The Secret of the Villa Mimosa (12 page)

“Next came the playboy. He had a title; it was
almost
phony but not quite. He was the third son, and his eldest brother was actually the count. But he was the best-looking man I’d ever seen. And he was the perfect party animal; he had been to every major event in the previous twenty years. I thought he was the perfect match for me because at that time I was determined to be known as the party girl of the decade. Very Scott Fitzgerald, you know. And speaking of Fitzgerald, of course, I met him, down at the Cap, with that crazy wife, and Chanel. And Picasso, that naughty man, and Cocteau.”

She sighed, recalling gay times on the Côte d’Azur. “It was all just tiny fishing villages then, dear girl, and endless sunny days, and the Hôtel du Cap was small but still the chicest place on the coast.

“Anyway, surprise, surprise, the aging playboy lost his playboy ways when he married the young heiress. Suddenly he didn’t want to party anymore. He wanted to be the country squire in a huge château with liveried servants. He even started thinking about entering politics. I was out of there so fast he never even saw my dust.”

She exploded into laughter at the memory. “Then I went back to the States and bought the Fifth Avenue apartment. I kept the alm Beach place, though I rarely used it. I could never stay in just one place; the grass was always greener somewhere else, and I was always traveling, crossing the oceans on liners and cruise ships and the skies in flying boats and Pan Am Clippers. Those were the days,” she said reminiscently, over dessert and coffee. “Now it’s boring old seven-forty-sevens
and Concordes and private Gulfstream jets. So now you see, Bea, why everyone knows me at all the great hotels around the world.

“They greet me with open arms and, I hope, genuine affection, because I’ve known some of them since we were all young, forty years or so. I’m always generous, and they seem to find me amusing, and they put up with my eccentricities and my demanding ways. Like you, dear girl,” she added, giving Bea’s cheek an affectionate pat.

Bea beamed happily at her. “Of course they do,” she said loyally. “And thank you for telling me your life story.”

“There’s a catch to it,” Millie warned, lighting up a Marlboro. “I expect to hear yours in return, one day soon.”

Bea promised, smiling, to do her best to remember it. She thought Millie Renwick was okay. And she understood that her millions had bought her fleeting happiness and a great deal of loneliness, wandering the grand hotels of the world, hoping the warm welcomes of the hotel managers and staff occurred not just because she spent a fortune and tipped well, but because they were genuinely glad to see her.

“It’s probably all due to my father getting killed like that when I was nothing but a kid,” Millie said, suddenly moist-eyed. “I guess I’ve been missing him all my life.

“And talking about the Côte d’Azur has made me nostalgic for the place.” She wiped away her tears and looked at Bea, her eyes sparkling with a sudden idea. “Why not let’s go there tomorrow?”

“But Phyl is coming to Paris in a couple of weeks,” Bea protested.

“And no doubt she’ll be tied up all day and half the night with the shrinks’ conference. She can fly down and join us afterward, at the Hôtel du Cap. They know
me there. They’ll look after me like the prodigal daughter.”

Bea knew by now there was no use arguing. When Millie made up her mind, it stayed made up. The Hôtel du Cap it was. And tomorrow.

12

I
t was early June, and the Côte d’Azur was living up to its name: all blue skies, calm azure sea, and brilliant sunshine. As Millie had forecast, the staff at the Hôtel du Cap welcomed her like an old friend. She filled her afternoons contentedly playing bridge with a host of new acquaintances, while Bea lazed by the pool overlooking the Mediterranean and acquired a light golden tan.

Inspecting herself in the mirror a week later, Bea thought she looked different:
like a new woman.
She shook her head to fluff out her hair until it resembled a shaggy copper chrysanthemum. It was long enough now to flop into her eyes and form a little ducktail at the nape of her neck, but she decided she wasn’t going to cut it yet. She laughed, admiring it. She was so glad to have hair she might never cut it again.

While Millie still slumbered in her lavish suite, Bea spent the early mornings wandering through the street markets of Antibes and Nice, admiring the stalls, heady with the scent of roses and lilies and gleaming with morning-fresh peaches and apricots, eggplants, and olives. She joined the chic women browsing through the
bargain-priced linen jackets and skirts with Paris labels and the inexpensive jewelry and strings of brilliantly colored glass beads.

Then she sat on a café terrace, shedding her worries like dust motes in the sunshine, happily watching the world go by over a
café crème
and a buttery croissant. The hospital and the broken skull and the man who wanted to murder her seemed a million miles away. Only the dark terror of not knowing the past remained to haunt her, the nightmare of falling endlessly down the black tunnel, falling and falling….

Some nights she would leap, shaking, from the bed and run to the open window, to look out at the midnight blue sky, and feel the cool air on her fevered skin, waiting for her heart to stop pounding and to feel normal again. Or as normal as it could be for a young woman who did not know who she was. But there were still many nights when the beauty and stillness did not soothe her. Those were the nights when despair overtook her, and she sobbed until dawn, when exhausted, she finally slept. She never spoke to Millie about those awful nights. She did not want to burden her with her problems. And if Millie noticed her pallor and swollen eyes, she made no comment.

Bea was also reluctant to worry Phyl. She decided her new friends had done enough for her. It was up to her to manage her own life now.

Millie had hired a white Mercedes convertible, and with Bea at the wheel, they explored the coast and the hills behind. Millie was full of memories of the way it used to be, “in the old days,” when she was just a girl, kicking over the traces, dining and dancing and flirting and gambling.

“It was still unspoiled, dear girl,” she said, filled with nostalgia. “You should have seen it then, Bea, when this string of towns and high rises along the coast were just tiny fishing villages. There are some compensations to getting old, I suppose. The things one has seen
and done, the memories. You never lose them, you know.”

Millie flung herself into the hectic social life of the Riviera, looking up old acquaintances and making new ones, attending openings and galas and dinners and concerts, and enjoying herself thoroughly. And being a woman who could afford to indulge her whims and fancies, she suddenly announced that she intended to buy a house somewhere along the coast that she loved best.

Bea did her best to talk her out of it, saying it was just another whim that she would live to regret, but Millie was adamant. She had made up her mind she wanted to spend her summers on the Riviera. “Just like the old days.”

They were going house hunting that very morning, and Millie had dressed for the occasion. She looked like a plump tropical bird in a floating lime green and pink dress with her blond curls hidden under a shady pink straw hat.

She threw a critical glance at Bea, cool in navy silk shorts and white T-shirt.

“You should always wear a hat, Bea,” she told her severely. “Believe me, if you don’t, you’ll regret it when you’re forty. You’ll have skin like a piece of old leather.” She laughed as Bea obligingly pulled on a Yankees baseball cap. “That’s not quite what I meant, dear girl. But on you it looks good.”

Bea drove to the smart real estate office in Cannes, and Millie told the smooth buttoned-down agent she wanted “something with a touch of class.”

“Don’t bother showing me any of those white plaster boxes all tricked up with marble and sliding glass doors on lots the size of a postage stamp,” she warned him. “I want terraces and balustrades and proper French doors and arches and columns. And a view of the Mediterranean.
Class
, my dear man. That is what I want.”
And the agent raised a supercilious eyebrow and informed her that the firm dealt only in the best.

But a few days and several dozen houses later both she and the agent were exhausted and beginning to lose their patience. “I’ll leave it to you,” she told Bea, retreating to the comforts of the hotel and the bridge table. “You know exactly what I want, dear girl. Find us something nice.”

Bea spent the next few days happily zigzagging along the coast, inspecting properties, but still found nothing that was quite right. She was up in the hills near Vence when she noticed the thunderclouds stacking ominously over the mountains. The temperature and humidity were soaring, so she decided to stop for a cool drink at a café.

The small village square was deserted, and the only other customer on the café terrace was a young man who was busy writing.

She sipped her cold drink, watching him, wondering what he was writing that kept him so absorbed. He was
almost
good-looking, she conceded. Not too tall, with rumpled curly brown hair that looked as though he had run his hands through it once too often. And he had an interesting bony face and a generous-looking mouth that she thought would have been described in romantic novels as “finely chiseled.” She guessed he was in his early thirties and decided he must be a writer, wondering if he was famous and if she should know him.

She jumped as lightning suddenly forked through the blackened sky, followed by a peal of thunder and the spatter of raindrops. A wind gusted from nowhere, scattering the man’s papers, and she ran to help pick them up before they were soaked. He thanked her in French, but she could tell from his accent he was English.

There was another flash, and the rain began to come down in torrents as they ran together into the café.
“Better sit out the storm in here,” he said, smiling at her. “Let me buy you a drink to thank you for saving my priceless manuscript.”

They sat at the small scarred wooden bar, sipping a glass of rosé wine, and he told her his name was Nick Lascelles. Then he asked where she was from.

Bea stared at him blankly. It was such a casual question, so easy. For anyone else. “San Francisco, I guess,” she said finally.

He looked quizzically at her. “You don’t sound too sure.”

“Oh, I am,” she said quickly, embarrassed. “Of course I am.”

“You’re on holiday, I suppose.”

“Sort of. I’m supposed to be working, but it seems more like a holiday.” She told him about Millie, playing endless games of bridge at the Hôtel du Cap and said that Millie wanted to buy a villa and she was supposed to be out looking for one to satisfy her requirements.

“And what are you doing here?” she asked finally.

“I’m researching my book. About crime on the Riviera, from the turn of the century to the present day. Crimes of passion, violence, grand theft, and murder. Solved and unsolved.” He grinned. “You’d be surprised how many there are.”

Thunder rumbled ominously around the hills, and he glanced at his watch, then looked hopefully at her. “The storm will be around for a while. Won’t you join me for lunch?”

The café had filled up, and they squeezed into a little table by the window. Bea watched the rain bouncing from the cobblestones in the square and realized suddenly that she was enjoying herself. Nick Lascelles was nice, he was young and attractive, and he talked nonstop throughout the generous seventy-five-franc meal of the day.

Over the soup he told her that his mother was
French and his father English. “From one of those ‘good’ families with an old name and not much money,” he said with a grin. “I was the poorest boy at the ‘rich boys’ school they sent me to in Switzerland. No helicopters whisking me off for weekends on the yacht like most of the other boys; no private planes sent to take me home for the holidays.”

As he ate his omelet, he told her that all that was left of the once-vast family fortunes was the old manor house and a few acres in Gloucestershire that his brother had inherited. And an old run-down vineyard near Bordeaux with the prettiest little château that had been left to him and that he was attempting to update into the twentieth century.