Free The Hotel Riviera by Elizabeth Adler

together and stepped silently back into her room, closing the shutters behind her.
    She waited until the sound of the car disappeared into the distance. Lola’s alone, she thought. Lord knows what they have just told her. It’s about Patrick, though, I’m sure of that. Maybe they have found him…or found his body is more like it.
    Wrapping her pink robe tightly around her, she opened the door and crept along the hallway. She padded down the stairs and out the front door, hurrying softly in her slippers, down the path to Lola’s cottage.
    Rounding the thick oleander hedge, Miss N stopped. No lights showed. No sound came from within. She hesitated, wondering. Should she knock and say, it’s me, Lola, it’s just Mollie Nightingale wondering if everything is all right?
    Sighing again, she shook her head, then she turned and walked slowly back through the gardens. Something bad had happened, though, she felt it in her bones. And her old bones surely knew a thing or two about trouble.
    She turned for one last look at the shuttered house by the sea. The only lights were the red and green ones on the small sloop anchored out in the bay.

Chapter 17
    Lola
    My eyelids were on springs. Every time I tried to shut them they just snapped right back open. And there I was staring at the ceiling again, counting the cracks between the beams in the emerging dawn light. You’ll know the questions I was asking myself over and over as the hours ticked past, slow as a night-bound snail. Those where, why, who questions. And especially the why me? Why did the police suspect me of being involved in my husband’s disappearance?
    All I knew was that Patrick would never have dumped his Porsche in some parking garage in Marseilles. That car was his image, his alter ego. In his silver Porsche, Patrick became the rich south of France playboy. It was not an image he would have forfeited lightly.
    I was out of my hot rumpled sheets at five, pacing the terrace beneath my windows, arms folded, head bent, hardly noticing the lovely dawn transition from opal to pearl to aquamarine to sunlit gold. All I saw was the pale terra-cotta floor tiles and my long brown feet with the chipped red toenail polish. I told myself sternly I really must get a pedicure, then shook my head, astonished I could even be thinking of such trivia.
    I scanned my little bay, loving its gilded early-morning stillness. The black sloop still rode at anchor, drifting gently on the breeze-rippled sea. I remembered the Naked Man and the hedonistic pleasure he took in the elements. I thought of his hard body as he stretched, his head tilted to the sun and the wind. And then I remembered his sleek blond girlfriend, young and gorgeous.
    I sighed as I went back indoors, envying their carefree lives, while I had a hotel full of guests to look after and a restaurant to run; menus to be planned; marketing to be done; coffee to be fixed; croissants to be baked. I could not afford to indulge myself in my problems.
    In the shower I let the cold water slide over my skin, shocking me awake. I dressed in a minute in pink linen shorts and a cool white camisole, shoved my in-need-of-a-pedicure feet into the beribboned wedgie Saint-Tropez espadrilles that laced around the ankles, wondering why I’d ever bought them. Like everything else in my wardrobe they were purchased on the run, either on my way to, or on my way back from, Saint-Tropez market, or else in the fall sales, which was the reason nothing in my closet went with anything else. I shook my orange hair to dry it a bit, remembered too late that I should have lathered on the UV lotion, did a hasty touch-up on the parts of me that showed, then grabbed my car keys.
    Car! Hah, that was a laugh! It’s only resemblance to Patrick’s Porsche was that it was silver. It was also old and small. Tiny, in fact. An ancient Deux Chevaux, of the kind that used to be called a sardine can because it looks as though you