Read Online Crazy Lady by James Hawkins - Free Book Online Page B

lady has been cooking up a to-do list since the day we were wed.”
    â€œThat’s why I always avoided marriage,” lies Daphne. “No lists for me; no expectations, no disappointments, never having to say sorry.”
    â€œNever understood that myself,” confesses Donaldson with a laugh. “I love Mrs. Donaldson, but I’ve spent my whole damn life apologizing for something or other. Anyway, what did you want?”
    â€œWhat makes you think I want something…” she begins, and then stops as he raises his eyebrows.
    â€œFirst clue: you’re a woman.”
    â€œAll right,” she admits, then briefly outlines the supposedly shady past of Janet Thurgood.
    â€œWay before my time,” he says as he picks at his shepherd’s pie.
    â€œI asked David Bliss, but he’s too wrapped up in that book he’s writing.”
    â€œAnd his little French chambermaid,” suggests Donaldson with a wink.
    Bliss isn’t wrapped up with Daisy at all. Moonbeams may be sparkling off the Mediterranean, but the light is cold as he wanders the deserted promenade of St-Juan-sur-Mer. The island fortress is just a shadowy smudge on the horizon, and he turns his back on it as he peers up at the promontory and tries to find the Château Roger through the eucalyptus and palms. The dilapidated building is there, he knows, but even in daylight he would struggle. But he doesn’t need to see it. He feels it and questions himself,
Do you honestly believe in past lives?
    Lots of people do, sensible, sane people who may try to deny it even to themselves, but why this compunction to reveal the identity of the masked man unless he’s there, inside you, saying, “You must tell my story to the world; the greatest love story ever told. It is time.”
    Maybe it’s just my excuse. Maybe I’m just trying to escape from the police.
    You want to escape? Get a job; be a plumber or an electrician. Do something creative.
    Oh yeah. Have tools will travel. That’s really exciting. Anyway, writing is creative.
    Five hours slip by like a long night’s drive as he wanders the darkened boulevards and quays, and when he eventually wakes up his mind he searches in vain for memories of the road. It’s nearing two in the morning when he opens his apartment’s door and breathes in relief at the empty bed. He checks the garden from the balcony — no lemons. But would he spot one in the moonlight?
    What do you want? What are you looking for?
    â€œI want answers,” he says as he peers across the promontory for signs of the dark château that dragged him into the mystery in the first place.
    Greg Grimes, a potter with piercing blue eyes and bushy blonde hair who threw little pots on a wheel every evening on the promenade, was the trigger. He was scruffy and unshaved, but he had a certain magnetism that drove women wild. Bliss would stand most summer evenings in the balmy air, watching in wonder as the English artisan moulded ceramic white elephants — midget ashtrays, egg cups, vases, and candle holders — for a google-eyed audience of women.
    â€œIt is free,
gratuit
,” the charismatic potter would say as he offered each freshly minted gem to a different young woman, but his begging bowl always overflowed, until someone roughly amputated his hand one night and left him to the rats in the Château Roger’s basement.
    That was more than a year ago, and although the stores are filled with pots from Picasso’s town of Vallauris, high on the hill above St-Juan-sur-Mer, none carry with them the love that Grimes infused into his tiny masterpieces. However, the lustre on a floppy wet clay pot quickly wears off, and most of the little treasures that warmed a heart one evening would be flushed down the hotel toilet by the next morning. And with much of the plumbing dating back almost to Napoleon, the entire system would be gummed up in no time.
    Bliss’s