This Crazy Rich Boy - Chapter 157

When finally, Dale gives up trying to reach Gabriel, he puts down the phone quietly, his face white as sheet.

“Where is Sir Gabriel?” he mutters out loud.

“I don’t know,” Lucille says, surprised. “We’ve never been together.”

Dale gives her a look. “I wasn’t asking you.”

“Then who are you asking? I’m the only person here,” Lucille says, then she storms off.

Has the world gone mad, Dale wonders. He watches Lucille’s figure recede down the corridor. Maybe it’s that time of month when women get a little cranky for seemingly no reason.

Dale looks around; he glances at the giant wall clock right across the cavernous lobby. The Residence feels so empty now that Claire has left the building; as though it’s darker, gloomier, pointless. How many minutes has Claire been gone? He presumes she’s going to the airport, maybe to try her luck as a chance passenger. If Claire still has family or kin or relatives, maybe she’s going home to them. But the big question is: where? He never got the chance to know here more than what he would have wanted to, so he has no idea where Claire hails from, where her parents are, if she still has any. Something terrible must have happened between her and Gabriel. And Dale knows that if he doesn’t get a hold of Gabriel right at this very minute, then it would be too late.

He tries the phone again. Three rings. Five, seven. He’s not picking up. Then an idea hits him: what about Mrs. Gomez? Maybe she knows where Gabriel is.

“I have no idea where Gabriel is,” Mrs. Gomez says as soon as she picks up the phone. “What a minute, why are you asking me? Why not ask Claire, for pete’s sakes!”

Dale pauses. “But she’s gone, ma’am.”

“How in hell do you mean ‘she’s gone’?”

“She’s gone. She left. With her old suitcase. I think something happened.”

“How do you mean something happened? Didn’t Gabriel visit her? Weren’t they together just this morning? Did they have one of those fights?��

“I really don’t know, Ma’am,” Dale is on the verge of crying, feeling like the subject in a Spanish Inquisition. “Claire wouldn’t say anything. She just took the dog with her.”

“What dog?”

Mrs. Gomez doesn’t know about Sam, Dale quickly realizes. “Sorry, never mind that. But that’s it. That’s why I’ve been trying to reach Gabriel and—”

“Wait. Did Gabriel’s mother speak with Claire? Did she visit her there?”

“Uhh, y-yes. But what is the—”

“Matilde Tan visited Claire in the penthouse suite?”

“Yes, Ma’am, that’s right.”

“Jesus,” Mrs. Gomez mutters. She has connected the dots. She has known Matilde for years, and she knows what the woman can do, especially to people she doesn’t like. Matilde knows the most painful buŧŧons to push; she’d strike where it hurts most, and leave without much of an evidence to prove it. “Continue calling up Gabriel’s number. Try the hospital. I’ll call his personal mobile.”

Dale blows a sigh of relief. “Thank you, Ma’am.”

“When did you say Claire left the building?”

“About half an hour ago, Ma’am,” Dale says.

Half an hour ago—that truth flashes in Mrs. Gomez’s brain as she speed-dials Gabriel’s personal number—the number that can be called only by a few designated people, and only during the most critical times. Thankfully, Gabriel picks up on the second ring. “Where are you, Sir?”

“I’m here. I’ve just arrived,” Gabriel says, sounding like he’d been catching his breath.

“At The Residence. What’s the matter?”

At that moment, Dale also sees Gabriel walk into the lobby, his phone to his ear, confusion crumpling his face. He runs to him, but Gabriel holds up a finger, signaling for him to wait. “What do you mean Claire’s gone?” Slowly, Gabriel’s gaze turns to Dale. “Dale? What in hell is Mrs. Gomez saying about Claire? What happened?”

“It’s uhh, Claire, sir,” Dale stammers, trying to keep his nerves calm, but failing spectacularly. “She left. She took the dog. With her suitcase.”

Gabriel makes a tiny nervous laugh. “She just probably went out shopping. Don’t be silly.”

“But Sir, she was in tears.”

Gabriel’s brow furrows. “What happened? I just left here hours ago, and we were fine. She was fine.”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Gabriel stares at Dale’s face, trying to fathom the truth, because really, this is all so confusing. “Let’s check her room. Maybe she left a little message. Shall we?”

Dale trails behind him as Gabriel bounds toward the elevator. Gabriel tries to appear cool, while Dale keeps glancing at him nervously.

“Something else on your mind, Dale?”

“It’s just…It’s just I think we’re probably running out of time.”

“Out of time for what, Dale? Relax. I’m sure Claire just took a walk with the dog or something.”

Dale gulps down; there seems nothing he could do to convince him. While Gabriel looks at him askance.

When they get into Claire’s suite, nothing out or the ordinary greets them. Everything seems normal. Gabriel looks around; she must have left some note or letter. They go to the kitchen to see if she’d tacked something on the fridge. Nothing. They check the bedroom, and other rooms in the suite. Nothing. Gabriel looks into the wardrobe and realizes Claire’s old suitcase is gone. What Gabriel has been trying to dismiss earlier—that growing sense of inexplicable loss—is becoming a banshee scream at the back of his mind by now, and he couldn’t hide it from Dale, anymore. “Something’s wrong,” he mutters.

I’ve been trying to tell you so, is what Dale wants to say to his face. Yet, he responds with silence. He stares at the floor. That’s when Dale notices those little pieces of paper scattered on the carpet. He kneels down to pick up the pieces, examining it against the ambient light. “It’s some kind of a check, Sir.”

Gabriel gathers the pieces of torn paper on his palm. It looks familiar because he uses and signs the same kind of checkbook almost every day. One particularly larger piece gets his attention: it’s a part of the check’s signature line. The highly slanted name scribbled on it is unmistakable: Matilde Tan.

Gabriel gazes wildly around him. The walls around seems to close in on him. Seeing the torn check, suddenly the entire universe seems to have imploded into a single, heartbreaking truth: his mother got to her while he was gone. And whatever his mom told Claire, it must be the reason why she left in tears.

“Where did she say she was going?”

“I don’t know, Sir. But maybe, if I may hazard a guess, the airport?”

“Jesus,” is all Gabriel manages to say. He bolts out the door so quickly, crossing the space in big strides, and is gone before Dale could take another breath.

Inside Gabriel’s head now is a raging storm, and mentally he’s trying to calm himself down. He tries to focus on the single most pressing task: run after Claire before he loses her to God-knows-where. He knows how Claire can be extremely emotional. Emotional? That’s too rich coming from you, says a tiny voice from the back of his head. He ignores it. He slips into his car waiting right out front of The Residence—an Aston Martin DBS, the same car Daniel Craig used in one of his early James Bond movies—and quickly guns it, all the while thinking was it just coincidence that of the dozens of cars in his private garage, he’d chosen this super-fast one? Maybe he was fated to run after Claire—whether or not he gets to her on time is yet to be seen.

He floors it, the car’s powerful engine making itself known to everyone else on the road that day. Yet Gabriel cares not for them all—the airport, that’s the destination. Probably domestic flights, as Claire has no business to fly international. He wonders, too, if she has money. And more and more, Gabriel finds himself worrying about the mundane details: maybe they’d not allow Sam the puppy on board because the dog had no medical or health clearance for transport. And that would further break her heart and drive her over the edge. “Where are you going, Claire, my love?” Gabriel mutters to himself, as the world behind him melts into a blur. He realizes, too, that he had taken knowing Claire for granted—he’d presumed that Claire would always be there, that things would go on a natural progression between them. That’s why even now, he doesn’t know where Claire hails from, where her parents live, the names of her parents, even the names of the schools she had graduated from. And realizing all of this gives Gabriel a terrible, sinking feeling: you’re an idiot, Gab. A first-class idiot who takes everything for freaking granted. So now what?

Now, reach the damn airport. And for some reason, road traffic seems to be giving him a break that day—the traffic is light, and intersections are largely clear. His car zooms past trucks and buses in what looks like the kind of driving with a death wish. He doesn’t care, anymore. He’s dying to see her, to talk some sense into her, to reassure her Matilde Tan is, despite being his mother, nothing but a gadfly to the life he’s planned for them. Matilde will buzz around them, annoy them, antagonize the hell out of them, but will do no damage. Because he’s no longer a child, which is a fact his mother refuses to acknowledge. He will love and marry whoever he chooses.

Gabriel almost jumps out of the Aston Martin as soon as the car slips into the parking slot nearest the airport’s main entrance. He runs straight to the counter for domestic flights, asking the personnel there if they’d taken a passenger named Claire Monteverde, and thereby ruffling the feathers of quite a number of tired travelers. When he gets nothing useful from the first counter he’d asked, he runs toward the security turnstile, scanning the faces of the crowd, looking for the girl with the dog and a battle-worn suitcase. But Claire seems nowhere. Desperate, Gabriel takes out his phone and calls up a friend, the head of the airport’s management, who quickly reassures him he’ll send a battalion of personal to quickly search for Claire. “We’ll find her even if she’s already in one of these planes.”

Yet, Gabriel refuses to be reassured. He keeps walking among the crowd, combing the lines of people, looking for the girl with the saddest eyes, holding a very confused puppy, in the middle of all this madness.

Meanwhile, in another part of the city, Claire’s cab arrives at the drop-off area of one of the city’s bus terminals. She pays the driver and tells him to keep the change. The driver is only too glad to help her with her single suitcase and dog. She steps out into the dying light of the afternoon, and looks behind her, at the long road she’d come from. Somehow, despite her outward bravado, Claire Monteverde is still hoping that Gabriel would suddenly materialize out of nowhere, holds her in his arms, and rescues her from herself.