Trick of the Mind

by J. S. Chapman

  She snuggled closer. “Wasn’t me.”

  “When you got off, you stood in front of the boutique, the one that sells nighties and skimpy underthings.”

  “I didn’t go out for lunch today.”

  “Did you buy that little red number you were admiring?”

  “Whoever bought that little red number ...” She licked her lips in remembrance of their lovemaking and recalled the taste of fulfillment. “... it wasn’t me.”

  “You don’t have to keep it from me, Kendra. I know everything about you.”

  The trance broke. She became keenly alert. She crutched herself on an elbow and gazed at his shaded profile. “Someone else, Joel. You mistook me for some other woman.”

  He rolled over and tucked his hands beneath his head, complacent in his superiority. “There’s only you.”

  “You’re imagining ... hell, I don’t know what you’re imagining.”

  “You admired the mannequin. Damned if she didn’t look like you.”

  “Now who’s crazy?”

  “Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “The little red number?”

  “Can’t you just drop it? I didn’t go shopping. I didn’t buy a little red number.”

  “Must be a shopping bag around here someplace.” The mattress rebounded with his departure. He prowled the room and edged around to the other side of the bed. Ambient light carved him out of the shadows. He squatted and peered beneath.

  “I’m telling you, I didn’t go to any mall.”

  “Then what’s this?” The bag crinkled to his handling. Two curious items swayed from his fingertips. Price tags fluttered like autumn leaves.

  “A belated birthday present?” she said. “For me? Some husbands buy flowers and candy. But you ...”

  “Model them for me.” He tossed them onto the bed and climbed in beside her.

  “Not my style.”

  “You bought them.”

  Her smile stiffened. “Not me. You.”

  He reached inside the shopping bag and held the receipt up to the window light. “Hard to see in the dark, but I believe ... yes, it has your name on it.”

  “You bought a gift for me that I have to pay for? How romantic.”

  “I like the color. Would you call it cherry or something else? The color of cranberries maybe?”

  She sat up and fingered the garments.

  “Go on. Try them on.” His eyes were lusty with expectation. He liked his sex games. She liked them, too. But this one felt contrived and somewhat unsavory. “Or wear nothing at all. Makes no difference to me.”

  She climbed out of bed, cut off the price tags, and slipped into the meager top and matching bikini bottoms. The little red number fit.

  His wolfish eyes skimmed over the curves of her body. “High heels? Wouldn’t be complete without.”

  She slipped on a pair of dress shoes from the closet and strutted, putting on a striptease to absent music.

  He tapped a finger to his lips. “Something missing. I know. The necklace.”

  Moments later, the choker lay cold against her chest. She struck a sensual pose and smiled broadly. His eyes lit up like firecrackers. “You see, Joel, I can’t deny you anything. Not even this tawdry display.”

  He hopped out of bed and held out an elbow. “Shall we celebrate moonlight and madness?”

  “Only if you get me smashed.”

  “You’re talking to the expert.”

  They dined by candlelight, Kendra swathed in next to nothing and Joel wearing nothing at all. They guzzled champagne, sucked up leftovers from the party, and stuffed themselves with soggy birthday cake.

  Kendra didn’t remember going to bed.

  Awakening to the chirrup of songbirds and a splitting headache, she reached for Joel. His side of the bed was empty ... except for a single red rose reposed lovingly across the pillow.

  Chapter 5

  DRESSED IN LAYERED clothing yet chilled to the bone, Kendra ran a zigzagging course around office workers, out-of-towners, students cutting class, and urbane housewives with too much time on their hands. She clutched her keys in the palm of her hand, each key protruding between matched knuckles and ready to strike should a mugger approach. It was an old habit, something seen on television: self-defense for defenseless women. The trick had come in handy years ago. She didn’t know what spooked her today.

  Though the Michigan Avenue mall was crowded with shoppers, the boutique was doing a so-so trade. The clerk snatched up the shopping bag and did a slow take on the detached price tags.

  “I purchased these yesterday,” Kendra explained. “Do you remember me?”

  “Wasn’t me,” she said, double checking the receipt. “Jennifer’s on shift. Want to talk to her?”

  Jennifer claimed to remember Kendra. “You knew exactly what you wanted. Saw it in one of our catalogs. Size eight, you said. We had two sets left. Didn’t it fit?”

  Kendra removed her sunglasses and blinked up at the security camera. “Sure it was me?”

  The shop girl shrugged. “So many people. I do remember the sale. Fifteen minutes later, sold the other size eight to a guy. Thought it was weird, the coincidence.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  “Didn’t pay much attention.”

  “I’d like to get a copy of the receipt, if it’s all right, the one with my signature.”

  She shook her head. “Armored security picks them up daily. You’d have to put a call into customer service. Something the matter? I mean, with the sale. I wouldn’t want ...”

  Kendra stuffed the items back into the shopping bag.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to return them? Exchange them for something else maybe? We’d be happy to ...”

  Kendra made her way out of the shop. When she stepped into the mall, her field of vision shattered. Distances foreshortened. Everything compressed into flatness. Floors louvered open. Skylights punched through ceilings. Iridescent paint splashed the walls.

  She pressed her forehead against the boutique’s cool picture window. Semi-transparent scenery paraded past the plate glass. Crystalline shoppers crossed translucent paths and toted see-through shopping bags. Reflected beside her in the quicksilver surface but trapped on the other side of the windowpane, a mannequin bearing an uncanny resemblance to Kendra stared back. Unmanageable tresses framed doll-like features. Nicely proportioned hips, waist, and legs begged for admiration. Agreeable breasts, tanned and flawless, hid beneath sheer lingerie the color of cranberries.

  Even if Kendra was flesh and the tailor’s dummy plastic, they could have been twins.

  A stranger joined them in the mirrored glass and fixed his stare on Kendra. It gave her a sense of permanence. At least he knew which was which.

  She swiveled on a heel and confronted him. He didn’t glance away but loafed in the middle of the aisle, an unlit cigarette sagging from thin lips. Several days’ growth of golden beard spackled his cheeks. Crescent moons lidded sleepy blue eyes. The untidy jacket covered a shirt buttoned only halfway. Shirttails fell over grubby slacks two sizes too big for his stringy build. Shoppers sent rude stares in his direction, but he ignored them and thrust a hand into his pants pocket, busying himself with a forbidden activity.

  Kendra made a hasty retreat. The throng thickened. She found safety in numbers, a false perception, since the flasher followed by a constant three yards to the rear.

  Out of breath, she arrived at the center hub and called for the elevator. The down button took the brunt of her panic, as if the repetitive action could compel the gears and pulleys, visible inside the clear Plexiglas pod, to speed up.

  The stalker positioned himself behind a protective barrier, not broaching any nearer but leaning precariously over the railing. Watery eyes shifted to the exposed elevator shaft just as two capsules soared past each other, one taking off and the other coming to a stop. Stepping back from the dizzying height, he palmed the cigarette and strutted back and forth. Though he
hadn’t made a threatening move toward her, she couldn’t shake the feeling of danger.

  The elevator arrived on a spurt of electromagnetic energy. Kendra splashed herself against the farthest clear panel. As the voyeur whisked out of sight, she remembered where she had seen him before ... standing outside the quaint Italian restaurant on Monroe Street ... and jerking off.

  On her way out of the mall, she pitched the shopping bag into a garbage bin.

  Chapter 6

  CITRUS RIPE AND distended, the sun arched across the western sky, rubbing a golden sheen onto one of the last fine days of autumn. Beneath a leaf-strewn lawn lay the remnants of summer, vivid as emeralds. Father and daughter sloshed across the turf, each immersed in private thoughts. God alone knew what was on Alan McSweeney’s mind, but Kendra was thinking about her younger brother Danny.

  Looming in the background, the three-story Queen Anne—the house of Kendra’s childhood—soared against a cathedral of ancient oak and birch trees. Fittingly and by design, Queen Anne’s lace choked the garden paths.

  Home wasn’t where the heart was but where a timpani of memories beat, some of them good and others unspeakable. While Kendra and her father were close, closer than most fathers and daughters, they never shared certain intimacies lest the scars, perpetually raw, split apart. Five bedrooms, four baths, and all the amenities of North Shore living, the century-old manor on Lakeshore Boulevard was a place for retreat but never forgetfulness.

  They followed a rock-strewn path down to a private beach and strolled along the shore. The connection between them was strong, yet they didn’t touch, not with an embrace, a handhold, or the mistaken brush of arm on arm. Like the invisible wind sweeping over the lake, an unseen current dragged them on a common course beset by cross-purposes. Bobbing on the surface of a great body of water, each clung to opposite sides of the same life raft. Though both were in danger of drowning without the aid of the other, neither reached out a helping hand. Self-interest didn’t guide them. Fear did. If one were saved, the other would be forever lost. The abnormal relationship had been forged the year Kendra turned nineteen.

  Joel walked at Mac’s right. He had found a water-washed rock and worked it in his hands, his windbreaker ballooning like a sail off his back.

  Mac said to his son-in-law, “Eddie Santana made his fortune in construction, if I remember correctly.”

  “Your memory is good, sir.” Prescription sunglasses mirrored a gold-leaf landscape. “He had a hand in one of the River North projects.”

  “I have it now. He’s connected to the mob.”

  “Never proven.”

  “The FBI arrested him three times under the Rico act.”

  “Charges never stuck.”

  “After his first wife died in a car accident, he married a perfume hawker.”

  “Sales consultant at Bloomingdale’s.”

  “Nicely put. On the evening shift.”

  “Do you know Juliana Morrissey, sir?”

  “Not personally, but word gets around. She gave him breast implants, and he gave her a condo.”

  Joel lobbed the rock into the lake.

  “You laugh because it’s comical,” Mac said. “Two short months of wedded bliss, and poor Eddie Santana turns up dead in bed of a heart attack.”

  When the McSweeneys first moved into the house, a small cottage set well back from the street stood on the adjoining property. The renters eventually moved out and when the parcel came onto the market, Mac purchased the land outright and annexed it to the Queen Anne. He sectioned off the quarter acre into a botanic showplace and toiled many hours, personally making it his special Eden. Parcels for vegetables, herbs, and tulips intermingled with cherry, maple, and dogwood trees, hedges of lilacs, rhododendrons spreading like weeds, swaths of lilies-of-the-valley, neat rows of foxglove, and blue phlox sprinkled like stardust across a windswept field.

  Presently, Emily McSweeney rambled in the garden, pottering among her vegetables and flowers. Silhouetted against a feverish sky, she deadheaded rust-colored mums as she bowed and straightened like an old black crow sifting for corn. Every now and then, she mumbled about things remembered ... or possibly forgotten. Or cackled at a private joke. Or argued with no one in particular. Or put a shading hand to her brow and peered down toward the shore. She hardly ever joined father and daughter on their beach walks. Whether it was because she understood they shared a special intimacy or whether she preferred to be alone was never established.

  “The autopsy indicated Viagra as a contributing factor,” Mac said, pursuing the same subject.

  “He died happy.” An amused smile crept up on Joel’s lips.

  “In the arms of his second true love.” No one could match Mac for his dry sense of humor. “From what I gather, his young widow wept hailstones at a very public funeral.”

  “She’s broken up over the loss.”

  “His loss. Her gain.”

  Joel chuckled silently.

  “He cut out his daughters and left everything to his bereaved widow,” Mac said. “True?”

  Joel nodded.

  “Upwards of a billion dollars, or so the stories go.”

  “An exaggeration.”

  “Hundreds of millions, in any event. And you represent the grieving widow.”

  “That’s what we’re doing now,” Joel said. “Sorting out Santana’s holdings and trusts.”

  “But his grown daughters aren’t taking it lying down the way their father did,” Mac said. “The day after the will was read, they filed suit and pressed for an investigation into his death.”

  “That’s up to the state’s attorney’s office.”

  “And the homicide division, I should think.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “But you’re prepared to fight the family’s claims.”

  “I have an obligation to my client.”

  “The late Mr. Santana and his grieving widow.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I had the pleasure of meeting Eddie Santana,” Mac said, “but not his wife. Either the first or the last. I trust you made the will airtight. Do the daughters stand a chance?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “If I were them, I’d be mad as hell. Doesn’t it bother you, robbing them of their inheritance?”

  “My client expressed other wishes.”

  “Isn’t there a moral clause, though, of what you will or won’t do on your client’s behalf?”

  “If I resign the case, another attorney will step in.”

  “That would be his burden, not yours.” Mac faced the lake straight on, his fists clasped at his back and his silver hair raked by the wind.

  Joel said, “I guess I don’t believe in divine retribution.”

  “All men eventually believe in divine retribution. Except those who meet with sudden ends. Had Santana succumbed to a prolonged illness, no doubt a priest would have been summoned and his will changed at the last minute.”

  “With all due respect, sir, I doubt it. He wasn’t a man moved by sentimentality.”

  “Or the prospect of hell?”

  “You missed your calling. You should have been a man of the cloth.”

  “Kendra, don’t you think he would have sent for a priest and an attorney, in that order?”

  Trailing a broken tree limb in the sand, she said, “He might have, Daddy, but he wouldn’t have rewritten the will.”

  “Have you met the lady in question?”

  Emily’s laughter rang out in the distance.

  “I don’t have to,” Kendra said. “I know the type.”

  “We all know what the devil looks like, I suppose,” Mac said, “even when it’s a pretty woman.”

  “Alan,” Mrs. Jellinek piped up, “you speak like a heretic.”

  Stout and pink-faced, Bernice Jellinek waddled ten respectful steps to the rear, a shadow treading at the base of Alan McSweeney’s afternoon shadow. Like the garden, she belonged to the house, along with ghosts
that slept by day and haunted by night. In public, Mac called the widow of his former partner “Mrs. Jellinek,” but in private, she was, “Birdie,” the affection in his voice anything but an oversight.

  “A heretic,” Mac said, “who shall call for a priest at his final hour.”

  “But what if you don’t have the opportunity to call for a priest?”

  “I’ll meet the same fate as the late Mr. Santana. Except my worldly goods shall be left solely to my wife for an altogether different reason.”

  “And what reason would that be?” Birdie said, goading him with a smile.

  “You know perfectly well.”

  “If you mean selflessness rather than selfishness, I quite agree.”

  “All that is well and good,” chimed in a voice chasing them down the beach. “But first you must precede your wife’s death.” Though approaching sixty, Emily was beautiful yet. With flaxen hair barely touched by gray and a nearly flawless complexion untouched by sun, she defied the years. Her season was eternal springtime.

  Mac dawdled, allowing his wife to catch up. “You, my dear, shall outlive every one of us.” He claimed his wife’s youthfulness had to do with five generations of sturdy Midwestern stock, eating sparsely of meat and heavily of fresh vegetables, walking three and four miles a day, partaking of herbs picked fresh from the garden, wearing a straw sombrero when out of doors, and living a contemplative life. Although everything he claimed was true, it didn’t account for all.

  “Kendra shall outlive us,” she said, out of breath. “If only I can find the girl.” Her watery blue eyes mesmerized the most casual of observers and made them see what she wanted them to see: a woman living in perfect harmony with the world around her. It was a lie perpetrated by a madwoman.

  “But here she is, my darling. Here is your beloved daughter, walking at my side.” Mac was older than his wife by ten years, and it showed in every line and crevice.

  “That woman? She’s not Kendra.”

  “Who is she then?”

  “A young lady come to call.” She stepped in Kendra’s way. “You leave footprints in the sand, my dear.”