From Barcelona, with Love (20 page)

“Then will you come to the vineyard with me tomorrow, to see Paloma? We can talk then.”

He'd meant to go back to L.A. tomorrow but he knew now he couldn't. Not even for Sunny. He was too involved. “I will,” he agreed.

“I'll pick you up at eleven.” Without a further word, she signaled to the driver and was gone.

Mac watched the disappearing taillights. It had been an eventful evening. What's more, he still did not have a clue as to where to begin his search.
Where
would a woman like Bibi run to? And, more importantly,
who
would help her, because she had to have had help. He wasn't sure of anything much, right now, but he was sure of that. Bibi could not have done this disappearing act alone.

 

Part Three

 

Chapter 31

Cáceres, Extremadura, Spain

You would not
have recognized the plain-looking woman in the longish green cotton skirt and shirt, a beige hand-knit sweater thrown loosely around her shoulders against the cool wind that had gotten up. A wide-brimmed straw hat was pulled over her mouse-brown hair and she wore rimless tinted glasses over her dark brown eyes. There was something almost hippieish about her, as she strolled through the Saturday street market in the small medieval Spanish town of Cáceres, with her big woven basket and the hat, and those shaggy bangs half obscuring her face, and with the old dog plodding devotedly behind her.

She had parked her small Seat in her usual spot on a side street, always careful to be legal. She could not risk so much as a parking ticket.

She strolled the market, followed by her dog, buying fruits and vegetables picked that same morning by local smallholders, who greeted her familiarly, calling out
“Hola señora, buenos días.”
They took the best tomatoes for her from the back of the stall, the ones they saved for special customers; they added a little extra to the bag of hazelnuts; weighed only the ripest of the new mountain cheese, first cutting a small chunk for her to taste.

The miller was there with his sacks of flour, wholemeal and also unbleached, which she preferred as it was lighter. The region was famous for its excellent bread and she took pleasure in making her own.

Her shopping done, weighed down by her loaded basket, she walked to a café on the square, where she ordered a double dark coffee and a slab of baguette, sliced across, then brushed with deep rich green olive oil and toasted on the
plancha
that still had a hint of the previous night's garlic. Buttered until it glistened, it was a treat she looked forward to all week.

Sitting alone in the café in one of Spain's most beautiful squares, Bibi felt a brief moment of content.

Time seemed to have stood still in Cáceres. As it had when, thanks to her father's friend Rodolfo Hernandez, she had changed her life and become his distant cousin, “Vida.”

*   *   *

It had happened
so suddenly, like a bolt of lightning coming at her from her past.

She was alone at the Hollywood Hills house. Jassy had taken Paloma away. Her staff and hangers-on had already departed, not wanting to be associated with a woman involved in murder, whether it was true or not. She had just dismissed her loyal housekeeper who had cared so dearly for Paloma, and whose wails as she had walked out the front door for the last time still rang in Bibi's ears. She had sent her daughter away to find a new life with Jassy and her Spanish family. She had done it because she loved her, and saw there could be no life for them together: a notorious suspected killer traveling the world with her small daughter.

Who would even want to know them? Who would even allow their own kids over for play dates at the notorious Bibi's house? Paloma must have a new start, free and clear. And Bibi would grieve forever.

She stood in the front hall, listening. There had always been music in her house: pianos, guitars, voices, laughter, children. She had turned off all her phones except the very personal one, a private number very few people knew.

The silence was profound, almost tangible; it was like a wall of fog around her, she was stifling on it, couldn't breathe …

And then the phone rang, the one clutched in her hand, the one with the private number. Her eyes were so filled with tears she had to hold it close to see who was calling.
Rodolfo Hernandez.
Her father's friend. She had known him since she was a child. He had called earlier, when the story first broke, said he would be there immediately to help. But she had turned him down. “I'm ashamed,” she told him, “to have my father's friend see me like this.”

“Call me,” he said, “when you need me.”

She had not called and now he was calling her.

“I heard about Paloma,” he said. “I'm sending a plane for you. You will come back here, to me, in Spain.”

“I need to disappear,” she said.

“You will,” he promised.

*   *   *

Rodolfo Hernandez observed
her now, from his place at the open storefront bar in Cáceres. Its gray terrazzo floor was littered with discarded wrappers from the
pinchos,
the small tapas served there, succulent mouthful-sized portions on a bit of crusty bread, speared with a toothpick and handed to you on that bit of paper that always ended up on the floor. There was usually a sampling of wild boar stew or the Spanish
tortilla,
a potato omelet; there'd be a chunk of local flinty cheese and the tiny white anchovies known as
boquerones
and fresh fava beans in their skins; and the sweetly salty Iberian ham for which the region was famous. Along with a mid-morning brandy, they went down very well.

He drained his glass and tossed his paper napkin—so small and slippery it was virtually useless for its purpose of cleaning fingers messy from tapas, onto the floor along with the rest. Every now and again somebody would come out with a straw broom and sweep them up, scattering a few drops of water then mushing around an old mop, until in another half hour or so the papers and the peanut shells and the fava skins accumulated all over again.

It was a Spanish tradition, like the TV stuck high on a shelf blaring the latest soccer game, and the bottles of Soberano and the sherry; the rough red wine; the draft beers, and the
plancha
—the flat grill—and the gathering of older workmen whose place this really was, and who for breakfast and before they set off for work at dawn tossed back a brandy with a slab of oiled baguette hot off that
plancha,
the way others might have a cup of coffee and a muffin.

Rodolfo was an older man, in his seventies now, leonine with his broad brow and swept-back silver hair and with the formal manners of an earlier European generation. A longtime friend of Juan Pedro's—though he was younger—he had known Bibi since she was a child. He had stood back, watched her career take off, admired her talent and her strange beauty, watched from afar the mistakes she had made; and he had always remembered her birthday. And one thing he knew for sure was that Bibi was no killer.

Looking at her, sitting in the café across the square, Rodolfo thought no one would recognize her now, though he himself had hardly recognized the woman stumbling wearily down the metal steps from the sleek Gulfstream 5 he'd sent to rescue her from the house in the Hollywood Hills that had become her prison: ripped jeans, black sweatshirt, red hair dragged so tightly back it looked painful, large green eyes blurred with fatigue and tears.

She'd looked at him, then looked around her at the towering Sierras cutting through the dense forests and boulder-strewn hills of the province of Extremadura, one of Spain's least populated and remote areas, where life still went on at a pace long-lost to the tourist-ridden Costas. She'd looked at the lowering gray sky and the silver helicopter ready to take them to Rodolfo's country home in the dark green forest. He could tell her heart was in her boots. He knew all she wanted was to get back on that plane and go find her daughter.

He'd hardly recognized her, but Bibi recognized
him
. When Rodolfo wrapped his arms round her she felt safe. For a few moments the terrible past weeks were gone. She was free. She was home.

He took her to his house, a place he called modestly “my cottage” though in reality it was a two-story stone mansion dating back to the fifteenth century, and where the ruins in the parklike grounds were reputed to be of a hideaway built by the Knights Templar, who'd hunted in that area in the thirteenth century. To be sure the house was modernized and luxurious for a man like Rodolfo, who had been brought up with luxury. Generators powered electricity; twenty-first-century plumbing had replaced the original outhouses and now there were sybaritic bathrooms—not of marble or onyx, nothing flashy for a country house, he explained to Bibi when he showed her around. Just good Spanish ceramic tiles and the old rust-colored terra-cotta floors that had been there for what seemed like forever.

Bibi had hidden out there until, before too long, the hue and cry abated. There were other scandals, other murders, other celebrities in trouble. Bibi was half forgotten, though not by the L.A. police, who still had an unsolved double murder in their cold-case files. Unless they found the killer, Bibi would never go home again.

Instead, with Rodolfo's help she learned how to become someone else. Clairol changed her red hair to mouse; contacts changed her green eyes to brown; big skirts and loose sweaters changed her slender body to shapeless. She chose the name Vida because it meant “life,” and Rodolfo said what she had was a new life. Now she spoke only Spanish, sometimes Catalan, but certainly never English. In fact if anyone she met inquired, she would quietly admit that she'd always had a block about foreign languages and had never managed to become fluent.

“It's embarrassing,” she would say in her sweetly lisping Castilian accent. “But I do not travel so it scarcely seems to matter.”

With time hanging heavily on her hands and a terrible gap in her heart and in her mind, with her constant thoughts and worry for her daughter, and a brain that needed occupying now she had no music, Vida learned to cook. Nothing like her sister, of course. Vida was a plain country cook, like the plain countrywoman she had become. She was, Rodolfo knew, different in appearance, but not in her heart.

And anyhow Bibi/Vida had her own place now, a couple of kilometers from Rodolfo's. Her new home. Simple. Silent. And lonely.

*   *   *

It had taken Bibi
a long time to get to the point where she could sit in the café and watch children playing, without her heart wrenching. Finally, she had stopped trying to guess which of them might be Paloma's age and was able to watch them chasing each other round the plaza, shrieking with delight, fast and fleet of foot as little wild animals. She told herself they were simply children, free to laugh and play and lead a normal life. And
that
was what she had given her daughter.
A normal life.

Still, a tear lurked as she quietly sipped her coffee. She missed having children around so much. They had always been an important part of her life.

*   *   *

Rodolfo left the bar
and pushed his way through the noisy Saturday morning market crowd toward the café. Bibi saw him coming. Her face lit up and she waved. The dog recognized him too and stumbled eagerly to its feet.

That damned dog, Rodolfo thought, exasperated.

Bibi had found it living wild, lying tiredly by a stream where the forest just began and the trees were more thinly spaced, letting in the sunlight. So she had spotted his dull black shape and gone to investigate.

The dog had struggled bravely to its feet and, head hanging, looked up at her with eyes that seemed to say
This is the end of the road.
To which Bibi had added, out loud so she knew the dog heard, “For both of us, my friend.”

He was too weak to walk so she picked him up and carried him back to Rodolfo's. “We are the same,” she'd told the shocked Rodolfo, who'd said she must let the vet deal with him.

“He's too old and decrepit for you to take care of.
Now
…” he'd added. He didn't need to finish his sentence, Bibi knew what he meant. “
Now.
When you need to look after
yourself
.”

“I don't care that he's old and starved.” She'd held him closer. “I'll fix him.”

And she had, though of course there was nothing she could do about his age, which the vet put at around twelve years. Old, for a dog who'd had such a hard life and who was in such bad shape.

Bibi didn't care. He was her friend, and she named him “friend” in Spanish.
Amigo.

Amigo's tail wagged slowly as Rodolfo bent to pat him. Everything about Amigo was becoming slower, Bibi thought, worried, as Rodolfo kissed her, patting her shoulder affectionately too.

“You look well, my Vida,” he said, calling to the waiter for a
café solo,
then turning back and giving her an appraising look. “I might even have said, just a minute ago when I spotted you from across the square, that you looked … happy?”

Bibi smiled. He obviously had not noticed her tears from across the square. “I'm happy because you are here this weekend. I didn't expect to see you.”

Looking at him, she thought how handsome he looked, the perfect gentleman in his custom dark blue shirt and tan linen pants, his handmade country loafers. He wore a simple round steel watch and no rings. Rodolfo had never been married, though he'd had a partner for twenty years whom he loved. His name was William and he was trusted with all Rodolfo's secrets, including Bibi's identity. The rest were confidential business secrets of Rodolfo's private financial company, based in the tax-free haven of Andorra.