The Dark Glamour (7 page)

Chapter Ten

T
he heavy, carved-wood doors of number 665 swung open, and Jane jolted to attention. She had been staking the place out from a Starbucks across the street, set a little bit back on Sixty-Eighth Street, from about nine that morning, but so far hadn’t seen a single useful thing. A couple of the youngest McCarrolls, the grandchildren of Lynne’s cousin Cora, had left with a nanny shortly after Jane had started watching. Blake Helding, the son of Cora’s twin, Belinda, had staggered in around ten thirty in what looked an awful lot like last night’s clothes. But between then and almost noon, she had seen nothing but comings and goings through the staff entrance, and she was starting to feel both discouraged and over-caffeinated.

Jane leaned forward toward the window, checking automatically to make sure her sunglasses were still in place. It was probably overkill, since she had acquired a completely different face and body since the last time she had seen anyone who lived in the Dorans’ mansion, but a habit was a habit.
Besides,
she reflected,
if I’m trying to act like I belong in their circle, getting recognized as “that chick who was stalking the house” would probably be counterproductive.

The woman who emerged from the dark stone archway was so thin she looked brittle, with massive sunglasses like Jane’s and a telltale head of completely implausible highlights.
Laura.
Blake Helding’s wife—probably distinctly irritated with her husband’s so-late-as-to-be-early arrival home—was striding away down the block, and Jane nearly knocked over her stool in her hurry to get outside and follow her. She stayed behind her onetime almost-friend and across the street, careful not to get caught at a corner by the changing traffic signals. She guessed that Laura would have taken one of the family cars if she’d been planning on going far, and three short and one long block later, Laura proved her right.

Sunday at noon—brunch time,
Jane realized belatedly as she watched Laura saunter into 212. She chewed her lower lip thoughtfully and considered the merits of staying right where she was. She only had twenty-eight days, one of which was half-gone: an abundance of caution was not what was called for here.

She stepped out onto the street, first nearly breaking an ankle in her viciously pointy, strappy shoes and then narrowly missing getting hit by a delivery truck. Crossing the rest of Sixty-Fifth Street more carefully than she had begun, she checked to make sure that a couple of crisp fifty-dollar bills were readily available in the pocket of her vintage, chain-strap Chanel minaudière.

She strolled past the line of waiting patrons as if she couldn’t see them; she was busy locating Laura and her three trophy-wife friends, anyway. “One for brunch,” she told the host in the bored, lofty tone that she had learned from the Dorans.

“Do you have a reservation?” he asked pointedly, his wispy blond mustache twitching strangely.

Jane pulled the bills deftly from her purse and rested them on his wooden stand, still folded between her slim mahogany fingers. “The banquette near the back is fine,” she told him softly, releasing the bills. They drifted down across his reservation book like a rumor, coming to rest just above his pale, dry hands. He hesitated briefly, and then they were gone before Jane had even seen his fingers move.

“This way, please,” he told her diffidently, leading her to the white-draped table she had suggested. She thought she heard an annoyed murmur from the line behind her, and she made herself remember to strut rather than slink.

She slid along the soft brown leather of the bench; he moved the table in a bit closer to her and hurried back to his post. She saw his right hand move to his left sleeve as he went, and then to his inside jacket pocket, and smiled: Malcolm would be so proud of her. A shrill laugh pierced her reverie, drawing Jane’s somewhat jittery attention to one of Laura Helding’s friends, a woman with slick, professionally straightened hair, whom Jane faintly remembered as the wife of some athlete. Her bare bronzed shoulder was so close that it almost touched Jane’s. Laura herself was seated across the table from Jane’s neighbor, but Jane still felt sure that, if she wanted to, she could reach over and touch Malcolm’s second-cousin-in-law.

So close,
she thought tensely,
but now what?

As if in answer, a waitress arrived at Laura’s table with three Bellinis and a Bloody Mary.
Now I wait,
Jane realized with a sudden flash of insight.
Now I let her get a little tipsy.
Laura had always been even more outgoing than usual when she had a cocktail or three in her angular body.

Jane suited action to thought, setting her purse on the table and picking up the menu. Over her fluffy Niçoise omelet (which was barely an omelet and not remotely Niçoise, to Jane’s authoritatively French eye, but was absolutely delicious all the same), she thought she noticed Laura eyeing the beading on the minaudière, and reminded herself that she wasn’t going into this mission completely blind. She knew a lot about Laura, after all: the woman liked private sales, loved one-of-a-kind anything, and loathed her husband in a good-natured sort of way.

Jane took a sip of her water and then a sip of chardonnay, reached into the tiny purse, and dug around for her new Vertu Constellation phone. It had been expensive—shockingly, heart-stoppingly expensive—but during the nerve-racking days of choosing the spell and locating the Forvrangdan orb, Dee had managed to convince her that she needed a power accessory. At the time, Jane had grudgingly written it off as retail therapy, but now it was practical in a whole new way: it was exactly the sort of accessory that Ella, socialite acquaintance of the Doran clan, would have. And since she couldn’t wear her engagement ring around the Dorans, of course, she would have to get comfortable spending money on other eye-catchers.
Plus, so pretty,
she cooed silently, stroking the smooth ceramic of its keys.

Laura noticed it, too, out of the corner of her heavily lined eye, and Jane thought she read approval in her expression.
So far, so good
. But glances weren’t invitations, and Jane gritted Ella’s small, even teeth and dialed Dee.

“I’m on my way to the interview with that caterer,” Dee answered crisply. “Is everything okay?”

“You’re late,” Jane drawled, forcing herself not to hush her voice the way she normally would. The real players didn’t worry about who heard them. She tried to copy the light, lovely accent her old friend Elodie had spoken with: a mix of British English, Haitian French, and boarding-school Swedish. The memory of the week the two girls had spent in the Dessaixes’ posh London home crashed over Jane like a wave, but she twisted the edge of the cream-colored tablecloth between her fingers and fought down the nostalgia.

“No, it’s at—” Dee initially sounded confused, but then stopped abruptly and Jane guessed that she had caught on. “Oh my God, which of them is there?”

“I don’t even care about your stupid excuses,” Jane insisted, raising her voice a tiny bit more. “I can tell that you’re hungover, anyway.”

“Well,” Dee pointed out reasonably, “you
did
keep me up past midnight with your coma drama. Who wouldn’t drink, with such a crazy roommate?”

Jane had a fleeting moment of regret that she had called Dee instead of their answering machine, which probably wouldn’t have distracted her with wiseass remarks. But it was too late now, and she determinedly soldiered on. “Do you think I couldn’t just check with Alfred and ask when he drove you home? Do you think he keeps your secrets when I sign his paychecks, you idiot? But, you know, it’s not even worth my time; I don’t care enough.”

“You’re
so
mean.” Dee pretended to pout. “Also, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be your ne’er-do-well lover or your bratty teenager.”

“Just get your things and get out.” Jane sighed. “Forget brunch, forget us, forget everything. Be gone by the time I’m back from Garren, and don’t bother the staff with carrying your crap.”

“Bitch,” Dee remarked good-naturedly. “And to think I was going to make enough dinner for
both
of us.”

Jane clicked her phone shut with a disgusted snort and signaled to one of the ubiquitous blue-clad waitresses. “Champagne,” she mouthed broadly.

To her barely containable delight, Laura snapped her French-manicured fingers briskly to get the waitress’s attention before she could fill Jane’s request. “Bring the bottle,” she ordered, and then turned to Jane. “On me, of course. It sounds like you’ve had about enough of freeloaders for the day.” She smiled at Jane, who had a momentary pang of guilt at using, arguably, the nicest adult associated with the Dorans. But, she reminded herself, when she brought Annette back to her family, everyone’s life would get better, including Laura’s. It was a deception but not really a betrayal: Lynne would probably
thank
Laura for bringing “Ella” into their lives.
And then Ella will disappear for good, and all the loose ends will vanish with her, and Malcolm will be safe and I can go on with my life.
It was almost easy to smile and raise her quickly produced glass in a toast when she kept all of that in mind.

“To cutting dead weight,” Laura suggested archly. The five women clinked their glasses high above the table and sipped.

“I don’t know what it is about men,” Jane sighed tragically. “The moment they get comfortable, they turn into little children. Do they not know how terribly unattractive that is?”

“You should see mine,” one of Laura’s friends agreed, rolling her lash extensions skyward. “You’d think the entire world revolved around poker night.”

“You
did
see mine, at the ASPCA thing last week,” another pointed out. “And he thinks
I
should ‘get a little work done’? I can tell you that whatever I ‘have done’ will
not
be for him. It’ll be for that adorable boy who delivers for our florist, who actually takes care of his body.”

“Blake came home this
morning
from Oliver’s bachelor party,” Laura admitted in a tiny voice, swallowing the rest of her champagne. “And we have to smile and be nice tonight for that harpy.” Jane automatically poured more into her glass and leaned in. “Oh, sorry,” Laura added, apparently remembering that Jane wasn’t already in her loop. “My mother-in-law’s cousin—it’s kind of sick, you know, how they all live together, like it’s a tiny town in Iowa no one ever leaves—anyway, she’s talking to these weirdo Europeans about some kind of merger. I get it, you know: the family businesses pay for my Manolos. I’m totally on board with helping things go smoothly. But do we really all have to go to every stupid party and event and pretend like we’re the world’s most perfect people in every way? Not
one
night off since they got here last week, and I’m supposed to take the woman to Bendel’s tomorrow. It will literally be the
least
fun that I have
ever
had while shopping.”

Laura twisted a lock of hair that bore no relation whatsoever to her natural color and swallowed half of her refreshed champagne. Jane, however, was afraid to touch her own in case she got too loose-lipped in her excitement.
Lynne’s distracted,
and
the Dorans are having parties every night!
She couldn’t have found a better time to get herself invited into the mansion.

“Think of it as charity,” Jane suggested, eyeing a ring that she knew Laura had been proud of acquiring. She searched her memory for every detail she could remember about it. “Everyone should be so lucky as to get to shop with someone who knows where to find authentic Laliques. I’d heard a few pieces went up at the Elaine Ausprey estate auction a few years back, but I thought it was just a rumor.”

Laura giggled happily and sipped her champagne again.
I’m in,
Jane celebrated silently, and bit her lip to keep from grinning. “You should try shopping with that beast and see if you can stay so positive,” Laura teased, “but I won’t inflict that on you. Here.” She reached across the table and scooped up Jane’s Vertu between her white-tipped fingernails. She plucked her own topaz-encrusted phone and held the two beside each other, tapping diligently with her thumbs. “We’ll think of something else to do; you’ll thank me later.”

I want to thank you now, but I’ll wait,
Jane cheered to herself, the grin finally breaking across her new face.

Chapter Eleven

J
ane sipped her Manhattan carefully before setting it on the glass table beside her. Less than an hour after settling in to her new home at the Lowell Hotel—not quite ten blocks from the Dorans’ mansion—Jane had decided that it was time to
really
get into character. Two days into her twenty-eight, Ella finally had a last name: Medeiros. Unfortunately, she also was allegedly Brazilian with an English-French-Swedish accent, and had impulsively tacked on the title of “baroness,” which, she suspected, created even more uncertainty about her origins. So Jane had decided to take a few minutes in the lobby bar to figure out who Ella really was, and had realized almost right away that even this presented problems: Jane drank chardonnay whenever she had the option, but what did Ella drink?

After an uncomfortably long hesitation in front of the patiently impassive bartender, she had remembered Maeve’s sweet-bitter-dark drink from the night of the disastrous cocktail party at MoMA. It had been stronger than Jane had really wanted, but she also remembered the way a borrowed sip of it had steadied her nerves, and she decided that Ella would probably love them. She also loved bright colors (the pastels and even some of the neutrals in Jane’s closet had made her look dull and lifeless), high heels even though she was already tall, dogs more than cats, and the partly unbuttoned shirt of the unfairly tall, dark, and handsome man in the corner armchair. Jane had never really gone for the brooding, dangerous type, but to Ella it was hot as hell.

I can totally do this,
Jane decided, letting the heat of the whiskey spread outward from the pit of her perfectly flat stomach. Dee, still giddy from her promising job interview the day before, had convinced Jane that she needed to go all in to shore up her disguise. After all, she couldn’t risk the Dorans knowing where she actually lived, but if she wanted to hang with them, she couldn’t very well pretend to be homeless, either. She might need a place to let Laura see; an address to hand out on the calling cards that the printer swore would be delivered by four o’clock at the very latest.

There was the sound of footsteps on the pale marble tile, and Jane turned instinctively to see if it might be the printer, finished ahead of schedule. But it was just a bellhop, studiously working not to struggle under the weight of about thirty shopping bags. Most were from Barney’s, which was conveniently nearby, but Jane also spotted a few from Fresh, Teuscher, and Jo Malone.

I think Ella prefers Annick Goutal,
Jane decided as the young man passed behind her chair,
but the rest is good
. Every sip of her cocktail made it easier to feel decisive, and she took another to celebrate the latest conclusion she had drawn about her temporary persona.

“ ‘Garden’ apparently means something different to you from what it does to me,” an icy-cold voice announced, and Jane swiveled again on her black leather chair to see what the disturbance was. She tracked the voice across the shiny marble floor and past the polished brass of the revolving doors to the deep cheery finish of the reception desk. “I will be happy with your complimentary upgrade once I have been able to inspect the new suite,” the woman standing at the desk continued in a tone that made Jane feel absolutely positive the “upgrade” in question had not been intentionally complimentary. Jane took in the complaining guest’s close-cropped black hair and her sinewy, deeply tanned calves, and guessed that she was the source of the mountain of shopping bags that had just disappeared with the bellhop behind the doors of the service elevator.

The conciliatory-looking desk agent handed the unhappy woman a new key card, mouthing what looked distinctly like profuse apologies. Jane rolled her eyes and fished the cherry out of her drink. Was Ella the type of person who made a scene to get stuff for free? It would distinguish her from Jane, but hopefully there were enough other differences between them that such desperate measures wouldn’t be necessary. She bit into the cherry, letting the soft burn of the liqueur spread to every corner of her mouth.

The woman at the desk spun on one totally-overkill-for-daytime stiletto and headed for the bank of elevators on the far side of the lounge, and Jane’s gasp caused half of the cherry to lodge in her throat.
Mystery Witch
. Even without the sunglasses, there was no doubt: the woman who had been stalking Jane all over Manhattan was now in her brand-new hotel. Jane tried to inhale, but couldn’t, around the cherry. She coughed instead, which helped, and then glanced around for the closest emergency exit.

But how is she even doing this?
her mind complained.
Did Lynne hide some kind of tracking device under my skin?
The theory was a little too plausible to laugh at, especially now that Mystery Witch was bearing down on her at an alarming rate.
Screw this. If she can find me here, I’m just going to have to fight her and be done with it.
Jane turned a little in her chair and started pulling in her magic. She didn’t have as much time as she had had for the last week’s prepared spells, but she had the major advantage of fury working for her, and she had a respectable amount of power burning before her eyes before Mystery Witch had drawn even with her.
I should question her first,
Jane realized in alarm.
Also, fighting to the death is
so
not appropriate in public.

As she hesitated, Mystery Witch swept past her and into an open elevator, leaving a cloud of L’Air du Temps in her wake.

What the—?

Jane looked around, completely baffled now. Mystery Witch hadn’t even seemed to see her . . .
because I’m not me,
she realized finally. Her stalker hadn’t followed her all the way to the Upper East Side; Jane had moved to the Upper East Side and stumbled across her stalker. At her hotel. By chance.

Jane finished her drink in a hurry and signaled the bartender for another one. Following Laura to brunch had been a lot of good planning combined with a lot of good luck, but this was just pure serendipity, and it was hard to wrap her mind around. She was literally right under Mystery Witch’s nose, and the other woman had no idea. With a little ingenuity, Jane could find out who had sent her and what she wanted, and figure out her next moves accordingly.

Her fresh drink arrived, and Jane reached for it eagerly. The rim of the glass was at her lips before she noticed that it had come to her in the hands of Tall, Dark, and Handsome from the corner.
Ella really
is
one lucky girl,
Jane decided, smiling coyly at the stranger. From this close she could smell the rich, musky leather of his bomber jacket, and she inhaled deeply, letting its pheromones saturate her brain.

“When I saw you here, I thought,
This beautiful woman must be having a very bad day, or else a very good one,
” Tall, Dark, and Handsome told her softly. His voice was low and soothing, with just a trace of an accent that made Jane hope he would speak more. “So I felt I must come to you and ask you which it was.”

Jane nodded to the chair across from hers, and the man slid into it with the controlled grace of a panther. “It’s been a bit of both,” she told him honestly, running a finger around the rim of her glass.

“Improving, I hope,” he offered with raised eyebrows that suggested thoroughly insincere humility, and Jane smiled a little. Something about him reminded her of the men she had flirted with in France, before she had met Malcolm.
I wish I could place the accent,
she mused.

Every movement and gesture of his said “Old World,” and Jane automatically copied her friend Elodie’s cool confidence along with her borrowed accent. “I suppose that depends on how good the company is,” she told him, leaning back slightly in her chair as she sipped her Manhattan. This one didn’t burn her throat on the way down, and she guessed that she was already tipsier than she had realized through her adrenaline haze.
Good thing I don’t have to fight, after all,
she decided,
although flirting with this particular man might be nearly as risky.

Her stranger’s name turned out to be André, and after the briefest of hesitations, he added that he was visiting from Romania.

André was in town on “business,” but declined to add more. Jane, who suspected that he was deliberately trying to make her curious, refused to take the bait, instead chatting with him about the chic Upper East Side lifestyle that she decided Ella led. It was easy to fake both the experiences and the attitude after the time she had spent living with her impeccably upper-crust in-laws, and she even managed to spare some of her attention for evaluating her companion. The set of his jaw told her he was frustrated that she wasn’t swooning over his secretiveness, but she couldn’t help but be impressed by how still and neutral the rest of his body was. It reminded her of a cat, waiting and watching, and she felt flattered to be the object of such unwavering attention. Sure, most of it was due to her new body and face, but she reminded herself that her personality, her wit, and the way she carried herself were still her own. And André, no matter what had drawn him to her in the first place, clearly enjoyed all of those things as well.
Besides, it’s not like I was so painfully homely before,
she admitted to herself. Lynne Doran may have come up with a hundred inventive little ways to call her fat, but curvy, blond Jane had never lacked for male attention.
It’s just weird getting it for being someone else. My looks were
mine
.

“Baroness Medeiros,” a timid voice whispered in Jane’s ear, and she startled a little. Fortunately, she had already swallowed enough of her drink to keep it from spilling over the sloping sides of the glass.

She set it down carefully on the table between her and André, and although he stayed as still as ever, she was fairly sure that his eyes slid to the neckline of her raw silk tank when she leaned.
And me without my cleavage,
she griped silently, but André seemed to approve thoroughly of Ella’s smaller, more delicate breasts. Smiling a little to herself, she turned to the anxious-looking concierge hovering by her shoulder, who was quite plainly trying not to wring his hands. “Yes?”

“Something has arrived for you,” he managed to force out, holding out a single piece of creamy, heavy card stock in one lightly trembling hand.
That’s definitely not my calling cards.
As soon as Jane touched it, she recognized it unmistakably as Doran stationery. She had received dozens of notes like this in the mansion: phone messages, appointment reminders, and invitations/summonses from Lynne herself. Jane’s fingers began to tremble a little, too, as she took the card, but the handwriting inside was upright and loopy and totally unlike Lynne’s. She steadied her breath and made herself read.

Dear Ella,

Ran by Cenzo’s Papiro for my daughter’s birthday invites, and he was in the middle of engraving some absolutely gorge cards. I recognized your name, and would love to be the first to welcome you to the neighborhood! Please meet me for dinner tonight. My number’s in your phone!

—Laura Helding

Jane fought the temptation to turn the card over, backward, upside-down. But it wasn’t in code and there were no hidden messages: she had just made it one step closer to her goal.
I wonder if “dinner” is at the mansion,
she thought, but quickly reminded herself that she’d already had more than her share of good luck so far, and twenty-six and a half days to go with her disguise.

“ ‘Baroness Medeiros’?” André purred, and Jane flushed.

But my new skin shows it less,
she reminded herself sternly, and folded Laura’s note into her purse. She fumbled clumsily with the buckles, which she didn’t remember being nearly so complicated, and realized that she might be heading past “tipsy” by now. She pushed the edges of the purse closed and turned her attention back to André. “It’s just ‘Ella’ among friends,” she told him lightly, remembering just in time that real royalty shouldn’t be self-deprecating. “Speaking of which,” she went on, “I’m afraid I have some business to attend to this afternoon, and I really need to get going.”
Such as a cold shower, a hot cup of coffee or three, and picking out the perfect dinner outfit,
she added silently, but if André was going to be coy about his business, then she could be coy, too.

The planes of his olive-skinned face registered what looked like genuine disappointment, and Jane felt a deeply pervasive desire to stay. But she had more pressing things to focus on than romance—or lust—and so, she reluctantly stood and brushed the lace layers of her skirt smooth. “I hope I will see you again while we are here,” André told her, his black eyes following her movements intently. “It would be a crime to ignore
all
pleasure in favor of . . . business.”

Jane smiled; he had a point. She really couldn’t spend every moment stalking the Dorans, anyway. “I couldn’t agree more,” she told him sincerely before turning on one heel and sauntering toward the elevators, allowing her long legs to pull her hips into a gentle sway that she knew he would be watching. As the doors closed behind her, she felt a smile tugging at her lips.
Being Ella has definite perks
.