Another glass of Kir is deposited on the bar and Manon motions to Noah that it’s for him. He gives her an easy smile and takes a sip, pressing his lips together. She’s trying to drag this confrontation out for her own amusement.
Noah continues, in a softer tone, ‘I often open the bar during the day for various literary events, so I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from, but it’s wrong.’
‘I got the information from your website.’
His shoulders stiffen as if I’ve won a point. I could get used to one-upping him. And all men. ‘I update the website when I can, but not every event is advertised on there. I’d prefer if you check in with me and ask what I’ve got on and we can come to an arrangement that way.’
My eyebrows shoot up. ‘You want me to run our schedule past you every day? And then what? You’ll tell my builder no? I’m on a timeline, and JP has other projects too. We can’t delay simply because you say so.’
‘We can compromise.’ What Noah’s saying by ‘compromise’ is me stopping all tradespeople whenever he sees fit. How is that fair?
‘This is me compromising. I’ll be mindful of your patrons when you have events, but you can’t expect I’m going to kowtow every time you have an issue. I have to fix my desolate hotel,non?’
‘Fine.’ He lets out a long, weary gas-lighter sigh. ‘I have something for you.’
‘Oh?’ A list of handwritten rules? An invoice for cleaning my windows?
He takes a key from his pocket. ‘I found this behind the hotel a few months back. I presume it’s for one of the rooms in L’Hotel du Parc?’
I gasp and take the rusty antique key from the palm of his hand. ‘It could be for suite nineteen!’
Noah shrugs. It’s a completely different shape from the other suite keys, which were updated at some point. While the patina of this key has suffered being exposed to the elements, it’s also clearly from another era. It might just be a coincidence and not the missing key in question, but there’s a weight, a heft, to it. Inexplicably, it feels special. What lies behind the door of suite nineteen?
‘The secret room might finally be revealed!’ Manon says.
‘Secret room?’ Noah queries.
I shoot Manon a warning look. Would Noah know anything about the room, or what it contains, from his friendship with the former owner? Do I dare tell him? I decide to risk it in case the previous hotelier shared anything with Noah that may be helpful to us.
‘On the third floor, a heavy mirror fell, leaving a head-size hole in the plaster. Sealed behind that wall are two suites: nineteen, which is locked tight, and twenty, which is unlocked.The locksmith refused to toy with the lock itself in case he damaged it. Not being able to see what’s in there adds to the intrigue, I guess.’
Noah scratches his chin. ‘Ah. I take it you never heard the rumours then?’
Manon sits up straighter on her barstool. ‘What rumours?’
‘It might just be one of those stories that gets exaggerated with each retelling, but there have always been whispers that a famous writer once lived in L’Hotel du Parc, though no one could ever confirm who it was. The previous hotelier said he’d searched every inch of the place but couldn’t find evidence of such a thing, though he still believed it.’
A rush of blood to the head makes me woozy, but I press him for more details. ‘When did he think the writer lived there?’
‘Oh, this is going back to the 1920s or ’30s.’
My eyebrows shoot up. ‘Really?’ The timeline fits with the belongings we found in suite twenty, which were of that era.
Noah grins and it transforms his features from gruff to pleasant. ‘Really.’
It’s so strange to think of a mystery as great as this as I sit on Hemingway’s barstool in a restaurant that it’s rumoured he wrote part ofThe Sun Also Risesin.
‘So, this writer holed up at L’Hotel du Parc? Like a Coco Chanel situation?’ It’s well known that Coco Chanel moved into suite 302 in The Ritz in 1937 and lived there for over thirty years until her death. It’s awe-inspiring to think of the sumptuous hotel being called home to a famous fashion designer for all that time. Now her suite costs around forty thousand euros per night, a price tag that puts most of us out of contention. Still, I’d love to see it one day.
‘Well, Coco residing in The Ritz was never a secret. Whereas details about this mysterious writer staying at the hotel are sketchy. It’s said she was a reclusive for some reason. It could bea rumour perpetuated over time, who knows, but I like to think that there must be some truth to it. The way the hotelier spun the story was that the writer assumed another name when they moved into the hotel, so perhaps no one knew their real identity.’
‘But how did the previous hotelier know that but not any further details?’
‘That’s just it, it could all be gossip. But he believed it enough he searched his own hotel inside and out. L’Hotel du Parc was owned by generations of the same family until he bought it in the seventies and remodelled.’
‘So he’s to blame for the atrocious colour scheme,’ Manon pipes up.
I ignore her jibe and ask, ‘Were they an affluent family?’ The belongings in suite twenty were rich and lustrous, with a few house clothes that had more humble origins.
