The Gift of Death - E-book

‘Aaah!’
In my mind, that was quite a civilised scream for the horror I’d encountered.
My assistant Thibault, however, practically broke down the door to my bathroom in his haste to rescue me. ‘Julie! What’s wrong?’ he panted, wide-eyed.
From my position against the shower door, I pointed at the monster on the little shelf under the round mirror. ‘Big locust. On my toothbrush!’
Beau went limp, except for the hand he slapped to his face. ‘It’s just a little grasshopper. How do you deal with life when I’m not around?’
As the surprise wore off, I adjusted my perception of the size of the terror still clinging to my toothbrush. It diminished just enough for me to take my eyes off it for a fraction of a second to glare at Beau.
‘Excuse me? You’re sleeping on my side of the courtyard because of some “little bees”.’ I exaggerated the air quotes as much as I dared move with that Thing so close by.
He straightened and stepped into the bathroom, stretching his hands towards the Green Fiend. ‘Yeah, but there are hundreds of them. Or at least, there were, until we smoked them out.’ He scooped up the intimidating insect with his bare hands, leaving my skin crawling all over, and carried it out.
I followed at a respectable distance. ‘What are you going to do with it?’
‘Put it in your bed.’
Raah! I knew it was supposed to be a joke. I knew that. But my immediate reaction was to shiver from top to bottom.
‘Can you open the window for me?’ He stood beside my bed, his hands forming a ball around the grasshopper from Brobdingnag.
‘Here? You’re going to let it loose right outside my bedroom? What if it comes flying right back in?’
He closed his eyes with a pained expression. ‘Just open the window. It’s too early for this.’
Still doubting the wisdom of this action, I shuffled towards the window, opened it, and pushed out the shutters. Thibault stuck his hands out the window and dropped the grasshopper, which plummeted to the ground.
‘Oh no,’ I exclaimed without a hint of irony. ‘I hope he hasn’t hurt himself.’
Beau only sighed as he fixed the shutters to the wall outside. ‘Will you be all right, or should I call someone from the trauma team?’
When I didn’t dignify his question with a response, he added, ‘You woke me up from a great dream.’
‘Did it involve Céline?’
His surprised gape negated the pleasing effect of the morning breeze playing with his blond mop.
I rolled my eyes. ‘Oh please, you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes for that one. Besides, you told me.’
Rubbing his eyes, he pushed past me on his way out of the room. ‘I know. But I was hoping you’d have forgotten about that.’
‘Aucune chance.’ It was probably just as well he didn’t see the enormous grin I sent to the back of his head. We hadn’t talked about – or even mentioned – his crush on the baker’s daughter since he confessed it at Easter. It was now July. This was a tremendous sacrifice on my part, but as I had been about to throw him out of my house after his snarky remark about the trauma team, mentioning her was the best compromise I could make.
‘Since I’m awake,’ he called from halfway down the stairs, ‘I might as well go to the boulangerie. You want anything for later?’
I suppressed the urge to sing about the baker’s daughter being at the bakery and very maturely answered, ‘No, I’ll be at the hotel later, so I can do it myself.’
He uttered something that sounded like d’accord, but since he was already downstairs by then, I assumed it more than I heard it. Suspiciously eyeing the shelf under the mirror, I entered the bathroom once more. That toothbrush would grace the landfill soon. But as I bought bamboo ones, I wasn’t too sorry for the Earth. Were grasshoppers particularly attracted to bamboo? In that case, I might have to rethink my reduction of the use of plastics.
Making a mental note to look this up, I took a new toothbrush from its wrapper and thought about my day. My client yesterday had been eighty-three years old. As sprightly as she was, she did have the wrinkles to go with her age, and not just on her face, if you get my drift. She’d been perfectly willing to show her frilly granny pants, but I now had a good amount of editing to do. Not that I was going to polish her up completely, but she had to look in the picture the way she’d felt during the day, which was just a few years younger than reality showed.
But before I started work, I’d have to pay a visit to the hotel in the village. Though I was supposed to be a silent partner, my friend Jeanette Ta often asked me for my advice and help in certain matters. The hotel had only been open for a couple of months, but already we were dealing with a major event. One of the most important global film celebrations, the Gala des Lumières, had just taken place in Lyon, and four of its famous attendees had decided to extend their stay. In our hotel. And of course they happened to be my best friend Tiana’s absolute heroes.
Literally. These four played superheroes in one of the most successful film series in its genre. Tiana had asked me to join her at various events surrounding the Gala, which I’d managed to dodge, but now I had to go and meet them after all. And I knew nothing about them. Perhaps I should stop in at Tiana’s on my way to pick up some pointers on how to deal with these men.
Determined to at least look professional, I selected my black cropped trousers and matching simple blouse with a pair of shiny Oxfords. With my hair in a low ponytail, I couldn’t have looked more French if I’d worn a beret. By the time I’d done my make-up, Beau was home with breakfast, and I went down to make coffee.
‘One more month,’ I declared.
‘To the day,’ Beau finished for me.
I grinned at him. ‘Do I say it too often?’
‘Every single day. Multiple times. Just in case I didn’t get it from the calendar.’ With an indulgent smile, he pointed at the kitchen wall, where a calendar had been open to August for months now, the tenth circled in thick red ink with the words LÉON RETURNS written on top, followed by several exclamation marks for good measure. If possible, I had only grown more smitten with the dusty economics professor, even though we only talked late at night because he was teaching in Michigan. For now.
Since Beau seemed in a good mood, I dared ask a seemingly innocent question. ‘So how is Céline today?’
He’d just been to the bakery. It could have been a polite remark and nothing more. Which is what I was prepared to defend in case he accused me of prying. Instead, he looked me in the eye over his coffee mug, took a long sip, then sighed and dropped all pretence. ‘Amazing, as always.’
I jumped on it with all the curiosity that had been building since Easter, though I needed to be careful not to scare him off. ‘I don’t get it. Her boyfriend gets jealous because she embraces you in the middle of the café – which wasn’t all that strange since you’d just been shot – so she breaks up with him. And still you do nothing about it. They broke up. Because of you! And yet, here you are sighing.’
Okay, so maybe I was just super curious and not all that careful. But it had to be said.
He stared at the coffee mug in his hands. ‘She just wants to be friends. She said so, years ago. And again after she broke up with him, claiming he was being jealous for no good reason because there was nothing more than friendship between us.’ He twisted his voice, but his imitation of Céline lacked some of the mocking accuracy of his other impressions. ‘He was jealous, which is ridiculous. You and I are just friends. He should know that.’ He sighed again. ‘Eh ben, I’m always there. If her feelings ever change, I’ll notice, non?’
I had nothing to say to that. Even if I could think of something, I didn’t want to poke a wound that was clearly painful. I glanced at the calendar. While I was looking forward to Léon’s return, he and I had quite the past too. ‘What a pair we are.’
He huffed, but it wasn’t really a laugh. We drank our coffee in silence, but though I felt for him and would love to spend the hours dreaming about Léon, my thoughts drifted towards the day ahead. I’d scheduled a couple of days without shoots so I could give my full attention to Jeanette, should she need it. As a matter of fact, though, I hoped she didn’t. I could use a few days just lying in the sun. Well, mornings, of course, now that it was summer. Only ‘mad dogs and Englishmen’ as they say…
Apparently, one or two of the film stars were British. I really should find out more about them. I checked my watch. Would Tiana be awake already? As a writer, she could fill in her own hours, which in her case meant late mornings. I decided to throw caution to the wind and simply drop in on her. Making Beau dodge by reaching out in a pretend attempt to ruffle his hair, I got up and put my phone in my purse. ‘Any plans for the day?’ I asked my own superhero.
Beau shrugged, which was all I would get.
‘All right, have fun with that. Tomates farcies for lunch, if you’re here.’