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respect.” His eyes locked onto mine. “After all, a woman like you, a lady …”
    So that’s why the police were here at two in the morning. They thought I had killed my husband. Detective Mercier was being nice to me to get me to confess.
    â€œI’ve already told the police everything I know,” I said, suddenly cautious.
    Mercier’s dark brows folded into a straight line. “Are you telling me you know nothing? That your husband simply left one sunny morning and never came back?”
    I nodded yes, and I felt the sweat slide icily between my shoulder blades. I said, “But now you’ve found his car, surely you’ll be able to track him down? You and your colleagues in forensics…?”
    The detective stopped me with that upraised palm again. “Forensics deal in death, Madame Laforêt.”
    I gaped at him. “What do you mean? Where is my husband?”
    Mercier lumbered to his feet. He walked to the door with the gendarmes following him. As he opened the door I heard the thunder, rumbling closer. He turned and looked back at me. “We were hoping you would be able to tell us that, Madame Laforêt,” he said. “Since you were the last person to see him, and you are a suspect in his possible murder.”

Chapter 16
    Miss N
    Mollie Nightingale couldn’t sleep either. It was her talk with Lola that was the culprit, she decided. Mentioning Tom had been a mistake. This always happened: it triggered off her subconscious, bringing him back again, larger than life—and twice as dead.
    Tom was a man who’d lived dangerously and he’d died violently, as she had predicted he would.
    â€œRubbish,” he’d said, dismissing her fears with a contemptuous curl of the lip as he stood in front of the mahogany cheval mirror that had been her father’s, knotting his tie—always a striped silk rep, he must have had two dozen of them, all the same style but in different colors. It was Mollie’s task each morning to select the “colors of the day,” which pleased her, made her feel in some small way she was sharing part of his life. Silly, she knew, but that was the way it was between them.
    Tom had lived his life as the hard-nosed detective at Scotland Yard with a reputation for pushing the envelope into dangerous territory. And she’d had her life as the refined schoolmistress, head of a select London day school for girls where calm and decorum were the watchword and the only crimes were sneaking a smoke in the bathroom or—the worst—cheating in a test.
    Her and Tom’s lives could not have been more different and, like creatures from alien planets, they met cautiously in the neutral territory of her tiny London flat, and also—when Tom the workaholic could no longer claim he had to work weekends and was actually forced into going—at her favorite place, the equally tiny cottage in the village of Blakelys.
    Mostly, though, Miss Nightingale was at the cottage alone on weekends, soaking up the peace and quiet, and quite often, the drizzle as she gardened enthusiastically, spilling her spare love and emotions—those not reserved for Tom—into the heavy brown earth where she’d created a tangled beauty of a garden from the simplest of country flowers. She had sculpted daisies into topiaries; built great banks of delphiniums and hydrangeas; and scattered spring primroses under the lime trees, the true old-fashioned pale yellow primroses that came after the great clusters of daffodils, which, corny though Tom said it was, somehow always caused Mollie to quote Wordsworth:
    â€œA host of golden daffodils,” she’d say, admiring that springtime bonanza, while huddling from the cold wind under several layers of jumpers and cardigans. She thought Wordsworth had got it exactly right. Then, in summer, came her joy of joys, the roses, especially the climbing variety, the Gloire de Dijon with its