Chapter Seven
The chandelier in the lobby of the hotel was brass and crystal, with small light bulbs shaped like candle flames. Half the bulbs were missing. The brass had turned black. And most of the crystals were in a box on the floor.
I looked over at Claudine. “This,” I said emphatically, “was not in my contract.”
She smiled. “No. Marie Claude and Colin are going to take the rest of the crystals down, scrub them clean, polish the brass, replace the bulbs, and put all the crystals back.”
“I thought Eliot was her partner in crime.”
She made a face. “I think Eliot is not as enthusiastic about helping out as he once was. Besides, Colin is perfect for something as tedious as this.”
I sighed. “When do you think they’ll be finished? July?”
She laughed. “You have so little faith, Lucy. It will only take a few days.”
I looked back up toward the chandelier. “Who’s going to stand on the ladder for all that time?”
She shook her head. “Ah, no. Nothing so difficult. There is a mechanism that lowers the whole thing down for cleaning. In the office. I’ll show you.”
I followed her down the corridor and into the office. I hadn’t been in there more than once or twice since I’d arrived, because it was just another outdated mess that I was going to have to clean, update, and improve without any money.
The office was long and narrow, with frosted windows on two opposite walls to let in the light from the corridor on one side, and the salon on the other. Two large wooden desks were pushed against the back wall. On one of them, there was a desktop computer, so old I knew that if I powered it up, I’d get a flashing C: prompt. There was not a printer in sight, nor a fax machine, not even a phone. There was a large safe, looking about a hundred years old, open and empty. And there were boxes everywhere, stacks of papers, and yellowed manila folders crammed in the bookcase.
I’d been having nightmares about this office intermittently since the last time I’d peeked in, about two weeks ago.
Claudine moved a few boxes from in front of a narrow door in the corner and opened it. There was a handle sticking out of the wall, and she cranked it slowly. I could hear the creak of metal against metal, and I went back out to the lobby to watch as the entire chandelier lowered itself slowly until it stopped three feet from the marble-tiled floor.
I couldn’t help myself. I felt a grin. “That is so cool,” I called to Claudine.
She walked up beside me and sighed. “I know. It was my job, as a child, to dust the crystals. My father lowered this once a month, and I used a feather duster to clean it. Now, we will need a good soak with ammonia, and it will be back to its glorious self.”
I nodded, still smiling. The lobby looked perfect. We had primed and painted the walls and trim, scrubbed and polished the marble floor, waxed the long mahogany counter, and dusted every pigeonhole behind it. We had moved the library table into what had become—quite successfully—the guest office space. It now served as a desk, pushed against a freshly painted wall, across from a small and quite lovely bookcase where, I envisioned, we would have guidebooks and brochures available for our guests.
“Urns with palm trees,” I said, waving at the double front doors in their creamy new paint. “And art on the walls. A cluster of chairs with a few tables, and maybe a few more chairs on either side of the salon doors. And ferns in pretty pots. I love ferns. I think that’s all we’ll need.”
“All doable,” she said. “Easily.”
I stepped back and looked into the office. “Listen, Claudine…”
She followed my gaze. “I know. It is a disaster.”
“We’re going to need all sorts of stuff. At least two desktops, a printer—”
She waved a hand, cutting me off. “We already have all of that. In my office in town. I’ve sold it, you know. The practice. Well, the client list, anyway. But all the office equipment, including desks and chairs that were manufactured in this century, are mine. We will be officially closing the office the first of June, and then we will bring everything here.”
The relief was so intense I could have kissed her. I’d kept my mouth shut about so many things over the past few weeks, mainly because it was painfully clear that money was a real issue. Other than making sure I knew there were very limited funds, she never talked about money. She had shown me a budget, a simple spreadsheet with a list of items and amounts in euros. But I did not have a copy, and I was sure it was not accurate, which made me uncomfortable.
One of the reasons Tony so efficiently cleaned out all the accounts at The Fielding was because he had, in the nine months before his abrupt departure, slowly steered me away from the financial side of the business. He had claimed that I had too many other responsibilities, especially since he had allegedly been planning a second hotel in Miami, and I had been meeting with architects and schmoozing investors. I still saw the daily sheets, of course, but had stopped receiving monthly reports from the accountant. When Tony left, I had no idea how much money had been slowly building in accounts that had been earmarked for the new hotel. When I found how much had been involved, I was stunned. Millions of dollars for the development of the Miami project had vanished, along with everything in the operating accounts, the pension fund, and the reserve.
I was sure Claudine was not sitting on anything even close to that kind of money. And I was also sure that she would start selling body parts to realize her dream of reopening Hotel Paradis if that’s what it took. But I was still uneasy when she made it quite clear that the money side of the business was hers and hers alone.
I walked back into the office and pulled a manila folder from the bookcase and opened it up. The paper inside was so old it crumbled. I was holding a sheaf for registration sheets, with the fleur-de-lis logo of Hotel Paradis on the top and the ornately printed sheets filled in by hand. The date was September 23, 1938.
I glanced up at her. “All of these go back this far?” I asked, incredulous.
She took the folder from my hands and read the top sheet, then turned it over carefully. “They never opened the hotel back up after the war. We just lived here, surrounded by empty rooms and echoes. I suppose we can get rid of all this now.”
I shook my head. “No. We can frame these. We’ll put an old registration in each of the rooms. This is history. We can’t just throw it away.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Are you going through all these? Because we still have serious work to do.”
She was right. In the seven weeks I’d been there, we had completely redone the ground-floor guests’ rooms, the salon, the office space, and, once the chandelier was cleaned, the lobby.
After going through the rooms of Hotel Paradis, we were like a well-oiled machine. Bing, Colin, and I had done most of that work; Bing did the ceilings, I did the walls, and Colin came in last to do all the trim. Karl helped by coming in after we were done and cleaning all the drips and smudges and polishing the tall windows until they sparkled. Marie Claude and Eliot had finished with the furniture. Eliot seemed to have dropped away from work around the hotel, but Marie Claude happily stepped in wherever she was needed.
We had moved up to the first floor. Raoul was three rooms ahead of us, working his way through the building, patching plaster and replacing broken molding, and all I could think about was his finishing all the repair work so we could give him a brush and roller. Vera had produced yards of drapery, styled like opera house curtains, which could hang straight to the floor, puddling softly, or could be drawn up with a single tug of the cord to open, revealing cleaned and sparkling portes-fenêtres. She had insisted on organza, rather than linen, and the final effect was perfectly sheer and luxurious.
But more than half the rooms were uninhabitable.
Claudine cleared her throat. “I’m thinking about calling in a few favors with a journalist or two. Get some local press about the renovation and the reopening.”
I brushed the dust of the crumbling paper from my hands. “Do you have an opening date in mind?”
“July 1.”
I mentally went over the most recent timeline I’d created. It was the fifth timeline I’d sweated over in as many weeks. July 1 was a few weeks ahead of my projections but was not unreasonable. “That’s less than two months,” I said slowly.
She nodded. “I know, but look how far we’ve come. Can the website be up and running next week?”
Ah, the website. It was a real thing now, with a registered domain name, an email address, and a URL that opened to a landing page, complete with a full-color photo of a stately mansion that I’d lifted from Google images.
“No. We don’t have anything in the way of pictures, Claudine. Just a few rooms are finished, and we don’t have them completely styled. The salon looks fine, and the lobby will be ready as soon as Marie Claude and Colin finish, but the courtyard is still a mess. I don’t even have a good picture of the front of the hotel.”
She pursed her lips. “Colin has finished with the front gate,” she said.
“Yes, and that looks terrific, but we can’t photograph the front gate without also photographing the courtyard and the front facade of the hotel. It’s a problem.”
“What do we need in the courtyard?” she asked.
I leaned against the doorjamb. “I wanted to pressure wash the whole courtyard. Just to blast away some of the grime and moss.”
She nodded. “That’s not grime. That’s patina. And moss conveys graceful aging.”
I grinned at her. “If you say so.”
“I do. What else?”
“All the urns in front need to be filled. Palms with trailing vines, maybe? Or ferns? The front windows need to be repaired and cleaned and drapes put up in all the windows. The outside of the door needs to be repainted, and all the exterior trim.”
She made a face. “That’s a lot.”
“Yep. I think it’s too soon for photos.”
“But we need to start getting the word out. You know that, as of July 1, the whole of Europe goes on vacation. We need to grab some of that trade. And when do people in the US go on vacation? Summers, right?”
“Yes. But we need somewhere to download the software we’re going to use. I can’t use my laptop, and—”
“I’ll get something from work this week and see what we can get going.”
I had found free, open-source hotel management software. Who knew? The Fielding had the best software money could buy, sophisticated and complex, with customer support for the smallest of glitches available to us around the clock. I was surprised to find free options out there for smaller hotels and decided which one would work best for us, but without any workstations, it was a moot point.
“We need to finish off the rooms that are done. What about artwork? And your rugs?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes. I’ll get them here. We can dress the rooms we have.”
We spoke in French, and I was surprised how naturally the language came to me now. I spoke English to Colin and Bing, but the rest of my day, surrounded by French-speaking natives, had tuned my ear and quickened my tongue. No one would mistake me for a natural-born French speaker, but no one cringed at my accent, either.
Claudine narrowed her eyes, and I recognized that as a sign she was thinking hard. “I know someone who can get us greenery,” she said slowly. “Very cheaply.”
“Cheap is good,” I said, wondering if I should question her further, but decided against it. Claudine had a way of producing things we needed without receipts or even packaging. She had miraculously produced keyless locks for all the doors, the kind that opened with the swipe of a card, but had presented them, a whole two dozen, jumbled together in a cardboard box. Raoul had installed them, and I had had to scan the internet for instructions on how to program them.
I nodded. “And art. And rugs. And anything else you may have stored away.”
“I’ll make the calls,” she said. “Maybe two weeks? If I can get you plants? And everything else? Then we can take pictures for the website?”
I looked at her. “We shouldn’t be taking these pictures on an iPhone,” I told her.
She nodded. “I have a client. No worries.” I wondered what kind of deal she would make as I remembered the accommodating electrician.
There was a clatter in the lobby, and I looked to see Marie Claude, in faded overalls, and Colin, in his uniform khaki pants and denim shirt, standing next to the chandelier. Claudine hurried over to them.
“Perfect,” she crowed. “Just in time. Let’s get a few buckets, and I’ll show you what to do.”
Marie Claude nodded and, seeing me, gave me a broad smile. She was a delightful young woman, sweet and very smart, and I liked her. Her husband, Eliot, not so much. As Bing had said, he was very dull, slow to join in conversation, and never sat with the rest of us when we gathered in the garden in the evenings. I didn’t know what she saw in him, but I had long ago lost any right to pass judgment on romantic relationships, being such a dismal failure at my own.
I looked back into the office. I’d need garbage bins, plastic bags, a broom.…
I sighed and started to work.
There was a knock on my door, just loud enough to wake me out of a sound sleep. I glanced at my phone. Just after five in the morning. The knock came again, and I hurried out of bed and looked out the window.
There was a flatbed truck in the courtyard, and Claudine was standing at my door.
I opened the door. “What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”
She jerked her head toward the truck. “We need to unload. Can you help?”
I nodded, shut the door, and hastily threw on jeans and a sweatshirt. Unload what?
The truck had moved up closer to the hotel, and the back panel was down, and I saw that it was filled with greens: palm trees, potted ferns, cardboard boxes with all sorts of vines spilling over the top. I ran up to the back of the truck.
There were two men pulling items from the truck bed and handing them to Karl, Claudine, and now me. No one said a word, and in the semidarkness, I really couldn’t see what we were off-loading, except that there was a lot of it and there was spilled dirt everywhere. It took us several minutes to empty the back of the truck. Then, the two men jumped down, turned the truck around, and drove out of the courtyard. Claudine followed, closing the gate behind them.
There were all the plants I’d mentioned to Claudine earlier in the week, as well as additions that Karl had brought me later. Obviously, Claudine had made an extensive list of plantings and had placed an order with a local nursery or landscaping company.
But as I looked closer, I realized that none of the items looked like they had come from a nursery. The palm trees were in very attractive and expensive ceramic pots, but none of them matched. The same with the ferns. I poked into one of the cardboard boxes, filled with traditional ivy, and saw that there were leaves, roots, and dirt, but no pots. As though they had been just dug out of the ground and …
“Claudine?” I called. “Where did all of this come from? Were those men from a nursery?”
Claudine and Karl exchanged a glance. “Not exactly,” she said.
“These pots? I mean, they’re very nice, but why aren’t these palm trees in plain black plastic pots? These all look like they came off somebody’s front porch.”
Karl began to whistle tunelessly between his teeth.
I stared at Claudine. “Where’s the invoice?”
She picked up a large potted palm tree and hoisted it onto her hip. “There is no invoice,” she said shortly. “Can you get the door for me?”
I hurried ahead and opened the front door and watched as she placed the palm tree next to the door to the salon.
“Are you going to help me or not?” she asked somewhat crossly as she went back outside.
“Where did all this come from?” I asked again, even as I lifted another palm with both hands and followed her back to the foyer.
“Over by the stairs, I think,” she said.
I set the palm down carefully. It was thick and healthy, with delicate leaves as tall as I was, in a lovely emerald-green pot.
Back outside, Karl had taken the ferns from their variety of pots and had replanted the first of them in one of the cast-iron urns. He lifted a green-and-white vine from another box, shaking the dirt from the roots, and, with a small trowel, dug in the vine into the dirt at the base of the fern.
“Isn’t this beautiful?” he asked. “It’s variegated plectranthus. Good in sun or shade. These should do well, don’t you think?”
Claudine handed me another palm tree. “In the salon,” she said, giving me a small push.
I trotted through to the salon and set it down near the door to the outside patio. The sun was stronger now, and I could see where we had scattered iron tables and chairs around. We could put a few palms out there as well, along with flowering annuals, since we suddenly seemed to be enjoying a wealth of green plants. In fact, we practically had an entire greenhouse’s worth.
Claudine carried in another palm, set it on the other side of the salon door, and made a face. “I wish those pots matched,” she groused. “We may have to buy something…”
She hurried out, and I was right behind her.
“Claudine, stop. What do you mean, ‘buy something’? Didn’t you buy all of this?”
She shrugged. “Well, I paid money, that’s for sure. I had to give Stefan fifty euros.”
“For what?” I asked.
She gave me another potted palm tree. “Acquisition fee. Put this in the salon, too? Maybe by the new hallway to the office?”
“You’re not going to give me a straight answer, are you?”
She rolled her eyes. “Stefan is a client of mine, and he provided a service, and now we have lots of beautiful green plants, just like you wanted. Can’t you just say, ‘Thank you’?” She went through the front doors.
Karl was working on the second urn, and I had to admit it looked lovely. The fern was thick and dark green, and he’d planted a tall, pale grass behind it; the green-and-white vine spilled over the edge of the pot and trailed almost to the ground. There were several more of the large cast-iron urns, and I saw that he had more than enough to fill them. They were going to look perfect for pictures, adding just the right air of elegance. And the additional ferns could be put out in the patio, along with some very nice topiaries, also in very expensive planters.
I stood, holding a palm tree, watching Karl as he carefully separated a vine and snuggled it in at the base of the fern.
“Do you have everything you need?” I asked him.
He straightened, rubbed his back, and smiled at me. “Oh yes. It took me almost a week to find everything, but it was worth the effort.”
“And where, exactly, did you find everything?” I shifted the palm from one hip to the other.
His smile never faltered. “We started in Cesson-Sévigné, just east of Rennes.”
“Oh?” I asked innocently. “Is there a garden center there?”
“No, but many beautiful homes with gardens.”
“So … these all came out of people’s yards? Did you just drive through neighborhoods, taking stuff?”
He looked indignant and shook his head. “Of course not. Most neighborhoods are gated. You can’t just drive through them, especially at night.”
“Oh.”
“And we never took more than one thing from someone’s garden. I am not heartless, you know. I wouldn’t take so much that it would be a burden to replace. A palm here, a fern there … that’s why it took us so long. Stefan grew rather impatient with me.”
“I can imagine. And those vines and—” I motioned to the cardboard boxes, overfilled with plantings.
“Ah. Well, we had to be careful there. I didn’t want there to be gaps, you know. I took a little bit from here and there, so no one would even notice.”
Claudine came back out and glared. “Are you going to just stand here all morning? Or are you going to help?”
“Claudine, all of this was stolen.”
“Which is why we are going to do some transplanting. This pottery is very nice, but some of it is distinctive and very expensive. I’d hate for someone to read about our opening and recognize something of theirs in the photographs. That would not be so good.”
“And you don’t care about them being stolen? I thought there was an item in your budget for plants and flowers.”
“There was. And then you decided that we needed a rose garden. Do you have any idea how much roses cost? Not to mention the espalier you wanted. And those silly little boxwood plants?”
“Wait. This is my fault?”
“Not at all. I manage the expenses, not you, so the responsibility is of course mine.” She looked at Karl, who had gone back to his digging. “But we’re not talking grand larceny here. No one is going to miss one potted plant, Lucy. Now, see that one there? Out to the patio, I think.” She picked up two of the ferns, one and each hand, and went inside.
I looked at the topiary. It was some sort of evergreen and looked like a green lollipop. She was right. Perfect for the patio.