AL07 - Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

SHE STARED AT the Monoprix aisle crowded with diapers, formula, teething rings, bibs, nonirritant soap . . . endless. How could tiny babies require all this? Every package bore labels color coded to age and weight. Endless varieties of formula, including soy and lactose-free. A large display printed with symptoms and arrows cross- referenced photos of homeopathic herbs for diaper rash, floral remedies for colic, a veritable rainbow of products for ages zero to five; it resembled the duty-free brochure on an Air France 747. Her mind balked; she was overwhelmed. Unless it was for shoes, shopping wasn’t her forte.

Did it have to be this complicated, did she need to take courses? In Madagascar, women squatted by thatched huts, letting their diaperless babies do their business in the white sand, then rubbed them with coconut oil. No vast crowded Monoprix aisle for them.

Her hand brushed a booklet, Using a Pacifier or Not . . . the Hidden Traumas. Here was a new world, new worries . . . pacifier trauma?

She had to get a grip; it couldn’t be that difficult. She looked for the newborns section, figuring the baby weighed less than five kilos, like her laptop. But she stood devastated by the array of baby wipes, scented and unscented; shampoos; vitamins. She would need hours to read the labels, to compare and match them to the baby’s skin condition and digestive disposition. She didn’t have that kind of time; she had work to do—a body that had been found in the Seine to identify, her security programming assignment to complete . . .

She needed a method to bring order out of confusion.

Within three minutes she’d located several women with infants. One held a baby in a carrier across her chest, its pink knit cap with rabbit ears poking up, who looked the right size. She trailed the woman to the baby aisle. Every time the woman selected an item from the shelf and put it in her cart, Aimee followed suit.

With a full cart she stood at the cash register.

“You sure you want the night-control protection diapers for a newborn and for a ten-month-old?” the cashier asked with a wink. “Had them close together, eh?”

Aimee reddened. “Oui . . . non, I mean you can’t be too careful at night.”

A woman chuckled behind her in the long checkout line. She stammered merci, grabbed her change. Ran out and hailed a taxi, jumped in, and piled her bags on the seat.

She was late. Ahead, a snarl of buses and cars sat in midday stalled traffic. Pedestrians filled the zebra- striped crosswalks; the outdoor cafe tables on the sidewalks spilled over as the lunch crowd took advantage of the unexpected heat.

“Quai d’Anjou. Fifty francs extra if you skirt the traffic on rue Saint Antoine,” she said, perspiration dampening her collar.

The driver grinned and hit his meter.

Ten minutes later, she set her bags down in her sun-filled kitchen, where the wonderful scent of rosemary filled the air.

“Bought out the whole baby section, have you?” Michou pulled out pureed broccoli tips, yellow squash in small jars. “Quite the organic gourmet . . . but a thing this little won’t eat solids for a few months.”

She was useless. She couldn’t even buy the right food.

The baby cooed, wrapped in Aimee’s father’s soft old flannel bathrobe. Michou had improvised a bassinet from an empty computer-paper box resting on the table.

A surge of protectiveness overwhelmed Aimee. Duty—no law—required her to turn the baby over to the authorities. But the mother knew her name and had begged her not tell the flics. Until the autopsy result revealed whether Orla was the baby’s mother, she’d keep her and care for her.

She put the future out of her mind. She planned to monitor Regnault’s system, deal with their other contracts, and master diapers this afternoon. She lifted the lid of the copper pot simmering on the stove, swiped her finger across the surface, and licked it. “Ratatouille!” The last time she’d used the stove had been for heating up takeout. For her, that counted as cooking.

The wavering slants of pale light pouring through the window, the aroma of herbes de provence perfuming the kitchen, reawakened a warm familar feeling she remembered from the deep recesses of her childhood. Good homemade food had been as much a given as breathing in her grandmother’s kitchen. She recalled the hazy summer heat in her grandmother’s Auvergne garden; her mother’s laugh, her sun- warmed pockets filled with fragrant fresh-picked raspberries—red, glistening jewels exuding a scent that was so sweet. Her laughter as she popped them into Aimee’s mouth. Her mother . . . where had that memory come from?

“Take a cooking class, Aimee.”

“I’d do better to get a wife, Michou. Like you.”

Michou grinned. “Try cuisine dating. It’s for singles. You cook together, eat, and see if any sparks fly.”

Baby products, cooking classes . . . what next? As if she had spare time after completing her job: computer security, sysad-min, and programming. Let alone time to discover why a baby had been left in her courtyard, and why the mother, if indeed it was she, was lying in the morgue.

“At least you bought diapers. That’s a start, Aimee.” Michou shouldered his bag, rubbed his chin. “I need to wax my chin and iron my gown. We’re playing in Deauville tonight.”

She caught her breath. “Deauville? You’ll be that far away?”

“The casino.” He smiled. He patted her on the back. “You’ll do fine. Oh, by the way, the phone rang in the middle of her bath, but when I answered they hung up.”

She wondered if the mother had tried to make contact, then had hung up, scared by a man’s voice answering Aimee’s phone.

“Michou, did you hear voices?”

“Only in my head, cherie.”

“Wait a minute, Michou. You answered the phone, said, ‘Allo’—”

Common courtesy, of course,” Michou interrupted, putting “his wig case into his tote bag.

“Try to think, Michou. Repeat what you did and said. There could be a clue, some way to—”

“You mean like in Agatha Christie?” Michou’s plucked eyebrows shot up on his forehead. “Mais oui, I looked out the window.” He took a mincing step. “I showed la petite the birds nesting in the . . .”

“I mean when you answered the phone?”

“I bathed her in the kitchen sink, wrapped her in a towel, of course, but oui, right here.”

He took another step, gestured with wide arms to the open kitchen window. “Allo, allo . . . I kept saying allo, that’s all.”

From below came the churning of water, the lapping of waves against the bank as a barge passed them on the Seine.

“Michou, think back,” Aimee said, trying to keep her foot from tapping. “Did you hear anything in the background? Maybe traffic, indicating the call came from a public phone, or was it quieter, like in a resto or from a home. . . .”

“That’s why it seemed so hard to hear—it was the water.”

“Water?”

“C’est ca!”

“You heard water like the sewers being flushed or—”

“The river.”

Aimee controlled her excitement. “You’re sure?”

Michou’s eyes gleamed. “Over the phone, I could hear a barge whistle . . . that’s right. Like someone was calling from right downstairs.”

Hope fluttered in Aimee’s chest. There were no public phones on the quai downstairs but the mother was nearby, and alive, she sensed it. She would surely make contact again.

Michou shouldered his bag.

“Don’t forget, Aimee, keep the baby’s umbilical stump out of the water for at least two weeks.”

“But I don’t know how old . . .”