Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Afew mornings after that (or was it a whole week?
Alexander was losing track of time), Alexander got up and had an espresso at a little café down the road from his hotel.
A part of him wondered if he’d ever find the will to leave Italy and face whatever was happening back home.
But wasn’t Florence a tiny scrap of paradise?
For half an hour, he watched the city streets as they hummed to life.
Italian men flew past on motorbikes. Their gorgeous girlfriends clung to them from behind, their exposed shoulders glistening in the sunlight.
Alexander checked his phone for messages from Janie and ignored the airline's calls. Even his children hadn’t reached out, although he guessed Janie had told them not to call.
He knew he needed to get on a plane sooner rather than later to figure out where his life was going and address the problems at hand.
He was lucky that the journalists who desperately wanted to interview him hadn’t yet tracked down his private phone number or email.
They didn’t know he was in Florence, either. Maybe that wouldn’t last for long.
But that afternoon, as Alexander tried and failed to read a book in a nearby piazza, his phone lit up with a call from Marie, their longtime maid, who’d been cleaning the house in Malibu for the better part of fifteen years.
The sight of her name on Alexander’s phone screen frightened him.
She’d never dealt with Alexander directly and had always chosen to speak to Janie about matters of the house and what needed to be done.
Alexander hadn’t been around enough to know what to say to her.
He’d always thought Marie considered him “like all the other husbands in Malibu,” and maybe he was.
(Save for the fact that he’d spent a great deal of his childhood and teenage years cleaning a hotel himself. He knew what grit it took.)
But Alexander had had Marie’s phone number this whole time.
He couldn’t remember why. Maybe he’d been the one to interview her in the early days, when Janie had been so overwhelmed with parenting responsibilities and being a new mother so far from where she’d grown up, that they’d decided together that they needed help with the house.
Marie had been a godsend, bringing light and order to their numerous rooms. “So much space,” Janie had said when they’d first moved in.
“And it’s all ours, unlike that Lodge of your family’s.
We don’t have to share with anyone. No tourists, complaining.
No expectations.” Alexander’s heart felt squeezed.
“Hello,” Alexander answered the call, his voice shaking.
“Mr. Whitmore!” Marie cried, sounding frightened. “Mr. Whitmore, I’m terribly sorry to call you like this. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Immediately, Alexander got to his feet and began pacing next to his little table, his heart pounding.
All this time, he’d thought Janie was ignoring him.
He hadn’t reached out to the kids, for fear that doing so was manipulative and cruel.
But maybe something was really wrong. Perhaps they’d been injured, or maybe they’d been taken.
Alexander ran through the possibilities in his mind and nearly found himself in the midst of a panic attack.
“What’s going on?” Alexander demanded.
Marie huffed. “It’s just I can’t find your wife!”
Alexander squeezed his eyes shut. The Italian sun overhead stifled him. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Two weeks ago,” Marie said. “I was away on vacation last week and didn’t come. But your wife knew all about that. And she’d agreed to meet me here today to discuss…” Marie trailed off, sounding frightened.
“What is it, Marie?” Alexander demanded.
“I was going to ask for a raise, Mr. Whitmore.” Marie’s voice was tiny.
Alexander exhaled all the air from his lungs. “Have you called her?”
“I did. Of course I did. She didn’t answer. She isn’t with you?”
“No. I’m out of town,” Alexander said.
“I assumed you were,” Marie said, with a slight point at the end, as though indicating that Alexander was always out of town. “They are saying strange things about you. Have you heard?”
Alexander’s heart was going to explode. He was sure of it. “Can you go upstairs and look in their closets?” he asked, collapsing back in the piazza chair and putting his elbows on the table. “Can you see if they’ve packed anything and left?”
“Oh!” Marie didn’t say anything else and instead hustled up the stairs of the Malibu house. Alexander listened as she opened and closed various doors and checked in closets. “Your wife’s three suitcases are gone,” she said. “And half the closet! It’s really quite a lot. Where did she go?”
Alexander groaned loud enough for everyone on the piazza to hear. Birds flocked overhead, seeming to eye him. Maybe they were after what he hadn’t eaten of his lunch.
“And the kids have taken things, too,” Marie said. “But I’m not as familiar with their wardrobes. They’ve grown up so fast,” she said it gently, touchingly.
Alexander guessed that Janie had packed up their things and taken the kids elsewhere.
But where on earth would she go? Xander had that summer job.
She wouldn’t have let him quit it, would she?
And Conor and Gwen had their friends, their day camps, their activities.
It was cruel to rip their children away from the house they called home.
Then again, Alexander had no idea what his family was going through, now that so much information about him was rising to the surface.
He told Marie to clean the house to the best of her ability, and he doubled her rate of payment—a fact that startled her so much that she almost wouldn’t let him off the phone.
She thanked him over and over again. “Thank you, Mr. Whitmore! This is wonderful news.”
That afternoon, Alexander packed up his things and checked out of the hotel.
It had been more than a week since Ned’s disastrous display of bad private investigating, and Alexander knew he had to face the music sometime.
Maybe if he returned to Malibu, he’d discover clues as to where Janie had taken the children.
Perhaps he could find a way to explain his side of the story to the airline and ensure his job remained secure.
No matter what, Janie's disappearance had startled him out of his frozen reverie. He needed to do something.
It was hard to believe he hadn’t flown a plane in nearly three weeks.
That had to be a record since he’d begun his professional career.
But goodness, he missed it: that charge down the runway and the subtle shift as the nose tilted toward the sky.
He missed walking through the airport in his captain’s uniform, feeling the eyes of so many passengers on him as they assessed him, captivated by his bravery and earnestness.
How he looked as a pilot wasn’t why he’d gotten into flying in the first place, but it didn’t hurt.
But tonight, he wouldn’t be flying. He’d be riding standby, probably from Florence to London and London all the way to Los Angeles, depending on what was available. Flying standby was a wonderful part of the job. It allowed him to go wherever he pleased at the drop of a hat.
When he reached the Florence airport, he walked to his airline’s lounge to check standby options and see if anyone he knew was there and willing to chat.
He shoved away thoughts of how many times the airline had tried to contact him, thinking he’d clean all that up with a wave of his hand.
He streamed through security easily, flashing his captain’s badge, and then shot up to the airline desk to say hello.
The woman at the desk was Italian, so he spoke Italian, telling her his name, that his home base was Los Angeles, and that he wanted to fly standby back to California.
The woman took one look at him, raised her finger, and said, “One moment, please.”
She disappeared, leaving Alexander stranded at the desk, his heart pounding.
This was nothing he recognized. Usually, he was taken care of right away.
It took three minutes for another employee to return and explain, “Your contract is currently suspended, which means that it is not legal for you to fly standby with the company at this time.”
Alexander’s jaw dropped. “There has to be some mistake. I’ve been a pilot here for over a decade.”
The man spun the computer screen around so that Alexander could see the red banner over his employee page, affirming what he’d said.
The man wiggled his dark, caterpillar eyebrows and said, “I can’t answer any of your questions, of course.
I’m just the messenger.” After that, he beckoned for the next person in line, and Alexander was asked to step off to the side.
Alexander couldn’t believe it. It felt like an injustice. He wanted to scream, “What happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’?” But he figured that was the kind of thing a guilty person said. He didn’t want any more attention drawn to him than was necessary.
Instead, he walked out through baggage claim and collapsed on a plastic chair near arrivals, gripping the handle of his suitcase and watching as Italians swarmed out and greeted the people waiting to pick them up.
Kisses and hugs were exchanged, and rapid conversation popped from every direction.
Alexander’s eyes filled with tears. What if he never saw his family again?
What if he’d screwed up his entire life?
It wasn’t my fault, he wanted to tell someone.
I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But was that even true?
“Alexander?” The name rang out through the din. At first, Alexander didn’t think it had anything to do with him, so he kept his eyes down.
“Alexander?” Laughter ricocheted. “Alexander!”
It was too many times for him to ignore it.
Alexander yanked his head up and found two women staring down at him from three feet ahead.
They gripped suitcases and wore pretty dark dresses, a green and a purple.
Their features were similar and freckled, presumably from hours spent in the sun, and it was clear they’d been on an airplane, probably for a long time, headed here. But why? What were they doing here?
Alexander got to his feet. At first, he thought he was dreaming.
But suddenly, the younger one sprang forward and wrapped her arms around him, and the other followed, cackling, uniting them in a group hug.
Alexander’s heart filled. It was the first time he’d seen them since the night of the White Oak Lodge fire.
It was the first time he’d hugged his little sisters in decades.
“I can’t believe you’re here! At the airport! It’s like you were waiting for us!” It was the younger one, the one who had to be Nina, who squeezed his shoulder and let tears fall. What was she now? Thirty-seven? Thirty-eight? How was it possible?
Charlotte—who had to be in her forties by now, if Alexander’s math was correct—looked at him suspiciously. “Did you know we were coming?” she asked.
Alexander was taken aback. How could he have known?
“I was trying to get back to LA,” he said, feeling foolish. He didn’t want to tell them that his contract had been suspended, that the airline was looking into his connection to the fire at the White Oak Lodge, that his wife had taken their kids and left him.
This was Alexander the Great, their eldest brother and the “heir” of the White Oak Lodge fortune.
He laughed to himself, remembering all those rumors of treasure hidden under the hotel.
Where had all those stories come from? Where did such rumors go after so many years of mystery?
The Lodge had burned nearly thirty years ago, taking its fake treasure with it.
“What are you doing here?” Alexander demanded of his little sisters. Was he back in his Florence hotel room, drifting through nightmares? Was a snake about to come through the ceiling? Could he trust any of this?
“We’re here to get you, silly,” Nina said.
“We’re here to get you and take you back to Mom’s villa,” Charlotte affirmed.
Alexander’s confusion felt heavy in his chest. “You knew I was here?”
Nina and Charlotte exchanged glances and laughed. Obviously, they were in on a joke that Alexander had never heard. But Nina squeezed his hand and tilted her head toward the line of cabs out front. “Come on, Big Brother,” she said. “Let’s go eat an Italian feast.”