Chapter 40
“That’s impossible!” Derek exclaimed for the hundredth time since they’d left the resort mall where he’d come face-to-face with the woman who claimed to be his dead mother.
They were back in their suite after Derek bolted away from the mall like an escaping fugitive, with Rachel and the bodyguards chasing after him. It was as if he had seen a ghost and he had been badly shaken ever since.
“There has to be a logical explanation for what just happened,” said Rachel. “How is it possible that she has been alive for nearly nine years and nobody found out about it. Has she been in Bermuda the whole time or does she come here from time to time to commemorate her death?”
“How would I know?” Derek snapped. “I’m just as confused as you are. This is insane! My mother is supposed to be dead, not alive, and walking around in Bermuda looking like Ariel the little mermaid!”
“I agree. She does look hot for a dead woman,” Rachel joked, trying to ease the tension in the air.
Derek chuckled. “Sounds like a great title for a Netflix series. Hot Dead Woman on the Move!”
“I like that,” Rachel laughed. “How about The Hot Undead Woman?”
He laughed. “Oh, my God! I can’t believe we are making a joke about this. My brain is still spinning.”
“But seriously, we should have asked her some important questions before running out of there like criminals. We need answers.”
“We don’t,” he said with a straight face.
“What do you mean? Don’t you want to know what happened to her?”
“I don’t. If she wanted me to know that she was alive, she would have contacted me all these years to tell me. I mean, my dad died of a broken heart because of her!”
Rachel sighed. Derek’s passionate reaction showed her that his emotional wounds ran deep. Was this the guy she was expecting to fall in love with her? A guy who has been burned by love just by witnessing his parents’ volatile relationship? How could she expect him to give what he didn’t have?
“I know you are upset, Derek, and that’s very understandable. But now that you know that she is alive, your conscience would never let you rest if you don’t find out the truth of what happened to your mother. You cannot go through life not knowing the truth.”
“There is no truth anywhere. If that woman is truly my mother, then it means that she faked her own death and made me and my father mourn her for nothing. How could she live with herself knowing that I had believed all this while that she was dead? If we had never come to Bermuda, I wouldn’t have known this.”
“I know this might sound wild, but I have a feeling that she didn’t just bump into us at the mall,” said Rachel, ominously.
“Why do you say so?” Derek asked curiously.
“Because the other day we went to the beach, she was sitting right beside me and asking me questions about you and Zoe.”
Derek stared at her in awe. “What? You’ve met her before?”
“Yes. She was in the lounge chair next to me and was complimenting your looks and gushing over Zoe. I felt uncomfortable with how familiar she was getting with me and I stopped talking to her. Then I fell asleep and you came over to wake me up, but by then she was gone. I didn’t think anything of it because I didn’t know who she was but I remember thinking that her eyes looked familiar but I was dead sure that I didn’t know her.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“As I said, I wrote her off as a random stranger who was just trying to have a friendly conversation with me but it sort of came off like she was interested in you. I mean, I literally thought she was a cougar.”
Derek groaned. “Ew…”
“Sorry,” Rachel giggled. “Anyway, she saw me first at the mall today and asked about Zoe, and that was when I started to feel weird about running into the same tourist twice in two different locations. It seemed too… deliberate to be a coincidence.”
“This situation is becoming creepier by the minute. Does that mean she was following us? How did she know that we would be here? How did she even find us in the first place?”
It was indeed disturbing how this was going. How did Yolanda Fraser know where to find her estranged son and his family in a country that they chose randomly and traveled to? How did she know to find them at the beach and again at the mall, which was several miles away from their first place of contact? Something just wasn’t adding up with this story.
“The math isn’t mathing at all,” Rachel mused. “I know you are totally freaked out but I still think we need to find her and ask her to fill in the gaps for us. There must be a reason why she tracked us down. I think she wanted you to see her and she succeeded. Now we need to find out why.”
Derek sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. He’d never been so freaked out in his entire life. He’d heard tons of ghost stories all his life but he’d always brushed them off as fiction, but here he was barely minutes after seeing the ghost of his dead mother! How had she been able to pull that off? If she didn’t die in that plane crash nearly nine years ago, how did she manage to fly under the radar and avoid being discovered by at least one person? The only change she had done to her appearance was to change her blonde hair to an orange-red color, get some nips and tucks, and botox injections to keep her body and face looking taut and youthful.
Other than those aesthetic improvements, she was still recognizable. How come nobody ever found her out? The news of her death alongside her Russian lover was a hot topic for months in the U.S. as the paparazzi followed him and his father about in the following days after the tragedy, trying to get a comment from the mourning family.
“Was her body ever found?” Rachel asked.
“No, but we still had a funeral in her honor because my father insisted on it,” said Derek bitterly. “We buried a casket with her favorite Valentino gown and Louboutin shoes inside it.”
“I guess that solves part of the mystery then. If her body wasn’t found, then she wasn’t dead. What about her companion? Was his body found?”
“No. They said their bodies were incinerated in the crash fire. Gosh! He played us all for fools!”
Someone knocked on their suite door and they both jumped at the unexpected sound.
Rachel laughed. “Now we are a couple of jumpy cats. This is crazy.”
They heard Mark talking with the person at the door before another round of knocks hit the door.
“Who is it?” Derek asked.
“The resort manager,” replied Mark. “She says she’d like to speak to you.”
“Let her in.”