Fade to Black Read online

“No, you don’t.” He places a hand on hers.

  Taken aback, she flinches, looks at him to see whether he meant it ominously.

  Because despite his kind green eyes and her own fierce attraction to him, she still can’t shake the fear that he isn’t what he seems, or the memory of the way he hedged when she asked him about his background last night.

  But his grip on her hand is gentle, and he’s smiling. “Don’t go yet, Elizabeth. At least finish your coffee.”

  “I really can’t. I have a lot to do.” She had told Manny she would look for him in the park, though now she desperately wants only to go home, to hide.

  “Are you sure you have to go?”

  “I’m positive,” she tells Harper, and adds vaguely, “We’ll get together again soon....”

  But only in my restless dreams.

  “Damn,” he says, releasing her hand, snapping his fingers, and shaking his head. “I’m never going to see you again, am I?”

  How does he know?

  A chill slips down her spine, though she realizes again that he hasn’t read her mind. He can’t know that she’s about to leave town.

  “You finally meet a beautiful woman and you want to get to know her better,” he says as if to himself, “and you can’t seem to get it through your thick head that she’ s not interested.”

  Elizabeth doesn’t know what to say.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, looking at her. “It’s just that … I guess I read you wrong. It’s obvious you want nothing to do with me—”

  “That’s not true. I—”

  “Look, you don’t have to—”

  “No, really,” she says, somehow unable to help herself. “It’s not that I don’t—I mean, I do want …”

  She trails off, wishing he’d interrupt her again.

  But this time he’s waiting for her to finish her sentence, and when she doesn’t, he prods, “You do want … what?”

  “I want to see you again,” she says in a small voice, not looking at him.

  “You do?”

  She nods, still afraid to meet his gaze.

  “Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help feeling like you really have a funny way of showing your affection.”

  She smiles. “I’m sorry. Like I said, I didn’t get much sleep last night, and … I don’t know. I guess I’m just not myself.”

  Truer words have never been spoken, she thinks ruefully.

  “Oh, right,” he says, nodding. “The break-in. I forgot all about that. No wonder. Did the police find out who did it?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Are you afraid to be alone tonight? Because I can …”

  Don’t tempt me, please.

  “… give you some pepper spray, if that’ll help you to feel safer.”

  Oh.

  For a moment she had thought he was going to volunteer to come spend the night, the way Frank had.

  But Frank is a neighbor, and a cop.

  This man is a virtual stranger. It would hardly be appropriate for him to offer to stay at her place....

  Even if the merest notion of spending the night with him has already filled her mind with disturbing images.

  Images of Harper Smith naked, in her bed, of herself lying in his bare, muscular arms, feeling safe for the first time in years …

  “I can tell by the look on your face that you’re not exactly turned on by the idea of pepper spray,” he comments.

  She feels her cheeks grow hot. If he only knew what is turning her on …

  “Well, that’s understandable. The problem with any weapon is that the attacker can turn it on you.”

  Or they can surprise you so that you don’t have time to reach for your weapon, she thinks, remembering the pistol she’d had tucked in the drawer of her nightstand back in Malibu.

  “Well, maybe you can get a dog,” Harper suggests.

  She freezes.

  A dog.

  She’d had a dog once, a big, lovable black Lab named Gent.

  That was short for “Gentleman.” Because that was the dog’s nature. He never jumped on the furniture or slobbered or got in the way. He was a perfect dog.

  And she had come home one day to find him lying stiffly on the living room floor, his throat slit, his blood soaked into the white carpet....

  “What’s the matter? You don’t like dogs?” Harper is asking.

  She forces herself to look at him, to shake her head mutely.

  “Personally, I love them. Anyway, listen, Elizabeth,” he says, “I know you’re probably jumpy after what happened …”

  Jumpy.

  The understatement of the year.

  “… but chances are that whoever broke into your place yesterday won’t try it again. And even if they do, those new locks I installed are the best you can buy. Nobody’s going to be able to force their way in now.”

  She finally manages to speak. “I know.”

  He goes on, telling her more about the dead bolts he installed, about how they work, obviously trying to reassure her that she has nothing to worry about.

  She can’t help thinking, if you only knew …

  And then, for some bizarre reason, it crosses her mind suddenly that maybe she should simply …

  Tell him the truth.

  All of it.

  About who she is, and what she’s doing here, and why she can’t let herself go out with him …

  Or fall in love with him.

  No. That’s impossible. You can’t tell him anything. You’ve got to get out of there....

  She bites down hard on her lip to quell the crazy instinct to spill her secret, and the second he pauses in his conversation, she stands and tells him she has to go.

  This time he doesn’t argue.

  Just tells her he’ll give her a call, and they’ll catch that movie some night this week.

  “That sounds great,” she says simply. “Thank you for the coffee. And the cookie.”

  “My pleasure. I’ll be seeing you.”

  No, she thinks as she heads for the door, you won’t.

  And she realizes, as she hurries back down North Main toward the post office, that she’s filled with an inexplicably profound sense of loss.

  The nightmare has come back.

  It always does.

  The woman tosses on the lumpy mattress, moaning in her sleep, trying to escape the image of the child.

  Her child.

  A child with large, pleading eyes …

  A child with a frantic, sobbing voice …

  Please don’t hurt me anymore, Mama. Please don’t hurt me. I didn’t do anything bad. Why are you hurting me?

  She stands over the cowering child, her body taut with anger, her throat raw from screaming curses.

  But gradually, the fury melts away, and she can’t remember why it was there in the first place.

  She opens her mouth to speak, to say that she never meant to hurt anyone, especially this beautiful, vulnerable creature, her own flesh and blood.

  But her voice is gone.

  She can’t make a sound.

  And then the tables are turning.

  And she’s the one on the floor, trying to shrink into a corner as the child’s cruel fists beat down violently on her own tender flesh.

  She’s the one sobbing; yet still, nothing is coming out of her mouth.

  And now the child is turning away, walking away, without a backward glance.

  And the woman is left behind, desperately trying to call out, to stop the child from leaving her.

  Alone.

  Abandoned.

  Chapter

  6

  “You’re doing a great job, Manny. Keep it up.”

  The child smiles at his day camp counselor, Rhonda, a pretty high school girl with long, shiny brown hair. She’s not as pretty as Elizabeth, and her hair is a lighter shade, but Rhonda kind of reminds Manny of her anyway.

  She always takes the time to talk to Manny, and she told him she was rooting for him to get t
he lead in the play. She’s the assistant director, and today, all through rehearsal, she kept catching his eye and nodding her approval.

  “How are your costumes coming along?” Rhonda asks him, still in step at his side as they head away from the park pavilion where rehearsals are held.

  “Fine,” Manny says. At least, he’s sure they’re coming along fine. Elizabeth said she would make them for him, and she would never say it if she didn’t mean it.

  She’s the only person Manny has ever trusted not to let him down.

  He’s keeping his eye out for her as they walk along the path. She had said she might come to the park yesterday, but she hadn’t shown up. Maybe she’ll be around today. He’ll come back a little later to look for her if it doesn’t rain.

  It’s been cloudy all day, for the first time in weeks, and everybody’s been saying that it’s supposed to storm out this afternoon. Manny is praying that it won’t, because if it rains, Elizabeth won’t come, and he really needs to see her.

  “So, is your grandmother using a pattern to make the costumes?” Rhonda asks, brushing a damp tendril of hair away from her flushed cheeks. It’s uncomfortably warm today, the kind of weather where you don’t feel like moving around much.

  “Uh, my grandmother isn’t making them,” Manny tells her. “My friend is doing it for me.”

  “Oh. That’s nice.”

  “Yeah.” Manny can’t think of anything else to say to Rhonda, but that’s okay, because they’ve reached the fork in the path, and she says good-bye and heads in the opposite direction, just as he’d known she would.

  A girl like Rhonda wouldn’t live in Manny’s neighborhood. She probably lives in The Bay, a gated community outside of town, by the water.

  Or maybe over in the historical district downtown, in one of the big three-story houses with a plaque by the door saying what year it was built. According to those plaques, some of the houses in Windmere Cove have been around for three hundred years.

  Manny’s grandparents’ house is old too—but not in a good way, like so many New England landmarks. It’s pretty much falling apart, and last night he heard Grammy telling Grampa that the front steps are all rotted and they need to be fixed, or someone’s going to break their neck.

  But Grampa can’t fix the steps now that his heart is so bad. And Manny heard him telling Grammy that he can’t afford to hire someone to do it either.

  Manny wishes he had some money to give them.

  He wishes, too, that he didn’t have to live with them, because he knows that the money they spend taking care of him could be used to fix up their house and maybe even to hire a better doctor to take care of Grampa’s heart and Grammy’s arthritis.

  He wonders how they would really feel if his mother came and took him away.

  He figures they might miss him a little, because they do act like they care about him. But maybe they would mostly be relieved that they wouldn’t have to take care of him anymore. Maybe, if his mother asked them, they would say she could take him away.

  The last thing he wants is to go live with his mother. The very image of her scary, bony face makes him shudder.

  He keeps remembering what she said—that she’s his mother and she can take him anywhere she wants.

  Well, you don’t have to go with her. You can run away before she comes to get you.

  But what about Elizabeth?

  He could never leave Elizabeth.

  She’s been so kind to him. How would she feel if he disappeared? That wouldn’t be fair to her.

  So running away is out of the question.

  Manny walks slowly toward the house he shares with his grandparents.

  When he gets there, nobody’s home.

  A note on the table says that Grammy has taken Grampa to the doctor for a checkup.

  Manny opens the refrigerator, hungry.

  He finds half a piece of cheese left in the meat compartment, and a jar of Grammy’s home-made pickles. He wishes they could have regular store-bought pickles, the kind he’s had at his friends’ houses. But Grammy cans her own, from cucumbers she buys by the bushel at the farmer’s market. They’re soggy and too sour, but Manny’s stomach is so hollow that he eats four of them, along with the cheese and a big glass of water.

  Still feeling hungry, Manny goes out back to his grandfather’s shed for some scrap wood, a hammer, and some nails.

  Then he sets to work, determined to fix the front steps.

  “Gretchen? I’m home, honey.”

  She looks up from the murder mystery she’s reading and murmurs, “Hi.”

  “How was your day?”

  “Fine,” she says tersely, and asks, because she knows it’s expected, “How was yours?”

  “Not so great. I lost a patient Mrs. Alderson.”

  “Isn’t she the woman who just turned a hundred and one years old?”

  “That’s her.”

  “Well, I guess she had to die sooner or later, don’t you think?”

  Her mother shrugs, opens her mouth as if to say something, and then closes it again.

  She turns and goes down the long hall to her own room, the white shoes of her nurse’s uniform almost silent on the hardwood floor.

  Gretchen looks back at her book, then sticks her finger between the pages and closes it, staring out the window at the cloudy August afternoon.

  Outside, in the next yard, the neighbors’ three kids are playing on their wooden swingset despite the oppressive heat. They’ve been out there all day, every day, ever since school got out in June. You would think kids would get tired of the same thing day in, day out.

  Lord knows, Gretchen does.

  Every night when she gets into the twin bed in her childhood bedroom, she thinks that she’ll go crazy if she has to face another day just like the one before.

  Her mother will flutter around her, trying to interest her in some inane conversation about the garden or the weather or one of her patients at the nursing home.

  Gretchen will listen politely, eager for her mother to go off to work so that she can be left alone.

  Alone to stare out the window, or at the television, or into the pages of a book …

  To look at anything but a mirror.

  Her room at home is almost exactly the way Gretchen left it when she moved to Los Angeles after high school graduation back in eighty-eight. The walls are still a pale lemon color, the carpet still off-white. The same frilly white priscillas hang at the two windows; the same yellow-rose-flowered chintz spread is on the same too-soft mattress on the same maple bed.

  Only one thing has changed.

  On the wall between the closet door and the window is the faint outline of a rectangle where the paint is a slightly deeper shade of yellow than the rest of the walls.

  That’s where the full-length mirror used to hang—the antique mahogany-framed looking-glass that had once belonged to Great-Grandmother Dodd.

  Over the years, that mirror had reflected Gretchen in her Brownie uniform and in prom dresses and in her cap and gown on graduation day.

  Now it’s gone.

  Where it is, Gretchen has no clue. Nor does she care whether her mother sold it at a yard sale or stashed it in the drafty old attic.

  The rest of the slightly ramshackle Queen Anne Victorian is the same as it was when Gretchen left it nearly a decade ago.

  Except, again, for a few minor changes.

  Down the hall, in the bathroom, the mirrored door has been removed from the medicine cabinet over the sink.

  And in the foyer downstairs there is no longer a large mirror hanging on the door of the coat closet.

  Gretchen’s mother is taking no chances.

  The curtains are drawn throughout the house long before dark so that the windows won’t accidentally betray a reflection.

  Even the trusty old stainless steel toaster that always sat on the kitchen counter has been replaced, so that there’s no possibility of Gretchen accidentally glimpsing herself in its shiny surface. />
  Gretchen looked into a mirror once, about five years ago, not long after it happened. She was still in L.A. then, still in the hospital where she had been rushed from Mallory Eden’s Malibu mansion after that basket of flowers had exploded in her hands.

  She had gotten out of her hospital bed in the middle of the night, and she had shakily wheeled her IV stand into the small adjoining bathroom. She had peeled off the bandages in the dark, wincing at the raw, stinging pain but unwilling or unable to stop until she saw what had been done to her.

  Finally, the bandages removed, she had turned on the light, and …

  Screamed.

  Screamed so long and so loud that nurses had come running from every direction, screamed so hysterically that they had sedated her.

  They must have, because she later remembered someone rushing at her with a needle, and then blessed silence and darkness for a long time afterward.

  If only she didn’t remember the rest of it …

  What she’d seen in the mirror.

  Her face …

  The face that had once caused a stranger on a bus in L.A. to hand her a business card and tell her to call about modeling opportunities …

  Her face was …

  Gone.

  She had become a monster, a hideous monster doomed to live the rest of her life in seclusion. There is no money for the kind of plastic surgery this kind of damage would demand.

  Gretchen knows. She had met with Dr. Reed Dalton before she’d been released from Cedars Sinai. Rumored to be the finest plastic surgeon in the world, he had brusquely told her what it would cost for him to even attempt to reconstruct her face.

  If she and her mother had saved every penny they’d ever earned in their lives, they would still have only a fraction of the money.

  Her mother had written a letter to Mallory, asking if she would consider helping pay for the plastic surgery.

  There had been no response.

  And then, not long after the letter had been sent, Mallory had taken her own life.

  And so Gretchen had allowed her mother to take her back to her eastern Connecticut hometown. There was no place else for her to go. Nothing left for her in Los Angeles, where beautiful faces are as common as palm trees and cellular phones.

  She had hoped to become an actress.

  She was well on her way, when that bomb destroyed her life.