The Orchid Shroud by Michelle Wan

Author:Michelle Wan [Wan, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-67345-7
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2006-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

The others had gone. Only Julian remained. He reached out to draw her to him.

“Look, Mara,” he murmured into her hair. “The police can’t really think you did it. You were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Her body felt small and unresponsive. She mumbled something into his shirtfront. He bent his head. “What’s that?”

“I said I couldn’t admit it in front of the others.” She looked him in the eye, but with difficulty. “And I was afraid to tell that awful adjudant. Jean-Claude tried to make a pass at me, Julian. Well, more than a pass. He came on in a very nasty way. I slapped him.”

“Damn right,” Julian said indignantly.

“You don’t understand. We struggled. And I—” She broke off and glanced away. Gently, Julian hooked his finger under her chin, turning her face back.

“You what?”

“I pushed him. Oh, Julian, I pushed him. Really hard.”

He stood still, taking this in. “Are you saying you shoved him over the terrace wall?”

“No!” She shook her head vehemently, and then muttered with less conviction, “I don’t know. I didn’t think we were that near the edge. The thing is, he stumbled backward into the drinks trolley. I didn’t hang around to see what happened next. All I wanted to do was get out of there.”

“Okay,” he whispered, pulling her in to him again. “It’s okay.” But as he tried to reassure her, he wondered. Could Mara have unintentionally sent Jean-Claude sailing over the parapet after all?

Mara’s hypersensitive antennae immediately picked up Julian’s doubt. She stiffened.

“You don’t believe me.”

“Of course I do. Look, if anything, it was an accident. He assaulted you, there was a struggle. No one can blame you for running—”

The monstrosity of what he was saying hit her hard. She broke sharply from him.

“You think I did it!” Her voice rose in volume with every word. “You really think I knocked him over and then left him down there? That I would be capa-bu-ble of just leaving him for—for animals to eat?” She was close to tears. To her, that was his far greater offense: not just his suspicion that there had been more to the push than she remembered or wanted to admit, but that he thought her base enough to run away, knowing that Jean-Claude was lying, injured or dying, at the bottom of the ravine.

“No.” He tried to frame another denial. “That’s not what I meant.”

But she shouted him down. “You bastard! You really think I did it. Oh, leave me alone. Just leave me alone!”

If there had been a ledge handy, Mara really thought she would have shoved Julian off it.

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