Page 7 of The Expat Affair

On Sunday afternoon, the stress finally catches up to me. I fall asleep hard, but my dreams are like shallow puddles, the images so sharp and vivid that they feel almost tangible.

Me, standing alone on Xander’s terrace. The wind has picked up, the icy gusts whipping my hair and the duvet all around, raising chill bumps wherever it touches my naked skin.

And on its tail, Xander’s voice, speaking in Dutch.

I follow the sound inside, chasing the guttural gibberish through the empty bedroom and down a long, art-lined hallway, black-and-white framed photographs of faces I recognize, models and actors and rock stars. Xander’s voice grows louder, more heated, until suddenly, there he is, standing between his desk and the far wall of his study, talking on the phone.

No, not talking. Screaming. Under the buttery terry cloth of his robe, his back is rigid with fury. I don’t understand any of what he says, but I know instinctively that it’s not pleasant.

And all around him are diamonds. In giant piles on the floor, spread in glittering heaps on his desk, spilling over from his fist and a safe cracked open on the wall. Massive mounds of diamonds everywhere.

Suddenly, he turns. His eyes meet mine, and he mouths one word.

Run.

I lurch upright on a gasp, blinking into my dim beige bedroom. The metal table lamp on the dresser is still glowing, sending up a halo of dirt-tinted light. I fish around in the bedding for my laptop and check the time: 8:17 p.m. Outside my little window, the sky is black with night.

That one word echoes through my brain: Run. Did Xander try to warn me? Did he know he was in danger that night? That I was?

I fall back onto the bed and replay my memories for the millionth time.

I squeeze my eyes shut and poke around the edges of what I can summon up, playing back the snippets over and over in my mind, trying to connect them, to line them up in chronological order.

The booze, the terrace, the sex, the bed, the shades that peeled up the terrace windows unprompted like they worked on a timer.

But anywhere during those however many hours, did I follow his voice to the study? Was there really a phone call and piles and piles of diamonds? The dream felt so palpable.

The smell of night jasmine on the wind, the feel of the hallway runner under my bare feet.

Xander’s dismissive tone, the sharp blade of anger behind every word.

I can’t tell what’s real and what is my mind playing tricks.

Did Xander even have a study?

My heart won’t stop thudding, because I feel like he did.

That bit about following his voice, the art-lined hallway . . .

An image pops in my mind of a giant box of bonbons, colorful chocolates in all shapes and sizes cushioned in shiny, pleated cups.

Not a painting but a sculpture, hung on the wall at the very end of the hall.

I see it, lit up with a spotlight from above, and another memory comes to me in flashes.

Getting turned around on the way back from the bathroom, taking a left when I should have taken a right.

A room with a big desk parked before the window.

Xander was there, and the phone call, that part was real, too.

I backed out of the room before he could catch me eavesdropping on what was clearly drama because I thought it was a former girlfriend, or maybe an ex-wife.

Later, when Xander joined me in the bedroom, I didn’t mention the call, and neither did he.

Still.

This seems significant.

I swing my legs out of bed and push to stand, rummaging through my bag for Detective Boomsma’s business card.

I find it tucked in the side pocket, and I’m looking for my phone before remembering I no longer have one.

The detective confiscated it, which means it’s in an evidence drawer somewhere, along with my most important cards sitting in the holder on the back.

If I don’t get them back soon, I’m going to have to start chasing down replacements.

I awaken my laptop and pull up Google Voice, plugging in the number on the card. A few seconds later, the detective’s voice crackles in my speakers.

“Arie Boomsma.”

The name pushes through an uproar of background noise, house music blaring over a loudspeaker that sounds like it’s positioned directly above his head in a room packed full of people, great swells of animated voices and laughter. If it weren’t for the hour and the delighted squeals of what can only be kids, I’d think he was in a nightclub.

I lean in to the laptop, putting my lips close to the speaker. “Hi, Detective, this is Dumont. Sorry to call on a Sunday evening, but I just remembered something that might be pertinent to the investigation. Do you have a minute?”

He pauses, but he must have caught at least some of what I said, because his next words are in English. “What? Who is this?”

“ Dumont,”

I shout back, overenunciating my words. “I’m calling about Xander van der Vos.”

“Hang on, give me a second. I can’t hear a thing.”

He says something in rapid-fire Dutch, then he must step outside because suddenly, the racket dies away. “Okay. Say all that again.”

“This is Dumont. I just remembered something that might be pertinent to the Xander van der Vos investigation.”

“My phone didn’t recognize your number.”

“Because I’m calling on Google Voice. You still have my cellphone, remember?”

I pause to give him room to respond, but he doesn’t bite. “Speaking of, when do you think I could get my cellphone back?”

“We will release it when we are done with it.”

“Do you have any idea when that will be?”

“Like I said, when we are done.”

I can’t get a read on this guy, can’t figure out if he’s being difficult on purpose, or if he’s just grumpy because I interrupted him in the middle of what’s obviously a social event.

“Okay, then. What about the cards on the back? My tram card, debit card, and residence permit. It’s illegal to just walk around this country without an ID, you know.”

A weird little tidbit I learned about this country from the lady at the IND. You must be able to show proof of identification always, at all times, or risk arrest. I could use my American driver’s license as ID, I suppose, but all those other cards in the holder—I want those back, too.

“I’ll see what I can do. Is that all?”

“No. I called to tell you—”

There’s another wave of noise, music, and squealing kids, like someone opened the door. I picture him standing on a sidewalk somewhere. “Where are you, at a rave?”

A puff of air into the phone, not quite a laugh. “Close. It’s my niece’s birthday party, and they’re about to bring out the cake, so perhaps you could hurry this along.”

An order, not a request.

“I’m calling because I remembered something. I was coming back from the bathroom when I heard Xander talking to someone in the study. He was on the phone. The conversation was in Dutch, but I understood the tone. It was an argument, a pretty heated one.”

“I see. Was the call on the house line or his mobile?”

“His iPhone. I remember that part clearly.”

“Did he tell you who it was?”

“No, and I didn’t ask. I was worried he’d think I was eavesdropping, which I guess I kind of was. I thought maybe I’d stepped into some kind of past relationship drama, so I cleared out of there before he saw me. Neither of us talked about the call afterward, not that I recall.”

I pause, turning over the memories in my mind. Xander returning to the bedroom and shucking his robe, crawling up the bed with a grin. “At least, I’m pretty sure. Almost positive.”

“You’re almost positive.”

“Yes.”

I frown because I know what the detective is getting at, and I don’t need his judgment. “I already told you we drank a lot, Detective. The end of the night is a little spotty.”

“Okay, well, do you remember who called who, or what time this phone call occurred?”

I pause, considering the question. “I remember hearing his voice and following it down the hallway, so no. I don’t know who initiated contact. The conversation was already underway when I got there.”

“And the time?”

“I didn’t look at the clock, but I . . .”

I trail off, about to say I was already naked when this all went down, which means it was late. “After midnight, certainly. Can’t you pull up his phone records to check?”

“We’ll take a look at his call logs. Anything else?”

His voice is brusque, clearly in a hurry to get back to his party, his people, his life, and honestly, who can blame him? Detectives need days off, too.

Still, though. I can’t let him go just yet.

“Actually, yes. Did Xander have a safe?”

There’s a stretch of silence so long I’m about to wriggle my mouse to check the connection when finally, he clears his throat. “What makes you ask about a safe?”

“I had a dream that he had one, and that it was filled with diamonds. But I don’t remember seeing it when I was there, so now I’m wondering if the dream is my mind’s way of telling me something I’ve forgotten or if I just made it up.”

“I see. And in your dream, where was this safe?”

“In the study, hidden behind a painting in the wall.”

“Which wall? Do you remember the painting?”

“In my dream, the safe was already open, which means the face of the painting was facing the wall. But it was in the wall behind his desk, kind of to the left, between the desk and the window.”

Another long spell of empty air, which I fill with, “That’s where it is, isn’t it? I wasn’t making it up.”

He doesn’t answer, but his silence seems like a pretty firm yes to me, and I feel a warm rush of heat, my breath catching in the back of my throat. My dream wasn’t entirely fiction, wasn’t just my mind making up a story around the trauma I’ve been carrying around for two days now. Suddenly, I’m wondering what else I’ve forgotten. What else happened while my brain was too booze soaked to think clearly? What else did I miss while I was in Xander’s bed?

“Was the safe filled with diamonds like in my dream?”

I ask. “Because I know about Xander’s job. I know he worked for a diamond house and that he ran their line of lab-grown diamonds, big ones that go for a hundred thousand a pop.”

“Like the necklace you were wearing in that picture.”

An elevator plunges down the center of my chest and lands in my stomach with a thud. And here I thought it was the people back home I had to worry about, their gossip and screenshots and shares. The detective saw the picture of me in that necklace.

“That picture was a joke. I already took it down.”

Though apparently, not quickly enough.

“Ms. Dumont, I don’t know if you’re aware, but Xander van der Vos was something of a celebrity here in Amsterdam. His death is all over the news, and so is that picture of you wearing his necklace. The legitimate news sites are one thing, but people are posting to X and Reddit and TikTok, and they’re jumping to their own conclusions. I’d advise you not to go searching for those comment threads, but here’s the basic gist: they say as the last person to see Xander alive—”

“I’m pretty sure the last person to see him alive was his killer.”

“Exactly my point. People are talking about you. They’re identifying you by name, and they’re wondering if you took that necklace. If you have it in your possession right now.”

“The answer, for the record, is no. The last time I saw the necklace, Xander was dropping it in the nightstand drawer.”

“It’s not just the necklace. My colleagues and I are still trying to determine what was in Mr. Van der Vos’s safe, which is exactly where you said it was, by the way, except there was nothing in it. By the time we got there, it had been emptied out. The nightstand drawer, too.”

“So what are you saying? The necklace is missing?”

“Yes. The necklace is missing.”

My body goes hot and then cold, and I think about what this could mean. Maybe Xander moved the necklace after I fell asleep. Maybe he put it back in the safe for the killer to clean out later.

But what if he didn’t?

The thought drops into my head fully formed. What if the necklace was still in the nightstand when Xander got out of bed, when he flipped on the shower and stepped into the stream? What if the killer was right there, opening and closing that nightstand drawer while I snored away, oblivious?

I hear the thump that sent me racing out of the penthouse, picture a nameless, faceless killer fetching another zip tie in another room so he can wrap it around my neck and silence me, too. A shiver goes down the skin of my back, a feverish kind of panic that feels like the start of the flu.

“What about the building’s security cameras? Did you see anyone on the footage?”

Because I was lucid enough when we got there to remember that Xander’s building had dozens of them. That he used a fob to operate the elevator, and it opened straight into his apartment. There’s no way the killer could have gotten inside without passing multiple cameras, not unless he scaled the outside of the building like Spiderman, and even then, a building like Xander’s would likely have outdoor cameras, too.

“How do you know Xander didn’t buzz his killer up?”

“Excuse me?”

“If you slept through a fight to the death between two large men and possibly a killer emptying out the drawer next to your head, then how do you know you didn’t miss something else? How do you know Xander didn’t invite his own killer upstairs?”

I don’t answer, because I don’t know. I have no idea what else I might have slept through. Is that what happened? The killer was someone Xander knew? Or is the detective implying that he thinks I’m the killer Xander invited upstairs?

“Is that an accusation? You don’t really think I had anything to do with his murder, do you?”

“I’m simply trying to put together the chain of events that ended in a man’s death. And now there’s this picture of you in a priceless necklace floating around the internet, one someone was presumably willing to kill for once. All those people on Reddit right now, all the people on the other sites? If one of them wants that necklace just as badly as the killer did, where do you think they’ll look first?”

To me. They’ll assume that I have the necklace.

“But I don’t have it,”

I say, as emphatically as I know how, even though a smarter part of me says it’s not the detective who needs the most convincing. “I don’t have the necklace.”

“Thanks for calling, Ms. Dumont. I’ll be in touch.”

There are two quick beeps, then nothing. I wriggle the mouse, and he’s ended the call.