Rae Hamilton gets into her one-bedroom Burbank apartment at four in the morning to find the red message light blinking on her answering machine.
She kicks off her high heels and pauses to turn on a lamp before padding over to the phone in her bare feet.
Just a moment earlier she had been exhausted from a full night of club hopping.
Now she feels renewed energy at the thought that there might be a message from her agent, calling to say someone from one of her dozens of recent auditions wanted to see her again.
Sure enough, Buddy Charles’s recorded voice greets her ears after she presses the button.
“It’s me, sugar. I wanted to be the one to tell you before you heard it somewhere else—it’ll be all over the papers in the morning. The part in that new TriStar comedy is going to Gwyneth. Cameron decided to go with a Name after all. Sorry, sugar. Something else will pan out though. Hang in there.”
There’s a double beep, meaning not just that the message has ended, but that it’s the only one.
Cameron decided to go with a Name....
She curses and savagely yanks first one, then the other of her clip-on earrings from her earlobe.
That’s how it’s always been. They’ve always wanted a Name. But not hers.
Sorry, sugar.
“What the hell kind of agent are you?” she mutters at an invisible Buddy Charles.
She’s had it with him. Everyone in the business knows that he’s antagonized one too many influential directors with his abrasive personality. For all she knows, he’s the reason she lost this latest role to a Name.
First thing tomorrow, she’s going to get rid of him, as she’s been promising herself for months, years now. She’s on a freelance basis anyway these days, having refused to renew her contract with him. He simply hasn’t helped her career lately. If anything, he’s hindered it.
So it’s settled. She’ll go on her own for a while, until she can land a decent agent. Maybe Flynn can recommend someone.
She strides back across the room to the door, which she’d left ajar in her haste to get to the answering machine.
Not a good idea in this neighborhood, in a building that doesn’t have security.
She thinks longingly of the old days, a few years back, when she was living in a rented house behind electronic gates in Pacific Palisades.
Roles had been easier to come by back then.
She likes to think it was her youth and talent that had made her more sought after men than she has been lately.
But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that her erstwhile success was primarily due to her association with me legendary Mallory Eden.
During the first year after her friend’s death, she had found herself with enough work so that she could actually be a little choosy. Nothing major had come her way—certainly no leads in blockbuster films or even decent roles in indies.
But in two big-budget movies she had played Nicole Kidman’s loyal friend, and Glenn Close’s loyal sister—thankless background roles, really, but she was working. Then she had been cast—for a few blissful weeks, until the project’s financial backing fell apart—as the suicidal war bride of Gary Sinese for a high-profile period picture, in what had promised to be a challenging, career-making role.
After that, things went downhill.
There were more bit parts with waning visibility, and then the lead as the long-suffering wife of a stand-up comedy buffoon in that quickly canceled television sitcom, and finally, her role as Rainbow Weber on Morning, Noon, and Night.
An out-of-work soap opera actress—that’s what she is now.
Just a down-and-out loser whose only value to the Hollywood-hungry media is her connection to Mallory Eden.
It isn’t fair. She’s not even dead when she’s dead, Rae thinks grimly, going into her small bedroom and turning on the bedside lamp.
Her gaze falls on a framed snapshot of Mallory on her dresser, and she feels a stab of guilt.
But then she thinks of a guy she dated briefly last year, the one who had actually seemed interested in her, until she realized that he kept telling her how much she looked like Mallory Eden. He spent their first and second dates asking her what the famous actress had really been like, and whether Rae thought she had actually killed herself.
She couldn’t get rid of the jerk, who clearly didn’t know or care who Rae Hamilton is.
Not many people ever have.
Not even her own parents, stuffy East Coast professionals who sent her to Yale, expecting her to become a doctor like her father or a lawyer like her mother. Instead, she had majored in drama.
They had always been distant toward their only child, but once she drifted from the path they had chosen for her, she might as well have fallen off the face of the earth.
She hasn’t heard from them in months. They call to check in every once in a while, ostensibly hoping to hear that she’s decided to give up on this show business foolishness, come home, become a doctor—or marry one.
She sits on the edge of the bed and peels off her black sheer stockings, then stands again and strips off the halter-top cocktail dress.
In the bathroom she removes her eye makeup, washes her face, and brushes her teeth, all the while cursing Buddy Charles for not landing her better auditions.
If only Flynn Soderland had signed her on when she’d approached him years ago. By now he could have done for her what he did for Mallory.
But he had given her some lame excuse about his client list being too full, not giving her enough credit for knowing a classic agent brush-off.
It’s a wonder she keeps in touch with him after all these years, especially now that he’s retired. Well, all that ties them together is Mallory’s ghost.
Mallory’s ghost …
She shudders at the very idea, and it isn’t the first time it’s crossed her mind.
They’d had a conversation about it once, her and Mallory. They were drinking wine up in Big Sur, lounging lazily at dusk on the porch at some remote inn, when somehow the conversation had turned to the death of Mallory’s grandmother, who had raised her.
“I used to lie in bed at night and wait for her spirit to appear to me,” Mallory had said so solemnly that Rae had burst out laughing.
“You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?” she had asked her friend.
“I don’t know, Rae. If anyone was going to come back as a ghost, it would have been Gran. She had a real flair for drama, and she used to love to sneak up on people, see them jump. She would probably enjoy going around as a ghost. But then, maybe she’s so peaceful wherever she is that she doesn’t feel the need to come back. I hope that’s the case.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want anyone’s ghost coming around to haunt me.”
“Not even if it were me?” Mallory had asked, the teasing sparkle back in her impossibly blue eyes. “You wouldn’t be afraid, would you, Rae?”
“Of a ghost? You bet I would.”
“Not if it were my ghost.”
“I’d be afraid of anyone’s ghost, Mallory. Ever see The Shining?”
“Ever see Beetlejuice? I would be a fun ghost, Rae. And I could fill you in on all the details about what’s waiting on the other side. Aren’t you curious?”
“Okay, maybe a little.”
“Well, if I die before you do, I’ll come back and fill you in. I promise I won’t spook you with chains or make stuff float around or anything. I’ll just pop in and say, ‘Hey, Rae, it’s me.’”
They had started laughing at the idea of Mallory casually dropping in on her as a ghost, and had gone on drinking their wine.
But Rae has never forgotten her friend’s promise.
And it has never ceased to disturb her.
So far, Mallory hasn’t made an appearance.
But it doesn’t mean Rae isn’t always a little on edge when she’s alone at night, waiting and wondering....
Elizabeth stretches and looks at the clock.
Nine A.M.
She’s been hunched over the green felt fabric for three hours already.
She hadn’t risen at dawn intentionally, even though she’d been concerned about not getting started on the costume yesterday.
The fact is, she hadn’t slept at all last night, and it had nothing to do with the uncomfortably humid weather and the fact that she couldn’t open her windows for whatever slight relief that might offer.
Finally, when she heard the birds starting to sing outside her window, she figured she might as well get up and get busy on Manny’s costumes.
Now, as she sets her sewing aside and goes into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, she allows her mind to wander back to Harper Smith.
He was in her thoughts throughout the restless night.
She had alternated between wishing she could see him again because she’s so attracted to him …
And being terrified that he’s the one who’s been terrorizing her all along.
After all …
He’s new in town.
He’s from the West Coast.
He was noticeably cagey when she asked him about his past.
And what about her strange feeling that she had seen him someplace before?
For some reason, she keeps thinking that it hadn’t been here in town, or recently.
She keeps thinking that it had been a long time ago, in California.
But that might just be her paranoia creeping in.
Then again, it might not.
What if the reason she recognizes him is that he’s the obsessed fan who was stalking her?
She has often wondered over the years if her attacker was someone whose face she had glimpsed in the throngs of people who were always crowding around to see her. Maybe she had talked to him, smiled at him, even signed an autograph for him, feeding his sick fantasies.
And maybe he’s Harper Smith.
The evidence points in that direction, though all of it’s circumstantial.
And she can’t quite convince herself that she has anything to fear from the man whose presence attracted rather than repelled her when they were alone together here yesterday.
Besides …
He’s a locksmith.
A locksmith wouldn’t break into someone’s house by smashing a basement window and kicking in a door.
A locksmith would know how to get in undetected.
A locksmith could probably come and go without anyone knowing he had been there, if he wanted to.
So …
If he’s not the stalker, then Harper Smith is simply a man whose mere presence aroused feelings of lust that she had long ago buried.
And Harper Smith just happens to be new in town, cagey about his past, from the West Coast....
And vaguely familiar.
Why?
She knows she should stay as far away from him as possible in the next few days, before she leaves town.
And she will leave town.
She has no choice.
Her only regret is that she won’t be able to tell Manny why she’s going, or even say good-bye.
No, that’s not her only regret.
She regrets, too, that if Harper Smith really is simply a nice, normal man—just a nice local locksmith who makes her lonely heart go pitter-patter—she will never see him again.
“Are you all done eating, Hannah?” Pamela asks the two-year-old, eyeing the untouched half-slice of peanut butter toast remaining on her plastic Barney plate.
“All done.”
“You didn’t eat your toast.”
“Hannah eat bananas.”
“I see that you ate your bananas. And you drank all your milk too. But what about your toast?”
“Hannah no like toast. Watch Elmo now?”
Pamela sighs. “All right.”
She settles her daughter in the living room in front of Sesame Street, then returns to the kitchen.
She fights the urge to go to the cupboard and get a Pop-Tart. She buys them for Frank, but finds herself sneaking them herself, even though they’re not the low-fat kind. She’s constantly hungry lately. It has to be because she’s nursing.
As soon as she weans Jason, she’ll go back to having a normal appetite.
She’ll be able to eat slimming foods like salads. Lettuce and tomatoes are off limits to nursing mothers, according to the pediatrician. Lettuce gives the baby gas through the breast milk, and tomatoes make the milk too acidic.
Pamela turns away from the cupboard, telling herself she doesn’t need to eat a Pop-Tart right now. She’ll only be angry with herself later.
A rare private moment, she realizes, sitting at the table and picking up the barely touched mug of coffee she’d poured an hour earlier. Coffee is something else she’s supposed to be avoiding while she’s breastfeeding, but one cup now and then can’t hurt.
She’d poured some for Frank too, hoping they could sit at the table together for five minutes before he left for work.
But he’d dumped his into a plastic Dunkin’ Donuts travel mug and taken it with him, saying he was late.
He had left without kissing her good-bye.
Well, he was in a hurry, she tells herself, trying not to think about the early days of their marriage, when they would eat breakfast together after making love and showering together, when he would leave her at the door with a lingering kiss.
This is what happens when you have children, Pamela decides. The romance vanishes.
But it can’t happen to everyone, can it? There must be parents out there who are still crazy about each other, who still kiss passionately and make love every night....
Every night.
Try once a year. If I’m lucky.
She clutches the mug in both hands, elbows propped on the table, pondering the problem. It can’t be as bad as it seems. Maybe she just has a touch of postpartum depression.
But you had the baby over two months ago.
So?
Is there a cap on the postpartum depression period?
Anyway …
Our marriage isn’t abnormal. We’re both just exhausted, and busy. Once things settle down…
But when will that be? When Hannah and Jason are grown and living on their own? How do other couples manage to keep the passion alive?
Pamela decides to bring up the topic at Wednesday’s play group, then just as quickly decides against it. The last thing she wants to do is admit to the other moms—all of them nearly as slim and beautiful as damned Elizabeth next door—that her sex life is less than perfect.
Elizabeth.
That’s the last thing she wants to think about.
She pictures Frank hurrying across the lawn last night, looking guilty.
And no, it hadn’t been her imagination.
He had looked guilty as sin.
He was supposed to be out there watering the grass—an intention he had suddenly announced during dinner.
“But what about the watering ban?” Pamela had asked.
“You were right this afternoon. It won’t make any difference if I give the grass a little water. It is getting pretty brown.”
And so he’d gone outside to water the grass.
And, at some point, while she was giving Jason his sponge bath or reading Hannah Good Night, Moon for the zillionth time, he had gone over to Elizabeth Baxter’s house.
She had glimpsed him through the nursery window, hurrying back to their own yard.
He’d resumed watering the grass, not coming inside for nearly another hour. When she asked what took him so long, he’d merely said, “You were right. It was really dry.”
Hmmm.
Pamela’s eyes are narrowed as she takes a sip of her coffee....
Then makes a face.
It’s cold, dammit.
Before she could drink it earlier, Jason had needed to be nursed, and then, just after she’d gotten him changed and dressed for the day, had spit up all over his outfit. By the time she put him into something clean, Hannah was up and clamoring for breakfast.
Pamela rises, sticks the coffee into the microwave, and turns it on for a minute.
While she waits for it to heat, she removes the Barney plate from Hannah’s high chair and carries it over to the trash. But instead of dumping the untouched piece of toast in, she grabs it and takes a bite.
The next thing she knows, she’s sitting at the table, finishing it off with her now-steaming coffee—and glad Frank can’t see her. She’s noticed the little disapproving glances he sends her lately whenever she eats something fattening. He hasn’t actually said anything about her weight, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t disgusted by her appearance these days.
No wonder they no longer have sex. Who wouldn’t be turned off by the quivering jellylike flesh that covers her once-slim belly, hips, and thighs?
Had there really been a time when her husband had told her, every day, how wildly attracted he was to her? He used to tell her daily that she looked great, used to buy her sexy outfits so that he could show her off, used to call her “babe.”
She thinks back to when they met, nearly five years ago at Redondo Beach.
That was Pamela’s first trip to California; she and her friend June were spending a blissful two weeks sightseeing up and down the coast.
She distinctly remembers what she had been wearing when she met the man who would become her husband. It was a red bikini. Though she had been in California for only a few days, her lean, hard body was already evenly tanned, thanks to a head start in the tanning booths back home.
Frank had struck up a conversation with her and June as they waded in the surf. It turned out he was from the East Coast too—from New Jersey. He was there on vacation, visiting his brother, Rick, who lived in Pasadena. Back home he lived with his widowed father, and he had recently been laid off from the factory where he had worked since high school graduation.
“I’ve always been a sucker for skinny, beautiful blondes,” he had told Pamela before asking her out.
Their first date was dinner at a restaurant in Marina Del Rey. Joining them were Frank’s brother, an ex-marine who had earned a medal in the Gulf War, and June, a fervent pacifist who had marched in Washington to protest it. Naturally, the two had taken an instant dislike to each other before the drinks even arrived on the table. They did their best to cut the evening short, but their bickering hadn’t dampened Pamela’s and Frank’s ardor in the least.
She slept with him that night, in his car parked outside the motel room she shared with June. It was reckless and raw, that first time, but incredibly satisfying. When Pamela returned to her room at dawn, she woke June and announced that she was going to marry Frank.
“I really hope you don’t,” June had said, “because that would mean I have to see his brother at the wedding, and I never want to lay eyes on that SOB again.”
As it turned out, Rick had been the best man and June the maid of honor a year later, and they had reluctantly called a truce in honor of the happy occasion.
Pamela and Frank had honeymooned at the Cape—misty mornings, deserted dunes, dazzling falling leaves.
They moved to an apartment in Windmere Cove, a picture-perfect seaside town only an hour away from her parents in the Boston suburbs and twenty minutes from Frank’s first place of employment, working the night shift at a toy factory in Pawtucket.
By day, he attended the police academy, pursuing his dream of entering law enforcement. She toasted him with champagne when he landed the job on the local police force. They bought the house soon afterward; Pamela got pregnant, and she fully expected to live happily ever after.
She licks a glob of peanut butter off her finger and stares off into space, wondering what happened.
How fortuitous that the Windemere Cove Public Library had chosen last week to finally leap into the nineties by acquiring two brand-new computers with on-line services that can be accessed by the public.
That little tidbit of information had appeared in Saturday’s edition of the Harbor Times. According to the librarian, Vivian Saunders, the computers would be available on a first-come, first-serve basis, although a sign-up sheet would become necessary once school is back in session next week, when, presumably, local students would be jostling one another in their eagerness to surf the Net.
But at this hour on a hot, sunny Tuesday morning in late August, the library—a historic federal-style brick building conveniently located on North Main Street between the post office and the police department—is, thankfully, all but deserted.
And luckily, the librarian is busy in the book stacks, helping an elderly, hard-of-hearing man who’s looking for an obscure book about World War I, in which he served. Neither of them seems to notice the person who scurries straight over to the computers, sliding furtively into a seat behind the one closest to the window, farthest from prying eyes.
A crumpled scrap of paper is removed from a pocket, smoothed so that the scrawled notes can be read.
A few commands are entered on the keyboard, and then a name is typed in....
B-A-X-T-E-R, E-L-I-Z-A-B-E-T-H.
Along with other pertinent information that was copied off the driver’s license that had been so conveniently left in that envelope in her desk drawer.
She had even been so thoughtful as to have left a supply of identical envelopes in the desk.
How simple it had been to jot down the necessary data from the license, then slip it into a new envelope. The ripped, original envelope had been easily disposed of later—burned so that no one would ever trace it.
As if anyone would ever have a reason to try.
“Perhaps, if you’re interested in World War One, Mr. Collins, you would be interested in learning to use one of our new computers,” the librarian is suggesting in a hushed tone as she and the elderly man emerge from the bookstacks.
Damn!
Don’t come over here now.
I need only a few minutes....
“Eh? Use one of the new whats?” asks Mr. Collins, his voice booming through the silent library.
“Computers. We just got them last week, through a special grant … you won’t believe how much information is available on the Internet.”
“The Internet? Is that what you’re talking about? What the hell would I need with the Internet? I wouldn’t even know what it was if my grandson didn’t make a mint working on some software program.”
“That’s wonderful. Then you must be curious about—”
“Do you know how old I am? Guess how old I am.”
“Um … well, if you served in the first World War, you must be … uh …”
“I’m ninety-eight years old. That’s how old I am. What does a ninety-eight-year-old man need with the Internet?”
“Well,” the librarian says feebly, “you could find out about people you used to know. You know, maybe look up your old war buddies, find out where they are today.”
“I’ll tell you where they are. They’re all dead,” says Mr. Collins. “Everyone I ever knew is dead, except my kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, and none of them want anything to do with me.”
The librarian makes a tsk-tsk sound and listens sympathetically while Mr. Collins relates his miserable existence, and how his family is just waiting for him to die so that they can inherit the old captain’s house with a water view, the house he’s lived in from the day he was born, the house that’s been in the family for two centuries. They don’t want it to live in, but to sell so it can be turned into an antique shop, like most of the others in the historic district. Or, worse yet, a bed and breakfast, so that a bunch of strangers can run roughshod over the place.
Tsk-tsk goes the librarian over and over again.
Meanwhile, the computer has come up with some fascinating information about Elizabeth Baxter.
Previous addresses, all of them in the Chicago area.
And previous arrests, all of them for drug possession—or prostitution.
But most interesting of all is a short blurb from a Chicago paper, dated six years earlier, when Elizabeth Baxter—purportedly the same Elizabeth Baxter who now lives in Windmere Cove—had been found in a fleabag hotel, dead of a drug overdose.
Brawley Johnson pops the tape into the VCR and stretches out on the bed with the remote control. The blinds are drawn against the bright midday sun, leaving him alone in the shadows.
He fast-forwards past the opening credits and the early scene showing the nerdy, bespectacled male star walking out on his fat, ugly wife to find “a real woman.”
Brawley has seen the film so many times, he can recite the dialogue.
Sometimes he does, taking the role of the male star, rewinding certain scenes so that he can repeat stimulating snatches of conversation with the youngest of the half-dozen female actresses.
Babie Love.
That’s what she called herself when she filmed this movie back in the mid-eighties, wearing a red wig and so much makeup it’s difficult to recognize her teenage face—which is rarely on camera anyway—unless you freeze the frame and study one of the few close-ups very carefully.
Even her voice was different back then—higher-pitched, with remnants of a little-girl squeal. She had barely been eighteen.
He presses play when the tape reaches her first scene. In it, the man goes to a seedy strip club and she’s one of the exotic dancers.
Brawley presses the control and watches her dance scene in slow motion, wanting to prolong the shots of her nubile young body writhing and strutting, her bare breasts jiggling provocatively, and her slightly fleshy stomach and hips still bearing the last remnants of adolescent padding.
He watches the dance three times, then fast-forwards again, past the graphic sex scene where two older female stars seduce the nerd in the alley behind the club, leaving him naked and stealing his wallet.
He presses play again for the scene where Babie Love comes along, giving him a ride in her jalopy.
The naked nerd has no place to go, so she brings him home with her, to the suburban house where she lives with her unsuspecting parents, who think she’s at cheerleading practice every night while she’s dancing.
She sneaks him up to her room, a frilly little-girl room with an eyelet-covered canopy bed.
She puts on her see-through nightie, then climbs into bed with him, running her hands over his tense body.
“It’s all right,” she tells the quaking nerd. “Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you. I just want to make you feel better.”
“But … I’m married. I have children.”
“Married men with children really, really turn me on,” she purrs.
She takes off her nightie and does a dance of seduction just for him, stopped just short of making love to him by her angry parents, who suddenly burst into her room.
Babie Love protests tearfully as her father grabs her hapless would-be lover and tosses him out of the house....
And that’s the end of Babie Love’s role in the movie.
Brawley presses stop.
He has never bothered to watch the end.
He rewinds to the point where the precocious redhead first slips the nightie over her head.
That body.
He knows every inch of it.
It had belonged to him back when she made the film.
The whole thing had been his idea. They were three months behind in the rent, and he was out day and night, busting his ass busing tables and pumping gas while she sat around the apartment, crying about her dead grandmother and talking endlessly about becoming an actress.
“You want to become an actress? Well, I got you an audition,” he had announced one night when he got home, his hands black with grease from the gas station.
“An audition?” She looked up from her copy of Premiere magazine. “For what?”
“A movie,” Brawley told her truthfully, adding that he had met the director, Jazz Taylor, just that afternoon at the service station. They got to talking as Brawley filled the gas tank of his Range Rover.
“Jazz Taylor—that sounds like it should be the name of a director. But I’ve never heard of him,” she said, not suspicious, just intrigued.
“Oh, he’s terrific. It would be a big honor to work with someone like him.”
What Brawley didn’t tell her was that it was the director’s first film—and it was porn.
She didn’t find that out even when she got the part, following a brief audition during which she was asked to dance seductively, wearing a skimpy bathing suit.
Brawley had insisted on being present at the audition.
It was he who convinced her to take off her clothes when Jazz Taylor asked her to.
“This is Hollywood—the big league,” he told her, pulling her aside for a pep talk. “You’ve got to be realistic. Every actress does nude scenes.”
So she took off the skimpy bathing suit for the director, whose careful, semileering appraisal of her nude body made even Brawley a little uncomfortable.
But when she landed the role, he took her out to dinner to celebrate.
And he was there with her, at her insistence, while she filmed it, helping to coach her performance until Taylor told him to shut up or get out.
She had ultimately acted the part like the pro that she later became—unaware, still, that the film was pornography. She didn’t realize it until months later, when she saw the finished product.
In retrospect, he is astonished at her naïveté—even considering her age at the time, and the fact that she was fresh from Nebraska.
When she discovered the truth, she was horrified, of course.
Brawley had feigned shock, telling her that no, of course he hadn’t realized what kind of production it was.
“But look at it this way,” he told her. “You didn’t do anything but dance around naked. And you made a hell of a lot of money … and there’s a lot more where that came from. Taylor’s loaded.”
“I’m never doing that again, Brawley! What’s going to happen when everyone back home sees it?”
“Don’t worry. They don’t show X-rated stuff at the Custer Creek Cinema, remember?”
“Well, what if someone—”
“Don’t worry! Even if somebody sees it, they won’t know who you are. You look completely different now.”
The red wig had been her idea—she had been experimenting with different looks back then. And on Brawley’s advice, she hadn’t used her real name on the contract or in her billing.
And the director, a shady character who wasn’t big on legal details and whose own real name wasn’t even Jazz Taylor, knew her only as Babie Love.
He hadn’t asked or seemed to care about her real name.
Cindy O’Neal.
The future Mallory Eden.
To Mallory’s dismay, the film had been released on video in the late eighties, along with dozens of other relatively obscure porn movies. But apparently no one had ever picked up on her presence. Presumably, only she and Brawley were aware that she was Babie Love.
And Jazz Taylor, wherever he is, is obviously still unaware that he’s sitting on a potential gold mine.
If the world ever discovers that Hollywood’s long-dead girl-next-door had appeared, nude and provocative, in a porn movie…
But that will remain Brawley’s little secret.
For now.
Elizabeth hesitates on the sidewalk in front of the post office. She should go in and check her mail; she hasn’t since Friday.
Friday, when the card came.
I know who you are.
Earlier, filled with trepidation, she had checked her mailbox back at home—a mailbox that is always empty except for the occasional flyer or junk mail addressed to “resident.” But she was almost startled to see that there was nothing in it today.
After all, somebody broke into the house. If it had been the stalker, then he knows where she lives. If he wants to frighten her again, to make his presence known, then he could do it by sending another card or a letter right to her home.
But …
If he knows where she lives, why would he have bothered sending something to her at the post office address in the first place?
The card had been sent from Windmere Cove sometime last week.
Is he in town now, watching her every move?
Or was the break-in a fluke, totally unrelated?
Just kids, me way Frank had said …
Someone jostles her.
She gasps, looks up to see two pudgy middle-aged women, both clad in nylon jogging suits and sneakers.
“Sorry,” one of them calls over her shoulder as they continue to race-walk by her.
Her heart is pounding and her feet seem rooted to the ground.
She can’t just stand mere in the middle of the sidewalk, scared out of her wits, obstructing pedestrian traffic all day.
Go, she tells herself. Go get the mail. It’s just mail; it can’t hurt you.
She tries not to remember the flower arrangement that hadexploded and maimed her assistant, Gretchen.
That hadn’t come through the mail, of course. The police hadn’t even been able to trace it to a florist. Nobody had a clue where it had come from or how it had arrived; mere had been so much confusion back then, so many gifts and flowers and cards from well-wishers.
Don’t think about that, Elizabeth tells herself again, but it’s all there in her mind, the sound of Gretchen’s scream intermingling with the thunderous blast; the sight of blood spattered everywhere....
Get the mail, she commands herself, before you have a nervous breakdown here on the street.
But what if …?
Well, if there’s a package waiting in her box, she won’t open it. She won’t even accept it.
If there’s a package, she’ll leave town immediately.
What about Manny’s costume?
If there’s a package, she’ll leave town immediately, but she’ll bring the fabric and sequins with her, and she’ll finish the costume on the road, and she’ll mail it to Manny with an explanation.
Except …
What explanation does one give to an eight-year-old boy upon deserting him?
“Elizabeth?”
She jumps at the sound of her name, turning to see a man standing behind her.
He’s big and tall enough to easily overpower her, and his face is partly hidden behind a pair of sunglasses.
Her impulse is to scream, to run from the stranger …
But then she realizes that it isn’t a stranger after all.
It’s Harper Smith.
Harper Smith, whose sex appeal was partly responsible for her sleepless night.
“Hi,” he says, grinning so that those familiar dimples appear on either side of his generous mouth.
And all she can think about, suddenly, is what it would be like to feel those lips on hers.
Then she manages to say “Hi,” trying to sound casual.
As though she isn’t consumed by lust.
And fear.
As though she isn’t a fugitive movie star being stalked by the psycho who forced her to fake her death five years ago.
“How did those locks work out for you?”
“Locks …? Oh, um, they … you know … they’re fine.”
“How did those locks work out. God, that was a stupid question,” he says with a slightly sheepish grin.
“Not for a locksmith.” She can’t help grinning back.
She finds herself wishing she weren’t wearing this worn pair of jeans and a simple white Gap T-shirt, and that her hair wasn’t pulled back in a casual ponytail fastened with a plain old elastic band.
“On your way to the post office?” he asks.
She nods.
“I’m just coming from there. Actually, I just sent you your bill.”
“You could have saved yourself a stamp if we’d run into each other two minutes earlier,” she tells him.
“Oh, well. It won’t break me.” He shrugs good-naturedly, then adds, “and neither will two cups of coffee at the Sailboat Cafe. What do you say?”
It takes her a moment to realize he’s asking her out, more or less.
She’s so taken aback that she can’t think of a single thing to say but “Okay.”
“I’ll wait here while you go into the post office, if you want.”
“Urn … no. No, that’s all right. I can come back later.”
She doesn’t want anything to delay this … this … whatever it is that’s happening between her and this man.
And she doesn’t want to risk letting anything ruin it. If there’s another sinister greeting card in her post office box, or a package without a return address …
Well, she doesn’t need to know about it until after.
She will allow herself this one stolen interlude with Harper Smith. A cup of coffee in the Sailboat Cafe. And that’s it.
After that he’ll be out of her life, and she’ll be leaving town....
She finds herself walking beside him along North Main Street, laughing as he jokes about the eager, bargain-hunting crowds at the sidewalk sale down the block.
How long has it been since she laughed out loud?
Years?
God, it feels good to walk down a sun-splashed street with a good-looking man at her side and the salt breeze in her hair.
She can almost forget that she’s there on borrowed time....
That someone wants her dead.
Dark thoughts keep trying to shove their way back into her mind, but for once she won’t let them intrude.
She sits at a small, round table and watches Harper go up to the counter for two coffees. He returns with a couple of shortbread cut-out cookies.
“Mmm, you have to try this,” he says after taking a big bite of one.
“No, thanks, I’m really not hun—”
“No, I mean you have to taste it.” He offers it to her, holding it right in front of her mouth, and she bites into the crumbly, butter-rich cookie before stopping to think.
About the wisdom of accepting food from a man who, though she’s instinctively all but ruled him out, could be the person who tried to kill her five years ago …
Or about the intimacy in the gesture—that he, a virtual stranger, is sharing his cookie with her, as though they’ve known each other forever, as though they’re …
Lovers.
“What do you think?”
“Excuse me?”
“Is that a great cookie, or what?”
“It is,” she says belatedly, chewing, swallowing. “It’s delicious.”
“I’ve been hooked on them ever since I moved to Windmere Cove. I come in here every day and buy a couple. Nellie won’t give me her recipe.”
“Nellie?”
“The owner—see the lady wearing the glasses and the red T-shirt, back behind the counter? That’s Nellie. I’m surprised you haven’t met her. She’s the kind of person who knows every customer by name. How long have you lived here again?”
Has she told him? She doesn’t remember.
Her guard goes up.
“A few years,” she says cautiously, “but I hardly ever come in here.”
“Well, I bet you’ll start, now that you’ve tasted that cookie. Here, take the rest of it.”
She smiles stiffly and accepts it, taking another small bite.
She has left her sunglasses on though they’re inside; if he thinks anything odd of that, he doesn’t say it.
His own sunglasses are off, and she notices that his green eyes are the color of the ocean on an overcast day. They’re honest eyes … aren’t they? Kind eyes.
Not the eyes of a murderer.
“What’s the matter?” he asks, and she realizes he’s caught her staring at him.
“Nothing,” she says quickly. “I was just thinking …”
“That I look familiar? Because I keep thinking the same thing, ever since I saw you last night. And I still can’t figure out where we’ve seen each other before.”
“Probably on the street. It’s a small town.”
“I guess,” he muses in a tone that makes it clear he isn’t quite convinced that’s the case.
And she’s reassured by that, because if he were the one who has been stalking her, he wouldn’t sit there telling her she looks familiar. He wouldn’t want her to suspect that he knows her true identity.
She realizes he’s asking her something.
“Pardon?” she says stupidly, then says, “I’m sorry. It’s not that I’m deliberately not paying attention, it’s just that I’m … I guess I’m really tired.”
“Didn’t sleep well last night?”
Her head snaps up.
How did he know that?
Oh.
Because you just told him You’re really tired, you idiot.
Relax and talk to him like a normal human being.
Well, that would be a lot easier if she were a normal human being, instead of living the life of a paranoid recluse.
“What I asked before,” Harper is saying patiently, “is what you like to do in your spare time.”
“Oh … read. And … sew. I sew....” She tries to think of something else, something that won’t be a total lie.
“So you’re not the outdoorsy type?” he asks. “Not into Rollerblades or sailing or hiking or anything?”
Long ago …
So long ago, she had enjoyed all of those things. But now . . .
“Me? No. No, I guess I’m not really the outdoorsy type. Are you?”
“I like to work out, yeah. I ski …”
“Water or snow?”
“Both.”
She nods.
“And I run a few miles every morning, to stay in shape from all these cookies.”
She smiles.
There’s a pause.
“Do you go out much?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
He gives her a slightly puzzled look, then clarifies, “You know, with friends, out dancing, or playing pool … that kind of thing.”
“Not very often.” She does her best not to sound wistful.
It’s just that the way he’s talking to her, the way a man talks to a woman when he’s interested in getting to know her …
It’s making her remember exactly what she has given up in her life. There was a time when she had friends, when she went out, when she loved to drink margaritas and flirt and dance until the wee hours. And then there were the gala events, the glitzy Hollywood fund-raisers, the premieres …
“What about the movies?”
“What about them?” she asks, startled, like he’s read her mind.
“Do you go?”
I used to star in them.
“Sure, I go....”
Just not in the past five years.
“What kind of movies do you like?”
“Oh … all kinds, I guess,” she says warily, taking a drink from the hot mug of coffee.
“Have you seen The Invasion yet?”
She shakes her head, thinking she must be the only person on earth who hasn’t seen the extraterrestrial blockbuster hit of the summer; she’s been reading about it for two months now.
“You’re kidding,” he says, but not like he’s suspicious, rather … pleasantly surprised. “How about going with me, then, Elizabeth? Later on tonight? We could—”
“I can’t,” she cuts in before she can find herself doing something absolutely insane …
Like saying yes.
Because his invitation is so incredibly tempting, and she realizes that she would like nothing more than to sit in a darkened movie theater with this man, munching popcorn and watching a movie—not at a premiere or a private screening, but at a regular movie theater with regular people. People who aren’t bitter because they weren’t cast in The Invasion, who haven’t worked with the director, who didn’t have a hand in financing the picture.
It would be so different to see a movie now that she’s no longer in the industry, such pure pleasure, but …
“Another night, then?” Harper asks, looking only slightly disappointed at her refusal.
“Why not,” she says with a shrug, sipping her coffee.
Because it’s easier than telling him the truth—that there will be no other night.
“Great. I’ll call you.”
She realizes that he has her number; she gave it to him when she first called him about changing her locks.
But it doesn’t matter. She won’t be there when he calls.
“Unless,” he says, as though he’s suddenly realized something, “you’re seeing somebody else?”
Her stomach flutters, dammit. He’s romantically interested in her, and she wishes, oh, how she wishes…
“No, I’m not seeing anybody,” she tells him because he’s waiting.
“Good. Then I’ll call you,” he repeats.
“You know,” she blurts out, shoving her chair back and bracing her hands on the table, about to stand, “I have to get going.”
“No, you don’t.” He places a hand on hers.
Taken aback, she flinches, looks at him to see whether he meant it ominously.
Because despite his kind green eyes and her own fierce attraction to him, she still can’t shake the fear that he isn’t what he seems, or the memory of the way he hedged when she asked him about his background last night.
But his grip on her hand is gentle, and he’s smiling. “Don’t go yet, Elizabeth. At least finish your coffee.”
“I really can’t. I have a lot to do.” She had told Manny she would look for him in the park, though now she desperately wants only to go home, to hide.
“Are you sure you have to go?”
“I’m positive,” she tells Harper, and adds vaguely, “We’ll get together again soon....”
But only in my restless dreams.
“Damn,” he says, releasing her hand, snapping his fingers, and shaking his head. “I’m never going to see you again, am I?”
How does he know?
A chill slips down her spine, though she realizes again that he hasn’t read her mind. He can’t know that she’s about to leave town.
“You finally meet a beautiful woman and you want to get to know her better,” he says as if to himself, “and you can’t seem to get it through your thick head that she’ s not interested.”
Elizabeth doesn’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry,” he says, looking at her. “It’s just that … I guess I read you wrong. It’s obvious you want nothing to do with me—”
“That’s not true. I—”
“Look, you don’t have to—”
“No, really,” she says, somehow unable to help herself. “It’s not that I don’t—I mean, I do want …”
She trails off, wishing he’d interrupt her again.
But this time he’s waiting for her to finish her sentence, and when she doesn’t, he prods, “You do want … what?”
“I want to see you again,” she says in a small voice, not looking at him.
“You do?”
She nods, still afraid to meet his gaze.
“Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help feeling like you really have a funny way of showing your affection.”
She smiles. “I’m sorry. Like I said, I didn’t get much sleep last night, and … I don’t know. I guess I’m just not myself.”
Truer words have never been spoken, she thinks ruefully.
“Oh, right,” he says, nodding. “The break-in. I forgot all about that. No wonder. Did the police find out who did it?”
She shakes her head.
“Are you afraid to be alone tonight? Because I can …”
Don’t tempt me, please.
“… give you some pepper spray, if that’ll help you to feel safer.”
Oh.
For a moment she had thought he was going to volunteer to come spend the night, the way Frank had.
But Frank is a neighbor, and a cop.
This man is a virtual stranger. It would hardly be appropriate for him to offer to stay at her place....
Even if the merest notion of spending the night with him has already filled her mind with disturbing images.
Images of Harper Smith naked, in her bed, of herself lying in his bare, muscular arms, feeling safe for the first time in years …
“I can tell by the look on your face that you’re not exactly turned on by the idea of pepper spray,” he comments.
She feels her cheeks grow hot. If he only knew what is turning her on …
“Well, that’s understandable. The problem with any weapon is that the attacker can turn it on you.”
Or they can surprise you so that you don’t have time to reach for your weapon, she thinks, remembering the pistol she’d had tucked in the drawer of her nightstand back in Malibu.
“Well, maybe you can get a dog,” Harper suggests.
She freezes.
A dog.
She’d had a dog once, a big, lovable black Lab named Gent.
That was short for “Gentleman.” Because that was the dog’s nature. He never jumped on the furniture or slobbered or got in the way. He was a perfect dog.
And she had come home one day to find him lying stiffly on the living room floor, his throat slit, his blood soaked into the white carpet....
“What’s the matter? You don’t like dogs?” Harper is asking.
She forces herself to look at him, to shake her head mutely.
“Personally, I love them. Anyway, listen, Elizabeth,” he says, “I know you’re probably jumpy after what happened …”
Jumpy.
The understatement of the year.
“… but chances are that whoever broke into your place yesterday won’t try it again. And even if they do, those new locks I installed are the best you can buy. Nobody’s going to be able to force their way in now.”
She finally manages to speak. “I know.”
He goes on, telling her more about the dead bolts he installed, about how they work, obviously trying to reassure her that she has nothing to worry about.
She can’t help thinking, if you only knew …
And then, for some bizarre reason, it crosses her mind suddenly that maybe she should simply …
Tell him the truth.
All of it.
About who she is, and what she’s doing here, and why she can’t let herself go out with him …
Or fall in love with him.
No. That’s impossible. You can’t tell him anything. You’ve got to get out of there....
She bites down hard on her lip to quell the crazy instinct to spill her secret, and the second he pauses in his conversation, she stands and tells him she has to go.
This time he doesn’t argue.
Just tells her he’ll give her a call, and they’ll catch that movie some night this week.
“That sounds great,” she says simply. “Thank you for the coffee. And the cookie.”
“My pleasure. I’ll be seeing you.”
No, she thinks as she heads for the door, you won’t.
And she realizes, as she hurries back down North Main toward the post office, that she’s filled with an inexplicably profound sense of loss.
The nightmare has come back.
It always does.
The woman tosses on the lumpy mattress, moaning in her sleep, trying to escape the image of the child.
Her child.
A child with large, pleading eyes …
A child with a frantic, sobbing voice …
Please don’t hurt me anymore, Mama. Please don’t hurt me. I didn’t do anything bad. Why are you hurting me?
She stands over the cowering child, her body taut with anger, her throat raw from screaming curses.
But gradually, the fury melts away, and she can’t remember why it was there in the first place.
She opens her mouth to speak, to say that she never meant to hurt anyone, especially this beautiful, vulnerable creature, her own flesh and blood.
But her voice is gone.
She can’t make a sound.
And then the tables are turning.
And she’s the one on the floor, trying to shrink into a corner as the child’s cruel fists beat down violently on her own tender flesh.
She’s the one sobbing; yet still, nothing is coming out of her mouth.
And now the child is turning away, walking away, without a backward glance.
And the woman is left behind, desperately trying to call out, to stop the child from leaving her.
Alone.
Abandoned.