Zan unlocked the door of her small office in the Design Center, the magazines under her arm. She had promised herself that she would avoid any references to Matthew that might be in the media. But as she passed the newsstand she had not been able to keep from buying two weekly celebrity magazines, the two most likely outlets for any follow-up stories. Last year on Matthew’s birthday both of them had extensive write-ups about his kidnapping.
Only last week someone had snapped her picture when she was walking to a restaurant near her home in Battery Park City. She was bitterly aware that it would probably be used in some sensational article rehashing Matthew’s abduction.
In a reflex gesture, Zan turned on the lights and took in the familiar trappings of her office, with several bolts of cloth stacked against the stark white walls, carpet samples scattered on the floor, and shelves filled with heavy books containing swatches of fabrics.
When she and Ted separated, she had started her venture as an interior designer on her own in this small office and, as satisfied clients sent her referrals, had elected to keep it that way. The antique desk with the three Edwardian chairs surrounding it was wide enough for her to sketch suggested designs for homes and rooms and lay out possible color combinations for a client’s approval.
It was here in this room that she could sometimes not think about Matthew for hours and thus force the heavy unsettled pain of losing him to retreat into her subconscious. She knew that wouldn’t be the case today.
The rest of the suite consisted of a back office barely large enough to hold a computer desk, files, a table for her inevitable coffeepot, and a small refrigerator. The clothes closet was opposite the lavatory. Josh Green, her assistant, had observed with ironic accuracy that the dimensions of closet and lavatory were exactly the same.
She had resisted Josh’s suggestions that they lease the suite next door when it became available. She wanted to keep her overhead to a minimum. That way she would be able to hire yet another private detective agency that specialized in finding lost children to look for Matthew. She had gone through what was left of the money that she had received from her parents’ modest life insurance in the first year that Matthew had been missing, spending it wildly on private investigators and psychic quacks, none of whom had turned up a shred of evidence that might lead to finding him.
She hung up her coat. The fur trimming on the collar was one more reminder that she was going to meet Ted tonight for dinner. Why does he bother? she asked herself impatiently. He blames me for letting Tiffany Shields take Matthew out to the park. But he loved Matthew passionately and no amount of blame that he could throw at her could possibly match the blame and guilt she carried herself.
To get it out of the way, she opened the celebrity magazines and scanned them quickly. As she had suspected, one of them was carrying the picture of Matthew that had been released to the media when he vanished. The caption read, “Is Matthew Carpenter still alive and celebrating his fifth birthday?”
The article ended with the quote Ted had made the day Matthew disappeared, a caution to parents about leaving their children with a young babysitter. Zan ripped out the page, crumpled it, and threw both magazines in the wastebasket. Then wondering why she had subjected herself to looking for this kind of article, she hurried to the big desk and settled in a chair.
For the hundredth time in the past few weeks she unrolled the drawings she was going to submit to Kevin Wilson, architect and part owner of the thirty-four-story apartment building that overlooked the new walkway bordering the Hudson River on the Lower West Side. If she did get the job of furnishing three model apartments, it would not only be a major breakthrough for her, it would be her first successful toe-to-toe with Bartley Longe.
It still was incomprehensible to her that the employer who had so valued her while she was his assistant had so utterly turned on her. When she first began to work for him nine years ago, right after she graduated from FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology, she had eagerly embraced the demanding schedule and put up with his volatile temper because she knew she was learning a lot from him. Divorced, then in his early forties, Bartley was very much a man about town. He had always been extremely difficult, but it was when he turned his attention to her and she made it clear that she was not interested in an involvement that he had begun to make her life miserable with his biting sarcasm and endless criticism.
I kept putting off going to see Mom and Dad who were living in Rome, Zan thought. Bartley would get furious if I said I needed a couple of weeks off. I delayed that trip for six months. Then when I finally told him I was going, whether he liked it or not, it was too late.
She had been in the airport in Rome when the car her father was driving to meet her had crashed into a tree, killing him and her mother instantly. An autopsy showed that her father had suffered a heart attack at the wheel.
Don’t think about them today, she warned herself. Concentrate on the model rooms. Bartley will be submitting his plans. I know the way he thinks. I’ll beat him at his own game.
Bartley would have undoubtedly created designs for both a traditional and an ultramodern décor and one that combined elements of both. She made herself concentrate to see if there were any better way she could find to improve the sketches and color samples she would be offering.
As though it mattered. As though anything mattered except Matthew.
She heard a key turn in the door. Josh was there. Her assistant was also a graduate of FIT. Twenty-five years old, smart, looking more like a college kid than a gifted interior designer, Josh had become something of a younger brother to her. It almost helped that he had not been with her when Matthew disappeared. Somehow she and Josh just clicked.
But today the expression on his face made Zan realize that the concern she was seeing was different. Josh began without a greeting, “Zan, I stayed here last night catching up on the monthly statements. I didn’t want to call you because you said you were going to take a sleeping pill. But, Zan, why did you buy a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires for next Wednesday?”