Free Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis by Cara Black Page B

she’d used the stove had been for heating up takeout. For her, that counted as cooking.
    The wavering slants of pale light pouring through the window, the aroma of herbes de provence perfuming the kitchen, reawakened a warm familar feeling she remembered from the deep recesses of her childhood. Good homemade food had been as much a given as breathing in her grandmother’s kitchen. She recalled the hazy summer heat in her grandmother’s Auvergne garden; her mother’s laugh, her sun-warmed pockets filled with fragrant fresh-picked raspberries—red, glistening jewels exuding a scent that was so sweet. Her laughter as she popped them into Aimée’s mouth. Her mother . . . where had that memory come from?
    “Take a cooking class, Aimée.”
    “I’d do better to get a wife, Michou. Like you.”
    Michou grinned. “Try cuisine dating. It’s for singles. You cook together, eat, and see if any sparks fly.”
    Baby products, cooking classes . . . what next? As if she had spare time after completing her job: computer security, sysad-min, and programming. Let alone time to discover why a baby had been left in her courtyard, and why the mother, if indeed it was she, was lying in the morgue.
    “At least you bought diapers. That’s a start, Aimée.” Michou shouldered his bag, rubbed his chin. “I need to wax my chin and iron my gown. We’re playing in Deauville tonight.”
    She caught her breath. “Deauville? You’ll be that far away?”
    “The casino.” He smiled. He patted her on the back. “You’ll do fine. Oh, by the way, the phone rang in the middle of her bath, but when I answered they hung up.”
    She wondered if the mother had tried to make contact, then had hung up, scared by a man’s voice answering Aimée’s phone.
    “Michou, did you hear voices?”
    “Only in my head, chérie.”
    “Wait a minute, Michou. You answered the phone, said, ‘Allô’—”
    Common courtesy, of course,” Michou interrupted, putting “ his wig case into his tote bag.
    “Try to think, Michou. Repeat what you did and said. There could be a clue, some way to—”
    “You mean like in Agatha Christie?” Michou’s plucked eyebrows shot up on his forehead. “Mais oui , I looked out the window.” He took a mincing step. “I showed la petite the birds nesting in the . . .”
    “I mean when you answered the phone?”
    “I bathed her in the kitchen sink, wrapped her in a towel, of course, but oui , right here.”
    He took another step, gestured with wide arms to the open kitchen window. “ Allô, allô . . . I kept saying allô , that’s all.”
    From below came the churning of water, the lapping of waves against the bank as a barge passed them on the Seine.
    “Michou, think back,” Aimée said, trying to keep her foot from tapping. “Did you hear anything in the background? Maybe traffic, indicating the call came from a public phone, or was it quieter, like in a resto or from a home. . . .”
    “That’s why it seemed so hard to hear—it was the water.”
    “Water?”
    “C’est ça!”
    “You heard water like the sewers being flushed or—”
    “The river.”
    Aimée controlled her excitement. “You’re sure?”
    Michou’s eyes gleamed. “Over the phone, I could hear a barge whistle . . . that’s right. Like someone was calling from right downstairs.”
    Hope fluttered in Aimée’s chest. There were no public phones on the quai downstairs but the mother was nearby, and alive, she sensed it. She would surely make contact again.
    Michou shouldered his bag.
    “Don’t forget, Aimée, keep the baby’s umbilical stump out of the water for at least two weeks.”
    “But I don’t know how old . . .”
    “I rubbed off all those ink marks. An infant’s skin is very delicate. Why in the world would anyone . . . ? But it doesn’t matter. She didn’t have an allergic reaction and they’re gone now.”
    Good thing she’d copied them.
    Aimée eased the pink bunny-eared hat she’d bought over the baby’s