The Viscount's Daughter - [A Treadwell Academy - 03]

by Caitlyn Duffy

  “What are you doing?” Bijoux asked me in an accusatory tone.

  I had taken off my dirty canvas slip-ons and was trying on a pair of wooden shoes, painted a bright, happy shade of blue with delicate white details. I knew wooden shoes weren’t exactly in fashion, but sue me. I wanted a pair.

  “I like these,” I told her.

  “Oh my god,” Bijoux groaned. “If you buy those, I am totally pretending I don’t know you.”

  Bijoux skulked off toward the gate in pursuit of thick, glossy fashion magazines.

  I held the shoes for a long moment, really wanting them. I couldn’t help but think that Taylor Beauforte would have wanted wooden shoes, too. If Taylor was my sister instead of Bijoux, we could have bought matching wooden shoes and clomped around the airport like huge nerds.

  But then again, if Taylor was my sister, I’d be on my way to North Carolina with my dad’s band. I sighed with a heavy heart. I put the wooden shoes back down on the display and felt the eyes of the shop clerk boring into my back. I smiled politely at her. She was in her late forties and looked really tired. To her, I probably just looked like any old fourteen-year-old brat shopping alone in the airport, probably with irresponsible parents reading novels at the boarding gate. Little did she know that my own irresponsible parents were three thousand miles apart from each other, and probably neither of them had given me a single thought that day.

  At the gate, Bijoux had struck up a conversation with two really handsome guys who were apparently going to be on our flight. She was sitting on a blue chair and had twisted her legs into a contorted pretzel shape.

  “This is my sister, Betsey,” Bijoux said, introducing me as I approached with my backpack. “Betsey, this is Andrej, and his college roommate James. They’re going to be in Split until August.”

  “Hi,” I said, waving. I assumed Andrej was Croatian and his college friend was accompanying him home for the rest of their summer break. The American friend, in particular, was really cute. He had short brown hair and a nice smile.

  “Could you go get me a Diet Coke, piggy?” Bijoux asked, holding her black American Express card toward me.

  I just about wanted to kill my sister in that moment. Both of the boys smirked a little bit. For the record, I am not fat. I just have a bigger frame than Bijoux. Plenty of boys looked at me and talked to me when Bijoux wasn’t around to outshine me.

  “There will be beverage service on the flight,” I informed her, plopping down in a seat across from her and glaring at her.

  “But I want the fancy glass bottle,” Bijoux whined. “Please, Betsey. Pretty please.”

  I snatched her credit card away from her and marched toward the nearest convenience store to our gate. Inside, I used her credit card to buy her soda, a soda for myself and a tell-all book about my favorite band, All or Nothing. And a bag of pretzels. And some gum.

  When we boarded the plane, I was relieved that Bijoux’s new friends were seated in the front of the plane, and we were seated at the back. It was a smaller plane without a First Class section. We plunked down in our seats and my heart sank when the captain announced that we would be delayed by a little bit due to air traffic congestion around Amsterdam.

  “What if we just get off the plane,” I suggested to Bijoux. “What if we just get off, take the train into the city, and walk around all day.”

  “Why would we want to do that?” Bijoux muttered, barely looking up from her fashion magazine. Bijoux didn’t read. She only looked at pictures.

  “It would be cool. Amsterdam is cool. We could pick tulips and go to the Anne Frank house,” I said. I didn’t really know all that much about Amsterdam other than that it was known for being a big party city.

  “We already boarded, and the fasten seatbelt sign is on,” Bijoux discouraged me, sounding bored with my idea. “They won’t let you off the plane after that.”

  “They will if I pretend like I’m having a horrible asthma attack,” I insisted. I didn’t have asthma. But a girl in my seventh grade class had asthma and suffered a horrifying attack in the classroom. She couldn’t find her inhaler in her messy backpack. It was just about the scariest thing I’d ever seen.

  “I don’t want to walk around Amsterdam,” Bijoux informed me. “I want to plunk my butt down at the beach and get the darkest tan of my life.”

  I opened my bag of pretzels and sucked on the salt. Being delayed was even worse than just flying to Croatia and getting it all over with. Had I known as I stared out my window to the blank, boring runway that morning in the Netherlands what awaited me in Croatia that summer, I might have just gotten out of my seat without my sister and explored Amsterdam on my own. Maybe things would have been different then.

  But there’s never a way to go back and get a do-over.

  CHAPTER 2

  Split is a small city, but not like any kind of American city. The airport is super modern and strange. Whenever we flew directly into that airport, I felt like I had just landed on another planet instead of in another country. When Bijoux and I de-boarded our plane, it was already almost 1 P.M., and Bijoux was in an extremely annoyed mood because she was missing out on precious sunlight for her tan. The weather was always beautiful in Croatia in the summer. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and it was an amazing shade of blue. It was fascinating to me that the sky was an entirely different color of blue in this part of the world than it ever was in New York.

  It was kind of a relief when we made our way through customs and found Niko, our mom’s driver, waiting for us near the baggage area. Niko was balding and always wore a navy blue polyester jacket even when it was hot outside. Even though he looked less than delighted to see me and my sister, I was a little delighted to see him. I would have at least another forty-five minutes free from Danko during the drive to the house.

  “I come to drive you home,” he told us in his broken English.

  “Ugh!” Bijoux exclaimed. “She couldn’t even be bothered to pick us up.”

  Bijoux was going through a phase with our mom. She was very impatient and was making a stink whenever possible about ways our mom chose to focus on work instead of us. In my opinion it was a little late for anyone to care about how much attention Mom gave us; we were both teenagers and it was a bigger deal when we were little that we spent so much time with nannies and housekeepers. Our mom had never been, and was never going to be, the kind of mom who cut the crusts off sandwiches and set time aside to go shoe shopping with us.

  Niko helped us carry our suitcases out to the parking lot, where he had parked the silver Mercedes that he used for driving Mom to and from her various errands in Croatia. She didn’t like driving in Europe. The rules were all different and the many, many scooter riders violating traffic laws freaked her out. He tried and failed to explain why Mom hadn’t come with. It had something to do with the telephone. Even without my knowing who she was on the phone with or why, the phone was usually the reason she couldn’t be present for things involving us.

  “Niko, could you just pull over?” Bijoux commanded as we were driving past Okrug beach, which was crowded beneath the midday sun. We had just passed the bridge connecting the small town of Trogir to the island where Danko’s estate was located. Beach life in Croatia was basically a twenty-four-hour-a-day affair. You could stay out all night on the beach; there were bars and restaurants that were open around the clock from May until September. From the road on which we were driving, there was a thick patch of trees obscuring the beach, but when I saw Bijoux tucking her mobile phone back into her bag, I assumed she had probably just gotten a text message from Jadranka or Mili telling her where they were. Jadranka was some kind of distant cousin of Danko’s (a lot of people in the vicinity of Trogir were). She was built like a supermodel, but with a crooked nose and squinty eyes. My sister secretly referred to her as a “butter face,” which was to suggest that everything about Jadranka was perfect, but-her-face. Despite the cruel nickname Bijoux had assigned to Jadranka, she adored her. Mili was J
adranka’s long-time boyfriend. He was impossibly handsome with his wide set green eyes and curly blond hair. Those three would spend the majority of the summer tipsy on the sand, dancing after nightfall at the beachfront night clubs.

  Sure enough, when Niko stopped the car along the side of the road, Bijoux hopped out, pulled her knit sundress over head to reveal she had been wearing her green bikini the entire time we’d been traveling. She kicked off her espadrilles and pulled flip-flops out of her canvas carry-on bag. “Tell Mom I’ll be at the house for dinner,” she instructed me, and ran off through the trees toward the beach. That beach, probably the most popular around Danko’s property, was within walking distance to the house, although we usually road bikes whenever we went there.

  Ugh. My sister.

  What was always kind of remarkable to me as the car approached the tall stone wall around Danko’s house was that from the outside, the house looked majestic. It was four stories high with bay windows and a balcony that wrapped around the house, facing seaward, on the two top floors. The property was right on the beach, but on this part of the island, the beach was mostly pebbles, so it wasn’t ideal for hanging out. It looked like any fancy Mediterranean villa. There was also an in-ground pool, with an outdoor wet bar and a huge barbecue grill for when Mom and Danko entertained in the summer, which was often. Palm trees had been planted, in an effort to insist that the location was tropical (which, in actuality, it was not).

  But the house’s interior served as a grim reminder that it was situated in Croatia and not Monaco. It was really expensive to bring furniture over from the U.S., so most of the house’s décor was Croatian. There was an enormous flat-screen television in our living room, but the couch in that room was an ugly overstuffed, vinyl wrap-around thing, made to look like salmon-colored leather. There was no such thing in Croatia as a window treatment that wasn’t made of lace, so lace curtains of all colors hung in every window even though old-fashioned lace directly clashed with the house’s modern architecture. My bedroom in this house had yellow walls with a strange art deco bed frame. The floor throughout the house was ceramic tile because the climate could be so damp that carpet would mildew. It couldn’t have been more different than my room in our apartment on Park Avenue, which I had been allowed to paint with blackboard paint so that I could doodle on the walls with chalk whenever I wanted. I had picked out all of my own furniture in that bedroom at a Danish import store with Donna, my mother’s interior designer.

  “Betsey!” Jelena, our front-of-the-house maid, greeted me at the door as Niko carried my suitcases up the front stairs.

  She embraced me in a rough hug and planted a firm kiss on both of my cheeks.

  “Hi, Jelena,” I said. Her hair was dyed a very unnatural shade of red, and she had a big hairy mole on her left cheek. Under different circumstances I would have not hesitated to call her ugly, but she was one of the slim few people in the world who favored me over my sister, so she was beloved to me.

  “You get so big since last summer,” she said, taking me in.

  I kind of had changed since last summer, I guessed. My hair was longer, I was a little taller, and had no choice anymore about wearing a bra all the time. Jelena told me that Danko’s brother and family would be joining us the following week, and my heart leapt. Danko only had one brother that I knew of, and his kids, Kristijan and Magda, were about my age. We had ridden bikes all over Trogir together in past summers and I had been hoping they would make an appearance again, although it would have been totally awkward for me to have asked Danko directly. It wasn’t like I called him, or emailed him, or really talked to him, even though he was married to my mom.

  “Hello, dear,” my mother said, sounding stressed out. She was descending the main staircase from the second floor of the house, holding her cell phone. There is never an hour of the day when my mother isn’t dressed to perfection, even in the privacy of her own home. She wore a white silk blouse with tight pink jeans and a slim pink belt with black and white Bally t-strap wedge shoes. She could just as easily have been walking through her office building in Midtown Manhattan as she was walking through our house in Croatia in the middle of the afternoon on a summer weekday. She brushed my hair away from my face and kissed me on the forehead.

  “How was your flight?” she asked. She smelled like Peony Bouquet, the classic Darlene fragrance she had worn since before I was born.

  “Fine,” I replied. “Bijoux’s already at the beach.”

  My mother studied my face and I wondered if she was trying to assess whether or not I had gained any weight or gotten myself into any trouble in the weeks since I had last seen her. Actually, it had been close to a month since I had last seen my mother in person. She and Danko had left New York for Croatia the first week of June, before my school year had ended. I had stayed in the apartment in Manhattan with Bijoux until classes let out, and the first week of July we had flown to Virginia to see Dad. During the two weeks we were on our own in Manhattan, Bijoux had thrown two big parties and had mostly depleted the entire liquor cabinet. It had been somewhat of a complicated affair convincing one of her older friends, Kenny, her business partner in her handbag line, to help us buy replacement booze so that we wouldn’t get busted when the whole family returned to New York at the end of the summer. Going for long periods of time without seeing Mom wasn’t uncommon. She traveled a lot for business. Sometimes she went to Paris or Milan for two months when new product lines were about to be released.

  “Your visit with your father was OK?” she asked.

  “It was good,” I said, kind of wanting to rub it in that sometimes he actually made an effort with us, and this had been one of those times. I told her about going to the beach, leaving out the part about meeting a lot of boys and drinking, and about Taylor being at the hotel with the band.

  “Oh, goodness,” my mother said, sounding genuinely upset about the death of Taylor’s mom. “That’s hard to believe. What a shame. Dawn was a nice girl. I had wondered what had happened to the baby but I don’t remember her being called Taylor. Maybe she changed her name.”

  I had forgotten that my mom actually knew Taylor’s mom back when they were both newlyweds and spent a lot of time with the band. My mom had tired quickly of the behavior that went along with touring, or rather, her board of directors had brought a swift end to it. She had a global position and an obligation to Darlene, as an heir to the fortune, and she couldn’t just be blowing off board meetings left and right because she had a hangover or was in Atlantic City, or because of any of the variety of bad excuses she used to make. Right after I was born, the board of her own company gave her an ultimatum: leave my dad and clean up her life, or lose her position with Darlene. When I was a little girl I used to find her decision very upsetting because no one really wants their parents to get divorced, but as I got older I had a Giant Duh moment and realized that she had become an alcoholic when she was with Dad, and her decision had just as much to do with getting her act together for our benefit as it did with her career and income. It took quite a few more years after their divorce before Dad stopped drinking, too. Of course, my dad’s cheating played a huge factor in their divorce, too, but Bijoux was under the impression that our mother hadn’t exactly been faithful, either.

  “Dad’s doing yoga these days,” I announced, knowing my mother would find humor in that. Even after all of these years and the ugliness of their very public divorce, I knew my mom still found my dad to be a little charming. I mean, there was negative hope of them ever getting back together again. But she thought of him kind of like a teddy bear that she missed from time to time.

  “Oh, God,” she said, unable to suppress a smile. “Not in Spandex, I hope.”

  I climbed the stairs up to my room and found it oddly comforting that it seemed completely untouched since I had last seen it, the summer before. When I opened the door I could see dust dancing in the air, sparkling because of the sunlight streaming in through my windows. My room was in the back of
the house, so my windows faced the forest instead of the sea. I got the most sun in the late afternoon when the sun began to set. I never really thought of this room, or anything in this house, as mine, but the familiarity of these four walls was comforting after being in a hotel with Dad and then traveling for so many days. It crossed my mind to go down to the pool for a while before dinner, but I decided instead to savor my privacy in my room.

  As promised, Bijoux managed to get herself back to the house in time for the dinner our help staff had prepared. I had already been seated across from Mom and Danko in our dining room, and was fiddling around with the napkin in my lap, waiting for the kitchen girls to serve dinner under Jelena’s direction. Every summer it seemed like we had a kitchen full of new faces, and this year I could help but notice that the new girls didn’t seem much older than me and Bijoux. Mom was in the middle of filling Danko in on the latest crisis at Darlene. Sales of their longtime top-selling night cream had been falling steadily in the United States for the last six months since a Japanese wonder product made out of some kind of rice had hit the market. She had a file folder on the table next to her plate filled with what looked like financial reports she had printed out.

  “And the insane thing is that the price point is fifty percent more than our Maximum Night Complex, per twelve-ounce unit,” Mom complained. “They’re consuming our entire top-earning consumer base and crossing over into the next bracket. It’s incredible.”

  “It’s a fad,” Danko assured her. “The last thing you want to do is lower your price point. You have to keep the Night Complex at a premium.”

  “I know,” Mom snapped at him. She was very territorial about her business and didn’t appreciate it when he said anything to suggest that he might be more of an expert in corporate management than she was. “We’re working on a higher end product, a slightly more advanced formula, but the clinical tests that we’d have to run in order to make any new claims about results would take at least a year. They’ve got us. They’ve got the market for the next eighteen months, at least, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”