Page 99 of The Shop on Royal Street
He gave me an encouraging smile, his eyes pleading. Reluctantly, I sat down again. “What about Mr.Bingle?” I asked. “Did you ‘borrow’ him, too?”
“Of course. He must have belonged to Louise, because all I got from him was the smells of Christmas and the happy feeling of a childon Christmas morning. I gave it back to you, didn’t I? I thought you could use the happy vibrations from it.”
I quickly opened my backpack and pulled out the clientele book, placing it on the table next to the jewelry box. Then, one by one, I placed the pipe and the tie pin, the pipe rolling over with a small clunk. “Maybe you can tell us who these things belonged to, and why they were locked in the closet of my house.”
She gave us an odd smile. “You’re thinking my husband and Jeanne were having an affair, aren’t you?”
“It seems pretty obvious,” Beau said. “Weren’t they?”
Mimi folded her hands in her lap and smiled. “From the outside, it does seem logical. But there’s nothing logical or natural about any of this. I will tell you everything I know, but I need you to understand that none of it will be easy to hear. And when I’m done, you need to promise that you won’t do the one thing you will feel compelled to do.”
“I can’t promise you anything right now, Mimi. You’ve kept me in the dark my whole life and I don’t know why. And if Jeanne and Grandfather and all of the rest of it are somehow connected to Sunny, I want—need—to know everything. And then you will have to trust me to make my own decisions.”
Mimi’s unusual eyes settled on me. “What about you, Nola? Are you willing for Beau to risk his life? And yours?”
My hands shook, my nerves jumping across my skin. I turned and met Beau’s gaze. “Look, this all sounds very dramatic. Can you just tell us what you know and let us decide for ourselves?”
Mimi took a deep breath, then settled back into the chaise. “All right. Charles did love Jeanne. But not like that. He loved her like a daughter. He was the family doctor, and it became clear, not long after he took over the practice from their old doctor, that Jeanne’s feelings for Charles weren’t those of a daughter for a father.
“He used to laugh about it, tell me how she would flirt so outrageously with him, and how she would try to shock him by deliberately taking off her clothes when she came to see him for a sore throat. She would also tell him... confidences... that he wouldn’t share withme, saying they were too personal. But I knew they upset him.” Her chest rose and fell. “I can’t tell you how much I later wished that I had forced him to tell me. Because then everything would have been different.”
“Everything?” Beau asked.
Mimi nodded. “Jeanne was my best friend. She was the one who introduced me to Charles. I actually loved that they were friends. I had such dreams of Charles and me and Jeanne and Angelo being friends forever. Raising our children and spending holidays together. I was so young and naïve.
“For the record, I had no idea Jeanne was pregnant. I know she and Angelo were not sleeping together. She said she wasn’t attracted to him ‘that way,’ that she liked older men. Someone more mature. She was so much more worldly than I was, so I assumed she must have met someone at Maison Blanche, but she never mentioned anyone.
“I was devastated when she was murdered, and I believed along with everyone else that it had been a random murder. And I continued to believe that until 1997.”
I sat up, the year ringing a bell in my memory, but I didn’t know why.
“That’s the year that they began remodeling the upper floors of the Maison Blanche building to convert them to the Ritz Hotel,” Beau said, his voice almost a monotone. “When my grandfather had to move his medical office, and a lot of architectural and other remnants were either discarded, scavenged, or sold.”
My eyes widened. “And that’s where my door came from. But how?”
Mimi nodded. “Because it had a connection to my husband’s office, I wanted to reuse it as the door for my storage room at the Past Is Never Past.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I sent my son, Buddy, to go retrieve it since I knew it was too heavy for me and he had a truck.” She pressed her lips together. “I can’t tell you how many times I wish I had gone, because then I would have known to never allow that thing anywhere near me.”
Beau leaned toward her. “Let me get you some water.”
She shook her head. “No. Because if I stop, I don’t think I’ll have the courage to start again.”
Beau stood and took the box from her and replaced it on the table before sitting next to her on the chaise. He placed her hand in his.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He put the door in the back room at the shop. He and Adele were there when I went to go see it. The door was already ‘speaking’ to Buddy, and he was exhausted from fighting it, so I knew that whatever it wanted to tell us was powerful. I wish I could go back in time and leave that damned door where it was and allow it to be consigned to a dump.” She shook her head. “But we didn’t. And Adele and Buddy were there to witness me laying my hands on it.”
She pressed her forehead into Beau’s shoulder as his arm went around her. “Please stop, Mimi. If this is too hard...”
She straightened, took a deep breath. “It’s time. I’ve been holding on to this for too long. I need to let it go.”
Unable to sit and watch Mimi struggle without helping, I left the room to get a cup of water from the bathroom next door. Mimi took it gratefully.
“What did you see?” I asked gently.
