by Victoria Fox
Aurora’s heart was thumping wildly. Pascale knew something … something about the island and JB and Reuben van der Meyde.
Arnaud Devereux’s words swam towards her through the night. The concerned fathers, I am sure …
Aurora lay back.
She remembered Rita’s offer to take her away.
It was settled, then. She knew exactly where she wanted to go.
37
Stevie
The headlines in London were the worst. SORDID SECRETS OF A SEX MANIAC screamed the UK tabloids. PERV PRODUCER IN SHOCK DEATH TRYST. Stevie hadn’t realised how intent the British press were on the gory details. At least in LA they treated the episode with a modicum of respect, if not for Linus then for poor Bibi.
Her friend had been inconsolable when Stevie returned from her honeymoon. She had accompanied Bibi to police questioning—a formality, they were assured—before helping her move out of the Posen mansion and into a small apartment of her own, close to where Stevie and Xander were living. Bibi was frail, her body wrung out by drugs and despair, flashbacks from the night her husband died circling in her memory. Stevie thought how small she looked, how fragile, and wondered how anyone, whatever ‘formalities’ might be necessary, could suspect her of murder at a time like this. It had been a terrible, tragic accident—nothing more.
Mercifully she’d been tied up the past couple of months on the set of her new film, a biopic centring on a fugitive young woman on the run from the government. She was filming in San Francisco, but made a point of coming home whenever her schedule permitted.
Early Friday morning she flew into LAX, politely greeted a handful of paparazzi waiting outside Arrivals and took a cab straight to the Bel Air place she shared with Xander. The villa, a circular-fronted construction half obscured by lush vegetation, was modest in comparison with its neighbouring counterparts. Xander didn’t employ a housekeeper and Stevie was glad: she’d hate not to be able to kick off her shoes when she got in, cook what she felt like or make a mess if she wanted. She fixed coffee and unpacked, knowing she was stalling the inevitable. Bibi would be here in half an hour and there was something she had to do first.
Upstairs in the cool, quiet bathroom, she extracted the pregnancy test. They’d been having unprotected sex for months now—it hadn’t been a conscious decision, just what happened. They loved and trusted each other, and, while Stevie had for a long time carried a horror of falling pregnant again, being with Xander had, slowly but surely, begun the healing process. She was content to let nature run its course.
Only nature hadn’t delivered.
It didn’t mean anything was wrong. Couples spent years trying to get pregnant, and it wasn’t even as if she and Xander were trying in earnest. Even so, Stevie could admit to the fear that terminating her first had left her unable. Or, if it wasn’t that, retribution for her duplicity.
She remembered the day she’d found out. They’d just spent a blissful weekend—his wife had been away, she hadn’t asked where—holed up in a hotel, having sex and ordering room service and showering together and sleeping in each other’s arms. He’d told her for the fiftieth time that his divorce was imminent: the affair had been going on for months now and it was she he was in love with. And Stevie had looked into his eyes and believed with the whole of her heart that she had loved him truly, and it didn’t matter that there were nearly twenty years between them, or that he was a father or the man she worked for—they were technicalities. So when she’d registered on Monday morning that her period was late, and decided to buy a test at lunch to put her mind at rest, there’d been a part of her that knew that even if the unforeseen were to happen, and even if the timing were impossible, he would be happy. Because wasn’t this what he wanted? A future with her, a family? He said he did.
It hadn’t happened that way.
In that toilet cubicle on the seventh floor of an office building on Fleet Street, a twenty-six-year-old Stevie had sat alone with the news, letting it sink in, deep breaths, deep breaths, and practising how she’d put it to him, what she’d say.
I’m pregnant, she’d told him late that night. He’d been in meetings and the relief of letting it go was immense. She’d waited for the smile, the outstretched arms.
You’re what?
I’m pregnant.
Whose is it?
The question had been a knife to her throat. It’s yours.
It can’t be.
And he’d denied it, saying he didn’t believe her and she must have been with other men, and she’d been so stupid, so weak back then, that the first thing she’d cared about was that he doubted her fidelity and how she could prove it to him.
I’ll get a test when the baby’s born, she’d said. Then you’ll know.
It’s not getting born. Which was surely a contradiction, because if he’d honestly thought he had nothing to do with it then why put in the request?
Request. It hadn’t been. It had been an order.
I don’t want to. I’m keeping it. It’s my child, too.
That was the first time he had hit her. His fist came from nowhere, slamming her backwards, and she remembered hearing her head crack against an expensive Escher print he had framed on his office wall. He’d hit her so hard her ear bled. Then came the threats…
Stevie shook her head against the past. She ran a hand over her stomach, brushing off superstition. What would be would be. She had to have faith. With Xander, it would be different.
Last month she’d waited in ignorance, savouring a maybe, her late cycle ripe with promise, before she’d bled into her knickers. Today was the same. She needed to stop using these tests that spelled the damn thing out: NOT PREGNANT.
She stood, washed her hands, unlocked the door (seclusion was weirdly necessary) and made her way downstairs, just in time for the main-gate buzzer to sound.
It was Bibi, clad in a headscarf and huge shades that shrank her already tiny features.
‘Talk about Thelma & Louise,’ Stevie teased, enveloping her in a hug. Bibi was feeble in her arms and so she didn’t squeeze too tightly.
‘Want to run away with me?’ Bibi enquired weakly, attempting humour as she stepped inside. When she took off the dark glasses, Stevie could see the haunted look around her eyes, the badge of sleep deprivation and bad nutrition.
‘Let me make you a sandwich,’ she offered. ‘And tea.’
‘Tea?’
‘Cures all ills.’
‘You’d better make a lot of it, then.’ Bibi sat at the breakfast counter and unwound her scarf. Underneath, her hair was patchily dyed, alternating clumps of harsh blonde and redorange—but that wasn’t the sole reason she wore the camouflage. Since her husband’s death, paparazzi had been trailing her non-stop. Though she had been cleared of any involvement in his killing, at least any involvement with intent, she was fast becoming a black-widow figure, elusive and remote. Nobody considered that perhaps she was still in shock.
‘Are you OK, B?’ Stevie put two mugs on the counter and settled opposite. ‘You look a million miles away. Aren’t you sleeping?’
Bibi endeavoured a smile. ‘Not much.’ Try not at all. At night she lay terrified, convinced she was about to hear a knock at the door, a warrant for her arrest, or that she’d wake to find herself rotting on death row and the time since Linus’s demise would all have been a dream. She couldn’t believe she was still walking free. People didn’t get away with murder … did they?
‘Nightmares?’ Stevie gently pressed.
‘Kinda.’ Oddly, not of the night she had killed him. Instead, images from her marriage and the games her husband had subjected her to. Perhaps that was her special punishment, her own bespoke hell—because now she was no better than him, just as morally bankrupt and as undeserving of redemption, condemned to a life trapped inside those dreadful recollections.
‘B …?’ Stevie was concerned. ‘You’ve gone white as a sheet.’
She sipped the too-sweet tea. ‘I’m fine.’
‘If you thi
nk it would help to talk about what happened …’
‘It wouldn’t.’
‘All right.’
‘I’m not ready. Sorry.’
Stevie took her hand. ‘You know I’m here, don’t you? I’ll always be here.’
Bibi kept her eyes down, afraid that if she met Stevie’s kind, understanding gaze, her confession would fall straight out of her mouth, thick and scaly as a big ugly fish.
‘Talk to me about you,’ she said, desperate to put her mind to anything else. ‘I wanna hear how you’re doing, Steve.’
Stevie sat back. ‘Things are busy.’ Such an anodyne comment in light of Bibi’s misfortune felt like a brush-off so she added, ‘We’re hoping to get pregnant.’
Bibi’s face lit up. ‘You are? Any luck?’
‘Nah. It’s early.’
‘I’ll say. Why the big rush?’
Stevie frowned, but it was tempered by a smile. ‘I met the right person.’
‘That’s romantic.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Xander’s been good to me. Since what happened, I mean. You’re lucky.’
‘I know.’ She paused. ‘Although sometimes … No, it’s silly.’
Bibi leaned forward. ‘What?’
Stevie thought about whether or not to voice what was on her mind. ‘It’s not a big deal, it’s just …’ She put her elbow on the counter and supported her chin in her hand. ‘Sometimes I feel like there’s stuff going on with Xander that I haven’t got a clue about.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘He closes up.’ She sighed. ‘Not all the time, just occasionally. And it’s fine, you know—there’re bits of people we never see, and it’s not like I have to know everything about him and he about me … I guess it’s that he gets this look. I don’t know how else to describe it. He gets further and further away from me, in his thoughts, I mean, and then he seems like he’s about to tell me something but at the last second decides not to.’
Bibi waited. ‘Might you be looking too much into it?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Xander’s a trustworthy guy, Steve. Believe me. By rights I ought to hate every man out there but I don’t hate Xander. He’s decent.’
Stevie smiled. ‘I know he is. I expect I’m just thinking of reasons for it to go wrong.’
Her cell rang. ‘One second.’ She picked it up and went to the patio doors. After a brief conversation, she folded it shut. ‘That was Marty,’ she said, refilling their cups. ‘I was talking to him about you. An agent friend of his is seeking new clients. Can I put you in touch?’
Bibi had been approached for representation a number of times since her husband’s death, but the intentions behind the offers were seldom honourable. ‘I dunno,’ she said cautiously. ‘Work’s the last thing on my mind.’
Stevie sat down. ‘So what’s next?’
‘I’m taking it a day at a time. Dirk Michaels has booked me in for a week on Cacatra—I know, I know, he’s the last person I want to accept favours off, but he insisted, saying it’s what Linus would have wanted. So I can get away from it all.’ She bit her lip, uncertain. ‘I could do with getting out of LA. And after the favours I’ve done for him …’
‘Cacatra?’ Stevie had read about it—a remote island in the middle of the ocean. She’d thought it was a rehab spa, at the forefront of a host of breakthrough therapies.
‘Dirk knows Reuben van der Meyde,’ said Bibi. ‘I imagine he struck a deal. There are dozens of treatments I can access while I’m out there, all paid for by him. Though the only things I want to prioritise right now are blue sky, deep sea and doing as little as possible.’
Stevie agreed. ‘It sounds exactly the thing you need. But when you’re back, let’s hook up with Marty’s contact, OK? I think it’s going to make a difference to how you feel, B; help you get some confidence back. Right now it’s all about you being Linus Posen’s widow, but it doesn’t have to be. You’re not Bibi Posen any more, remember? You’re Bibi Reiner. And that’s who you were all along; you just lost sight of her for a while. So, after a little R&R, soon as you’re back on your feet, we’ll—’
Bibi cut in. ‘Steve, I killed Linus.’
Stevie didn’t think she’d heard right. ‘What?’
‘I killed him.’
It took a moment for her meaning to become clear. ‘Oh, sweetheart, you mustn’t think that.’ She reached across and touched her friend’s arm. ‘It was an accident—’
‘No.’ Bibi withdrew. ‘That’s exactly what I’m telling you. It wasn’t.’
Stevie searched the other woman’s face. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I killed him, Steve. I lured him into his favourite game and then I took his life. It was planned; it was intentional; it was entirely in cold blood.’ She swallowed. ‘I murdered him.’
38
Lori
Miles from the mainland, Cacatra was a beautiful jewel in a glittering ocean, a destination that was somehow part of the world and yet distinct from it, as if, by a trick of light or a sleight of hand, a curtain had been lifted to reveal a glorious, heavenly secret.
A solitary figure was waiting when the helicopter touched down on the south of the island. Its rotors whipped up a startling wind from which the man didn’t flinch. He was wearing a charcoal shirt, tucked in loosely at the waist, and his hands were in his pockets.
Lori’s ears were buzzing from the noise of the pistons. The helicopter had dipped and bumped as they’d come in over the cliffs, and she was relieved when finally it met ground. An official in a canary-yellow jacket came rushing over to release the doors and shout a reminder to keep her arms down. He gestured towards the man standing outside the perimeter.
The sunlight was strong, rendering her surroundings hyper-real. Close up JB’s eyes were silver, the pupils vanishing.
‘Fun, isn’t it?’ Smoothly he claimed her bag and swung it on to his shoulder. ‘I used to fly them myself. Not so much any more.’
‘You didn’t need to do this.’
‘I know.’
‘You seem to know a lot of things.’
For the first time she saw humour in his eyes. Warm. She found it hard to look at him.
‘Shall I show you where you’re staying?’ he asked.
‘Sure.’ Lori took in her immediate surroundings. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Good.’ He didn’t take his eyes from her. ‘I think so, too.’
The helipad and runway took advantage of the only level terrain on the island. From here, the rest was hidden behind a steep rocky bank. Vehicles waited beyond the fence to meet new arrivals and a private jet was unloading a short distance away. Lori was surprised by how wild it was. The rugged cliff face, chalky and golden and green, gave way to a sheer, rocky drop, below which the blue ocean lashed angrily, white horses riding into war, the island an unwelcome obstruction in an otherwise unblemished expanse.
JB carried her bags towards a gleaming black Jeep.
‘You’re going to fall in love with this,’ he told her.
Cacatra was enormous. The part Lori had seen in photographs and magazines must have been just a fraction. A winding road was carved from north to south, along which the Jeep now sped, JB at the wheel. Occasionally they came off on to a narrow snaking track, a short cut through marshy patches sunk behind ironed-out golf courses, natural outdoor pools and lush rock waterfalls, tennis courts and diving centres and boats bobbing patiently on transparent water.
To the north, the ocean was calmer. Fanning from the island were twenty or more wooden walkways, at the tips of each the villas where visitors were accommodated. Another, smaller island could be seen further out, on which, just decipherable, stood a lighthouse, thimble-sized in the distance.
‘Cacatra is a spa on a mega scale,’ JB was explaining. For politeness’ sake, she listened, but she’d give him nothing more. The unspoken encounter of almost two years ago sat between them like a forgotten offspring, once demanding attention, now resigned
to obscurity. ‘It’s the highest order of recuperation and leisure on the planet. Anything a client wants, we have it. Everything they are yet to think of, we have that too.’
They rejoined the smoother road and slickly he changed gear. ‘Many use it like a club or a holiday retreat,’ he continued. ‘A week of fresh ocean air, concentrated workouts, time away from the spotlight—that is what they pay for. Others come for different reasons.’
Lori watched his hand on the steering wheel, the way his Rolex flashed in the sun and the muscles in his forearms as they pulled and relaxed.
‘Therapy?’ She had heard about troubled stars sent by worried management—addictions, depression, anxiety, Cacatra treated it all.
‘The island accommodates every mode of recovery. We employ a team of specialists from across the world. Time spent here has proven results.’
‘Like rehab?’
‘Everyone in LA goes to rehab, it’s a given—especially for girls your age.’ She resented the observation. ‘Months later, the problems remain. Cacatra is different: you visit once and you don’t need to again. It makes you see life with new eyes. That is the key. Rediscovering nature can be like an epiphany. This is the dearest place in the world to me.’
Lori was touched by the expression.
‘When we’re children,’ he elaborated, ‘we are full of amazement at the miracle of life. We want to find out, we want to know. We must know everything—all the secrets there are, even if we would be happier in ignorance.’
She looked at him sideways. ‘And when we’re grown?’
‘When we’re grown we see that ignorance is precious.’ His jaw hardened. ‘Once you know a secret, you can never go back.’
They mounted a steep incline. ‘What about me, then?’ she asked. ‘Why am I here?’
‘Escape,’ he answered. ‘The third reason they come. People who are known the globe over pay vast amounts for privacy. It interests me how treasured loneliness can be.’
‘Who says I need privacy?’
The Jeep came to a halt. They were on the highest point of the island. From here Lori could make out the landscape’s sweeping contours, the patches of different terrain and clusters of chalky-white buildings.