Framed by John M. Green

Author:John M. Green [Green, John M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pantera Press

48

Most people would’ve pressed the green button without a second thought, but I’m not really one of those ‘just do it’ Nike types. I’m intrinsically more of a ‘don’t do today what you can put off till tomorrow’ type – though without any real sense of urgency – especially if the words criminal, millions of dollars and prison are all trying to cram themselves into the one sentence.

I remove myself from the green button and make myself a cup of lemongrass and ginger tea. I’m about to take it out onto the terrace but I see through the glass that the dogs are sprawled out on the tiles. The sun is a tangerine disc hovering over the top of the Finger Wharf. The sky is still pink, and a kookaburra is cackling outside, later than usual. It’s probably laughing at me.

As I sip the tea, I decide that before I green-button my life away, I need to do another reverse-image search, one I should have done long before now … using my Girl photo series to find out if Lesley is really Lesley.

After that, I’ll do the same thing with the photo of her parents, or whoever they are.

I scrunch down into her sofa, open the Girl photos on my laptop, choose the absolute sharpest one where she’s looking to camera, and start the search. All it gets me is hundreds of thumbnails of random stylised images of women in headscarves, and none of them look much like Lesley at all.

I AirDrop my shot of the desk photo to my laptop, and that too generates lots of junk … couple after couple looking front on, including the grim-faced farmer and his daughter in American Gothic.

Hopeful as ever, I keep scrolling and, eventually, one thumbnail stands out. I click to enlarge it and … boom! … It’s the couple in Lesley’s photo. They’re in a similar pose but it’s a different scene.

It’s like they’ve just walked out of a Vogue magazine spread aboard a yacht – and when I say yacht, it could easily be an ocean liner. Both are wearing sunglasses. The man’s hair is windblown, while the woman’s is protected by a headscarf. She looks like Marilyn Monroe in one of those retro 1950s glamour shots. Something about the man now reminds me of Dante, the naked guy who lived next door to Samantha in the first Sex and the City movie, but older and greyer.

They’re definitely the same people. I click the link – it’s to a newspaper article – and according to the caption, they’re Jacques and Gisèle Fontaine. Or they were, because the first article sends me to an obituary notice a few years later in the same paper.

Jacques, it tells me, was the founder of a major law firm in Monaco and he died in March 2021, two years after his wife, Gisèle. The only family mentioned is a child, Claude, who became the firm’s senior partner after Jacques’ death.

I’m thinking about this Claude. He must be someone who’s pretty special to Lesley if she keeps a portrait of his parents on her desk.

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