Resurgence (38 page)
Laurel feels no strain as yet; the rapid pace hasn’t gotten to her, nor has assuming primary responsibility for keeping the two boys occupied—three boys if she counts those times when Colin was at loose ends. The only thing she could remotely complain about is difficulty recalling even the highlights of the six cities visited so far. That’s not just because of her emergence as a rabid fan of Verge; time has gone by faster than she can ever remember—in a proverbial blur. She’ll have a lot of catching up to do when things get back to normal. If they ever do.
The other occupants of the limousine are rubbernecking while she muses. Exclamations from all are heard when the Eiffel Tower comes into view, and awe is expressed in hushed tones when Sacre Coeur is briefly glimpsed through a heat haze. The Louvre goes on for miles or so it seems before they cross the double spans of the Pont Neuf to the Left Bank.
According to this morning’s handout, they are headed for the district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and a small boutique hotel chosen for its superb location and low profile.
Amanda was part of the advance party and is in the lobby to greet them when they file into the exquisite refurbished mansion.
“Seventeenth Century,” Colin whispers without bothering to conceal his Michelin cheat sheet.
Room keys are distributed and it’s quickly agreed that Rachel will take the afternoon shift and order up a room service lunch for herself and the little boys. After baggage is accounted for, the concierge herds the group to a miniscule elevator situated in an alcove next to the reception desk. They can’t all get on at once, so Laurel hangs back, giving Amanda the opportunity to draw her aside.
“Yes?” Laurel says, smiling her receptivity.
“David asked me to pass this on to you,” Amanda replies in a chill manner. “Although he said it was for your eyes only, he did fill me in on the contents.”
Amanda hands over an envelope imprinted with the return address of an independent chemical testing laboratory. Unsettled by Amanda’s atypical behavior, Laurel rips it open on the spot. She reads from a one-page report that the area of her attic alleged to contain an unidentified contaminant had been polluted with an industrial-strength cleaner prior to the attempted analysis, so no determination was possible.
“
What
?” Laurel says. “I don’t understand. Who would do that?”
“The same nutcase that spilled the coke in the first place, this Hoople Jakeway guy, who by now has to be considered extremely dangerous even if it’s only Nate and I who think so, because you apparently think this is over, you think just because you tricked Colin into accepting bodyguards twenty-four-seven you can just look the other way because you just don’t want to believe there’s a threat and you even enlisted David to make it go away and make Nate look bad and—”
“
Amanda
!” Laurel cuts in. “Take a breath while I find someplace less public to get this straightened out. Can we go to your room? You are staying here aren’t you?”
“No, I’m staying somewhere else because—”
“You needn’t spell it out. Nate’s in town, right?”
Without waiting for affirmation, Laurel steers Amanda toward a pair of doors leading to a courtyard furnished with widely spaced tables and chairs, and plenty of potted greenery to hide behind. Ideal for her purposes, especially now that she notices the bill of fare propped on an easel at the entryway.
“
No
.” Amanda resists for no apparent reason. “No, you don’t understand” she continues. “We can’t go in there, they’re not ready yet. They’re late. No, we’re early.”
“Don’t be silly.” Laurel urges her on. “The placard says they open at eleven-thirty and it’s past noon. They’re already serving lunch and I can’t imagine I won’t be able to order you a drink at this hour. This is France, after all.”
Amanda hears no humor in the remark. “I don’t need a drink. I don’t
want
a drink. Please!” she all but pleads.
“You are making no sense whatsoever.”
“And you’re not making it easy for me to complete the arrangements for . . .
dammit
.”
Amanda’s expression is such a contradictory mixture of resignation and alarm Laurel swivels in all directions to see what new menace might be edging over the horizon. In the process she very nearly collides with her brothers, Benjamin and Michael, and her sister, Emily, who appears as overwrought as Amanda.
But Emily’s only suffering from excitement that now comes out in shrieks and squeals. Which is more than Laurel can produce. Speechless with surprise and delight, impervious to the scene they’re creating, she gives and receives hugs and kisses and wonders how this miracle came about.
She’s releasing her sister, backing off a little to admire the lovely young woman she is, when Emily’s wide-eyed openmouthed expression indicates someone else is creeping up on her.
“
There
you are.” Colin appears at her side, gives her shoulder a squeeze. “I was beginning to think you got lost.” He turns to the others. “And who do we have here?” He feigns utter amazement. “Bloody hell, I do believe it’s Laurel’s family. Imagine
that
, will you.”
“
You
did this.” Laurel finds her voice.
“Well yeh, I did. Always lookin’ to increase my entourage, aren’t I then? Now, if little sister will pucker up we can get on with where we left off.”
He kisses Emily the way he did the only other time the two of them met—thoroughly—then confronts her brothers, who are showing none of the immunity to fame they flaunted on that Connecticut Sunday when Colin Elliot was the surprise.
Colin cuts through their awe with questions about what they’ve been doing since yesterday’s arrival and, more importantly, what they thought of the Concorde.
Laurel moves to the sidelines to monitor the resulting competition for the zaniest description of supersonic flight and only then realizes that Amanda is still hovering, still agitated.
“I really have to go,” she says. “I have to follow through on the baggage distribution and double check the room assignments, then I’ll be leaving the hotel. But before I go . . .” Amanda draws closer. “I want to say that I should have realized there wouldn’t be time to discuss what needs to be discussed with all this other stuff going on. I should have waited until later to give you the report. Or maybe not given it to you at all. It’s not like you’ll ever
do
anything about it and—”
“Please don’t be that way,” Laurel says. “If anything, I should apologize for disrupting the plans—”
“Don’t worry about it. I mean you
were
surprised, weren’t you? That’s all Colin wanted to accomplish and that worked, didn’t it?” Amanda retreats a few steps, then turns back. “Increased security notwithstanding, you really shouldn’t stand around in a hotel lobby unless you
want
to attract attention, and you’d be wise to put that report in your purse before Colin sees it and starts asking questions.”
Thin-lipped and frowning, Amanda waves a halfhearted goodbye to the others and leaves.
Laurel stuffs the report into her bag and nudges the others in the direction of the courtyard restaurant. As soon as their party is seated at a niche table near a water feature, she cuts into the celebratory mood by asking the last time a family member visited their Glen Abbey home. “Have any of you been there in the last few weeks?”
They react as though she’s asked a trick question, eyeing each other uneasily until Benjie volunteers as spokesperson.
“Uh . . . no,” he says. “But we did go to Mrs. Floss’s funeral like you asked, and one of us visits Dad every week. You can verify that with the nursing home.”
“I’m not checking up on you, sweetie. I trust you to do what I’ve asked. I only wondered if you had stopped by the house . . . perhaps spent some time there. If I seem surprised that you haven’t, it’s because you had such strong objection to—”
“I know what you’re gettin’ at,” Mike says. “We
did
object when you first said you wanted to sell the place. But now, with you gone and Dad out of the picture, nobody wants to go there anymore.”
“So we don’t,” Emily says with a catch in her voice.
“I see. Thank you, that’s all I need to know.”
It isn’t all she needs to know, it’s only the beginning of what she needs to know.
Generous pourings of champagne restore the party mood. The others offer toasts and take sips, but Laurel can’t swallow even a drop because to her, the bubbly smells like industrial-strength cleaning compound.
Yesterday’s Concorde flight was an expensive tradeoff. Although flying time was greatly reduced, and flying during daylight hours relieved the strain of trying to sleep, arriving in Paris eighteen hours ahead of Amanda’s ETA left Nate insomniac in a hotel instead of a plane.
Today, after a cold shower, a pot of strong coffee, a calorie-laden breakfast and a brisk walk—the usual means of emergency invigoration—he’s still thirty minutes away from the earliest he can expect to see Amanda enter the majestic lobby of the George V.
“Patience, hell,” he mumbles, abandoning his seat in the lobby and the newspaper he was pretending to read. Within minutes he’s in a cab moving along the Champs-Elysées, his destination a small hotel on the Left Bank, where he’s willing to risk a confrontation with Colin if only to get the endless wait over with.
The impulse pays off when the cab edges up to the porte-cochère entrance on Rue Dauphine and Amanda appears as though on cue. If he believed in signs, this would be seen as a good one—an outstanding one. Then again, maybe not, because when he tells the driver to wait, and steps out of the cab to intercept her, she shows no surprise. She doesn’t reciprocate with any energy when he embraces her; she doesn’t say anything intelligible when he hustles her into the cab and climbs in after her.
“George Cinque,” he says to the driver and turns to Amanda, justifiably afraid to hear what’s wrong when he flashes back on the disaster that marred their last reunion.
“I am
so
glad to see you.” She brightens a little and takes his hand, laces her fingers through his in the hokey visual metaphor for sexual congress used by all soap operas and too many movies.
He eats it right up. Forgets that she seemed disconnected a moment ago, concentrates on kissing her—investigating the more graphic metaphor within her mouth—and ignores the jaded voyeurism of the driver as registered in the rearview mirror.
“All the suites were booked,” he explains when he leads her into a standard room on the third floor of his hotel. “And I had to settle for an inner courtyard view. I hope that’s all right.”
“Like I’m going to be looking out the window.” She strips off the jacket to her smart linen suit and wriggles out of the skirt.
“Good point. The view’s definitely better inside,” he says and relieves her of a flimsy bra and the briefest of briefs before he sheds his own clothes and they fall together on the bed.
Two extended finger-lacings later, he should be snoring and she should be ready to describe whatever was bothering her when she left the other hotel. But he’s wide awake and she’s garrulous about every little thing except today’s events.
He’s treated to a complete rundown of the tour even though he’s been kept in the loop via their daily phone calls. She speaks of triumphs and tragedies, glorious weather in Scandinavia, substandard hotels along the way, container packs that wound up in Rotterdam instead of Amsterdam and Frankfurt instead of Hamburg, larky reunions with venue personnel from the old days, inevitable hostilities inflamed by too much togetherness. She covers everything from gate receipts, to relentless demand for additional concert dates, to projected sales and charting of Rayce Vaughn’s posthumously released live album. She marvels at the spontaneous tributes to Rayce that sprang up at every venue and wonders aloud what the potential is for Verge to remain together. She extols the high caliber of the various bands that have opened for Verge and the expertise of a veteran road crew that made everything work.
She rattles on in her usual breathless way, draws him in on the subject of what they’ll do and see in Paris during the break. He’s all but convinced that whatever happened earlier was unimportant when she suddenly sits up and pulls the sheet up to her chin, signaling a sharp turn in the narrative.
“You remember that Laurel went running to David with the information we put together about the Jakeway guy. I know I told you about it the minute she let me know what she’d done.”
“Yes, you did . . . and?” He props himself up on one elbow.
“And it seems that David hired an independent testing laboratory to check out the contaminant—that’s what he called it—in Laurel’s attic.”
“I hope that’s not what’s bothering you. I would have done the same in David’s place.”
“What’s bothering me is there
was
no contaminant when the lab people checked the specified area.”
“Wait a minute. Are you saying the evidence was tampered with?”
