Death Becomes Him - 18

And so Trent's life went on. The hotel continued to prosper under his management. To the point that when a fast-food place next door closed its doors, he suggested to the hotel owners that they buy the property and expand. They not only thought it was a great idea, they gave him a raise.

When he had free time, and he tried not to, he would sometimes go out to a club. He always returned home afterwards wondering why he bothered. I’ll be a bachelor until the day I die. I was over Rory, almost, until he reappeared. Then, for a brief moment, once I began to accept what he is, I thought perhaps we… He smiled grimly. That will teach me to think. When it comes to him it only causes pain.

Still, he couldn’t get Rory out of his mind and it was driving him crazy. Everywhere he went in the city after dark he looked for him. Every man he came in contact with he compared to Rory, and they came in a poor second. It was insane and he knew it. What they’d had between them, before Rory vanished the first time, had been good but not some earth-shattering romance. They had become lovers in high school, then again when Trent had moved down to New Orleans. They were pulled apart by life, and—by death he supposed. Now it had happened again.

Only this time he walked away, without looking back. No, he did look back, just long enough to say he still loved me. Apparently that’s not enough. What did I say, or do, that he didn’t want to stay? What made him think I didn’t want him to?

Trent pondered those questions more than once, replaying their final words over and over. Then, late one evening as he and Beau returned from their walk, it hit him. ‘Just the way I will always remember you’.

He thought… he must have thought my saying that was my way of telling him to leave. That I would remember him because I wasn’t going to let him be in my life again. Is that what I meant to say? Or did two small words misspoken, ‘will always’ ruin what chance we might have had, had I not said them?

“I guess I’ll never know, will I, Beau?” They continued on toward the house and suddenly Trent stopped, much to Beau’s apparent surprise from the look the dog gave him. “I could find out, if I knew where to start looking for him. And I do. Well, sort of. Maybe. I mean how many chateaus can there be in the Pyrenees?”

Hundreds, he discovered an hour later when he went online to look. Rapping his fingers on the desk in frustration, he muttered, “What did he say her name was? Emily… Emily Carpenter. But that’s Anglicized. What would it be in French?” He brought up a translation site, typing in ‘Emily’, which was no help, and then ‘Carpenter’. “That’s it, I think,” he said when ‘Charpentier’ came up as one of the words meaning carpenter in French. He headed to a name site to try again to find something French which would mean ‘Emily’, or which she could have shortened, Anglicized, into Emily. There were three and he made note of them.

From there he Googled each one with the surname Charpentier after it, praying he had it right and would get a hit, or hits, but not too many. He found some, on ancestry and genealogy sites, and might have ignored them until he remembered Rory saying she was at least five thousand years old.

She was, is, a Countess too.

He added that to the search parameters and sighed softly when he came up with two women who fit. Neither one was as old as Rory had said, but then when he thought about it, Rory realized she wouldn’t appear that old. Maybe in her twenties or thirties? One of the two women had been thirty-two when she had died, the other had been in her sixties. That would have been very old, back in the late medieval times. He was honestly surprised to find that ancestry sites traced things back that far until he realized there were people who claimed to be descendants of very early English and European royalty, and had proof that they were. It almost made him consider tracing his own family history. But not now. That’s for some future time when I’m old and retired.

Going back to the Émilienne Charpentier who had died when she was thirty-two, he delved deeper into her ancestry and her descendants. He figured if she was Rory’s Emily she would have ‘come back’ as a daughter or niece. Finally, long after midnight, he found what he had been searching for. An Eveline Bonheur, the great-grand daughter of Émilienne, had married one Cyrille Fournier, a count in the court of Louis XVIII. The king had rewarded him with a chateau in the Pyrenees for meritorious services rendered.

“It’s a long shot,” Trent said as he wrote down all the information and shut off the computer. “But”—he chuckled—“I always did want to visit France and I’ve got three weeks vacation time coming. So what the hell, nothing ventured, nothing gained as they say. And the gains, if I’m right, could be well worth it. I hope.”