Shimmers of Pearl (The Pearl Trilogy, Part 3)

by Richmonde, Arianne

  He nods.

  “Have you had sex with Laura since you’ve been with me?”

  He fixes his gaze on me and I feel sick for a moment. The dark flecks in his green eyes flicker with hesitation. Can I bear what I’m about to hear?

  “I swear by my mother, by Sophie and Rex and all those who I love. I swear by you and the moon and stars, I have not touched, nor even kissed any woman since I met you, least of all Laura.”

  The relief I feel right now is indescribable. I search his eyes for clues – he’s telling the truth, I’m sure of it. Now it’s my turn to well up. A hot tear rolls down my cheek.

  He continues, his mouth pinched, “I despise Laura. She’s trying to ruin my life. If it were just my life she wanted to butcher, I might be more forgiving, but she’s threatening my mother. And you.”

  “Me?”

  “I know you, Pearl. I know that if you don’t spend the rest of your days with me you won’t be truly happy. I don’t mean to sound conceited saying that but deep inside me, I feel exactly the same. If we can’t be together we’ll both go through life half dead. Without you, I feel my flame has been snuffed out. I function on auto-pilot. Without you I am half the person I should be.”

  I take his chin in both hands and tilt his mouth towards mine. I run my tongue along his upper lip to ease the tension in his angry mouth and we kiss gently. To my surprise, he’s not ravenous for me but just returns the kiss sweetly. Innocently, even.

  He breathes into my mouth, “If I can’t marry you, Pearl my life will be running on empty.”

  “I want to marry you more than anything,” I whisper back. “I love you. I can’t be without you, either.”

  “Will you come home with me tonight and we can talk?”

  “If you promise to tell me the whole story. If you promise to trust me. I don’t care what you’ve been hiding from me,” I say honestly. “What hurts me is that you’ve been hiding it.”

  “If I tell you everything, will you promise to marry me, Pearl? No more running away?”

  For some reason, his request causes a rush of adrenaline to stream through my body. Fear? Excitement? Panic? This is it. I’ve been running from him, using every excuse. But I can’t run anymore. I need to trust him, to show my loyalty. I take a deep breath and reply, “I promise.”

  Alexandre gets up onto his haunches and lifts me up, cradling me in his arms as if I were a baby. His eyes stray to my pregnant breasts again. But I don’t care if he has sex on the brain - I want him even more than he wants me. I can feel my nipples pucker with desire, my breathing’s shallow. He sets me down and kisses me lightly on my temple. I grab my long overcoat from the hall closet, my Birkin bag and slip into my thermal boots. I can’t get back to his apartment fast enough.

  “You’re coming just like that? In your PJ’s?” he asks, surprised, yet eyeing up my ass with a look of lust.

  “I think we’ve both waited long enough, don’t you? I just want to be back in your bed even if Rex has taken it over.”

  He laughs. “You’ve heard, huh?”

  “Yes, Sally told me.”

  “I’ve been lonely. Missing you like crazy.”

  As I’m scrawling out a note to Daisy so she doesn’t think I’ve been abducted, I say, “Are you going to tell me everything, Alexandre?”

  He nods.

  “Everything about Laura?” I ask again, double-checking that this isn’t a trap of seduction to get into my panties (or PJs).

  “I promise. Let’s go.”

  ***

  The whole time I have been in my new apartment it has felt like Limbo and, now back at Alexandre’s, I know I’ve come home. We’re sitting on one of the huge white couches in the living room, snuggled up with Rex. I’m keeping the bedroom at bay, for fear of letting desire get in the way of my mission; to find out everything I can. If Alexandre doesn’t come one hundred percent clean about this insidious situation with Laura, which has been eating into our relationship, then I will give up for good. This is Make or Break time and I think he senses that.

  My eyes stray to the bald patch on the wall where my engagement gift was; the Jim Dine painting of the big red heart that is now hung in my new apartment, and I feel a wave of sadness. So much time has been wasted because of our own fears. It has all boiled down to trust. I have not trusted him; not trusted his judgment about Sophie – of course he would never have put me in danger; of course he knows his own sister. And now, he has been keeping secrets from me for fear I might abandon him, or worse, report him for whatever wrong he or his mother has done – that I would betray his family.

  I lie back with my head in his lap as he strokes my hair, the soft touch of his long fingers caressing me, making me remember that I belong to him and nobody else.

  “I’m breaking my promise to my mother but if I don’t tell you, I know that our lives will be ruined. I’m trusting you to keep this to yourself, take it with you to your grave, Pearl.”

  “I swear.” I make a cross sign on my heart.

  “You know what I told you about my father? That he disappeared?”

  I hold his hand to let him know that I’m on his side, no matter what he tells me. “Was it a lie?”

  “Yes. Not all of him has disappeared – that’s the whole problem.”

  “What do you mean?” This is sounding really crazy. “Sophie told me that he had gone to Rio - that he’d been spotted there.”

  “That’s what she still believes. I told her that a friend of mine had seen him there. This friend doesn’t exist, of course. My father’s dead, Pearl.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  He says nothing for a beat and then answers in a cold voice. “No. My mother did. No, let me be completely honest here. She didn’t just kill him, she murdered him.”

  I try to sound unemotional. I don’t want to spook him away. “Was Laura witness to the murder, then?”

  “No. It happened when I was only nine.”

  “Well what does Laura have to do with it? Even if you told her, she has no proof!”

  “Oh, but she does. She’s got proof that he’s dead. And he has never been declared dead. No death certificate, nothing. Officially, he’s still alive. And there are some people still wondering where he is. His brother, my uncle, for one.”

  “I don’t understand – how does Laura know he’s dead?”

  “He was lying peacefully in his bath. Ironic that. Some of the only times when he was being truly peaceful was when he was wallowing about in warm water. My mother had bought him his favorite Scotch. She was plying him with it so he was completely relaxed. She’d had enough, and knew that the only way to be free of him, once and for all, was to kill him. He’d threatened her that if she ever left him he’d hunt her down and kill her – then search for us, too.” He looks at me and hesitates.

  I absorb all that Alexandre has said. It sounds crazy but you read about these people and see them on the news often…the nutters that shoot their families down, killing each and every member, or massacring them in a stabbing frenzy before doing themselves in, too. I squeeze Alexandre’s hand. “I empathize, Alexandre. I really do. Please go on.”

  He stares into space as he reels off the story in a monotone, hardly stopping for breath. “She had the electric heater plugged into the wall with the extension cord. She’d planned everything. When he was lying back with his eyes closed she came into the bathroom with the pretense to top up his drink and threw the heater into the water to electrocute him. She was even wearing rubber shoes and gloves just to take extra precaution.”

  I gasp. What a scene that must have been. “Did he die instantly?”

  “I don’t know. My mother had assumed she could pretend it was an accident but there were huge burn welts where the water level was. It was obvious it was cold-blooded murder. She had to think on her feet. Had to get rid of the evidence – there was no way she could pass it off as an accident.”

  “So then what happened?”

  “Luckily, she had
some French doors in her apartment that led onto a balcony. She unplugged the electricity, drained the bath, hauled him out, little by little, and rolled him into bed sheets, wrapping him like a mummy. Then she pushed him off the balcony in the dead of night. Once she was sure nobody had woken from the thud of the body landing on the ground – she was two flights up – she dragged him to the car. Amazingly, nobody saw her, or if they did, they never said a word. The neighbors hated him anyway – even if they’d seen something they would have probably been relieved. She managed to haul him into the trunk of her car.”

  “That must have been hard. Was he tall and strong like you?”

  “No, my height comes from my mother’s side of the family. But still, it was no mean feat. She drove to the countryside. When she found an isolated place, miles from anywhere, she made a bonfire and set him alight.”

  “Oh my God. Nobody saw? No farmer or anyone?”

  “She doused him with gasoline – he went up fast.”

  “I still don’t understand what Laura has to do with all this.”

  “Not everything burns, does it?”

  “There were remnants?”

  “My mother waited for the fire to burn all the way down but there were two things left over – his teeth and bits of his hip replacement, both identifiable through medical records. There was the titanium part of the fake hip and a ceramic ball bit that didn’t burn either. They have identification numbers, not on the parts themselves, but from the factory where they make the prosthesis. These are kept by the hospital on a register with the name of the patient and the date of operation, in case of problems like breaking or premature loosening. They can be traced back to their source. It’s the same with teeth and dentist’s records - a common way of identifying corpses.”

  “How the hell did Laura get her hands on those?”

  “Years ago, I found them in my mother’s house in a drawer when I was looking for something – I put two and two together; that’s how I knew he was dead. I’d always suspected, anyway, because I knew if he’d been alive he would have hunted her down. Anyway, I had a long talk with my mom and she told me the whole story. I’ve kept it a secret all these years; I never even told Sophie.”

  My nose is prickling with tears as Alexandre’s voice sounds as if it’s about to break at any moment.

  “But what on earth was your mother doing with all that evidence? Why didn’t she chuck it all in a river or take it out to sea?”

  “That’s the multi-million dollar question, but she had a reason, crazy as it was. Having the remnants, she said, reminded her that he was truly dead – that he could never harm her again.

  Anyway, I took away the bits of evidence and took them to Provence with me – I didn’t want my mother having them in her house, in case her husband found them. But at the same time, I didn’t throw them away because I didn’t feel it was my right to if they were so important to her. I was an idiot. A fool. I should have taken it into my own hands. Instead, I hid the teeth in a multi-volume Encyclopedia. Call me a heathen but I’d cut out the centre of one of them and placed the evidence inside. Nobody looks at Encyclopedias anymore with the internet and Wikipedia – I thought they’d be safe there. And the titanium bit of hip was wedged behind the book. Laura knew exactly what it was because she, too, had a hip replacement a couple of years after her accident. And I’d mentioned to her once, years ago, about my father having had one – tried to assure her that they worked.”

  “She discovered them?”

  Alexandre looks down at the floor ashamedly.

  “But even if I found that stuff, I wouldn’t know that they were body parts of a dead man. How did she know?”

  “When I started dating you, Laura became obsessed. I didn’t realize this, of course, until just a few weeks ago. I thought we were friends, I had no clue that she wanted me back, that she was still in love with me. Although, when ‘love’ is that warped it’s hardly a word I’d use to describe her feelings for me. Basically, she became obsessed, possessed - and will stop at nothing to get me back.”

  “I still don’t understand. How did she know for sure that those things were parts of your father?”

  “You’ve been her victim, as I have. She had my cell phone hacked, too. Really dumb of me to not have caught onto that, especially in my line of business. A joke, really. I think she must have been in on a text message or conversation or even an email to my mother – we’ve never mentioned the murder in a call or message but Laura’s not dumb. Who knows? She’s a smart woman – she put two and two together. I’ve never admitted a thing but she has all the evidence in her possession. With forensic labs the way they are these days – medical records; all it takes is one call from her.”

  “When did she get her hands on all this?”

  “When she and James were there last summer.”

  “You didn’t notice it missing?”

  “No. I wouldn’t have thought to look. I’d pretty much forgotten all about it, actually.”

  “If she’s had everything since the summer why has she waited until now to tell you?”

  “Good question. She must have thought things with you and me would die down - fizzle out. It didn’t, she tried that stunt pretending Sophie was responsible for her accident, which nearly did the trick to split us up, but when she saw that you and I were back together, she pulled out all the stops.”

  “What does she want, exactly?”

  “She wants you out of the picture and for me to marry her.”

  “But that’s insane, especially as you don’t even love her.”

  Alexandre closes his lids as if locked into a deep thought and continues in a grave tone, “The truth is, after her fall she was never the same person. I did understand why, though, at the time. Shit, your whole life changes after an accident like that. They said her head wasn’t damaged in the fall, but when I think of it now, I think they were wrong. I’m convinced something changed in her brain. She was so sweet before, so loving and fun. After the accident…well, I didn’t spend much time with her afterwards, we didn’t see each other for a couple of years, anyway, so it was hard to gauge—”

  “But I thought you two were bosom buddies.”

  “She left me immediately for James. Said I couldn’t look after her properly, that I was too young and she needed stability. What she really wanted - even I wasn’t stupid – was someone who was rich enough to take care of her. That’s why I worked my ass off – determined that HookedUp would be a financial success. I became driven with the idea of proving that I, too, could look after her, could be wealthy enough to take care of her. Not just her but any future relationship – any future girlfriend or wife. I felt very proud – I still do. I’m old-fashioned in that respect. I’m the type of man who wants to be able to support my partner financially.”

  “Well, why didn’t you both get back together as soon as you’d made all that money?”

  “By that time, I’d become good friends with James and I just wasn’t in love with Laura anymore. They came to stay in Provence and stuff. I genuinely had no idea she was still into me, until recently. I think the second you came along she became competitive and wanted me back. At first, she was convinced you and I would split up, but the moment she heard about our marriage she went wild with jealousy.”

  “What about James? How does he feel?”

  “He still hasn’t returned my calls. He got busted for dodgy tax dealings and is in financial straits. That made Laura nervous. I don’t think she loves me at all, really, I think she loves my bank balance. Plus…” he hesitates.

  “What?”

  “James can’t have children and she’s fixated on the idea of getting pregnant. She wants me to father her child.”

  A stab of fury seizes my heart making it skip a beat. “Jesus. Why can’t she pick on a single man? Why you?”

  “I know.”

  “So she’s blackmailing you, then?”

  “Exactly. But in her warped brain she believes it’s
for my own good and we’ll live happily ever after.”

  “Where has she got the evidence hidden?”

  “She says it’s in a safety deposit box and if anything happens to her, any accident or mishap, she has instructed her lawyer to open the box and its contents with a note revealing everything.”

  “What a monster!”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “But that’s insane! If you don’t love her, how could she have a happy life, even if she did get you back?”

  “As I said, I think some chip in her brain went doolally when she had that fall. The girl I dated would never have done this. Her behavior is totally irrational. I just didn’t see it before because James was always about. He’s a good guy. We’ve done some Aston Martin and Austin Healy rallies together, he’s a nice man. It’s crazy what she’s playing at.” Alexandre buries his head in his hands and lets out an exasperated sigh.

  “So her idea is to have the evidence sitting in that safe deposit box forever, blackmail you throughout your ‘marriage’ so you’ll never leave her or else your mother goes to jail?”

  “Yeah, that’s more or less the plan she’s got up her dirty little sleeve, although she’s not coming out and saying it directly. She pretends it’s for my own good, just in case the evidence got into ‘the wrong hands’, she says.”

  “That’s terrifying. I mean, if she were to get run over by a bus tomorrow, out comes that goddamn safe deposit box.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  Alexandre smiles at me. “Thank you, chérie, for using the word ‘we’ - although that’s why I’ve been so secretive - I didn’t want to get you involved in this mess.”

  “Till death do us part. For better or for worse. We may not have said our vows yet, Alexandre, but I’m with you one hundred percent, whatever your decision.”

  He puts his arms about me and holds me close to his chest. I feel his slow, strong heartbeat. His voice is low and quiet when he tells me, “I love you, Pearl.”

  I breathe him in. “I was so scared you wanted her back, that you were still in love with her – all those parting, ‘goodbye’ gifts you gave me; the Porsche, the Mercedes, the apartments—”