Almost Gone (The Au Pair—Book One)

by Blake Pierce

  As she sorted through the chaos of the toy box, Cassie suddenly wondered whether Marc, in his own way, was also resisting the unreasonable standards of neatness and perfection that his father imposed on him. It would certainly explain his strange behavior and the way he seemed to seek out opportunities to disrupt his environment.

  Cassie’s methodical search left the room slightly tidier than she had found it, but it yielded no results. Her passport was definitely not there.

  She was beginning to feel less hopeful about her chances of being gone before the family returned.

  She searched Ella’s room just as thoroughly and with as little success. The bathrooms on the upper floor yielded nothing either.

  It was possible that the passport could have been hastily hidden elsewhere in the house.

  Cassie went downstairs, checking each room first to make sure there were no household staff working in it. A housemaid would certainly wonder why she was shaking curtains, peering into drawers, and even reaching down into the larger vases and amphoras. Cassie suspected that in this house, walls had ears and eyes, and that if anyone saw her they would report back to Pierre immediately.

  Trying to remain unobtrusive, she made her way through the downstairs section of the house. She looked around the dining room and the hallway very thoroughly, thinking that somebody might have quickly stashed the passport in one of those places before they left for the morning.

  The downstairs search took her a full two hours. By the end she was exhausted, overwhelmed by the scale of the house and the number of rooms, and the sheer volume of hiding places and treasures within them. She wondered how many of these were family heirlooms, or whether Pierre had acquired them himself. From the brief hint he’d given at breakfast about a meeting with an art gallery owner, she guessed he was somehow involved in the business.

  She’d left out two of the rooms because staff had been cleaning them, and a whole section of the house was locked—but if it was locked for her, it would surely be locked for everyone else. And in any case, she tried to console herself, why would you hide a document somewhere that a housemaid might innocently find it while cleaning?

  No, Cassie decided, if you stole something so important, you would keep it in a safe place, a private place.

  That meant there was one more room she had to search.

  She felt a stab of apprehension as she walked upstairs and headed to the end of the passage. She’d left this room till last because going inside really did feel as if she was overstepping all her boundaries. She’d hoped she would find the passport before she had to look here, but she hadn’t. Now she was worried that she’d wasted too much time, because this was the one place where she couldn’t possibly risk being discovered.

  She knocked softly on Pierre’s bedroom door.

  “Hello?” she called, just in case anyone was inside cleaning.

  There was no reply. All Cassie could hear was the sound of her own rapid breathing.

  This side of the house faced the gardens, not the driveway, so it would be more difficult to hear the car coming back. That was another complicating factor.

  With a shiver of nerves, she pushed opened the heavy wooden door.

  The room beyond was spacious and exquisite. Light streamed in through enormous French doors that led onto an ornate balcony. The huge four-poster bed was covered by an intricate lace throw, and several large paintings hung on the ivory-papered walls.

  She could smell a hint of Margot’s perfume in the air.

  Cassie tiptoed across the room. She wanted to avoid the bed, after the hellish scene she’d spied playing out on it, but it had to be checked so she decided to get it over with by doing it first.

  She felt carefully under the pillows and covers, and then spent some time plumping the pillows and replacing the delicate lace cover just as she had found it. She knew Pierre, with his eye for detail, would spot any imperfection straight away.

  The dressing table drawers were filled with makeup and a variety of different perfumes. Glass bottles were crammed shoulder to shoulder—there must have been at least twenty perfumes there, but her passport was not in any of the drawers.

  Moving to the desk, she was captivated by the brilliant shine of a Venetian glass paperweight. A bouquet of colorful flowers was encased in the perfectly clear globe. With the sun illuminating the glass, the effect was mesmerizing, and for a long, distracted moment she was too entranced by its beauty to remember the urgency of her search.

  Then a bang from outside made her jump and the spell was broken. She gave herself a mental slap. What on earth was she doing, pausing to admire objets d’art when there was so much at stake, and her presence here was so risky? She was appalled that she’d been sidetracked so easily. Was this another sign she’d gotten her meds badly wrong? If Pierre walked in, she could not possibly explain her presence here; it was nothing short of criminal.

  She held her breath as she listened, but when she heard nothing else, she pulled herself together and continued her hunt, going faster now.

  In the study, to the right of the bedroom, Cassie found a landline phone. It rested on the marble desk, next to a few neatly labeled files. She looked at it longingly, knowing she couldn’t possibly use it as Pierre might check the last number dialed. The wooden filing cabinet in the room was locked, but she hoped that meant Margot would not be able to access it either.

  To the left of the bedroom was a huge dressing room, the walls lined with cupboards that were filled with clothes. Panicking that she was running out of time, Cassie did the quickest search possible, running her hands over all the shelves and into the pockets as best she could.

  She found nothing.

  Cassie let out a deep breath. To be honest with herself, she hadn’t expected the passport to be hidden here, which was why she’d left this room till last.

  For all she knew, whoever took the passport might simply have destroyed it. Thrown it into the fire or tossed it into the overflowing kitchen trash can. She might have been wasting her time from the start.

  Instead, she needed to direct all her energy toward devising a plan B, whatever that might be. It would definitely involve contacting the embassy, to find out what she needed to do to get a replacement passport.

  But as she was on her way back to the door, she suddenly remembered she hadn’t checked a very obvious hiding place—under the bed.

  She should have thought to look there immediately. After all, it had been her hiding place of choice in the past, when times had turned bad.

  Crouching down on the polished floorboards, Cassie peered under the bed, tensing as she heard a distant thumping from somewhere outside. Telling herself to be calm, and that she couldn’t let every small sound distract her now that she was almost finished, she resumed her search.

  There was nothing there, but she noticed a long, narrow drawer concealed in the bed frame.

  She opened it and stared down at its contents, feeling her spine prickle with dread.

  The drawer contained leather gags, vicious-looking whips, ropes and harnesses, and some silk scarves like the one she’d seen through the keyhole. There were a few of those, in various bright colors, neatly folded in a corner. Other items, too. Handcuffs, blindfolds, and shiny metal clamps—she didn’t want to think exactly how and where they might be applied.

  She lifted out one of the scarves. It was gossamer-light to the touch, deep pink in color. Its softness contrasted with the heavy, tough feel of the harnesses as she moved them aside. The chains attached to them rattled loudly as she moved them and she jumped at the unexpected noise. She felt incredibly vulnerable crouching here. Perhaps it was her own guilt at prying into this hidden drawer, but she was suddenly sure she was being watched.

  Cassie replaced the harnesses and the scarf carefully after checking there was nothing hidden under them. Then she closed the drawer carefully and stood up, wishing she had never seen the contents. A glimpse through the keyhole was one thing, but stumbling upon an entire s
tockpile of bondage equipment was something else again. She could never, ever let Pierre know she’d discovered this secret hiding place.

  She walked quietly to the bedroom door, but as she reached it, she heard a louder, more familiar sound that caused her to freeze. She waited, panic blooming inside her, praying that she’d misheard.

  Then she heard it again, confirming her worst fears.

  It was the unmistakable shout of Marc’s voice, reverberating down the passage.

  She’d spent too long searching, and now the family had returned, and she was trapped in the master bedroom.

  At any moment, Pierre might open the door.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A door slammed further down the passage, and Cassie heard Marc shout again. She shrank back into Pierre’s bedroom, instinctively wanting to hide, but in this tidy, minimalist space there was nowhere to go.

  Pierre and Margot might head straight into the modern bathroom, or the study, or the dressing room, and they would see her immediately if they did. Hiding under the bed would simply invite disaster.

  Cassie tried to reassure herself by remembering how Marc loved to run ahead of the others. Hopefully, the rest of the family was still on their way upstairs, in which case it would be better if they found her leaving the room, rather than waiting inside. She had to make a decision now, because they might already be wondering where she was, and expecting her to run and help with the children as soon as they arrived home.

  She pulled open the bedroom door, slipped through, and closed it quickly behind her. Then she hurried down the passage and round the corner. Her heart sped up as she heard Pierre’s voice coming from Marc’s bedroom and she realized what a near miss she’d had. The boy must have called his father into the room as he passed by. Perhaps he’d wanted Pierre to admire his battalion of toy soldiers.

  If it hadn’t been for Marc, Pierre would certainly have discovered her there—perhaps even walked in as she was peering into that secret drawer, and she didn’t want to imagine what the consequences would have been. She couldn’t risk such a reckless action again, not even for the sake of finding her missing passport.

  Antoinette was not in her room, but Ella’s door was open. Looking inside, she saw the young girl had already changed out of her smart dress into one of the corduroy pinafores that seemed to be her favorite. That meant the family had been home for longer than she’d thought.

  She waved to Ella and said a friendly hello.

  “Do you want to go for a walk in the garden before lunch, Ella?” she asked, but Ella’s only response was to turn away.

  Cassie trudged dispiritedly back to her bedroom. The day had been a total failure. Her search had ended in near-disaster, her passport was still nowhere to be found, and Ella’s silence was unrelenting.

  Looking out her window, she saw the day was turning cloudy and gray again. She put on a tracksuit top, tidied the clothes that she’d thrown back into her cupboard earlier, and spent some time picking up the crushed tablets and sweeping the dusty residue away with tissues until the floor was clean.

  With everything tidied up, she noticed the bottle with the single unbroken pill was still on her bedside table. She should have put it away this morning, because she didn’t want her medication lying around in full view.

  Cassie opened the bedside drawer and let out an audible gasp as she looked down.

  Her passport was there.

  She blinked, unable to believe what she was seeing. There it was, lying neatly in the drawer, its gold-embossed cover undamaged.

  “How on earth…?” Cassie said aloud.

  She grabbed it out of the drawer, needing to feel its reassuring shape in her hand. Paging through, she saw her visa was still there, and none of the pages were creased or torn. It hadn’t been tampered with at all.

  The frantic worry that had been consuming her since the morning ebbed away and she felt euphoric with relief. Whatever other problems she might have—and she knew there were plenty—the presence of this small, navy-covered document had given her back the power to make decisions. She was no longer a prisoner in this unfriendly house.

  Cassie suddenly wondered if the passport might have been in the drawer all along. When she’d unpacked, she remembered thinking that the bag was not the safest place to leave it, and that she should put it somewhere else.

  Perhaps she had done that, and then forgotten about it.

  She hadn’t checked any of the drawers after she’d found her room trashed, because she’d seen the bag’s open zipper compartment and assumed it had been taken from there. Still, here it was, and now Cassie found her relief was tinged with worry, because how could she have put it away and not remembered a thing about it afterward?

  Was she genuinely losing her mind?

  She rubbed her forehead in confusion, trying to replay exactly what she’d done while unpacking, but her thoughts were interrupted by the rattle of her bedroom door. Looking up, she saw Pierre standing in the doorway.

  Cassie felt her face grow hot with embarrassment as she realized she was holding the very passport she’d accused one of the family of having stolen earlier.

  “I—I just found it,” she said. “It was in my bedside table drawer. The money’s still missing, but at least the passport has turned up.” She forced a smile.

  Pierre stepped inside and closed the door behind him. His imposing presence made the room seem smaller, and although he looked stern, Cassie had no idea what was wrong. Something must have happened if he had come to speak to her in private. Perhaps he’d been told about what she did at the carnival, and had come to fire her.

  “I believe you have been looking for the passport, Cassie?” Pierre said.

  She swallowed. She hadn’t been careful enough; one of the housemaids must have seen her rummaging around in the downstairs rooms.

  “Yes,” she said, deciding to stick as close to the truth as possible. “I thought I might have dropped it while Margot was showing me round on the night I arrived.”

  Pierre considered her words for a few moments. His silence was unnerving, and she couldn’t read the expression in his narrowed, brown eyes.

  “Did you think you had dropped it in my bedroom, Cassie?” he asked, and she visibly started at the words, a clear admission of her guilt.

  “I…” she began, but there was nothing more she could say. It hadn’t been a genuine question, but rather a statement of fact. Somehow, he must have seen or heard her in there.

  “Perhaps you didn’t notice everything in that room,” he continued. “The drawer where Margot keeps her jewelry, for example. That is in a very well-hidden place.”

  She couldn’t meet Pierre’s gaze. She looked down at her hands, watching her fingernail dig into her cuticle so deep she thought she would draw blood.

  “No. I didn’t notice any jewelry drawer. I just had a very quick look around. I’m so sorry. It was unforgivable of me to go in there. I wanted to—well, I wanted to make sure I’d searched everywhere.”

  “You might have found another drawer, though,” he suggested in a conversational tone, as he sat down on the bed next to her.

  She stared at him in panic. How had he guessed she’d looked inside that secret drawer? She was sure the bedroom door hadn’t opened. Perhaps he’d left the contents arranged in a certain way. She’d tried her best to put things back as they were, but she’d been shocked and rushed and realizing she was out of time.

  If he knew for sure, she’d only make things worse by denying it. So perhaps it was better to say nothing at all and simply brace herself for his wrath to descend.

  To her surprise, she saw Pierre’s heavy features were not flushed with anger. Instead, he was regarding her with the same expression she’d seen the previous morning when he met her on the stairs.

  “Do you think rules are made to be broken, Cassie” he said quietly, as if he didn’t want his voice to carry further than her bedroom, or even beyond the bed.

  She shook her head in viole
nt denial but he continued.

  “I think you do. And so do I. It makes life more interesting.”

  He reached out a hand and smoothed her hair away from her face, then pinched her cheek gently.

  His voice was playful, but his words were not.

  “I believe searching through your employer’s bedroom is a dismissible offense. It could even be a criminal offense. After all, we have had jewelry go missing in the past. Do you think we took no action against the culprit, or since? The local police would be interested to hear of your wrongdoings. Are you wondering if I have proof of what you did? Perhaps we should inform the police already, so they are aware.”

  Cassie stared at him, fear blooming inside her as Pierre’s softly spoken threats told her what he was capable of.

  “Please don’t. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t aware your room was out of bounds. I didn’t know that was a rule. Now that I know, I’ll never go in there again.”

  “Yes, you have broken the rules, no doubt about it. But this time I will be lenient to you. I will believe that you acted in innocence. I will say nothing, and nor will you. I will pretend you were just playing games with me. But a game must be played by two people, not so? So next time, in our game, it is my turn to break the rules. You think you will like what I am going to do?”

  “I—no, not really,” she stammered. Her face was on fire, and she felt paralyzed by indecision, unsure whether the safest option would be to remain quiet, or scream for help. Keeping quiet seemed the less terrifying alternative, even though she was appalled by what Pierre was implying.

  “Oh, but you are wrong, Cassie, because I think you will.” His tone was teasing now, his fingers roaming over her face as if it were his property—stroking her jaw, her brow, touching her lips, cupping her neck. Then he lowered his hand and touched her thigh, and Cassie felt every muscle in her body turn to ice.

  She decided she was going to scream, no matter how much trouble it got her into. She had to put a stop to this before it went any further.