The Red Brick Cellars: A Tolosa Mystery by R.W. Wallace Read Free Book Online Page A

you not want tea and cake?”
    “That is not the point here,” she hissed.
    “Are you suggesting,” he said in the reasonable voice he used when purposefully pissing off phone salesmen, “that I should have let you order for yourself just because we are no longer married? You would have ordered the exact same thing, but it would have taken twice as long for the waiter.” He threw his hands out to the side and there was the slightest of pauses as if he was going to add something, then changed his mind. “I saved time for everyone.”
    “I sincerely hope,” Catherine said in a calm voice promising a storm to come, “that you were not going to add that I would have had to repeat myself in order for him to understand my accent, and that that was where we would all have saved time.”
    “That is not what I said, mon cœur. ”
    “I am not your heart, your honey, your cabbage, or anything else. I am your ex-wife. With an extra emphasis on the ex .” Her volume had gone up. The man in a suit at the next table glanced up at them from his paper. Catherine attempted another deep breath.
    Max leveled her a half sad puppy and half general-going-to-war stare. “It is not up to you, or the Church, or the Republic to say what you are to me. If I say you are my heart, then you are. You do not have the power to change the fact that I love you.”
    Catherine wasn’t so sure about that, but wasn’t willing to step over the line and do something really stupid only to anger him. Once again, she decided to leave the battlefield, or at least find a different one.
    The waiter arrived with their drinks and the one brownies. Catherine poured milk and sugar in her tea, and stirred. Maxime paid the waiter for both of them. He picked up his lighter, flicked it open, and closed it again. Maxime inherited it when his father passed away two years before. Now, he was never without it and used it to occupy his hands when he wanted something to fiddle with. As far as Catherine knew, he had never used it to light anything. She wasn’t even sure that it had fuel.
    The fact that he paid for her both annoyed and relieved Catherine. She might have money right now, but at the end of the month, she would be in the same fix as the past month. She couldn’t expect a mayor to die and pay for her food on a regular basis. In any case, she needed to get to the point of this meeting, so she let the who-pays-for-what argument go.
    Once they were married, they had bought an old brick house close to the Capitole. For the past year, Max lived in the house and Catherine had found a dingy apartment a little farther out from the city center. They had both shouldered their half of the mortgage and rent combined. Of course, Maxime being a hot shot IT and Agile independent consultant meant that he made about twice as much money as Catherine. So where he had been doing fine financially since their separation, she slowly ate through her savings and learned to live cheap.
    This last month she hit bottom. She maxed out on the allowed overdraft of her bank account, which was why she had ended up going to the mayor’s wake despite being forbidden to write about it. With minus 1000 euros in the bank and not even a crumb to eat at home, she had turned to the generous Pierre Saint-Blancat, who specified in his will that there should be food and dancing at his wake. Somebody had apparently removed the dancing part, but the food remained.
    “I wanted to meet to discuss the selling of our house,” Catherine said, eyes on her tea.
    Maxime winced. “I’d prefer if we could wait a little longer. It really is a buyer’s market these days. The prices aren’t going up. If anything, they’re going down. And we’d need to sell with a profit to gain back the notary fees after only two years.” He set his empty coffee-cup on its saucer.
    Catherine planned to make her tea last for a while. The brownie was delicious, and now the sugar was kicking in. “I don’t care about money