Free The Girl Who Remembered the Snow by Charles Mathes Page A

other words.
    â€œSan Marcos,” she whispered.

    â€œYes, that is it,” said Charlemagne triumphantly.
    â€œIs what?”
    â€œThe island where the Kaito live. It is somewhere near Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, is it not?”

6
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    T he Alhambra sat on top of Nob Hill like the crown on the head of a king.
    It was a huge yet strangely delicate stone structure which had risen, Phoenix-like, from the rubble of the 1906 earthquake just a few blocks from two of San Francisco’s other grand hotels, the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins.
    Emma pulled her battered Nissan into the hemispherical driveway and stopped directly in front of the hotel’s massive entryway. It had been only three days since she had dropped Henri-Pierre Caraignac off here, but it seemed more like a lifetime ago.
    A doorman dressed in a uniform that would have earned nods of approval in Czarist Russia instantly swooped down on Emma’s car, followed by two porters and a parking attendant. The team extracted Emma’s luggage and departed with her vehicle with an efficiency she had thought reserved to car thieves. The doorman then ushered Emma up the steps and into the waiting clutches of another character dressed for operetta, who in turn guided her through the bustling lobby—a gigantic affair of plush
furniture and palm trees, topped by a soaring skylight ceiling—and delivered her finally to the front desk. Presumably she would be reunited with her luggage at some other time; it was nowhere to be seen.
    â€œMay I have your credit card, please, Miss Passant?” sniffed the check-in clerk, barely looking up. He was a slender young man with long teeth and eyebrows that slanted upward at an ever steeper angle the closer they got to the middle of his face—as if they aspired to grow vertically, rather than in the usual horizontal fashion.
    Emma dug into her wallet and handed over the appropriate piece of plastic, then turned her gaze back to the busy lobby as the clerk went about his business.
    A few individuals sat reading newspapers or milling about in small groups, but most of the lobby’s population seemed to be in motion. A continual stream of people rushed about in every direction: men dressed in dark suits and quiet ties, women with silk blouses and gold jewelry. Everyone seemed very serious and very well fixed. Even their hair looked expensive.
    â€œAnd how long do you plan to be with us on this stay, Miss Passant?”
    â€œNot long,” said Emma, looking down at her blue jeans, feeling out of place, as she knew she would. “Maybe a few days.”
    The clerk continued tapping the keyboard of his computer terminal. He didn’t seem to have noticed her outfit. In fact, he didn’t seem to have seen her at all. No one had—not really. There was nothing so anonymous as a large hotel.
    â€œThat will be three hundred forty dollars per night for a single.”
    â€œThree hundred and forty dollars!”
    â€œNot including tax. Sign here, please.”
    The price was outrageous, thought Emma as she signed the registration slip. The strange thing was that she could actually afford it.

    Charlemagne hadn’t let Emma leave his office until he had written her a check for twenty thousand dollars as an advance against her executor’s fee and given it to Jean Bean to deposit in Emma’s account. Emma would have more when probate was finished and they had sold the house, much more. She could order anything she wanted at dinner or from room service and not have to scrimp on gasoline and chocolate for the next month.
    The only trouble was that Emma still couldn’t understand how Pépé could have had so much money. How could she feel comfortable about spending even a nickel of it until she did?
    And Charlemagne’s insistence on reading Jacques Passant’s entire will to her before she left the office had only made matters worse. In it her grandfather