Dark Chocolate Murder

by Anisa Claire West

  In control again, Pierre jackknifed the vehicle into an even higher speed than before. Belinda cringed as the speedometer soared past 100 miles per hour, but she did not try to stop him anymore. There was no turning back now. If they surrendered, they would both be arrested and charged with any number of offenses. Belinda had already escaped an emotional prison in coming to Monaco. And she wasn’t about to trade it for a physical prison.

  Recklessly, Pierre darted through side streets and cruised down a narrow alley way before picking up a main road that would lead to the highway---and eventually to the Italian border. Sirens blared in the distance, and Belinda choked on her breath, wondering if those were the back-up police cars she had feared. But when Pierre rounded a bend and merged onto the busy autoroute, the sirens faded into the distance.

  “I think we finally lost Buchet!” Pierre shouted in a half-crazed manner.

  Daring another glimpse behind them, Belinda saw that Pierre was right. “Oh, thank goodness!”

  Without a reply, Pierre switched on the radio and surfed over to an all-news station. In a moment, his features had morphed into an expression of horror. Belinda distinctly heard her name from the newscaster, albeit in a thick French accent. Desperately, she listened to the broadcast, struggling to understand the rapidly issued words.

  “Oh, this is terrible!” Pierre shouted, slamming his hand on the armrest.

  “What did they say? I couldn’t understand much except for my name!”

  “They said that you are now an official suspect in this murder investigation. They also said you are a fugitive on the run. I knew Buchet couldn’t be trusted!” He punched the radio dial so the horrible news would stop.

  “Why? What did Buchet do to be able to call me a fugitive?” Belinda demanded, nervously nibbling on her pinky nail.

  “He must have planted some fake evidence in your shop. Because the newscaster said that a bottle of cyanide was found there and that other chocolates were poisoned with it,” Pierre said remorsefully, wishing he could somehow shield Belinda from the dark fate that could await her if she were caught.

  “No! Why would a detective do that? Could it really be just because he has a vendetta against American women? It doesn’t make sense. It seems too extreme. There must be something else going on.” Belinda shook her head in confusion, pondering what Buchet’s motive could possibly be for going to such drastic measures to falsely frame her.

  “I don’t know what else is going on, but I think you’re right. This is getting uglier,” Pierre sneered, pressing down heavier on the gas pedal as though that motion somehow had the power to solve this swiftly worsening problem.

  “How come your name wasn’t mentioned? Or did I just not hear correctly?”

  “No, my name was not mentioned, and I have no idea why. I assume Buchet has my license plate number and could identify me. This whole thing is mystifying.” Pierre glanced over at Belinda and added glumly, “The broadcast also said that they have a police sketch of you. That means we’re going to have to get you a disguise.”

  “Pierre, this is awful!” Belinda buried her face in her hands.

  “It’s despicable! If I could get my hands on Buchet---and Debauche---I would squeeze until there’s no life left in them both!” Pierre seethed in a voice that trembled with fury.

  Belinda peered over at him cautiously. His face was drenched in anxious sweat, and his brow was deeply furrowed. He looked like a man who had just endured a life or death situation. In fact, he had. And he still was. Belinda’s eyes hardened with worry as she noted the feverishly red color of his face. Not even during their athletic lovemaking had his face become so enflamed.

  “Pierre, are you alright? Your skin is so red.”

  “I have high blood pressure. Usually, it’s easy to manage. But not in a situation like this.” Pierre wiped a bead of sweat off his stubble-roughened cheek.

  Belinda reached for a tissue and gently dabbed Pierre’s face. Gazing lovingly at his strong profile, she said, “I’m sorry I doubted you before. I should have known better. You’ll get me through this, no matter how difficult it will be. I trust you.”

  “I’m not upset with you for having doubts before. I understand. But don’t declare victory yet. We’re still not in Italy, and I don’t know how much damage was done to the car. I just hope it will carry us over the border.”

  “It will. I’m sure that accident was just a little fender bender,” Belinda soothed, massaging Pierre’s shoulders and neck as he drove.

  “Your massage should be lowering my blood pressure. But your touch raises it even more,” Pierre said as his pulse quickened beneath her fingers.

  “Should I apologize?” She asked saucily, eager for a distraction from their tense predicament.

  “No, not at all. But you’ll be to blame if I go into cardiac arrest right here in the car,” Pierre joked.

  Belinda frowned. “Don’t talk like that! Why do you even have high blood pressure? You’re in amazing shape.”

  “Well, thank you.” He grinned. “It’s the stress. Since my divorce, I’ve had so much on my plate. I’m raising Marc alone. I moved across the world. I opened a very demanding business. It’s hard sometimes. And Marc needs a mother. It worries me all the time that I’m not enough. He needs a woman’s love.”

  Belinda’s heart soared unreasonably. Was Pierre confiding in her about this intimate topic because he wanted her to be a mother to Marc? From the moment she had met the dimpled, blue eyed little boy, she had dreamed of forming a family with Pierre. Even though she might never be able to have biological children, she knew she could love someone else’s child with all her heart. Raising Marc with Pierre would fulfill her maternal longings in a way that perhaps even having her own child could not. Marc was already here on earth and needed a complete set of parents; mothering him would be a selfless act, not one designed to continue her own bloodline.

  “You got very quiet,” Pierre observed grimly. “I wasn’t saying that you should be Marc’s mother, so please don’t feel any pressure.”

  Devastated that Pierre had misinterpreted her silence, she cried, “Oh no! I don’t feel pressured at all. I know I’ve only met Marc a few times, but I love that little boy!”

  Pierre’s smile lit up the heavy atmosphere. “And he loves you.” Inhaling a sharp breath, he added, “And his father loves you too.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Belinda blinked, not sure she had heard Pierre correctly. Even in his roundabout way, Pierre had just confessed his feelings for her. The notion that he loved her was not surprising; she had known for some time now that she loved him too. But the fact that he would express it so openly was new to her. Belinda was accustomed to emotionally closed men who would rather crawl naked on a bed of hot coals than say “I love you.”

  “I do, Belinda. I love you so much,” Pierre repeated the words, smiling as they poured from his lips.

  “Pierre, I love you too,” Belinda whispered as tears threatened to fall.

  This day had thrust a bevy of emotions at her, from discouraged to terrified and now from stressed to elated. Pierre swiftly removed one hand from the steering wheel so he could caress Belinda’s face. Hastily, he placed both hands on the wheel for fear that they could experience another collision. Belinda hadn’t noticed, but he was still driving at a dangerously high speed. And somehow, amidst his beautiful declaration of love, they had crossed the border into Italy.

  Street signs were all written in Italian, and the scenery was becoming more picturesque with every mile deeper they traveled into Italy. As the sun began its ritualistic descent past the horizon, the sky shifted through a kaleidoscope of mystical colors. Lavender, rose, and flame all blended together poetically in the twilight.

  “Italy is beautiful,” Belinda breathed in awe.

  “It is a beautiful country. And we’re going to go to Ventimiglia. It’s very close to here and it’s full of tourists. We can blend in easily,” Pierre explained.

  “I
hope so,” Belinda sighed. “After hearing that radio broadcast, I have my doubts…”

  “Don’t say ‘doubt’ anymore. That word is forbidden from you. Interdit. D’accord?”

  “Okay. You’re right. Let’s just make sure we stop somewhere to get me a disguise. I don’t want to go out in public without one.” Belinda shivered, envisioning herself getting arrested in Italy and hauled back to Monaco in handcuffs. Despite Pierre’s insistence that she should let go of her doubts, her sensible side refused to do so. She would just have to keep the doubts to herself from now on.

  “Yes, hopefully we can find a party store and buy you a wig. A brunette wig. And a plain pair of glasses. We don’t want you to be conspicuous,” Pierre said, glancing salaciously at her curves. “Although, there are parts of you that will always be conspicuous, and I don’t mind.”

  Belinda swatted him playfully. Suddenly, she couldn’t wait to be in a hotel room with him. So far, they had not been intimate in the same place twice, and she shuddered, gleefully imagining another new venue for their passion to unfurl.

  Nestled against the seat for the remainder of the ride, one hand absently caressing Pierre’s face, Belinda felt her nerves calm. As soon as they careened into Ventimiglia, Pierre programmed his GPS to locate a hotel.

  “We want to get a hotel off the beaten path, right?” Belinda queried.

  “Yes, as far away from the action as possible. This one here looks good. It’s just a couple of miles away. And look what the web page says: there are 120 rooms. It will be easy for us to blend in at such a large hotel.” The matter decided, Pierre headed in the direction of the hotel.

  As they walked through the elegant sliding doors, they caused a stir. Scandalized, people pointed to the plastic bags Belinda held and Pierre’s hands, which were entirely empty.

  “Do you think they’ll send us away? Without any luggage, we look like we should be checking into a cheap motel!” Belinda hissed nervously at Pierre.

  “Let me handle it,” Pierre said smoothly. Confidently approaching the uniformed clerk at the front desk, Pierre spoke in broken Italian, “Buon giorno, my name is Denis, and this is my wife, Katie. We would like a room. Please. Thank you. Grazie.”

  Belinda looked up at Pierre in amazement. She hadn’t bothered to ask him if he spoke Italian and, although his words were piecemeal at best, they were more than she could string together in the language.

  Clearly thrilled to be addressed in his native language, the clerk swiftly produced a room key and rang for a bellman. “That’s okay. No bellman, please. We don’t have too many bags,” Pierre said awkwardly, and his combination of a French and Italian accent made Belinda tingle.

  Before the clerk could reply, Pierre grabbed Belinda’s hand and led her to the elevator. “I didn’t know you could speak Italian, Signor Say Dare!”

  “Don’t say my name! I’m Denis now, and you’re Katie. Remember that,” he urged, pressing the button for the third floor.

  “But there’s no one but us in this elevator!”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m not convinced that we’re not being trailed. Let’s take every precaution.”

  “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking,” Belinda said sheepishly. Perking up, she asked again, “So how is it that you speak Italian?”

  Wryly, Pierre quipped, “I speak all the Romance languages, darling.”

  “Is that true?”

  “No!” He laughed. “I know some Italian from cooking school. And I spent a semester studying pasta making in Rome.”

  “Ooh, that sounds so exciting! That would be like me studying chocolate making in Belgium!” Belinda enthused.

  “You could teach chocolate making in Belgium! I miss those sweet treats of yours,” Pierre said sadly as Belinda hung her head. “No, don’t get upset. You will be making chocolates again very soon! This is just a minor detour.”

  As the elevator stopped at the third floor, Pierre gathered Belinda into an embrace, holding the doors shut. In the whirlwind of their kiss, all business-related thoughts dropped down to the ground floor as her heart ascended to the sky.

  *****

  Ventimiglia, Italy

  Five Days Later

  Curled up on the king size bed in the stylish Italian hotel room, Belinda should have been relaxed. After the weeks spent sleeping on a carpet in her minuscule apartment, the bed did feel heavenly, but she couldn’t enjoy it. She was now an official fugitive in a double homicide investigation. Fugitive. The word chilled her every time she thought of it. Even more gravely, she had caused an international police search. And Pierre, that beloved man, was harboring a fugitive since they had fled the country in his car. Images of little Marc asking where his daddy was made Belinda’s heart constrict with remorse. Even though Pierre had volunteered to take her out of the country, she still couldn’t shake the feeling that she was stealing a father away from his son.

  Fiddling around on her computer, Belinda dared to download an online newspaper. She had been avoiding the news at all costs, unable to stomach hearing her name in the context of a homicide investigation. Yesterday, Belinda had risked calling Crystal on the phone, even though they both knew the police could have had the phones tapped and were possibly recording their entire conversation. According to Crystal, the case had become quite the sensation in Monaco and southern France. It was not every day that people died after eating a box of chocolates from a supposedly reputable, swanky boutique. Belinda cringed thinking of all the scandal she had caused. True, she wasn’t the one who poisoned the chocolates, but she had opened the shop in a circuitous way by allowing Jean-Jacques to sign the lease.

  Perhaps if she had done things by the book, she wouldn’t be in this predicament. In fact, she wouldn’t be in Europe at all, Belinda realized. If she had followed the Rule Book, she would still be in Boston wasting away in that cubicle and enduring daily tongue lashings from Jerry. No, she had to leave Boston. It had been her destiny to do so. Otherwise, she never would have met Pierre and believed that she could fall in love again.

  Belinda aimlessly surfed the news sites, not sure what she was looking for, but knowing what she didn’t want to see: her name and face printed on the front of a Wanted poster. On a whim, she typed the names of the victims into a search engine. The first results retrieved were news stories, as she expected. But when she scrolled a little further down, Belinda found a website that caught her eye. She clicked on it with trembling fingers and called to Pierre, who was in the bathroom shaving.

  “Pierre, please come out here! I have to show you something on the computer!”

  Instantaneously, Pierre emerged from the bathroom, a layer of shaving cream coating his face. “What is it? Did you find out anything new?” He asked urgently.

  “Yes, take a look at this!” Belinda turned the computer screen towards him as his eyes widened.

  “You found François and Collette’s obituary!” He exclaimed.

  “Yes! And read the part about their next of kin,” Belinda prompted impatiently.

  Pierre read the French words before exclaiming, “So Philippe is their nephew! And it doesn’t mention any children or grandchildren!”

  “Right! So I would assume that means that the couple didn’t have any living heirs.”

  “Except for Philippe,” Pierre said slowly, exchanging a glance with Belinda.

  “Eureka! Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “That Philippe poisoned his aunt and uncle to get to some sort of inheritance since he was the only one in line for it?” Pierre suggested, already knowing the answer.

  “Yes, it had to be greed. Why else would anyone kill this old couple?”