with her slender,
dainty legs encased in their plum-colored stockings.  Yes, he hated to leave
her thus exposed and open to ridicule while he went for help.  Help that would likely
be slow in arriving, for there was no emergency here, was there?  Forensics may
not even come in such a case.  Only the drivers of the mortuary wagon, those
heartless beasts, and they would plop her on their stretcher with little regard
for proper procedure and even less regard for the dignity of the dead.

He looked down at her
and sighed again. She had not been in the water long.  She was quite unspoiled.
 Without that red satin jacket – an unfortunate sartorial choice which would
likely cause the authorities to draw quick conclusions about her life and thus
her death – he might imagine her to be a virgin, someone’s sweetheart, a girl
he would like to court.  Impulsively, he bent back over her. Yanked at the
skirt which, trapped beneath her hips and wound nearly around her waist, did
not easily release.  

With a quick glance
around him - for his position above her body could give rise to any number of unfortunate
speculations - he stooped lower and slipped a hand beneath her thighs to help
free the skirt.  Her body shifted.  Flopped abruptly to the side and in a
moment of sheer horror he imagined her gathering momentum and rolling right
back into the Seine - even, most dreadful possibility of all, taking him along
with her.   He grabbed at her jacket frantically, pushed her chest into the mud
to stop the slide, and then, in this moment where his body was almost on top of
hers, in this absurd parody of love, he perceived her more clearly than he had
before.  

He froze, stared at
her face.  

It was impossible,
and yet it was not to be denied.

He struggled to his
feet. A noise escaped him.  A roar of rage, or perhaps it was more of a
scream.  A sound that caught halfway up his throat and strangled him, closing
off his air.  Although he brought his whistle to his lips, he seemed to have
lost the force to blow it and, with a final glance, he left her there on the
riverbank and went scrambling back up toward the street. 

CHAPTER ONE

Paris

April 14, 1889

2:10 PM

The man was angry. 
Beneath his well-cut clothes and the exaggerated, almost absurd courtliness of
his manner, he was clearly little more than a bully.  The woman sitting
opposite him at the café table was beautiful, but the way she clinched a glove
in her left hand betrayed her anxiety and, even if it had not, the slight
sucking in of her lower lip would have likewise given her away.  Her husband
was not kind to her, this much was clear, but if Rayley’s limited experience of
women had taught him anything, it was that they often gravitated toward men who
were not kind.

Rayley Abrams had
come here every Sunday, to this same café, since he had arrived from London
five months earlier.  The food was good, of course, but the food was good
nearly everywhere in Paris.  The true reason he was drawn to this particular courtyard
was because it offered the perfect venue for people watching and for
eavesdropping on the conversations of strangers. 

Well, perhaps
eavesdropping was not the proper word; despite his best efforts, Rayley
understood barely a dozen phrases in French.  But it was almost as if his
failure to grasp the words made it easier to understand the intent behind
them. 

For some things are far
clearer in a foreign language, are they not?  Rayley did not know, for example,
precisely what the angry man was saying to the beautiful woman and this very
ignorance of the surface reality of their conversation freed him to plunge
deeper, to notice gestures, body movements, subtle shifts in their facial
expressions, to hear the rise and fall within the cadence of their lovely and
incomprehensible voices.   They were a striking couple – without question the most
beautiful people in this beautiful café in the most beautiful city in the world
on a beautiful afternoon in April.

The woman glanced in
his direction, and Rayley swiftly dropped his gaze back to the pages of his
small red leather journal.  He had fallen into the habit of bringing it along on
these Sunday excursions, but not because of any need to make note of his
impressions. Hardly.  His memory for detail was legendary among his fellow
detectives at Scotland Yard and Rayley, in fact, had often teased his friend
Trevor Welles for the man’s compulsive need to record every interview, every
theory and conjecture.  But now, miles and weeks out of London, Rayley found
himself carrying a journal almost identical to the one Trevor had kept when
they had worked together on the infamous and infamously unsolved case of Jack
the Ripper.  For a journal, Rayley had found, also served as a companion.  When
he was writing in it, he did not feel so noticeable and awkward here at his solitary
table on the Rue Clairaut.

He was not lonely.  He
would never use that word.  Being invited to study with the Parisian police was
undoubtedly the greatest honor of his career and he knew how much Trevor and
the others were depending upon him returning with a full knowledge of the latest
techniques in forensics.  It was the singular subject - save perhaps for those
most minor sciences of fashion and cuisine - in which the French had surpassed
the English, and Rayley must not muff his chance.  His hosts had obliged him
with a translator, who, if not inclined to gossip or chatter, did manage to
convey the bulk of what Rayley needed to know in the laboratory. His work days
were full of activity, but Sundays always seemed to stretch out flat and wide
before him, much like the famed avenues of Paris, and he had created certain
rituals to hasten the passing of his leisure. The long walks, the lunches at
this café with a journal at the ready, his game of observing the people around
him and imagining that he knew their lives.

Rayley let his eyes
lift from his notes. The woman was no longer looking at him.  Most likely she
never had been at all, rather simply gazing into the street beyond him. 

Now that he
considered the woman more closely, he wondered why he had been so quick to
declare her lovely.  Taken in pieces, there was nothing exceptional about her. 
Her hair was brown, as hair so often is.  Her skin was smooth and pale, but not
without flaw.  Not without a slight pucker at the corner of her eyes which,
along with the parenthetical lines around her mouth informed him that she was
not a girl, but closer to his own age.  Twenty-eight, he guessed, perhaps even a
well-tended thirty-two.  Her color of the eyes was blue, but not remarkably so,
nothing to prompt comParisons to sapphires, or oceans, or the sky.  She had
been clever enough to echo their color in her gown, which was cut in what he
had come to think of as the French fashion, with the skirt narrower than those
worn by the ladies of London, the neckline high and austere, the shoulders a
bit broader. Another trick for the eye, a style designed to make the waistline
of even a plump matron appear as narrow as that of her daughter. 

He wondered what the
woman would look like if she smiled.  Not likely to find out anytime soon, for
she had returned to her soup, dragging her spoon through the broth in a
somewhat dispirited fashion, as if she were searching there for something she
didn’t really expect to find.

Observing without
being observed in return was his profession and his passion.  The detective had
once again gone undetected, which was the whole aim of the game, so Rayley
couldn’t say why he picked up his journal with a similar expression of defeat. 
Of course she hadn’t been looking at him.  Women rarely did.  He had hardly
needed to cross the channel to confirm what he’d always suspected, that women
of any nationality were unlikely to find him handsome.  That his visage was in
fact thin and owlish, with heavy spectacles and a weak chin.  He’d managed to
avoid reminders of his ugliness well enough in London, but here in Paris the
task proved nearly impossible.  The entire city was besotted with itself,
hanging mirrors on every wall, creating reflections of reflections, as if the collective
civic desire was not merely to provide a confirmation of its glory, but rather
to render the beholder dizzied with rapture, unsure of what was real and what
was illusion.

“Monsieur?”

The waiter had
pushed over a cart and was drawing back the gleaming copper hood to reveal a
selection of desserts, plump pastries with such colors and aromas that Rayley
was immediately shamed by his earlier gloom.  What man could be downhearted in
the midst of such bounty?   “Je veux…” he began, pointing at a cherry tart and
the young man nodded, plopped the plate in front of him with an abrupt little
clatter, and disappeared. 

Je veux.  One of the
few French phrases he knew, but undeniably the most useful.  Since his arrival
in Paris, he had been reduced to the position of a child, a toddler pointing
his chubby finger to demand a toy.  Reduced to the most primitive of longings,
able to say only “I want, I want,” without the skill to clothe the nakedness of
this need among further explanations and descriptions. Rayley picked up his fork. 

The couple across
from him had abandoned any pretense at conversation.  The woman now turned her
attention to a notebook much larger than the one Rayley carried.  She sketches,
he thought.  She is one of those innumerable Parisians who feels compelled to
capture their city in chalk and charcoal.  The woman drew swiftly, decisively,
her hand making broad strokes across the notebook, her expression serious. The
man was reading a newspaper, leaning back gracefully in his iron chair, one leg
crossed over the other at such an angle that Rayley could observe the pink
blossoms crushed and impressed upon the soles of his shoes.   There was a
flower market nearby and the wind coming from the river carried stray petals
through the air, so many that the floor of this open courtyard was scattered
with dots of white and rose and gold.  Such a surfeit of beauty, Rayley
thought.  Enough so that we trod upon flowers, enough so that no one notices
the waste.