‘No kidding.’ Dirk regarded her shadily. ‘You liked Reuben’s place?’ he asked.
It made sense Dirk and Reuben would be cronies. Linus, too. They were the same type: chauvinist, unreconstructed, thought money could buy everything. Maybe it could.
‘Very much. Cacatra’s a beautiful place.’
‘Seems it’s done Bibi a world of good,’ Dirk went on. ‘Heard she got an audition with Sammy Lucas.’
‘It’s about time she had a break.’
Evidently it struck him as an odd thing to say. ‘Getting with Linus was her break.’
‘That depends.’ Stevie wanted to add:
If you mean it nearly broke her then I guess so
.
He came closer. ‘Wanna know something?’
She raised an eyebrow.
‘There’s some of us thinkin’ Linus’s death might not have been an accident.’
Stevie kept her face perfectly still. ‘Oh?’
‘Ms Reiner should watch herself. Because rest assured we all are.’
‘Don’t try intimidating me, Dirk. It won’t work.’
He spat the words. ‘It’s always attitude with you women, isn’t it? Attitude that gets you into trouble. If you know what’s good for that bitch you’ll bring her straight to me.’
She wanted to hit him, turned before she could and he grabbed her arm.
‘Tell her that Linus’s pals aren’t as boneheaded as the cops,’ he hissed. ‘And you can bet your bottom dollar we’re not gonna rest till we get to the truth.’
The following morning she was back from LA, sore-headed from a sleepless night. Dirk’s threat bothered her more than she cared to admit. He was powerful enough in this world, but if ‘Linus’s pals’ included Reuben van der Meyde then they were up against a colossus. But, she reasoned, what could any of them know about Bibi? What could they prove? Absolutely nothing.
She hadn’t expected Xander to be home till the weekend and was surprised to find him waiting for her back at the villa.
‘What’s this about?’ she asked, bemused as he deposited an enormous bouquet of flowers in her arms, followed by a swift kiss to the lips, the first in weeks.
‘I came back early,’ he said. His hair had grown to just below his ears. It suited him.
Stevie put the stems in water, taking her time, watching as Xander made his way out to the terrace pool and stood with his back to her, hands on his waist. He looked like an orator about to address an assembly.
She followed him out.
‘Xander …?’
He turned. Written all over his face was confession.
‘We need to talk,’ he said. Those four words among the very worst there were. She could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. Guilt.
‘I need to be upfront with you,’ he said. ‘I thought a lot about this while I was away and I’ve realised I have to tell the truth. It’s only fair. I want to be fair to you, Steve.’
Don’t be a cliché. Please don’t be a fucking cliché
.
Who was it? Some debut actress he’d fallen for, in the same way he’d fallen for her? Some older woman, someone she knew?
Lowering herself into a chair, she held her hands in her lap. Xander crouched next to her.
‘You asked me once if I knew JB Moreau,’ he said quietly. ‘Well, I do.’
She blinked. It took her a second to adjust, the notion of his affair still fresh in her mind.
‘This is about him?’
Xander released a lungful of air. ‘I don’t know where to begin, honest to Christ. It’s complicated, Steve, there’s so much to—’
‘Begin with why you didn’t want me to go to Cacatra.’
He ran a hand across his unshaven jaw, trying to find a way into the labyrinth. ‘OK.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Paul
and Emilie Moreau, JB’s parents. I was there when they died.’
‘What?’
‘I was there.’
‘But what’s that got to—?’
‘Listen to me.
Please
.’
She struggled to remember, a story finally surfacing. ‘The boating accident,’ she said.
‘That’s right.’ Xander watched her carefully. ‘What I’m trying to tell you, Steve, is that it
was no accident
.’
‘We attended the same school, JB and I. The international academy in Switzerland. I hated it.’
The too-tall Jewish kid who nobody liked
. He’d told her before, laughed with her, even—ostracised in his school days for having bookish, boring parents and a bookish, boring life and always doing his bookish, boring homework.
‘This French kid turned up in the middle of semester. He was different from everyone else, kind of detached. He seemed older than thirteen, like the world had shown him all there was to see, and he was weary of it. He didn’t care for rules or authority; he did things his own way. All the boys wanted to be him, me included. All the girls wanted to date him. But he never looked at anybody, just kept himself to himself.’ Xander narrowed his eyes, drawing the memories into focus. ‘You can imagine my surprise when he singled me out, decided maybe I was worth making the effort for. And when JB made an effort, you knew about it. He could make you feel like the most important person that ever lived.’
‘You became friends?’
Xander nodded. ‘He only had one other friend, he said. Nicole, her name was, this girl from his village back in France. He was fond of her, the way he talked about her. She was the only thing that made him happy, over there at least, because his parents didn’t give a thought to him, they never had. Weekends and half terms came about and all the other students were picked up, full of excitement about the holidays. They’d forget to send someone to collect him, because they never came themselves, and he’d stand outside the academy, this lost, lonely kid with his cases, just waiting, and nobody came.’
‘What was it about you?’ she prompted. ‘Why did he pick you?’
‘I think he saw himself in me. A part, however small. I was smart, I was quiet … and I was alone, too, in my way.’ A ghost of a smile. ‘Every decision JB makes is a definite one. He doesn’t bow out of it. If he decides it’s you, it’s you.’
Xander became animated. ‘And I found him inspiring and exciting and all the things I wanted to be. He knew stuff I couldn’t work out
how
he knew, about history and politics and people … How people work, you know? How they feel, which is harder to learn than equations and biology and conjugated verbs, complexities that come with the wisdom of age. He knew what people wanted, what they feared and loved and valued—and how far they would go to get it.’ Darkness crossed his face. ‘Our friendship became intense. Quickly.’
There was the shade of a question on Stevie’s tongue but she didn’t know how to ask it.
‘End of the first year, I found out he’d started dating Nicole. He didn’t tell anyone except me. But JB changed.
He became brighter. He started to pull away from me, letting the other boys in, and I didn’t like it. Of course everyone was impressed he had a girlfriend and whenever he spoke about Nicole he got this look and this manner that the rest of us were too young to identify. He was happy, for the first time. He lost his heart to Nicole. As far as I know, it hasn’t happened since. He’s never lost his heart, not in that way, to anyone else.’
Xander stood. He put his hands in his pockets, facing the pool and the sun so that all Stevie could see was a black outline.
‘His family were rich, it goes without saying. It seemed like every summer his parents would experience a pang of conscience and realise they hadn’t seen their only son in a year, and so they’d take him on a brief vacation in St Tropez, or to a castle in the French countryside, or on one of their fleet of boats. I couldn’t believe when he invited me out one time. It felt like the golden ticket. I’d been scared he was extracting himself from the bond we’d shared, like I might get replaced, but JB was loyal. Is loyal. He doesn’t do stuff like that.’
Xander turned to face her. One of his fists was caught in the palm of the other.
‘We took the boat out early one morning,’ he said. ‘There was bad weather forecast, but JB’s father didn’t listen. By the time the storm hit, we were helpless. Paul and Emilie were torn from each other, the wind howling and the waves pounding, and I hadn’t a clue what to do though they were shouting instructions I couldn’t understand. JB was an able sailor, he’d spent his early years thrust out of sight on every activity going, but even so it was a lost cause.
‘Paul went over first, then Emilie.’ Stevie saw her
husband’s knuckles tense, geared for impact, the bone cauliflower-white as it pressed against his skin. ‘It was suicide, JB and I both knew it, but Emilie was the stronger swimmer and she believed she could save him. Next thing their arms were in the air, reaching and stretching, and their mouths were filling up with water.
‘They drowned. Lives, memories, everything, snuffed out like a candle flame.’
‘You were so young,’ Stevie murmured. ‘Poor JB …’
Xander looked at her directly. ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ he said. ‘It’s not “poor JB”, it never has been.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘He was watching it happen, Stevie. While I was trying to save them, he was
standing there and watching it happen
. His parents begged.
Help us, please, help us
. And I was shouting at JB to do something, because he was the one who knew boats and time was running out, the water was getting higher and the rain thrashing so it made me blind, thinking I saw them then losing them, till I didn’t know what I was seeing any more. I grabbed what I could—a rope, jackets, the lifebuoy I knew they kept on the underside of the cabin—but nothing made any difference. He didn’t help me, Steve. And I couldn’t see fear in him, though I looked for it. He just stood there. He let it happen.’
‘That can’t be right,’ she said. ‘He was only a boy!’
‘That’s what they thought,’ agreed Xander. ‘And it’s what he relied on.
It’s the shock
, they all said.
Poor child
. He didn’t speak for days. He went to stay with his aunt and uncle in Paris and I went, too, for a while, but by then he frightened me. And it wasn’t till we returned to school in the fall that he told me what happened.
‘He vowed that his father was a cheat and a liar, and
that he was glad he was dead. Because he’d walked into Paul’s office a week before the boating trip and found a fourteen-year-old Nicole on her knees. He told me Paul had been forcing the girl’s head into his lap, the girl JB loved, the only person he’d ever loved and who had loved him back, the only thing that belonged to him alone and not to his parents. And if Paul was forcing Nicole then, how many other times had he forced her? JB believed he should have done something sooner, to help her, prevented it from happening in the first place. She stopped coming by. She stopped holding his hand. She stopped everything, after that. So it was for Nicole that he’d let them drown. Well, his father was for Nicole. I believe his mother was for him.’
Stevie recalled the furore over the couple’s deaths. ‘You’re saying he let them die?’
‘You do believe me,’ Xander insisted, ‘don’t you?’
‘Of course,’ she said, and she did, even if something wasn’t right. The story didn’t seem entire. There were so many questions. ‘Why didn’t you tell someone?’ she asked. ‘Why didn’t you admit what happened?’
‘How could I?’ protested Xander. ‘Anything I said would have been dubious at best, malicious at worst. JB had lost
both his parents
. What kind of person would accuse him of that?’
Stevie examined him. ‘You should have told me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you didn’t.’
‘I wanted to.’
‘So that’s why you didn’t want me to go to Cacatra?’
Xander held her gaze for a fraction too long.
And then he lied. The coward JB Moreau always told him he was.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s why.’
46
Lori
Lori and her father flew to Spain for the funeral. Despite her repeated offers to pay their fare, for Tony’s benefit more than theirs, Angélica and her daughters elected not to come.
The black-clad procession winding through Murcia was filled with mourners for Corazón. Lori was amazed at the number of lives her grandmother had touched. She would always treasure the precious few months they had shared. If Corazón had done half as much for these people as she’d done for Lori, their affection ran deeper than she knew.
The following day she and Tony had the difficult task of sorting through Corazón’s belongings. Trinkets, diaries and photographs; string-bound bundles of brittle letters laced with faded ink; drawers packed with clouded silver. Lori remembered how frustrated she’d been last time she had visited, how desperate in the aftermath of Rico’s
arrest. How caught up she’d been in her lust for another man …
Corazón had given her a way out and in doing so had given her everything.
Now, more than ever, she needed her grandmother’s counsel.
She needed her mother. She needed a woman she could trust. Turmoil couldn’t come close to describing the state she was in.
Pepe the dog lay on the stone floor with his chin on his paws, his eyes sad, every so often pricking his ears and sniffing the air, either mistaken in believing the old woman was with them or the only one, perhaps, who could sense she still was.
‘What’ll happen to him?’
Tony was at the table, sorting through papers. ‘Mama organised him to go to a friend.’ The afternoon light was fading, a burned, Spanish light, and bathed him in its glow. Lori saw what he might have looked like as a boy, as Corazón would have seen him in her kitchen.
‘I should have been with her,’ he said. ‘After Maria died, I didn’t come back as often as I should, and now—’ he shook his head ‘—it’s too late.’
Lori rested her hands on his shoulders. They felt thin and small. ‘There is too much death in the world,’ Tony said sadly, ‘isn’t there?’
Taking her silence for assent, he reached round and took his daughter’s hand.
‘Death makes way for life,’ she replied, feeling his fingers entwined with hers. ‘You can’t have one without the other.’ Releasing him, she eased into the chair opposite.
‘I have something to tell you, Papa,’ she said, allowing
him a moment before she broke her news. She steeled herself, strong as she could be.