Fleur De Lies by Maddy Hunter Page B

you end up doing?”
    “Three. Bobbi and Krystal grabbed the two Roussel daughters and Dawna took charge of Mrs. Roussel.”
    “So … who did you work on?”
    “I didn’t have anyone to work on. I supervised.”
    “But … if it was your idea to begin with, shouldn’t you have gotten first dibs on which family member you wanted to remake?”
    She stepped back into the cabin and closed the sliding glass door. “This may come as a shock to you, but I don’t mind taking a back seat so others can assume their rightful spots in the limelight.”
    “Since when?”
    She fisted her hand on her hip and drilled me with a fierce look. “You know, Emily, you don’t really appreciate how selfless I am. But the girls have seen it firsthand. Laugh if you must, but I fully expect they’ll be singing my praises to Victor so loudly, I’m going to be shame-faced with embarrassment.”
    I regarded her, deadpan. “Right.” Grabbing my clutch, I turned off the overhead lights and motioned Jackie out the door in front of me.
    At the far end of the corridor, guests were clogged together at the entrance of the restaurant like gumballs waiting to funnel through the mouth of a narrow-necked bottle. The Renoir carried only sixty passengers, housed in outside cabins on a single deck, but from the looks of things, every last one of them was in line ahead of us, pushing their way through the congestion to the dining room.
    “Do we have assigned seating?” asked Jackie as we took our place at the back of the scrum.
    “Nope. We get to sit wherever we want.”
    She cleared her throat and lowered her voice. “The girls will naturally want me to sit with them, so if there’s only one seat at their table, you don’t mind if I take it, do you?”
    “Knock yourself out. I’m sure I’ll find an open seat somewhere. There’s lots of new people to meet.”
    “ Thank you !” She flung her arms around me, crushing me against her as if I were a nut in need of cracking. “I’m so relieved. That’s what I love about you Emily. You’d happily forgo an opportunity to shmooze with the big wigs at the Mona Michelle table in order to share a lackluster meal with a bunch of dotty strangers. You are so evolved.”
    Retrieving a mirrored compact from her pocketbook, she rechecked the gloss on her lips. “So, now that we have that out of the way … did anything happen on your home visit that’s worth mentioning?”
    “ Uhh —A guy in our group was hammered out of his head, we barely escaped having to buy advanced funeral plans, and Osmund was reunited with a woman who helped save his life during World War II.”
    She snapped her compact shut. “So, nothing out of the ordinary.”
    The bottleneck at the entrance to the dining room suddenly broke up, allowing guests to stampede through the doors like shoppers at a blowout sale. We exchanged “ Bon soirs ” with the official greeter at the door, sanitized our hands with a squirt of gel from the stationary dispenser, then angled off to our right, circling around the food station that occupied the center of the room.
    Guests were loitering behind chairs, waving their arms to friends, flashing the number of seats still available, sitting down, standing up, bumping into the guests standing at the chairs behind them. Tables were set up to accommodate four, six, or eight guests, and each table abutted a sparkling clean, floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the river and its traffic. What could be more thrilling than the prospect of oohing and ahhing over the spectacular views of the Seine while we dined?
    Well, one thing might be more thrilling.
    Finding an empty seat. Why were all the tables full?
    “There they are … with some bald guy I’ve never seen before. Ew ! They’ve saved two seats. C’mon.” Jackie seized my hand and sprinted toward a round table that occupied the far corner, arriving two steps behind an elderly couple who’d just claimed the chairs by pulling them out. “Excuse