I’d barely begun to breathe again when I turned off Beverly and into the brief circular drive that led up to Cissy’s house.
Though I’d grown up within the walls of the 1920s mansion, had spent eighteen years of my life there being followed about by Sandy Beck, who made sure to erase all traces of my grubby fingers from the silk wallpaper and brush my crumbs from the chintz upholstery, the place would forever be Mother’s.
Every room had her mark upon it, from the polished marble tiles in the foyer, to the vintage chandeliers, hand-carved moldings, and eclectic mix of antiques and expensive reproductions bought at auction or occasional trips to Europe. The only rooms that didn’t bear Cissy’s stamp were my father’s study with its dark wood and leather, softened only by the artwork (including some pieces of mine), and my bedroom, where I’d been allowed to paint on the walls and had attempted my own version of Claude Monet’s Garden in Giverny.
Sometimes pulling up in front of the heavy door flanked by the whitewashed pair of terra cotta lions made me catch my breath, and not only because the place was something out of Architectural Digest; it was like taking a step into the past.
My own past.
When I walked through the halls and up the gracefully curving stairwell, I relived sensations I’d felt when I was young and not so sure of myself. I got a flutter in my belly that had seemed ever-present when I was a child, a wondering about if I’d measure up, if I’d be good enough, pretty enough, and perfect enough to make Cissy love me.
It didn’t matter that I’d come a long way from being that insecure girl who grew up in the very tall shadow of a mother who seemed to do everything right.
Maybe that was something I’d never shed, the reminder of who I’d once been, and that was okay with me. Because I appreciated the woman I’d become, and I knew I didn’t want to go back, not for anything.
Though my mother hadn’t quite given up on her dream—make that delusion—of turning me into a blue-blooded Highland Park princess, a proper heiress who never dressed off the rack and whose goal was to chair countless fund-raisers and make the annual best-dressed lists.
I’m sure she’d keep trying to lure me back “into the life” until her dying breath, and I’d keep resisting. It was an endless chess game we played, and it gave me something to constantly complain about.
And complain I did. Mostly to Malone, who’d fast learned just to nod and make sympathetic noises.
As I rang Mother’s doorbell, I thought of Miranda and how she’d done all the things—become all the things—that I hadn’t. Many of those goals my mother wished I’d accomplished for myself; heck, for us both. But how had they benefited the late Ms. DuBois in the end, huh? What had titles and fame and perfect looks gotten her?
A tag on her toe at the county morgue.
Surely no one’s aspiration.
Some of my fellow geeks at Hockaday had openly hated Miranda’s guts, enough to wish her dead way back then. Would they be happy when they heard the news? Would they feel like they had triumphed?
There were plenty of girls I hadn’t exactly liked when I was younger; the kind who’d made me feel less than I was.
Miranda had been one.
She’d never been cruel to me, nothing like that, and I’d never despised her, or even been jealous. I’d just felt a great sense of distance, as if we were from two different planets, speaking languages the other couldn’t comprehend.
As kids, we’d been thrown together by our mothers fairly often, but the togetherness never stuck. Miranda had been winning local beauty pageants when I was still finger-painting. She was the only girl I knew who wore lipstick in third grade, and she graduated from knee socks to panty hose by grade five. To this day, I didn’t don either lipstick or panty hose except on occasions as rare as alignment of all the planets in the solar system.
As a grown-up, the world I’d chosen to live in hadn’t intersected often with my old classmate’s, unless I was coerced into doing something for my mother, like attending a charity function or volunteering at a fund-raiser. If, perchance, I bumped into Miranda, we’d exchange pleasantries. But that was about it.
Before the Pretty Party at Delaney’s, it had probably been at least a year since I’d last seen her—at the “Shoe-in the New Year” bash at the Jimmy Choo store in Highland Park Village that Cissy had co-chaired to raise funds to shod the homeless—and the always flashy Ms. DuBois had looked on top of the world. I hadn’t wanted to go, but the nonprofit that would reap the dough was one whose Web site I had designed and still managed. The party hadn’t been all that bad, though I hadn’t stayed long. Miranda was just arriving as I was leaving that night, around ten o’clock.
Who could have imagined she’d be dead within twelve months?
Certainly not I.
“Andy? Are you okay?”
I hadn’t even heard the door open, and, at the sound of Sandy Beck’s worried voice, I blinked to clear my lashes of unshed tears and brushed aside my dreary thoughts.
“No,” I said, and shook my head. “I’m not.”
“What is it, honey? Don’t tell me it’s Brian again?”
We’d all had cause to worry plenty about Malone during the mess involving the Oleksiy case, and I had never been happier than when we put that behind us. But it was over and done, and we’d moved on.
“Brian’s fine,” I assured her. “He’s home, sleeping off a deposition.”
“Thank God.” She put a hand to her heart, over the pearl buttons of a gray cardigan, and I was tempted to throw my arms around her familiar shoulders and bury my face in her neck, as I’d done often enough when I was little. Sandy always smelled like roses, and usually I found the scent reassuring.
But not this morning.
I stood there like a zombie, saying nothing, my senses numbed around the edges, the shock sinking in.
“Goodness, Andy, don’t stand outside in that chilly air. You’ll catch pneumonia.”
She drew me inside and shut the door behind us. “Your mother’s up in her sitting room, finishing her toast and coffee. Go on and talk to her. She’s why you’re here, isn’t she?”
Sandy Beck had always been able to read my thoughts like a psychic. Or maybe I was just that obvious.
“I have some bad news about Miranda DuBois,” I said.
“What kind of bad news?”
“The worst,” was all I could think to muster, unable to voice the phrase, She’s dead. I think Sandy guessed pretty well what the worst was, considering my puffy eyes and hangdog expression.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” She tucked a thumb beneath my chin and gave me a good long look, before she sighed and took my hand, patting it. “If there’s anything I can do…”
“Thank you.”
Then she let me go, and I headed up the stairs, as I had so many times before; treading carefully on the Oriental runner, my weight causing each step to gently groan.
I slid my hand up the banister, the carved length of it polished smooth, glistening with the Murphy’s oil soap that I knew I’d smell on my palm long afterward.
At the top of the stairs I glanced aside to see my father’s study, and found myself giving a wave at the door, as if he still sat behind his mammoth desk and would look up, calling out, “Hey, pumpkin. How was school?”
Some things you just never forgot.
There was a time when I would have knocked before entering my mother’s sitting room, but on this particular morning I didn’t even pause at the threshold.
I walked straight in and found her perched on her settee, the newspaper settled on the cushion beside her; on the table in front of her sat a coffee filled Limoges cup atop its matching saucer. The plate that had once held her toast was bare of all but the smallest crumbs and a smear of strawberry jam.
She glimpsed my approach over the top of her reading glasses and quickly removed them, as I know how she hated to be seen wearing them.
“My God, Andrea,” she drawled, the thin curve of her
eyebrows arching. “You look like death warmed over.”
That good, huh?
“It’s Miranda, and it’s my fault. I never should have left her alone last night,” I got out before I choked up, feeling guilty all over again, and began to hiccup.
My mother swept the newspaper off the settee and plunked me down beside her. “There, there,” she said, and rubbed my back until my hiccups stopped.
Then I told her what had happened when I went to Miranda’s duplex that morning, how Anna Dean was there, awaiting the arrival of the medical examiner’s van.
“Miranda’s dead?” she repeated, and the pale slip of her forehead puckered. “Are you sure?”
Well, I hadn’t exactly seen her death pose, but I think I trusted the deputy chief of the Highland Park Police Department to know a live person from a dead one.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“I don’t believe it.” Cissy’s blue eyes went wide. “She’s as full of life as anyone I know, and far too pretty to die.”
I nearly choked, trying to swallow down that one.
Too pretty to die, huh?
I doubted that being pretty could ever stave off death the way garlic and crosses could ward off vampires, but I knew what she meant, despite the overt flippancy of her remark.
Miranda had been one of those women who’d seemed too beautiful to be real, the kind who floated through life without a care in the world. Or, at least, that’s how it looked from the outside.
But I knew better.
I had witnessed Miranda’s last few hours—well, the last few hours before her last few hours—and they’d hardly been a cakewalk.
When I told her Deputy Dean had suggested that Miranda orchestrated her own demise, Mother reared her head, her lips tight, obviously no more convinced than I. In fact, she looked downright mad.
“Anna Dean thinks Miranda DuBois killed herself? Pish posh!” Cissy sniffed, as if catching a whiff of Dollar Store cologne. “I don’t believe it for a minute. That young woman took care of herself like an Olympic athlete. You know how pageant girls are.”
“I know, I know.” Something I’d already told myself a million times over. Anyone who’d ever come up against a Texas beauty queen realized they might look like candy on the outside, but on the inside they were as hardy as a cockroach. “That’s exactly what I said to Deputy Dean, but she doesn’t agree. A neighbor heard a noise in the wee hours. When she went out for her paper later, she found Miranda’s door open and went inside.”
“Dear Lord.” Mother’s hand went to her heart. “I can’t imagine anything more awful. It’s just not right to lose someone so young and vital,” she moaned. “No child should die before her mother.”
Miranda might’ve been youthful and vital, but she was human after all, and lately life had thrown her curves that had her questioning her own worth and doubting that it amounted to much.
Was it so implausible that her anguish over the damage done by Dr. Sonja’s botched injections had triggered doubts and insecurities that were too much for her to bear? Not to mention getting booted from a club that sent her a formal “kiss off” on letterhead.
I shared my concerns about Miranda’s state of mind with my mother, though she mostly shook her head, repeating, “It would be so unlike her, really, so unlike her.”
But Cissy hadn’t watched Miranda’s emotional collapse in front of a dozen guests at Delaney Armstrong’s. If she had, she would’ve understood that Miranda’s pain had been all too real.
“She brought a gun with her, Mother, to shoot Dr. Sonja, or at least frighten her,” I reiterated, “which isn’t exactly something a rational person would do.”
“So Miranda was a smidge melodramatic? That doesn’t make her suicidal,” Cissy countered, and crossed her arms defensively. She seemed to get angrier the more I attempted to lay groundwork for the notion that Miranda might have indeed ended her own life, and I wasn’t sure if she was mad at me or at Miranda.
“Maybe she figured her life wasn’t worth living if she wasn’t perfect anymore,” I said, putting it out there, plain and simple, and Cissy’s frown deepened.
Beneath her pale shade of powder, her skin turned a hot shade of pink. “Beauty isn’t everything,” she announced, her drawl less molasses and more venom, “but for some, it’s all they’ve got. Or so they believe. And it’s too bad, isn’t it, sweet pea? God gives us all a million different ways to shine, and sometimes we just have to look a little deeper than the glitter.”
Great balls of fire.
Had my mother really said that?
I blinked at her, half expecting her to morph into Mother Teresa.
But, nope.
She hadn’t changed into anyone else.
Cissy was still Cissy.
Sometimes we just have to look a little deeper than the glitter.
Wowee kazoo.
That was quite a profound statement, coming from the Queen Bee of Dallas Society aka Her Highness of Highland Park, a woman who’d spent most of her life keeping up appearances and doing her damnedest to convince me that being a well-heeled society matron with the perfect house, perfect clothes, perfect marriage, and perfect life was the only dream worth having.
Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a smidge (but only a smidge).
Just when I thought I had Cissy nearly figured out, she proved me wrong. Then again, grief affected each of us in mysterious ways. It certainly had made her philosophical in this case.
“Miranda was such a strong-willed child, so full of energy,” my mother said quietly. “I still can’t buy the idea that she’d do something so final”—she flicked a hand across the air—“and without so much as a word to her mother. You said she didn’t even leave a note behind?”
“The police didn’t find one.” So Anna Dean had let drop.
“But Debbie and Miranda were so close, like two peas in a pod.” She sighed and stared off into space.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked, as she looked awfully glassy-eyed. “Maybe you’d like a little brandy in your coffee?”
She snapped out of her trance, making a noise of disapproval. “Heavens, Andrea, it’s barely eight-thirty in the morning. You know that I never drink before noon unless it’s mimosas with brunch.”
“I’d say all rules go out the window at times like this.”
“It’s not booze I want,” she said, and sighed the most doleful of sighs.
The silk of her robe swished as she rose and stepped around the table that held her breakfast dishes. She went over to her lovely little Louis XV desk and fiddled with the small drawers, removing a slim leather wallet, which she brought over to me. Settling beside me again, she flipped the monogrammed album open to reveal a color photograph from the predigital era.
“Do you remember that picnic?” she asked, and I nodded.
“Yes.”
It had been during spring break. Mother and Debbie Santos (then Mrs. DuBois) had taken me and Miranda to Longboat Key, where Miranda’s daddy was having a very large house built on the Gulf side of the island. We’d ventured over from our suites at The Colony to see how construction was going, taking our lunch with us, and we ended up picnicking in the middle of a great concrete pipe. Or, at least, Miranda and I had, at our mothers’ urging.
In the photo, we had our backs pressed against the curve of the pipe, our legs bent, feet braced on the other side. I looked miserable with my frizzy hair and lobster-red sunburn. I remember ants in my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Miranda, on the other hand, looked poised and cheerful and brown as a berry.
I handed the wallet back to Mother and smiled sadly. “It’s too bad we can’t go back, huh? Set Miranda on a different path entirely.”
But we couldn’t, as we both knew good and well.
If life had a Rewind button, I would have hit it many times before, whenever I’d wanted a chance to do-over. Like before I lost Daddy. If I’d just had another few moments with him, to tell him all the things I never did, to s
ay “I love you” once again.
But there was no instant replay in real life.
Once. That was it. If you screwed up, you screwed up. If you fell under the wheels of a bus, you didn’t have a cat’s nine lives to try again.
It sucked, however you cut it.
“Do you honestly think Miranda wanted to die?” my mother asked me, looking me straight in the eye.
I wanted to tell her no, to reaffirm what she herself was thinking, what I’d been thinking all morning. But I wasn’t so sure of anything anymore. I hardly knew Miranda and could only guess what had been going through her head last night. She was upset, for sure, but suicidal?
“I don’t know,” I finally confessed, sighing loudly, wishing I could reassure her. But I couldn’t. I mean, I did have doubts and questions, like about the open door, about the gun, and I remarked as much to my mother. But I hadn’t been there when “it” happened, so I would never know for sure. “I’d like to think she didn’t, but if it’s not true, then it would suggest that she was—” I stopped, swallowed down the word murdered, because I didn’t want to go there, either.
Cissy nodded, seeming to understand the conundrum. She remained silent for a moment, closing her eyes and pressing the photo album between her palms. After a while she sighed, opened her eyes and glanced at me. “How will I tell Debbie about this godawful mess? How can I tell a mother that her daughter is dead?”
Call me Ms. Redundant, but I said “I don’t know” again, because I didn’t have a clue, especially with Mrs. Santos in Brazil, probably wrapped in bandages, recuperating from whatever she’d had nipped and tucked so that she could hang onto what was left of her own beauty, her own youth. I thought of how far away she’d feel when she learned about Miranda.
She’d doubtless blame herself for not being there when Miranda had needed her, just as I had blamed myself.
“Deputy Dean said she was going to try to get ahold of Mrs. Santos somehow,” I told my mother as she sat beside me, uncommonly silent. “I’m sure she’ll find a way to track her down in Brazil and give her the news.”
“Not if I tell Debbie first.”
“You’re going to call the spa?” And force them to put Mrs. Santos on the line, whatever her condition, even if she was swathed in bandages from head to toe and sipping her three squares through a straw.
Too Pretty to Die Page 7
