Deadly Beloved by Jane Haddam Read Free Book Online Page A

Her hips were beginning to spread a little now that she was racing through middle age. She was content to buy her jeans a couple of sizes larger and let it happen. Spending hundreds of dollars on a dress that would disguise the weight gain seemed so stupid, she had no idea why anyone ever did it. The one thing she did spend money on was her equipment—the cameras and the lenses and the tripods and the lights—but that was different. That was work. Karla Parrish understood absolutely why it was important to spend time and money on her work.
    What she didn’t understand was the attitude of this man behind the registration desk at the George-V. She didn’t even understand what she was doing at the George-V. “Book us a hotel room in Paris,” she had told Evan when they were about to leave Nairobi—and then she had forgotten all about it, because she was tired and dirty and depressed, and the way things were going she wasn’t going to feel any better for weeks. She had just spent four weeks taking pictures in Rwanda, and her head hurt. Her film cases were full of images she didn’t want to see again. Every time she came to rest in a hotel room or a restaurant, she got phone calls from New York. She wanted to go someplace where she didn’t have to listen to anybody talking at her, but she didn’t know where that would be. Home, something in her head kept pounding at her, and that was when it had hit her. Karla Parrish was almost fifty years old and she didn’t have a home. She had a pied-à-terre in Manhattan with a lot of secondhand furniture in it. She had her camera equipment and the clothes in her pack and some books she’d picked up in the airport in London on her way out to Africa. She had this succession of hotel rooms that looked as if it was never going to end: Nairobi to Cairo to Lhasa to Athens to Tokyo to God-knows-where. Some of the hotels had electricity twenty-four hours a day. Some of them had electricity only some of the time. All of them had dust and bugs and heat in spite of their air-conditioning systems and their cheaper-than-cheap maid service.
    The George-V had a lobby that looked like a stage set for a movie about France during the time of Marie Antoinette. The carpet was so plush, Karla felt as if she were swimming in it. The chandeliers were so large and densely packed with crystals, they sounded like factories full of glassware breaking every time there was a slight breeze. Karla saw a woman in a chinchilla coat down to her ankles and another woman walking five overgroomed dogs on silver lamé leashes. Karla could feel the dust in her pores, caked and hardening. Her hair felt so dirty, she wanted to cut it off instead of get it washed.
    The man behind the registration desk was beaming and bouncing in her direction. He came around the counter to where she was standing and took her hand, talking all the time in a rapid-fire French Karla hadn’t a hope in hell of understanding. Karla wouldn’t have understood if he’d spoken in slow French. She had never paid much attention to her language classes.
    Karla let the man take her hand and bow while she smiled back. Then she turned to Evan at her side and raised her eyebrows. Evan was her new assistant, hired less than ten months ago in a fit of craving for organization. This time, Karla had told herself, she was not going to go off for a year in the hinterlands and let her life unravel in the process. She was going to have somebody who would keep track of the bills and the receipts and the travel arrangements and let her keep her mind on her photography. She had put an ad in the Vassar College alumnae magazine, expecting to get a young woman with an itch for travel—and ended up with Evan instead. Vassar was coed these days. It kept slipping Karla’s mind.
    Evan was tall and thin and wore wire-rimmed glasses, the way all the preppie boys did these days. He was also very smart and very eager and close to fluent in French.
    “Evan,” Karla