Fade to Black (18 page)

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.

“G
retchen? 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.

She had already done a couple of commercials—one for toothpaste and two for hair products. She’d landed a decent agent and hired a reputable acting coach; she had a terrific apartment in West Lake Village, loads of friends, and a boyfriend.

She also had the most amazing job a would-be actress could hope for.

Personal assistant to Mallory Eden.

She had gotten the job through her agent, who had mentioned to her that the client of a colleague was looking to hire a new assistant, and was she possibly interested?

Great pay, flexible hours. Was she interested? Was he kidding?

She didn’t find out until she went on the interview that the client was one of the most prominent actresses in Hollywood.

Malloy Eden had been barefoot and makeup-free that day. Gretchen later discovered that her new boss was always that down-to-earth at home, away from the spotlight. She had grown not only to respect her, but to really like her.

That was
before
the explosion that changed everything.

You should have known better
.

How many times has Gretchen cursed herself for continuing to work for Mallory after the violent attack on her boss?

You should have known that anyone connected to her might be in danger, that the Eden household couldn’t be the safest place in the world in those days after Mallory was shot
.

How could she have been so blind, so stupid?

It wasn’t your fault
.

Mallory should have warned you that you might be in danger. She should have sent you home when you showed up for work that day
.

Mallory’s fault
.

Rage courses through Gretchen as the familiar refrain fills her tormented mind.

Mallory’s fault
.

It’s all Mallory’s fault....

T
he last thing Elizabeth wants to do is go to the park.

But she didn’t show up the day before yesterday, even though she had told Manny she would try.

She just couldn’t.

After leaving Harper Smith, she had impulsively gone straight home.

No post office.

No park.

She had found her house just as she had left it, but that doesn’t mean the threat has gone away. It doesn’t mean someone isn’t watching her every move, waiting until the time is right to …

So.

Today, the park.

And afterward, the post office.

She hurries along the path toward the playground, wishing the sun were shining and the sky were blue. Nice weather would be reassuring somehow.

But the late-summer afternoon is humid and overcast, with ominously dark, low clouds way out on the horizon over the water. It’s one of those New England days when the whole world seems depressingly monochromatic. Nothing but gray, no matter where you look.

The meteorologist on the radio that morning had said there’s actually a chance of thunderstorms today.

“And to all you folks who are disappointed about missing a ball game or a picnic: remember that this is one of the driest summers on record. Heaven knows we need the rain,” she had commented brightly before the program went back to the news announcer, who had followed up with a story about the severe water shortage in the East Bay area.