The Charmers by Elizabeth Adler

all the bad boys.”
    I had to admit she was right.

 
    9
    The Colonel
    Rufus Barrada, or the Colonel, as he was always referred to because of his ten years of service in the French army prior to joining the gendarmes, had seen too many road accidents to be sympathetic. He’d been a happily married man for seven years when his wife was killed. She was walking from their home, an old farmhouse that had been in his family for two centuries, to the Saturday village market, striding along the side of the road when she was struck by a tourist RV and knocked into a rocky ditch.
    Agnes, her name was, but the Colonel always only called her mon amour , and she called him mon choux, though never in public, of course. Theirs was a passionate relationship, nurtured over the years, and he was bereft without her. Time, as it usually does, eventually papered over the cracks of despair until it resembled some form of acceptance, though never forgotten.
    Their children, the twin girls named Marie-Laure and Marie-Helene for their grandmothers, were now six years old, Laure with long pigtails, blond like her mother, Helene exactly like her father with his thick dark hair that sprouted every which way, falling into her eyes mostly so she seemed to peer at you shyly, which in fact she was not at all.
    Laure was the shy one, usually walking behind her sister, head down, clutching her bookbag over one shoulder, small gold-rimmed glasses half hiding her blue eyes. Helene always looked out for her sister though.
    The Colonel was to pick them up from school and because of the interviews with the Matthews woman he was late. He spotted them sitting on a low wall outside the schoolhouse, each with an elbow on her knee, chin clasped in hand, eyes blank with the lethargy of the long wait.
    He pulled up next to them, apologizing, got out, opened the door, and watched while they climbed in. He fastened their seat belts, double-checked everything, and said, “Okay, girls, we’re off to get ice cream.”
    The Colonel drove off with them chattering away about the school day. He was a family man at heart despite his formal demeanor, his position, his uniform, and his reputation for toughness, which came from a hatred of criminals and anyone against the law. He was a “true” man, in his heart.
    He was not happy with the supposed “accident” in the canyon. The body of the man driving the green car had been identified as that of Josephus Raus, a Russian, in the country without a visa, yet who purportedly worked for a well-known property developer by the name of Bruce Bergen—whose passport was Italian but whose birthplace was Belarus, and who was commonly known as “the Boss.”
    All in all, it looked messy to the Colonel, and now those two women had almost lost their lives. It puzzled him as to why they should be so targeted. What could they have done to inspire such revenge? If in fact it was revenge. It might be unrequited love—after all, they were two fine-looking women. Or some other reason he had yet to find out. It looked like a big job to him. Less time with his girls, and more time finding out what the two women were up to at the Villa Romantica. You never knew.

 
    10
    Mirabella
    My new home lies on the narrow coastal strip near Antibes, a town with two personalities, the old and the new.
    New Antibes has a smart seafront promenade where artists sit in front of easels painting portraits of tourists and local landscapes, or rather, “waterscapes,” since the Mediterranean is ever-present. Bars and cafés compete for those same tourists’ attention, their terraces shaded from the sun by colorful awnings and where lounging around is the order of the day.
    The cafés and bars are always crowded of an evening, when a cool glass of wine or a chilled beer is necessary while watching the passing parade of suntanned beauties in short dresses. Not to mention the rich and sometimes good-looking