The Bones of Paris Read online

  The Bones of Paris is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Laurie R. King

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  King, Laurie R.

  The bones of Paris : a novel of suspense / Laurie R. King.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53177-3

  1. Paris (France)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3561.I4813B66 2013 813′.54—dc23 2013010332

  www.bantamdell.com

  Jacket design: Eileen Carey

  Jacket images: Cyril Couture/Getty Images (Eiffel Tower and Bir Hakiem bridge); Ekely/Getty Images (textured red panel)

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Part One: September 9–11, 1929

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Part Two: September 11–20, 1929

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Part Three: September 20–24, 1929

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  Afterword

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  PREFACE

  WEDNESDAY & THURSDAY

  SEPTEMBER 18 & 19, 1929

  THE ENVELOPE REACHED Bennett Grey early Wednesday afternoon.

  His neighbor Robbie splashed up the muddy drive with it, beaming with eagerness—post was rare here at the farthest reaches of Cornwall, and an oversized, airmailed envelope from Paris was a prize. But Wednesday had been a bad day already, with a headache beating at Grey’s skull and shadows dancing at the corners of his eyes. He let his gaze slide over the envelope’s surface, and told the lad to leave it on the kitchen table.

  There it lay, growling like an angry cat whenever he set foot in the kitchen, while the rain streaked the windows and the day faded to night.

  He took a cold supper in the sitting room. He abandoned the dishes in the sink. He called himself a coward and took himself to bed, where he spent the next seven hours feeling the world scrape across his raw nerves.

  The raindrops grew smaller, then slowed. As the sky cleared, the full moon pressed against the house, cool light whispering a path along the threads of the bedroom carpet. On the road, the faint sound of farmer Evans’ motor came, grew, receded: the hesitant foot on the pedals suggested one drink too many. The odor and feel of his fresh sheets testified to Mrs. Trevalian’s distraction on laundry day: the residue came from one rinse rather than two. Out in the yard, a dog-fox hunted: Bennett heard the dig of the big creature’s claws into gritty soil, the thump of its landing, the pale squeak of a mouse’s death. Waves chewed at the cliffs; air currents climbed and slid down the hills; the grandfather clock in the front room tick, ticked the world towards morning. One of its gears had a flaw that his bones felt whenever the tooth worked its way around. The uneven wear would lead to trouble in another ten or fifteen years—but by then, please God, it would be someone else’s problem.

  If the envelope had been from Sarah, he’d have forced himself to open the thing, despite the weather, the shadows, and the miasma of dread that clung to the paper like old grease. But it was not Sarah’s writing. The letter came from Harris Stuyvesant, a man whose motives Grey had reason to distrust. A man who stirred a whirlwind of emotions: guilt and hate, pity and pain, friendship and the deep ache of unacknowledged responsibilities. A man whose hand had been so tense when printing the address, the nib had caught twice in the fibers.

  If that wasn’t sufficient warning, the flap had been doubly sealed, its glue reinforced with paper tape. Fear alone would do that, fear that a mere lick of the tongue was not enough to keep the contents from escaping.

  The sky was still dark when Bennett Grey left his bed. He dressed, and walked through moonlight to the promontory overlooking the Channel. The slab of stone he climbed onto was the edge of the world, Britain’s final bit of land. The infinitesimal shift beneath his boots told him that, sometime in the next century, an added weight such as his would tip the thing into the sea. In the meantime, the rock provided a viewpoint, and a temptation: just lean forward …

  The eastern horizon grew lighter. The waves below his dangling boot-heels called their Siren song: You always have a choice. He could simply bend over and let the sky claim him, let it pull at his garments and cushion him with airy hands for a few moments, then deliver him safely to the rocks, sixty feet below.

  There was always a choice.

  The
sun breached the horizon, flaring the world into a brilliance that thinned, faded, retreated. When the mist had cleared from the water below, Bennett Grey got to his feet and looked straight down at the seething waves.

  “Not today, friends.”

  Back in his kitchen, the sun poured through the windows, beating the dark gremlins into the corners of the room. Still, Grey stirred the fire into life before approaching the table.

  He stood in the sunlight with the envelope in one hand and his knife in the other; the blade whispered through the manila paper. Grey slid the contents onto the table. When he lifted the top sheet, a fleeting look downward made him grateful for the reinforcing tape: had Robbie’s curiosity got the better of him, the poor lad would have had nightmares for weeks.

  Stuyvesant’s American script on the cheap French stationery was as tense as his printing on the envelope:

  September 16

  Hotel Benoit

  Rue de Colle, Paris

  Bennett,

  Sorry to disturb you, but I need to know if these can be real, and I don’t know who else to ask. I’m hoping you tell me they were staged.

  I saw Sarah the other night, she’s looking well.

  Harris

  Grey reread that last sentence: flat, noncommittal, and with a hesitation on the I. There was something Harris was not telling him. Something troubling the man.

  Grey shook his head at the ill-fated relationship between his sister and his friend, then rested the needle-sharp point of his knife on the topmost photograph to push it away. He repeated the motion three times, moving each picture across his kitchen table with the point of the knife. Four pieced-together images seared onto his mind and soul: the widened eyes; the pull of muscle; the strain in the neck; the texture of the skin. He studied all four, although a glimpse of any one of them would have been enough, for a man with his abilities.

  When he had looked, he slid the envelope under the pictures and thrust everything into the stove. He wiped the knife on his trouser-leg, waiting for the flames to catch. He washed his hands with soap. He scrubbed the table and used the steel poker to reduce the ashes to dust.

  And then he went to pack a bag.

  The pictures were not staged.

  The terror was real.

  ONE

  THE MORNING EXPLODED.

  The room’s east windows flared with a hot torment that seared across Harris Stuyvesant’s brain, stabbing through his eyes, splintering his thoughts, turning his mouth to old shoe leather: cracked, greasy, foul.

  A long way off, miles and miles away, his hand crept across the sticky sheets to the bed-side table, directed by one squinting eye towards the leather straps that stuck in the air like the legs of some dead thing. The hand fumbled, lifted, fumbled again to reverse the watch-face.

  Jesus: not yet ten, and already a furnace.

  Stuyvesant managed to get his feet to the carpet, waiting out the secondary explosion inside his skull before he rose to stumble a path through discarded clothing to the corner basin. The water was disgustingly warm, but he drank a glass anyway, then bent to let the tap splash over his face and hair. He wrestled with the aspirin bottle for an hour or so, palmed three pills and washed them down with a second glass, then reached out to part the curtains a fraction.

  A dizzying panorama of rooftops: tiles and tin, brick and timber, steeples and drying laundry; centuries of chimneypots, with a narrow slice of stone magnificence in the distance. Children’s voices and taxi horns competed with a tram rattle from the rue de Rennes and a neighbor’s accordion, mournfully wading through a lively tune. His nose filled with the pervasive stink of an unemptied septic tank.

  Summer in Paris.

  He went back to his seat on the side of the bed, picking up his cigarette case and lighter.

  The tap of the Ronson touching wood set off a convulsion in the bed. A hand emerged from the sheets, then a tangled head of brassy blonde hair, followed by blue eyes blinking in outrage.

  “Ferme les rideaux putain!”

  He wasn’t sure if she was calling him a whore, or the curtains, and he didn’t think he would be able to shape the question without coffee. Even the French swill that was mostly chicory.

  “Doesn’t help any to shut them, honey. They’re like tissue paper.”

  “Eh?”

  “Nothing,” he told her. “I have to go to work.”

  She understood that, and yanked the covers back over her matted hair. Stuyvesant swiveled around on the bed to rip them off her. “Really,” he said. “It’s time to rise and shine.”

  But instead of complaining, or assaulting him with curses, she gave a sinuous writhe to curl against his leg, looking up at him as coquettishly as a person could when her mascara was smeared like something from a German horror film.

  “You take me for breakfast, ’Arris?” One soft breast pressed into his knee, two firm fingers walked a path up the inside of his bent thigh.

  He smashed the cigarette out against the ash-tray, then bent over the smeared horror-eyes. “I try never to disappoint a lady,” he told her.

  Be nice if he could remember this one’s name.

  TWO

  A CONVERSATION:

  “You knew that Crosby girl, didn’t you?”

  “Crosby? I don’t believe I …”

  “Peggy? Patricia? There was something about photographs and a scar—this was some time ago.”

  “Ah, yes: Philippa. What about her?”

  “Is she still around?”

  “I haven’t seen her in months. Why?”

  “There was an American asking about her, last night. He claims he was hired by her parents, though he looked a real brute to me. I thought if you were still in touch, you might let her know.”

  “As I say, it’s been months. Did you talk to the fellow?”

  “No, but he’s around the Quarter if you want him. That girl, Lulu? The one with the light fingers? He’s spending time with her.”

  “Sounds a suitable match.”

  “Better than the Crosby girl—too naïve for her own good.”

  “A description fitting half the women in Montparnasse.”

  “Certainly the Americans. Why on earth do their fathers let them leave the house?”

  “Madness.”

  “I know—they’re just asking for trouble. They come to town, sleep with as many boys as they can find, and are shocked as lambs when they get hurt. I suppose that’s why so many of them drift away. I can’t think how many times someone has said, ‘Has anyone seen Daisy?’ or Iris or whoever. The girls here seem to make a habit of flitting in and out, and …”

  The other man nodded.

  And in the background, a machine began to tick.

  THREE

  THIS SEEMED TO be Stuyvesant’s day for drunken women. Well, it was Paris; it was 1929. What else could he expect?

  Two hours after he’d taken Lulu for breakfast (there: he’d even remembered her name), Harris Stuyvesant rapped on a polished wooden door. The Rive Droite apartment was half as old and ten times as clean as his hotel room across the Seine, and even three flights up from street level, its hallways smelled like money. No septic tanks around here.

  He knocked again.

  The girl had to be back from the Riviera (or Monte Carlo or wherever she’d spent the summer)—and the building’s gorgon of a concierge had spoken on the telephone with someone in apartment 406 before reluctantly permitting him to pass, two minutes ago.

  So unless the resident had made a break over the roof tiles …

  He changed from knuckles to fist and pounded, hard. In response, a long extended grumble welled gradually from within. Locks rattled. The door swung open.

  The girl was tall and brown: dark eyes, chestnut hair, sun-tanned skin, dressed in a man’s chocolate-colored dressing-gown. The most colorful things about her were two heavily bloodshot eyes, explained by the stale-wine smell oozing from her pores.

  Colorful eyes, and vocabulary. Three years ago when he
’d come to France, Stuyvesant wouldn’t have understood a thing the girl was saying—and even now he missed a few phrases. Those he did get made him blink.

  “Yeah, sorry,” he interrupted loudly, in English. “I woke you up and you’re not happy with me. I need to ask you about Pip Crosby.”

  “Who?” The accent sounded American, suggesting this was the roommate, but he’d need more than a monosyllable to be sure.

  “Pip—Philippa. Crosby.”

  “Phil?” The red eyes squinted against the brightness, and the wide, dry lips emitted another expletive. Thought appeared to be a challenge, but he caught no flare of guilty panic across her angular features.

  “Are you Nancy Berger?”

  “Uh.”

  He took that for an affirmative, and planted one broad hand against the door, pushing gently. “How ’bout I come in and fix you some coffee?” She swayed. He caught her elbow, then hooked his Panama over the coat-rack and walked her inside to a seat, finding a roomy, light-filled apartment, comfortably furnished and clean beneath what appeared to be an exploded suitcase.

  He located the kitchen and a coffee percolator, along with a package of grounds that, although stale-smelling, at least wasn’t chicory. While the pot gurgled, he snooped through drawers and flipped through a crate of unopened mail. It dated back to June.

  When the glass button showed dark, he poured two cups and stirred sugar into both, carrying them out to the next room. The brown girl sat, unblinking, on a bright orange settee, the gap in her robe creating a provocative degree of cleavage (though personally, he preferred freckles to sun-tan). He pushed a cup into her hand, removed a pair of silk undergarments from the chair, and sat down in front of her.

  “Drink,” he ordered. “It’ll help.”

  Her eyes focused on the cup. She tried to speak, cleared her throat, tried again. “Milk?”

  “There isn’t any.” Her robe kept sagging; in a minute, one side or the other would be unfettered.

  She blew across the top, sipped, and croaked, “I don’t take sugar.” American, yes. She took another swallow.

  Soon, she looked more alive and less queasy—and more crucial, her straighter posture restored a degree of closure to her garments. He handed her the note that he’d left with the concierge on Saturday afternoon, which he’d found on the counter under a dusty boot.