Dreaming of Manderley

by Leah Marie Brown

  “Psh.” She waves her hand dismissively. “He said you could drive any car you wanted, didn’t he?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “The McLaren it is!”

  She opens the passenger door and it swings up.

  “I don’t know,” I say, looking at the metallic silver paint glittering in the overhead lights.

  “We are making a statement,” she declares. “You need to claim your spot, show those snooty bitches you are Madame de Maloret and you will not be intimidated by their baseless insults. This car makes that statement.”

  I look down at my chest and grimace. “Well, maybe not entirely baseless.”

  “Baseless, I say.” Olivia climbs into the passenger seat. “There’s nothing wrong with your sisters, Manderley. They are pert and proportionate—and best of all, they are silicone-free. Now, let’s go! Let’s drive this sexy beast.”

  She pulls the door closed with a soft thud, leaving me to stare at the black side vents set behind the door. I have never driven a car with side vents.

  Isn’t that the point? I eloped with Xavier because I was tired of living in the narrow confines of my perfectly boring, perfectly predictable life. I wanted to break out of the safe little box I constructed for myself and experience the world beyond the same four walls.

  Olivia wants me to drive the McLaren to make a statement to the villagers; I want to drive it to make a statement to myself, a reaffirmation that I am not going to let fear force me into a monotonous existence. I might not be as audacious as Olivia, as determined as Tara, or as beautiful as Emma Lee, but does that mean I can’t work to emulate them a little from time to time?

  Walking back to the cabinet housing the keys of all the cars in the stables, I hang the Range Rover key back on its hook and remove the pebble-shaped key marked McLaren.

  We encounter our first problem before we have even pulled out of the stables—and it isn’t that the McLaren’s steering wheel is located on the right instead of the left side. I push the round start button located on a console between the driver and passenger seats, where the stick shift is usually located, but can’t figure out how to shift into reverse to back out of the garage.

  “Where is the gear shift?”

  Olivia googles it and finds a page that describes the “exhilarating experience of driving a supercar.”

  “Supercar?”

  “A high-performance sports car,” Olivia says, reading from the site. “Supercars are focused on performance with little regard for accommodation or cost. If it weren’t for their advanced safety features, these vehicles would only be operated by professional drivers on a track.”

  “Professional drivers? This is crazy!” Panic squeezes my chest and I force myself to take slow, deep breaths. “Let’s just take the Rover.”

  “Relax,” Olivia says, patting my arm. “It says the McLaren is designed for touring. We are touring.”

  I frown at her.

  “We are touring the village.”

  “That’s hardly the same thing.”

  “Okay, here it is,” she says, reading from the website again. “ ‘The drive, neutral, and reverse engage buttons are located on the center console of the cockpit. The MacLaren has a seven-speed seamless-shift gearbox that can be engaged by using the steering-wheel-mounted rocker-shift paddles.’ ”

  I lean sideways and discover plastic levers affixed to the underside of the steering wheel.

  “Of course!” Olivia cries. “Why didn’t I think to look on the steering wheel? I test-drove a Mercedes that had gear-shifting paddle thingies.”

  Olivia continues reading from the website about the McLaren’s unique features while I quietly worry about shifting smoothly and avoiding potholes in a car with such a low clearance.

  “Oh, it says here you can adjust this dial”—she turns a small black and silver nob on the center console–“and it will stay in automatic mode so you never have to shift. Isn’t that spec?”

  “Absolutely,” I say, unable to keep a note of sarcasm from creeping into my tone. “When we crash Xavier’s high-performance sports car, at least we will know it wasn’t because I shifted improperly.”

  “Drive on, Madame Andretti,” Olivia says.

  My legs are shaking before we have even driven past the château gates. Whereas the Jaguar’s engine purred like a contented cat, the McLaren’s engine growls like a ravenous predator. Just turning out of the drive onto the main road happens with a squealing of tires and a spray of gravel. I drive slow, keeping one eye on the speedometer.

  “Hit it, Vin Diesel. Let’s get fast and furious!” Olivia says.

  “I am not getting fast and furious,” I snap, palms damp on the wheel.

  “Come on! A Mini Cooper passed us.”

  I give the McLaren a little gas, the engine growls, and we shoot forward, gaining on the Mini Cooper in a matter of seconds.

  “Whoo-whoo!” Olivia hollers, punching the air. “That’s what I am talking about. Get it, girl. Get your speed on.”

  “Stop it,” I say, easing off the gas. “I am not getting my speed on. When did you turn into such an adrenaline junkie?”

  I take my gaze off the road just long enough to shoot her a grow up, please look, but she just grins a toothy grin, and I intuitively know what she is going to say next.

  “What can I say? I feel the need.”

  I groan and roll my eyes. “Don’t say it.”

  “The need for speed!”

  I have become accustomed to Olivia’s frequent movie references in the eight years we have been best friends—I even occasionally enjoy them—but I don’t appreciate the reference to Top Gun, a movie about fighter pilots, especially since, as I recall, one of them dies in a crash.

  By the time the sign appears announcing our arrival in Saint-Maturinus-sur-Mer, I am a trembling, nauseous, sweaty mess. I drive to Caro’s store, but there aren’t any parking places wide enough for my comfort.

  “There’s a spot,” Olivia offers.

  “Too narrow.”

  I put the directional indicator on, slow down, and turn onto a less congested road.

  “There’s a spot.”

  “There’s a puddle.”

  “So?”

  “So, I don’t want muddy water to splash onto the paint.”

  Olivia groans. “Just let me out and circle the block.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  I pull closer to the curb and push the hazard lights. Olivia hops out.

  “I won’t be long,” she says, opening the passenger door. “Circle the block a few times, but roll the windows down and turn the radio on to a noticeable level. Make it EDM or something you would dance to at a club.”

  “Go!”

  She closes the door and I drive off.

  Forty minutes and dozens of laps around the block later, Olivia emerges from Caro’s store, grinning, a reusable bag flung over her shoulder. Maneuvering Saint-Maturinus’s narrow roads might not have given me the confidence of a race-car driver, but my nerves have definitely relaxed.

  She hops in, clutching her purchases to her chest.

  “Find a place to park,” she says, reaching behind her and stowing the bag in the shallow boot behind our heads. “We need to talk.”

  “I will drive back to the château.”

  “No! Not there. I don’t want to risk Madame Vous overhearing what I am about to tell you.”

  I follow the main road out of town for several kilometers until I see an Esso and pull into the service station, parking away from the pumps—far, far away.

  “Okay,” I say, killing the engine and turning to look at my best friend. “Let’s hear it.”

  “We are going to find where the bones are buried before this day is out, I promise.”

  “What are you talking about? What bones?”

  “Marine.”

  “That’s not funny, Olivia,” I say, my protective instincts for Xavier roused. “You have to stop implying Xavier murd
ered his first wife. We have no proof Marine is dead, let alone that she was murdered by my husband.”

  “You’re right,” she says. “I am sorry. I meant it more metaphorically. I had a lovely little chat with your new British friend and she told me some things about the first Madame de Maloret that have answered a few of our questions.”

  “What sorts of things?”

  “Caro said Marine was popular in town. Girl from a humble family who marries local royalty and uses some of his fortune to host lavish parties and festivals at the château. Apparently, the locals still talk about a Christmas a few years ago when she invited all the village children to the château for a winter carnival.”

  “Great,” I say bleakly. “How is this information supposed to make me feel better, exactly?”

  “Caro didn’t like her, though, and apparently she wasn’t alone in her dislike. She wouldn’t elaborate. She would only say Marine made her uneasy.”

  I am a moth to the flame, drawn to Olivia’s gossip despite my common sense. I want to know more, so I move closer to the flames, hoping what she tells me next doesn’t singe my wings.

  “What else did she say?”

  “She said Xavier used to visit her shop periodically to purchase Marine’s favorite chocolates and that he was always charming and friendly. She had the sense then that he was very much in love with Marine, but he changed.”

  “Changed? How?”

  “Caro said he stopped buying the chocolates, and when she would encounter him around town, he seemed burdened, as if he were struggling with a matter so weighty he couldn’t expend the energy to engage in pleasantries. She said many times he appeared to be angry.” Olivia pauses long enough to pull an Altoid out of her purse and pop it into her mouth. “That’s when the rumors started.”

  “What sorts of rumors?”

  “Infidelity.”

  “Whose?”

  “Xavier’s.”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  I stare out the windshield at a man in blue coveralls with a red Esso patch pumping gas into a mud-splattered Citröen and wonder if he was one of the villagers who gossiped about Xavier. The gossip didn’t involve me, but I still feel angry, paranoid, and defensive.

  “Caro believes the rumors were started by those snooty bitches you met on your first visit to town.”

  “Why?”

  “They were Marine’s village besties, who she spent time with when she wasn’t finding the cure for cancer or jetting off to Milan to stomp a runway,” Olivia says, her loyalty to me rousing her sarcasm. “There is more.”

  “Go on.”

  “Did you know the village hosts an annual festival celebrating their Celtic heritage?” She pauses, but not long enough for me to respond. “Xavier and Marine attended the festival together, around the time Caro noticed his mood change. She said Xavier drank a little too much. There was some sort of disagreement. A man stepped in to defuse the situation and Xavier punched him.”

  The Xavier Olivia is describing is a stranger to me, as foreign as the man in the Esso coveralls.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Serious as a fractured jaw, which was what the innocent bystander ended up with, by the way.”

  I am trying to imagine what might have happened to have provoked such a violent reaction from a man I have only seen show kindness and tenderness.

  “There’s more.”

  “Lawd. How much more can there be?”

  “The morning after the altercation at the festival, Marine came to town with a bruise on her cheek, the sort you might get if you were slapped hard.”

  The bottom drops out of my stomach. “You’re not saying. . .” The idea that Xavier might have abused Marine snatches the breath from my lungs and a full minute passes before I am able to speak again. “I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it. Xavier has shown me respect in a thousand ways. He pulls my chair out, opens my door, walks closest to the curb. Xavier wouldn’t hit a woman. He just wouldn’t.”

  Olivia looks at me and raises her brow.

  “What? Do you believe Xavier is abusive?”

  “You never know what someone will do when they are pushed; besides, even you said he has flashes of temper. It doesn’t matter what I believe. The fact that you are asking me what I believe tells me you have your doubts.”

  “Xavier arranged that lovely day for us in the South of France, remember? I can’t believe someone so charming could also be a wife beater.”

  “Abusive men are often charming.”

  I don’t want to fall into that despicable pattern of blaming the victim, but something about this story isn’t making sense to me. It doesn’t help that the “facts” of the story were gleaned from second- and third-hand gossip. I know what it is like to live in a town of gossips, how perverted and contorted a titillating story becomes as it travels down the grapevine.

  “Why didn’t Marine go to the police and formally accuse Xavier of abuse?”

  “She disappeared the day after she showed up in town with the bruise on her face.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Yes, disappeared. Nobody has seen Marine. Her friends say they haven’t spoken to her. It’s like she vanished.”

  Olivia gives me time to process everything she has just told me. She pulls a small packet of Kleenex out of her purse and hands it to me.

  “I don’t need them.”

  Maybe the pain of hearing such terrible things about a man I love hasn’t penetrated the numbness the gossip created, because I don’t feel like crying. Or maybe my over-analytical mind refuses to accept what she has told me until all my questions have been answered. Would a man as controlled and contained as Xavier de Maloret allow himself to get as drunk as the gossips suggested? Why would Xavier, someone who values his privacy, discuss private matters in so public a forum? Who was the man who tried to intervene? Where is Marine? And why didn’t she take any of her belongings—including her precious pet—with her?

  “Caro did say one other thing.”

  I take a deep breath and exhale. “Tell me.”

  “Marine was raised by her grandparents. They live on an island not too far from here. I think we should go talk to them.”

  “Did she give you a name?”

  “She said she thought it was Verity or Verite, but to ask the man who works in the toll booth leading to the island.”

  “There’s a road to the island?”

  “Yes, but only when the tide is out.”

  I look at Olivia aghast. “I am not driving Xavier’s expensive sports car on a road that disappears with the tide. It’s probably rutted and pocked with potholes. Besides, what happens if the tide comes in when we are driving across it?”

  “Relax,” she says, popping another Altoid in her mouth. “We will just hire some brawny sailor to take us to the island on his boat.”

  “A brawny sailor? Where do you expect to find a brawny sailor?”

  “Caro said we follow the main road going north, and the turnoff for the road to the island is just past the docks and shipyard.”

  My conscience is wrestling with my curiosity. My conscience is championing for Xavier by reminding me of my promise to him to be honest. The honest thing for me to do would be to speak to Xavier directly and ask him what went wrong in his first marriage, even though I tried once before and was rebuffed. My curiosity is urging me to seek out the answers to my questions on my own and reminding me that Xavier has avoided talking about Marine.

  “Freud believed that nothing happens by chance or accident, that our unconscious mental processes drive us to do things our conscious mind resists. He called it psychic determinism.”

  I know where she is going with her argument. “You’re suggesting Xavier avoided telling me about Marine because it was too upsetting, so he arranged a trip to Dubai after our arrival, knowing someone in the village would say something? That seems complicated, doesn’t it?”

  “The human psyche is complicated. On some level, maybe he hop
es you will hear the gossip and bring it up so he doesn’t have to, or . . .”

  “Or?”

  “Or he murdered Marine and got creepy old Madame Vous to bury the body somewhere in the château. Either way, you deserve to know.”

  “I do deserve to know, but Xavier deserves my trust and honesty, too.”

  “You’re not being dishonest by asking a few questions. In fact, you don’t have to ask. I will. Then, if there is nothing to the rumors, you can forget them and you have spared Xavier the pain of having you dredge up unpleasant memories.”

  “Fine.”

  I push the engine button and carefully pull out of the gas station. The solemnity of what we are about to do is not lost on me, and it is all I can do to keep from crying in shame. Shame that I married someone I hardly knew. Shame that I am skulking around trying to uncover clues about his past. Shame that I love him, and will continue loving him, even if the rumors are true.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Text from Xavier de Maloret:

  Bonjour, mon amour. I called you this morning, but you must have been sleeping. Just wanted to let you know how much you are missing from me. I am sorry this business has kept me away from you during our first weeks of marriage. I will make it up to you . . . soon.

  The weather in Brittany is proving as difficult to fathom as Xavier. The early morning rains that were pitter-pattering against my bedroom window when I woke this morning disappeared by the time we finished breakfast, and the bright sunshine and cloudless cobalt skies we enjoyed on our drive into the village have been obliterated by thick-as-flannel gray clouds. I am sitting in the McLaren while Olivia speaks to a man about a boat. I decide to check my iPhone for messages.

  There are two texts from Tara, asking me to call her because she wants to talk about her “castle business,” five texts from Emma Lee asking if I ordered her Hunter rain boots yet and if I remembered to get the shine kit (yes and of course), and two texts from Xavier. The second text simply reads: Where are you? I don’t know how to answer him without being duplicitous, so I decide to wait until after this business with Madame and Monsieur Verite is over.