Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Tuscany
Alexander found himself sitting in the back seat of a cab next to Nina and Charlotte Whitmore.
His palms sweaty, he wiped them on his lap and listened as Charlotte spoke rapidly in Italian to the driver, telling him where they wanted to go.
The cab driver recognized the address and said aloud their grandfather’s name, the Italian director, their mother’s father.
“He’s our grandfather,” Charlotte affirmed to him.
The cab driver was overjoyed with this news and spoke at length about his love for cinema, particularly their grandfather’s films. He drove far too fast and dangerously around the airport and onto the highway.
Such were all Italian cab drivers, Alexander thought.
It was like they weren’t afraid of death.
Alexander, who’d mentally prepared himself to be on a flight to London followed by a flight to Los Angeles, felt it all like whiplash.
He couldn’t get his mind around why his sisters were here, nor why they hadn’t been shocked to find him at the airport.
In fact, they’d said, “We’re here for you, silly. ”
When the cab driver finally shut up about their grandfather’s movies, Alexander asked, “Where did you fly from?”
“Boston,” Charlotte and Nina answered in unison.
“You were together? On the East Coast?” Alexander asked.
“Yes,” they said again.
“On Nantucket,” Nina said.
Alexander felt again like he was in a nightmare, maybe twisted up in sheets at the hotel. None of this made any sense. Nina reached over and touched his arm, mouthing, “We’ll explain everything,” as the driver sped down the road. Alexander thought he was going to be sick.
“Mom doesn’t know I’m in Italy,” he said.
“True. We didn’t tell her. But she’s about to find out!” Charlotte declared.
“She always loved you the best,” Nina chirped. “She’ll be overjoyed.”
Alexander put his face in his hands and counted to one hundred, trying to calm down.
When they pulled in front of his mother’s villa, the villa where she’d lived since she’d left Nantucket after the fire and moved back to Italy, Alexander watched the shadows for signs of his mother, both nervous and excited to see her again.
Through the years, he’d been to this villa a handful of times, but he’d thought the greater the distance between himself and his original nuclear family, the better.
But now that everything was exploding before his eyes, maybe it didn’t matter.
Nina traipsed up the steps and used a key hidden under the mat to open the door. It reminded Alexander of the key they’d hidden under one of the mats at the Lodge.
“She texted to say she’s napping,” Charlotte whispered to Alexander, “so I suggest we take some wine to the veranda and catch up. What do you say?”
Alexander nodded. The first thing he needed was a drink, and then he could ask the hundreds of questions zipping through his mind. They owed him an explanation, at least.
It was surreal that Ned had only recently been here to spy on his mother, and now Alexander himself was here.
Alexander inhaled the old-world smells of this ornate villa in the middle of Tuscany.
As he sauntered through the foyer, the living room, the library, and out onto the terrace, he recognized his mother’s design in every choice, some of which echoed what had been on display at the White Oak Lodge.
He hadn’t realized how much of the Lodge had been from Francesca’s own mind.
Charlotte disappeared into the kitchen and returned with wineglasses and a bottle of Tuscan red, which she opened on the back table, her eyes dark and furtive.
Alexander’s throat was thick. He didn’t want to admit he was terrified. Maybe they could sense it.
Charlotte poured their glasses and raised hers, saying, “To being back together again.”
Nina and Alexander murmured in agreement and sipped their wine. It was evening, and purple clouds rolled along the far horizon. But it was still terribly hot and humid, and Alexander’s shirt was wet with sweat.
“How did you know I was here?” Alexander asked again. His shoulders were heavy.
Nina and Charlotte exchanged glances. Alexander wanted to tell them to stop having conversations through the air.
More than that, he wanted to ask how they’d gotten to know one another so well.
Back when they’d been a real family, back when they’d been the iconic Whitmores of Nantucket Island, Charlotte had been much older than Nina, and after the fire, Nina had been sent to live with their great-aunt Genevieve in Michigan.
It meant they couldn’t have known one another so well back then.
There was so much he didn’t know.
“We’ll tell you that,” Nina said, “when you tell us something else.”
Alexander’s heart pumped. “Okay?”
Charlotte cleared her throat. “Why did you send a private detective after us?”
Alexander closed his eyes and cursed Ned. Clearly, he wasn’t as secretive as he thought he was. Clearly, he’d made bigger messes than either of them could fathom.
“I mean, you’ve had the same investigator for years,” Charlotte continued when Alexander didn’t answer.
“I met him back in the early 2000s. He came after me. We talked in my kitchen. He pestered me about where Jack was. I was terrified. Gosh, it felt like a nightmare to see him again. Here! At Mom’s villa! ”
“It’s awful,” Nina said.
“But I never would have guessed that you’d be the one to send him after us!” Charlotte cried. “I thought you were all the way out of our lives, flying planes all over the world and pretending the White Oak Lodge was dust. I thought you wanted nothing to do with us.”
Nina continued to gaze at Alexander, mystified.
It killed Alexander to see his kid sister like this.
It made him feel like an enormous failure.
Wasn’t the eldest brother supposed to protect the youngest kid?
And Nina had been so adorable back in the nineties, all knobby knees and secrets.
Because her siblings were so much older, she hadn’t really had anyone to play with, and she’d made up stories for herself, amusing herself, creating a sort of fantasy world within the White Oak Lodge.
She’d loved Jack, Alexander remembered. He’d been her favorite. Did she know where Jack was? Was she the key? Alexander had discredited her because she’d been taken away. Maybe that was wrong. Once a Whitmore, always a Whitmore, he knew.
Suddenly, it was like the storm in the distance welled up in Alexander’s chest. Tears filled his eyes.
Was he going to burst into sobs? He bit his tongue, but there was no keeping it in for long.
“You don’t understand,” he whispered. “I’ve lived with what happened that night for almost thirty years.
I’ve carried these secrets for so long that they’ve started to break me down.
Now, my contract’s been suspended. My wife has taken the kids and left me. I’m a broken man.”
Charlotte and Nina remained quiet and captivated. Their eyes told him to go on.
“In the early 2000s, not long after my daughter was born, I started receiving strange messages. Letters, mostly, but also phone calls. Post-its from the airline secretary, passing along messages from whoever had called for me. The messages were always sinister. Sometimes they were simple, just saying, ‘July 4th, 1998.’ Or things along the line of ‘I could ruin you. Remember what happened. Remember that your life is a facade that will break and show who you really are.’ Sometimes the messages were just a list of the people who supposedly died in the fire. Dad. Tio Angelo. Jack. Sometimes the messages just told me to stay on my toes.” Alexander sniffed and squeezed his eyes shut.
“It felt like someone was sneaking up on me, watching me, preparing to destroy my life the minute they decided it would benefit them.”
Charlotte’s and Nina’s eyes were enormous, taking this in. He understood that the story was so much bigger than they’d previously fathomed.
“I panicked, obviously, and hired a private detective, this guy named Ned Fulton, who I’d known back in flight school,” Alexander continued.
He didn’t add that Ned was a terrible detective because he knew that wouldn’t help his case.
“I wanted him to track down who was sending the messages, and when he couldn’t do that, I had him track you down, Charlotte. I’m sorry.”
Charlotte looked quizzical. “Why me?”
“I knew where Nina was. I knew where Mom was. I knew where Allegra and Lorelei were,” Alexander said.
“I thought, maybe, that Dad, Tio Angelo, and Jack were dead, although I don’t think that anymore.
” He waited, checking their faces to see if they were surprised, but Nina and Charlotte seemed on board with the idea that nobody had died in the fire. None of their family members, anyway.
“So, Charlotte, you were the only person I couldn’t find. I figured that meant you were a good person to start with. Maybe, I thought, you were hiding out for some reason. Maybe you knew more about the Whitmore situation than I did.”
Charlotte sniffed and looked down at her hands. But she didn’t protest, which made Alexander think, She does know more than she’s telling me. Maybe she always has.
Could he trust anyone in the Whitmore family?
Nina sounded flustered. “I don’t understand. What did you see that night?”
Alexander felt it like a needle through his heart.
“I don’t think it’ll help anyone if I talk about it.
I don’t want you to be at the mercy of whoever’s threatening me.
” He glanced from side to side on the veranda, feeling paranoid.
But ever since the messages had begun in the early 2000s, he’d felt the same, like someone was watching his every move and waiting for him to make a mistake.
“Whoever leaked information about me to my employer, and my wife found out,” Alexander said. “That’s enough damage for one lifetime, I think. I don’t know if Janie will ever talk to me again.”
Nina squinted at him.
“And my kids…” Alexander trailed off. He remembered his own father, how Benjamin had never let Alexander off the hook when it came to the White Oak Lodge, how he’d forced Alexander through back-breaking work, day in and day out, telling him that it was his legacy.
Alexander had hated it. He’d wanted the White Oak Lodge to burn. Figuratively, he thought.
Alexander sputtered, “But how did you know I was the one who sent the investigator?”
Charlotte and Nina exchanged a nervous laugh.
“He was here at the villa, talking to Mom,” Charlotte said.
“We were spying on them. But I remembered that my luggage tag had a tracker in it, you know, just in case they lose your luggage. And before Ned left, I ran over and threw it in his car. We watched him drive to that hotel in Florence, so we decided to go over there and demand answers.”
Alexander could hardly believe his ears.
“I went upstairs and waited and watched as you answered the door,” Nina said. “I couldn’t believe it. I considered accosting you, but we panicked and went home to regroup.”
“We even flew back to Nantucket and stayed for a little while,” Charlotte said. “Enough time to decide something absolutely insane.”
Alexander frowned. “What could be more insane than any of this?”
Nina threw her arms up. “We’re going to reopen the White Oak Lodge.”
Alexander was on his feet so fast that he nearly spilled his glass of wine. It teetered to and fro on the table, and he steadied it in the nick of time. “You’re kidding.”
“We’re not,” Charlotte said. “We’ve already got a construction crew hard at work on it, cleaning up the debris and figuring out a path forward. And Amos…”
“Amos? Not Amos the high schooler?” Alexander remembered the kid who’d been involved in Tio Angelo’s scheme, remembered how poor he’d been and how obvious it had been that Tio Angelo had wanted to manipulate him to do whatever he wanted.
Nina looked formidable. “Amos is a very dear friend of mine.”
Alexander sat back down, no longer able to stand. None of this made any sense.
“We met when I got to the island earlier this summer,” Nina said. “He’s told me things about the Lodge, about what he and Jack were doing, that made my toes curl. In essence, it sounds like Tio Angelo ruined his life.” Her eyes were shadowed.
Alexander remembered Jack and Amos, staggering around the grounds of the hotel, cackling, so sure that they were about to rule the world. Tio Angelo had infected them.
“For most of that time, I was never really sure what was going on,” Alexander whispered. “But I had my suspicions. And I curse myself for not stepping in. Maybe I could have fixed it before it all fell apart.”
Charlotte and Nina were quiet, contemplative. Their paths had taken such extraordinary turns since that day in July 1998. But now they were here, together.
“The luggage tag was a good idea,” Alexander said, trying to laugh.
His sisters tried to join him, but everything felt too sad and strange.
Suddenly, Nina perked up and put on a secretive smile. “Question,” she said, sounding more like she had at eleven than the age she was now. “Did you know that our mom isn’t my real mom?”
Alexander’s blood pressure skyrocketed. He remembered how cruel his mother had always been to Nina, how she’d never spoken Italian to her, and how she’d seemed genuinely exhausted when it came to caring for Nina.
It had always boggled his mind back then.
Nina had been so curious, kind, introspective, and wonderful.
If anything, she’d been the perfect child.
Quietly, he muttered, “You know?”
And then, suddenly, the double-wide French doors to the veranda parted, and their angelic mother Francesca Whitmore appeared, wearing a silk robe, her penetrating eyes pegging him.
It was evident that he would never escape her.
He didn’t even want to. “My darling Alexander,” she said, almost like a song. “I never thought I’d see you again.”