Marnie
At seven in the morning, fishmongers, grocers, florists, and cheesemakers were still setting up their stands at Le Suquet Market, a covered hall in the old part of Cannes.
The space was bustling with scents, colors, and textures.
Sea brine mixed with fragrant peonies. Citrus and the saltiness of pungent cheeses.
It was a place for the locals, as far away from the Croisette and the movies as I could find on short notice.
I’d left my phone in the room, a wave of paranoia reminding me all the ways I could be tracked, followed. Uncovered. Since walking home from the yacht party, my brain had gone in overdrive. We’d acted rashly. Unconscionably.
And it was my fault.
Now was the time for reason.
Lou arrived first, wearing a crumpled button-down shirt and denim cutoffs, her face covered by a pair of large sunglasses.
Next to me, the baker, a woman in her forties wearing a white apron, was filling up her stand with the kind of buzzing energy I had on a normal morning, humming a song to herself.
“Geez!” Lou said, noticing me. “You could have signed the note.”
“I’m not leaving any proof behind,” I said, making sure no one was listening. “We’re kind of going through something.”
“I’m aware.”
“You didn’t talk to anyone, did you?”
She stuck her tongue against the inside of her cheek. “Well, I did—”
“Hey!”
It was Constance, trotting toward us breathlessly.
“I entered from the back,” she added. “The butcher. All those dead chickens waiting to be roasted.” She shuddered. “I don’t understand how people still eat meat.”
Constance looked a little gray, except for her eyes, which were bloodshot. The pain was written all over her face, and I wondered if I looked quite as upset. Or if I should. What did it say about me that I could think mostly straight? That I could make plans and strategize, even on no sleep?
“Are you okay?” I asked Constance.
“Nope.”
She wouldn’t look at me directly.
“What happened?” I asked.
She cocked her head to the side. “Some things happened.” But then she caught my meaning. “Not since the…party. Nothing you need to know about anyway.”
“Good. Let’s walk,” I said.
Again, I couldn’t believe how confident I sounded.
We slowly made our way down the aisles, alongside elderly people dragging shopping caddies behind them.
A woman with a neat mop of white curls smiled at us.
I tried to imagine how we might look to her, like three friends who liked our produce fresh and with a side of girl talk.
“Bonjour,” I said with a reverent nod. “Belle journée, n’est-ce pas?”
She beamed as she greeted us in response.
“How do you do that?” Lou asked, when the woman was out of earshot.
“Speak French?”
“Compartmentalize.”
I cleared my throat and motioned for them to huddle closer as we kept walking.
“I thought about it. That’s all I’ve done. We have nothing to worry about. Nothing to hide, either. It’s going to be fine.”
“We watched him die,” Constance said, deadpan.
Lou stared around us. “Shhh! Are you crazy?”
“We did. We have to live with that,” Constance replied.
“But that’s done,” I said, stopping to admire some of the shiniest strawberries I’d ever seen.
I leaned forward and inhaled. The smell made my mouth water. I grabbed a carton and handed a ten euro bill to the grocer, trying to ignore the puzzled looks of both girls as I waited for him to count my change and give it to me.
“If we don’t buy anything, we’re going to look suspicious.”
“That’s what’s going to make us look suspicious?” Lou retorted.
“Why are we here?” Constance asked.
I motioned for us to start walking again. I couldn’t keep still.
“Like I said, I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’ve come to the conclusion that we should…
share what we know,” I said, as neutrally as I could.
“Which is that we were drunk, and we needed a moment to gather ourselves. We only went down there to get some space. We saw a woman and a man arguing. It sounded intense. We couldn’t tell who they were.
We stepped back because we felt like we shouldn’t be listening to their conversation.
We didn’t see anything clearly. And then”—I’d considered the last part over and over—“Something went overboard.”
Constance shook her head, like I was the world’s maddest woman. “Something?”
“It was dark,” I countered.
“You’re joking,” Constance said. “We saw two people arguing, something went overboard, and then one person went back up to the party.”
She looked at Lou for support.
Lou made a face. “That is not a great story.”
“Maybe we couldn’t believe it was a human…person. We were drunk—okay I said that already, but that helps to explain things—and we weren’t sure what we saw. We didn’t really understand what happened.”
“We watched a man die,” Constance whispered, “and we saw who killed him.”
“That’s not our fault,” I said.
“It might become our fault if we don’t—”
“Stop.” It was Lou, sounding more serious than ever. “What’s done is done. We need to focus on what happens next. Do we even know if they found him yet?”
I shook my head in panic. “We can’t search anything on the internet. Not on our phones. Promise me you won’t.” The girls nodded. I exhaled. “But if they had found him, the whole town would be talking about it.”
The three of us scanned the market, alert for signs of murder chatter. But there was none, only old people sniffing some cheeses and weighing some melons.
“Anyway,” I continued. “Now we’ve sobered up. We’ve come to our senses.”
“Right,” Lou agreed. “If we go to the police…”
Her face lost its color at this last word.
“We have nothing to worry about,” I said again. “We just need to have the exact same story between the three of us.”
Maybe if I kept repeating it, it would become true.
“You’re going to be a renowned actor,” I said to Lou. “When people find out what happened, the movie is going to gain cult status overnight. You will be catapulted into stardom, along with the rest of the cast. My boss will love this.”
I hadn’t realized how true that would be until I said it.
There was the publicity for the movie. The windfall would be pure gold, and Carmen would be over the moon.
I might even get that promotion now. And yes, I knew how terrible it was for me to have these thoughts, but I was high on panic and sleep deprived, and things were a little messy in my head.
I turned to Constance.
“And you will go on to become the stylist all the stars want to work with. This doesn’t have to define us.”
I bobbed my head up and down, denying entry to any more intrusive ideas.
“We can be okay. It’s not like we had a reason to want him dead,” I whispered.
Lou whipped around. “What did you just say?”
“That we don’t have a motive?”
Constance cleared her throat. “Right.”
“Okay, so we’re in agreement.”
Both girls gave the faintest of nods. Lou was staring down at her sandals, and Constance’s face was twisted in anguish.
I’d started this whole thing and had summoned them here. It was on me to spell it all out, even though I was suddenly finding it hard to breathe.
“We’ll go to the police. We’ll explain why it took us so long to come forward. We should go together.” I checked the time on my phone. “The earlier we go the less guilty we look.”
“Yes,” Constance said.
But she didn’t move.
“So we’re going?” I said, my stomach twisting.
“We are,” Lou said.
Again, no one made a move.
Then Lou grabbed each of our arms.
“What if… Let’s say one of us might have had a motive to want him, you know… What do we do then?”