The Charmers Read Free Page A

murder a few innocent pheasant, that I refused to eat when they showed up later on the dinner table. Every Sunday the family attended church where a lady in a feathered hat pounded out “Abide with Me” on an organ with many pipes. I can still sing every verse.
    Needless to say it didn’t last long. London called. And boys—well, men really.
    In London I went through my gauzy, “hippie” phase, all fluttering skirts and softly draped tops with a large fake jewel or two prominently displayed on my bosom. This was when I met husband number one, about whom the less said the better. His only excuse was that he was as young as I was.
    Then it was on to smart little suits and heels, very businesslike. I took a job as a receptionist at an agency for actors where I met some fun people, all of whom were as broke as I was. I also met husband number two. An actor of course.
    After him, and I was still only twenty years old, came the “debutante” era: the dirndl skirt, the little white frilly collared shirt, the cashmere cardigan, and the flats, with a bag big enough to pack a weekend’s clothes in, which I often did. Along with that look came husband number three. I never could resist a man with charm and he had it in spades. He also had money but I got none of it when I left, being too goody-goody to take any man’s money. “Fool,” was more like it. Obviously, I was having trouble “finding myself.”
    A couple years later I took the train to Paris, and then to Nice and Aunt Jolly. Well, that was then . And now is now.
    And now, I guess, I’m just me. Or who I perceive I am currently. Like the characters in the books I write, I can change with the wind.
    My Aunt Jolly was in her seventies, or thereabouts. We didn’t actually know for sure because she never let on. Looking at her, she might have been any age between fifty and seventy; she was of medium height but stood tall. Her large, curious brown eyes were always interested in other people and she loved a good gossip, though never of the mean sort. She was a whiz at bridge and an evening tippler—two glasses of champagne—at precisely five each evening. A giver of good parties where the food was important and the wine was local, brought down the hill to the Villa Romantica on a wheelbarrow from the grower. There was always music in the background, along with the sound of the sea and the happy blur of conversation.
    Elegant, chatty, pretty, Aunt Jolly was a delight to be with. Not a proper “aunt,” more likely a second cousin of my late mother’s, a couple of times removed, but beloved in the family anyway.
    Jolly had never married, though there were “gentlemen” as she demurely called them, and young though I was when I met her, I still remember that when I kissed her she smelled delightfully of some citrusy musky perfume that clung to her clothes and made me want to bury my head in her shoulder, simply to drink it in.
    â€œQuite a girl” was how Aunt Jolly had described me, and I had alway believed that. Oh, and she was rich.
    I’m writing a book about Aunt Jolly’s murder, though so far I have no ending since there seems no way to know the truth. Now, though, I am wondering if I might find something: a clue here and there, a word dropped in my ear, a conversation avoided, a meeting canceled. Normal enough day-to-day events, you might think, yet something had gone horribly wrong.
    Verity
    I’m on the same Paris-to-Nice train, looking at my opposite neighbor. She is wearing a brown jumper, a too-long and very crumpled linen skirt, sensible black shoes with a cross strap, and little white lace gloves. No, not lace, they are crochet, ending just above the wrist bone in a tiny ruffle. She’s not “made-up” but certainly powdered, and with a pale lipstick in entirely the wrong shade. Who wears that pastel pink anymore, unless they are from the 1960s, and this woman