Which I’m pretty sure is why my stomach did a flip-flop.

“You know how it is sometimes, Annie,” Eve said, ever the bearer of wisdom when it came to any relationships but her own. “You and Peter, you could never work things out, either.”

“I tried. Peter wasn’t interested.” I would have thought she’d remember. “But that’s beside the point, which is-”

“That we’re supposed to be talking about Monsieur. Research, isn’t that what you said?” In a message as un-subtle as that presidential motorcade, Eve reached over and flicked on my computer screen. “It’s nearly three, Annie, and I have to be back at Bellywasher’s in a little bit. We’d better get down to business.”

There was no use arguing and, hey, since I’d probably spend the rest of the years I knew Eve worrying about her romantic entanglements-and since I planned to know her for the rest of my long, long life-I figured there would be time enough later to quiz her about Tyler. For now, we had Monsieur to think about.

With that in mind, I Googled his name.

“Eight pages of citations!” I bent closer to the screen for a better look. “Here’s the Très Bonne Cuisine home page,” I said, pointing to each line as I went. “Here’s an article about the appearance he’s scheduled to make at the big D.C. food show in a couple weeks. He’s one of the main presenters. That’s what Jim says, anyway. Monsieur is supposed to be doing a demonstration of French cooking.”

“I wonder what they’ll do if we don’t-”

This was something else I didn’t want to think about. Two weeks was a long time. Too long to go without word of our friend. Rather than consider it, and the emptiness that assailed me when I thought about the way I’d feel if we hadn’t made some positive progress by then, I kept on reading.

“Here’s a page that talks about Vavoom! and how popular it is.” I shook my head and clicked to the next page.

“Look! Here’s one that says something about Monsieur’s early life in France. That’s exactly the kind of information we’re looking for.” I clicked on the article and when it popped up, Eve and I both bent forward, eager to read more.

The article was a profile piece that appeared in D.C. Nights, the local (and locally influential) culinary magazine, seven years earlier, long before I’d known Monsieur, or Jim, or that a place as terrifying to a kitchenphobe as Très Bonne Cuisine even existed. The headline declared Monsieur the “King of D.C. Cuisine.” It appeared right above a full-color photograph that showed a beaming Monsieur in a blinding white chef’s jacket. He was smiling in that devil-may-care way of his while he motioned in a very Gallic, voila! sort of way to the sign over the front door of Très Bonne Cuisine.

“Gosh, I hope he’s all right.” Eve’s sentiments pretty much echoed my own thoughts. I glanced over to see that, as she looked at the photo, her eyes filled with tears. “What if he’s-?”

“Not going to talk about that,” I said, and because the photo of Monsieur made the same impression on me, I scrolled down to the body of the article as fast as I could. “Not even going to think about it. All we’re allowed to think about is what we can do to find Monsieur. For now, this is what we can do.”

Eve agreed, and reached into her purse for a tissue.

At the same time that I instructed my computer to print the article, I started skimming.

“He’s been in this country for seventeen years now,” I told Eve, and without me even asking her to do this, she grabbed the legal pad and added the information to my list. “His mother was named Marie. She was a pastry chef back in France and he credits her for giving him a lifelong interest in food and a desire to prepare it correctly and serve it with flair. His father was Pierre Lavoie, a sommelier. That’s a wine expert,” I added, because I knew even without her asking that Eve didn’t have a clue.

“Monsieur was born in a little town in France called Sceau-Saint-Angel. The family bloodlines go back there for hundreds of years. Wow. Imagine having that kind of wonderful, rich heritage. I’m surprised he didn’t talk about it more. I’ve never heard him even mention Sceau-Saint-Angel, have you?”

“No.” Eve squinted at the screen so she could copy down the proper spelling of Monsieur’s hometown. “Maybe he had an unhappy childhood.”

I read some more. “Maybe not. He talks about accompanying his parents on trips to wineries and orchards and to the markets where they purchased the freshest ingredients for their cooking. Look, here he says something about the first time he went to Paris and ate at Lapérouse.” I added another aside for Eve’s benefit. “It’s an old, old restaurant. Very famous. Supposed to be romantic, and with fabulous food.”

“So we know Monsieur had a happy home life.” Eve rapped the pen against the pad. “Maybe something terrible happened to him after he came to this country. You know, unrequited love. Or a love triangle with another chef and a gorgeous food critic. Or-”

When Eve got this way, it was best to stop her before things got out of control. That’s why I asked her to get the article out of my printer and put it in the file folder I’d left on my desk, the one where I’d written Monsieur on the tab.

I printed out some of the other information we found out about him, too, but honestly, by the time we were finished, we still didn’t have much to go on.

Except for that information about Sceau-Saint-Angel, of course.

I checked the clock, did some quick mental calculations, and Googled the name of the town.

A couple minutes later, I had the phone in my hand.

“How’s your high school French?” I asked Eve.

AS IT TURNED OUT, EVE’S HIGH SCHOOL FRENCH WAS nonexistent.

I should have remembered that.

Eve took four years of Spanish. It wasn’t that she was some kind of fortune-teller who anticipated our current global economy. Or that she had an inkling of how valuable it would become to be truly bilingual.

The way I remembered it, there was a cute football player who Eve had her eye on back in our high school days, and since he was Puerto Rican by birth, he was taking Spanish for an easy A. While I muscled my way through French I, II, and III under the eagle eye of Sister Mary Nunzio, Eve struggled just enough in Spanish class to make sure she needed extra tutoring from you-know-who. She went steady with that cute linebacker for the better part of our junior year.

Funny, isn’t it, how even incidents like that from years ago have repercussions in the present.

That’s why I found myself with the phone in my hand, listening closely as the person on the other end spoke slowly in the hopes of getting through to me.

“Cent dix-sept?” Just to be sure I got it right, I repeated what the kind gentleman from Sceau-Saint-Angel had told me. “Êtes-vous certain?”

I nodded in response to his answer. “Je comprends,” I told him, then thanked him and hung up.

“You don’t look happy.” Eve’s comment was an understatement.

“Monsieur Brun… he’s the owner of the one and only local bed and breakfast in Sceau-Saint-Angel… Monsieur Brun has lived there all his life.” I thought back to our conversation. “I’m not exactly sure, but either he said he’s two hundred and eleven or he said he’s seventy-one. I’m guessing the seventy-one is right. Either way, he’s been there a long time and he knows every single person in town. Everybody knows everybody else in town. They know everybody’s families. And their families’ families.”

“And?” Eve leaned forward, anxious to hear more.

“And there are only one hundred and seventeen people in Sceau-Saint-Angel,” I told her. “So it isn’t hard to know what’s going on there. Monsieur Brun… he says he’s never even heard of a family named Lavoie.”