Deadly Beloved by Jane Haddam Read Free Book Online Page B

whispered, leaning back so that he could hear her. “What is going on here?”
    Evan rubbed his soft hands together and blinked. “Monsieur Gaudet is welcoming the famous Karla Parrish to Paris.”
    “The famous Karla Parrish?”
    Evan reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out a magazine. His shoulder bag was an expensive piece from Mark Cross, given to him by his mother when he got this job with Karla. Evan’s mother was an oncologist in Grosse Pointe.
    The magazine Evan handed to Karla was a copy of Paris-Match . The cover photo was a black-and-white of a refugee camp in Zaire. Karla checked it out critically and decided that she had blurred the print a little in the bottom left-hand corner. She hated developing on the road. She never got the effects she wanted unless she had days to work at them.
    “They put my photograph on the cover,” she said. “That’s good.”
    “Page twelve,” Evan said.
    Karla opened to page twelve. There was a photograph of her there—a terrible photograph, she thought, taken at the worst possible moment in an airport somewhere, with her hair coming out of its pins and her eyes drooping. She looked down the column of print and found her name in bold-faced type halfway to the bottom of the page. This seemed to be some kind of gossip column. She handed the magazine back to Evan.
    “I don’t get it,” she said.
    Evan put the magazine back in his shoulder bag. “You could be bigger than Annie Liebowitz,” he said solemnly, “if you paid a little more attention to your image.”
    “I don’t think Annie Liebowitz pays attention to her image.”
    “Annie Liebowitz lived with the Rolling Stones for a year. You live with refugees in central Africa. It’s a different situation.”
    “It’s my situation.”
    The man from behind the desk had summoned a bellhop. The bellhop took Karla’s backpack out of her hands with all the seriousness he would have brought to the luggage of the Pope. Karla felt like an idiot.
    “It’s a question of knowing what to do and where to do it,” Evan said judiciously. “I got you in every gossip column in France practically, and I set up an interview with a man from People magazine. He’ll be here the day after tomorrow. And after that you’re going back to the United States for a month.”
    “Am I really? Evan, for Christ’s sake. You can’t just rearrange my life that way.”
    “You don’t have anything else to do for the next six weeks,” Evan pointed out. “You were the one who said you wanted to be calm for a while.”
    “I was thinking of taking a vacation in the south of Spain. I always take my vacations in the south of Spain.”
    “From what I can figure out looking through your records, you haven’t taken a vacation in twelve years. I got you a three-day visiting-artist thing at the University of Pennsylvania. Two lectures. Three seminars. One dinner.” Evan pawed through his shoulder bag and came up with a folded piece of paper. He handed it over to her and said, “I tried for Yale and I tried for Brown, but they’re going to have to wait. You’re going to have to let me work on your reputation for a while.”
    “My reputation is the best in the business,” Karla said automatically, but she was looking over the letter from the University of Pennsylvania, half mesmerized by the engraved college seal at the top of the page. “Ambitious,” like “successful,” was not a word she would have applied to herself. It evoked images of blue-suited armies marching out the door of the Harvard Business School, each of the women wearing two-and-a-half-inch stack-heeled pumps. What else was this, though, if not ambition? She could see herself, standing at the front of a classroom full of teenagers, talking about a slide she had projected high up on a classroom wall. She felt Evan’s eyes on her and looked up to find him staring. She blushed hot red and handed the letter back.
    “You’ll like doing it,” Evan said. “You’ll see.