Blinking repeatedly, Viola fought to grab onto the passing thread of memory. She brushed it with the edge of her mind, but it floated away. Shaking her head, she frowned.
Jacques came toward her, holding a full glass of wine.
She reached for it, out of habit. Growing up on a vineyard, it was considered a great insult if you didn’t accept and taste a glass of wine when it was offered to you. So, even though she’d never been a fan of cabernets, Viola dutifully raised it to her lips, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply.
The scent that assaulted her was one she immediately recognized. A hint of cologne on the stem of the glass. Woodsy, like cedar, with a thick mask of cigar smoke. The sickening sweetness underneath it all, like a toxic basenote.
Viola opened her eyes. Meeting Jacques’ gaze, she forced herself to smile stupidly, as if she was still in the throes of a bizarre but pleasant dream.
“I really love that smell,” she said, stalling as she dug for her phone under the blankets with one hand. “What kind of cologne is that?”
“It’s Bulgari,” he answered impatiently. “It was a gift. Now, drink your wine and go to sleep.”
“I thought I already was asleep, Uncle Jack.” No matter how hard she tried, Viola couldn’t prevent a sharp edge from showing beneath the pretend sweetness in her voice.
“Yes,” he said. “You are asleep, but you won’t wake up until you drink the wine.”
“You first.”
Jacques narrowed his eyes. “Why?”
“Because,” she said, as her fingers finally brushed against the plastic cover of her phone. “It’s inappropriate to drink alone. My mother taught me that.”
Jacques let out a short burst of air, almost like a laugh, but he wasn’t smiling. In fact, all traces of humanity seemed to have bled from his face when she’d mentioned her mother a second time.
“You’re not going to drink it, are you?”
Since he seemed to be dropping the act, Viola decided she would, too. “No thanks, I’d rather die. In fact, something tells me I probably would.”
He sighed, gently placing the bottle on top of the dresser. He reached into his leather case again—her father’s, Viola realized, now that she was steadily catching on—and pulled out a small, but vicious-looking handgun.
“You’ll die either way,” he said. “But trust me, the wine will be much easier.”
Viola had never felt less ready to surrender to her fate. Which was peculiar, since the last time Jacques had tried to kill her, she’d still had a family, a future. But even now that everything she loved had been taken from her, there were so many things she still wanted to do. So many questions she needed to find out the answers to.
“What’s in the wine?”
Jacques shrugged. “Does it matter? It will be quick. Just like before, you’ll fall into a deep sleep. Only this time, I’ll make sure you drink enough so that you’ll never wake up.”
“Won’t people know that I’ve been poisoned?”
Her ‘uncle’ only shook his head. Of course, he would make it look like an accident, or an overdose. Just like he’d tried to do the last time.
Viola felt the bile rising in her throat as she realized how close she’d been to the truth. But she’d turned back, doubting herself before she doubted the rest of the world. Possible and impossible. Right and wrong. Perception and reality. She didn’t need to ask him why he’d done it, because there were millions of reasons. But there was one thing she couldn’t bear to die without knowing.
“How did you know about my father’s heart condition?” she asked. “Did you poison him too, to make him crash the car and kill my mother? How did you make it look like an accident?”
To her surprise, Jacques looked stricken, even hurt by her question.
“I would never have harmed Étienne,” he said, his voice cracking as he screamed at her.
Recoiling, Viola realized that she might be the sanest one in the room, after all. But then, maybe that could work in her favor. Maybe she could tip the scales.
“I don’t believe you,” she taunted, pushing him with her anger. If she pushed him far enough, maybe he would crack and shoot at her. Then, at least, people would know what had really happened. Then, at least, she wouldn’t go down in public memory as another self-involved heiress who had taken her depression a little too far.
“My parents had to die, and I had to die, so that you could get your hands on Bellerose. If my father had lived, you wouldn’t have gotten a cent!”
“No,” Jacques shook his head vehemently. “I loved him. Everything I ever had, I owed to him. We built a life together, and it was our legacy, not yours. Because of you, I was pushed into the shadows. Because of you, he kept up that sham of a marriage for twenty years. All for his silly obsession with family, with the name…” he was almost sobbing now, looking toward her but not really at her, the way crazy people do. “The legacy…it was all he ever talked about. No matter how often I tried…I tried to tell him…mon coeur, I’d say. J’aurais pu être…I could’ve been his family. LeAnn never mattered. She was the money. He didn’t love her. But you…you took him from me. And you never returned him.”
Mon coeur, her father had said, only she had misunderstood. My heart. Pas encore. Not yet.
Feeling her mouth drop open in shock, Viola’s gaze fell to the ring on Jacques’ finger, just under the trigger of his gun. Her father’s ring. Her father’s suits. Her father’s briefcase. For most of her life, she’d assumed he was trying to emulate her father, because he was jealous of his position. Or out of some weird, Freudian need to be more like him.
But, never…Viola never would have guessed that this man, the man who had always been like a brother to her father, could have been the one who actually held his heart. Because of her, because of the centuries old Bellerose legacy, because of what other people thought…her father had stayed in a loveless marriage for more than twenty years.
It was the only truth that could possibly make her parents’ death seem even more tragic, more senseless than it already was.
“Jacques. Please.” Her voice was urgent now, as she rose to her knees to entreat him. “I never knew, I swear it. If I had, I would’ve told him to follow his heart. I never would have let him stay with my mother, if I’d thought he wasn’t happy.” Tears welled up in her eyes, as she found herself not fighting, but begging for her life. “I was kept in the dark, just as much as you. I’m sorry I got in the way. I’ll forgive you for trying to kill me. If it’s not about the money, what purpose would killing me now possibly serve? It won’t bring him back,” she choked. “No matter how much we wish it would.”
But Jacques didn’t seem to be listening. His gaze was intense, focused on the wall above her head—not directly at her.
“Jacques?” Carefully, tentatively, Viola inched toward the edge of the bed.
If she could just make it to the bathroom door, and slam it behind her, she could use her phone to call for help. Hotel doors were heavy, he wouldn’t be able to break it down. He could shoot the lock, maybe, but that would make noise. Someone would come.
The moment her foot hit the floor, Viola flung herself toward the light of the doorway.
There was a blur of movement behind her, but she didn’t dare to look back. Freedom and safety were only inches away.
A loud crack reverberated through the room.
Viola fell.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.” –Sigmund Freud
Sam stared down at his phone, bleary-eyed with exhaustion, as he typed in the next number on the list.
It was only 10:00 PM, but he felt like he’d aged ten years since that morning, and he still hadn’t found a single trace of Viola anywhere in New York City. At one point, in a moment of sheer desperation, he’d even called the Bellerose Co. offices, but no one had heard from Viola, and Jacques Gosselin’s secretary had very coolly informed Sam that he couldn’t be rea
ched, because he was mid-air on a flight to Paris. Well, at least that meant he was out of the way. But Sam would’ve felt better if he could have heard Jacques deny his suspicions about Dr. Horace.
After Sam had practically begged, the Frenchman’s secretary had told him she would have Jacques call him as soon as he landed.
That didn’t mean he would, though. Even though Sam hadn’t been able to find any connection between Jacques and the fraudulent Dr. Horace, he felt more and more certain that there had to be some kind of link. After all, who else would’ve cared enough to take the deception to such great lengths? Not Aiden, that was for sure. And as far as Sam knew, Viola had no other living relatives. No one else to benefit from her alleged insanity, or sudden death.
“Dr. Philips,” a familiar voice chided. “What the hell are you doing here? I heard you’d called in sick.”
Sam held up a finger, silently asking Nurse Bouchard to wait her turn. After coming up empty with every other lead, he’d finally been reduced to sitting in the hospital cafeteria with his cell phone and a borrowed facility directory, frantically calling every hospital in the area. It was not helping his attitude.
“Mount Sinai Emergency, how may I help you?”
“Yes,” Sam said into his phone, getting ready to repeat his blanket inquiry for what felt like the hundredth time. “I’m a physician from Our Lady of Mercy in Brooklyn, and I’m wondering if you might have taken in one of my patients. It would’ve been some time in the last…” he checked his watch. “Twelve hours.”
God, had it really been that long? His throbbing headache and the pitted, sick feeling in his gut told him yes. It had been that long. Too long.
“What’s the patient’s name?”
“Viola Bellerose,” Sam said, then rattled off her DOB. “Also, please check for any Jane Does, approximately nineteen years of age, potentially with an ALOC diagnosis.”
If Viola was still experiencing an altered level of consciousness, there was a good chance she might do something to injure herself unintentionally. If that happened, she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone her name or what had happened to her. All she would know was that she was scared and in pain. The idea that someone else might hurt her—or take advantage of her when she was in such a fragile state—was quickly topping the list of Sam’s greatest fears.
When the Mt. Sinai secretary put him on hold, Sam finally looked up and met Nurse Bouchard’s judgmental stare.
“You let her get away, huh?”
Running a hand over his increasingly scrubby face, Sam shook his head. He was too tired, and too worried, to go three rounds with the prickly old nurse right then.
“I just want to know she’s safe. That’s all I care about right now.”
But instead of leaving him alone, she pulled up a chair. “So, I take it she didn’t just run off to Aspen for an impromptu ski trip, then? Did she leave on her own steam, or do you have some reason to suspect foul play?”
The woman seriously needed to lay off the soap operas.
“No,” Sam told her. But then the small army of doubts in his head prompted him to add, “I don’t know. Maybe. Honestly, I don’t think she would’ve run unless she genuinely believed she had to—either because she was in danger, or because she had something very important to do, that just couldn’t wait. But I’ve already called all the airports, and she hasn’t left the country yet—that I know of. I even checked with the caretaker at her house in Seneca Lake. They haven’t seen her since a few weeks before the accident.”
“Alright, but what does your gut tell you?” The old nurse wasn’t smiling, otherwise Sam would’ve thought she was joking. She might still be making fun of him, though, which was a possibility he deeply resented.
“I’m hoping that it’s nothing,” he confessed. “But I can’t shake the feeling that something bad is happening. Or that something bad is about to happen. It’s almost like there’s this…invisible rope, tied to my brain. And someone keeps yanking on it. Like, there’s something I’m not seeing, just around the corner.”
But instead of making fun of him, Nurse Bouchard nodded, smiling sadly.
“I felt the same way the day before my husband Gerald died. All day long, I just kept cleaning the house…going through the mail…calling up all my kids. Just to figure out what in the hell I was forgetting about.”
The secretary from Mt. Sinai came back on the line then, but just long enough to announce another goose egg from her end.
“Thank you anyway,” Sam said, before hanging up.
For a few seconds, he just sat there quietly, making awkward eye contact with the old nurse. He knew she hadn’t told him her story so that he’d feel sorry for her, and yet there was something about the moment that made him want to apologize for treating her as less than a person. Just because she didn’t wear her fears and emotions on her sleeve, it didn’t mean she wasn’t feeling them. Actually, in a way, Nurse Bouchard reminded him a little bit of Viola.
“Can I ask you a question, Nurse Bouchard?”
“Lucinda,” she corrected him, without even missing a beat. “Go ahead.”
“Before your husband passed away, did you ever tell him?” Sam searched for the word to explain what he wanted to know, but he couldn’t quite find the right one. Love seemed too trite. Need seemed too dramatic.
Lucinda shook her head. Her smile was tight, like somehow she already knew what he was trying to ask, and she wished he hadn’t gone there. But then she answered anyway.
“You know, bitchy geriatric nurse that I am, I never fully did.”
Sam felt his ears heating up, and he stared down at his phone in an attempt to hide the shame on his face. The voice mail alert on his phone was blinking, but he hadn’t noticed until just now. Before he could press it, Lucinda covered his hand with hers. It was gentle, not threatening.
“But I showed him how I felt, every damn day he was alive.”
With that, she stood up and sauntered over to the salad bar. Sam was left to stare after her and wonder what she’d meant. Was she telling him to prove how he felt, or hinting that Viola already had?
Pushing the question to the back of the pile—because it was way too complicated for his stress-riddled brain to deal with at the moment—Sam checked his voicemail.
The moment he heard Viola’s voice in his ear, he took off. Running through the hallway and into the stairwell, too afraid to take the elevator because it might cut off part of her message, Sam beat a path toward the parking lot.
As he clumsily dodged his way around patients, visitors and various hospital employees, he felt like he was being split into two separate people—the boyfriend, or whatever he was, who was just floored to hear his girl’s voice, and the doctor who was freaking out over the way she sounded. Not crazy, exactly. But definitely altered. Her words were slurred and confused, like she’d been drugged. He needed to find her. Now.
He called her, and it went straight to voice mail. Either her phone was off, or she was on it. He suspected the former. Statistically, fate couldn’t be that cruel.
It wasn’t until he was behind the wheel of the minivan that he realized: she’d never actually said the name of the hotel she was in. Before starting the engine, he played back the message a second time. No, there were no usable details in what she’d said. Just a lot of really bizarre statements that didn’t add up to peace of mind in Sam’s book.
At one point, he thought he even heard her say something about a stupid song, which made absolutely no sense. But it did give him an idea about how to find out where she was.
Pulling up YouTube on his phone, he searched for that terrible “Wake for Me” video, then followed the link at the bottom to Aiden Faux’s website. Of course, the site wouldn’t have his phone number on it, but it would have his…yes, there it was, Calvin Parker Management. He pulled up a second search window and found the manager’s office, which was located in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, when he called the number, there was just an automated answering s
ystem with a bunch of unhelpful options. Not one of them would’ve taken him to an actual human being.
Sam hung up the phone, tapping his fingers angrily on the steering wheel as his mind reeled through a series of options, none of them promising.
That was when he realized, there was one trump card he held, but had never actually played.
It was still only seven-thirty in Los Angeles at the moment. Scrolling through his directory for the name Brady, Sam clicked on the second entry.
After about five seconds, a deep, booming voice answered. “This is Keith.”
“Hi, Keith? It’s Sam, Brady’s friend…from school? We met at that thing last year? Anyway, I was wondering if you could do me a really big favor. Could you ask your agent to track down a cell phone number for me? It’s an emergency.”
“Of course,” Brady’s dad said, his signature charm practically oozing through the phone. “Anything for my son’s BFF.”
Sighing with relief, Sam told him the talent manager’s name.
“Thanks, Keith. And…” Sam awkwardly searched for something to say that would come off as complimentary instead of weird. “Great job on last week’s show. It was…great.”
“Hey, thanks a lot. I like to know when I’m staying true to the trade, brother. You kids keep up the good work now, okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
A few moments later, Sam’s phone lit up with a text message. Calvin Parker, seems like a pretty righteous dude. Below the name, there were two numbers listed: home and cell.
Sam went straight for the cell number, holding his breath as it rang.
“Yell-o.”
“Hello—Calvin Parker?”
“Yeah?”
“My name is Dr. Philips. I work at Our Lady of Mercy Hospital in Brooklyn.” He cleared his throat, trying to sound less nervous and more authoritative. “I urgently need to contact one of your clients, regarding some, uh—extremely sensitive test results. He’s not answering his home phone number, and he listed you as one of his emergency contacts.”
Wake for Me (Life or Death Series) Page 28
