The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence Read Online Free Page B

on the middle one in the morning as the sun rose up over Cap Canaille, giving the sandstone a reddish-yellowish hue.
    The lighthouse in Cassis’s small port would shine into her opened bedroom while she listened to the sea on those summer evenings. The lapping of the Mediterranean’s dark waves against the incandescent bluffs of white limestone lulled her to sleep. The greenish glow from the harbor’s lighthouse cast shadow and light across the sea, as it floated above the blue-black swells of water. She woke up mosquito-bitten on many August mornings. She had wondered if Winston Churchill had felt the same way about the Académie and Cassis when he was here painting during the heady years of the 1920s. She had also wondered if he had stayed in her apartment. There was so much history in Cassis and at the Félibrige Foundation. Kit’s murder would become part of that history. Who else was here? Who else knew Kit was there? Havilah Gaie was unfortunately compelled to find out. Thanks to her phone call, she was now wondering if her time on earth would also end prematurely and so grotesquely.
    She opened the heavy brown wood door that let on to the busy road, remembering to look into the mounted mirror for oncoming traffic. There was a blind spot at the crossing. She pushed the door open to the main villa. A grand piano was tucked off to the side of the large room. Laurent’s office was off to the left. She could hear his voice trying to calm someone.
    “Hello?” she called out, so as to alert the party that someone else was in the vicinity of their conversation.
    “Havilah!” He jumped up, giving her a peck on each cheek. “It’s always great to see you whatever the circumstances. You know Améline Fitts? She and Kit were quite close.”
    It was just like Laurent Pierce to go on and on in his breezy manner before he realized you hadn’t said a word— if he’d realized it at all. He was an efficient man, small with a thick build, broad back, and full head of bushy blond hair despite his fifty-odd years. He looked hale and hearty with his sun-kissed skin, and even under the lamentable circumstances, contentment radiated from his eyes and warm smile.
    “Hello, Améline.”
    “Havilah.” Améline greeted her with a nod, and she too began prattling on. “We had just spoken yesterday about my coming to Astor for a year as a visiting professor in the institute.”
    “Really?” Havilah could barely disguise her surprise.
    “He said he had not had the opportunity to email the faculty with the proposition. But he was sure he could rally them to his way of thinking. What a beastly group of faculty you have there, always battling for oneupmanship.”
    Havilah nearly rolled her eyes. She had met Améline on two occasions, once at Astor when the novelist and professor of English gave the annual Robert Penn Warren lecture on liberalism and Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro? , and the other, when Havilah offered an address at Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. She couldn’t say she knew Fitts well; she only knew the contours of her academic life and biography from rumor and gossip. But she had caught a three-hour CSPAN interview. She remembered thinking that the Princeton professor had an affected way of talking, like she had read too many Austen novels, like she was born and bred in Bath. Her use of the word “beastly” for some reason jogged that memory.
    She thought then of Kit. Of just how close the two academics were and if Améline’s cupid’s bow pucker had something to do with Kit’s offer of a visiting position. Améline, like Kit, seemed entrepreneurial and self-fashioned almost from whole cloth. She was from Idaho, and after she had written her first novel to warm reviews, she promptly dropped her middle name, Rae, and got rid of Emily as well; “Emily Rae” became Améline. And she insisted everyone enunciate it in French.
    As Havilah chose to interpret the gossip