Saving Mr. Perfect

by Tamara Morgan

  She wants to take the bait, I’m sure of it. I recognize the glittering look in her eyes as she tries to figure out how much I know.

  I hold her gaze steady. All of it, Tara. I know it all. And I know my friends sent you here to confirm it.

  “I guess it’s a good thing I’m not the Prowler, then,” she says.

  “I guess so.”

  This could go on for hours, but Tara clears her throat and forces us to continue playing nice. “Does that mean you’re not going to the ball?”

  Oh, I’m going. I don’t see what other choice I have. The old Penelope would have rested easy after she warned her friends away, but the new Penelope isn’t so sure. I need to be there to make sure they don’t try to sneak in behind my back. I made a promise to Grant, and I intend to keep it.

  “I have to,” I reply. “I already said I’d be there. People are counting on me.”

  “You mean people like Jane Bartlett?”

  By now, Tara should no longer be able to shock me. Ever since she sashayed back into my life in her stupid peep-toe shoes, she’s been at least two steps ahead of me and unafraid to show it. No matter what I seem to accomplish in this world, she’s always been a shinier, more put-together version of myself.

  Still. Just once, it would be nice to have something untainted by her hand—to have something for my very own.

  “You know her?” I ask.

  “I know of her,” Tara replies and sighs when I don’t reply right away. “She owns one of the biggest cosmetics lines in the world, Pen. In fact, I’m wearing her lipstick right now. Of course I’m aware of your family’s connection to hers. I always have been.”

  For most of my life, I’ve assumed that my father is the omniscient one in the family, manipulating the people around him like pawns on a chessboard. It’s the way he shows his power, his status, and as much as I wish he would stop playing every now and then to simply be my dad, I understand his nature well enough to accept reality. To love my dad is to be bested by him, every time.

  I’m starting to wonder, though, if Tara isn’t his master.

  Love her or hate her, the reality is that she knows people. She knows their relationships. She knows who they care about and who they’re related to and how she can use that to her own advantage. This stuff with Christopher Leon is a prime example. Is he really a secret double agent she’s working with on the side? Does he somehow tie into her plans with my friends to infiltrate the Conrad Museum under the guise of the Peep-Toe Prowler? Is it all a smokescreen to cover some other, deeper truth?

  To be honest, I have no freaking clue anymore. But she knows enough about the strained professional relationship between Grant and Christopher, the strained relationship between me and my friends, that it doesn’t matter. She dropped a single name in my ear and shifted the entire course of an FBI investigation. She dropped a single name in my ear and derailed my entire life.

  That’s power, right there.

  I draw a deep breath and square to face her. “You knew I might meet her at my grandmother’s?”

  She nods.

  “You knew she was my mom’s best friend?”

  She nods again.

  “And this whole time, you never told me? You never thought I might want to know about her?”

  “I wasn’t aware you were interested in her…or, as long as we’re on the subject, her in you.” She watches me for a suspended second, but I’m not sure what reaction she expects.

  “Why wouldn’t she be interested in me?” I ask, my hackles up. “Maybe she likes me. Maybe she thinks I’m nice. Maybe she loved my mom so much, she’s even willing to put up with me for a chance to feel close to her again.”

  “Don’t get angry. I was just asking. It seemed awfully sudden, that’s all.”

  “You weren’t just asking.” I try to lose the juvenile, peevish note to my voice, but it’s hard. “You never just ask. There’s a double meaning to everything you say.”

  I expect Tara to retaliate with a taunt or a sneer, mocking me for my excess of emotion, but she doesn’t. Instead, she turns to me, her mouth drawn tight—actual lines of age showing around the curve of her lips—and asks, “Have I ever told you about my mom?”

  “Um. No?” I step back and nudge my calves against the couch, startled by the sudden topic change. To be perfectly honest, it never occurred to me before that Tara had a mother. I’d always assumed she sprang into the world fully formed.

  “She was a beautiful woman, probably the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. The most beautiful anyone has ever seen.” This, coming from the lips of the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, is a tad surreal. “Watching her get dressed in the morning was a spiritual awakening. The way she moved in a slip, like she knew the whole world was watching—I can tell you this much, you’ve never met anyone so magnificent.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I ask. “So I can be jealous of your great relationship with your mother?”

  Tara’s eyes snap dangerously. “She was magnificent around everyone except me. To this day, I couldn’t tell you why she kept me or why she had me in the first place. I knew what I was to her before I could even walk. Her burden, her shame, the one thing she owned that didn’t make her look good.”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  Tara ignores me. “I hated her. I’ve met a lot of terrible people in my lifetime, but I’ve never hated anyone as much as I did her.”

  “So does that.”

  The look she gives me is her most maternal to date, and I promptly clamp my lips shut. Perhaps this is more of a listening moment than a back-talking one.

  “I know you think I’m this horrible, evil stepmother, Pen—and that’s on me. I messed up, and there’s nothing I can do to make up for my past mistakes. But you have to understand the situation I was coming from. My mom…” She opens her mouth as if waiting for truth and sentiment to pour out, but when nothing but a heavy sigh comes, she shakes her head and tries again. “She could barely muster up enough enthusiasm to feed me, let alone care about me. And don’t give me that shocked look. I don’t mean I starved. It was more like our life was a stasis between men. When she had a man—which was most of the time—she was this gorgeous, enchanting creature who would cover me with fake kisses and send me to bed while her lover admired the picture it made. Those times were fine. Lonely, but fine. But when she didn’t have someone…”

  I wait, unmoving, but all Tara does is shrug.

  “Let’s say I learned to take care of myself pretty early on.”

  Those stupid feelings of guilt and sympathy return, and I wish I could pluck them from my stomach and shove them under the couch cushions. I’m not supposed to feel sorry for her. She’s using my father, my friends, and my husband to line her own pockets, consequences to the people I love be damned.

  But the words still form before I can stop them. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I learned a lot about how to handle men from that woman. More than most girls learn their entire lives.” With a lick of her lips and a toss of her long platinum hair, I know I’m witnessing one of those tips firsthand. “When I married your dad, I didn’t know how mothers were supposed to act—and it didn’t occur to me that you might want one in the first place. I was so glad to finally be rid of mine that I assumed everyone else felt the same way.”

  “I never expected you to be my mother.”

  “And I never planned on being it. Not then, and definitely not now.” She reaches into her purse and extracts a scrap of folded paper, which she extends in my direction. “It’s not much, but your father used to carry it around in his wallet. I, uh—well, I was only nineteen at the time. Don’t hate me too much for asking him to get rid of it.”

  The scrap of paper turns out to be a photograph, heavily creased from being folded all these years. It’s also grainy and in the faded yellow typical of late
eighties photography. The woman in it is yellow, too, her hair the same color as the exposure, her details difficult to make out.

  But her details don’t interest me. I don’t care where she is or what she’s holding in her hand, don’t need to know what the print on her shirt says. All that matters is the smile on her face, as recognizable to me as my own.

  Because it is my own.

  “I think she’s about six months pregnant with you in that photo. See? It’s hard to tell from the way she’s standing, but you’re there all the same.”

  Me and my mom. Together. I open my mouth and close it again. “My dad carried this around with him?” I ask.

  “Everywhere he went. It was the only thing I remember us fighting about. Well, except you, of course. I told him I wasn’t willing to compete with a perfect dead woman he all but erected a diamond pedestal for, and that if he didn’t get rid of the picture, he could get rid of me instead.” She casts me an anxious look. “Remember the part about me being nineteen?”

  “You were a very old nineteen.”

  “I was a very experienced nineteen. It’s not the same thing.” She pauses. “My plan was to burn the picture and remove all traces of her for good, but you and I had a huge fight right before I was going to do it. I decided to keep the photo around in case I needed leverage.”

  I’d done a decent job of keeping the swell of emotion inside my throat from erupting, but at that, it starts to leak. “Leverage?” I echo. “You were going to use the only picture that exists of my mom and me together as leverage?”

  “Yes. But I didn’t, and now I’m giving it to you instead—along with a piece of advice.” Her voice drops. “Don’t forget who your real friends are, Pen.”

  It’s more threat than advice, and I treat it as such. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve been spending a lot of time with Riker lately, and he’s much more vulnerable than you realize. You have this great new life now—with your husband and your grandmother and Jane Bartlett—and that’s fine, but all he has is a void where you used to be. Don’t punish him for not knowing how to fill it.”

  In other words, don’t turn him in to the FBI. Don’t ban him from the Conrad Museum. Let him try for the Starbrite Necklace as payment for abandoning him when he needed me most.

  I can’t believe it. After all this, they still want my permission to go through with the museum heist.

  Except I can believe it, and I glance down at the picture in my hand with a laugh. It’s a bizarre reaction, I know, but this is a bizarre situation. It was generous of Tara to give me this piece of my mother, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to repay her—but if this isn’t emotional leverage, I don’t know what else is. She basically walked in here, admitted she kept this picture as a means to play me, and then played me so hard, I almost didn’t see it.

  I laugh louder.

  Tara looks at me with a carefully arched brow. “I’m sorry. Did I miss something?”

  “No, and I’m beginning to think you never do.” I swear, if I didn’t dislike this woman so much, I’d adore her. “Thank you for the picture, Tara, and for the clothes, but I think you should go now.”

  She doesn’t argue as she heads for the door. “You are some kind of messed up, Pen, you know that?”

  “What can I say? I learned from the best.”

  “And you’ll keep in mind what I said? Especially about Jane Bartlett? In our line of work, it’s never a good idea to trust someone you barely know.”

  I don’t answer as I close the door behind her. In our line of work, I’m coming to learn that it’s the people I know best who pose the real problem.

  23

  THE SOCIALITE

  The next week is a blur of social activity and trying to figure out what I’m going to do about the Peep-Toe Prowler—in other words, business as usual.

  Tea parties give way to cocktail hours, which soon transform into brunches where the women drink copious amounts of gin and complain about their husbands. Every time I turn around, my grandmother is admonishing me to make an effort, for heaven’s sake or at least put on an interested face. Which is why, at one such brunch hosted by Millie Ralph, I find myself discussing my married life with virtual strangers.

  “That makes three times he’s stood me up for our anniversary,” says the statuesque woman from the tea party—her name, I’ve since learned, is Olivia Newton, absolutely no John. “Each year, he promises to make it up to me, and each year, I get the same tennis bracelet two days later.”

  I pray she’s not wearing one of those tennis bracelets now, because the flash of those rocks is one hundred percent cubic zirconia. Her husband sounds worse with each passing day.

  “You’re married, right?” she asks me earnestly.

  “Ye-es,” I reply.

  Olivia and the nonstatuesque woman, whose name I still haven’t learned, look down at my plain band in clear judgment. I immediately bristle.

  I might not wear flashy jewels or have a private jet, but I could tell them all about how Grant woke me up this morning. His method was slow and careful and included a lot of tongue—so much of it, in fact, that I’m still struggling to stand on solid ground.

  I don’t mention it, though. No one likes a show-off.

  Besides, there’s that minor problem where I have yet to tell him that I’m pretty sure I know who the Peep-Toe Prowler is. He spent his entire day yesterday at Otisville Federal Correctional Institution, interviewing the criminals Christopher Leon put away in hopes they might admit to working in league with him.

  It was a waste of twelve hours and of Grant’s talents as a federal agent, and he has no one to blame for it but me.

  “What’s your husband like?” Olivia asks.

  I doubt she’s asking about his weight and height, but my grandmother gives me another one of those steely try-to-fit-in looks, so I offer a tentative, “Um, he can be overprotective sometimes?”

  “Overprotective?”

  “Yeah, he’s an FBI agent, so he gets really worried about the things he can’t control. Including me.” Especially me. “Like, I know he loves me and everything, but I can’t help thinking he’d rather have a different version sometimes. A quieter, softer one, you know?”

  “A quiet one?” the nonstatuesque woman echoes.

  “I know, right?” I grab a crab-filled pastry from a passing tray and shove it in my mouth. “You might as well bury me in a box for the rest of my life as ask me to be quiet, but he won’t listen. He just wants me to be safe and happy.”

  From the look on Olivia’s face, it’s obvious she finds the box part alarming, but the nonstatuesque woman nods. “Safe and happy sounds nice, if you ask me,” she says.

  I turn to her eagerly. Pouring out my heart and soul to a woman whose name I don’t know reeks of desperation, but that’s what I am—desperate. I can’t talk to my friends, and talking to Grant is obviously not an option, but I need to get this out to someone. The only alternative is to call Simon and get his thoughts on the subject, but I doubt that’s what he meant when he said I could turn to him for help.

  “That’s the problem,” I say. “Safe and happy sounds nice to ninety-nine percent of the population. I know it’s what I’m supposed to want, but it feels like a death sentence. Oh, not the sharing my life with him part—he’s pretty great, actually.”

  More than great, but that right there is a big part of the problem. He’s everything I’m not. He always will be.

  “It’s all the stuff that comes with being safe that freaks me out,” I explain. “Following rules and obeying, um, traffic laws and playing nice… If that’s the kind of person my husband expects me to be, if that’s what he wants out of our relationship, then I’m starting to wonder if we’re doomed. How can two people be so different and still be so much in love?”

  “Are you sure you’re all that d
ifferent?” the nonstatuesque woman asks. “There must be a common ground somewhere.”

  “Not a very big one,” I say. “Sometimes it feels like we’re killing time until one of us is willing to admit we made a mistake.”

  “Honey, you just described every marriage in this room,” Olivia says.

  “Get a counselor or get a lawyer, that’s what I always say,” puts in another woman lingering at the edge of our group. “I’m on my third husband already.”

  Although I get a sympathetic smile from the nonstatuesque woman, she also shrugs and holds up two fingers, indicating her own marital status. In other words, I’m screwed.

  There’s not much to hold my interest in the gathering after that. I wouldn’t have come at all except I need to pretend to be investigating this case for a while longer. How much longer, I can’t say, but I hope my part ends soon. I like my grandmother, I really do, but it’s possible to have too much of a good thing—especially when that good thing is as strong and willful as her. I’m starting to see why she and my mother might not have always gotten along.

  In an effort to curtail some of that togetherness while I can, I approach the corner where my grandmother and Jane stand politely chatting. “If you don’t mind my leaving early, I think I’m going to head out,” I say.

  “Uh-oh.” Jane gives a maternal cluck. “So soon?”

  “Yeah, I’m not feeling well.”

  She reaches out and presses her palm against my forehead, her fingers cool on my skin. It’s silly, this time-honored test of illness being conducted between grown women, but it’s nice, too. I don’t think anyone has checked my temperature before.

  “You do feel warm, poor thing. We’ve been trotting her too hard, Erica. Do you want to go upstairs and lie down for a spell?”

  My grandmother’s eyes narrow in what feels to me like a much more normal reaction to feigned illness—doubt and suspicion. “Of course she doesn’t want to lie down. Duponts don’t get sick.”