“She’s not ‘a teenager.’ She’s my sister. I love her. And you know, it’s been years.”
“I know, my darling. And I also know why. You know how your father feels about your lifestyle. About me.”
Peter Templeton was proud of his son’s success. But he had never fully come to terms with Robbie’s sexuality. Now that Robbie was famous and gave interviews in which he spoke openly about his love for Paolo, Peter’s disapproval had intensified.
“It’s your life,” he would tell Robbie grudgingly, during their increasingly rare phone calls. “I don’t see why you have to be so flagrant about it, that’s all.”
“I love him, Dad. The same way you loved Mom. You were flagrant enough about that, weren’t you?”
Peter was incensed.
“Your involvement with that man bears no comparison to my love for your mother. The fact that you think it does shows just how far off course your moral compass has drifted. I knew it was a mistake, letting you go to Paris.”
Paolo had never tried to come between Robert and his family. He didn’t have to. Peter’s attitude, combined with Robbie’s own hectic life in Europe, made the growing distance between them inevitable.
“I wouldn’t be going for Dad. I’m doing this for Lexi.”
“But Lexi stays with us every summer. Can’t you throw her a second birthday party in Paris, after the tour?”
Robbie shook his head. He didn’t expect Paolo to understand about Dark Harbor and Cedar Hill House. About what those places meant to him and to his sister. How could he? But the time was right. He had to go back. Lexi’s sixteenth was as good an excuse as any.
“You’re sure you won’t come with me?”
Paolo shuddered. “Quite sure. Je t’aime, Robert, tu sais ca. But a Blackwell family get-together on some godforsaken American island, making small talk with your homophobic father? Non merci. You’re on your own.”
FIFTEEN
GABE MCGREGOR STEPPED OUT OF THE GATES OF WORMWOOD Scrubs Prison onto the street. It was six-thirty on a cold November morning. It was still dark. A light drizzle of icy rain was beginning to soak through his thin gray woolen jacket.
It was, without question, the happiest moment of his life.
“Got somewhere to go?”
The guard at the gate smiled. Wormwood Scrubs was a shitty place to work. The screws hated it almost as much as the inmates. But watching men like Gabe McGregor savor their first taste of freedom in eight long years, reformed young men with their lives still ahead of them, that was a joy that never got old.
Gabe smiled back.
“Oh yes. I’ve got somewhere to go all right.”
Thanks to Marshall Gresham. I owe that man my life.
On his first night in prison, Gabriel McGregor tried to kill himself.
Michael Wilmott, his lawyer, had told him not to panic. That the sixteen-year term handed down by the crown-court judge would likely be reduced on appeal.
“If it goes down to twelve, chances are you’ll be out in seven or eight.”
Seven or eight? Years?
The longest Gabe had been without heroin was seven days. The worst seven days of his life. It was his first week on remand, and he had not yet learned how to buy drugs inside. Once you knew the system, heroin was easy enough to come by. The big dealers all had guys working inside on a commissioned-sales basis. Heroin and crack were both priced at a 30 percent markup. As long as you had money and a friend on the outside who could make regular payments to the gangs, you were okay. But those first seven days! Gabe would never forget the misery. Nights spent screaming, convulsed by cramps so violent he felt like he were being hanged, drawn and quartered. The sweats, the vomiting, the hallucinations.
A figure on a white horse was coming to get him. Jamie McGregor! In his hand was an ax. As he rode, he swung it to the left and right, slicing off the limbs of the screaming women who surrounded him. Gabe knew the women. There was Fiona. Angela. There was Caitlin, pleading for her life as the man on the horse laughed maniacally, severing her head with a single stroke. All the girls Gabe had used to feed his habit suffered the same fate. Then he saw his mother’s face, contorted with terror. She was crying out to him: “Gabriel! Save me! It’s Jamie McGregor! He’s killing me, he’s killing us all!”
Gabe woke up. His sheets were drenched in sweat. He wanted to scream, but his throat was so dry and sore he felt like he’d swallowed a pack of razor blades.
The next day one of his fellow prisoners had given him a hit. On the outside, however desperate he got, Gabe never shared needles. Here, he practically wrenched the syringe from the guy’s hand.
The night before he went back to court for sentencing, he heard two of the remand prisoners talking.
“If they send me to the Scrubs, I’m finished. Mike says it’s like a bloody desert in there.”
“I heard the same thing. The new warden used to work for the drug czar. That place is cleaner that a nun’s arsehole.”
Gabe thought: That’s it. If they send me somewhere where I can’t get drugs, I’ll kill myself.
Like all British prisons, Wormwood Scrubs was overcrowded. The twelve-by-eight-foot cells had been built by the Victorians to house a single inmate. Now the same cramped space was home to three or even four men, each sharing a single lidless toilet.
Gabe’s two cell mates did not look up when he entered. Both were black, in their midtwenties and of the same heavyset build as Gabe himself.
At least they don’t look gay, Gabe thought. Then he remembered that it didn’t matter anyway.
By this time tomorrow he’d be dead.
Climbing silently onto his bunk, he lay back and stared at the ceiling. His original plan had been to hang himself with torn up sheets, but he realized now that that wasn’t going to work.
These guys might not be what you’d call sociable, but they aren’t gonna sit by and do nothing while I choke myself to death.
Gabe scanned the room. It was bare. No pictures, no hooks, no curtains, no lamps, no nothing. He started to panic.
What the hell can I use?
Then he saw it.
Perfect. It’ll hurt, but at least I can do it quickly, while they’re asleep.
Gabe was scared. He did not want to die. But anything was better than cold turkey.
Mike says it’s like a bloody desert in there.
I’ll do it tonight.
Nelson Bradley, the bigger of Gabe’s two cell mates, awoke to the sound of groans.
“Keep it down, jock. Some of us is trying to kip.”
A few seconds later, Gabe projectile-vomited onto the floor. He started to shake, then convulse.
Nelson Bradley sat up.
“Duane. Wake up, man. Something’s wrong.”
Duane Wright turned on his handheld reading lamp, pointing it first at Gabe, then at the pool of vomit. Except it wasn’t vomit. It was blood. On the floor beside Gabe’s bunk was an empty bottle of bleach. The screws must have gotten lazy and left it by the loo after sluicing out.
“Oh, shit. He’s only gone and necked the bloody Dettol!” Duane Wright hammered on the cell door. “Get someone in here. Now!”
When Gabe woke up in the prison infirmary, the first thing he thought was: Christ alive, my stomach is on fire. The second thing he thought was: I’m still alive. I failed. Depression washed over him.
“You’re a very lucky man,” the doctor told him. “A few more minutes before we pumped your stomach and you wouldn’t have made it.”
Oh yeah, that’s me. Lucky.
The psychologists asked him why he’d done it and Gabe told them the truth. There didn’t seem any point in lying.
“You bloody prat.” The chief psychiatrist wrote Gabe a prescription for methadone. “You think you’re the first addict to walk through these doors? We can help you. There are programs…”
But Gabe didn’t want programs, and he didn’t want methadone. He wanted enough H to put him out of his misery.
Whe
n he was well enough, he was transferred to another wing of the prison. This time he had only one cell mate, an ex-junkie lifer named Billy McGuire. Billy was Irish, a former jockey whose life had careened spectacularly off the rails after he got mixed up with drugs. What began as a few “innocent” thrown races and betting scams ended up as internecine gang warfare on the streets of Belfast. An innocent father was killed and Billy was sent down for a minimum twenty-year sentence.
“The IRA aren’t what they used to be,” Billy told Gabe.
“I’m confused. What did they use to be? Weren’t they always a bunch of murdering terrorists?”
“Ah, well, sure they were. But right or wrong, they had a cause. Now it’s all about the money. Money and drugs.” Billy shook his head in disgust. “That’s what heroin does to you, lad. Makes you forget who you are.”
Gabe couldn’t argue with that. The only trouble was that he wanted to forget who he was: a loser with no qualifications, no skills, and now, with a serious criminal record, no future.
I thought my dad was pathetic, wasting his life in the docks.
He was twice the man I am.
SIXTEEN
LEXI LAY SPRAWLED OUT ON THE BLUE-AND-WHITE-STRIPED Ralph Lauren couch at Cedar Hill House, poring over the guest list for her party.
At sixteen, Lexi Templeton had fully emerged from her awkward early teen years. Gone were the hated braces on her teeth and the mornings spent staring longingly in the mirror trying to make her breasts grow through sheer force of will. Draped over the couch like Cleopatra in a pair of cutoff denim hot pants, her lithe, tanned legs stretching out for miles, Lexi was at last a full-fledged sex kitten. Her brown stomach was as smooth and flat as a Kansas prairie, despite the three bowls of Cocoa Krispies she’d wolfed down for breakfast that morning. A simple white bikini top covered breasts as full, round and perfect as small honeydew melons.
To be strictly accurate, the guest list she was studying was not for her party. Much to Lexi’s chagrin, next week’s celebration at Cedar Hill House was officially a joint sixteenth for her and Max.
Why should I have to share my birthday with him? Can’t I have any life of my own?
Whatever Lexi did these days, her cousin seemed to show up like a bad penny.
Lexi’s father felt sorry for him: “I think he’s lonely, honey. Stuck in that apartment with his mother all vacation long. He probably doesn’t have many friends.”
I’m not surprised. He’s so arrogant and stuck-up.
Peter had always put Max’s moody silences down to shyness. Over the course of their childhoods, Lexi had formed a different view. Max wasn’t shy. He was aloof. She called it his superiority complex, and it irritated the hell out of her.
On the plus side, at least Max’s lack of social skills meant that a solid 80 percent of the birthday guests would be Lexi’s friends from Exeter, and not a bunch of stuffed shirts from Choate, Max’s prestigious Connecticut boarding school.
Lexi examined her list again:
Donna Mastroni, Lisa Babbington, Jamie Summerfield…oh, crap. Lisa can’t sit next to Jamie. He screwed her over spring break when he was still dating Anna Massey. Where the hell can I put Lisa?
The answer was obvious: Lisa Babbington should sit at Max’s table. God knew there were enough spaces. Lexi hesitated. Somehow the idea of seating one of her most attractive girlfriends next to her cousin did not appeal.
The truth was, though she would have died before admitting it, Lexi Templeton had mixed feelings about Max Webster. Three-quarters of the time, she hated him. He followed her around like a bad smell. He was rude, weird and more arrogant than any boy she’d ever met. During their joint internship at Kruger-Brent last Christmas (I can’t even get a job on my own) Max had made it perfectly plain that he saw himself as Lexi’s superior, intellectually and in every other way. Even at fifteen, the staff had begun to defer to him the way they used to defer to Robbie. Because of Lexi’s deafness, people just assumed that Max would inherit the company one day. This assumption, fueled by Max’s own sense of entitlement, drove Lexi crazy. At Kruger-Brent, Max made a point of playing up Lexi’s disability, treating her with kid gloves as if she were some fragile flower. He never treats me like that when we’re alone.
Lexi might be deaf but she wasn’t blind. She saw what Max was up to and it incensed her. She also saw, much as it pained her to admit it, that her cousin had grown into an incredibly good-looking young man. Black-haired and even blacker-eyed, Max had an irresistible air of danger and wildness about him, like Heathcliff or a young Lord Byron. Most boys Lexi’s age were gauche and immature. Even the jocks at Exeter seemed to have a built-in geekiness that surfaced in the presence of attractive girls like Lexi. But not Max Webster.
Max looked through Lexi as if she didn’t exist.
So why does he hang around me all the time? If I’m so goddamn invisible, so beneath his royal notice, why doesn’t he get a life of his own?
Lexi began scratching out names with a pen, rearranging the seating chart.
Lisa Babbington could sit next to Grady Jones.
If Max didn’t have enough friends to fill his table, it wasn’t her problem.
“Do you like it? I know it’s not your official birthday yet, but Rachel thought you might want to wear it for the party.”
Lexi’s interpreter, Rachel, was her more or less constant companion. Peter Templeton had relied heavily on Rachel’s advice when it came to choosing Lexi’s birthday present. Watching Lexi’s face light up now, he was glad he had.
“Daddy, I love it. Oh my goodness.”
“Really?” He beamed with pleasure.
“Really.”
Lexi ran her fingertips in wonder over the gossamer beaded silk dress. It was Chanel, from the new season’s collection. The delicate fabric was the exact same shade of champagne blond as Lexi’s hair. The cut was exquisite, plunging and clinging in all the right places, but too much of a work of art to look slutty. It was, without question, the most beautiful item of clothing in existence.
“A beautiful dress for my beautiful girl. You’ll look like a princess, my angel.”
Lexi smiled. “Thank you, Daddy.” He still thinks I’m six years old. “It’s an amazing present.”
And it’s gonna help me get the birthday present I really want:
Christian Harle.
Lexi learned early that her deafness was a double-edged sword when it came to dating.
Going to school with an interpreter who rarely left her side was a definite minus. Lexi’s lip-reading was excellent and her speech by no means poor, but she was self-conscious about her imagined slurring and preferred to sign whenever possible and have Rachel speak for her.
She was lucky to have had the same interpreter for almost eight years now, since her early days in the hospital. Peter knew that consistency of caregivers would be crucial to his daughter’s recovery. Consequently he had thrown money and perks at the then twenty-year-old Rachel, upping the ante every year to make sure she wasn’t tempted to leave. Now twenty-eight, Rachel was considerably chubbier than she had been back then, but just as hardworking and sunny-natured. Lexi herself had long since passed the point where she actively noticed her interpreter’s presence. To her, Rachel was like her shadow: always there, yet somehow almost invisible.
Unfortunately, boys didn’t see it that way.
“Can’t you lose Chubby Checker for half an hour after school?”
Pete Harris, a rebel with floppy blond hair, skater tattoos on his chest, and a reputation as the biggest player in tenth grade, leaned over in math class and whispered in Lexi’s ear.
His warm breath on her earlobe felt nice. Lexi could pretty much get the gist of his intentions from pheremones alone. But of course, without being able to see his lips, the words themselves meant nothing.
She signed to Rachel. “Ask him to say it again. Tell him to look at me when he speaks.”
Rachel duly did as she was asked. Suddenly the whole class had tur
ned around to stare at Pete Harris. He didn’t feel so cool anymore.
“Harris, you moron! Don’t you know she needs to see your lips to read them?”
“Yeah, c’mon, Pete. Share with the class, man. What’d you say?”
“You guys should definitely date. Deaf and Dumb, what a couple!”
“I…I’m sorry,” Pete Harris blurted, blushing to the roots of his blond hair. “You’re cute, but I…I can’t do this.”
Lexi was philosophical about Pete Harris. He was hot, but he was kind of a moron. Besides, she had her sights set on a much bigger fish: Christian Harle.
Lexi had begun Operation Christian in the eighth grade. At fourteen, she was still far too lowly a minnow in the Exeter High School pond for a guy like Christian Harle to notice. Two years her senior, with the body of an Olympic athlete and a face that could make Brad Pitt cry, Christian Harle dated only cheerleaders or models. The fact that he was astronomically out of Lexi’s league didn’t faze her in the least. On the contrary, it made this the perfect time for her to lay the groundwork of her operation.
Her plan was simple. She would find out what Christian looked for in a woman. (Big tits, pretty face, ditzy manner, IQ of dung beetle.) She would then transform herself into his ideal mate.
Lexi checked off the points on Christian’s wish list one by one.
My tits are nonexistent, but they’ll grow.
My face is already pretty, or it will be once the braces come off.
I’m smart enough to pretend to be stupid. So what’s left?
Ah yes. Ditzy and helpless.
If having Rachel around was a dating minus, Lexi’s deafness also provided some unique dating pluses. Because of her disability, boys tended to think of her as sweet and vulnerable-the poor little deaf heiress who needed their protection. Lexi quickly learned how to turn this misconception to her advantage. By ninth grade, she had her phony damsel-in-distress shtick down to a fine art.
“Rachel? Would you ask Johnny to help me with my books? I’m so tired this morning, I really couldn’t walk another step.”
Mistress of the Game Page 14
