“Story?”
“Beauty and the Beast. The photo, the books.”
“Who knows? Maybe,” Joe said. “In the Disney movie, the Beast will stay a monster forever unless someone can love his sorry-ass self. So of course it turns out to be Belle, and once she comes through, he goes back to being a prince. It’s so fucked up.”
“Transformation,” Conor said. “Maybe that’s what this is all about.”
“This?”
“The boat, the room. Maybe he thinks that if the girl—one of the girls—loves him, she’ll restore him to someone he used to be.”
“He’ll turn back into a fucking prince?” Joe asked.
“Maybe. In his mind, anyway,” Conor said.
“What’s in it for her?” Joe asked.
“She gets to have her throat slit,” Conor said.
His phone was burning in his hand, with Kate’s text saying Belinda had said that she was Belle and he was the Beast. He knew he needed to get back to Watch Hill as soon as possible, to return to the house where Belinda had been murdered. Because even through the drug’s haze, he remembered where he had seen the imprint beneath the bottle before, where he had seen a rose stamped in blood.
And he knew that figuring that out was his way back to Kate.
20
Sunday, July 4; 5:00 p.m.
After that visit to the Maynard-King cemetery, Kate felt incredibly relieved to return to the Ocean House, her sanctuary. She went up to the Tower Suite and took a long, hot shower. She put on the white robe and walked upstairs from the bedroom into the living room, and she sat on one of the window seats looking south, out toward the lighthouse. Her finger hurt from where she had pricked it on the rose at Jonathan Tyler’s grave. Her heart hurt from where it had been broken by Conor.
She looked at her phone, at the photo he had sent her just a short while ago. He had seemed not to realize how upset she would be by theBeauty and the Beastreference. Had he truly not heard what Belinda had said, there in the Harbour Room?
Why would she believe Belinda instead of Conor? But images kept flashing through her mind: Conor and Belinda huddled together on that bench by the harbor, the picture of the blue-eyed baby on Belinda’s phone, the silver ring, her words about him calling her Belle. Him saying he had slept with her.
Slept with her.
It was undeniable that the dark fairy tale somehow played a role in the mess they had found themselves in. It kept popping up—Belinda’s words, the Cocteau film still—so it had to be significant. Kate thought of the various interpretations. She knew the Disney version becausewhen Sam was a little girl and came to spend the weekend with her, or when Kate had gone to her sister’s house to babysit, they had snuggled together on the sofa and watched the animated movie—the tale of Belle and the Beast.
The Cocteau film was avant-garde and certainly a different art form—even, almost, a different story. Shot in black and white, it was unbearably romantic. It was dangerous and erotic. Kate found it to be an emotional, most unlikely, love story. Outwardly, the Beast was frightening, but at heart, he was gentle. Belle was a delicate beauty, with a caring spirit that led her to see beyond his physical ugliness and fall in love with him. And save him.
Kate had seen the movie many times. She spoke fluent French—studying French and German had been a requirement for her master’s degree in art history—and she found that the French language added to the film’s romance and mystery. Cocteau was a surrealist, and to view his work was to enter a fantasy.
Kate had felt that—and she knew Conor had too—when they had stayed in Cocteau’s room at the Welcome Hotel on the quai in Villefranche-sur-Mer—a pink hotel by the azure Mediterranean. Conor had planned it, just for her. That first day, they barely got out of bed. They didn’t want to let go of each other. The scent of jasmine and bougainvillea was hypnotic, and they fell in and out of sleep until almost midnight when they woke to the glow of moonlight on the harbor.
Then they got up, went out to look for a late supper at one of the cafés on the Quai Courbet. They stopped in front of the Chapelle Saint-Pierre. The Romanesque chapel belonged to the Fishermen’s Guild, and in the fifties, Cocteau transformed the walls. The exterior was wild with color, frescoes, and two unblinking eyes on the top story. The door was ajar.
“Can we go in?” Kate asked Conor.
“Well, the door is open, so ...” he said, putting his arm around her waist as they walked inside.
It seemed like a magical invitation, that they could enter so late at night. Kate had known, in an abstract way—from her studies—what the interior would hold, but seeing it illuminated at midnight left her breathless.
Cocteau had filled the walls with images, connecting spirituality and art, paintings of angels and archangels and soldiers and ladders to heaven, all dedicated to Saint Julian, the patron saint of fishermen. The altar was painted in shades of rose; the rear of the chapel shimmered blue and silver, like the moonlight on the water that had wakened them. It all felt eternal, like a dream. It felt sacred.
“I wish,” Kate whispered.
“What do you wish?” Conor asked, holding her.
“That we could live here, in Villefranche-sur-Mer,” she said. “And come here every day.”
