Fade to Black Page 11

  Finally, when she heard the birds starting to sing outside her window, she figured she might as well get up and get busy on Manny’s costumes.

  Now, as she sets her sewing aside and goes into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, she allows her mind to wander back to Harper Smith.

  He was in her thoughts throughout the restless night.

  She had alternated between wishing she could see him again because she’s so attracted to him …

  And being terrified that he’s the one who’s been terrorizing her all along.

  After all …

  He’s new in town.

  He’s from the West Coast.

  He was noticeably cagey when she asked him about his past.

  And what about her strange feeling that she had seen him someplace before?

  For some reason, she keeps thinking that it hadn’t been here in town, or recently.

  She keeps thinking that it had been a long time ago, in California.

  But that might just be her paranoia creeping in.

  Then again, it might not.

  What if the reason she recognizes him is that he’s the obsessed fan who was stalking her?

  She has often wondered over the years if her attacker was someone whose face she had glimpsed in the throngs of people who were always crowding around to see her. Maybe she had talked to him, smiled at him, even signed an autograph for him, feeding his sick fantasies.

  And maybe he’s Harper Smith.

  The evidence points in that direction, though all of it’s circumstantial.

  And she can’t quite convince herself that she has anything to fear from the man whose presence attracted rather than repelled her when they were alone together here yesterday.

  Besides …

  He’s a locksmith.

  A locksmith wouldn’t break into someone’s house by smashing a basement window and kicking in a door.

  A locksmith would know how to get in undetected.

  A locksmith could probably come and go without anyone knowing he had been there, if he wanted to.

  So …

  If he’s not the stalker, then Harper Smith is simply a man whose mere presence aroused feelings of lust that she had long ago buried.

  And Harper Smith just happens to be new in town, cagey about his past, from the West Coast....

  And vaguely familiar.

  Why?

  She knows she should stay as far away from him as possible in the next few days, before she leaves town.

  And she will leave town.

  She has no choice.

  Her only regret is that she won’t be able to tell Manny why she’s going, or even say good-bye.

  No, that’s not her only regret.

  She regrets, too, that if Harper Smith really is simply a nice, normal man—just a nice local locksmith who makes her lonely heart go pitter-patter—she will never see him again.

  “Are you all done eating, Hannah?” Pamela asks the two-year-old, eyeing the untouched half-slice of peanut butter toast remaining on her plastic Barney plate.

  “All done.”

  “You didn’t eat your toast.”

  “Hannah eat bananas.”

  “I see that you ate your bananas. And you drank all your milk too. But what about your toast?”

  “Hannah no like toast. Watch Elmo now?”

  Pamela sighs. “All right.”

  She settles her daughter in the living room in front of Sesame Street, then returns to the kitchen.

  She fights the urge to go to the cupboard and get a Pop-Tart. She buys them for Frank, but finds herself sneaking them herself, even though they’re not the low-fat kind. She’s constantly hungry lately. It has to be because she’s nursing.

  As soon as she weans Jason, she’ll go back to having a normal appetite.

  She’ll be able to eat slimming foods like salads. Lettuce and tomatoes are off limits to nursing mothers, according to the pediatrician. Lettuce gives the baby gas through the breast milk, and tomatoes make the milk too acidic.

  Pamela turns away from the cupboard, telling herself she doesn’t need to eat a Pop-Tart right now. She’ll only be angry with herself later.

  A rare private moment, she realizes, sitting at the table and picking up the barely touched mug of coffee she’d poured an hour earlier. Coffee is something else she’s supposed to be avoiding while she’s breastfeeding, but one cup now and then can’t hurt.

  She’d poured some for Frank too, hoping they could sit at the table together for five minutes before he left for work.

  But he’d dumped his into a plastic Dunkin’ Donuts travel mug and taken it with him, saying he was late.

  He had left without kissing her good-bye.

  Well, he was in a hurry, she tells herself, trying not to think about the early days of their marriage, when they would eat breakfast together after making love and showering together, when he would leave her at the door with a lingering kiss.

  This is what happens when you have children, Pamela decides. The romance vanishes.

  But it can’t happen to everyone, can it? There must be parents out there who are still crazy about each other, who still kiss passionately and make love every night....

  Every night.

  Try once a year. If I’m lucky.

  She clutches the mug in both hands, elbows propped on the table, pondering the problem. It can’t be as bad as it seems. Maybe she just has a touch of postpartum depression.

  But you had the baby over two months ago.

  So?

  Is there a cap on the postpartum depression period?

  Anyway …

  Our marriage isn’t abnormal. We’re both just exhausted, and busy. Once things settle down…

  But when will that be? When Hannah and Jason are grown and living on their own? How do other couples manage to keep the passion alive?

  Pamela decides to bring up the topic at Wednesday’s play group, then just as quickly decides against it. The last thing she wants to do is admit to the other moms—all of them nearly as slim and beautiful as damned Elizabeth next door—that her sex life is less than perfect.

  Elizabeth.

  That’s the last thing she wants to think about.

  She pictures Frank hurrying across the lawn last night, looking guilty.

  And no, it hadn’t been her imagination.

  He had looked guilty as sin.

  He was supposed to be out there watering the grass—an intention he had suddenly announced during dinner.

  “But what about the watering ban?” Pamela had asked.

  “You were right this afternoon. It won’t make any difference if I give the grass a little water. It is getting pretty brown.”

  And so he’d gone outside to water the grass.

  And, at some point, while she was giving Jason his sponge bath or reading Hannah Good Night, Moon for the zillionth time, he had gone over to Elizabeth Baxter’s house.

  She had glimpsed him through the nursery window, hurrying back to their own yard.

  He’d resumed watering the grass, not coming inside for nearly another hour. When she asked what took him so long, he’d merely said, “You were right. It was really dry.”

  Hmmm.

  Pamela’s eyes are narrowed as she takes a sip of her coffee....

  Then makes a face.

  It’s cold, dammit.

  Before she could drink it earlier, Jason had needed to be nursed, and then, just after she’d gotten him changed and dressed for the day, had spit up all over his outfit. By the time she put him into something clean, Hannah was up and clamoring for breakfast.

  Pamela rises, sticks the coffee into the microwave, and turns it on for a minute.

  While she waits for it to heat, she removes the Barney plate from Hannah’s high chair and carries it over to the trash. But instead of dumping the untouched piece of toast in, she grabs it and takes a bite.

  The next thing she knows, she’s sitting at the table, finishing it off with her now-stea
ming coffee—and glad Frank can’t see her. She’s noticed the little disapproving glances he sends her lately whenever she eats something fattening. He hasn’t actually said anything about her weight, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t disgusted by her appearance these days.

  No wonder they no longer have sex. Who wouldn’t be turned off by the quivering jellylike flesh that covers her once-slim belly, hips, and thighs?

  Had there really been a time when her husband had told her, every day, how wildly attracted he was to her? He used to tell her daily that she looked great, used to buy her sexy outfits so that he could show her off, used to call her “babe.”

  She thinks back to when they met, nearly five years ago at Redondo Beach.

  That was Pamela’s first trip to California; she and her friend June were spending a blissful two weeks sightseeing up and down the coast.

  She distinctly remembers what she had been wearing when she met the man who would become her husband. It was a red bikini. Though she had been in California for only a few days, her lean, hard body was already evenly tanned, thanks to a head start in the tanning booths back home.

  Frank had struck up a conversation with her and June as they waded in the surf. It turned out he was from the East Coast too—from New Jersey. He was there on vacation, visiting his brother, Rick, who lived in Pasadena. Back home he lived with his widowed father, and he had recently been laid off from the factory where he had worked since high school graduation.

  “I’ve always been a sucker for skinny, beautiful blondes,” he had told Pamela before asking her out.

  Their first date was dinner at a restaurant in Marina Del Rey. Joining them were Frank’s brother, an ex-marine who had earned a medal in the Gulf War, and June, a fervent pacifist who had marched in Washington to protest it. Naturally, the two had taken an instant dislike to each other before the drinks even arrived on the table. They did their best to cut the evening short, but their bickering hadn’t dampened Pamela’s and Frank’s ardor in the least.

  She slept with him that night, in his car parked outside the motel room she shared with June. It was reckless and raw, that first time, but incredibly satisfying. When Pamela returned to her room at dawn, she woke June and announced that she was going to marry Frank.

  “I really hope you don’t,” June had said, “because that would mean I have to see his brother at the wedding, and I never want to lay eyes on that SOB again.”

  As it turned out, Rick had been the best man and June the maid of honor a year later, and they had reluctantly called a truce in honor of the happy occasion.

  Pamela and Frank had honeymooned at the Cape—misty mornings, deserted dunes, dazzling falling leaves.

  They moved to an apartment in Windmere Cove, a picture-perfect seaside town only an hour away from her parents in the Boston suburbs and twenty minutes from Frank’s first place of employment, working the night shift at a toy factory in Pawtucket.

  By day, he attended the police academy, pursuing his dream of entering law enforcement. She toasted him with champagne when he landed the job on the local police force. They bought the house soon afterward; Pamela got pregnant, and she fully expected to live happily ever after.

  She licks a glob of peanut butter off her finger and stares off into space, wondering what happened.

  How fortuitous that the Windemere Cove Public Library had chosen last week to finally leap into the nineties by acquiring two brand-new computers with on-line services that can be accessed by the public.

  That little tidbit of information had appeared in Saturday’s edition of the Harbor Times. According to the librarian, Vivian Saunders, the computers would be available on a first-come, first-serve basis, although a sign-up sheet would become necessary once school is back in session next week, when, presumably, local students would be jostling one another in their eagerness to surf the Net.

  But at this hour on a hot, sunny Tuesday morning in late August, the library—a historic federal-style brick building conveniently located on North Main Street between the post office and the police department—is, thankfully, all but deserted.

  And luckily, the librarian is busy in the book stacks, helping an elderly, hard-of-hearing man who’s looking for an obscure book about World War I, in which he served. Neither of them seems to notice the person who scurries straight over to the computers, sliding furtively into a seat behind the one closest to the window, farthest from prying eyes.

  A crumpled scrap of paper is removed from a pocket, smoothed so that the scrawled notes can be read.

  A few commands are entered on the keyboard, and then a name is typed in....

  B-A-X-T-E-R, E-L-I-Z-A-B-E-T-H.

  Along with other pertinent information that was copied off the driver’s license that had been so conveniently left in that envelope in her desk drawer.

  She had even been so thoughtful as to have left a supply of identical envelopes in the desk.

  How simple it had been to jot down the necessary data from the license, then slip it into a new envelope. The ripped, original envelope had been easily disposed of later—burned so that no one would ever trace it.

  As if anyone would ever have a reason to try.

  “Perhaps, if you’re interested in World War One, Mr. Collins, you would be interested in learning to use one of our new computers,” the librarian is suggesting in a hushed tone as she and the elderly man emerge from the bookstacks.

  Damn!

  Don’t come over here now.

  I need only a few minutes....

  “Eh? Use one of the new whats?” asks Mr. Collins, his voice booming through the silent library.

  “Computers. We just got them last week, through a special grant … you won’t believe how much information is available on the Internet.”

  “The Internet? Is that what you’re talking about? What the hell would I need with the Internet? I wouldn’t even know what it was if my grandson didn’t make a mint working on some software program.”

  “That’s wonderful. Then you must be curious about—”

  “Do you know how old I am? Guess how old I am.”

  “Um … well, if you served in the first World War, you must be … uh …”

  “I’m ninety-eight years old. That’s how old I am. What does a ninety-eight-year-old man need with the Internet?”

  “Well,” the librarian says feebly, “you could find out about people you used to know. You know, maybe look up your old war buddies, find out where they are today.”

  “I’ll tell you where they are. They’re all dead,” says Mr. Collins. “Everyone I ever knew is dead, except my kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, and none of them want anything to do with me.”

  The librarian makes a tsk-tsk sound and listens sympathetically while Mr. Collins relates his miserable existence, and how his family is just waiting for him to die so that they can inherit the old captain’s house with a water view, the house he’s lived in from the day he was born, the house that’s been in the family for two centuries. They don’t want it to live in, but to sell so it can be turned into an antique shop, like most of the others in the historic district. Or, worse yet, a bed and breakfast, so that a bunch of strangers can run roughshod over the place.

  Tsk-tsk goes the librarian over and over again.

  Meanwhile, the computer has come up with some fascinating information about Elizabeth Baxter.

  Previous addresses, all of them in the Chicago area.

  And previous arrests, all of them for drug possession—or prostitution.

  But most interesting of all is a short blurb from a Chicago paper, dated six years earlier, when Elizabeth Baxter—purportedly the same Elizabeth Baxter who now lives in Windmere Cove—had been found in a fleabag hotel, dead of a drug overdose.

  Brawley Johnson pops the tape into the VCR and stretches out on the bed with the remote control. The blinds are drawn against the bright midday sun, leaving him alone in the shadows.

  He fast-forwards past the opening
credits and the early scene showing the nerdy, bespectacled male star walking out on his fat, ugly wife to find “a real woman.”

  Brawley has seen the film so many times, he can recite the dialogue.

  Sometimes he does, taking the role of the male star, rewinding certain scenes so that he can repeat stimulating snatches of conversation with the youngest of the half-dozen female actresses.

  Babie Love.

  That’s what she called herself when she filmed this movie back in the mid-eighties, wearing a red wig and so much makeup it’s difficult to recognize her teenage face—which is rarely on camera anyway—unless you freeze the frame and study one of the few close-ups very carefully.

  Even her voice was different back then—higher-pitched, with remnants of a little-girl squeal. She had barely been eighteen.

  He presses play when the tape reaches her first scene. In it, the man goes to a seedy strip club and she’s one of the exotic dancers.

  Brawley presses the control and watches her dance scene in slow motion, wanting to prolong the shots of her nubile young body writhing and strutting, her bare breasts jiggling provocatively, and her slightly fleshy stomach and hips still bearing the last remnants of adolescent padding.

  He watches the dance three times, then fast-forwards again, past the graphic sex scene where two older female stars seduce the nerd in the alley behind the club, leaving him naked and stealing his wallet.

  He presses play again for the scene where Babie Love comes along, giving him a ride in her jalopy.

  The naked nerd has no place to go, so she brings him home with her, to the suburban house where she lives with her unsuspecting parents, who think she’s at cheerleading practice every night while she’s dancing.

  She sneaks him up to her room, a frilly little-girl room with an eyelet-covered canopy bed.

  She puts on her see-through nightie, then climbs into bed with him, running her hands over his tense body.

  “It’s all right,” she tells the quaking nerd. “Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you. I just want to make you feel better.”

  “But … I’m married. I have children.”

  “Married men with children really, really turn me on,” she purrs.