Free A World I Never Made by James Lepore

next day I was on a plane:”
     
    “Have you met anyone here? Anyone who knows where you’re staying, that is?”
     
    “Just Inspector LeGrand and you:”
     
    “Your brother?”
     
    “No. I told him I call him but I haven’t gotten around to it:”
     
    “You are quite sure?”
     
    “Yes. Only you and LeGrand know my hotel:”
     
    “Bien. You should stay here tonight. You are a large man, but that sofa is large as well:”
     
    “You mean there might be more Saudi Secret Police out there looking for me?”
     
    “Yes, if they were Saudi Secret Police:”
     
    Catherine uncurled her legs, reached down to pick up her shoes, and rested them on her lap. “One last thing,” she said.
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “What did the gypsy have to say?”
     
    “She told me Megan was pregnant. She delivered a baby boy in December:”
     
    “A child!”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “Who is the father?”
     
    “I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask:”
     
    “We will ask tomorrow. Now you will sleep and I will work. There is bedding in that chest in the corner. Bonne nuit, Monsieur Nolan:”
     
    “It’s Pat. Remember?”
     
    “Yes, of course. Good night, Pat.”
     

    In her study, which she had transformed from an old walk-in closet across the hallway from her bedroom, Catherine dusted and lifted the fingerprints on her makeup mirror, then scanned them into her computer. She stared at them on the screen for a long moment, mesmerized, as though she might find the secret to evil in the world hidden in their delicate whorls and loops. Then she sent them to her uncle, Daniel Peletier, a retired Gendarmerie forensics expert, hoping he would be awake and at his computer in Normandy, in his stone-and-timber farm house on Cap de la Hague overlooking the English Channel, winter-mad with storms and gales this time of year. Call me, her e-mail said. While her bath was running, she made a pot of hot chocolate and put slabs of fresh butter on several chunks of bread leftover from her breakfast. These she took—along with her cell phone—into her bathroom with her, eating and drinking while she slowly undressed. Unhappy before and then guilty after Jacques’s death, she had ignored her body for long stretches. Tonight, with a strange and handsome man in the house, she looked at it. Acknowledged it. Her tiny black bra and panties punctuated this acknowledgement as she dropped them to the white tile floor. Crossing past the living room with her food and phone, she had slowed for a second to see Patrick Nolan asleep on his back on her sofa, his bandaged arm across his chest, his good arm hanging straight down, the hand resting with curled fingers on her Persian carpet. A band of yellow light no wider than an inch or two, spilling from the half-closed kitchen door, lay diagonally across Nolan’s face, illuminating his lustrous dark brown eyelashes and a brow furrowed more in sleep than when he was awake.
     
    She finished her bread and chocolate while soaking, and then afterward she put on silk pajamas and a robe and sat at her desk to read the flimsy file entitled In the Matter of M. Nolan. It contained the responding officer’s report, a statement from the concierge at the Hotel Lorraine, the autopsy report, Megan Nolan’s passport and Moroccan visa, and Catherine’s half-page report of Pat Nolan’s positive ID at the All Souls morgue. Attached to the visa was a note dated January 1 in Inspector LeGrand’s hand of her call to Rabat to inquire about the visa’s provenance. There was no note indicating that her call had been returned. She saw at the bottom of the autopsy report that copies had been sent to Insp. LeGrand, etc. She made some notes of her own, questions to ask Uncle Daniel, and then leaned back in her leather chair to stare up at the painted tin ceiling of her hundred-year-old apartment. When she and Pat exited the Metro near Rue St. Paul, she had stopped at a pay phone and called the police precinct in Montmartre