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 hopes 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.