by M. J. Rose
Stella was coming at me with her hands open and her fingers curled. She tried for my eyes; I ducked. She grabbed my hair and yanked. I heard myself scream and swung my right arm. The flat of my cast made contact with her face. I heard something crack. My wrist? The cast? Stella staggered back, clutching her face. She was screaming. Blood was running through her fingers.
Nina had reached us by then.
Stella’s fingers were smeared with blood. Blood was still streaming down her chin and dripping onto her neck and it occurred to me that I had done that to her.
While Nina tied Stella’s hands together with my scarf, I pulled the gag out of Blythe’s mouth. Clearly drugged, she looked at me with glassy confused eyes.
“You’re going to be okay. Just hold on,” I told her.
Awkwardly, I pulled my cell phone out of my bag with one hand, dialed 911, gave them the address of the theater and told them to send both the police and an ambulance. “There’s a young woman here who I think has been poisoned. Hurry.”
Knowing the more information we could give the paramedics, the better the chances for Blythe’s survival, I told them all I knew. Once I hung up I turned to Stella.
Sitting in a corner of the stage, she was rocking slightly back and forth as if she could hear music and was moving to its beat. Nina, standing above her, looked down on her old friend with an expression of desperate sadness.
“What did you give her?” I asked Stella.
“She can’t hear you, Morgan,” Nina said.
I knew what kind of shape Stella was in, I could see it, but I couldn’t give up, not yet. “What did you give Blythe?”
Stella didn’t even look at me. Staring out into the distance, she was seeing something beyond Nina and me, beyond the stage and the theater, beyond the present.
“What did you give Blythe?” I was screaming now.
Stella started to answer me in a hoarse whisper and I leapt forward to make sure I heard every word.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…” she sang in a thin, cracked voice.
“What did you give Blythe?”
As if she’d actually heard the question, she stopped singing and cocked her head toward me and I felt a flutter of hope.
“If only we’d had the cake.” Stella’s voice was low and without inflection. “It would have made Simone so happy. She would have liked to see all of us so much. If only we’d had the cake. It would have made Simone so happy. She would have liked to see all of us so much…”
Meanwhile, Nina had opened Stella’s bag and was rifling through it. “Let’s hope this is all she gave Blythe.” She held up a prescription bottle of popular sleeping pills.
Even though it was probably pointless, I tried once more. “Did you give her these pills, Stella? How many?”
“If only we’d had the cake. It would have made Simone so happy. She would have liked to see all of us so much. If only we’d had the cake. It would have made Simone so happy. She would have liked to see all of us…”
Her recitation was interrupted by the arrival of the police and the paramedics right behind them.
Ninety-Three
On Sunday, I picked Dulcie up after her three o’clock performance. We were quiet in the car as it pulled away from the curb. We still had to resolve our differences. And I knew, because Mitch had told me, that she still had her heart set on trying out for the television series because they still hadn’t cast anyone.
The driver headed west and at Eighth Avenue, turned the corner. The light changed. We’d stopped just a few feet away from the Playpen Theater.
It had only been two days since Stella had almost blown us all up in there.
Blythe was already out of the hospital and home with her parents. She had been given sleeping pills but just enough to sedate her. Stella was in a psychiatric hospital under observation; I doubted she’d ever leave.
A shudder went through me. Inside that theater, I hadn’t thought about how much danger I’d been in, but now sitting next to Dulcie, it hit me harder than I expected it to.
Protecting everyone had been all that mattered to me.
Dulcie. Nina. Blythe. My patients.
Long ago, my mother.
I hadn’t thought about protecting myself.
It was something, to use the analytic phrase, that I would have to work on.
“What do you want to do this afternoon?” I asked Dulcie when the car started moving again.
She shrugged.
“Nina invited us to go ice-skating with her. Do you want to do that?”
I could see that the suggestion had piqued her interest. Her eyes had widened and she’d almost smiled, but then she’d remembered that she was supposed to be mad at me. “I guess.” She managed to keep any expression out of her voice. She really was the consummate actress. I thought of my mother and sighed. There wasn’t anything I could do about it.
At Wollman Rink in Central Park, a waltz played, the ice shimmered, and dozens of pairs of silver skates flashed as they raced past. I watched my daughter as Nina must have once watched me. The wind blew her dark hair out behind her and her eyes sparkled as she sped across the rink, skating so fast her feet were a blur.
Nina and I were skating arm in arm, very slowly. She was concerned that with the cast my balance might be off. I didn’t think it was, but I didn’t mind the contact or the comfort she offered. Despite the cold bite in the air, I kept circling, watching my daughter’s agile body flying across the ice, feeling the warmth of Nina’s arm against mine. Going around and around. No beginning to the circle, and no end.
Afterward, we went back to Nina’s brownstone. I sat in the kitchen while she and Dulcie hovered over the stove, melting chocolate in a double-boiler until it was shiny and soft and then stirring in milk. It wasn’t hot cocoa, but hot chocolate, prepared the way they had been making it in Europe for the past three hundred years. The way Dulcie had wanted me to make it two very long weeks ago.
Sitting around the coffee table, sipping the thick, fragrant elixir and munching on cookies, Nina asked Dulcie about the play, and I listened as my daughter launched into a soliloquy about the rewards and frustrations of performing on Broadway. I wasn’t surprised when she segued very nicely into how much more exciting it would be to do something different every week. Like be in a television drama.
She managed to shoot me a look but I didn’t respond.
I just drank my hot chocolate and wondered how I was going to get my daughter back without giving in to what she wanted.
Ninety-Four
Later that night, I stopped by her room to say goodnight. The door was open and she was in bed, watching a rerun of The Actor’s Studio.
I walked in, sat down beside her, picked up the clicker and muted the sound. “I know how much the audition means to you, but it’s not going to happen no matter how good a job you do of torturing me. I don’t know what the right way to deal with this is— I’m sure if it was something one of my patients was going through I’d know just how to advise her, but I’m just being your mother here, and all I can think to tell you is that I don’t want you to have to deal with the pressures and stress of doing a television show yet.”
“Yeah, yeah. Dr. Sin saves the sinners, but she doesn’t know what to do with her own daughter.”
“What do you mean saves the sinners?” I was used to her calling me Dr. Sin, but this wasn’t just her being cute and clever, she was issuing a new challenge.
She told me what she’d pieced together between the news on TV and what Mitch had told her about the scene at the Playpen Theater. She’d heard that I’d saved a woman’s life and that the woman had been a Web-cam girl—hence, a sinner.
Until that night, I’d tried to shield Dulcie from so much of what I did. I’d always thought she was too young to hear it. But she was only three years younger than Simone and Amanda had been when they’d made their X-rated movie.
So for the next hour, I told Dulcie about the two best friends
and how they’d felt about the boys in their school and how hard it was for them to figure out what to do, and I told her what they’d finally done, how it had all turned around and become a nightmare that they never escaped, and how sadly one had taken her own life, but the other was in therapy now and would be getting the best help there was.
When I was done, I brushed a lock of dark hair off my daughter’s face and looked into her cornflower-blue eyes. “I know what you want, but I can’t let you have it yet. I need to protect you. I promise I’m not going to go crazy and lock you up in the house. You can do the play. And after this play, if you want to do another one, we can talk about that. But I need to keep you with me for a few more years, so I can do everything in my power to help you through this last part of growing up. And so you can help me through it, too.”
She hadn’t interrupted me once. She still didn’t say anything. I hoped I hadn’t made a mistake by telling her Amanda and Simone’s story.
“Do you want some water before you go to bed?”
She shook her head. “I think I’m really tired, Mom,” she said, scooting under the covers, looking so little among all the pillows and the comforter.
I hadn’t expected her to acquiesce or to throw her arms around me and tell me that she loved me and would do anything I wanted her to do. This was all I had hoped for. A cease-fire. A willingness to listen to me explain.
I was so grateful.
As long as she would let me sit on the side of her bed and talk to her, as long as she would listen, as long as she took what I said in, that was all I could ask for. It was so much more than so many parents had.
Ninety-Five
Dulcie was still sleeping when I left on Monday morning. I asked Mary, our housekeeper, if she would try to convince her to have more than juice for breakfast for once.
“If she saw you eat something, she’d eat something. She does whatever you do, don’t you know that? She wants to be just like you,” Mary chided me and was confused when I broke into a smile.
There was enough sidewalk showing for me to walk to work again. Sure, it was cold, but the clean-smelling cold that is refreshing rather than painful.
Twenty minutes later, I was sitting at my desk. I’d just gotten off the phone with Blythe, who had called to tell me she thought she was almost ready to come back to work but thought she could use a few therapy sessions first. I was setting up an appointment when Allison stuck her head in my door.
“Alan Leightman’s ready to see you. Are you ready for him?”
I hadn’t expected him to keep his standing Monday appointment that first week.
In the first five minutes, he told me that after he’d been released on Friday, he’d moved into a hotel, and had offered to go to therapy with Kira.
“I’d like to have a real relationship. I don’t know if it can be with her, but I owe it to both of us to try. You asked me once about the first woman I’d seen naked and I told you how I’d watched her behind the glass in that theater. You knew that all the women are behind glass. The theater glass. The computer screen. Can we figure that out? Will we figure that out?”
I could encourage him, and I did. But no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t make that promise. The best we could do, the best we can ever do, is try.
At noon, I put on my coat, went downstairs and walked around the corner to the Regency Hotel.
The maître d’ showed me to the table. Noah stood up when he saw me. He was smiling, and while he still looked like he could use some more sleep, he clearly had gotten some rest.
“How’s your wrist?” he asked after I’d sat down and accepted some of the red wine he’d already ordered.
“Not bad. The doctor said I didn’t do any extra damage.”
“Didn’t do any damage? You smashed her nose. Broke it in two places.”
We talked about Blythe and how she was doing and Stella’s arraignment, and about the three women who had died because a daughter had not lived up to her mother’s expectations. I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable for a minute, thinking about my own expectations for Dulcie. We talked about the past four days, and about how Dulcie was adjusting to being back home with me.
“She’s going to be fine.”
I nodded, wanting to believe him. “I know I don’t have any control over what happens to her. I just want to help her find her way and make it as painless for her as possible. But I may not be able to do even that. No matter what, she’ll know I loved her. Not some idea of her.”
I was thinking about Stella Dobson and a young woman named Simone whom I’d never met.
“The best you’ve done with Dulcie has been to show her that she’s lovable for who she is. She’ll take that with her out into the world, and that will keep her relatively safe, Morgan. It will.”
I smiled at him.
“So, this is a little complicated,” Noah said, changing the subject.
“Meeting me?”
“Yes, well, what I’m here to talk to you about.”
A waiter appeared with a bottle of wine and topped off our glasses. Noah waited until he’d left.
“I think I’m here to offer you a job,” he said.
The last time we’d been alone together had been five days ago, on that morning that Noah had dressed me, when we’d made love, and afterward, over breakfast, fought for the second—or was it the third?—time about what I couldn’t tell him about Alan Leightman but wanted him to believe me. It wasn’t the first time we’d clashed over his profession and mine and I knew each time it happened it took its toll.
It felt like much more time than that had passed, but not this much.
“A job? Is this a joke?”
He shook his head and looked at me a little sadly. He was sitting close enough to me that I could smell his rosemary-and-mint cologne.
“No.”
“Okay, shoot. Sorry. Bad choice of words.”
He waved away the apology. “The New York Police Department, Special Victims Unit, is looking for a chief forensic psychologist. We have been for more than a month.” Noah’s voice wavered and he cleared his throat. “You have every qualification. We haven’t found the right person to fill the job. Or, I should say we have. You could do it. You’d be perfect. I thought that, at least, I should tell you about it. Not make the decision for you. It seemed to me that you might want a challenge.”
“In a million years, I never would have guessed that you would be talking to me about this.”
“No, me neither.”
The room wasn’t conducive to romantic encounters. It was all business. Clean, hard lines, crisp linens. Men and women in business attire. Noah was probably the most casually dressed man there, in his worn leather jacket, a black turtleneck and jeans.
I looked away. At strangers. Out the window. Anywhere but Noah’s face. The ragged edge of disappointment I was feeling reminded me that no one lives without regret. A splinter of fear cautioned me that loving someone meant a loss of power, and that even though power was sometimes all that kept me sane, it wasn’t always worth holding on to.
A week earlier, I would have thought Noah could read in my eyes all that I was thinking, but when I finally glanced at him, he looked back at me with eyes that were dulled. The electricity was turned off.
“Let me just get this straight,” I said. “If I were to take this job, we wouldn’t be able to see each other, right?”
“Well, we’d see each other, but not in a personal way anymore.” He shrugged. As if that shouldn’t matter to either of us.
“We’d finally stop this push-pull thing we have going on. We’d be friends.”
“Friends.” His New Orleans drawl slowed the word down and turned it into something lesser, something inadequate.
“Is that what you want?”
“It would be easier.”
“Is it what you want?”
He wasn’t going to tell me. He didn’t have to. Impulsively, I leaned over, getting as close to him as I could, put
my good hand on top of his arm as if to anchor him there, and then I kissed him.
His lips were closed at first.
And they stayed closed.
I’d lost him. I’d waited too long.
And then…then, finally, he moved forward, his hands came up and cupped my face, he pulled me closer to him, as close as we could get in our chairs, and he kissed me back.
Not the way a man would kiss you who offered you a job.
No, not that way at all.
Acknowledgments
To my incomparable agent Loretta Barrett as well as Nick Mullendore and Gabriel Davis at Loretta Barrett Books for all your hard work and great advice.
To my amazing editor, Margaret O’Neill Marbury, for whom I am daily thankful for too many reasons to list.
To Dianne Moggy and Donna Hayes for all your efforts and enthusiasm on my behalf. Thank you.
To MIRA’s editorial department, marketing & PR departments, art and production departments and the entire sales force for everything you do and do so well.
To Mara Nathan and Chuck Clayman for your insight, time and creativity. Any errors in this book are because I didn’t listen to you two well enough.
To Luci Zahray, the amazing and generous “poison lady.” I could never have killed all these poor women without you. You are a novelist’s dream.
To every bookseller who works so hard to get books into the hands of readers but especially my hometown booksellers: Jenny Lawton of Just Books Too and Diane Garrett of Diane’s Books.
To Lisa Tucker and Douglas Clegg for helping when the words didn’t come or this story got stuck.
To all my wonderful friends and colleagues—and those who are both—especially the brilliant and generous ITW gang.
To my wonderful family: Gigi, Jay, Jordan, my father and Ellie.
And always last but also always most important, to Doug Scofield for the laughs, the support, the smarts and the faith.
