I looked at the picture on the front again. An attractive painting in the Impressionist style of a woman drinking tea. That was all. I carried it over to the window and stared at both sides in the light, wondering if there might be some kind of hidden message. But there was none. “To the Lady from New York”… the person who had written this didn’t even know my name. Unless “the Lady from New York” wasn’t intended for me at all, but for either Sid or Gus. Perhaps I was hoping for too much from this postcard, thinking it might be some kind of message for me. Perhaps the simple explanation was that Gus had admired a painting. Someone she had been chatting with had seen a postcard with a rendition of this painting on it and sent it to her as a kindly gesture.

I sighed, put it down on the bed, and went into the kitchen to prepare an evening meal for us. I tried to put it from my mind, but it was the first communication of any sort I had received, even if it made no sense to me. A woman drinking tea from an elegant little cup. Were Sid and Gus in some kind of danger? Did they want me to meet them at a tea salon? Might they have left a message for me there?

I remembered the worrying thought that had occurred to me earlier—that the Cosa Nostra gang in New York had somehow managed to find out I was coming to Paris and had harmed or kidnapped my friends. But then why leave me unharmed, walking around the city for three days? Nothing had made sense since I arrived in Paris. Nobody in the artistic community seemed to have seen Sid and Gus recently. Their cousins were happily going about their business. And yet someone had murdered a fellow artist and I had come to not believe in coincidence. Tomorrow I would make a list of tearooms in Paris and see if that produced any result.

Liam had a bad night. I suspect his stomach could not handle the amount of food that Madeleine had tried to put into him. I took him into bed with me, lying him on my own stomach and feeling the comforting warmth of his body against mine. I longed for Daniel and his arms around me. How soon could I hope for a letter from him, I wondered. I lay there, listening to the noises of the street below—laughter, shouts, singing. It sounded as if the rest of the world was having a good time in Paris. Eventually I drifted off to sleep and dreamed of the woman in the painting. “Really it’s quite obvious, isn’t it?” she said to me and put down her teacup with a bang.