by John Saul
“Are you looking for something?” Conrad asked as he approached, then stopped and frowned. “What’s that behind your back?”
“N-Nothing,” Risa stammered, staring at the spatters of blood on his shirt.
Conrad’s gaze flicked to the mannequin, and a slight smile came over his lips. “Ah! The picture of Alison. Doesn’t she look lovely in that dress?”
He stepped closer, reaching out as if to take the picture from her, and Risa took a step back.
Conrad’s smile faded. “She’s going to be beautiful,” he said. “Did you know that her face has the exact same bone structure as Margot’s?”
And in an instant the truth—the unimaginable truth—exploded in Risa’s mind.
She had to get Alison out of the house!
She turned toward the door, but it was too late. In two strides Conrad was next to her, his right arm curling around her neck. “I’m going to show you something, Risa,” he whispered in her ear. “Something wonderful.”
The pressure on her neck grew, and though she could still breathe, she felt herself starting to black out.
“But you have to behave,” Conrad whispered. “Do you understand?”
As her vision began to fail her, Risa managed a slight nod.
The pressure on her neck eased slightly, and Conrad began to move her toward the dressing screen.
Even if she could scream, she knew no one would hear her. The house was empty, except for Alison, who was two floors away.
Without a struggle, Risa let him walk her through the door that lay behind the screen.
28
THE PRESSURE ON RISA’S NECK EASED JUST ENOUGH THAT SHE DIDN’T black out, and Conrad’s grip on her arm kept her from falling even though her knees were buckling.
Stay calm, she told herself. Stay calm and save Alison.
Having moved her through the door behind Margot’s changing screen, he slammed it shut behind him.
Looking around, it seemed she’d sunk into a nightmare.
Everywhere she looked there were tanks filled with a greenish fluid, and objects floating in them.
Grisly objects.
Objects that looked as if they had been cut away from human corpses.
Or living human beings.
“My laboratory,” she heard Conrad say. “This is where I do all the truly important work.” His stress on the penultimate word sent a chill through her. “Interesting, aren’t they?” he said as his eyes followed her gaze to the objects in the tanks. “They don’t look like much at the moment, but wait until tomorrow.”
Risa, repeating the two words—Keep calm—over and over in her mind, tore her eyes away from the tanks. “T-Tomorrow?” she rasped, her throat raw from the pressure of Conrad’s arm.
“Alison’s surgery,” he said, still moving her through the laboratory and into the operating room, where motion-sensitive switches turned on blindingly bright overhead lights.
Risa blinked in the sudden glare, saw the operating table, an IV stand, monitors, instrument trays already laid out—everything a surgeon would need.
All of it there.
All of it ready.
She struggled to comprehend what she thought she’d heard him say.
Alison’s surgery?
What was he talking about?
Then her mind flashed back to the photograph of Alison in Margot’s dress.
Then further back, to the television special she’d watched that evening.
“No,” she whispered, barely able to hear her own choking voice.
Instead of answering her, he strong-armed her into a metal chair, then bound her arms and legs to it with surgical tape. She saw him step out into the laboratory and tap at a computer keyboard. A moment later one of the large wall-mounted monitors on the wall of the surgery room came to life.
As Conrad returned from the laboratory, Alison’s face, at least three times larger than life, appeared on the monitor.
Risa gazed at the image of her beautiful daughter.
“It’s her features,” he said. “That’s the problem—nature was not as kind to her as it should have been.”
Risa felt her blood run cold.
“Now you’ll see how God intended Alison to look.” He flicked some kind of remote control toward the computer in the laboratory and the image on the monitor began to change.
As Risa watched in growing terror, Alison’s face slowly morphed into a perfect replication of Margot Dunn.
“You see?” Conrad said, his glistening eyes fixed on the monitor. “That is what God intended, and that is what I am going to do.”
Risa’s belly churned, and for a moment she thought she might throw up.
“It’s going to be quite simple,” he went on. He pressed the remote again, and Alison’s face reappeared, this time with black ink marks around her eyes, her nose, and her lips. “And her ears, of course,” he said. “All the soft tissue. That’s the wonderful thing about Alison—her underlying bone structure is perfect. The moment I met her, I knew. It was as if I could see right through her flesh to the perfection of her bones.”
Risa struggled against the surgical tape that bound her to the chair. “No,” she whispered, her voice hoarse. “Not Alison. I’m not going to let you—”
“Let me?” Conrad cut in, wheeling around to face her, his eyes glittering as they bored into her. “You should be thanking me!”
Risa gazed up at him, no longer recognizing the man she’d married. It was as if Conrad had become someone else, someone gripped in an obsession she’d assumed was only a fading memory.
Margot.
He was consumed with her, and she was dead, and now he was going to re-create her.
And make Alison—her daughter—disappear.
Risa scanned the room, looking for a weapon.
If she could knock him out—if she could get out of the surgery and the lab and call the police—
“You’ll thank me,” Conrad said. “And so will Alison.”
“No,” Risa said again, struggling harder against her bonds. “I won’t—”
“You won’t do anything,” Conrad said, as if instructing a child. “It’s too late for that now. It’s not up to you. It’s up to me.”
Now all the doubts she’d ever felt about Conrad flooded back.
The night in Paris, when he’d called her Margot.
The shrine in the basement that no woman would ever have built to herself.
His careful seduction of Alison, until she actually wanted him to cut into her body, to make it different.
To make it beautiful.
And she’d let it happen. She—not Alison—had let it happen. She never should have married Conrad, never should have moved into his house, never should have let him so much as look at her daughter, let alone touch her.
Cut her.
Change her.
“No!” she screamed now, her guilt coalescing into pure fury. With a sudden lunge, she tore free from her bindings, her rage lending her more strength than she could have imagined. She hurled herself toward the tray of surgical instruments, reaching for a scalpel or a pair of scissors or anything else that came to hand.
Cut him!
That’s what she had to do.
Cut him, as he was going to cut Alison.
Cut him, before he could cut Alison.
Cut him, and kill him, and—
The chair, still bound to her right leg, caught on the corner of one of the cabinets, and she lost her balance. She felt herself plunging forward and threw out her arms to break her fall, and—
—Conrad’s arm was once again around her neck, and he was squeezing. Once more the blackness gathered around her, and once more she tried to force herself to stay calm, to do whatever she had to do to save Alison.
Too late.
The blackness closed in, and she felt herself slipping away.
“Alison,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry…so very sorry….”
CONRAD SWITCHED OUT the las
t of the lights in the laboratory. It had been a long, complicated day, and he could feel the exhaustion in his bones.
He needed sleep.
A good night’s sleep, given the surgery he would perform tomorrow.
A few minutes later he gently opened Alison’s bedroom door and peered inside.
A pink nightlight softly illuminated the girl’s young, elastic skin. Her breathing was slow and regular, and he knew that her strong young body would easily withstand the many grueling hours of surgery ahead.
It would be worth it.
Worth it for her, and worth it for him.
Alison Shaw would be more beautiful than she had ever imagined she could be.
And finally, Margot would once again be his.
“Tomorrow, then, my love,” he whispered.
Closing the door, Conrad Dunn went to bed.
29
ALISON FELT THE DIFFERENCE THE MOMENT SHE ENTERED THE DINING room the next morning. Somehow, it seemed larger and emptier than usual. Conrad sat at the head of the long table, and the morning sun was bright on the garden outside the French doors. But there was no sign of her mother, nor did Maria appear with her orange juice as she always had. Then, as she slipped into the chair at her usual place, she noticed that her mother’s place wasn’t set for breakfast.
“Conrad?” Her stepfather’s eyes shifted from the morning paper folded neatly in front of him. “Where’s Mom?”
“I think she must have had an early appointment. She was already gone when I came down.”
As his eyes returned to the newspaper, Alison glanced toward the kitchen. “Is Maria here?”
“She’s not coming in today—something about her mother having to go to Immigration, I think.”
Alison cocked her head. “She usually takes me to school if Mom has to work early.”
“Not a problem,” Conrad said. “I can take you.”
Alison went to the sideboard, where a pot of coffee was sitting, then went to the kitchen, found a bowl and cereal, added milk to it, and returned to the table.
Conrad pushed his newspaper aside. “Just the two of us,” he said. “Kind of nice, isn’t it?” Before she could answer, Conrad spoke again, only now he was looking at her the way he had when she was at Le Chateau, recovering from her surgery. “How are you feeling? No fever? Pain?”
“I’m fine,” she said. But instead of going back to his paper, Conrad continued to look at her, and suddenly she wanted to be out of the house.
Something, she was certain, wasn’t right.
She glanced at her watch.
“Oh, my God! I’m going to be late,” she said, though she still had almost thirty minutes before either her mother or Maria usually drove her down to school. She dug into her bowl of cereal, eating as fast as she could.
“Relax,” Conrad told her. “We have all the time in the world.”
Alison cast around in her mind for something—anything—she could use as an excuse to go to school early. “I have to go to cheerleader sign-ups this morning,” she said. “Maybe I’d better call Tasha and have her pick me up.”
“I’ll drive you,” Conrad replied. He reached for his coffee cup, then pulled his hand away. “Better not have any more of that,” he went on, his eyes fixing on Alison. “Big surgery today.”
“I’ll get my books,” she said, finishing the last of her own coffee. “Be back in a minute. Want me to meet you in the garage?”
Conrad hesitated, then smiled. “Perfect.”
Alison ran upstairs and threw her books into her backpack. She grabbed her cell phone and clipped it on, then looked in her closet for the green vest she always wore with her jeans and yellow silk tank top.
Not there.
Had Maria taken it to the cleaners?
No—her mom had borrowed it the other day when she went to lunch with Alexis.
Grabbing her backpack, she hurried down the hall to the master suite, went directly to her mother’s dressing room and began pulling open drawers until she found the vest. Pulling it on, she was about to turn off the light and head back downstairs when she saw her mother’s big Louis Vuitton bag sitting on the dresser next to the vanity.
The bag that her mother never left behind if she was working.
Never left behind, and never forgot.
Suddenly, the house seemed even emptier than when she’d gone into the dining room. A knot of fear began to tighten in her belly.
Where was her mother?
Maybe she’d just forgotten her bag.
But then when she opened the bag and looked inside, she found her mother’s cell phone, her appointment book, and her keys.
Without her keys, how had she gone? Could someone have picked her up? Alexis, maybe?
But her mother hadn’t said anything last night about an early appointment, and even if she’d had one, she would have come in this morning and said good-bye.
Wouldn’t she?
What was going on?
What had happened?
Something had happened—she was sure of it now.
Suddenly, every dark thought she’d ever had about Conrad came flooding back.
And she remembered the way he’d been looking at her.
And what he’d said:
Just the two of us…. We have all the time in the world.
What was happening? What was he up to?
Out!
She had to get out of the house and get away from Conrad, and she had to do it now.
But where could she go?
Her dad! All she had to do was call her dad and tell him to come and get her.
She turned away from the dressing room and started toward the bedroom door, fishing in her backpack. She was almost at the door when she found the phone, opened it, and speed-dialed her dad’s cell phone.
But before it even began to ring, Conrad Dunn was looming in the doorway, blocking her way.
“This isn’t the way I wanted this to go,” he said softly.
“Where’s Mom?” Alison demanded, her voice low. He moved toward her, and she backed away. “What did you do?” she yelled. “What did you do to my mother?”
Reacting to her shouts as if jolted by electricity, Conrad’s right arm shot out and his fingers closed on her wrist. He jerked her around, and the phone flew from her hand, hitting the wall four feet away and falling to the floor.
“I’ll show you,” he whispered, his voice so low and cold, the words filled her with a new terror.
“No!” she cried out, trying to jerk her arm loose from his grip. “Get away from me!”
But instead of letting go, Conrad’s arms enfolded her in a bear hug that felt as if it would squeeze the breath from her lungs, and no matter how hard she struggled, she couldn’t get even one of her hands loose to hit him or scratch him.
He pushed her against the wall, and one of his arms moved up around her neck and she felt the pressure of it.
“You need to go to sleep for a little while,” Conrad whispered in her ear. “And when you wake up, you’re going to be calm again, and I’m going to show you what’s going to happen, and you’re going to be beautiful. So beautiful…”
His words echoing in her mind, darkness swirled around the periphery of Alison’s vision, and with her terror becoming panic, she willingly gave herself over to the dark swirl.
MICHAEL SHAW WALKED OUT of the boardroom with his ears ringing, which told him his blood pressure was far past the point his doctor would call “critical.” Still, he wasn’t dead, nor was he about to take a fall for the legal team that had signed off on Tina’s special without anticipating the reaction from the TV audience. The reactions ranged from the threat of a lawsuit from a distant relative of one of the victims, who was claiming “severe trauma” due to her third cousin’s corpse being shown on television, to the threat of an injunction from the LAPD itself.
By the time the station’s owners had gathered in the boardroom, the finger-pointing had begun and the legal team, being lawyers
, were already claiming they hadn’t signed off on exactly the show that had aired.
They claimed there had been changes made.
Michael finally called a ten-minute break, if for no other reason than to let his blood pressure settle down a little. He needed fresh air, fresh coffee—the hell with his blood pressure—and a fresh shot at getting Tina Wong herself into the boardroom. Maybe between them they could convince the suits that the ratings would be worth the trouble, and the increased advertising rates would more than make up for the cost of defending against the third cousin, whoever she was.
“Coffee, please, Jane,” he said as he passed his assistant’s desk on the way to his office.
“Scott is on line one for you.”
“Got it. And find Tina Wong and tell her to be here in ten minutes. Ten, not eleven. And I’m telling her, not asking her.”
He collapsed into the squeaky old chair that should have collapsed years ago but wouldn’t quite give up the ghost, took a deep breath, and picked up the phone. “Hi,” he said.
“How’s it going?”
He took another deep breath. “Don’t ask—it’s a nightmare around here. What’s up?”
“Risa was supposed to show a house to a couple of my friends this morning, and she stood them up.”
Michael frowned. “Risa stood them up? Impossible.”
“That’s what I told them, but they say she didn’t show. And she’s not answering her cell phone, either. Any idea what might be going on?”
“Risa’s never missed an appointment in her life. And she doesn’t get sick, so they must have gotten the time or the place wrong.”
“She confirmed with them yesterday afternoon,” Scott said.
“And she’s not answering her phone? That’s not good.” He sipped at the coffee. “Let me check into it.”
“Okay. Sorry to add more to your load this morning.”
“It’s okay. I’ll call you back.”
Michael hung up and immediately dialed Risa’s cell, but it rang through to her voice mail. “Risa, it’s Michael. It’s eight-forty on Monday morning. Please call me as soon as you can.”
