Seen and Not Heard (Maggie Bennett 4)

Nicole felt absolutely horrible. She couldn’t open her eyes, the air was close and smothering, the bed hard as a board beneath her, and she wanted to throw up. She was cold, and frightened, and something was terribly, terribly wrong.

She would go back to sleep. That would improve matters. If things were too miserable to face, then sleep was the answer. Maybe then her stomach would stop jumping about. She hated to throw up. She hated kneeling on the hard marble floor in the bathroom, staring down into the dark cracks in the toilet bowl. She hated the burning along her throat, the horrid, childhood fear that she would throw up all her insides and then die.

No, if she just lay very still on the hard surface and tried not to breathe, maybe the sickness would pass. Maybe she would wake up and Grand-mère would still be alive. Maybe it had all been a nasty dream, Marc with the knife, Grand-mère dying.

But there’d been another dream, hadn’t there? Someone in the night, making her swallow something nasty. It hadn’t been the first time. And she knew that Marc was back.

At that her stomach finally gave up the fight. She crawled out from under the bed, gagging, and scrambled toward the bathroom. She didn’t make it in time, ending on her hands and knees, vomiting on the carpet. Marc had beaten her once when she’d tracked mud on it. What would he do when he found she’d thrown up on it?

It didn’t matter. Her stomach wasn’t worried about Marc—all it wanted to do was empty itself quickly and efficiently. When she’d finally thrown up everything, when the dry heaves finally shuddered into silence, Nicole sat back, wiping the mess from her mouth, shivering. She looked up, to the right, to the open door to her bedroom.

Marc was standing there. No knife in his hand, no blood on his clothes. He looked distant, almost affable, as he stared down at her.

“Sick, chérie?” he inquired softly, too softly. “We’ll have to clean it up, won’t we? And then I have a little game in mind.” And slowly, silently, he began to move toward her.

Claire couldn’t speak by the time she reached the sixth floor of Tom’s apartment. She’d passed any number of police along the way, and racing through her panicked brain had been the thought that maybe one of them might speak English, might help her.

But even the most sweeping command of the English language didn’t mean they’d believe her. Didn’t mean they’d let an American woman remove a French child from the custody of her French stepfather. And Marc could be so persuasive, so charming. What did it matter that his mother-in-law had been murdered last night? He would only use it as an excuse for Claire’s paranoia.

No, she didn’t dare stop, not until she reached Tom. But by the time she’d collapsed against his door, banging loudly, by the time she fell into his arms, she was sobbing and gasping for breath, unable to choke out more than a few struggling phrases, none of which made sense.

“Calm down,” Tom said, his hands steady on her arms. He gave her a slight, rattling shake. “You’re not making any sense. What about Marc? And Nicole? And you? Claire, are you all right?” His hand came up and caught her chin, forcing her face up to meet his, and his blue eyes were searching.

She still couldn’t manage more than a few disjointed sentences. “Marc’s … back. Nicole … drugged. … Afraid …”

The hand on her arm tightened almost painfully. “When did he come back?”

“Last night. I … thought … you …” She gave up the struggle for a moment, leaning against him and shuddering in remembered distaste.

Tom began to swear, a low string of obscenities that was curiously comforting. “I should never have left you.”

“It … would have … made things worse.”

“I should have brought you home with me, then.”

She lifted her head. “We’ve got to get Nicole. I couldn’t … move her. She was too heavy. He’s given her something, and I don’t think it’s the first time. I didn’t dare stay, but I was afraid if he woke up and found her …”

“We’ll get her.” He’d already put her aside and was pulling on a jacket. He was dressed as she was, in jeans and sweater and running shoes, and even with his superior height Claire had to wonder whether he’d be a match for Marc. She couldn’t imagine it would come to that, but so much had happened already that was beyond her wildest nightmares. Something was very, very wrong in that apartment, with her lover of the last four months, and that wrongness was so evil, so permeating, that it defeated even her overblown fantasies.

“Should we call the police?” She didn’t even flinch as she headed toward the door, prepared to retrace her mad dash of only minutes before.

“After we get Nicole out of there. The French do everything at their own speed, and I don’t think they’re going to like taking the word of a couple of Americans against that of a fellow Parisian. Bonnard is a fairly well-known figure in certain circles—it will only make it more difficult.”

There was no reply she could make to that, only swallow the groan of despair that threatened to overwhelm her. She was halfway out the door, ahead of him, when the phone rang. She stopped dead still at the top of the stairs, and Tom careened into her, almost knocking her down the steep flight.

“Answer it,” she said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. We have to get back as quickly as …”

“Answer it,” she said again, her voice dull and resigned.

He didn’t argue, simply turned and went back into the apartment, picking up the serviceable black phone and barking a French greeting into it.

She could tell by the sudden whiteness of his face that her instincts had been right. He held out the receiver to her. “It’s Bonnard.”

She didn’t ask how he knew where to find her. Tom wouldn’t know any more than she did. All that mattered was that Marc knew.

She took the receiver from him, holding it gingerly, as if it were a cobra about to bite her. She held it to her ear. “Marc?” she said, and her voice was surprisingly calm.