“Ahh, Ms. Lark, it is such a pleasure to finally meet you!” Jacque said in a thick, French accent, placing one large hand on my shoulder as he bent to kiss each cheek. “I have heard so much about you from Camilla.”
Though I knew he was wealthy in his own right, he wasn’t outwardly slimy or slick, and he didn’t come off as too interested in his girlfriend’s daughter’s teenaged friends, there was still something about him that made me uneasy; almost like he was too confident in Camilla’s mother’s affections toward him.
Ms. Stories swept a glance to where his broad fingers were still on my shoulder, and reached out to take both of my hands in hers, effectively pulling the attention back to herself. “Lark, you look so beautiful!” she replied, holding me out at arm’s length to take in the dress. “You know, I remember when you girls were just starting high school, so young and so awkward. And, of course, Camilla was a late bloomer and hadn’t yet sprouted her…”
Ms. Stories went on for a while about how much we’d all grown up over the past four years, before finally releasing me to continue on my way.
“I can’t believe the things that woman will say after a little gin,” Annie laughed.
“I can’t believe her new boyfriend!” I replied, peeking back over my shoulder at Jacque.
Before I could ask Annie what she thought of the Frenchman, Taylor’s mother stopped us.
“Lark, sweetheart,” she trilled, leaning in for air-kisses. “Happy birthday, darling!”
“Thank you, Mrs. Vanderkam. I’m so glad you could make it,” I offered one of my standard lines of the evening.
“But of course! We’d never miss such a to-do. Your mother,” Mrs. Vanderkam paused, taking in the scene with her keen eye for details, “did such a wonderful job pulling this all together!”
Coming from Manhattan’s hostess-with-the-mostess, that was quite a compliment. I briefly wondered if she’d shared it with my mother or was waiting until the end of the night to announce her approval, to keep my mother guessing.
“She really did,” I agreed. “I’m so lucky that she did all of this for me.”
While I knew that she didn’t really do it for me, that my mother had truly slaved over tonight’s affair for herself, her friends, and her reputation, I genuinely appreciated the time and effort she put into the party. The whole affair was like something out of a dream: descending the stairs, I had a birds-eye view of the dim chandeliers, the glowing candles everywhere, and the pristine ballroom full of elegantly dressed people wearing masks.
Though in my perfect version, Blake was my escort.
And then, as if my subconscious was playing tricks on me, I swore the broad shoulders and head of dark curls weaving through the crowd belonged to Blake. Attempting to shake off what was surely an alcohol-induced hallucination, I tuned back in to the conversation.
“It was really lovely,” Annie was saying, picking up my conversational slack.
“It absolutely was,” I added, unaware of what we were talking about, still focused on the guy who looked like Blake. “I don’t mean to be rude,” I continued, “but will you excuse us?”
“Of course, dear, of course. I know what it’s like, trying to make the rounds.”
“Thank you,” I replied with a smile. If I commented on the last bit of her statement, we’d never get away. “We’ll be sure to find you later.”
Grabbing Annie’s hand, I pulled her through the crowd, only nodding or calling out greetings over my shoulder as we went.
“Sorry,” I said to Annie when we reached the wall.
“No worries,” she said with a sympathetic smile. “I needed a break. It’s not shocking that you did, too.”
Flagging down a passing waiter, I asked for two bottles of water. Unless I wanted to see Blake’s green eyes hiding behind every mask, I needed to take a break from the vodka for a little while.
“Yeah,” I replied, grateful for her understanding. “It was just getting to be a little overwhelming.”
“Do you ever worry we’re all just going to grow up and become our parents?” Annie asked.
“Where is this coming from?” I asked, wondering if I should be worried about Annie going rogue on me.
“I don’t know. Just life,” she answered. “I know my parents aren’t half as bad as yours with all of the pressure and demands, but…it’s still a lot.”
“I know,” I replied, giving her a sympathetic smile. “They just…they never stop.”
“Exactly!”
“Your father and lectures about colleges and grades?” I guessed.
“Yup.”
“And your mother and the pressure to be perfect, to be desirable, to marry someone acceptable?”
“I wouldn’t have put it like that,” she admitted. “But yeah.”
“What a charmed life we have, eh?” I said wryly.
Speak of the devil, and she doth appear.
“Lark, dear,” my mother said, coming to a stop in front of us. Spotting her disapproving glance, I immediately stood up straight, shoulders back, public persona in place. “I was looking for you.”
“Everything okay?” I asked, bracing myself for the answer.
“With the party? Of course,” she said dismissively, turning to Annie. “Annabelle, hello, dear. It is so lovely to see you. I feel like we haven’t seen you at the house in ages.”
My mother loved Annie. In fact, had my mother chosen anyone on earth to be my best friend, it would have been Annabelle Stanley. Yes, those Stanley’s. They may not have been the oldest money, but they were as much American royalty as the Kennedy’s. Though Henry Stanley himself had never had children, the name—and the money—had filtered down to the children of his second wife, which included Annie’s paternal grandfather.
“It’s been a crazy year,” Annie replied. “There has been so much going on.”
“Yes, it most certainly has. I hope you girls aren’t being worked too hard in school. Oh, and what a lovely job you all did at the Met Ballet’s benefit—it was so beautiful!”
“Oh, thank you, but it certainly wasn’t just us, we were only the help,” Annie said modestly, giving me a sideline glance that I took as a plea for help.
“Nonsense,” my mother declared. “Before you know it, you girls will be running those committees. In fact—”
“You said you were looking for me?” I interrupted. This earned me another frown, though she quickly smoothed her expression. After all, wrinkle lines were more critical than her daughter’s rudeness.
“There are some people you simply must greet. Would you excuse us for a moment, Annabelle? Lark needs to say hello to some old family friends. Now, where did they get to, I wonder?”
Groaning inwardly, it was my turn to give Annie a beseeching look. The last thing I wanted was to spend the whole night with my parents’ friends, but I also knew it was par for the course.
While my mother was searching the crowd, Annie mouthed “Sorry.”
“Come find me when you’re done,” Annie said loud enough so my mother was sure to hear. She gave my hand a quick, encouraging squeeze, before sliding between two men in identical tuxedos and disappearing into the swarm.
When I turned back to face my mother, I was surprised to find a guy my age standing in her place. Like every other man in the room, he was wearing an impeccable tuxedo, which he filled out quite nicely. His warm, caramel eyes were smiling down at me, the grin on his face hauntingly familiar. Looking as though he stepped straight out of a Ralph Lauren ad, his brown hair was combed smoothly over to the side, and his teeth were perfectly straight and white.
“Lark, dear, you remember the Ridells, don’t you?” my mother prompted. But before I could answer, she gave a tinkling little laugh. “Of course you do. After your dinner with Adam, I had hoped we see him around the penthouse.”
My hand flew to my mouth. He looked so different, so much older, so much cuter.
A woman with eyes the exact same shade as her son’s appeared by his
side, and she leaned in for the standard greeting. Though I went through the motions without breaking stride, I felt as though a grenade had exploded in my stomach.
“Lark, I can’t believe how much you’ve grown!” Mrs. Ridell exclaimed, cupping my face in her hand. “And what is this I hear about a dinner date? Adam didn’t even mention it.” Her gaze flitted briefly to her son, but returned to me almost immediately.
“It was nothing, Mom,” Adam muttered.
Nothing indeed, since the dinner in question never happened.
I forced a smile.
“And Senator Ridell,” my mother prodded me, gesturing to the tall man with snow-white hair standing on her other side.
“Of course, it’s lovely to see you all,” I managed to say through numb lips.
“We were so delighted when we received your mother’s invitation!” Mrs. Ridell said. “We wouldn’t have missed this.”
“Now I feel bad about Adam’s eighteenth birthday celebration,” the senator said, clapping his son playfully on the back. “We just took him out to dinner.”
As my mother and Adam’s parents began discussing us, I turned my attention back to him.
“Wow…. How are you?” I asked, still dumbstruck by his presence.
“Not bad,” he answered. After a moment of silence, where he stared at his shiny, leather shoes, Adam finally met my gaze. “How’ve you been?”
“Good,” I said, pretending it wasn’t a loaded question fraught with underlying meanings. “I’ve been really good. It’s very different here in Manhattan. Not at all like Connecticut, but I’ve gotten used to it…at least, as much as anyone who wasn’t born here can.”
Adam smiled sympathetically, as if he understood what I meant. “Yeah, things are certainly different,” he said, sweeping his arm to encompass the ballroom and the masses of people.
“You know my mother,” I said with a dramatic eye roll. “She was made for this life. She actually has a friend named Bitsy.”
“You’re joking, right?” he asked, cocking a quizzical eyebrow.
“Not even a little bit,” I said, feeling the tension between us easing. “My friends are pretty awesome, though. You want to get a drink?”
Adam glanced around dubiously. “Yeah. That’s another difference: in Connecticut, we still have to hide the debauchery.”
“We hide the debauchery,” I replied with mock indignation. “It doesn’t get rowdy ‘til all the adults head home, hopefully around midnight.
His face morphed into a devious grin. “I do have my own room at The Plaza.”
“See, you fit right in,” I teased.
Crooking his elbow, Adam offered me his arm. “Shall we?”
“It was so nice to see you both,” I said to his parents, tucking my arm through Adam’s. “Thank you so much for coming!” I called over my shoulder as he pulled me away.
Once we’d made our way through much of the crowd, I paused, pulling him to a stop next to me. “Um, thank you for covering for me with that whole dinner thing,” I said.
Adam shrugged. “What sort of friend would I be if I didn’t?” he said playfully.
For a long moment, we stood there in awkward silence. I expected Adam to ask me where I’d really been on the night of our supposed date. But he didn’t. He stared at the ground, toeing an imaginary speck of dirt with his loafers.
I took a deep breath. It was neither the time nor the place, and yet I needed to know.
“Hey, can I ask you something?”
When he turned to face me, memories flooded my mind. My breath caught, and my heart pounded so hard that it blocked out all the chatter from nearby partygoers. The last time Adam and I had seen one another—it had been quite possibly the worst day of my life.
CHAPTER TWELVE
RAVEN
As it turned out, according to the internet, Blake Greyfield was real.
In Lark’s journal she’d mentioned that Blake played soccer for Rathbourne Academy. But she’d failed to mention that Blake Greyfield was his high school’s soccer team—the guy had received more awards, more accolades, more offers than an eighteen-year-old David Beckham. And because he was that good, he had more press write-ups than most high school athletes. Naturally, this was excellent for me; it made him incredibly easy to Google.
Of course, as with any good fairytale, Lark’s prince was every bit as gorgeous as she’d claimed—maybe even more so. His bright-green eyes sparkled on my computer screen, and his smile was infectious. And unlike the typical son-of-money-smirk, there was something sweet and kind in his expression.
In addition to articles about Blake’s soccer prowess, I found pictures of him in Rathbourne’s online yearbook and a brief blurb about some charity event he’d attended with his parents. It wasn’t hard to understand why Blake appealed to Lark. He was like her and her crowd, but…not. He knew her world, but only orbited the small sphere of massive influence that surrounded Lark.
Further digital snooping revealed that Blake’s father, Henry Greyfield, was a prominent and well-respected architect who traced his humble beginnings back to the Midwest. His mother, Emma Greyfield, was the proprietor of an art gallery in SoHo—yes, gasp, she worked! I decided that I liked the Greyfields. They seemed like a normal family who probably just took better vacations and dined at better restaurants than most.
Most importantly, I found not one digital breadcrumb linking Lark Kingsley and Blake Greyfield. Considering that both were mentioned frequently in one capacity or another, it was an extremely impressive feat. But Lark was nothing if not careful and had been just as efficient about covering her tracks with him as she was at hiding clues for me.
Interestingly, I did stumble across several mentions of Lark’s involvement with another guy: Adam Ridell. He was the cookie-cutter, prep-school boy that I’d seen pictured in The Washington Post article about Lark’s disappearance. The article featured a prom photo of the duo; a beautiful couple with matching good looks. The rest of the photos I found online were candid, with no camera-ready smiles, and they told a very different story: the pair was obviously very close, but romance played no part in whatever relationship existed between the diamond heiress and the senator’s son. Their body language was all wrong for teenagers in love. Though it wasn’t important enough to get sidetracked with now, at some point I needed to go through Lark’s journal and look for Adam’s name.
After spending several hours perusing the internet, my eyes were beginning to ache, and the persistent pounding in my head returned. I considered putting the cyberstalking aside for the night and doing something mindless, like playing WordHero on my phone. But there were a couple more articles I had yet to look at, and I was desperate to accomplish something productive before the day was over.
It had been a busy day, between finding the claim ticket, trooping to Larry’s Pawn for the safety-deposit box key, and discovering the box itself with the mysterious envelope addressed to Blake. Except, none of those things actually helped progress my search for Lark. As Asher so indelicately pointed out, none of the clues so far gave any indication to her whereabouts.
Was it possible that this entire treasure hunt was supposed to culminate here, with me sending Blake this package so that he could go find her? No, that theory didn’t sit right with me. If my sole purpose on this journey was to get the envelope to Blake, forged documents and a length treasure hunt wouldn’t have been necessary.
You could just open the envelope and see what’s inside, the devil on my shoulder whispered.
If Lark had wanted you to read the contents, she would have left you instructions to do so, the angel on my other shouldered countered.
“Well, damn,” I muttered. “Choices, choices.”
Of course, I desperately wanted to know what was inside that envelope. And yet, I also desperately didn’t want to know. What can I say? I’m complex like that.
The missing girl had let me into her life, showed me what it truly felt like to be Lark Kingsley; she’d shar
ed details about her relationship with Blake, the fears and pressures thrust upon her by a woman who would never win mother of the year, the father that she deeply revered and worried that she’d never impress, and the people whom she called friends, most of who knew her no better than her doorman. Most of all, she’d asked me for help. Not Blake.
Torn between the devil and the angel, I toyed with the clear, plastic tape holding the flap on the back of the envelope closed.
Is it so wrong to want a look?
“Finish your search,” I ordered myself. “Then you can return to contemplating your moral ambiguity.”
I returned my attention to the open laptop in front of me on the coffee table. The next hit on the list was a brief write-up on ESPN about college soccer.
Wow, I thought. He’s doing so well that even ESPN knows who Blake is. That’s incredible.
Scanning the article, I slowed down when I saw a mention of his name. After reading the line once, I had to go back and read it again. I was beyond confused: “Sophomore Blake Greyfield of Georgetown University scored three goals in the season opener against Syracuse.”
Sophomore Blake Greyfield? No, that wasn’t right. Blake should be a freshman. He was the same age as Lark. He’d been a senior at Rathbourne when she was a senior at Gracen. I was sure of it. And yet, this article claimed that Blake was a sophomore when he’d only graduated high school three months ago.
Typo, I told myself, brushing off the detail.
The reporters who covered college soccer weren’t exactly known for Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalism. Or maybe it wasn’t a typo. It was always possible that Blake had enough AP credits to technically be considered a sophomore. A number of my high school classmates left our academic halls with at least one semester, if not two, of college credits under their belts.
The pounding behind my eyes was steadily increasing, and spots of light began dancing at the edges of my vision. I went in search of the aspirin in the bathroom medicine cabinet and decided to call it a night.
On the way back to the bedroom, I gave one last, longing glance toward the living room where the envelope lay on the couch next to my laptop.
Platinum Prey Page 9
