“But this last message was left before you returned to the apartment? It was waiting for you?”
“Yes.”
“So it probably was her. She was out there wanting to confront you in some way, and for some reason, she might have changed her mind. Now I’m really sorry you didn’t tell me earlier. It does sound dangerous.”
He thought a moment. I could see his mind was twirling with the possibilities. He was going to insist I call the police. Why didn’t I kiss him the way I always did? Why didn’t I just keep all this to myself and deal with it myself?
“This is a lot more serious than it might seem, Pru. You shouldn’t have let it go on this long. I’m very concerned. It’s all too weird, especially if it involves another nurse at your hospital. Who knows what else she is capable of doing? She could deliberately hurt one of your patients. She could—”
“I knew you would say things like that. That was why I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“But she’s gotten to you now, and she knows where you live, and—”
I stood up. “I don’t want to go to the police and start a whole big thing, Chandler. It’s what she wants, I’m sure.”
“Stalkers can be dangerous. Who takes the time out to make all these calls for so long and then follows you? She’s intimidating you with the sex talk, too, and we’re not sure for what purpose now or when it will end.”
“I’ll end it,” I said, and went over to the answering machine. I detached it and took it to the garbage can in the kitchen.
“That doesn’t solve the problem,” he said when I dropped it into the can.
“I’m disconnecting my landline, too. I’ll inform the hospital I’m on mobile only.”
“What if she gets that number? Nothing’s sacred anymore.”
“I’ll change it.”
He shook his head. “You could just be driving her to make new contact with you, more direct contact. Besides, from what you’ve described, she’s already gone beyond making nuisance calls, Pru. I don’t think it’s merely some infatuation, something sexual, either. She’d have made it possible for you to contact her by now.” He shook his head. “No. This is more serious. She might come at you before you could defend yourself or something. I don’t like not telling the police. Later we might regret it, and that will be the first question they’ll ask. ‘Why didn’t you call for help?’ ”
“Let’s wait a little longer,” I said as firmly as I could. He was getting me to doubt myself. “Maybe if she can’t get to me, realizes I’m not going to respond, she’ll stop bothering me.”
“But considering the message she left last . . . and what she’s already done . . .” He shook his head. “This is a lot more than just bugging people on the phone for gags.” He nodded. “I think you might be right thinking it’s someone at the hospital. If it’s become revenge now, it sounds pretty sick.”
“I’m a nurse. I can handle sick.”
“Don’t joke about it, Pru. Damn. I wish you had told me when it first began. If the police didn’t take it seriously enough, I’d have used our private detective service.”
“Let’s stop talking about her. I’m sorry I brought it up. It was a mistake to upset you.”
“What? What are you saying? I’m glad you did, Pru. What happens to you is important to me, and I would hope vice versa.”
“I know. I’m not trying to diminish your concern for me. Of course you would care. I just don’t like her coming between us.”
“You talk about her like you really do know her,” he said suspiciously.
“I don’t. I swear.”
He nodded. “Nevertheless, we have to recognize that we live in a world where people just decide one day to shoot innocent strangers. We can’t ignore things like this. I want you to at least tell me anything else that occurs as soon as it does, okay? And if that name suggests someone, anything that comes to you, let me know.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry I ran from her. Next time, I’ll confront her.”
“Have you accused this other nurse, the one who made the medicine mistake, said anything that might get her to believe you suspect her of doing this now?”
“No. She’d really like that, having me make a scene at work. Please. Stop thinking about it. You’re whittling away at my courage. I don’t need more help gathering nightmares.”
“Okay, okay. We’ll talk about it later and make a better plan. Let’s go to dinner,” he said. “I wanted this to be a special night for us,” he added, practically under his breath.
“We won’t let her ruin it, then,” I said, even though I couldn’t imagine it would be the beautiful evening he had planned.
When he opened the door, he paused. “Can you describe the woman you saw, the woman you think was out there waiting for you?”
“Chandler . . . we just agreed . . .”
“Four eyes are better than two out there.”
I sighed. Now I was working harder at calming him down than I was at calming myself.
“She was about my height, I think, wearing jeans and the layered look, a light blue sweater over a blue and white blouse. Dark brown hair, I think.”
“You think?”
“I caught her under a streetlight. It might have been closer to black.”
“Fat, thin?”
“No, a nice figure. Oh, she had blue running shoes, but I didn’t see any socks.”
“So she was that close to you?”
I shrugged. “A half block or so. I do have good eyesight, Chandler.”
“Well, did she look like that nurse?”
“No, but as I said, it might be someone she put up to it. That makes sense to me, because if she did it herself and I saw her, I’d know this was all her, and I certainly wouldn’t have tried to lose her. I’d confront her. She doesn’t live in this part of LA, so she’d have no excuse for being here.”
“It’s thin, someone doing all this for so long out of professional jealousy and raising the intensity because you caught her medicine mistake? Someone that obsessed would attract more attention. We might be dealing with something completely unknown, Pru.”
“I have no reason to suspect anyone else. There’s no one from the past who would suddenly appear and go after me. Please. Stop thinking about it. I’ll find a way to end it.”
“I don’t know. Something’s not right about this.”
“No kidding.”
“Okay. When we step out, we’ll pause so you can look around carefully.”
“If we behave like paranoids, she’s won,” I said, but when we stepped out, I did pause to look up and down the street. He waited for me to say something. I shook my head, and we walked to his car. As he opened the door for me, I watched him scrutinizing every woman walking on the sidewalk and crossing the street.
“You look like a Secret Service agent, Chandler, a pretty obvious one. You’ll make her happy we’re spooked.”
He nodded, closed the door, and went around to get in.
“Maybe if she sees I’m around, she’ll get more discouraged,” he said after he got in.
“Please, please. Let’s not talk about this anymore,” I said. “Tell me about San Francisco and what you’ve done and have left to do.”
He started the car and began to describe his work as we headed for the restaurant.
I listened, but I barely heard a word.
At dinner, Chandler did try to make the evening special, but every smile, every laugh, seemed to struggle under the weight of what I had revealed. He constantly gazed around the restaurant as if he was afraid someone was near us, watching us, waiting for an opportunity to stab me or something. When I rose to go to the bathroom, he looked like he was going to follow me to the door.
“It’s all right,” I said, smiling. “I have a derringer in my purse.”
“What?”
“Joke,” I said, and left him.
I kept chastising myself for telling him anything. What made me do it?
“You keep secrets,” my moth
er once told me, “to avoid hurting someone.”
When I returned, I saw him watching me with the eyes of an Israeli Mossad agent. He had finished our bottle of wine and replaced it with a bottle of champagne chilling in a pail. It wasn’t opened. I froze. It was Dom Pérignon, the same champagne Douglas Thomas had brought me.
“You all right?” Chandler asked. “You look a little pale.”
“No, I’m fine.”
He rose quickly to pull out my chair and then sat.
“I don’t think I can drink much more, Chandler,” I said, nodding at the champagne.
For a moment, it was Douglas Thomas sitting across from me, smiling. I might have gasped. Chandler reached across the table for my hand, but I saw Douglas Thomas’s bony, prehensile fingers. I pulled my hand back.
“What’s wrong?” Chandler asked. “Pru!”
I looked at him. Douglas Thomas faded back into Chandler, and I breathed again.
“I’m sorry. I know I told you we should forget what’s been happening to me, but despite how I was before, thinking about it now angers me so much.”
“Exactly,” he said. “We’ve got to put an end to it.”
I smiled and reached for his hand. “I do love you for the way you love me, Chandler, but can we postpone that champagne?”
Disappointment flooded his face. I suspected the reason he had asked the waiter to bring it, but even he realized the timing was off now.
“Sure. Let’s just go back to your apartment. I’m not leaving you tonight,” he said, and signaled the waiter. He explained that we were not doing the champagne this time and asked for the check.
“I’m sorry, Chandler.”
“It’s all right,” he said, but I knew it wasn’t. He probably had been thinking all week of that champagne and what he was going to say. In a real way, Scarletta was ruining my life.
We were silent almost all the way back to my place. After we parked, he just sat there looking out at the street and the traffic. I did, too. He turned to me, his eyes questioning.
“I don’t see her, Chandler.”
“It can’t go on. I want to get our detective on this,” he said. “He won’t bother you, and no one will know anything. Also, I’d like you to put the answering machine back and not change your number. We want to catch her, give her a chance to make a mistake.”
I started to shake my head.
“We won’t involve the police. I promise. My guy is just an added layer of protection. We’ll bring it to an end. Okay?”
“I suspect you would do it if I agreed or not,” I said.
“Yes, but it will be a lot easier with your help.”
“Okay, but I don’t want him coming around the hospital asking anyone questions. Promise that.”
“I promise. He’s pretty good. If he did, neither of us would know anyway.”
“I’d know, and I would be very upset,” I said. “Will I meet him?”
“No. It’s better if you don’t look for him or look at him and that way warn your stalker.”
“Okay,” I said.
He pressed his hand on mine. “We’ll work this out, Pru. I promise.”
“I know.”
“You still have that port I brought back from New York?”
“It doesn’t work as shampoo, so yes.”
“Very funny,” he said, opening the car door.
Even though he tried not to make it obvious, he was looking everywhere as we headed for the building’s entrance. It was misty now, some low cloud cover. Traffic was just as heavy as ever. It seemed like no one stayed home in Los Angeles. There weren’t many pedestrians, but those who were near us seemed totally involved in themselves. Chandler held the door open for me but continued to look up and down the street. I had to wait for him to enter behind me.
Still in his protective mode, he walked up the stairs just a little ahead of me. When we reached the second floor, he paused, stopped abruptly, actually. I caught up with him, and we both looked at my door. I felt the chill move up my legs to my heart.
There was a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses lying there, the bottom wrapped in blue tissue paper. Chandler looked at me, and I shook my head and shrugged. We both approached it as if it was a land mine. He knelt and picked up the roses. There was no card, just the roses. They were fresh.
“This is really sick,” he said. “She came to your door and left this?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say it probably wasn’t my stalker.
But then I thought it probably was.
After all, I had two.
Scarletta
I WASN’T GOING to put on my mother’s nightgown, but like a child years younger, I did, because it made me feel closer to her. The sheer nightgown was perfumed with her lavender scent, a scent she claimed helped her fall asleep. I imagined how content my father was having it float to his nostrils, twirling into his mind to bring him a restful sleep while he lay there beside her, never dreaming of what would happen.
The gown was so light, so much lighter than my own, that I felt like I could float in it. My body tingled under the airy material. I turned and skipped like Peter Pan into the bathroom to prepare for bed.
When I paused and stepped back to look at myself in the mirror after brushing my teeth, I felt a very warm excitement at the sight of my perky breasts, my narrow waist, the small of my stomach, and my patch of pubic hair. No boy had yet seen me naked. I was even bashful in the locker room with my teammates.
Once again, I wondered. What would I do with Chet Palmer this Friday? What had Jackie really told him about me? Did she convince him that I was close enough of a friend to tell her intimate things about myself? I had never shared any with any other girl in school, not that my classmates, even my teammates, were dying to know things about me, especially my love life. Anyone could see that Jackie and many of my classmates made me feel so immature sometimes.
Being touched everywhere on your body, having a boy’s lips on your most private places, masturbating, experimenting with drugs and sex, alcohol and sex, all of it swirled around me daily at school, dressed in giggles, whispers, and smiles. On the one hand, the most popular girls openly bragged about their sexual relations, hooking up in the backseats of cars or in a girlfriend’s house, while other girls either listened in awe or fled. Was I one who fled? I did avoid hearing about these things. But was that because the girls made them more tempting or more frightening?
My mother had once told me that rare things have greater value and there was nothing as important and as valuable as your own body. How long could I continue to treat my body like a holy chalice before the emerging woman in me would lose patience? I couldn’t be a pretty little girl forever and ever, a girl people admired like some precious doll made to be on a shelf, touched gently and certainly with no sign of sexuality. Grow up, I told my image in the mirror. If you put yourself too high up on that pedestal, no boy will even notice you, much less reach for you. Was I ready to come off the shelf?
Maybe I should look forward to this party Friday night, I thought, and be as excited about it as Jackie was. I knew she wasn’t particularly interested in my being happy. She was quite clear about her selfish motives for inviting me. She didn’t have to tell me she didn’t pity me. She was using me, but maybe I could use her, too. Daddy had his work to distract him from facing our new tragic reality. The family was wounded, perhaps fatally. Only time would tell if we could manage any recuperation that permitted smiles and laughter, hope and pleasure again. I needed something to give me some relief, too.
I went to bed, practically forcing myself to dream about the party, imagining myself drinking forbidden things, dancing very closely with Chet, and eventually doing what Jackie had predicted and retreating to her bedroom. “Time to cross the Rubicon,” my mother would say whenever she wanted me to do something on my own. I had no doubt she didn’t mean it for something like what I was contemplating doing with Chet, but I was totally lost in the fantasy. I was going to enter th
at bedroom an almost asexual American Girl doll and emerge as a sophisticated, sexy Barbie doll.
Surely afterward there would be a different look in my eyes, the look of someone who had been there and knew the deepest secrets of being a woman. Would I walk differently, walk without hesitation, never again be intimidated by any boy’s gaze exploring my body in his imagination? I did like the idea that I could stare him down, make him blush for a change. His friends would laugh at him and ask him if he was playing with himself. I’d strut off like a conqueror.
Or was that really just a fantasy, a rationalization for doing something just to prove myself to people whose respect I really didn’t cherish deep inside? It was possible to be a victim of yourself. I think my mother was trying to teach me that. “Don’t let other people decide who you are, Scarletta.”
My dreams came and went quickly. I knew that, because not long after I fell asleep, I was woken by sensing someone beside me. The dim light from the hallway came through the now-opened bedroom door. I remembered that I had left it almost completely closed. It was the way I had my bedroom door before I went to sleep from the age of eight on, mainly because of my mother explaining that a woman should get used to her privacy as soon as she can.
“Because you are still a child, it’s permissible for you to have it slightly open if it makes you feel safer. Just know that you’re old enough now to deal with your nightmares and bad dreams. You’ll have to come to our closed door if you can’t. By now, I hope you can.”
Whether I could or not, I provided myself just a narrow slip of opening, my reassurance. It took only a moment to realize this light and silhouette wasn’t part of some dream.
Wearing only the bottoms of his pajamas, Daddy was standing there at the foot of my bed gazing at me. The slight smile on his face gave me a chill. During my short sleep, I must have pulled my blanket off. How long had he been standing there staring at me? Why wasn’t he talking as soon as he saw me awaken?
“What’s wrong?” I asked, sitting up. He didn’t answer. “Daddy?”
The smile evaporated. “I keep hearing her voice,” he said.
He sounded different, like someone talking in his sleep. I was still quite groggy. Her voice? It took me a second or two to understand what he meant. It brought a flush of heat to my face. Was I imagining it, or did I also smell a whiff of my mother’s favorite perfume when she went to dinner or an event, Chance by Chanel?
The Silhouette Girl Page 14
