“Where is she? Speak to me, you walking carcass! Where did she go? And why? Why now? Why right now?” he yelled out of control.
The teenager turned livid, shaking his legs and arms like a marionette.
“I swear I know nothing!” he screamed defensively. “I was joking earlier…Tim, leave me alone, man…please! You’re choking me, man…”
Driven instantly by peaceful thoughts, Clark and some of the groom’s closest friends jumped up from their chairs and rushed to help Igor.
“Let him go, Tim!” Clark commanded. “It doesn’t solve your problem, brother!”
“Take it easy, man!” another one pleaded.
Among the strong and young bodies of the men who had gathered shortly to take Igor out of Timothy’s crazy grip, a cute little girl was jostling and screaming her lungs out, struggling helplessly to reach the center of the commotion.
“Tee, don’t despair,” the little girl called out. “I will marry you! I’m all dressed up already. Teeee, listen to me! Teeee! I love you, Tee, I truly love you!”
A young man caught her by the arm and tried to push her out of the way, fearing that she could have gotten badly hurt by mistake. The child pounced upon him wildly.
“Take your hands of me, you beast!” she snapped, throwing rose petals from her basket right in his face. “I want to talk to Tee. He needs me. Teeeee!”
“Someone, take this spoiled brat away from here!” the young man yelled, at a loss. He took her by her shoulders and lifted her in the air, immobilizing her arms. Her fancy basket fell to the ground, covering his shoes in pink and red rose petals. He was beginning to regret his earlier act of kindness.
“I should’ve let you get into that foolish huddle and end up squashed like an obnoxious bug that you are,” he growled in her ear. The child writhed and shook her legs in the air. Red with fury, she continued to call out her “boyfriend’s” name.
“Put her down!” The groom’s voice reverberated like a thunder. He freed Igor instantly. The boy hit the sand almost inert, like a bag of potatoes.
Timothy Leigh rushed to Vivien’s side. She had started to cry silently. He lifted her in his arms and withdrew from the crowd. He sat on the piano bench and put her up on the piano. For a while, they just looked into each other’s eyes.
“I will marry you, Tee,” the eight-year-old girl uttered timidly, now acting like a scared little mouse.
“Vee, don’t you think that one painfully crushed soul is enough for today? Really! Do you want to humiliate yourself too?”
“You don’t have to worry about a thing, Tee! I thought about them all,” Vivien went on to plead her case. “I know how to make peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches and soft-boiled eggs. You can drive me to school every day and then go do your things. I won’t bother you.”
Exhibiting a sad smile, Timothy interrupted her.
“Vee, I understand that you want to help me get over this failure, deadlock, unfortunate situation – you name it! – but the sacrifice is way too big. And it’s impossible. I cannot marry you even if – against all reason! – I would want to. It is illegal. You probably know that too. In less than five minutes, the sheriff would be here to handcuff me and throw me in jail. Now, tell me! Would you want that to happen to me?”
“Who would denounce you, Tee? Not me, you can imagine,” Vivien rushed to exculpate herself, wearing an innocent look over her tear-wet face. “It’s true, you’re a bit older, but thirteen years difference between us is not une catastrophe,” she pointed out.
Her exercised French accent brought a faint smile on Timothy’s purple lips.
“You’ll grow up to be a beautiful woman, Vee. And you’re going to make a man very happy one day,” he said convincingly.
“But I want to make you happy, Tee! And I don’t want to wait to grow up! I’m old enough to make a decision. And I made up my mind: I want to marry you. Every girl has to find herself a boy and marry one day. What difference does it make if it’s now or ten years later? The sooner the better. And we have everything ready: guests, music, preacher, food and stuff…”
He wasn’t getting anywhere. Timothy Leigh rolled his eyes at her, exasperated, exhausted. He didn’t need this peculiar conversation, not now when he was going through the most difficult time in his adult life so far. Not ever, he decided, on second thought.
“Vee, I’m a man, and you’re a child. Men don’t marry children. Bottom line, I will not marry you. Period,” he said clearly.
However, his broken heart sent him an instant lived premonition that he could not completely ignore.
“Look,” he added quickly, reaching into the hidden pocket of his coat. “This gift was something special for the woman of my dreams.”
He placed in her lap a small pastel-blue box tied elegantly with a delicate yellow ribbon. “Nadine doesn’t deserve it anymore, but you can wear it when you grow up. If you want to.”
Huge, transparent tears sprang one after the other from her big blue eyes. Heavy and fluid, they rolled down her beautiful rosy cheeks.
“I don’t want gifts from you. I want you. I love you, Tee,” she whispered confused. “Is it so hard to understand? I could make you love me too, you just have to be patient,” she insisted sobbing. “I love you so much! Please don’t leave me!”
The young man looked at her wonder-struck. This child was telling him exactly what he wanted to hear, as if she were reading right into his soul. She knew exactly what he needed – love. He needed love so badly! What an irony! Timothy reflected sadly. The only girl who truly loves me is actually an eight-year-old child, and I’m going to break her little heart now the way Nadine did with me. Life is cruel. It punishes me in so many ways today… Without any reason at all…
He registered Vivien’s mother pitched voice like a gravely wounded man who hears the siren of the emergency ambulance coming to his rescue.
“Vivien, what in the world have you done now? I was dead sure you would do some sort of foolishness. I could feel it in my bones since we were still at home,” the woman said, wiping her daughter’s tears with an embroidered handkerchief and getting her down from the piano.
“Caprices of a spoiled child! The lack of education always surfaces, as oil on top of water,” a hostile Mrs. Leigh hissed nastily. The new hairstyle that she had recently adopted, right after she had bleached her hair, encouraged one to wonder if she were not, in reality, advertising for brooms. In fact, it seemed that she displayed one – in a tasteless manner – right up on her own head.
“I beg your pardon!” Alison Hopkins replied indignantly, and her cheeks flamed. “Vivien is a very sensitive child. She only wanted to express her empathy with Timothy’s misfortune,” the woman said to her daughter’s defense.
“Will you forgive me, dear Alison,” Timothy’s mother excused herself theatrically, a scornful smile on her heavily made-up face. “I was thinking about an entirely different person. The thought that I was actually referring to your daughter shouldn’t even cross your mind.”
Then, Mrs. Leigh brushed past her son and told him in the same aggressive tone that had made her proverbial in the Woodside area.
“Don’t make such a fuss, Timothy dear! She wasn’t worthy of you anyway.”
Not quite content with her bitter remark, she turned around and lectured him a little more.
“Just forget her! All right? She’s five years older than you. You’re so young! Smart men don’t marry at 21. You think marriage is good sex and laughter. You’re wrong, son! Happy marriage is a fata morgana. Only fools rush in!”
Timothy didn’t want to reward her with a reply, and frustrated, she called her limousine driver and left.
Alison Hopkins acted as if she had not heard Mrs. Leigh’s insensible words. She gently put a hand on the abandoned groom’s arm.
“We’re really sorry, Tim darling,” she told him sincerely. “You certainly didn’t deserve this.”
With that, she bid him goodbye and turned to her weeping d
aughter. She grabbed Vivien’s hand and dragged her toward the parking area, where Mr. Hopkins was waiting for them with the Mercedes’ doors open.
“I find it unnecessary to tell you that you’re grounded the entire following week,” she said categorically. “I am perfectly sure that you know what that means: no chocolates, no visiting friends, no escapades to Mademoiselle Lili, and no piano or French lessons. Rien, comprenez-vous?”
“Oui, maman,” the little girl answered resigned.
“Don’t be so hard on her, Alison!” Carol Hopkins called from her chair.
Vivien freed herself from her mother’s hold and ran to give her dear grandmother a hug.
“There, there, child. You’re too young and beautiful to suffer. If it’s any help at all, just remember that I’ll always love you.”
“I love you too, granny Carol.”
For a few seconds, under her granny’s fancy, flowery parasol, Vivien felt as if she had evaded into a fairy-tale-like world. The tears ceased to flow.
As the two women began to chat, the little girl turned to the groom again. More composed this time, she called out to him loud enough to make everybody look at her once again. She didn’t care what they thought, if they judged her, or if they made fun of her. She only cared about his answer.
“Tee, will you wait for me to grow up?”
Timothy nodded, smiling ruefully.
“I’ll try, Vee.”
“Good,” she said calmly and wiped the last tear that still rested on her cheek like a glistening dewdrop.
Vivien was able to steal a few chocolate bonbons, and many of her friends came to their residence in Woodside that week. But her piano and French lessons with Mademoiselle Lili ceased forever.
Mademoiselle Lili had committed suicide that very day. When they had returned from the unfulfilled wedding, they had found her house in flames. Mr. Logan had not reached her in time to save her.
The young woman’s burned body had been identified using her denture prints and her never-missing anklet that proved to be a common gold jewelry with cubic zirconium. Many believed that Nadine had helped her, and then she had left with Lili’s car. Minutes after, she had suffered that terrible accident on Interstate 1, and as a result, she was missing, probably she had drowned in the ocean. Others went even further with the suppositions and pointed the finger at Timothy and Mr. Logan. Vivien had someone else in mind – that scrawny Igor. However, Lili’s explicit, coherent suicidal note had exculpated everyone in the eye of the law.
The gossip regarding Timothy’s wedding, the mysterious disappearance of Nadine, and Mademoiselle Lili’s premature death continued to flow that summer in Woodside as if from an inexhaustible source of morbid imagination. Just until the end of August, when another ill-fated event finally put it to rest. A well-known face plastic surgeon from the area apparently had committed suicide, after he had allegedly shot in the head his entire family: his wife and two teenage daughters. The women had been found wearing huge yellow scarves wrapped around their scarcely dressed bodies.
CHAPTER 2
Menlo Park, California, 2011
The wipers were taking great pains to remove the heavy downpour cascading over the windshield in vicious, never-ending torrents. Vivien felt an inexplicable inner joy.
Maybe it was the fact that she loved the rain. She had learned to. After almost fifteen years in Southern California where rain is a rara avis, it was exciting to be in the San Francisco Bay Area again. With small exceptions, the rain was an everyday event here starting in the autumn up until the end of spring.
Or maybe it was the Halloween that brought so much joy to Vivien’s heart. She made a mental note to stop at the grocery store and buy a couple of bags of bonbons. She expected the neighbors’ kids to come trick-or-treating. I used to have a lot of fun on Halloween nights back then, when I was little, she recalled with a nostalgic smile.
At the first stoplight, she turned left. Her beige Lexus Coupe snaked cautiously on the narrow streets of central Menlo Park. She soon found her way into the parking space behind the exquisite antique store she had recently inherited from her grandmother. She had promised her family that she would take good care of it. It was, in fact, an excellent reason for her to return to this part of California that held so many memories. Good and bad. And equally loaded with unique life experiences. Those powerful memories had insistently dragged her back to this place.
On the other hand, the store supplied her with cash. It was particularly difficult to find students interested in piano and French lessons, even in this area generously populated with wealthy families.
As she looked for the perfect spot in the empty parking lot, she passed the back door of her store. On the door’s window, the bloody imprint of a hand sent shivers down her spine. It looked just as someone had wiped the blood off his or her fingers in a hideous, undulated movement. So Arlene has already arrived, Vivien thought, even though her employee’s car was nowhere to be seen. She was probably getting ready to scare her boss with some gruesome, macabre farce, as Vivien herself had done it so many times in the past. When I was a child, that is, she reflected. Arlene could not make that excuse anymore. Grow up, Arlene! Vivien smiled to herself. She recalled how she had scared her babysitter once, so badly that the teenage girl had fainted. A little ketchup and a big carving knife can work miracles! Sure thing, Arlene is trying something similar, Vivien concluded.
She opened her huge, transparent umbrella and rushed toward the back entrance of her store. To her utter surprise, she found it locked. Shaking uncontrollably with cold, she fished for the keys into her handbag and opened the door with wet and slippery fingers. She wondered what Arlene could have used to smear the window. It looked so unnervingly convincing. She could have sworn it was blood. It even smelled like blood!
Vivien stepped inside and shouted joyfully.
“Good morning, Arlene! Happy Halloween!”
She didn’t wait for her saleswoman to answer the greeting and rather continued quickly. “And… just so we’ll not have any lengthy debate later. You messed up the window, you will clean it. I think that’s fair enough! When I said I had nothing against Halloween decorations, I didn’t imagine you would go that far!”
No one bothered to send her a mere reply. Vivien anticipated that the young woman would jump in front of her any moment now, ketchup everywhere and a huge knife in her hand. If not something even scarier: a sword, a scythe, or a hatchet, she speculated, trying to brace herself for any ghastly oddity.
Vivien left her wet umbrella in the hallway and advanced reluctantly toward the large room behind the store. They used it as a warehouse and often took their tea or coffee there, or just relaxed for a while on the black leather sofa. As she stepped into the room, she gasped and staggered back against the doorframe. Her blood froze in her veins. Her earlier particularly resourceful imagination, the vivid anticipation of a terrifying trick, couldn’t have possibly prepared her for what brutally appeared before her eyes. For the interval of a few seconds, she stood there motionless, watching Arlene in horror. The girl was totally undressed, only a large yellow scarf had been thrown negligently over her naked body. Her left breast appeared to have been cut off, and the fine silk scarf was imbued with coagulated blood. Arlene had her cold, unmoving eyes fixed on Vivien. Her pale, almost white face seemed frozen in a resigned expression.
Vivien felt her body go stiff. Her stomach contracted nervously, threatening to throw out her earlier morning meal hardly swallowed in the first place. She turned her back on Arlene and articulated the words with difficulty, in an unsure voice.
“OK, Arlene, you’ve reached your point! Now I’ve seen a lot more than I’ve ever wanted to. Wash yourself and get dressed immediately! We have to open the store in only a few minutes.”
Not the slightest rustle came from the black leather sofa. Involuntarily, Vivien lifted her eyes to the thermostat in front of her. A somber premonition sneaked like a worm into her heart. Arlene had not turned on
the heat. Arlene was always the one to turn the heat on. It was the first thing she did when she arrived. She dressed too summarily not to be concerned about the temperature in the store. Actually, Vivien had not met anyone so far with a deeper décolletage or shorter skirt. In fact, Arlene’s panty collection had nothing new to offer Vivien anymore. She had seen everything.
Tensed, Vivien waited for a crackle, a giggle, anything at all. She would have happily welcomed any kind of noise coming from that sofa. The silence, heavy as a lead weight, was crushing her soul and feeding on her sanity.
“Arlene, please, say something,” she implored nervously. “I beg it of you. I’ve never been so scared in my entire life. You’ve won, can’t you see?”
Reaching the end of her patience, Vivien swung around. At that very moment, she realized the tragedy. The woman before her was dead. There was no doubt about it. It was not a stupid Halloween trick. It was the naked, horrifying truth.
Leaning on boxes and walls, she crawled until she reached the dead body of her young employee. She prayed in silence, still hoping that the whole thing was only a false assumption. Her trembling fingers gently touched the woman’s face.
“Arlene, dear girl,” she whispered sobbing.
* * *
The young police officer offered her a paper glass with Starbucks emblem imprinted on it. Vivien watched transfixed the dancing steam rising gracefully from the hot liquid. The coffee aroma seemed to soothe her senses. She was tempted to accept it.
“Thank you,” she heard herself articulate. “I don’t drink coffee.”
The man examined her closely, as if she were an extraterrestrial creature.
Vivien did not concern herself with explaining her refusal. The caffeine gave her palpitations, and she had already had enough excitement for one day.
The detective conducting the investigation continued to press her with questions. As if in a trance, she started to give monosyllabic answers. It was the fourth time he repeated his interrogatory, and it was getting mentally exhausting. Not to mention plain ridiculous, Vivien thought.
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