The bubbles slowly began to dissipate and Amanda glanced down at her breasts. Even in the flickering candlelight she could see they were flushed from the water, exposed from their full top curve to their pale tan nipples. She smiled for the first time that day, remembering when she had first developed. God, how she had hated it. She had been a late bloomer, and at the time, she would have been perfectly content never to have bloomed at all. All she had wanted to do was dance. And up until she was seventeen, she had possessed what she’d considered a perfect dancer’s body: long, lean, strong, and flat-planed. Then, suddenly, it had begun to change.
She hadn’t minded the changes in her hips and bottom too much. They weren’t all that different from what they used to be, actually, just a little rounder, a little fuller. Nothing she couldn’t learn to live with. But the newly lush breasts were an abomination. She couldn’t even run across a studio floor anymore without her chest aching from the bouncing weight of her full breasts. And in the course of a routine her arms no longer wrapped unimpeded around her torso. All the graceful arm movements of dance, which until then had been second nature to her, needed to be relearned to accommodate the hated new protuberances. It was her opinion, at age seventeen, that tits were the pits.
Amanda smiled again, ruefully. Where in the world had those particular memories come from? Talk about out of left field; she hadn’t thought about that in years. But somehow, seeing her breasts emerging from the dissipating soap bubbles had dredged forth memories of a long-dead adolescent outrage. She shrugged impatiently and stretched out her toes to snag the bathtub plug, releasing it and rinsing the last of the clinging bubbles from her skin as the water gurgled down the drain.
Wrapped in a warm robe, her hair shook loose and curling wildly above her shoulders as a result of the steamy air, Amanda carried her empty wineglass into the kitchen and set it on the counter. She made herself a scrambled egg but then pushed it away before she had scarcely eaten half. Her mind refused to remain a blank, and thinking about Maryanne’s murder made her stomach churn. What if Maryanne had been killed by someone she’d known?
Amanda hadn’t said so to Lieutenant MacLaughlin, but Maryanne hadn’t always picked wisely when it came to men. She was always searching for a romantic ideal, and every time she fell in love, she was convinced that this time it was for real. But she’d had a definite penchant for the most unsuitable men, often troubled ones, the most notable of whom had been a porn star suffering from job burnout. Even Rhonda, who didn’t always agree with Amanda that a woman had to set some kind of standards, had admitted that the king of the blue movies was not a guy you’d automatically deem a desirable catch. That relationship had been short-lived and had dissolved long ago, but in all honesty, Amanda couldn’t truthfully state that she’d observed the other woman’s more recent lovers to have been a noticeable improvement. Maryanne had simply been one of those women who seem destined to keep picking the man most likely to hurt her.
Amanda knew she should have mentioned at least some of this to Lieutenant MacLaughlin. But she’d known if she had, he’d be around even longer than he had been, and she had taken about all she could handle of those probing, rain-cold eyes of his for one evening. There was something totally unnerving about that man. He was too damn big, for one thing—big and hard…powerful. She was accustomed to dancers, who were generally slender and wiry. They were also strong, but not so massively built, not so palpably suffused with raw energy. It was a more subtle strength.
There was certainly nothing subtle about MacLaughlin’s physique. The body that Rhonda so admired looked as if it would be more at home in jeans, lumberjack boots, and a flannel shirt. But the conservative suit he had worn, with its starched white shirt and tightly knotted, subtly striped tie, hadn’t diminished his aura of toughness one iota. He had still looked capable of being mean as hell. When he had touched her, she’d felt frail and helpless, which she most definitely was not, and she had detested the sensation. He’d just towed her along, and there hadn’t been a damn thing she could do to prevent him.
You’d think he would realize that given the situation with Maryanne, being manhandled and dragged around against her will was precisely the worst sensation he could inflict on a woman. Apparently it hadn’t occurred to him, however, for he sure hadn’t hesitated to lay hands on her whenever he’d felt the urge, and she resented him hotly for it. It had driven home the fact to Amanda that no matter how fit she was, and she was very fit indeed, men were still bigger and stronger.
And, to top it off, every time he’d focused his attention on her, she had felt as though she were being assessed and found wanting. She had always thought glasses softened the impact of a person’s eyes, but not MacLaughlin’s. Even behind the slightly smudged lenses, his eyes had been laser sharp, and they’d had a way of looking at her that had made her feel insignificant. About the only good thing she could think to say about the man was that at least he’d had the sensitivity not to mention Rhonda’s offer to rent Maryanne’s apartment.
Oh, hell. Her assessment of him probably wasn’t altogether fair. She was exhausted and scared spitless. MacLaughlin hadn’t been a total ogre—not all the time, anyhow. He was doing a job at which he was quite obviously competent, and there had been moments when he had even shown flashes of compassion and gentleness. His smile that one time had been surprisingly sweet—attractive, even. But somehow, he was all mixed up in her mind with the way she felt: shaken and sick, with ragged, jumpy nerves. She couldn’t get her hands to quit trembling, and in her mind, MacLaughlin symbolized this whole horrifying situation. Damn him—he shouldn’t have taken away her freedom of choice; he shouldn’t have dragged her in to identify Maryanne’s body without allowing her a minute to prepare herself.
The little bit of food Amanda had been able to eat, and the wine she had drunk earlier while sitting in the bathtub, rose in a sour tide up her throat. She swallowed repeatedly and wrapped her robe tightly around her body, shivering with the cold sweat that flowed from her pores. She kept seeing Maryanne’s lifeless body beneath the sheet in that cold stainless steel drawer.
There had been what seemed like a million discussions about the Showgirl Slayer at the Cabaret. But despite hashing over the gruesome details of the most recent murder with her fellow dancers, and all the grisly facts that were presented in the papers and on the news, Amanda hadn’t been half prepared to see Maryanne’s corpse. Talking and reading about a madman who brutalized his victims in no way compared with seeing the final result of that brutality. Amanda had only seen Maryanne’s face, but it had been enough.
God, what an understatement: it had been too much, and she just couldn’t shake the memory of what she had witnessed. It was the primary reason she refused to forgive MacLaughlin for his part in forcing the identification.
Maryanne’s face had been sort of a waxen yellowish-gray on those areas where it hadn’t been grossly distorted by ugly multicolored contusions. Amanda shivered. God. Maryanne had been all scratched and battered and misshapen, and if Amanda had been merely a casual acquaintance, she probably wouldn’t have recognized her at all. Her mouth had been hideously swollen, her nose flattened, and the shape of her face distorted, but nonetheless, Amanda had known it was she immediately. The little scar that bisected her left eyebrow had been visible, and Maryanne had distinctive earlobes. They were sort of fiddle-shaped, dipping in excessively on the perimeter just below the whorls of her ears and flaring extra wide and flat on the lobes. Maryanne had hated them. She’d called them her Dumbo flaps and had always made sure that her hair was cut in short, wispy curls at the temples to disguise them when she was forced to pull the rest of her hair back to suit some of the headpieces that were a part of their costumes. She had also favored large clip-on earrings to conceal their shape.
Amanda wished she could quit visualizing it, but it kept replaying itself in her mind’s eye. She paced her apartment, prowling from kitchen to living room to the dining room that doubled as studio space. She ca
me to a halt at the French doors, pressing her forehead against the cool panes as she peered out into the yard. Except for weak pools of illumination from the three porch lights, it was dark down there. The absence of light pouring out into the yard indicated that Maryanne’s lights had been turned off and her curtains drawn. The police must have finished for the night and left.
Amanda lowered pleated fabric blinds over the French doors and turned away. She hesitated a moment, then drew a deep breath and began to move furniture out of the dining room. She wasn’t going to be able to sleep; that was a cinch, so she might as well dance.
The conversion from dining area to dance studio was one she had made so often it had become second nature to her and took only moments to complete. She put the chairs into the living room, rolled the drop-leaf table and antique sideboard down against the north wall, and placed the Oriental rug atop the sideboard. From the coat closet she removed her two-part wooden barre, which had been custom built for her by one of the Cabaret’s carpenters, and screwed it together, fitting it into the brackets permanently affixed to the mirrored wall where the sideboard normally resided.
She stripped out of her robe on the way to her bedroom, dropping the discarded garment on a chair and reaching for her worn leotard, slouch socks, and scuffed, soft kid-leather ballet slippers. She scraped her hair into a haphazard ponytail atop her head and returned to the studio. Heart thudding, she grasped the barre and took a deep breath. Exhaling slowly, she looked at herself in the mirror, drew her frame up to its full extension until all her muscles aligned correctly from an erect skeletal structure, and executed a deep plié. From there she moved through her daily repertoire of exercises.
Very well, she thought as the coils of tension in her stomach began to ease and the jumpy restlessness drained away. Maybe I can’t sleep and food probably won’t stay down. I’d settle for a good cry, but the tears won’t come. Well, dammit, I can dance. I’ve always been able to dance—even right after Teddy…
Amanda stopped, staring at her damp, flushed image in the mirror. She watched her reflection’s jaw firm up, chin lifting slightly, and slowly she resumed her exercises.
In her life to date, always, she could dance.
Amanda had built a life for herself around dance. It was her passion and her refuge.
She’d had her first dance lesson when she was seven years old, and it was a case of love at first instruction. In the society where she had been raised, instruction in piano, dance, and the arts was considered de rigueur. Like her sisters before her, Amanda had been enrolled from a tender age in lessons in social deportment. That the lessons were designed to develop a polished and poised young woman who would ultimately be marriageable was tacitly understood.
At seven, one didn’t care about such things. For Amanda, piano was a necessary evil to be endured, art was minimally interesting, but dance—dance was everything. From her first lesson, Amanda was enthralled. She loved everything about it: the big mirrored hall; her willowy, graceful teacher; the music; her pretty new pink tights, leotard, and slippers—everything. She walked through the big mahogany door on her first day of instruction, and it was like entering another world—one that was exciting and warm and endlessly fascinating. And it was a world that quickly came to mean home to her in a way the elegant mansion she lived in never had.
Amanda wasn’t very old before she realized her home wasn’t anything like the ones she saw on the few family-oriented programs Nanny Campbell allowed her to watch on television. Her parents were not warm, understanding people like the parents on TV. Father was an investment broker who spent long hours in the city, and Mother—well, Mother was on all the right committees. Between them, they conducted an ongoing, civilized warfare in well-bred, carefully modulated tones of voice—strictly in private, of course, as a Charles never aired one’s differences in public.
When she was still quite young, Amanda regularly expected to hear of her parents’ intention to divorce. Heaven knew, many of her classmates’ parents went that route, with subsequent remarriages and second and sometimes even third divorces. Amanda had observed so many stepparents come and go in some of her classmates’ lives that at times she felt a scorecard ought to be supplied just to keep track of who was currently related to whom.
But as she grew older she came to realize her parents had no intention of seeking a divorce. From their point of view divorce was a chump’s game, although neither Mother nor Father would be caught dead using that particular phrase. However crassly put, though, it expressed exactly their opinion of the dissolution of a marriage. Fortunes were lost through divorce, blown to the four corners of the earth by alimony payments, child support, and the high cost of maintaining separate residences and multiple club dues. And modern mores notwithstanding, in certain circles reputations were still quite often tainted by it. In Robert and Arlene Charles’s opinion, it wasn’t necessary to like one’s partner in order to sustain a viable marriage. Lack of affection wasn’t excuse enough to squander family fortune and reputation by dissolving a union that was mutually advantageous. Naturally, if one wanted to break the rules, one could always do so—but discreetly.
Always discreetly.
Discretion was her parents’ forte. There were few people outside the immediate family who knew of the Charleses’ own discord behind closed doors. It was, in fact, one of life’s little ironies, Amanda had always thought, that, contrarily, select members of the revered, blue-blooded Old Guard often held up the Charleses’ marriage to the younger generation as a model to be admired in a world gone mad. That appealed strongly to Bob and Arlene Charles’s esoteric sense of what was important. And in public, Amanda had to admit, they put on a very convincing display of marital harmony.
Bending over the leg up on the barre, Amanda sighed. Lord, but her parents were big on appearances. And the absolute hypocrisy of it all failed even to register, let alone disturb them. In private, the cold war was allowed to rage on, in carefully couched words and cool tones. It was very civilized…and deadly, for all of that. The reality of a situation simply wasn’t important, as long as it projected the correct illusion.
It could have been emotionally stunting to grow up in an atmosphere where one was expected to behave properly in public at all costs, regardless of the battles one constantly witnessed in the privacy of one’s home. And in truth, Amanda thought her two oldest sisters were extremely neurotic, but prudently discreet about it in the venerable Charles tradition. Proper clones of their parents, they kept their messes out of public view and felt righteous for doing so.
Amanda escaped the emotional vacuum Mother and Father called home through her dedication to and love for dance. And through her relationship with her third sister, Teddy.
Teddy. Theodora Marie. Impulsive, bright, and beautiful, she had been the bane of her parents’ existence and the delight of Amanda’s heart. Teddy broke every rule Mother and Father lived by, blithely living her life in accordance with what felt right to her, unconcerned with how correct it appeared to others. She was rowdy and flashy, scandalizing her parents time and again with her conduct; the volume of her voice, which dared to rise above the accepted level of the truly well bred; the clothes she wore; and the vast, inappropriate group of friends she attracted like heat to a solar panel.
Amanda adored her. They were total opposites in almost every respect, and shouldn’t have had enough common interests to form a bond. Amanda was uncomfortable with obscenities and dirty jokes; Teddy used language and told stories that could make a trucker blush. Amanda was dedicated to fitness; Teddy thought taking care of oneself meant smoking low-tar cigarettes and drinking lite beer. But Teddy was big-hearted, warm, and generous, and she showered Amanda with attention. In a house where physical contact was minimal, Teddy was like a roaring fire on a cold winter’s night. She was tactile and spontaneous, and she made Amanda laugh over things that, had they come from another, probably would have made her squirm.
Teddy was a toucher. It was one of Amand
a’s favorite things about her. She loved the way it made her feel inside when she was the recipient of all Teddy’s attention and enthusiasm. It didn’t have to be anything major. In fact, it was usually the small moments that meant the most, like when Teddy insisted on fussing with Amanda’s hair, torturing it into all kinds of outrageous shapes. And then there were the “Theodora Charles Patented Preparation for Hollywood” sessions, where she sat Amanda down to experiment with makeup. It didn’t matter that Amanda wouldn’t be caught dead outside her bedroom door in most of the results of Teddy’s efforts. What was important to both of them was the contact and the time spent together.
It was usually Teddy who initiated their furious tussles across the floor. Inevitably, it was also she who cried uncle, since years of dance had made Amanda strong, and she always won, but never before first faking Teddy into thinking that maybe this time she’d finally come out on top. Even sitting quietly, Teddy maintained contact with her younger sister, casually nudging her with a toe or a finger while she discussed or debated a subject, using her touch to emphasize a point.
Surprisingly, she also stimulated Amanda intellectually. Although emotionally impulsive, Teddy had an inquisitive mind, and she loved to debate the merits of whatever issue popped into her mind at a given moment. She could be silly and frivolous, but she had a serious side also, and often she and Amanda would argue heatedly over something they had read about or had seen on the news. Some of their observations and opinions were ludicrous and some were not entirely thought out. But just as often, they could be disconcertingly astute, and their opinions were always their own, not judgments passed along secondhand, which was all that Amanda ever heard when she occasionally tried to elicit an original point of view from one of her other sisters.
So, it could have been stifling, growing up in that mausoleum of a mansion, but it wasn’t. Between the discipline of years of dance classes and her time with Teddy, Amanda developed a quiet confidence in her own ability to make decisions. She discovered alternate options to the way their parents insisted they should live their lives, and she pursued those options with unobtrusive diligence. And because she was naturally quieter and her methods were so different from Teddy’s flamboyant rebellion, most of the time her parents believed Amanda to be doing exactly what was expected of her. Their styles may have varied, but both sisters managed to arrange their lives to suit their individual needs.
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