raised one eyebrow. “Out to impress the lady.”
Mathis watched his own reflection in the wall of glass. There was a flash of white teeth against tanned skin. “We want to make sure she recognizes right off that we’re the good guys.”
Beano grinned from ear to ear. “We could just tell Miss—?”
“Stratford. Desiree Stratford.”
“We could just tell Miss Stratford that we’re the good guys;” he suggested.
Mathis absently rubbed his hand back and forth along his nape. “She might not believe us.”
The longtime cook made a face. “I said it once and I’ll say it again. It smells like trouble.”
He had and it did.
The old man’s weathered brow crinkled into a dozen distinct frown lines. “Where we goin’?”
Where were they going? How could he explain the situation to Beano without saying too much or too little? How could he make the other man understand?
Mathis raised the can to his mouth and finished off his beer. Hell, he wasn’t sure he understood himself.
Then the words of an old and familiar American folk song started running through Mathis Hazard’s head.
Froggy went a-courtin’, he did go.
Froggy went a-courtin’, he did go.
“We’re going a-courtin”’ was his answer.
Two
The siren awakened her from a dead sleep.
Desiree Stratford rolled over onto her side, reluctantly opened her eyes and squinted at the clock on the bedside table.
Three in the morning.
“Ohh,” she softly groaned, turning her head and burying her face in the goose-down pillow.
She didn’t want to be awake. In fact, she wanted desperately to be asleep.
After a day of seemingly endless meetings with lawyers and bankers, architects and contractors, even a delegation of longtime hotel guests, after a dinner of thoroughly atrocious and utterly cold food—Desiree vowed she would fire the temperamental and incompetent chef, Andre, just as soon as she had the time to hire a replacement—after an evening spent poring over papers in her great-grandfather’s study—had the dear, sweet man kept every scrap of correspondence he had received in his life?—it had been nearly one o’clock, a mere two hours ago, that she had finally crawled, exhausted, into bed.
Now she found herself awake again.
She had no one to blame but herself, Desiree acknowledged. She was the one who had insisted that she move into the oldest wing of the Stratford, into what used to be her great-grandparents’ living quarters, into the very bedroom where she had stayed as a child on her thrice-yearly visits to Chicago.
Apparently as a girl she had slept much more soundly than she did at the age of thirty. Now she heard the shrill, jarring, nerve-grating wail of every siren that passed on the street below between the hotel and the busy city hospital nearby.
There was no sense in crying over spilled milk, as her great-grandfather used to say.
It was too late.
It was done.
It was in the wee, small hours of the night and she was wide-awake.
Desiree turned onto her back and stared up at the ceiling overhead. A faint light was coming from the row of windows on the far side of the bedroom, just enough light so that she could make out the shapes and patterns of the mural painted on the ceiling decades earlier by a starving yet talented artist.
The images had faded somewhat with time and the inevitable layer of dust and grime that had accumulated, but they were still a magnificent rendering of the heavens, complete with sun and moon, stars and planets, clouds and constellations.
The images might have faded, but not her memories ... never her memories.
“I’m afraid of the dark, Great-Grandpapa,” she confessed one night as she was being tucked into bed.
“But only when it’s dark can we gaze up at the sky and see all the stars,” he pointed out to her.
Desiree had never thought of that.
“How many stars are there in the sky?” she asked, excited as only an eight-year-old can be excited.
“Thousands. Millions, ” her great-grandfather answered from his leather wing chair, the same leather wing chair that had always stood alongside the guest bed
“Can I count them?”
“Of course you can. You can do anything you put your mind to. Anything at all. Don’t ever forget that, Desiree.”
She gazed up at the painted mural. “But there are so very many stars, Great-Grandpapa.”
“Don’t worry, child. We’ll count them together.”
So she and her great-grandfather had counted aloud, her little girl’s half-whisper in unison with his great, booming baritone, until she couldn’t keep her eyes open no matter how hard she tried. Night after night she would fall asleep to the sound of his voice and dream about places she had never been and things she had never seen.
The decor of the guest room had been something out of a dream, as well. In fact, it still was. It had remained essentially unchanged over the years.
The furniture was delicately carved and inlaid with rare woods from the Jodhpur region of India. Above the bombe bureau were framed pictures of elephants with their trunks majestically raised skyward, mischievous monkeys at play, colorfully plumed birds perched on tree branches and king cobras, hooded, coiled, sinuous, deadly, yet worshiped by a segment of the Indian population as gods.
A large painting hung over the fireplace. It depicted a fierce Bengal tiger with a royal hunting party in pursuit On the opposite wall was a seventeenth-century embroidered tapestry, stitched with silk thread and illustrating the life of a maharajah, the beautiful ladies of his court, his grand palace and riches beyond imagination.
The family’s living quarters had always been filled with personal mementos, keepsakes and souvenirs of the Raj in India. For Desiree they had been a glimpse into her great-grandfather’s world, into a world that was gone and would not come again. Oh, how he had enjoyed telling her stories of his days on the Indian subcontinent and of the times when the sun had never set on the British Empire.
There had been a splendor and grandeur about the Hotel Stratford in those days, although if she hadn’t been an impressionable child infatuated with the place perhaps she would have noticed even back then that it was beginning
