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out of her mouth,” he asked, barely able to look at her face again, “what’s that?”
    “Do you know whether someone tried to revive her?” I asked.
    Jacques pointed at Emil. “He says he attempted to resuscitate the girl, to press on her chest.” Jacques simulated the motion of CPR in midair, keeping his distance from the body.
“C’est vrai, Emil?”
    The weathered old man nodded in the affirmative.
    “It’s foam, then,” I said, looking at the mushroom-shaped froth that oozed from her mouth and nose. “It’s the mixture of oxygen and water with mucus created in her airway when she was fighting to breathe. Come look, Luc. Do you know who she is?”
    He moved slowly around the outstretched legs of the body, no more comfortable in this setting than the captain of the local police.
    “You’ve taken photographs, Jacques?” I asked, waiting for Luc to get next to me.
    “Just with the camera I keep in the car. And Claude’s cell phone. An inspector is coming from Cannes sometime later today to manage the investigation.”
    I had no faith that the integrity of the forensics in this case would be preserved, or that Jacques was terribly concerned about that. I took the ends of a few of the tangled strands of hair and lifted them gently so that Luc could see the girl more clearly—despite thedistorted features of her gaping mouth and foam-covered nostrils—so that he could tell Jacques he had been mistaken.
    “That foam is a pretty good indicator that this poor creature was alive when she was submerged,” I said to the captain. “You really need to get a professional team here quickly to move her before you compromise the chance for a coroner to find marks or bruises under her clothes.”
    I looked up at Jacques to be sure he understood the importance of what I was telling him, but he was more interested in the expression on Luc’s face.
    “Alex asked whether you know who she is,” Jacques said. “Why don’t you respond?”
    Luc rested a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it hard as he kneeled beside me. I let go of the girl’s hair when he answered. “Of course I know who she is, Jacques. Her name is Lisette. Lisette Honfleur. She used to work for me in the restaurant.”

FOUR
    “Busman’s holiday, Alex? Isn’t that what they call it in the States?” Jacques asked. “Working your way through your vacation?”
    It was an hour later and we were sitting in Jacques’s cramped office in the gendarmerie of Mougins. The bulletin board behind the captain was littered with celebrity headshots—movie stars, many of them in town for dinner during the Cannes Film Festival throughout the years, thanking the police for one courtesy or another.
    “This is all in your capable hands now, Captain. I’ve got another week here to relax with Luc,” I said, turning my head to offer my lover some reassurance, although it didn’t seem that would help. “I’m sure you’ll have things sorted out by then.”
    I’d been schooled in murder investigations by the best detectives in New York. The ignorance Belgarde displayed at the crime scene would have shocked Mike Chapman, and I harbored little hope that these village cops would know what to do next.
    One of the captain’s men had been dispatched to the restaurant to carry back the bones. They sat on the floor in a large wooden wine crate between Luc and the desk, the three hollow-eyed skulls meeting my gaze with a blank stare.
    “Tell me about Lisette, Luc.”
    “I thought we were waiting for the investigators to arrive.”
    “They’ve been delayed and I’m curious. Tell me about the girl.”
    “It must be at least five years since I’ve seen her, Jacques. Maybe more than that.”
    “Really?” the captain said, rocking back and forth on his ergonomically correct office chair. “Why so long between visits?”
    “I fired her. That’s probably the reason.”
    “She couldn’t stand the heat in the kitchen?”
    “Lisette wasn’t involved with food. She