Dreaming of Manderley by Leah Marie Brown (34)

Chapter Forty

“Nicabar gave us the shaft!” Olivia cries. “Bâtard!”

We are standing on the dock, staring across the channel separating the island from the mainland, a thin rain plastering our hair to our faces.

“In hindsight, maybe we shouldn’t have paid him until we were safely back on the mainland.”

“He still would have left us here.” Olivia angrily swipes her bangs off her forehead. “It wasn’t about the money for that shady, cunning bastard. It was a way to use you to stick it to Xavier.”

Normally, I would urge my best friend to give the man the benefit of the doubt, but I remember the way Nica leered at me when he learned I was Madame de Maloret and I am inclined to believe the worst of him.

“I’ll call Caro and explain what has happened.” I fish around in my purse for my iPhone. “I will ask her to call one of those charter captains to pick us up.”

“Good idea!”

I pull my phone out and my heart sinks when I see SEARCHING FOR NETWORK in the status bar.

“We are out of range.”

“What?” Olivia cries. The cool, composed woman has left the island. “What are we going to do? We can’t stay on this island all night. A storm is coming. What if it is a hurricane and we are swept out to sea?”

“Calm down,” I say, pulling a collapsible umbrella from my purse. “We will walk to the top of the hill and see if I get a signal.”

“Good idea.”

I flick the umbrella open and we huddle beneath it. We are halfway up the hill when I slip in the mud, my smooth-soled espadrilles providing no traction on the slick ground. I fall to my knees, scraping my skin on a sharp rock. Olivia helps me up. I wipe the blood-streaked mud from my knee and we finish climbing to the top of the hill.

“Still no signal.”

“You have got to be kidding me,” she cries, grabbing my iPhone and holding it at different angles. “What kind of godforsaken place is this? Who lives on an island without cell service?”

“Robinson Crusoe. Swiss Family Robinson.”

“Funny.”

“We are going to be just fine,” I say, taking my iPhone from her and slipping it back in my purse. I pull a Kleenex out of my bag, dab my knee, and cover the cut with a Band-Aid. “If Leo could survive The Beach, you will survive this island.”

Olivia slants a disgusted look my way. The Beach was a movie about a nicotine-addicted American video-game junkie (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) who travels to a mythical island in search of adventure. Think Blue Lagoon meets Lord of the Flies and you will understand why it gets a 19 percent splat rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

“One bad blip in an otherwise flawless career,” she says, holding up her finger. “One.”

“I was riling you up a bit to get your blood pumping.”

“Thanks,” she says, taking the umbrella from me and holding it over our heads. “We could try to find the toll road.”

I look down the hill at the rising surf.

“The tide is coming in,” I say. “We would never make it across in time.”

“We could walk back to the cottage, but I doubt Madame Verite would let us use their phone. Assuming they even have a phone.”

“And if they don’t we will have wasted time.”

“I am starv-ing,” she whines.

I pull a granola bar out of my purse and hand it to her.

“Thank you,” she says, taking the bar and tearing open the foil package. “You wouldn’t happen to have a pot of coffee in that rucksack of yours, would you? Or a speedboat?”

“I believe in being prepared.”

“Okay, Eagle Scout. Can you rub two sticks together and start a fire so we can send smoke signals?”

“I have a better idea,” I say, putting my purse strap over my head. “Come on.”

We scramble back down the hill and walk to the end of the dock, where the rowboat is secured to a post with a rope.

“We will row ourselves back.”

“You have got to be kidding me!” Olivia takes a step back, a horrified expression on her face. “You know I don’t do cardio! Don’t you remember what happened when I tried the NordicRower at the Beverly? I suffered a stress fracture in my rib! My body is not made for manual labor.”

“Well, I am not spending the night on this dock! Xavier sent me two texts this morning and I ignored them. If he doesn’t hear from me soon, he will worry and then he will call Madame Deniau and she will tell him I disappeared in his supercar. What will he think?” I climb down into the rowboat, no easy task with the waves moving it up and down, and my purse-strapped chest. “Come on, Olivia. If I can get into a boat after what happened to my father and Aunt Patricia, you can do a little cardio.”

“Fine,” she huffs, sitting on the edge of the dock and scooting off it until her feet touch one of the boat’s wooden benches. “But only because you’re a little frightening right now. Just watch where you swing that oar, Tom.”

“Tom?”

“Tom Ripley split Dickie Greenleaf’s head open with a paddle-thingy when they were boating together. The Talented Mr. Ripley. Matt Damon. Jude Law. Ringing any bells?”

“I’ve read Patricia Highsmith’s novel. Haven’t seen the movie.” I sit on one of the benches, scooting all the way to the right to make room for Olivia and then lifting the oar out of the bottom of the boat and securing it in the oarlock. “And it’s called an oar, not a paddle.”

The thin rain has thickened to a steady downpour of fat, cold drops. I help Olivia secure her oar, pull the rope from the post, and we begin rowing.

It takes a while to get a good rhythm, rowing in sync, but even then our progress is hampered by a strong headwind and choppy sea. We keep our heads down because the icy rain feels like needles of ice jabbing our cheeks.

The inertia of this situation is driving me to ignore the fear clawing at my insides, fear a wave will capsize our boat and we will be swept out to the open sea by a rip current.

“This is a futile endeavor,” Olivia says, looking over her shoulder. “My arms already ache and we have barely left the dock.”

“Don’t look back,” I say, pulling on my oar. “Just keep your head down and keep rowing. We will be back on the mainland soon and we will drive to the château and drink Xavier’s scotch beside the fire. We will laugh about it all.”

And I will call Xavier in Dubai and confess all of the sad, ridiculous details of this misadventure and beg him to forgive me for not bringing my concerns to him. I just hope he will forgive me and not see me as just another duplicitous, treacherous woman he married.

“I’m sorry, Manderley,” she says, wiping her face on her shoulder. “It’s my fault we are in this mess. I talked you into coming to the island. If we drown, you don’t have to wait for me in the light.”

“We aren’t going to drown,” I say.

“But if we do . . .”

“I will still be waiting for you in the light.”

The island is probably only a mile, mile and a half, from the mainland. On a clear day, with no wind, we would probably be able to row across this channel in half an hour, forty-five minutes at the most, but the headwind is hampering our progress. We are also struggling against the waves. The current seems to want to take us in a southerly direction—away from Nicabar’s pier. Keeping my gaze focused on the distant shore—no easy task with the sideways-falling rain hitting me in the face—I pull harder on my oar to correct our course.

My thoughts drift away from the boat and are carried on a current of memories, back, back to the day Tara called me, hysterical and crying.

When Tara phoned again, it was to say the Coast Guard had found the wreckage of Daddy’s boat and that they had retrieved two corpses.

One minute, I am sitting in my dark apartment, my iPhone in my hand, praying I will wake up and discover Tara’s phone call had been a terrible nightmare, and the next minute I am talking my baby sister off an emotional ledge.

After all of the practicalities had been dealt with—claiming the bodies, arranging funerals, meeting with lawyers, learning about my daddy’s serious financial troubles, packing up the more sentimental items the IRS wouldn’t care to claim—I plunged into a pool of grief. It felt as if my soul had been on my daddy’s boat and that it, too, had drowned one hundred miles off the coast of Sullivan’s Island. My body still functioned, but my essence was gone, my ability to feel deeply. I thought I would never feel again, never be happy or whole.

I still find it inconceivable that a man as big-hearted as Daddy and a woman as vibrant as Aunt Patricia have faded from this earth, but I realize my soul did not fade with them. Not really.

I recently watched a documentary on Netflix about the team tasked with restoring the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. After many months of painstaking work, the restoration was complete. Years of soot and grime had been removed to reveal a far more colorful and detailed painting than had been viewed before the team’s efforts.

I now realize my soul did not die the day my daddy drowned. My more colorful details, my essence, had simply been hidden beneath the soot and grime of grief. Meeting Xavier, falling in love with him, marrying him, sticking with him even through my doubts, has restored me.

“Uh, Manderley?”

“What?”

“I think we are in trouble.”

I look at the water pooling around our feet in the bottom of the boat and pray there isn’t a leak.

“We are taking on some water, but I think it’s—”

“No,” she says, letting go of her oar and pointing out her side of the boat. “Look!”

A large sport-fishing powerboat is racing toward us, its bow raised high in the air. If the captain continues on his present course, our rickety rowboat will be shattered into a thousand toothpick-sized pieces and we will be walking into the light together . . . soon.

“I don’t think he can see us through the rain.”

I reach into my purse and pull out my red pashmina and iPhone. I slide my finger up the screen and tap the LED flashlight icon.

“Here,” I say, handing Olivia my phone. “Aim the light at the boat.”

Olivia holds the phone high in the air and moves her arm back and forth, making a wide arc, while I frantically wave my scarf, but the boat doesn’t slow down.

“We are going to die!” Olivia cries.

“Keep waving the light!”

It might sound ridiculous, but I am more concerned about how Xavier is going to feel when the French Coast Guard tells him they fished his wife’s bloated corpse out of the channel than I am about my impending dismemberment by boat propeller blades. And what about Tara and Emma Lee? How will they cope without their big sister around to order their rain boots and listen to their problems?

I am about to suggest we jump overboard and swim for our lives when the boat decreases speed. Olivia lets out a whoop and throws her arms around me. We are hugging and laughing, nearly hysterical with joy at having been spared dismemberment, when the powerboat pulls alongside and gives a quick blast of its air horn.

We stop hugging and look up at the ship. A person wearing a black hooded raincoat emerges from the wheelhouse and makes his way to the stern. He stands at the rail, staring down at us, rain streaming off the brim of his hood. My breath catches in my throat.

Xavier.

He removes his hood and my heart feels as if it is about to burst within my chest, so powerful is my love for him. Even from this distance, I can see the worry lines etched across his forehead and the fierce scowl pulling down the corners of his mouth.

“I am going to toss down two life vests,” he says, his deep voice carrying over the waves and through the growing darkness. “I want you to put them on.”

Both of the orange vests land in the rowboat, floating in the water at our feet. I put mine on and then help Olivia fasten her straps.

“Now, I am going to toss you a rope,” he says. “Secure it to the eye hook on the hull and I will pull you closer.”

The rope flies through the air and lands across our laps. I grab the end and climb to the front of the rowboat, threading the rope through the eye hook and doing my best to tie an anchor knot, despite my frozen fingers and trembling hands.

Xavier pulls us alongside his vessel and Olivia climbs out of the rowboat and onto the powerboat’s bathing platform. Xavier helps her over the low wall and onto the deck. As soon as my feet hit the bathing platform, I feel his arms around my waist, lifting me over the wall and into his arms.

Like a frightened child lost in a shopping mall who bursts into tears only after being safely reunited with her parent, my legs begin to tremble and I bury my face against Xavier’s warm neck, sobbing.

He holds me tight, tighter than he ever has before, and murmurs in my ear in French. I think he is trembling as well, but I am not sure because I am shaking violently now, my teeth chattering.

“Thank God you are safe, ma bichette,” he says, pressing his lips to my wet forehead. “I don’t want to think of what could have happened if I had not found you.”

I close my eyes and concentrate on how it feels to be in his arms again, to hear him calling me his little deer, and I commit it all to memory, just in case it is to be the last time.