The Love I Never Knew: Contemporary Romance Mystery (Ariadne Silver Romance Mystery #1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Book Samples

  Thank You

  Booklist

  The Love I Never Knew

  (Contemporary Romance Mystery)

  Book 1 of the Ariadne Silver Romance Mystery Series

  Morris Fenris

  Love Romance Publications House

  The Love I Never Knew

  Copyright 2015 Morris Fenris

  Love Romance Publications House

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Chapter 1

  I

  It sounds like a fairy tale when you say it. It is definitely, not your run-of-the-mill fairy tale, but a dystopian modern world version of it. When you say it, it sounds like material for an award winning film script if executed meticulously. Ariadne Silver was born in a family of hate and perpetual misery. She naturally had no idea about the conditions of her birth. Her parents did not plan to start a family with Ariadne. They were simply inebriated one night and found the urges of physical attachment overwhelming. Their intoxication was so intense that they completely forgot about protection during or after the sex. The only time Ariadne ever felt at peace was when she was in her mother’s womb, though the peace was merely an illusion. Her mother did not even realize till it was too late that she was pregnant. The parents had a fist fight the day she was compelled to tell her husband of the pregnancy. The father accused her of being a whore who was disloyal to him and simply refused to acknowledge the pregnancy. Moreover, they were in no financial condition to raise a child. Whatever the parents earned was mostly spent on alcohol and heroin. It was a miracle that Ariadne saw the light of day even with her mother poisoning the bloodstream during the course of her pregnancy. Ariadne survived even before she knew what survival meant. She grew up in a wrong Wonderland and often wondered if what she saw was real. She couldn’t believe that her mother was dead even after she saw her unattended corpse, smothered in vomit. To a seven year old girl, “death by overdose” didn’t really make much sense. Ariadne Silver was forced to believe that her mother had gone over to a happy place. The memories of her mother were bittersweet. Ariadne felt she was a nice lady. Her mother mostly left her to herself. She was not a very good cook. Her meat was often undercooked. Ariadne disliked the raw taste, but she ate what her mother cooked anyway. She would often see her sticking a needle up her arms. Her mother would always be in a good mood once she had pushed the needle in her arms. She would share her chips with Ariadne then and eventually fall asleep. But Ariadne would also witness how her mother changed when she did not find the liquid to be put in the syringe. The mother, who would share her chips, would suddenly shake Ariadne violently and with a manic expression ask her, “Where is it? Where is it? Did you take it? Tell me did you hide it?” On not getting an answer, she would push away the little girl and sob incessantly till her father gave a needle full of the liquid to her mother. She grew up in a peaceful household as long as her father had a glass filled with a golden liquid and the mother had a needle in her arms. She remembered her father very vaguely and what she remembered did not make her very happy. The first thing that she remembered about her father was his smell. The strong, pungent smell repulsed Ariadne. He did not even know that she existed. She did not remember her father ever having a proper conversation with her. After her mother’s death, he had started drinking heavily. He created a storm if he ever missed out on a peg. She was raised by two very laidback people with severe disappointments in life. Drinking problem took over the household and soon led to the estrangement of familial relationships. Even their neighbors maintained a respectable distance from their house. The neighborhood children were specifically instructed to stay away from Ariadne as much as possible. They had tried helping the family in the past, but they were incorrigible. They were the proverbial ‘bad eggs’. At school, Ariadne was taunted as “white trash”. She didn’t have many friends in school and always kept to herself during recess. Ariadne Silver would spend most of her days under an acacia tree, reading Alice in Wonderland from a borrowed library book. She could really identify with Alice and was almost convinced that her living condition was nothing short of a Wonderland. The only difference between Ariadne and Alice was that Ariadne was born in a wrong Wonderland. With a history of sexual abuse running in her family, Ariadne found it difficult to talk to people in her locality. Wherever she went, people would look down upon her with pity and try to help her with a stray dollar or two. The first time Ariadne really understood the value of money was when she was really hungry and didn’t have a penny in her pocket. She went to the market and tried to coax the shopkeeper to give her a small slice of bread, she would pay him later. But people do not get free lunches in this world anymore. Ariadne Silver was ridiculed out of the shop. She was asked to do “give” the shopkeeper something in return. It was then Ariadne understood that the world listens to money and sex. Whoever had both would get anything they wanted. Ariadne Silver had neither money nor the resources to cultivate her feminine graces. She was a woman who loved playing on the fields with boys. She could throw spitballs and give wedgies to whiny crybabies. As a child, Ariadne teamed up with the local hoodlums and beat the good kids of the neighborhood. No one said anything to her because people treated her like an orphan, pitied her and showed her the way out of things. Ariadne Silver was an unwanted child, left to rot in the veritable dump of human interactions, with nowhere to go and no one to look up to. She was born in a wrong Wonderland and did not know how to get out of it. With her mother at the “happy place” and her father somewhere out of reach, Ariadne Silver was declared a legitimate orphan and immediately handed over to the stern and silent hands of an orphanage in remote Arizona. Growing up in an orphanage was tough and enlightening. Ariadne got tutored by the stark reality of her existence. She always kept to herself and trusted nobody. Since her mother’s corpse had lied to her, Ariadne felt betrayed and let down by humanity. She couldn’t come to terms with her mother’s death. How could she go to a happy place and leave her all alone in a strange little world? Since Ariadne had nowhere to go and nothing to hold on to, she decided to hold on to anything and everything that came her way. It was this decision that separated her from the autumn walls of the orphanage and led her to the path of prostitution. Ariadne Silver was not an ordinary prostitute. She was a woman of content, having been tutored by life, and knew her way around the world. Her customers called her Alice and she called them “Hatters”. Ariadne Silver lived her life to the fullest on the dark side of the wrong Wonderland. She played her tea parties well and often pleasured customers with some recreational scolding. Having had no guidance in morality and institutions, Ariadne learnt to differentiate between good and bad on her own. She trusted her instincts the most and made the right choices for her well being and sanity. While her other friends were busy spending their money on shoes and naughty lingerie, Ariadne ‘Alice’ Silver was busy saving
them for something bigger and grander than shoes and a whorehouse. There was a reason why customers always came back for Ariadne. She knew the art of sexual intercourse better than her sisters. She knew what aroused a man and what disappointed a customer. She wrapped her customers in delicate fragrances and essential oils and basically took them to a “happy place”. Alice was an excellent masseur, better than the best professionals in town. Ariadne was waiting for her day in the sun. She always dreamt big and saw the world through tinted lenses. There were places she had to see, people she had to meet. She had heard about models in Paris and actors in New York. She had heard about talk shows and reality shows. She liked to dream big. Ariadne Silver dreamt about the sunny side of the wrong Wonderland. She dreamt of fragrant parlors and shady boulevards. Alice wanted to shop in France and drive through the streets of San Francisco. Ariadne ‘Alice’ Silver didn’t just dream big, she breathed life into her dreams. It all seems like a fairy tale to her now. She has a vague recollection of her past life now. She is Ariadne Silver, a moderately rich spa owner in the arid parts of Arizona. She lives in a house that looms taller than that orphanage she vaguely remembers. It is a veritable mansion, a palace fit for a fairy tale. Ariadne ‘Alice’ Silver believed no one and did not let anyone get too close to her. She always avoided company and dated men as impersonally as she did her job. Ariadne loved freedom and money. The dry vegetation of Arizona and the screaming sun overhead always made her head spin. She spent most of her day offs at the pool in her back yard. She liked to swim languidly like an aimless fish waiting for a hook. Sun and cacti, that was all that Arizona had to offer. She was almost tired of being rich and bored in the quiet corners of her suburb and wished life would teach her a lesson soon. Although she had the money to afford a recreational break from her ennui and go off to another place, Ariadne didn’t like to do anything outside the “plan”. She had to make a lot of money first. She was too young and too free to want to take a break. She knew her customers well and her job was more presentable than what it used to be. No one would dare call her a whore for doing what she does. She offered recreational massages and relaxing aromatherapy. Ariadne knew the tricks of the trade and always made her services interesting for her clients. She offered them different themes and settings in which they would prefer to relax. In short, she was brilliant.

  II

  The pool was a brilliant guide for Ariadne’s muddled mind. Whenever she felt bored or confused with her life, she would consult the warm water of the pool for a remedy. Water helped wash the long hard day off of her and whispered careless sweet nothings in her ears. Some days, when she really needed counseling, Ariadne would consult her pool with chocolate shake and marijuana joints. Life seemed like a better teacher when Ariadne was well fed and high. She could take it all at once and look into her past with objective honesty. She was one of the most beautiful women in Arizona. She was a mesmerizing goddess with hourglass curves and an intrepid spark in her glistening black eyes. Her dark hair complemented her eyes and the ivory of her skin. Ariadne Silver complemented her lavish mansion. She was one of the most desired women and most admired business tycoon yet she was all alone, isolated in a wrong Wonderland with creatures and characters living on unawares. She was Ariadne Silver, a woman whom everyone admired from a distance. She initially took it as a compliment till she grew tired of people’s fake smiles and meaningless appreciation. She wanted to live a complete life, with a person who would not lie to her and would never remind her of that vomit-choked corpse of her childhood. Since Ariadne turned her fate around, she had forgotten what it felt like to be her old self again. She wished she never had to go through that again. Ariadne worked hard because she didn’t want to be slapped by fat greasy men for a $10 blowjob. The purple haze of marijuana took her back to that day on the road, when Ariadne decided to break off from the orphanage and make a dash for the real world. She found herself all alone in a big bad world with nowhere to go. With the little money she had managed to steal from the foster house, she managed to buy food and a blanket. Ariadne slept on the hard pavements of the night streets, wrapped in a two dollar blanket. When food ran out, she took to begging. A young girl with a gentle face generally gets the grace of passersby. She begged for a week till she met a man who changed her life. Ariadne remembered him perfectly. He came from behind and wrapped his arms around Ariadne. She couldn’t believe it. She turned to face a man twice her age, with flaming red hair and a bushy red moustache. His eyes shone with fire and his lips curved in a smile that is hard to define. He made her heart skip a beat. She lost herself to him through the conversation of their individual silences. No, he wasn’t a prince charming befitting a fairy tale. He was the Mad Hatter. He was the first Hatter Ariadne went to a tea party with. There was no turning back. Ariadne had no “back” to turn to. She went with her savior in practiced silence and let herself be swallowed by the darkness of a lonesome alley. Once they were hidden from conscience and cops, life took charge of the situation. Bodies were exchanged for a price and a deal was struck. Ariadne had made love to her pimp and her lover. Her first attempt at making love got her a job and a relationship. He sold her body for a profit but he adored her. When she was not working, he took her out on roses and brought her bouquets of wild flowers. They were two halves of madness that could separate the real and the fantasy and yet blend into each other seamlessly. The romance appealed to Ariadne. She had imagined love to be nothing less than this. The Alice of the wrong Wonderland demanded a loyalty that was more complicated than your average physical loyalty. She demanded her lover’s soul and the red haired man surrendered it quite willingly. That was the closest Ariadne ‘Alice’ Silver ever got to a normal healthy life.

  III

  The steam and smoke of languor devoured Ariadne’s soul and invaded the most private corners of her memory. Ariadne lay still in helpless warm water while her mind got unhinged and characters from the depth of her poverty stricken past surfaced to the consciousness. Ariadne’s first relationship with her pimp obviously ended on a sad note. She felt the jolts of renewed visitations of buried sadness. She felt the mind numbing pain of separation and the chain of coked up men Ariadne had to please in order to survive. She was a woman who saw everything. She got beaten up, molested and raped several times over. Life for Ariadne was hard in the civil society because no one, not even the society, took her seriously. That is why she couldn’t get her rape complaint registered. It would have been difficult for her to prove her allegations, doing what she did. Ariadne carried on with stiff jaws and stern eyes. She lacked lament and remorse. The only voice that soothed Ariadne was the voice of power and privilege. She was a woman who knew the world through and though. Ariadne remembered the days the crack dealer visited their house. The other sisters went crazy for a couple of lines. She had grown up enough to understand her mother’s cause of death and no, she did not want to die covered in vomit. That would be the end of her. Alice remembered saving her money while the rest of the ladies splurged on drugs and alcohol. Staying close to drugs helped Ariadne realize her limits. She moved on to a happy place when the rest of her sisters were claimed by bankruptcy and venereal diseases. With the money she had saved, Ariadne bought herself a comfortable space for a state-of-the-art spa and worked hard to make it the chosen spa of Arizona. Customers flocked to her spa with stress knots and ghost pains and left the place, completely healed and rejuvenated. Ariadne had found her calling. The joint was almost over and the chocolate shake was beginning to get warm. Ariadne Silver’s recreational stupor was ebbing away. She felt refreshed and sleepy.

  “I almost forgot…”

  Amidst the high and the epiphanies, Ariadne had almost forgotten about her big day. She would be a proud owner of a new spa the next morning. This would be the third spa added to her chain of services. She rushed to her bedroom, opened her closet and took out a hardbound colorful book from it. It was a hardbound limited edition of Alice in Wonderland, Ariadne’s favorite book as a child. Truth be told,
that was the only book Ariadne had ever read as a child. She believed in the Cheshire cat and the mad hatter. But mostly, she believed in Alice. She always admired Alice’s blatant nonchalance in the face of absurdity. She identified with Alice and the characters that she met on her imaginary journey. Somehow, Ariadne was convinced that the characters she read about were all very intensely real. The book served as her personal Bible through the course of her growing up. Ariadne ‘Alice’ Silver wanted to make a gift of Alice in Wonderland to herself on the eve of her big day. She had made it big in this wrong wonderland, all by herself. She wasn’t against the concept of a companion. It’s just that every guy Ariadne had the chance of knowing intimately disappointed her. They were passionate but were not mad enough. Ariadne couldn’t define this madness. She didn’t want a stark rebellious anarchist for her boyfriend. She just wanted a guy who would be genuinely genuine. That was the first symptom of madness. Ariadne didn’t like to keep a look out for her perfect match. If he had to come, he would.

  “Congratulations on your big day. Don’t let the mean daddies slow you down.”

  She read the note she wrote to herself several times before tucking the book away and switching the lights off. She had a big day to wake up to and newer challenges to face. Ariadne Silver slept to the whisky lullaby of the moon light.

  IV

  After a long dreamless sleep, Ariadne Silver woke up to a morning of freshness and commercial success. She remembered to wash and dress herself very carefully, wore the best perfume she had and spent most of her day matching diamonds with her shoes. After almost an hour’s indecision, Ariadne decided that she was ready to go sign the deeds of the new property she had bought for her third spa. The dry sun of Arizona couldn’t suck out the supple vivacity of her glistening eyes. Ariadne walked out of her apartment and into her car, in a tepid orange dress and black stilettos. Her dark eyes sighed revoltingly against the cacti-nourishing roughness of the Arizona sun. Her head swam in colors and sweat as the dusty expanse of the rugged terrain kissed the humid blue sky overhead. That was certainly not the place to be. Alice of the wrong Wonderland wanted to live in the right side of Paris, with French cheese and aromatic vineyards. She wanted to sit outside a sunny café and listen to the beautiful men and women discuss poetry and politics in their characteristic French candor. Ariadne, for some strange unknown reason had a great fascination for France. She had never been to France or read too much about it. There was something in the name; there was a ring to it. France suggested freedom and a break from inhibitions. She believed France would be as aromatic as her spa. The sound of the country’s name caused her to smell a peculiar cocktail of odors that could perhaps only be imagined, and not created. France was a symbol of her ultimate happy place. She imagined France would let her discover the madness that she craved for. She could feel a sense of peace and anarchy, a sense of order and chaos, every time France took over her brain. Ariadne wanted to shop in the best stores of Paris and get manicures fit for a diva. Her resentment of the Arizona sun got strangely mingled with an odd longing for the unseen France. This trance lasted long and was only broken by the tinkling of her cell phone.