by John Saul
Catching the faintly seductive note in her voice, Conrad eyed her speculatively. “Oh?” He picked up his wineglass, drained it, and started to move his own chair back.
“I need five minutes,” Risa said, smiling at him. “But don’t make me wait too long.”
“I’m liking where this is going,” Conrad said, taking her hand and kissing her fingers as she passed behind his chair.
“I’ll see you in bed,” she said, pulling her fingers free and disappearing through the dining room door.
As she hurried up the stairs, Risa felt much, much better. Tonight was going to be their real honeymoon night—the night she had imagined so often, the two of them alone, pleasing each other until they were exhausted, then falling asleep in each other’s arms just before sunrise. That it would happen here instead of in Paris was fine. In fact, the whole day was turning out fine; much finer, indeed, than she’d expected this morning. The surgery had gone every bit as well as Conrad had promised, and though Alison had gotten a little sleepy when she visited her at Le Chateau, she clearly was doing even better than he’d expected.
And since she wasn’t allowed to see Alison until nine, they could sleep in.
So she and Conrad deserved the night she was determined to give them, and though they might have had a little too much wine at dinner—Dom Perignon to begin, then a bottle of Montrachet, and a split of Chateau d’Yquem to finish—being a tiny bit tipsy never hurt when it came to making love.
Moving quickly, Risa lit all the candles she had carefully arranged in the bedroom, dimmed the lights, put a second bottle of Dom Perignon in an ice bucket, set two glasses on Conrad’s nightstand, then went into her dressing room and closed the door. The peignoir she had found hanging downstairs on one of the racks in Margot’s room fit her almost perfectly, and she dabbed on a touch of the perfume from Margot’s vanity at all her pulse points: behind her ears, behind her knees, and at her wrists.
She was just starting to brush her hair when she heard Conrad come into the bedroom. A moment later his bathroom door closed, and then she heard water running as he brushed his teeth.
She checked her makeup, brushed her own teeth, and heard the cork pop on the champagne.
Conrad—her husband—was in bed waiting for her.
With her heart pounding like a schoolgirl’s, Risa opened the door of her dressing room and made her entrance, posing seductively in front of the full-length mirror.
Then she began to move, the peignoir shimmering in the candlelight.
But instead of leaning back against the headboard to enjoy the show she was putting on, Conrad sat straight up in bed and snapped on the bedside light. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded. “Where did you get that lingerie?” He rubbed his hands over his face. “And that scent! Where did you get that perfume?”
The mood she had so carefully created shattered into a million irretrievable pieces, and she froze. Then, as Conrad gaped at her, a cold fury began to break through the veil of wine, and when she spoke, her voice was as icy as the bucket in which the champagne bottle still stood. “I thought if I wore one of Margot’s peignoirs, you might make love to me the way you did to her. Obviously, I was wrong.”
“Take it off,” Conrad said flatly. “I won’t even discuss this until you’ve changed into something else and washed off that perfume.”
Risa stood stock-still for a moment, then turned away, refusing to let him see the tears that were blinding her. Fleeing back to the dressing room, she stripped off the offending peignoir, crushed it into a wad, and hurled it in the corner. Maria could find it in the morning and throw it away for all she cared. Her fury still raging, she stepped into the shower to soap away the perfume, and scrubbed every inch of her skin a second time as if she could scour away the memory of how Conrad had been looking at her, along with the last vestiges of Margot’s scent. Stepping at last out of the shower, she dried herself, pulled on a nightgown Conrad had seen at least a dozen times before, and at last returned to the bedroom.
He had turned the light off again, and lay with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling.
Risa perched stiffly on the edge of the bed.
“Want to tell me what this is all about?” he asked, his eyes still fixed on the plaster overhead.
Risa stared down at the floor, her plan for a romantic evening in ruins. Once again she felt tears flooding her eyes, but this time there was no way of hiding her pain.
“Where did you get that stuff?” Conrad asked.
“You know damned well where,” she barked back. “It was in that shrine you’ve built for Margot downstairs.”
Conrad was silent for so long that Risa finally turned her head to make sure he’d heard her.
He was no longer looking at the ceiling.
Now he was looking at her.
And he was smiling.
Then, still smiling at her, he began to laugh. “Shrine? That’s what you think that is?”
She stared at him. Why was he smiling? And what, exactly, did he think was even faintly funny?
“Darling,” Conrad said, “that’s not a shrine! It’s the Margot Museum. She built it herself, for herself. Actually, it started out as just a place to store things—clothes she wasn’t going to wear anymore, and all the pictures of herself. But then, after the accident, it started to change. She spent more and more time down there, and had that vanity built, and it all started to get strange. It’s where she went to…I don’t know…reflect, I guess. Remember how she was before the accident…or pretend the accident hadn’t happened at all, I guess. The truth is, I’d practically forgotten about it—I haven’t been down there since she died. Since way before she died, actually.”
Risa gazed uncertainly at him. “Someone goes down there,” she finally said. “There’s no dust. None at all.”
“Maria,” Conrad said, finally sitting up and pouring the champagne into the two glasses. He handed one to her, then shook his head. “Did you really think I spend time down there?”
Risa thought about the perfectly lighted vanity for applying makeup, and all the mirrors in front of which Margot could have tried on clothes and modeled them. None of that had been designed by a man—it couldn’t have been.
It had to have been the work of a woman.
A vain, self-obsessed woman.
Suddenly, she could see it perfectly in her mind’s eye. See Margot, alone in that strange chamber, trying to recapture her past, trying to cover her scars with layer after layer of makeup, putting on dress after dress and gazing at herself in the dozens of mirrors, seeing herself as she used to be rather than as she’d become.
Conrad was telling her the truth.
A solitary tear leaked out of her right eye and landed on the bedspread.
“Come here, darling,” Conrad said, taking the glass from her hand and drawing her down onto the bed. “Margot is gone and you don’t have to compete with her memory. I should have taken that room apart a long time ago, but I’ll have it done immediately. I’m just sorry you found it at all, let alone that it upset you so much.”
“I just—” Risa began, but Conrad held a gentle finger to her lips.
“Shhh,” he said, then gently kissed her face, his lips touching her forehead, her cheeks, her eyes, and finally her lips, each kiss easing her pain and banishing her fears.
Then they were making love, and it was even better than she had imagined it in her fantasies, and the last of her doubts fell away as Conrad took the nightgown from her body and his lips moved lower, caressing every inch of her skin, arousing intense new sensations. The night stretched before her, and the last of her tears dried away, and she began to move beneath him, loving him as she’d never loved anyone before.
The night would, after all, last forever, and they would fall asleep in each other’s arms as dawn began to break.
And she would never doubt him again…
MOLLY ROBERTS FROWNED as the sound of a doorbell echoed in the living room of her lit
tle house in Alhambra, and paused in her knitting to gaze more intently at the television set. This was the third time today that she’d watched this episode of The Young and the Restless, and she didn’t remember any doorbell ringing. Could she have missed something? Had some plot point slipped by her while she concentrated on her knitting pattern?
“Move over,” she said to Weiner, the larger—and lazier—of her two dachshunds, who had been steadily encroaching on the lap robe that covered her knees, and who was now entangled in her yarn. She gave him a small and ineffectual shove, and was about to try to push him away entirely when the doorbell rang a second time.
Then, before the sound had completely died away, there was a heavy pounding on the door.
Both dogs leaped up and began barking at the door, but Weiner quickly tumbled over, his hind legs wrapped tightly in the skein of yarn, while Schnitzel leaped at the doorknob as if he intended to turn it himself.
“Wait, wait,” Molly cried out, trying to hold onto her half-finished sweater and get up without tripping over everything to get to whatever urgency had come to her door. The sweater slipped off its needle, but she let it lie in a heap on the floor, the empty needle still in her hand.
She skirted the piles of newspapers and magazines and looked out the peephole.
A nicely dressed woman, clearly in distress, with mascara running down her cheeks as if she’d been crying, stood on the porch. As Molly watched, the woman raised her hand to pound on the door yet again. “Isn’t anybody home?” she called.
“What is it?” Molly called back, not opening the door. She wasn’t dressed for company—indeed, she hadn’t dressed for company in years. Why would she when the only people who ever came to the house were delivery people who brought her groceries, and Dr. Hansen, who came whenever Weiner or Schnitzel were sick?
“Please,” the woman on the porch sobbed. “I—I’ve run over a dog….”
Molly gasped. Even her terrible fear of the world outside vanished as she actually felt the pain of the unfortunate animal that had been hit by the woman’s car. She slid the chain off, threw back two dead bolts, and opened the door. “Where is it?” she asked, doing her best to keep her own two dogs from running out of the house.
“I don’t know what happened,” the woman said. “I was just driving down the street when he suddenly darted right in front of me. I couldn’t stop!” Her eyes streaming with tears now, the woman held out a tiny—and unnaturally still—little schnauzer, as if offering it to Molly. “Is he yours?”
Molly’s hands flew to her face and she took a step back. “Oh, no. He’s not mine.” Her eyes flicked to her own dogs for an instant, both of whom had fallen silent, as if they knew something terrible had happened to one of their kind. “Is he breathing?” Then, without thinking about it, Molly spoke words she rarely uttered. “You’d better come in. I can call a vet.” Turning away from the door, she started toward the phone, Dr. Hansen’s number already snatched out of her memory. “Is he wearing a collar? Does he have a tag?”
For the first time in months another person stepped into Molly Roberts’s house, and as she heard the door close behind the woman, Molly felt the same kind of fear creeping up the back of her neck that had prevented her from leaving for the last five years.
Except it wasn’t quite the same feeling.
The fear her agoraphobia brought was a sort of general panic that made her want to get back into her house.
This time, oddly, she had the strangest feeling that she wanted to get out of the house.
But that made no sense; her house was her safe place—it had always been her safe place. Besides, what possible danger could there be? This poor woman had run over a dog and run for help to the first place she saw a light. Molly took a deep breath and reminded herself that the woman would only be there for a few minutes and then she’d go away, and she would reknit her safe space around her as carefully as she’d rebuild the sweater she was working on.
“He’s got a collar, but there’s no tag,” the woman said.
“We’d better call the police, too,” Molly said as she reached for the cordless phone that always sat on the end table next to her favorite seat on the sofa. But before her fingers closed on the phone, she heard a soft thud, the kind of sound the tiny dog would have made if the woman had dropped it on her hardwood floor.
One of her own dogs whimpered.
The phone forgotten, Molly was about to turn around to see what had happened when an arm gripped her around the throat and jerked her backward so hard she lost her balance.
“There’s a terrible odor in here,” the woman whispered into her ear, “but at least you won’t have to smell it anymore.”
A knife glinted in the light of the television set.
Molly felt a sensation of pressure slide across her throat, then felt something pouring down the front of her robe.
Realizing what was happening, she began flailing her arms, the knitting needle in her left hand lashing backward toward her attacker. She tried to jab at the woman, and finally felt the needle make contact, but it was too late. Suddenly, the mere act of breathing became far more important than trying to protect herself. Her knees weakened as she reached for something to hold onto—but there was nothing.
She fell back onto the mound of mail that had accumulated over the years, gasping, reaching for her puppies to tell them one last time that Mommy loved them.
Too late—the woman was already standing over her, the bloody knife glimmering as she clutched it.
Molly closed her eyes and felt herself slipping away as the blade plunged through the skin of her cheek, then dug deep, as if the woman was trying to dig her nose off her face. But now the pain began to fade, and a welcome darkness gathered around her, and she whispered a last good-bye, hoping her two dogs could hear her.
Then Molly Roberts was gone, unaware that her attacker had moved on from her face and was laying her belly open, quickly cutting out the treasures that lay within.
22
RISA STOPPED SHORT AS SHE WALKED INTO ALISON’S SUITE AT LE Chateau at exactly nine o’clock the next morning. Alison was sitting up eating a breakfast far larger than she herself had consumed that morning, and looking as if she was on about the fourth day of a very restful vacation, rather than less than twenty-four hours out of surgery. “Am I in the right room?” she asked.
“I feel great,” Alison said as her mother kissed her cheek. “All these bandages make me feel like I can barely breathe, but I hardly hurt at all.” She peeled off a piece of croissant, smeared it with butter and jam, and popped it into her mouth while Risa settled into a chair next to the bed. “The only thing I really hate is the IV.”
“Which will come out as soon as you’ve finished your breakfast,” Conrad said as he strode into the room, pausing to look at Alison’s purple-jacketed medical chart.
“Hello, my darling,” Risa said, rising to return his kiss as he moved on to her, then dropping back into the chair when Conrad shifted his attention to Alison.
“You’re looking good,” he said, still scanning the pages of her chart. As she told him she was feeling good, too, he closed the chart and put it on the table next to the bed, moved her breakfast tray aside, and began a quick examination, listening to her heart and her lungs, peering into her eyes, and finally opening the hospital gown to check the bandages over the small incisions he’d made under her armpits.
“Perfect,” he pronounced. “No fever, no leakage, good appetite. My ideal patient.”
For the first time, Risa was certain she saw not only respect, but a little affection as well when Alison grinned up at him. “Better late than never, right? I’m starting to wonder why I was such a wuss about this.”
“You weren’t a wuss at all,” Conrad assured her. “You were a perfectly normal almost-sixteen-year-old girl with a very healthy fear of having anyone mucking around with your body, even when they’re as good at it as I am.” Deliberately ignoring the mutual rolling of his wife’s
and stepdaughter’s eyes, he checked the level of the IV bag. “I’m going to leave the IV in until the bag is empty,” he told Alison. “Maybe another half hour or so, then Peggy will come take it out. Once that’s done, we’ll keep an eye on you for another hour, then you can get dressed to go home.”
“Home?” Alison and Risa echoed in shocked unison.
“Home,” Conrad repeated. “You’ll heal faster at home, but I do want you to stay in bed for the rest of the day and most of tomorrow, primarily to get over the effects of the anesthesia. Also, I want you to keep taking those homeopathics for another week.”
“What about the bandages?” Alison said. “How long do they stay on?”
“I’ll change them tomorrow and get them down to a reasonable size, but you’ll still have something on Monday.”
The door opened and a tall, perfectly made-up woman in a chic dove-gray suit came in, holding a pink box. “Alison?” she said.
Risa recognized her as Danielle DeLorian. But what would the head of the company that made the most expensive cosmetics in the world be doing visiting Alison?
“Hi, Danielle,” Conrad said. “You remember Risa, my wife?”
“Of course,” Danielle said, extending an elegantly manicured hand toward Risa. “And don’t get up,” she added as Risa started to rise from her chair. She held Risa’s hand for a moment, then turned to gaze appraisingly at Alison.
“This is Alison Shaw,” Conrad said, stepping back so Danielle could approach the bedside.
“It’s lovely to meet you, Alison,” she said, setting the box on the girl’s lap and lightly taking the hand that wasn’t attached to an IV. “Conrad’s been going on and on about you, and tells me you’ve got a birthday coming up that he promised you’d be ready for.” She leaned closer, dropped her voice, and winked at Alison. “Fortunately, I can actually keep the promises Conrad can only make.” She nodded toward the pink box. “I’ve brought you a supply of a salve my company makes. As soon as your bandages are off, rub this salve on the entire area, stitches and all. It will reduce swelling and bruising, make the incision heal faster, and keep scarring to an absolute minimum.” She shifted her gaze to Risa. “Most people think that’s just marketing talk, but it isn’t. The reason my products are expensive has nothing to do with the pink boxes—they cost a lot because they actually work.” She tapped the pink box. “And the public can’t even buy this one. Conrad gets all I can make.”
