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

names of the Indigo boys who had died in the Civil War were inscribed. First on the list was Alexandre Valois, who had built the opera house and whose widow had paid for the monument. The were also a Robichaux, two Picards, Maude’s great-grandfather and a cousin, and several Boudreauxs, members of Alain’s family.
    She smiled. It pleased her that she remembered at least a few of the bits and pieces of Indigo history that Maude had told her over the years. One or two people passed by and nodded pleasantly, trying politely not to stare too hard. Sophie nodded back, recognizing them from the wake and the funeral, but her attention remained focused on the opera house.
    The building needed painting she realized as she drew closer, and Marjolaine and Hugh Prejean, the old gentleman she’d spoken to at the wake, were right, the roof did need work. She could see half a dozen places where the shingles were missing just from where she stood. The almost simultaneous blows of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita a couple of years earlier had damaged the old structure even more than the occupation of Union soldiers had.
    Sophie turned the heavy key that had been among the items in Maude’s purse in the lock and opened one of the big double doors. Once more the scents of lavender and old leather and dust tickled her nostrils, but this time her sorrow was mixed with happiness. She had always loved Past Perfect. The summer she had been so madly in love with Alain, she had imagined herself living in Indigo and working with her godmother among all these mementos of a bygone day.
    Of course, when she’d gotten home to Houston, her mother had disabused her of that notion pretty quickly. And even if she’d had the courage to stand up for herself, Alain’s short, curt letter breaking off their secret engagement because he had decided to enter the army to earn money for college had put an end to her girlish fantasies.
    At least until that other summer, the short window of time after her divorce when she’d thought they might find that lost love again, before Alain’s pregnant wife had discovered them in each other’s arms.
    In this very building.
    The bell above the door jingled a greeting as she stepped inside. Past Perfect’s showroom occupied the lobby of the opera house, a space twice as long as it was deep. The counter, a relic of a demolished Memphis department store, stood directly in front of the tall, carved double doors that led into the auditorium.
    That brought her up short for a moment, but she shook off the shiver of embarrassment and remorse. She didn’t have to go into the storage area with its raised stage and two tiny bow-fronted boxes high on the wall—not yet, not unless she wanted to. Eventually she would—sometime when she wasn’t thinking about Alain, but of what a treasure trove of make-believe the opera house had been for a young girl. The narrow stairs to the boxes had been steep and a little scary to climb, but when she was up there looking down, her imagination had had no trouble at all turning the creaky wooden folding chair on which she perched into a velvet and gilt one. She’d populated the shabby seats below with beautiful ladies in hoop skirts and dashing gentlemen in gray uniforms with plumed hats and swords at their sides, hearing voices and music in her head that had once brought the empty space to life. Those were the memories she’d keep in her thoughts when she did venture inside.
    She wandered farther into the jumble of furniture and knickknacks, realizing as she always did that her godmother’s seemingly haphazard arrangement of merchandise actually facilitated the flow of customer traffic, leading them eventually to the assortment of antebellum Indigo souvenirs, candles and personal care products, with their generous markups, that brought her a good deal of income from less-than-enthusiastic antiquers and tourists who might otherwise leave the premises without taking out their wallets and credit