“Mmm.” Lia made some noncommittal sound. She wasn’t sure if that was a question, a statement, or an accusation. She adjusted her grip on the legal envelope, pressing it against her chest.
“You living here by yourself?” Her gaze shifted to Lia’s left hand.
“I beg your pardon?” Lia resisted the urge to shove her hand in her pocket.
“You seem old to not have a husband. Too late now, I suppose. Unfortunate.”
Lia blinked, uncertain she had heard right. “I’m sorry?”
“I know your type,” Lia’s neighbour sniffed, her eyes lingering first on Lia’s heavy backpack and the portfolio bag, and finally on her bare shoulders and the straps of her red sundress tied around her neck.
“My type?” Lia’s patience was wearing thin, and irritation was starting to creep in.
“I don’t want to hear your music. No drugs or booze or parties. No strange men prowling around my door at all hours of the night looking for you.”
“I’ll try to keep the men confined to daylight hours,” Lia replied pleasantly, unable to help herself.
Celeste, who had remained silent through the entire exchange, snorted in laughter before trying to cover it up with a fit of coughing.
The woman’s head snapped around.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Hoffmann.” Celeste composed herself. “How are you doing today?”
Madame Hoffmann gave the woman’s pink hair a hard look, scarlet lips twisting into a sneer. “Degenerate,” she muttered.
Celeste’s phone chimed, and she glanced down at the screen. “Duty calls,” she said, shooting Lia an apologetic glance. “Let me know if you need anything. And welcome to the building.” She pushed herself off the railing and vanished down the stairs, triggering another hysterical tirade of barking.
Lia used the distraction to retreat into her apartment and close the door behind her, abruptly enveloping herself in a stuffy darkness but saving herself from further conversation.
“No wonder you’re angry,” she muttered in the direction of the nude canvas that rested somewhere in front of her. “I’d be angry, too, if I’d lived across from a neighbour like that since 1943.”
She didn’t get an answer.
The air in the apartment was thick with the scent of age and dust, suggesting that the apartment had been unoccupied far longer than the six years Celeste knew about. Lia set her belongings down and let her eyes adjust to the gloom. Deeper in the apartment, on the side that would face the wide, sunny street, faint lines of light were seeping around what Lia surmised must be heavy curtains covering the windows. Enough light to give the suggestion of shapes but not enough for her to see anything clearly.
Carefully, Lia inched forward out of the foyer, past the dim outline of the canvas, and made her way toward the windows. The floor beneath her creaked with each step as if it, too, resented her intrusion. She reached the curtained wall and extended her hand, the tips of her fingers colliding with a heavy fabric that felt like damask. So far, so good. Nothing had jumped out or fallen on her head or run over her toes. She found the edge of the curtain, rings rattling on their rod somewhere above. Without hesitating, she pulled the curtain back.
And regretted it immediately.
As blinding sunlight spilled through the antique panes, thick, choking clouds of dust billowed around her. Lia gagged and coughed, her eyes instantly watering. She fumbled frantically with the latch on the window, relieved beyond measure when it reluctantly gave way. She pushed one of the leaded-glass panels open a crack, ignoring the groan of protest from the hinges, and pressed her face out into the fresh air.
She stayed that way for a good minute, her head stuck out the window, gasping and hacking and trying not to imagine how ridiculous she must look to people passing by down below. Perhaps she should have just left the apartment door wide open. Perhaps she should have sent the charming Madame Hoffmann in first.
Her coughing finally subsiding, Lia took a deep, fortifying breath and straightened, bracing herself for what she might find. She turned slowly away from the window. And discovered that, upon her death, Grandmère had not left Lia an apartment after all.
She’d left Lia a museum.
Dust still swirled but the brilliant light illuminated walls covered in patterned wallpaper the grey-blue of a stormy sky. Dozens of painted landscapes and seascapes in gilded frames were hung on the wall opposite the windows, some capturing images of bucolic country scenes, others freezing ships forever in their quest across the horizon, and each one bursting with saturated color.
In the center of the room, upholstered Louis XV sofas in dust-covered turquoise faced off against each other across a wide Persian rug. A long writing desk bridged the ends of the sofas closest to Lia, and it was against the desk that the tall, nude canvas had been propped, facing the door to greet anyone who entered.
On the back wall adjacent to the windows, an elaborate marble mantelpiece swept over an empty hearth. A bracket had been mounted to the wall high above the fireplace, suggesting that a piece of art had once hung in the tall space, although whatever was once there wasn’t now. And above her head, a chandelier hung in the center of the room, its dripping, dazzling crystals muted only partially by dust.
On unfeeling legs, Lia headed deeper into the apartment. She stopped at a dainty side table at the far end of a sofa and examined a collection of framed photos. With care, she picked up the first and wiped the glass. A young woman had been captured leaning against a light post in front of a jazz club, wearing a silky, beaded dress that clung to each and every curve like a second skin, a fur stole draped carelessly over her shoulders. She held a cigarette holder in one hand, eyes meeting the camera’s lens with smoky, sensual indifference. Lia turned it over. Estelle Allard, Montmartre, 1938 was written in pencil across the back.
Lia swallowed hard.
Though she had been told repeatedly by the estate lawyers that this apartment was the domain of Estelle Allard, Lia realized that she hadn’t truly believed it until right now. She hadn’t truly believed that her grandmother, who had not once in her life mentioned that she had ever travelled to Paris, much less lived here, had kept a secret of this magnitude for this long.
And Lia couldn’t even begin to imagine why she would have done so.
She set the photo back down and examined the second. In this one, the beautiful Estelle was behind the wheel of a low-slung Mercedes, leaning out the window and laughing at the photographer. Her hair was loose over her shoulders, a jaunty hat cocked over one eye. Lia blinked, trying to reconcile these sultry, fearless images with the rigid, reserved woman Lia had known. She failed miserably.
She turned her attention to the last of the photos and frowned. A German officer stared back at her, unsmiling and severe. From his uniform, it was clear that it was an image from the First World War. Lia frowned and turned it over but there was nothing written on the back. She set the photo down and glanced at a pile of magazines stacked beside it.
She slid the top one to the side. The issue beneath, devoid of dust, was easy to read. Signal blazed from the upper left corner in bold red text, the cover beneath dominated by an image of a Nazi soldier with an intense expression. A strip of the same bold red color ran down the spine of the magazine, September 1942 easily visible at the top. Lia snatched her hand away.