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his reaction.
    “I don’t watch much television,” Laurent
said.
    “It was a magazine ad.”
    “Ahhh.”
    They were quiet for a moment. From across the
courtyard and down the vineyard-studded hills, she noticed a
colorful, flapping line of laundered clothes starkly visible
against the landscape of browns and muted greens. The clothesline
bucked and twisted in the bright sky like the gay signal flags
she’d seen on the yachts moored in the harbor at Monte Carlo.
    “And now we have no idea of where she is, if
she’ll ever even contact us again or if she’s dead.” Maggie brushed
a dusting of pollen from her cotton dress. “Maybe my folks thought
that this was a stage she was going through and she’d snap out of
it, resurface some time and be normal when she finally came home.
I’m sure we all thought she’d eventually come home.” Laurent
reached over and took her hand in his. She looked at him, her eyes
full of tears. She blinked the tears down her cheeks and the burly
Frenchman leaned over and kissed her gently on the mouth. She felt
the comforting coarseness of his rough face against her cheek.
Slowly, she moved toward him, he, simply yielding and making no
other move. She folded herself against his broad chest, smelling
the soap and sunshine in his blue cotton pullover. A moment passed
and then he lifted her chin with his fingers and looked into her
wet blue eyes. He kissed her. His tongue pushed gently past her
lips into her mouth and his arms tightened around her.
    Maggie was vaguely aware of the Mediterranean
sun caressing her bare arms and legs, and of her cotton sundress
pulled high across her thighs. She could smell the redolent mixture
of olives and lemons and sun-sweetened grass and roses. And when
she held Laurent and felt him kiss her, she felt nothing else about
Elise or Nicole or Atlanta or her own fears of failure.
     
     

Chapter 3
    1
    “I flung myself down the availing sewer and
lay there gasping for what seemed hours but what was, in actuality,
only mere moments. Having successfully eluded them, I then crept
from the gaping maw of the stinking, pestilence-riddled hole and
immediately saw the girl.”
    Roger paused briefly and accepted another mug
of coffee from Laurent’s thermos.
    Maggie sat next to Laurent, a proprietary
closeness between them. No awkward “should-we-have-done-that?”
aftermath for them. From the warmth and exhilaration of their sweet
union late that afternoon until now when they sat quietly near one
another, it was clear that a very right thing had developed between
them. But now her thoughts and eyes were focused on the wee,
crooked comma of a child that sat draped in the cotton tablecloth
that had been spread beneath the two lovers only hours earlier.
    Roger had brought her twenty minutes earlier.
She was small—smaller at six years than Maggie had imagined she’d
be. All the Newberry women were leggy creatures—lanky girls and
tall women. All except Maggie who was the recipient of the family’s
good-natured teasing for her sole petiteness. Sole, it seemed,
until now.
    She wanted to gather the huddled, frightened
girl into her arms, to hold her and make her feel the love and care
that her American family had for her, even though her initial
attempts to do just that had been quickly rebuffed by the child. As
soon as Maggie saw Nicole, she reached out to touch her, wanting to
hug her, to connect with her. Instantly, the girl had recoiled,
yet, Maggie detected no recognition of pain or fear in the girl’s
large, brown eyes or their flat outward gaze.
    Now, Maggie sat motionless as Roger told his
story.
    “I’d ditched the blighters, right enough,”
Roger said, taking a noisy sip of his hot coffee, “so I just dashed
up to the tyke, grabbed her up quick as you please and off we went.
Well! They saw us, didn’t they?”
    “They did?” Maggie’s attention moved briefly
from the girl to Roger. “Was Gerard with them?”
    “Eh? Gerard? Absolutely! Yes, he