“…she told our night clerk that she was not afraid of him anymore,” the manager said, and slid the photograph across the desk toward me. “Madame, her name was Marguerite Aubry. She was twenty nine. She came to us from Lyon with a husband named Daniel Whitaker, who is the man you married on Saturday.” I looked at the bride in the picture. She had dark curls and a small, crooked smile, and she was holding the same pale bouquet that I had held two days earlier. I thought I might be sick.
The manager, a gray haired man named Monsieur Fabre, did not hurry. He had clearly told this story before, to himself, many times. “Madame Aubry came down at three in the morning,” he said. “She had no coat, and no shoes. She said her husband had taken her passport and her phone. He had locked her in the room twice already. She asked if she could use the telephone to call her sister. My night clerk, a very brave young woman, let her. Within the hour, Madame had left the hotel in a taxi, and by morning, Monsieur Whitaker was alone in the room, asking where his wife had gone. He claimed she was unwell. We told him she had checked out.”
I put both hands flat on the desk to keep them from shaking. My whole body was cold. I thought about the last two nights. The way Daniel had taken my phone out of my hand on the first evening and put it in the safe, with a laugh, saying we were on honeymoon and did not need the world. The way he had walked me across the Pont des Arts with his hand clamped on my elbow. The way he had said, “Claire, you are so trusting,” and kissed my hair. “Monsieur Fabre,” I said, as steadily as I could, “my passport and my wallet are in that room. And the second room. Who is in the second room?”
A locked door, a second room, and a hotel manager who remembered the first bride who ever ran from the same husband.
Fabre opened a ledger. “A woman named Veronica Shaw checked in at two oclock this afternoon. She paid in cash, for three nights. She told the clerk she was a friend of the family. I do not wish to alarm you, Madame, but I took the liberty of calling the police earlier this evening, when I saw Monsieur Whitaker name on the reservation. A detective is waiting in the next room.” He stood and opened a door in the paneled wall. A woman in her forties with short gray hair and a serious, tired face rose from a chair. “Madame Claire?” she said in careful English. “I am Inspector Lambert. Please, sit down. We have been waiting for you.”
The inspector put a folder on the desk. Inside were notices from three countries. Daniel Whitaker, who had given me his name as an investment adviser from Connecticut, was wanted for questioning in connection with two earlier marriages and four serious financial complaints. Marguerite had gone to the French police two years ago, after fleeing the hotel, but she had been afraid, and then she had been silent, and the case had stalled. “Veronica Shaw is his partner,” Lambert said. “She is not his lover, Madame. She is his accomplice. She comes to handle the accounts after the wedding, while the new wife is occupied.” I felt something in my chest ease and tighten at once.
It turned out I was the third wife in an arrangement that had taken years to refine. Daniel had spent three years learning that my mother had a small inheritance, that I owned a house in Hartford, that I was careful, alone, and eager to be loved. I had been so proud that he listened. “They intended to transfer the deed of your home within ten days,” Lambert said, “through a document you would sign on your honeymoon, believing it was a trust for your future children.” I thought of the stack of papers he had left on the dresser, all neatly tabbed.
They arrested him at midnight, in the lobby, in his silk dressing gown. I did not watch. I sat in the manager office with a cup of tea, my hands wrapped around the china, and listened through the wall to a muffled argument in two languages. Then a long silence. Then the click of handcuffs, which in French, apparently, make exactly the same sound as in English. When Lambert returned, she had my passport and wallet in a plastic bag. “Madame,” she said, “the woman in the second room is in custody too. She has asked to speak to you. I advise against it.” I thought about it for a long moment. I said, “No.”
The next morning, a small woman in a green raincoat was waiting for me in the lobby. She had dark curls streaked with gray. She stood very straight, with her hands clasped in front of her like a person at a church door. “I am Marguerite,” she said. Her English was good. “Inspector Lambert called me last night. I took the first train from Lyon.” I walked toward her, and she took one step, and then we were holding on to each other in the lobby of a Paris hotel at eight in the morning, two strangers who had married the same man, both of us weeping, while a bellhop politely examined the ceiling.
We spent three days together. She showed me the city as only someone who had been afraid of it could. We walked the river at dawn, and drank terrible coffee at a tabac, and she told me about the hospital where she volunteered, a shelter for women in flight from violent marriages. I told her about Hartford, and my mother, and the tidy quiet life I had lived. On the last evening she squeezed my hand. “You will think it is your fault,” she said. “You will lie awake. Do not. It is a talent, what he has. A very ugly talent. You were not stupid. You were kind.”
Daniel Whitaker was convicted of fraud in Paris the following spring, and he received nine years. I testified by video, from a lawyer office in Hartford, in a navy suit. I looked straight at the camera and said what I had to say, and I did not look away. Marguerite testified the same morning. We have kept in touch. The front door of my house is painted a bright new yellow. I chose it myself, and nobody locked it behind me.