“I was fifteen years old that year, very near Lily’s age. It was one of my first adventures.”
Instead of the comment about it being reckless, foolish in the least, he reached around me and seized the lever of the brass Lionhead door-knocker. When there was no response, he tried again.
“What are you doing there?”a voice called out in French from the street.
A woman in the usual dress of a French housekeeper with a shawl around her shoulders, stood on the sidewalk, a shopping basket over her arm.
“We are friends,” I replied in French. “We have come to visit.”
“Monsieur Dornay is away. He has been gone for several days,” she replied, and explained that she worked for the family in an apartment across the street.
She brought fresh fish for him when she went to market. Dornay, she explained gave art lessons to her employer’s sons.
I thanked her. She eventually nodded with a curious stare over the shoulder as if I was familiar, then shrugged and continued across the Rue Miron.
An art instructor? And now gone unexpectedly for several days?
Number thirteen Rue Miron had been on that note that someone had burned, obviously with the intention that no one else saw it.
I wondered what we might be able to find inside the apartment. Brodie obviously thought the same.
There was no alleyway or back entrance, only the main entrance at the street.
“Has she returned to her own apartment?” Brodie asked.
“Yes.”
“And the street?”
“There is no one about at the moment.” Of course, that didn’t include anyone who peered out a window of an adjacent apartment.
I could have picked the lock myself. I had become efficient at it, but not nearly as efficient as Brodie. A moment was all that was needed and he had the door open and motioned me inside.
The apartment was typical with the main entrance, a servant’s door to one side which undoubtedly led to the kitchen, although there didn’t seem to be anyone else about.
There was also small room at the other side that appeared to have been used as a studio for those art lessons the woman had spoken of. Stairs climbed to the second level, where we found a small drawing room with a fireplace, and stairs that led to the third floor with two private rooms.
I had seen such residences, and been inside one that belonged to the family of a student at my school. It had been opulently furnished with carpets, thick drapes on the windows, and furnishings that crowded every room, including a formal dining room.
The apartment at Number Thirteen was quite modest by comparison, with only a minimum of furniture that included a worn settee and overstuffed chair in the drawing room, and a narrow table with chairs for what passed as a dining room in the salon.
The sparse furnishings suggested the owner of the apartment rarely entertained, if at all. And it did seem as if Monsieur Dornay made only a modest living from lessons he gave. Might that have something to do with the address found on that note? If so, what was the connection?
As we had in the past, we each took a floor of the apartment to search more efficiently for anything that might tell us the reason that address had been on the remnants of that note.
As I climbed the stairs, it did seem odd that the drapes had all been left open. Most people who planned to be away were in the habit of closing their drapes.
There was sufficient light from the windows of the apartment that there was no need to turn on the electric, or use the handheld lamp Brodie usually carried when we made inquiries in a case. It made the search for anything amiss or revealing that much easier.
Brodie had inspected the ground-floor kitchen which revealed there was almost no food in the cold box, and then the small studio on the ground floor. He continued at the second-floor parlor and salon, while I climbed the stairs to the third-floor private rooms.
I entered the first room. The furnishings here were even more sparse and included only a bed and a chair. There was no wardrobe, only hooks along the wall which oddly held a coat, a jacket, several woolen scarves, and an umbrella.
I searched the pockets of the coat and jacket, then around the bed and under the bed, and found nothing. There was no desk or table in this room, therefore little else to search.
A door in the far wall led to a narrow bathroom. Here towels had been left about and there was what seemed a musty smell with no window. A door at the other end very likely connected to that second room on the floor.
What passed for a bathroom, what was called a‘salle de bain’in France, had a clawfoot tub, badly stained basin, and commode.
