The Weeping Willow
A Murder in Paris short story
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This short story, The Weeping Willow, is part of my Murder in Paris mystery series.
If you haven’t read the first book in the series, Bonjour, Murder, please consider doing so. My new short story is best understood after reading the first book.
You don’t have to read the first book, though. The short story focuses on two characters from the book and continues their relationship's development.
So, if you want to read book 1, click here.
If you would like to read this short story, The Weeping Willow, on your phone, Kindle device, or any other kind of reader, just CLICK THIS LINK. It will take you to a page where you can get the book emailed to you in a format you can read on any device.
So, without further ado, I give you The Weeping Willow!
Annette Baxter lay more than sat…or perhaps she sat more than she lay…on her too-short sofa in her too-small Parisian living room. She was surrounded by all the accouterments of having a mild case of the flu, known as la grippe in French. The digital thermometer in her mouth beeped annoyingly, which made Georges, the Shih Tzu, yap. Annette pulled the thermometer out. It said 37 degrees on the dot, which in the United States would mean that she was dead and her corpse nearly frozen. But in France, which is on the metric system, 37 degrees corresponded nicely to 98.6 Fahrenheit. “Well, at least that’s something,” Annette muttered.
It was less than a month after Annette’s mother returned to Florida to take care of her bookstore for a while. In the interim, nothing much had happened, except that Marc Tchobanian had asked her out on a date. Well, Sally Wildstein, Annette’s best expat American friend, said it sounded like a date. Tchobanian had framed the whole thing as an art talk. He had wanted Annette to tell him what to look for as he expanded his already amazing collection of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century paintings. Sally had heard the call when Tchobanian had asked Annette out, or at least Annette’s end of it. Annette had been standing in the very room she was in now when she had talked with Marc. (She was calling him Marc now in her head.)
“Oui,” Annette had said. “Yes—At eight?—No, not really—At seven—Afterwards?—at night?—I know, isn’t it?—Yes…not since they finished the restorations. Have you? What did you think of it?—That’s unfair! Why do I have to wait?—Okay, tell me during dinner, then.”
As soon as Annette had hung up, Sally was all over her. “What did Daddy say? Where’s he taking you?”
Annette frowned at how Sally was always calling retired doctor Marc Tchobanian “Daddy.” But she answered Sally’s questions: “Some new restaurant called La Tour Bleu. Have you heard of it?” Sally frowned, then she took out her phone, and after a second or so of furious swiping, her eyes widened to the size of dinner plates.
Annette’s heart skipped a beat, or five. “What?” she asked. “You’ve been there? Is it one of those exclusive places? You know I don’t do exclusive!”
Sally said nothing, just made a beeline down the short hall to her room. Annette stood rooted in place. Then she heard Sally yell from down the hall, “Are you coming?”
“Not this, not this, not this,” Sally mumbled. She stood in front of her eight-foot-long closet and pulled out at least twenty dresses. She held up each dress, throwing each one on the bed, stepping back to look, shaking her head, then grabbing a handful more.
“Sally, it’s fine. I think I’ve got something to wear.”
Sally stopped mid-throw and looked at Annette, horror-struck. She marched over to Annette (who was standing in the hall looking through the open door) and grabbed Annette’s face with both hands, like you would a child. “Honey,” Sally said. “You are so out of your league!”
“Maybe I should cancel,” Annette said.
“Don’t you dare!” Sally said, then she reached into the back of the closet and pulled out a classic black silk dress that fell just below the knees. Sally smiled and held the dress up to Annette. “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Go to your room and try this on!”
A good hour later, Annette was ready. She wore Sally’s just below the knees, black silk Givenchy dress, and Sally’s slightly too-big, low-heeled, black pumps. The apartment phone rang, and Sally answered it. Hanging up, she said, “Your coach awaits!” Sally walked Annette to the apartment’s front door and opened it. “I’m not waiting up,” Sally said, winking. Annette turned several shades of red. She shouldered her bag and started to walk out into the hallway, but Sally stopped her. “No! Nope! And No!” Sally ran back down to her room and returned with a small black clutch. “I couldn’t fit a pencil in there!” Annette said. “That’s kind of the point.” Sally took Annette’s bag and emptied the contents on the floor. She picked out Annette’s phone, ID, passport, and lipstick. She put just those items into the clutch and handed it to Annette. “Here you go!” Sally said. There was a large pile of Annette’s stuff from her everyday carry bag on the floor. “I’ll get it, you run along!”
La Tour Bleu was everything Annette had feared. From the moment they entered the restaurant…actually, when they drove up…Annette had done nothing but obsess about her dress, her clutch, her shoes, her hair. And then there was all that etiquette—what fork to use, what glass to drink out of, when to laugh, when not to laugh. Worst of all, Tchobanian seemed to enjoy her discomfort. Or was she imagining things? And everything seemed to take forever! There was the amuse-bouche, the scallops, and then the vichyssoise. By the time the veal fillet came, Annette was already stuffed and slightly tipsy. The tipsy helped, at least she didn’t care as much anymore.
Tchobanian talked about this and that. His version of small talk. It didn’t help his case, though. When he was on a particularly boring story about his residency in a Swiss hospital, Annette fantasized about being married to the man. My God! She’d kill herself sometime within the first year. But then she astutely wondered if Marc were as nervous as she was. Perhaps this whole debacle was overreaching on his part. He had to play the cards that he had, right? Short of doing anything remotely interesting during his life, he’d been nose to the proverbial grindstone the whole time. The time he’d spent as an ER doctor in a small hospital outside of Zurich had seemed mildly interesting, and they were only on the fifty-first course, so, to kill the time, Annette asked him if he had any stories about that.
Tchobanian looked away for a moment. For the first time, his face had finally stopped looking so boringly perfect. “Oui,” he said. “There was one. Well, there were many. Les urgences are sometimes filled with drama.” His voice trailed away.
“Tell me about it,” Annette said quietly. She had put her fork down, rested it on her plate, on the tines with the handle pointing outward. She didn’t care if this were gauche. Finally, the man was showing her his real self. The restaurant be damned.
Tchobanian dabbed his mouth with his napkin and took a small sip of wine. The wine was a Puligny-Montrachet. Annette hadn’t caught the year. By this time, she didn’t really care. Her only dividing line with alcohol was, did it come in a can or bottle?
But she felt as if she had stepped on a nerve or ripped off the bandage of an old, very infected wound. “Marc,” she said gently. “It’s okay.”
“No, I want to tell you. Honestly, Annette, I’ve been so nervous this whole time, I’ve prattled along like an old bore.”
Annette held up her hand. “You’re not a…”
Tchobanian stopped her. “I am! I apologize.”
Annette smiled, “I’m having a wonderful time.”
Tchobanian smiled back. “Thank you for saying that.”
“So, the story?”
Tchobanian leaned back in his chair somewhat. Finally, this was the man who had swept Annette off her feet that day when she and Sally had first visited his apartment in Neuilly. He looked around the restaurant, slightly waving his hand. “Europe. We’re so refined. But we have the same problems you do. One of them is incredible levels of drug addiction in some areas. Unlike the US, it’s relatively easy to import heroin. All you have are two borders to deal with. And you can watch them if you want, but here…Up the spine of Italy, across Greece and the Balkans, through Turkey, Romania might as well charge a toll to traffickers.”
“You knew someone with a drug problem?”
“Not someone…so many. But in Zurich at that time, there was this one young woman…” Tchobanian’s voice trailed off.
“This was?”
“Mon Dieu, forty years ago.”
“You were in love with her?” Annette asked, taking a stab and hitting the bullseye.
“Love, l’amour? Je ne sais pas. I don’t know, Annette. I was young and overworked, and I had come from a striving, rich family. Yes, they wanted the best for me, but I never got to really see the world…until much later.”
“They were trying to do their best for you,” Annette said. Not correcting the man. Just letting him know she understood. “In a way, my mother was the same. After her divorce from my dad, she fought for years just to keep her business afloat. And I think she didn’t want me to have to fight tooth and nail like that.”
“But it took something away from you?”
Annette nodded. Her eyes were embarrassingly moist. Can one cry in a five-star or however many stars it was restaurant? “She did what she thought was best.”
“As did my family, but I think I missed out on life in a way. Which, je crois, was part of why I liked the ER so much.”
“You came into contact with the real world.”
“Oui.”
“So, this girl or woman?”
“I don’t know, it was nothing and then it was everything, but she had come in three times over that past year. Once she had a nasty gash on her head. You didn’t have to be a doctor to see she was using. She had track marks up and down her arms. But she was lucid, and I stitched her up. She said she was coming down, and could I help her out with anything?”
“She meant dope,” Annette stated.
“Oui.”
“I told her I could get her into a rehab hospital. I knew the director of one of the finest ones in Zurich.”
“She said no,” Annette said.
Tchobanian frowned.
“Lucky guess. Then what?”
“She came back again a month later, overdosed. We…er, I…saved her life. Saved it for what, I don’t know.”
“For her soul.”
Another frown.
“So, she could live to fight another day.”
“Some fight,” Tchobanian said. He drained his wineglass, picked up the water glass, and drank half of that.
“But it was her fight.”
Tchobanian managed a weak smile. “She lost.”
Annette reached out and touched Tchobanian’s hand as it rested on the table. “In the end, we all lose. They didn’t teach you that in medical school?”
“First year, anatomy, I spent twenty hours a day cutting up dead bodies.”
Annette shrugged. She was feeling better now. She was finally talking to the real man. “They don’t grow on trees.”
Maybe it was the memories, maybe the tension, but that made Marc Tchobanian laugh out loud like an American in a sports bar. When he got control of himself, he leaned over the table and said, “To hell with these people! Want to go to my favorite place in the whole city? Maybe the whole world?”
“I’d love to.”
They parked in a discreet parking garage on the Quai des Grands Augustins, then walked up a set of narrow stone steps to the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris. It was warm out, but the breeze off the river made little goosebumps on Annette’s bare skin. Tchobanian took his coat off and draped it over Annette’s shoulders. It hung on her like a tent, but it was warm and the lining was soft, and the coat smelled like him.
At the end of the bridge, on the Île de la Cité, the same island that Notre Dame was on, they walked down another set of stairs into a little park.
“I didn’t know this was here,” Annette said.
Tchobanian didn’t respond. He took Annette’s hand and led her out to the end of the island. There was a weeping willow at the end, and Tchobanian and Annette walked underneath it, then beyond it. They stood in silence in the soft wind, the Seine gurgling around them, bateaux-mouches, those glass-enclosed sightseeing boats, plied up and down the river. The lights of the Louvre to their right and to her left, Annette thought she saw the golden dome of Les Invalides, built by Louis XIV to house old, broken-down soldiers from his wars. Beyond, in the distance, but easily seen, was the top two-thirds of the Eiffel Tower, sparkling golden. The whole thing took Annette’s breath away. She didn’t know what to say. And she was cold. Givenchy or not Givenchy, Sally’s dress gave her no warmth. She inched closer to Tchobanian, and he gently put his arm around her shoulders.
“Elle est belle,” Tchobanian said, almost a whisper. “She’s beautiful.”
Annette was speechless.
“To think, some people spend their entire lives and never see her.”
“I’m glad I’m here.”
“Moi aussi!”
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