‘I had an inkling. And my heart, my soft squishy heart, hoped for the best for you. And my suspicions were correct, were they not? You’ve unlocked a secret library, an office hidden for however long, and now you can share it with the ink drinker next door, and leave your poor overburdened cousin out of exclaiming about every word you unearth here. While you’re doing that, I’ll get back to doing menial labour.’
‘I see what you’re doing, Manon, and it isn’t going to work. Don’t forget, I’m a romance writer’ – suffering from crippling writer’s block, but still – ‘I can see a forced proximity ploy a mile away. This suite is a delightful, delicious literary mystery. Or it might well turn out to contain the mutterings of a reclusive woman who despised people and preferred to live out her days holed up in L’Hotel du Parc and, honestly, I can relate. But you putting Noah in my way isn’t going unnoticed. And can’t you see it’s having the opposite effect? Did you hear the way he said he would read anything? As if a book written by me would be… tedious but doable, because he’s so book smart and well read or something. Urgh, the man is pretentious.’
Manon takes a seat at the desk. ‘How is that pretentious? I took it to mean he’ll give any genre a go.’
‘You’re clearly not familiar with anti-romance bias. I am, and I can detect it a mile away. Men like Noah hate the fact that women write empowering stories where heroines take the lead and win against the ways in which they’re often oppressed.’
‘Not this oppression talk again.’ She groans and makes a show of dropping her head on the desk when there’s a clunk. ‘Aie! That hurt.’ Manon rubs her forehead while I move thestacks of papers to see what left a bump the size of a grape on her brow.
‘Ooh la lait’s a typewriter!’ I practically hip and shoulder Manon from the chair so I can inspect it up close. It has a gold MAP logo and is an exquisite piece of history. ‘There’s a sheet of paper in the reel!’
‘What does it say?’
Keep my soul in peace. Keep my last manuscript safe.
A shiver runs through the length of me and, for some strange and possibly stupid reason, I wish Noah was here to see this.
Manon’s eyes sparkle with sudden interest. ‘Her last words?’
‘It certainly sounds like it. And someone, maybe the affluent family who owned the hotel through the generations, preserved the two suites, just as they were. Actively went to great lengths to hide them. Why? Do you think they were honouring her wishes? The way she wrote she was relieved to be finished with the pseudonymandhad escaped her husband, as if both things were mutually exclusive, is odd to me. I’d like to find out more about that.’
‘Oui, it does have an air of finality about it. Like she ran from an evil man, maybe?’ Manon leans against one of the bookshelves and spins a sepia-tinted world globe.
‘If the rumours Noah heard are correct, she lived here in the twenties, until… when? Her death? And for all that time, this secret library has been left alone? It can’t be. Let’s see if we can find anything online about L’Hotel du Parc’s history. There might be old photographs archived somewhere. We might even be able to find photos of what these suites looked like originally.’
‘Ooh, good idea. Let’s look on the laptop.’ I take a few of the notebooks from the desk to read later and hope to find clues on who our mystery guest was. We lock the door as we go.
In my suite, we sit together and look for any history about the hotel online but find nothing that fits with our mystery.
How has this secret been kept all this time? ‘I wonder if we can find out the name of the family who owned the hotel before the previous hotelier?’
‘Sure we can. We can even get on the dark web if you want?’
‘What!Non.’ My cousin has many a talent; if only she’d use them for good. Manon is a tech wizard, a gift that could essentially set her up for life, but, like with everything, she only uses this talent when it suits her.
With a few keystrokes, Manon has the sales history of the hotel, which is rather sparse; there’s the Toussaint family, the previous owner, and then me.
‘Toussaint?’ she says. ‘Why does that name ring a bell?’
I gasp when it comes to me. ‘The paintings in suite twenty! L. L. Toussaint!’
‘So do we think that our writer is L. L. Toussaint?’
I contemplate it. ‘Could be. So she wrote and painted? But wait… If she left her husband and came here under an assumed name, wouldn’t her family here think that strange? And if shewashiding from her husband, wouldn’t he look here first, at her family’s hotel?’
‘Oui, it doesn’t fit, does it?’
‘Non.Even if she did in fact “escape” her husband for whatever reason, surely her family here would have protected her from him. They were obviously wealthy by the standard of items in suite twenty, so it’s not as if they couldn’t support emotionally as well as financially.’
Manon fidgets with the hem of her jumper. ‘Not all of the items in room twenty were of the same quality though. There were some very plain dresses, made from coarse material. And there is a bed in each suite, leading me to believe there are two different people in this story.’
‘But we didn’t find any clothing in suite nineteen. It’s a library, an office. Writers take naps, it’s part of the process, so maybe that’s why there’s a bed in there.’
‘Hmm. Maybe. Do you think Francois-Xavier heard the rumours and that’s why he was so hellbent on buying this place? Hoping to find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?’
‘No way. If he had half a suspicion there was a secret library, or the potential of a forgotten manuscript, possibly writing that is valuable, he’d have kept this in the divorce. He would have ripped this place apart to find it and sold whatever he could to the highest bidder.’
Manon’s eyes open wide. ‘Youcould do that, Anais. What if we found her last manuscript like they did with Harper Lee’sGo Set a Watchman?’
