Marisa Carroll - Hotel Marchand 09 by Her Summer Lover Read Free Book Online Page A

flat-screen TV that looked out of place on the drum table where it was sitting. The walls were papered in a faded rose print, covered in landscapes and amateurish still lifes, juxtaposed with fretwork shelves packed chockablock with all manner of glassware and china figurines.
    It was all so familiar, and yet sadly empty without Maude’s bustling presence. Sophie sat down on the edge of the sagging chintz sofa and covered her face with her hands, the tears she’d felt burning at the back of her eyelids all afternoon spilling over at last. “Goodbye, Nana,” she whispered into the quiet. “I’ll miss you, and so will Grandma Darlene.”
    She had spent so many happy times with Maude when she was younger. Sophie was an only child. Her parents were successful, driven people, her mother now a state district court judge, her father head of the prestigious fund-raising firm of Clarkson and Hillman. Her grandmother was a loving woman, but with a full and busy life of her own that left little time for playing dolls and dress-up with a sometimes lonely little girl.
    But it hadn’t been that way when she’d visited Maude in Indigo. There were always vintage clothes in the storage area of Past Perfect to play dress-up in, and bedraggled baby dolls to clean up and bedeck in the yellowing doll clothes that had belonged to Maude herself. She had had summer friends to go on bike rides with along the bayou, swimming in the pool the town had built in the river park, ice-cream cones and ice-cold watermelon slices at the church festivals that went on almost every weekend…and then the summer she turned eighteen…Alain.
    She remembered him as he had been in those days, thin and gangly, his big hands dangling from skinny arms, his hair long and slightly shaggy, the way all the boys were wearing it then, his nose too big for his face. He didn’t look like that anymore. He’d grown into his body and his nose. He was harder and stronger…and she wasn’t going to think about him anymore.
    Suiting action to thoughts, she stood up and walked down the hallway toward the kitchen, peeking into the room that was always hers when she stayed with Maude. Nothing had changed since her last visit, the familiar pale-yellow wallpaper festooned with purple honeysuckle, the colors faded a tiny bit more than they’d been in the spring, the muted blues and reds of the Oriental carpet, the same walnut armoire and dressing table, the same white candlewick spread on the squeaky iron bedstead and lace curtains at the window.
    She went across the hall to stand in the doorway of Maude’s bedroom. The bed, with its antique wedding-ring quilt, was neatly made, her chenille robe, the same one she’d been wearing as long as Sophie could remember, folded at the end of the bed, her slippers peeping out from beneath the coverlet. Her friends had taken care to make it look as if she’d just stepped out of the room, not left it forever.
    The kitchen, spanning the width of the narrow house, as the living room did, was just as she remembered it, too. Chrome table and chairs, white-painted, glass-front cupboards and scrubbed pine counters and the collection of china hen-and-rooster salt and pepper shakers on the windowsill above the sink. Surely she didn’t have to start dismantling the bits and pieces of Maude’s life right this minute? Tomorrow or the next day would be soon enough. She left the house, locking the door softly behind her. She swallowed hard to dislodge the lump in her throat.
    The house could wait until she was ready, but Past Perfect was a different matter. It was a viable business concern and she needed to make arrangements for someone to run it until it could be sold. She decided to leave her car where it was and walk the two blocks to the town square. The open grassy area was dotted with huge live oak trees and bisected by brick walkways. A statue of a confederate soldier stood at their intersection. On the statue’s cracked marble base, the