by John Saul
The silence stretched.
“You hate it,” Alison finally said, her voice cracking as she realized the dress looked so bad on her that her mother couldn’t even bring herself to speak.
But then her mother was smiling.
“Hate it?” Risa repeated. “How on earth could I hate it? It’s absolutely gorgeous! I just never dreamed you’d choose something so dressy.”
“Dawn and Tasha picked it out for me,” Alison said, rising back up to her tiptoes and piling her hair up the way Crystal had told her in the store. “What do you think? Is it way too old for me?” But even before her mother answered, Alison saw the approval in her eyes.
“Given the occasion, I think it’s perfect,” Risa said. “Your friends have good taste. All we have to do is find you the right shoes and get your hair done, and you’ll be the prettiest girl at the party, which is exactly as it should be.”
A flood of relief flowed through Alison, but as she turned back to the mirror to see what her mother was visualizing, she caught sight once more of the bodice, and her relief drained away. “I don’t know,” she said, her fingers going to the loose top. “This doesn’t seem to fit quite right.” She eyed herself gloomily in the mirror. “In fact, it doesn’t fit at all.”
Risa pulled four tissues from the box on Alison’s nightstand and tucked them into the bust of the dress. “Better?” she asked.
“Oh, that’ll be great—I can hardly wait to hear what Tasha and Dawn have to say about me running around with my bra stuffed with Kleenex,” Alison said. Still, if she imagined the tissues were flesh instead of paper, the profile was definitely improved.
Echoes of the conversation she’d had that afternoon with Lynette Rudd and Marjorie Stern recurred to Risa. “Suppose it wasn’t Kleenex?” she said. “What if it was you?”
Alison pulled the tissues out of her bodice and sourly eyed the reflection of her flat chest. “Why do I think that’s not going to happen?” she asked. “I mean, given how long it’s been since I hit puberty, it’s pretty clear that I’m just not going to get anything else up here.”
Again Risa remembered the conversation earlier in the day. “Not naturally, perhaps,” she said carefully.
Alison turned to look at her mother. “What do you mean, ‘not naturally’?”
“Well, there are other ways of gaining what nature isn’t supplying,” Risa said, still not sure how Alison might react to what she was about to suggest. But her daughter beat her to it.
“You mean implants?” she asked, her eyes widening.
“Well, it’s just a thought,” Risa began. “But apparently a lot more people are doing it than I ever thought.”
“Including Tasha and Crystal,” Alison said. “And Dawn even had her lips done.”
“Really,” Risa said.
For a long moment mother and daughter simply looked at each other as if each were wondering which of them was going to be the first to step across the line that had suddenly appeared in front of them.
Finally, Risa spoke again. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to talk to Conrad about the possibilities. I mean, he’s the professional.”
Alison wasn’t quite sure she’d heard right. “You’d really let me get implants?”
“Well, we can certainly talk about it,” Risa said. “Everything is worth at least considering, isn’t it? Besides, talking about them doesn’t mean scheduling surgery.” She turned Alison around to face the mirror. “Of course, your father might not agree.”
“Dad doesn’t have to agree with everything,” Alison said, speaking to her mother’s reflection. “And he doesn’t even need to know that we’re talking about it, since talking doesn’t mean scheduling.”
“How about if I talk with Conrad later?” Risa asked. “Then he can take a look at you and give us his professional opinion.”
Alison felt a shiver go through her at the thought of Conrad Dunn seeing her topless, let alone touching her. “No,” she said. “I don’t want Conrad looking at my breasts! That’s just too weird.”
Risa rolled her eyes. “For heaven’s sake, Alison—he’s a doctor! A professional. And he’s the best there is. Who else do you think should do it?”
“I don’t know,” Alison said, rubbing the shiver from her arms. “It’s just too creepy.”
Risa sighed. “Well, at least give it some thought, all right?”
“I guess,” Alison replied, but Risa could hear the doubt in her voice. She slipped off the dress and held it up. “And I’m going to keep the dress. At least for now.”
“You should. You look fabulous in it.”
“Almost fabulous,” Alison amended archly. Then, as her mother left the room, she hung the dress in her closet, closed the door, and eyed herself in the mirror once again, twisting and turning to see her torso from every angle.
There was nothing wrong with her waist, or her buttocks, and when she rose to her toes, her legs took on a very nice shape.
She just didn’t have anything on top to balance out everything else.
She cupped her hands under her small breasts and lifted them up into mounds.
And that, she decided, is how they should look. Or even, perhaps, maybe a touch larger.
16
FOR THREE DAYS RISA HAD TRIED TO FIND THE RIGHT WAY TO BRING up the subject of Alison’s breasts with Conrad, and for three days she’d failed. She told herself that the time wasn’t quite right, or that there wasn’t enough time to discuss it, or used any one of a dozen other excuses not to have the conversation she knew she had to have. But when Alison came down to breakfast while she and Conrad were already at the table on the fourth morning, Risa knew she couldn’t put the talk off any longer.
Alison wore her usual jeans, and a tank top that clearly showed that her bra had increased by at least one cup size. She’d watched Alison’s bra look a little fuller each day, but today there was no mistaking it. Alison had bought a new bra and was filling it with something other than her breasts.
And she looked good. Even that minor change had turned her from a still flat-chested adolescent into the beginnings of what promised to soon become a curvaceous young woman.
“Lit test this morning,” Alison said after bolting down her orange juice and a fistful of multivitamins. “And I need to get to the library first, because I won’t have a chance later.” She grabbed a piece of dry toast from the buffet and quickly ate it, perching on the edge of her chair.
“Okay, honey,” Risa said. “Put a banana in your backpack for later.”
Alison grabbed one from the buffet. “Got it,” she said, then kissed her mother’s cheek, eager to get going.
“Have a nice day,” Conrad said.
“You, too,” she called over her shoulder as she went through the swinging door to the kitchen to meet Maria for her ride to school.
Conrad shook his head, smiling. “Now that was a whirlwind breakfast.”
“That was a typical teenager,” Risa corrected.
“She sure adds a lot of energy to the house.” He leaned back in his chair. “I like it.”
Risa eyed him carefully, trying to decide whether he meant it. “She can be a handful,” she said, offering him a chance to voice any doubts he might be harboring about having taken on a teenager at this stage of his life.
“I think I can handle it,” he said. “In fact, I’ve been thinking about a birthday present for her. Sixteen is a special age.”
Risa put down her coffee cup, recognizing the perfect moment to broach the subject that had been on her mind for days. “I have an idea,” she said.
“Oh?” Conrad’s brows rose with curiosity. “I was thinking a car.”
“Which I’m sure she’d love, but I’m not sure I’d love her having, at least for another year. But there’s something I think she would rather have but is too shy to tell you about.”
Conrad frowned. “What?”
Risa saw no point trying to be delicate. “Breast implants.”
“Really?
” Conrad smiled. “So you, too, have noticed a curiously quick expansion in her bra size?”
“How could I miss it?” Risa countered.
“Well, it’s a very easy fix,” Conrad replied. “Implants are nothing anymore.”
“Nothing?” Risa echoed doubtfully.
“Okay, not nothing,” Conrad agreed. “But with Alison I’d do a transaxillary incision.” When Risa only looked blank, he chuckled wryly. “That’s a small incision in her armpit. Then I create a channel, go in with an endoscope, and position a bladder exactly where I want it. Once it’s in place, I fill it with the amount of saline required, and that’s it. A little pain of course, but only a tiny scar hidden under the arm.” He glanced at the date on the morning paper folded next to his breakfast plate. “In fact, if we move reasonably quickly, she’d be pretty much healed up by the time of her party.”
Risa’s eyes widened in surprise. “That quickly?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” he assured her with a shrug. “Want me to put her on the schedule?”
Risa shifted uneasily in her chair. “It’s sort of a touchy subject.”
“What is?” Conrad frowned, then reached over to cover Risa’s hand with his. “Tell me.”
“Well, you’re her stepfather, and she’s—well, she’s feeling a little shy about having you see her breasts.”
Conrad chuckled.
“No, really,” Risa said. “I’m not kidding. So what would you think of someone else doing the procedure?”
“I’d think that’s not going to happen at all,” he said flatly. “Do you really think I’d trust anyone else with Alison’s surgery?” When Risa said nothing, he patted her hand reassuringly. “Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “Believe me, over the years, I’ve become as good at talking to teenage girls as I have at working on them. I’ll talk to Alison—maybe even tonight.”
Wondering why it had taken her three days to work up the courage to have what turned out to be a simple conversation with her husband, Risa leaned over and gave him a long, slow kiss full of what she hoped he would perceive as a promise of more to come at the end of the day.
“Maybe,” he whispered, still close enough that she could feel his warm breath on her lips, “I should make Alison’s breasts look just like yours.”
She remembered, then, what Lynette and Marjorie had said a few days earlier. “Or maybe you ought to do a little work on mine, too.”
Conrad chuckled for the second time that morning. “Work on you?” he asked. “Why? Let’s just make Alison perfect, okay?”
Though Risa said nothing, his comment stung, and kept stinging for the rest of the day.
CORINNE DUNN KNOCKED softly on her brother’s office door, then turned the knob and entered.
Conrad was quietly dictating surgery notes into a handheld microphone, so she sat on the brocade sofa next to his desk, a file folder on her lap, and waited for him to finish.
Eventually, he put down the microphone, clicked off the machine, and turned to smile at her. “And a very good morning to you,” he said. “Sorry about that—just had to finish before I lost my train of thought.”
“Like you’ve ever lost a thought in your life,” Corinne teased. She held up the folder. “The foundation’s gotten a request to fix a facial mutilation on a young woman from Bakersfield.”
Conrad’s brow rose skeptically. “Bakersfield? Since when did Bakersfield become a center of birth defects?”
“Okay, so it isn’t as heart-tugging as a cleft palate from Honduras,” she agreed, “but it’s still an interesting case. The girl is only eighteen.” She placed the file on his desk.
“What’s the nature of the mutilation?” Conrad asked, leaving the file where Corinne had placed it.
“She was attacked while jogging. Whoever attacked her slit her throat and—if you can believe this—sliced off her eyebrows.”
“Her eyebrows?” he echoed. “Now that is truly weird.” He removed the before-and-after photographs of the girl from the file, set them on his desktop, and studied them. She’d been almost beautiful at one time, with shiny black hair and perfectly arched, beautifully proportioned eyebrows that he was sure had never seen so much as a tweezer, let alone any cosmetics.
“Something happened in the middle of the attack,” Corinne explained. “Apparently, another jogger came along, and the attacker took off before he’d killed her. Neither the girl nor the other jogger got a good description, and they never caught the guy.”
Conrad studied both pictures as she spoke. While the first was obviously a high school photo, the second one had been taken by a police photographer. It showed not only the bloody mess that had been her forehead, but the gash on her neck as well. A third photograph showed the girl with poorly done, uneven ellipses of skin grafts where her eyebrows had once been. “Good God,” he muttered. “Who did this to the poor girl?”
“I told you—they never caught him.”
“I meant the surgeon—if you can call him that—who tried to repair the damage? He’d have done better just to sew her up and let someone else do the real fix later.”
“The name’s probably in the file,” Corinne replied. “The point is, can you repair the damage?” She stood and moved around behind her brother, to gaze over his shoulder at the girl’s high school picture. “And there’s something else—I’m not sure what it is.” Leaning over, she traced the girl’s brows with her forefinger. “There’s something about her that looks sort of familiar, but I can’t think what it is.”
“Let me read what her mother wrote,” Conrad said, taking the letter out of the folder and laying it over the photographs.
Corinne straightened as he began to read, and found herself looking straight into the eyes of Margot Dunn, who gazed out at her from the framed blow-up of a Vogue cover that still hung on Conrad’s office wall.
“My God,” she said. “That’s it! Her eyebrows are exactly like Margot’s.”
“What?” Conrad said, looking up at her.
Corinne pulled the school photograph from under the mother’s letter and held it up. “See? Her brows are exactly like Margot’s, before her accident.”
Conrad scowled. “I hardly think—”
“Look,” Corinne insisted, walking over to the photograph on the wall and holding the five-by-seven school photo next to it.
Conrad shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not,” he finally said. “But there are only so many variations on eyebrows.”
“And these are an exact match,” Corinne declared. She moved back to Conrad and set the photograph down on the open file. “What do you think?” she asked, her voice suddenly gentle. “Maybe you can do for this girl what you didn’t have time to do for Margot?”
Conrad leaned back in his chair, his eyes fixed on the photograph of his former wife. “You’re right,” he finally said. “I can certainly help with the botched grafts.” He turned his gaze away from the image of Margot and looked up at his sister. “But I can’t give her back those eyebrows. I can build fairly good ones, but they won’t be like Margot’s. Besides, even if they were, the girl’s bone structure isn’t right—it’s not just the shape of the features that matters, but what’s under them. And those perfect bones don’t come along more than once—or maybe twice—in a lifetime.”
“Whatever you can do has to be better than this,” Corinne said, gazing at the picture again.
She put the photos and the letter back in the file, closed it, and left her brother’s office, already composing a press release in her head. Now all she had to do was put it on paper and give Jillian Oglesby and her mother the good news.
Alone in his office, Conrad Dunn gazed once more at the picture of Margot hanging on the wall. Jillian Oglesby’s brows had, indeed, resembled Margot’s, but no matter what he did, he wouldn’t be able to replace them. Margot, after all, had been one in a million.
On the other hand, there might still be the possibility of re-creating Margot’s perfection.
Given the
right bone structure.
And, of course, the right features.
TINA WONG STRODE into the Channel 3 newsroom, mentally organizing the details of the special report on the series of killings even as she spoke to everyone she passed. By the time she hit her desk, she already knew the order of the first dozen calls to make, decided who she’d recruit to help her assemble and edit the video, and made up her mind to direct the show herself. San Jose and San Diego had both been great—the mothers of both victims had shed more tears than even she would have tried to evoke, and the stepfather of the girl in San Diego had an expression on his face when he talked about his wife’s daughter that she was sure would put him very high on the suspects list if the cops were smart enough to watch her show.
She dropped her briefcase on the floor next to her desk, logged on to the computer, and checked her interoffice e-mail while sipping her coffee.
She’d asked for one of the editing bays from noon on, and it had been approved until 5:00 A.M. tomorrow morning, when the station would need all the editing bays to put together the morning news.
Excellent.
She forwarded that e-mail as a text message to Pete Biner, the cameraman she’d tapped to help her put the footage together. Pete was not only great with the camera, but remembered every frame of every sequence he’d ever shot, and always knew exactly where to find whatever she wanted. But even with his expertise, they’d take up the entire time they had, and probably need even more over the next couple of nights.
Still, though the pressure was starting to build, the special had been taking shape in her mind ever since Caroline Fisher’s murder, and on the way to San Jose she’d sketched out the introductory graphics, and come up with a few ideas about the music and sound effects as well. If she got it right—and she was damned sure she would get it right—this special would be her ticket to a correspondent gig at the network, and she’d make sure her fingerprints were on every aspect of every second of the hour.
She was about to make her first phone call when her office door slammed open and Michael Shaw stood in the doorway holding a sheet of paper. “Wait until you see this,” he said. “You’re not going to believe it.”
