The Secret of the Villa Mimosa (21 page)

Footsteps crushed the gravel. A man was walking toward him. A tall, handsome man. The sun glinted on his blond hair. The man stopped at the foot of the steps and stared at him. The boy heard Nanny Beale in the hall behind him, running.
That’s odd,
he thought, smiling up at the stranger
, Nanny never runs; she thinks it’s undignified.

He had been told never to speak to strangers, but he said, “I am Johnny Leconte.” He smiled trustingly. “Who are you, m’sieur?”

The man stared coldly at him, taking in his sallow looks, his frail physique, his silk clothes. In a tone of numbing indifference, he said finally, “I am your father.” Then to Nanny Beale: “Pack him up. I’m taking him with me.” Just as though he were a parcel.

The child turned at Nanny’s horrified gasp. “Where are we going Nanny? Where?”

Her frightened eyes met his anxious ones. “To the land of the heathens,” she wailed. “To the very end of the world.”

A nameless fear engulfed the boy, and a dark cloud settled over him, cutting off the beautiful morning the birdsong the silken air, the sunlight. Cutting him off from his world.

Flora Beale’s document ended abruptly with those words. Bea and Nick looked at each other, longing to know what had happened. They looked carefully through the other papers, but she had written nothing else.

Suddenly Bea began to cry, great silent, desperate sobs. Nick put his arm comfortingly around her. “Poor Bea. But we’ve made progress. At least now you know
what your dream meant.” He stroked her hair back from her forehead and said, “Though how you knew it beats me.”

“I don’t understand,” she sobbed. “Nick, it’s not just Nanny Beale’s words I’m reading. Those words are in my own head; the boy’s fear is in my heart…. I feel it as though what he went through happened to
me.
And I just can’t bear it, Nick.
I’m afraid.
”

18

M
illie’s yellow curls were freshly done. She was wearing a matching yellow flowered silk dress with a smattering of yellow diamonds pinned across her bosom, and her lips bore a fresh coat of bright pink lipstick. She was sitting at a table on the terrace at the Hôtel du Cap, waiting for Bea and Phyl to arrive from the airport. But she wasn’t thinking about her friends. She was thinking about the telephone call she had received in the early hours of that morning, from an attorney in Ohio.

“Who the hell is calling me from Ohio at two-thirty in the morning?” she had demanded groggily, reaching for her eyeglasses and putting them on as though they would help her understand more clearly what he was saying.

The attorney said that he was calling to tell her of the death of a long-unheard-of Renwick third cousin. Tragically the cousin and his wife had been killed, in an automobile accident. Their two young children were now orphans. In his will the cousin said that Millie was their only relative, and he had appointed her their guardian.

Meanwhile, the attorney said, the children had been taken into care. If Millie declined to act as guardian, they would be put in foster homes and he hoped they might eventually be adopted.

“Hell no!” Millie had said, shocked. “Kinfolk is kinfolk, even if I didn’t know about them until right this minute.

“Those poor kids need a home,” she told him. “Get them anything they need and bill it to me. I just need a little time to work things out. Meantime, tell them their aunt Millie loves them and can’t wait to shower them with toys and affection.”

She had hung up, astonished but pleased at the idea of suddenly becoming a “mother” at her age. She knew in her heart she had done the right thing.

“Of course, everyone will think it’s just another of my whims,” she told herself hours later as she was finally drifting back to sleep. “But as always, there is a method in my madness.”

She was still sitting on the terrace, staring dreamily out to sea, when she heard her name called. She smiled at her old friend Phyl and her new friend Bea as they walked toward her.

“There you are at last, dearest Phyl,” she said, clasping her to her cushiony bosom. “You look wonderful, as always, even if you are still in that everlasting black, like widow’s weeds, dear girl. It’s time you made a change.”

“You’re not the first one to say that.” Phyl laughed, remembering Mahoney.

Millie held her at arm’s length, inspecting her critically again. “Mmm,” she added, “I’m not sure I approve of those dark circles under your eyes, though. Either the shrinks’ conference kept you up all night, or someone else did. I hope for your sake it was the someone else. Do you good.”

They smiled at each other; they had no secrets. Phyl
knew all there was to know about Millie, and Millie knew all about her.

“I’m sure Bea has already told you the latest events,” Millie said, sailing grandly toward “her” table on the terrace and imperiously waving them after her. “It seems we’re getting somewhere at last, though I’m not sure I understand
exactly
where. That’s your department, Phyl,” she said, ordering tea. “Meanwhile, I have a little surprise of my own.” They looked at her expectantly, and she smiled, enjoying her moment of suspense. “You’ll never guess,” she teased.

“Don’t tell me you’ve gone and bought a condo in Monte Carlo as well?” Bea asked suspiciously.

“Of course I have not. I am already the very proud owner of the Villa Mimosa. Who could want more?”

“Come on, Millie,” Phyl implored. “Don’t keep us dangling.”

“I am about to become a mother.” She yelped with laughter as they stared at her with disbelief. Then she told them about the telephone call from Ohio.

“They are Scott and Julie Renwick. Aged nine and seven. Now don’t you think those are a couple of grand names? That smug attorney asked when I’d be home so he could put them on the plane to New York, and I would have loved to have seen his face when I told him
home
was right here, on the Riviera. ‘They can come here and attend the local school,’ I told him. ‘If it’s good enough for Princess Caroline, it’s good enough for me.’ Besides,” she added, clutching her hand compassionately to her heart, “I thought a change of scenery would be good for the poor little things, after what happened to them. But I told him they would have to wait a week or two. Just until the villa is finished.”

“A week or two?”
Bea said faintly, remembering the villa, reduced to a shell with roofers and carpenters and painters still crawling all over it. There was just a huge hole where the new swimming pool was to go,
and landscape gardeners were still busy cutting back the undergrowth and laying new turf.

“Well, maybe a tiny bit longer,” Millie admitted. “But I called that stuffy interior designer and told him get his skates on. He has a new deadline. One month, and that’s it. After all,” she said, glancing appealingly at Phyl, “I can’t have the poor kids arrive and have to stay in a hotel. Not after that long journey and all they’ve been through. They need a proper home, and I am going to provide it for them.

“Imagine
me
, Millie Renwick,
a mother
after all these years.” She yelped with laughter again at the very idea. “And that’s something none of my useless husbands could achieve. I always said it was their fault.”

The fate of Scott and Julie Renwick was the chief subject of discussion over dinner that evening, and it wasn’t until later, when they were alone in her room, that Bea was able to show Phyl Nanny Beale’s “document” and the letters.

Phyl told her that Mahoney believed someone must have described the villa to her. “It’s the only logical answer,” she said. “And that same person must have told you the story of the father coming back for the child. That’s why you remember it.”

“Then, Phyl,
why
do I feel so strongly about it? Why do I have this awful feeling of foreboding, as though it were
me
sitting on that doorstep, waiting for my world to end?”

“Perhaps it was someone close to you?”

“Someone I loved, you mean? But how could I ever forget someone I loved that much?”

Phyl shook her head. “Bea, my advice to you is to look forward instead of looking back. Let the past take care of itself. One day things will pop right into your head again, just the way the scent of mimosa did that first day at the hospital, and you will remember everything. Including who you are.”

Bea’s copper brown eyes were desperate as she
looked at her. Only Phyl knew the true depth of her terror at not knowing who she was and why someone wanted to kill her. But even though she knew Phyl was right, Bea still needed to find out what happened to Nanny Beale and little Johnny Leconte, alone on the island with his wicked father.

Nick had noticed that Marie-Antoinette’s husband was always referred to in the newspaper report of her death as Monsieur Leconte, and he went to find Marquand, the journalist, in the Café du Marin Bleu to ask if he knew why he used his wife’s name.

“The Foreigner took Marie-Antoinette’s name because her father had decreed it in his will,” Marquand said. “Her father said if Marie-Antoinette ever changed her name, she would lose her inheritance. Of course, it was just his way of trying to stop her from marrying. He hated the thought of losing his daughter, even after he was dead, and he was determined that at least she would go to her own grave bearing his name. It was all a matter of inheritance, you see,” Monsieur Marquand added. “And I’m sure the Foreigner came back to claim his son for the same reason: the inheritance.

“You must understand, my friend, that the old Napoleonic code of succession still applies in France. Under its laws a man does not inherit the entire estate of his spouse. Their children come first In the Lecontes’ case there was only one child, Johnny, and he automatically inherited half his mother’s estate. The Foreigner inherited the other half, on which he had to pay the taxes. Then there was the Leconte property. The Villa Mimosa and the flat in Paris were only a small part of her property holdings, and a lot of money would have been tied up in that. By law, the husband could not sell it immediately. He would have had to wait until the son was eighteen years old. Then it could be sold and the money divided.

“So it’s my guess that when the Foreigner realized he couldn’t beat the French inheritance laws, he came
back to claim his financial stake in the future: his son. The man was a big spender, you know,” Marquand added thoughtfully. “I’d bet that in five years he had gone through most of his share of Marie-Antoinette’s fortune and that it had been a lot less than he expected. He must have needed the boy’s money.”