Free Time-Travel Bath Bomb by Jo Nesbø Page B

goodbye – and he drove away.”

 

Juliette Continues Her Story
    JULIETTE WAS STARING straight ahead. Then she put the handkerchief over her nose and blew loudly, like a trumpet blast and not quite the way one would expect a baronette to blow her nose.
    “Three days later I married Claude Cliché in Notre Dame, a cathedral in Paris. People were up playing Uno until all hours that night and Claude lost some money to one of my father’s wedding guests. That guest was found a week later at the bottom of the Seine with his pockets full of small change. I think that finally opened my father’s eyes to what kind of person Claude is. My father pulled me aside, asked if I was happy, said it would be all right with him if I got a divorce, that we didn’t need the castle, that we could live in a small apartment and that he could get a job. Poor Dad! He just didn’t understand that Claude would never allow himself to be humiliated like that, that if we so much as mentioned the word ‘divorce’ we’d both end up in the Seine, Dad and me. So I said, no, I was fine. Of course the truth was that I could hardly stand living with that monster even for a single day.”
    “Triple yikes!”
    “You can say that again. And so the years passed. Dad got old before his time and then two years ago he got sick and died of pneumonia. As we were sprinkling dirt over his coffin, Claude whispered to me that now that my father wasn’t in the picture anymore, maybe I might be thinking about running off and finding my professor boyfriend again. But that if I tried that, I would find out what it was like to stand on the bottom of the Seine with my pockets full of coins, holding my breath and just waiting to drown. Then he patted my cheek and said the hippos would be watching me.”
    “That . . . that . . . bully,” Lisa whispered, feeling her eyes well up.
    “I had totally given up on having a happy life,” Juliette continued. “Until early this summer. Then I suddenly received a strange postcard in the mail. It had a Paris postmark and apart from my name the words on it were totally unintelligible. But I recognised the hand writing right away. It was my beloved Victor’s. Just think, he hadn’t forgotten about me after all these years! My heart rejoiced. So I sat down and tried to make sense of what he’d written. And do you know what I found out?”
    Lisa nodded. “I think I do. It was written backwards, wasn’t it?”
    “Yes!” Juliette exclaimed. “How did you know . . . Oh, right, I forgot that you got a backwards postcard too.”
    “How did you know—” Lisa started to ask, but Juliette placed a hand on Lisa’s arm and said, “I’ll get to that in a second, dear. When I read the card backwards, I saw that Victor wanted me to sneak out and meet him at the Hôtel Frainche-Fraille the following night. He was staying in the same room he had rented so many years before. He wrote that Madame Trot toir, owner of the Frainche-Fraille, had told him about the rumours that I had been forced to marry the worst thug in Paris, Claude Cliché. I was so nervous, I was shaking as I stood in front of his door and knocked. But when he opened the door and I fell into his arms, it was as if we had never been apart!” Juliette closed her eyes and whispered, enthralled, “Oooooh . . .”
    “Oooh,” Lisa whispered, every bit as enthralled.
    “Victor wanted us to run away together, but I explained to him that Cliché was more powerful, richer and had more small change than ever before, and that he would pursue us to the ends of the earth and that, eventually, he would find us. That’s when Victor came up with his crazy, crazy idea . . .”
    “What idea?”
    “The idea of using Doctor Proctor’s time-travelling bath.”
    “Doctor Proctor’s what-the-huh?”
    Juliette was just about to respond when Lisa saw her notice something across the street.
    “We have to get out of here, Lisa.”
    “What is it?”
    “Hippo alert.” Juliette put