Fade to Black Page 3

  And there, beyond the landscaped pool area, a dark silhouette crept toward her, moving stealthily through the shadows.

  In that impossibly convenient manner of dreams, she could see the figure clearly though she was inside the house, in bed, tossing in a restless sleep. She sensed that danger was closing in; she knew that in a matter of moments, she would be dead....

  No!

  Stop thinking of that. It was only a dream....

  Only a nightmare.

  Elizabeth lets out a shuddering sigh and abruptly shoves the quilt beneath the edges of the pillow shams. She turns and surveys the room, not reassured by its sun-splashed order or by the faint strains of an old Billy Joel song playing on the easy-listening radio station in the next room.

  The day Janet Kravinski had first shown Elizabeth this house, she had pointed out how spacious the master bedroom was, how bright with “all those windows”—three-paned, high rectangles overlooking the asphalt driveway and chain-link-fenced backyard.

  Elizabeth had nodded mutely as the Realtor rattled on. She had been remembering the skylit vaulted ceiling and three full walls of glass in that other, long-ago master bedroom that overlooked a lush, landscaped terrace and kidney-shaped swimming pool, and, off in the distance, the blue Pacific Ocean.

  How she had loved that expansive view. She distinctly remembered instructing the interior decorator not to cover those windows. When the woman—one of those ubiquitous designer-clad, Mercedes-driving Beverly Hills blondes—had pointed out that the room might feel too stark without some kind of draperies to soften the boxy lines, Elizabeth had insisted on simple white sheers so that she would never feel closed in.

  In the beginning she had rarely bothered to draw the drapes at night, wanting to feel as though she were sleeping outdoors, just as she had so long ago as a midwestern Girl Scout. It was comforting to open her eyes and see the moonlight filtering through the lush, blooming shrubs, reflected in the crystalline aqua waters of the pool.

  How could it have never occurred to her that the windows worked both ways?

  That someone was looking in on her as she lay alone in the wee hours of the morning?

  How vulnerable she had been....

  How utterly reckless.

  Now she glances at the heavy, lined curtains and sturdy Venetian blinds she has installed at every window in this small bedroom, where only flimsy vinyl shades existed before. She had forced herself to open the blinds and curtains this morning, refusing to allow herself to give in to the terror that has threatened to send her over the edge ever since she opened that card yesterday afternoon....

  I know who you are.

  The scrawled message has been continuously running through her mind.

  Even the teddy bear illustration haunts her, the creature’s black button eyes seeming to follow her with menacing intent.

  It has to be a mistake. Somebody meant to send the card to someone else....

  But it was addressed to her....

  To Elizabeth Baxter.

  Well, maybe it hadn’t been meant in a threatening way. Maybe someone sent it as a joke.

  There’s only one problem with that scenario.

  There is no one in Elizabeth Baxter’s past who would play a joke on her, because she has no past.

  This is it, this solitary life in this quiet New England town. There are no old boyfriends, no long-lost friends, no far-flung family members.

  Whoever sent the card has figured out who she really is.

  And they meant to scare the hell out of her.

  They have succeeded.

  Whoever sent it is right here in town, or they were as recently as a few days ago.

  Do they know where she lives? Or did they trace her to Wind-mere Cove through the post office box address she uses for everything, another attempt at keeping her exact location a secret, should anyone figure out the alias she’s been using.

  And apparently, someone has.

  Oh, God.

  All at once her body gives in to the panic, involuntarily releasing it to surge from her gut and course through her veins. Urgent warnings screech in her brain, and her heart launches into a violent pounding.

  Trembling, she strides to the nearest window and jerks her jittery hand toward the white plastic rod that controls the blinds.

  Only when all three windows are darkened and the curtains drawn again does she shakily release the breath she has been holding.

  She has succeeded in shutting out the bright morning sunlight.

  She is once again alone and safe in the shadows....

  Alone.

  Safe.

  For now.

  By early afternoon the frantic feeling has subsided enough so that Elizabeth is able to leave the easy chair in the living room, where she has been warily huddled for hours, her arms wrapped so tightly around her bent knees that her whole body now aches with tension.

  She fixes herself a tuna sandwich, which she barely touches, and then decides to throw in a load of laundry. Anything to keep busy.

  In the cellar she quells the thought that someone might be hiding in the dark corners that aren’t quite reached by the light from the bare overhead bulbs.

  She forces herself to move efficiently to the washing machine and open the lid.

  Inside, plastered against the side, she sees a damp scrap of pink and white ruffled fabric, and she remembers....

  Hannah Minelli’s sunsuit.

  Elizabeth sniffs it, but there’s no hint of mildew, though it’s been sitting there, damp, for nearly twenty-four hours. She puts it into the dryer and turns it on low.

  Then she fills the washer with bath towels and washcloths, measures the liquid detergent, dumps it in, turns the dial, and pulls the knob so that water starts gushing into the machine.

  Hannah’s sunsuit.

  When it’s dry, she’ll have to bring it next door.

  She promised Pamela that she would.

  And if she doesn’t, Pamela will come over to get it.

  Venturing out of her protected nest seems too perilous to comprehend....

  Yet, the thought of having her privacy needlessly invaded by her neighbor’s prying eyes and nosy questions is unbearable.

  Outside, she can hear the birds singing, and the faint sound of a neighbor’s lawn mower.

  Nothing’s going to happen to you in broad daylight, with people all around, she tells herself firmly.

  No. He would wait until after dark—after midnight, when she was alone in her bed and there was no one to hear her scream....

  Just as he had before.

  “Elizabeth!”

  Frank Minelli’s brown eyes widen in surprise and he opens the screen door wider.

  “Pamela’s not home,” he tells her. “She went to some play group with the kids.”

  “That’s okay. I just wanted to return this.” She hands him the neatly folded pink and white sunsuit, still warm from the dryer.

  Frank holds it up by the ruffled shoulder straps, then shakes his head and looks at her. “Must have been pretty skimpy on you, but Hannah’s always glad to share her clothes.”

  She forces her mouth to smile, knowing he can’t see that her eyes aren’t smiling. They’re hidden behind the sunglasses she wears whenever she leaves the house, even just to cross the yard.

  “Actually, Hannah has about a hundred of these little pink outfits,” Frank tells her. “I don’t think anyone would have realized this one was missing.”

  Elizabeth nods stiffly, wanting only to go, feeling trapped in this neighborly suburban encounter.

  “Then again,” Frank says with a chuckle, “knowing my wife, Hannah’s closet is probably alphabetized and labeled. She loves playing dress-up with Hannah, poor kid, like she’s one of those Barbie dolls. But my daughter doesn’t seem to mind, you know? Still, I’m telling you, the day I find Jason in a pink bonnet, I put my foot down.”

  She smiles, relaxes slightly.

  He’s nice, Frank. He must be a good cop. Wi
th his easygoing manner and sense of humor, he’s the kind of person you’d want around if you were in trouble.

  Not that Elizabeth has any intention of confiding her troubles to him. That’s not even an option.

  She takes a step backward, bumps into the black wrought iron railing at the edge of the small cement stoop.

  “Want to come in?” Frank asks, still holding the door open with one hand, clutching the sunsuit in the other. “I can offer you that diet iced tea that Pam drinks, or a cold beer. I was just about to have one myself. Cutting the lawn always makes me thirsty as hell.”

  “No, I should get back. I have—”

  What?

  Work to do?

  Calls to return?

  Company coming over?

  She can’t think of a single excuse that wouldn’t sound like a feeble lie. So she simply trails off with a shrug, and puts a foot down on the top step.

  “I noticed your grass is getting a little overgrown,” Frank says, leaning his shoulder against the door to prop it open, and casting a glance over at her yard next door. “You want me to take care of it for you?”

  “Oh, no, that’s okay,” she tells him quickly. “It’s fine. I mean, I’ll get to it as soon as I have a chance. It hasn’t needed mowing that much this month since it’s been so dry. I, uh, had planned to do it today, but …”

  But I’m too terrified to leave my house for the amount of time it would take me to mow the grass.

  “Are you sure you don’t want a hand? I’d be glad to help you out,” Frank says. “Pam told me she owes you a favor, anyway, for you taking Hannah off her hands yesterday afternoon. That really was nice of you to go out of your way like that.”

  “It was no problem, really,” Elizabeth assures him, and moves down another step.

  Frank shrugs. “Well, we owe you one, then. Just let us know what you need. And if you get too lonely later, feel free to drop by. We’re always around on weekend nights when I’m not working, ‘specially now that the baby’s here too. It isn’t easy to find a sitter for two kids.”

  “No, I’m sure it’s not,” she agrees conversationally.

  Suddenly, it occurs to her that maybe he expects her to volunteer to stay with the kids so that he and Pamela can have a night out.

  Then she realizes he doesn’t seem the type to drop a broad hint like that. His wife would do it, but—

  Correction. Pamela would come right out and ask if she needed a favor like that.

  Well, Elizabeth isn’t about to offer her baby-sitting services to Frank, whether he’s hinting or not. She has enough to worry about.

  Still, as she looks into his friendly face, she feels a pang of regret. He’s been so nice, offering to help her with her lawn and inviting her inside for a beer....

  You’re just feeling guilty because you can’t be neighborly in return, she tells herself.

  Once upon a time, reaching out to people had been second nature to her.

  But that had ended many years ago, long before she had come to Windmere Cove.

  She had learned, once she had made it big back in Hollywood, never to trust anyone outside of a very select circle of friends. Everybody else, it turned out, wanted something from her—wanted her money or her connections or her body, or simply a share of the limelight.

  “You all right, Elizabeth?” Frank Minelli asks, seeming to lean forward a little, his brown eyes concerned.

  “I’m fine,” she says hastily, and nearly stumbles moving down the last step to the sidewalk. “I have to get going. Tell Pamela I said hello....”

  “Will do.”

  She turns and just stops her foot from landing smack in the border of red and white impatiens along the sidewalk. She takes a giant step over the flower bed and crosses the lawn, tripping over a garden hose along the way.

  She feels Frank Minelli’s eyes on her and knows he must be thinking she’s a clumsy, jittery fool.

  But when she turns back, the screen door is closed and he’s not watching her after all.

  You’re totally paranoid. Everyone in the world isn’t caught up in watching every move you make.

  Not anymore.

  Not like the old days, when she couldn’t step out her door to get the morning paper without paparazzi jumping from the bushes, when she couldn’t go to the ladies’ room in a restaurant without being trailed by a barrage of fans and press and curiosity seekers.

  Those days are over.

  Now nobody’s watching her.

  Nobody except the shadowy stranger she had thought she’d escaped for good five years ago …

  Today.

  Five years ago today, she realizes with a start as she jabs the key into the lock and opens the back door to her house.

  She hadn’t realized it was the anniversary until now, when the date had suddenly popped into her head.

  That’s it, then.

  There goes the last glimmer of hope, hope that the card she had received yesterday had been some kind of fluke, that it hadn’t been meant for her or that it hadn’t been from the person who had made her life a living hell five years ago.

  She knows, now, that it arrived yesterday for a reason.

  Whoever had sent that card knows exactly what day it is, and he knows that Mallory Eden isn’t dead.

  But she has no doubt that he’s going to make sure that she will be soon.

  The child sits cross-legged on the scarred rust-colored linoleum floor in front of a small color television set. His neck is craned uncomfortably as he looks up at the screen, because the set isn’t at eye level. It sits high atop the rickety white-painted table his grandfather picked out of someone’s trash last year.

  Grampa’s always doing stuff like that. It’s embarrassing.

  So is the way Grammy’s always going around in that same green cotton dress and shoes so worn, the soles slap against her heels like beach flipflops—and the fact that she often hunts for greens in the vacant lot behind the house.

  She flours them, salts them, and fries them in oil, and they taste pretty good, but they’re still weeds. They don’t serve weeds in the school cafeteria or at the free day camp run by the town. None of his friends eat weeds at home.

  And Elizabeth, he’s positive, doesn’t eat weeds, though he never asked her about it.

  There are a lot of things he’s never asked her.

  The screen door in the kitchen bangs, and he hears footsteps in the hall, then voices speaking in Portuguese.

  His grandfather’s, then his grandmother’s. Then a third voice.

  It’s her.

  He moves closer to the television set, stretching his arm to turn up the volume. It’s just some stupid cartoon, but he focuses on the screen intently, as though mere are no distractions.

  No stupid golden oldies music blasting from his grandfather’s small radio in the next room.

  No simmering teapot building to a whistle, forgotten, on the gas range down the hall in the kitchen.

  No voices bickering, then hollering from the bedroom in a language he understands but has never chosen to speak.

  Money.

  She’s come for money.

  She always comes for money.

  Doesn’t ask to see him, or even about him.

  Her child.

  Her father hollers that he has no money to give her, especially not for what she’ll spend it on. Crack.

  Her mother screams at him to shut up, or the whole neighborhood will hear.

  Then, open windows clearly forgotten, they rant at their daughter; she rants back at them.

  She knows they have money; do they want her to starve?

  “What about your son?” her mother shouts. “We can barely afford to feed him now that your father’s out of work on disability. Do you want to take food out of your son’s mouth? Do you want him to starve? Do you care?”

  “He won’t starve,” comes the reckless reply. “He’s got that lady. She must give him money.”

  The child squeezes his eyes closed a
nd bends his head, shaking it. Elizabeth. But how does she know?

  “What lady?” his grandmother asks, sounding slightly less angry. Curious.

  “That lady who takes him out for ice cream all the time. I have friends. They see her with him. She’s trying to take my place. She’s trying to take over as his mother.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” his grandfather demands.

  “she’s hallucinating again,” his grandmother says, as if that’s the only possible explanation. “Calm down, Rafael. You don’t want to get worked up. Your heart—”

  “My heart is fine.”

  “I’m not hallucinating,” says their daughter. “You two don’t even know what he’s up to half the time, do you? What the hell kind of guardians are you?”

  “Don’t you curse at us!” Manny’s grandfather bellows. “What kind of mother are you? What kind of daughter? What kind of person leaves her own flesh and blood without looking back? Except when you need money for—”

  “Rafael, your heart!”

  “Forget it! I don’t need your money. I don’t need anything from you.”

  Footsteps again, retreating quickly down the hall toward the back of the house. The door creaks open, slams closed.

  His grandmother makes her way down the hall into the kitchen and the teapot makes a deflating, moaning sound as it slowly ceases to whistle.

  His grandfather mutters something to himself, then curses and throws something against the wall in the next room.

  And the child opens his eyes just in time to see a large brown roach the size of a small mouse scurrying across the linoleum inches from his bare leg.

  Had she actually thought she could escape the fear, escape the memories, even for a short time?

  Elizabeth draws a deep breath and forces herself to look back at the headline that has caught her eye in this evening’s edition of the Harbor Times.

  It’s a major story, located on the second page, opposite a piece about the ongoing reservoir water shortage in the East Bay, compounded by the hot, dry August they’ve had.

  Five Years Since Mysterious Death

  of America’s Sweetheart

  Even the dinky local paper has marked the anniversary with a full-length feature story off the wire, accompanied by several photographs.