Masquerade Read Free

forget to remember such a beautiful woman? To me, that is strange."
    "Oui." But it wasn't the how that puzzled Inspector Armand as he left the hospital room. No, it wasn't the how so much as the why.
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    Sunlight streamed through the hospital window, setting agleam the shiny satin fabric the young nurse held up for her inspection. "It is beautiful, non ?" declared the short, stout woman, whose olive skin and dark hair revealed her Mediterranean origins.
    She ran her hand over the gown's skirt, which lay draped across her lap. "It is very beautiful," she agreed, then sighed, fighting back a bitter discouragement to admit, "but I don't remember ever seeing it before, let alone wearing it."
    The nurse glanced at the balding man by the window, dressed in a corduroy jacket of charcoal gray with a pearl-gray turtleneck under it. A pair of glasses framed with gold wire sat on the bridge of his nose. With a downward tilt of his head, he peered over the top of them and signaled to the nurse, with a slight flick of his hand, to take the gown and its matching stole away.
    Only the jewelry remained—the antique brooch and the diamond-studded topaz earrings. She didn't recognize them either. She pressed her fingers to her temples and tried to lightly massage away the pressure. Earlier, a nurse had given her something that had reduced the throbbing pain to a dull ache—an ache that kept her on edge. But she wanted nothing stronger—not now, when she needed to think.
    "Is that all I had when I was brought in to the hospital?" Each time she looked at the man by the window, she had to remind herself that he was an inspector. He didn't look like one. If she had guessed his occupation, she would have said he was a headmaster or a schoolteacher—someone of authority who could be stern and benevolent by turns.
    "Oui, you had nothing else." He removed his glasses and returned them to the breast pocket of his jacket. "No identification, no passport, no hotel key, no purse."
    "Could my purse have been stolen? What happened? The nurses couldn't tell me. Do you know?"
    "You were seen by two young men— Americans—struggling or arguing with a man at the Espace Masséna. They think he may have struck you—which would account for the bruise by your mouth. When they saw you fall to the ground, one of them shouted, and the man ran off. Bits of tree bark were found when the laceration to the back of your head was cleaned here in the hospital, and later, traces of blood and strands of hair the same color as yours were found at the site. From that we assume that when you fell, you struck your head on the tree, resulting in your injuries."
    Those she knew about. The doctor had enumerated them for her when she'd seen him earlier—the bruise near her mouth, the laceration to her head, which had required twelve stitches to close, the hairline fracture to her skull, the concussion, and—a rare total loss of memory. Total in the sense that all details of her personal life had been lost, but not her store of knowledge.
    "I know where the Espace Masséna is—and the flower market on Cours Saleya. And Nice is in France; the capital is Paris—" She broke off the spate of facts. "Why was I at the Espace Mas-séna?"
    "I assume to participate in the Carnival festivities."
    "Carnival. It comes from the Old Italian word carnelevare —which loosely translates as a 'farewell to the flesh,’" she murmured, remembering that and so much more. "It's pagan in origin, isn't it?—a spring rite of the Greeks to celebrate the miracle of propagation, an annual event that the Romans subsequently corrupted with lewdness and the followers of Christianity eventually absorbed into their religion, making it an acceptable feasting time before the Lenten season. The custom of masking came from the French—along with the name Mardi Gras."
    The inspector smiled faintly. "Nothing is ever what it