Free Murder on the Ile Sordou by M. L. Longworth Page B

twirling in the air, and a few seconds later the cork gently popped out of a bottle of expensive champagne.
    â€œThat’s right,” Emmanuelle Denis replied, still standing. “Brice—he has a name—is
my
son, and I’ll decide where he’ll go to school.”
    â€œIt seems like you’re making a decision, all right,” Denis said. “Between the kid and me.” He turned around and yelled to Canzano, “Having trouble finding a glass, or what?”
    â€œAlain, you’re such an ass,” Mme Denis said.
    â€œA famous ass,” Alain Denis replied, grabbing his glass of champagne from Canzano. “You seemed to like that fact when we first met.”
    Monnier coughed, barely disguising another bark, and Verlaque tried to hide his laughing face in the glass of whiskey.

Chapter Eight

    Little Squid, Shirley
    C at-Cat Le Bon could see the Mediterranean from her office window. She turned away from the view and opened the third drawer in her desk, pulling out a stack of black-and-white photos of Locanda Sordou from the 1960s. Someone had taken color slides too—luckily—and using those, along with vintage magazine articles from
Life
and
Paris Match,
she and Max were able to design the new hotel. Bright greens and pale blues, with touches of pink and orange, had been the original color scheme, and they stayed faithful to that. Those happy colors would be a perfect match for the white stone and marble floors and the cream-colored walls. The Le Bons had gone over budget, of course. The architect, when he saw Cat-Cat’s file of clippings, fabric swatches, and tile samples, warned her that she would. But Cat-Cat hardly listened, because here, at Sordou, it belonged to them. They had saved and worked hard—always for other people—in order to someday run their own hotel. Their goal had been to own a hotel by the time they were fifty; Max was fifty-one and Cat-Cat had just turned fifty in March.
    The next drawer down was full of design ideas that she had been collecting for over ten years. She had recorded furnishing and room arrangements that worked, and those that didn’t, in every restaurant and hotel she had ever worked in, and put them in the envelope. The envelope had grown to two binders. She and Max had sourced the best linen drapes in Tuscany; colorful cement tiles in Morocco—a fraction of the cost than those bought in Parisian tile stores—and they prided themselves on purchasing crafts from living French designers: tall, fragile porcelain vases; small marble end tables; thrown-glass goblets made by a designer in Brittany. Even the light fixtures were handmade, in forged metal by an artisan in the Luberon, with silk shades made by an obsessed seamstress in Montmartre.
    Cat-Cat knew that guests would like to see the photographs of the hotel in the sixties, and especially try to identify the many stars, singers, presidents, and millionaires who came in those days. She wasn’t sure herself why she didn’t get the photographs framed and hung as Niki had suggested; but she knew, down deeply, that she was superstitious: she hid the photos away in a drawer because she was afraid they would bring them bad luck, as if the photographs could taunt the Le Bons, saying, “Look at what a tremendously successful hotel I was back then. See if you can do as well.”
    As if the photos could speak, she turned them over and slipped them back into their envelope and looked at the computer. The bank manager in Marseille who worked on their loan had worried about them having a luxury hotel on such a remote island. The screen flickered, reminding Cat-Cat of his concern. “It was different in the 1960s,” he had said. “Guests didn’t need Internet, or cell phones, and neither did the hotel. One phone line was enough.” He took a sip of coffee and then added the words that she and Max had dreaded, “And even then, the hotel