Читать книгу The French Connection - Tracy Kelleher - Страница 10

W. C. FIELDS GOT IT WRONG, Shelley McCleery thought. All things considered, she’d rather be anywhere but in Philadelphia.

And that old adage about April showers bringing May flowers? Someone should have told the City of Brotherly Love. It was May and it was pouring buckets, enough to leave six inches of standing water at every major intersection in Center City. Shelley had actually seen someone attach pontoons to his wheelchair.

And, p-le-ease, if one more perky TV weatherman said the rain was good for the farmers, she was personally going to shove his Doppler radar where the sun didn’t shine. “Come off it,” she’d informed the cashier at Starbucks earlier that morning. “The nearest agricultural region is southern New Jersey, and nobody—I mean, nobody—cares about Jersey.”

He’d nodded and given her the wrong change.

Now inside, things weren’t much better. The conference room of Dream Villas Enterprises may have been dry, but it was so stuffy, even the philodendron perched atop the filing cabinet—a plant propagated to withstand the abuse of countless bank lobbies and orthodontists’ offices—had packed it in more than three weeks ago.

Shelley could sympathize. It wasn’t easy sitting in a room where the most distinctive feature was a beige filing cabinet. It set the tone for the whole office decor: cheap and nasty. Cheap, she didn’t have a problem with. Given her pitiful salary and unpaid college loans, Shelley couldn’t afford that kind of problem. But ugly—that was a whole other matter. Call her a throwback, but she was firmly of the opinion that the world would be a much better place if everything were rendered in tempera, covered in gesso and lit with a soft medieval glow.

Yeah, call her a throwback. She sighed.

“What was that, Shelley, dear?”

Shelley looked up. Sitting at the head of the conference table was Lionel Toynbee. Reading glasses slipped down his pencil-thin nose.

Lionel, founder and owner of Dream Villas, was checking the proofs for the latest newsletter of his travel firm that specialized in renting luxury European estates—estates that featured top-of-the-line plumbing against the backdrop of fading Flemish tapestries, grand marble staircases and massive gated entrances, preferably emblazoned with crests for families like Romanov and Medici, or even those parvenus, the Windsors.

“Shelley?” Lionel repeated, turning her two-syllable name into three, so that it became “She-el-ley.” It was a habit that she found particularly annoying, second only to the measly salary Lionel paid her. “The piece on the Montfort chateau comes across very well.”

Bowled over by Lionel’s rare outburst of praise, Shelley almost fell off her chair. But then she quickly realized the reference wasn’t to her prose. It was about the seventeenth-century villa built on the ruins of a medieval convent on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence in southern France.

“But take out that line about the cool, damp walls of the subterranean caves. They make the place seem old. I was just there recently, as I’m sure you recall, and the feeling was one of timeless grandeur, not moldy decay.” Lionel tsked. “In theory, customers say they like atmospheric old things like caves, but they don’t really want to know the details. Talk up the whirlpools in the bathrooms instead. More jet sprays, less caves.” He turned to the next page.

“Fewer caves,” Shelley corrected under her breath, the curse of having a mother who was a tenth-grade English teacher. She took her blue pen and deleted the line and was about to flip the page when her eyes rested on a quotation from Madame la Comtesse de Montfort herself. Shelley stared at the words: “To savor the snow-white blossoms of the almond trees that cover the hills in springtime is to tantalize the senses with a pleasure so exquisite, it marks the soul ever after.”

She saw the passage was missing a closing quotation mark and was about to make a notation when she stopped and reflected. Would she, Shelley wondered, ever be able to forget the world of missing punctuation marks and experience a pleasure so exquisite it would mark her soul ever after?

The fax machine in the conference room hummed into action. She looked up. Was it a sign from above?

The cover sheet had a handwritten message scrawled in large letters: “MONSIEUR TOYNBEE. URGENT. PERSONAL.”

“Looks like something for you, Lionel.” She passed it across the table.

Lionel moved his lips as he read silently, then slowly lowered the fax to the table. “My God. Françoise, the comtesse de Montfort, has died.” He removed the yellow Hermès silk ascot from around his neck and patted the moist sheen that had popped out on his baby-smooth forehead.

Speaking of baby-smooth, Shelley had recently discovered a bill from a society dermatologist in the accounts payable folder of her desk drawer. But the evidence for BOTOX injections and dermabrasion was beside the point, especially in light of Lionel’s obvious distress—the ascot was, after all, silk. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know you and Madame la Comtesse go back a long way.”

Lionel strummed his fingers on the fax. After a moment he looked up. “Wha-at? Oh, it’s not that. It’s the chateau. It’s aw-aw-ful! The family is threatening to take the property out of our catalogue before the start of high season.”