Chasing Ghosts by Madalyn Morgan (best fantasy books to read .txt) 📕

‘I see him. He’s looking around the room,’ Thomas said.

‘That’s right,’ Claire turned so she was side-on to the man facing the door to observe him again. Beginning with the people on the left of him the beaky-nosed man began a slow sweep of the crowded foyer. From left to right he studied the face of every woman who had entered the hotel. Then, just as his eyes were about to reach her, someone shouted, ‘Harlot!’ The man’s head whipped round and his attention was off the women in the foyer and focused in the direction of the shouting.

Claire and Thomas - and everyone else in the foyer - stopped what they were doing to see what was going on. A tall woman in her mid-forties, wearing a full-length black sable coat and a Cossack-style fur hat, sashayed into the reception area. At her side was a young man in a chauffeur’s uniform, carrying bags and boxes displaying the names of some of the most prestigious Parisian designers.

Behind them, a short stocky man in his late fifties with a bald pate shouted, again, ‘Harlot!’

The woman turned and gave the man a contemptuous look. ‘Call me that once more,’ she goaded, ‘and I shall leave you. And this time it will be for good!’

The man ran ahead of her, turned, and opening his arms wide, blocked her way. ‘Fine. Go! But you are not going out at this time of night with my chauffeur?’

‘What? I am not going out with your chauffeur in the way you mean,’ she said, smiling at the young man, ‘He is taking me to visit my mother.’

‘That old witch? She only wants to see you to get her hands on my money!’ the man shouted. As the woman walked towards him the small man started to back off. ‘Fine!’ He put up his hands, but the woman didn’t stop walking. ‘Go and see your mother,’ he said, ‘but I forbid you to give her any of my money. And I forbid you to go in my car.’

‘She-lives-miles-away...’ The woman said, pronouncing each word deliberately. ‘How do you propose I get there if I don’t take the car? Walk?’

‘Yes! The exercise will do your grand derrière good,’ he shouted. Spurred on by the men in the foyer laughing, he continued, ‘Take the metro! Go on the tram! Fly on your broomstick! But you are not taking--’

‘Er, hum!’ Claire nudged Thomas who like everyone else was transfixed on the pantomime argument between the tall woman and her short husband. ‘We should leave while the two goons are being entertained.’

She turned, walked across the foyer to the revolving doors and stepped quickly into an empty section. Thomas followed but stopped at the door to let a young woman enter. She said thank you and he smiled. Still smiling he descended the hotel’s steps and walked in the opposite direction to where he had parked his car. Claire stopped and opened her handbag. She took out her powder compact and powdered her nose. When Thomas passed her, she dropped the compact back into her handbag and walked a few paces behind him to the end of Boulevard Principal. At the corner, she stopped again and looked back at the hotel. There was no one standing around in the street or leaving the hotel. It was safe to assume they hadn’t been seen.

Thomas tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Did anyone follow us out?’ Claire shook her head. ‘Good. We’ll wait here for ten minutes, to be sure, then I’ll go and get the car. You hang on here.’ Thomas handed Claire the suitcase. ‘I’ll drive around the block a couple of times and when I’m sure I’m not being followed, I’ll pull over a few doors down,’ he said, pointing along the street.

‘I’ll find a shop doorway.’

When the ten minutes were up, Claire watched Thomas walk casually back along Boulevard Principal. He passed the front of the hotel without looking in. She watched him arrive at his car, open the door, and slide in behind the steering wheel. When the car’s lights came on, she made her way along the street. A quarter of the way down she found an entrance leading to a shop door. Looking over her shoulder, and then in front of her, to make sure she wasn’t being followed, she stepped back and was soon out of sight in the shadows beneath the arch of the shop’s doorway.

Cars came and went along the street until eventually she saw Thomas’s Citroën pull up a few yards from where she was standing. She picked up her case and walked briskly to the car. She opened the back door, threw in her suitcase, and dropped onto the seat beside it. When Thomas pulled away from the curb, the momentum slammed the door shut.

‘Where too, Madame?’ he said, looking at Claire in the reverse mirror.

‘The next anonymous hotel on your list,’ Claire said.

Thomas laughed. ‘I don’t think there is another hotel that you could call anonymous.’ Claire laughed with him, which she realised from the multitude of knots in her stomach was from nerves not amusement.

‘How about my old Resistance comrade’s hotel? I’ve only been there once, just after the war, but from what I remember it was a decent enough place. It’s around here somewhere,’ Thomas said, leaning forward and looking through the windscreen trying to spot the hotel. ‘There, look,’ he said, ‘Le Petit Château Hotel. I’ll go in on my own first, and if he still works there I’ll say hello, have a bit of a chat and see if he has any rooms.’

‘If he remembers you, ask him if he’s had anyone come into the hotel that just sat about? Anyone who looked as if they were waiting for someone who didn’t show up.’

‘Okay. Will