Hide Your Eyes

by Alison Gaylin

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1 - Squad Watery

  Chapter 2 - Strangers Are Danger

  Chapter 3 - Worked Up

  Chapter 4 - Sailor Knots

  Chapter 5 - Magic Mirrors

  Chapter 6 - Verbal Judo

  Chapter 7 - Two Hours Late

  Chapter 8 - Another Round

  Chapter 9 - Ariel’s Grave

  Chapter 10 - Black Box

  Chapter 11 - I’ll Wait Here, Butterfly

  Chapter 12 - You Shook Me All Night Long

  Chapter 13 - Area Unsafe

  Chapter 14 - Souvenir Bruise

  Chapter 15 - Intaglio

  Chapter 16 - The Last Laugh

  Epilogue

  Teaser chapter

  “Crack up along with Alison Gaylin’s protagonist in this bold take on the thriller. This is not your standard deadly serious crawl past slimy alleyways—nope, it’s a headlong rush into the muck and panic, in cute boots.... Welcome to a fresh new talent.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Perri O’Shaughnessy

  Cold Call

  The phone rang. A voice floated back—a thin whisper, barely audible. “Samantha. They’re best when they’re little.”

  “Who is this?” Of course I knew who it was. By now I knew.

  “More corpses, then little you.” The whisper was genderless, but strong, like an icy wind.

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Have you ever touched a corpse’s skin? It’s cold and stiff. Perfect.”

  “I said—”

  “Soon you’ll feel like that. Touch your face.”

  Suddenly, my whole body felt deeply, painfully cold....

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, March 2005

  Copyright © Alison Sloane Gaylin, 2005

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-49817-0

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To my mother, Beverly LeBov Sloane, and in loving memory of Bob Sloane, my dad

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First of all, I’d like to thank my agent Deborah Schneider for her enthusiasm and great ideas. And everyone at NAL—particularly Ellen Edwards, the shockingly kind, smart and sane editor of this book, whom I’m so happy to know.

  I’ve also been fortunate to count as friends some truly talented writers who’ve given me great support and advice: Marlene Adelstein, Abby Thomas, Sharyn Kolberg (who said, “Why not make her a preschool teacher?”), Val Wachs, Richard Hoffman, Kath O’Donnel—not to mention James Conrad and Paul Leone, who’ve been giving me love, laughs and vodka drinks for the better part of two decades.

  Also, the Tuesday Night Babes, Cindy Chastain and Adam Levy, John Burger and all the other dear friends whose stories and boyfriends’ names I’ve ripped off.

  I’d like to thank the brave men and women of NYPD’s Sixth Precinct. (Which really does have a nice bomb squad sign.)

  And most of all, I’d like to thank my husband, Mike Gaylin, for absolutely everything.

  PROLOGUE

  Your Spiritual Lifeboat

  “I’d kill for publicity like yours,” said Shell Clarion yesterday morning. Shell has said this many times within the past month, but I’ve never responded because it annoys me in so many ways.

  First of all, there’s the tone: I’d kill for publicity like yours, as if she were talking about metabolism or pore size.

  The truth is, when you’re in the papers, everybody stares at you. You can’t buy things like condoms or facial depilatory cream. And you can forget all about spitting, or saying “fuck you” to a bike messenger who nearly knocks you unconscious, or doing anything even remotely unphotogenic, because you will be noticed and it will make Page 6 of the New York Post under some self-fulfilling headline like “Is the Pressure Getting to Her?” and then you’ll be even more paranoid than you were to begin with.

  There’s also the unspoken implication that I should be doing something with this publicity—writing a book, for instance. I don’t want to write a book. I want to teach prekindergarten and work in the box office of an off-Broadway theater. I’ve been doing both for years, and neither requires a spokesperson.

  Most important, there’s the fact that I did kill for publicity like mine, and if Shell honestly wants a bunch of cameras shoved in her face when she’s buying tampons at Rite Aid, all she needs to do is kill someone too. But she has to understand this first: No amount of publicity can make up for the dreams you have, every night, after you take someone’s life.

  Of course, I didn’t tell this to Shell, because she is an aspiring soap opera actress who chose the name of Shell Clarion, and you don’t want to discuss existential pain with somebody like that. So instead I said, “I bet if I punched you in the face, we could both make the six o’clock news.” Worked pretty good. Wish I’d said it earlier.

  My name is Samantha Leiffer. Even before the killing, the last name sounded familiar to people because of my mother, Sydney Stark-Leiffer, self-help author and lover of publicity.

  In her latest book, Your Spiritual Lifeboat, Sydney talks about the simple ways we can all stay afloat in “the sometimes placid, sometimes roiling sea called living.” Meditation or prayer is the life vest—“the puncture-proof floatation device that you wear close to your heart.” The planks of the lifeboat, described in the following fourteen chapters, include self-education, exercise, caree
r fulfillment, family, laughter and friendship. The rudder—the thing that gives the boat direction—is love.

  Sydney’s sold about a trillion of these books, so I hate to disagree with her, but my lifeboat has always been constructed differently than that. Until recently, it consisted of two planks getting tossed around in a choppy ocean, with me lashed to the top. The planks were my two jobs. Love was the school of hungry sharks circling just below the surface. Forget about the life vest; the sharks would swallow it whole.

  The odd part is, love was what brought me to New York in the first place. I’d met Nate during my senior year of college when I stage managed King Lear and he played Edmund the Bastard. He was so freakishly beautiful, Nate. A shimmering blond museum piece, with brains and talent and an ass you could rest a full martini on, and he claimed to love me. I guess I’m attractive, but not like Nate. Nate literally caused traffic accidents.

  I’d often wake up in the middle of the night and stare at his closed eyes—almond shaped, with thick, honey-colored lashes—and wonder, What is wrong with him?

  Turned out there was something wrong with Nate—or, at least, with Nate and me. I found out after I’d followed him to New York and taken the job at the box office and learned, through a series of cryptic answering machine messages and a bouquet of irises on the doormat, that he was screwing his commercial agent, Susan, every day after I left for work, and his theatrical agent, Gregory, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings, when he was supposed to be at his Method class.

  Through my mother’s most recent ex-husband, a real estate developer, I found a decent-sized, lower Chelsea studio on the twelfth floor of a prewar building, overlooking an airshaft but rent stabilized. Then I called a furniture rental place called Rent 2 Own and ordered a roomful of blond wood and beige cushions. The idea behind that decision was: light, modern, very temporary. Yet I wound up renting the stuff so long I owned it, and found myself stuck with an apartment that looked like a dentist’s waiting room.

  Still, the place was convenient. Only ten street blocks north of the Space, which is the theater where I work; an additional three avenue blocks east of the Hudson River, where I like to take walks; five street blocks south and two avenue blocks west of Sunny Side Preschool, where I began teaching a year after the breakup, when I decided my lifeboat needed a sturdier, more buoyant plank.

  Unconsciously, I’d arranged my life in a tight, safe circle in which even subways were unnecessary. I had my kids to keep me company from eight ’til noon; my aspiring actor coworkers at the box office to entertain me from two ’til curtain. Then I had a microwavable dinner on my blond wood dinette in front of the Shopping Channel, and bed.

  My mother said I wasn’t realizing my true potential. “Who moves to New York City to teach nursery school?” she’d ask over the phone from L.A. “Who goes to Stanford to work in a box office?”

  I don’t know, Mom, I’d want to reply. Who gets divorced three times in six years and then writes a chapter called “Love Is the Rudder”?

  Mainly, I was happy—the kind of muted happy that you don’t notice at the time, but see clearly after it’s gone.

  There are seven people, including the manager and me, who work in the box office of the Space. That’s about six too many. But in a textbook case of putting the cart before the horse, the rich owner believes a busy box office attracts big ticket sales. Or so she says. I think it’s a tax scam.

  Before I tell this story, I should list the names of my box office coworkers. The kids at Sunny Side have normal, human names like Daniel Klein and Nancy Yu. When I introduce them, you won’t go, “What?” and stop paying attention to the story in order to digest the syllables. The Space staff, though—aspiring actors—have the most blatantly changed names this side of the porn industry: Besides Shell Clarion, there’s En Henry, Argent Devereaux, Yale St. Germaine and Hermyn. Hermyn is a woman—a feminist performance artist and the only person I’ve ever met with just one name. Each of us has a cubbyhole near the will-call window, for phone messages, mail and notes from visitors. On top of each cubbyhole, there’s a piece of masking tape with our initials on it. Hermyn’s just says “H.”

  Until last month, Hermyn never spoke. Not a word. She’d taken a three-year vow of silence in order to shore up vocal power for Inanimate Womyn, a one-person show in which she mutated her voice into a whip, a brick and a feather.

  My other coworkers thrill to the sound of their own voices. That includes my best friend Yale St. Germaine, but I like the sound of his voice too.

  When the rest of them have been sniping and singing and pontificating so much that it seems they’ve stolen all the air out of the room, Yale invites me outside for cigarette breaks. Even though he knows I don’t smoke. Even though everyone knows I don’t smoke. “How about some secondhand carcinogens?” he says. And I run.

  Life would’ve been so different had I chosen to not smoke with Yale on that overcast day in February when I took a walk to the Hudson River instead.

  I still wonder what made me stop at that ugly, abandoned construction site in the first place, let alone stay long enough to see what I did. Initially, I assumed it was boredom, or PMS, or possibly the loneliness that used to hit me so often, especially on overcast days in late winter when everything looks ugly and abandoned. In interviews, I’ve attributed it to claustrophobia—an occupational hazard for anybody who works in a box office. But lately, none of that seems right.

  I’ve been thinking it was luck. Whether it was good luck or bad, I’m not sure.

  1

  Squad Watery

  It was Valentine’s Day, or, as Yale St. Germaine liked to call it, “the only holiday with a massacre named after it.” Valentine’s Day depressed Yale because he’d had some gorgeous ones in his life—the kind with roses and candlelight and someone with moist eyes grasping both your hands over a white tablecloth and comparing you to various addictive substances.

  I’d never taken Valentine’s Day seriously. It was fine for my preschool class, but to my eye it was a kids’ holiday, full of sweet but unsubstantial things like paper hearts and candy. And boyfriends.

  The only valentine I could depend on was the one from my mother. It was the same postcard her publicist sent out to the media: a black-and-white headshot of her taken circa 1981, the year her first book came out. In the white space over the photo hovered a pink, cursive inscription: Open Your ❤ and Love Will Sail In. Despite the two decades that had elapsed since the shot was taken, Sydney looked more or less the same. Like me, with an Adrien Arpel makeover.

  Because she still used it as her author photo, it had attained icon status among Stark-Leiffer enthusiasts: the sculpted, dark hair with its warm, professional-looking highlights; the pale eyes, embraced by kohl; the outlined and painted lips compassionately pursed. It was a photo that said, “I know how to accentuate my best features, but right now, I’m thinking about you.”

  Sydney usually just scrawled her signature on my valentine, but this time she’d added a note. Have fun, Samantha, she’d written at the bottom of the card in bright red ink. Please.

  I was carrying the card in my giant patchwork shoulder bag as I walked to Sunny Side that morning. And I was also carrying more February 14th fun than Sydney Stark-Leiffer could shake her red pen at: twenty cut-out valentine hearts, five extra pads of construction paper, one bag of children’s scissors, eight packages of doilies, two jars apiece of red, silver, gold, green and pink glitter (and three extra jars of gold, because the kids loved gold), nine tubes of Elmer’s glue and twenty small boxes of crayons.

  It wasn’t tons of fun, but it felt close to it. Who knew paper products could be so heavy? It couldn’t be helped, though. My classroom had been robbed twice. (I still found this hard to wrap my head around. A gang of West Village nursery school marauders.) In the latest heist, they’d made off with all my Chanukah decorations—including the Styrofoam latkes and the giant paper dreidel—so I was relatively certain valentine supplies wouldn’t be safe
there overnight.

  I shifted the heavy bag to the other shoulder, and that’s when I felt it. A creeping, cold sensation originating at the base of my spine, winding up through my vertebrae one by one, settling into the sweat on the back of my neck and pressing against it, like puddled ice. For a few seconds, I couldn’t breathe.

  A man bumped into me as he passed. “Get the fuckin’ fuck out of my fuckin’ way!” he said. It always amazed me how many times New Yorkers could insert the word fuckin’ into a sentence, and normally I would’ve stared at this man, if only to see what someone who said “fuckin’ fuck” looked like. But I was too distracted. The awful tingling began to dissipate, though the idea of it lingered.

  Dead Man’s Fingers. Chills up your spine for no reason. The sign of a bad premonition.

  I don’t like to think of myself as superstitious, but I am. It comes from my grandmother, who lived with Sydney and me after Dad moved out and chastised us if we wore socks around the house. (If you wear socks with no shoes, you’ll lose all your money!) Grandma was forever spitting, muttering oaths, knocking wood and tossing salt over her shoulder. My mother thought it was obsessive-compulsive, but I bought right into it.

  Ten years after Grandma’s death, I still didn’t wear socks around my apartment. Occasionally, I whispered keinahora to ward off the evil eye.

  When you feel Dead Man’s Fingers, you’re supposed to stop whatever it is you’re doing and do the opposite. That way, the premonition might not come true.

  For me, doing the opposite would have meant turning around and going home. I imagined myself calling the principal, telling him, “Sorry, Terry. Dead Man’s Fingers.”

  I tried to attribute the sensation to the bitter February cold, to a forgotten bad dream, to Valentine’s Day with no valentine. But then it returned, this time in italics: Dead Man’s Fingers.