Too Pretty to Die (8 page)

Like a blubbering baby, I cried.

I hated the very sound of it, the way my shoulders shook, the helplessness I felt, and still I couldn’t stop until I let it all out.

“Here.”

At the gentle tap on my arm, I pried my damp palms from my cheeks and looked up as I sniffled.

Anna Dean pressed a paper towel into my hand.

“I couldn’t find a tissue,” she said. “This was the best I could do.”

“Thank you,” I murmured through snot and tears, grateful for her small act of kindness.

I blotted eyes and skin then blew my nose. When I was done, I balled the paper towel in my hand, not sure what to do with it. I felt blotchy and awkward, and wished ever so briefly that I was more like my mother, who always seemed so in control of every situation.

I finally stuffed the wadded towel in the pocket of my hoodie, and made a disgusted noise before I blathered on: “If I were Cissy, I’d have a proper hankie, folded and pressed, ready to go. But I can never seem to find a Kleenex when I need one. Sometimes I wonder if I wasn’t adopted after being left in a milk crate on the doorstep.”

The deputy chief momentarily shed her stoicism to offer a look of sympathy. “I’m sure even your mother gets rattled, Andrea. Everyone does, though some are better at hiding it than others.”

“It’s not even like Miranda and I were close, but I feel like I’ve been hit by a Mack truck,” I said wearily, and glanced back at the doorway, hearing voices and movement beyond the kitchen.

“You’ve gotten a shock, and it’ll take some time to sink in. I’ll call you again if I have any more questions.”

I turned to her, wiping my nose on my sleeve. “You want me to leave?”

If I’d been a normal person, I would’ve welcomed the chance to escape, to get out of a place so recently visited by the Grim Reaper. But I wasn’t done yet. I still had so many questions.

“If you wouldn’t mind, Andrea, I do have work to do.” The deputy chief crossed her arms over her chest, and her shiny badge winked beneath the kitchen lights, as if I needed a reminder of who she was and why she was there.

Instead of taking the hint and vamoosing, I flung an ultimatum at her: “Promise me you’ll investigate this further. Maybe things aren’t as clear cut as they seem on the surface. Miranda just wasn’t the kind of girl to give up so easily.”

“You said you weren’t very close to her, so maybe you didn’t know her as well as you think,” Deputy Dean said in such a logical way that I felt like nodding.

Only I didn’t agree. Or perhaps I didn’t want to.

I couldn’t believe that Miranda DuBois had woken up after I’d taken off last night and decided to off herself, just like that.

It wasn’t possible, was it?

Though what did I know about suicide? I’d never tried it, never even considered it, even when I’d felt the most alone.

Maybe Miranda had felt too damaged—too humiliated—to greet another day. Maybe it hadn’t taken much thought at all.

The stoic mask returned to Anna Dean’s face, and I wasn’t surprised when she said, “We’ll see what the medical examiner has to say, but the evidence is looking pretty strong from where I stand. I’m not one to rush to judgment, though, Andrea, and I won’t do it here. When the M.E. tells me the cause of death, that’s when I’m sure and not a moment before then.”

“Thank you.” At least she hadn’t dismissed my concerns. That had to count for something.

The deputy chief rounded the granite island. “Why don’t you stop by your mother’s before you go home? It might do you good to have someone to talk to about this.”

Oddly enough, the idea of seeing Cissy and telling her about Miranda didn’t sound all that atrocious. My mother could be hard on me sometimes, a tad overbearing and overprotective; but beneath the Chanel and pearls beat a truly caring heart. Even if she didn’t like to show it, Cissy felt things very deeply. I’d grown up thinking my mother was indomitable, sort of a modern day Joan of Arc who could stand in the fire and not flinch. I’d only begun to see how wrong I was over the past year.

Despite the fact that one would rarely ever glimpse Cissy Blevins Kendricks with a hair out of place, she bled red like everyone else. (Okay, so it was Coco Red by Chanel, but still.)

I slid off the stool, rubbing damp palms on my thighs. “You’re right,” I told Anna Dean. “I should go.”

There was nothing else I could do for Miranda besides.

It was too late for that.

I
shuffled out of Miranda’s duplex just as the medical examiner’s van pulled up, and I can’t say I was unhappy to miss what came after. I didn’t want to view Miranda’s lifeless corpse encased in a body bag as it was wheeled outside on a stretcher.

Long ago I’d decided it was far, far better to remember people as they were (i.e., alive and breathing). If you got a glimpse of them in death, you could never shake it from your mind.

Trust me on that.

And call me insensitive, but it felt even worse when the deceased was someone young with an interrupted life. It always left you to wonder what they could have become had they stuck around.

Though, most often, dying wasn’t a matter of choice.

Sometimes life derailed like a bad day at Amtrak, and there wasn’t much you could do except hang onto the handrails, grit your teeth, and ride it out.

I knew Miranda DuBois and I had never been tight, and maybe it shouldn’t have been so difficult for me to accept that she had chosen to check out of the Heartbeat Hotel way earlier than scheduled.

But it was.

I just couldn’t reconcile that a woman who’d braved her way through beauty pageants, debutante balls, sorority rush, and television news would end it all because she was no longer the prettiest girl in the room.

Sure, Miranda had been superficial and vain, but she could conjure up tough when tough meant winning instead of losing. Pageant queens were no pansies, despite how they fluttered around in glittery ball gowns and rhinestone tiaras. Miranda might’ve oozed charm on the surface, but she had the cunning of Donald Trump. She’d used what she had to get where she wanted to be. Was that such a bad thing?

She’d carved herself a place as a bona fide Dallas celebrity with a sandwich named after her at Who’s Who Burgers in Highland Park Village, and a cartoon rendering of her bodacious blond self hung on the walls of The Palm on Ross Avenue in the West End.

In the yearbook, Miranda had written her ambition as “To be famous,” and she’d achieved that, for sure. Were a droopy lip and an eye tic worth giving up all that?

My answer would have to be, “No.”

Was I in denial?

Maybe that was it.

I was suffering from a severe case of guilt.

Most assuredly, I wasn’t taking Miranda’s alleged suicide well. My insides felt like ill-prepared oatmeal: mushy and full of lumps.

Daddy had always advised that I listen to my gut, and my gut was telling me there was more to what had happened to Miranda than anyone realized.

Until I better understood, I couldn’t get her out of my mind.

I nearly called Brian.

For my own peace of mind, I needed someone to hear me out and explain away my doubts, and Brian was one of the best listeners I knew.

But I didn’t do it.

I hated the thought of waking him up. He’d been through a lot lately, with his heavy workload at ARGH (aka Abramawitz, Reynolds, Goldberg, and Hunt, the primo defense firm in the city), not to mention a money-laundering case that had nearly done him in. Then his parents had popped into town, and we ended up taking them along to the Birthday Party from Hell at my mother’s.

Talk about trying times.

If Brian wasn’t such a Steady Eddie and natural-born Eagle Scout (much like my daddy had been), he would’ve needed to book a room at the funny farm.

Besides, what good would it do to jolt him out of a sound sleep to grouse about Miranda’s death?

He hadn’t even known her beyond watching her on the news on occasion. I’m sure he’d sympathize, but it wouldn’t mean anything to him, not the way it should.

Instead, I followed Anna Dean’s suggestion and headed over to Mother’s.

My mother had known Miranda. Even better, she knew me. I never thought I’d say this, but if anyone understood how I was feeling at the moment, it would be her.

As I left Miranda’s street, I passed a silver VW sedan whose redheaded driver bore a striking resemblance to Janet Graham; but I didn’t ease my foot from the gas pedal, not even a little. I wanted out of there. Getting as much distance between myself and Miranda’s place was foremost on my mind.

I’d barely begun to breathe again when I turned off Beverly and into the brief circular drive that led up to Cissy’s house.

Though I’d grown up within the walls of the 1920s mansion, had spent eighteen years of my life there being followed about by Sandy Beck, who made sure to erase all traces of my grubby fingers from the silk wallpaper and brush my crumbs from the chintz upholstery, the place would forever be Mother’s.

Every room had her mark upon it, from the polished marble tiles in the foyer, to the vintage chandeliers, hand-carved moldings, and eclectic mix of antiques and expensive reproductions bought at auction or occasional trips to Europe. The only rooms that didn’t bear Cissy’s stamp were my father’s study with its dark wood and leather, softened only by the artwork (including some pieces of mine), and my bedroom, where I’d been allowed to paint on the walls and had attempted my own version of Claude Monet’s
Garden in Giverny.

Sometimes pulling up in front of the heavy door flanked by the whitewashed pair of terra cotta lions made me catch my breath, and not only because the place was something out of
Architectural Digest
; it was like taking a step into the past.

My own past.

When I walked through the halls and up the gracefully curving stairwell, I relived sensations I’d felt when I was young and not so sure of myself. I got a flutter in my belly that had seemed ever-present when I was a child, a wondering about if I’d measure up, if I’d be good enough, pretty enough, and perfect enough to make Cissy love me.

It didn’t matter that I’d come a long way from being that insecure girl who grew up in the very tall shadow of a mother who seemed to do everything right.

Maybe that was something I’d never shed, the reminder of who I’d once been, and that was okay with me. Because I appreciated the woman I’d become, and I knew I didn’t want to go back, not for anything.

Though my mother hadn’t quite given up on her dream—make that delusion—of turning me into a blue-blooded Highland Park princess, a proper heiress who never dressed off the rack and whose goal was to chair countless fund-raisers and make the annual best-dressed lists.

I’m sure she’d keep trying to lure me back “into the life” until her dying breath, and I’d keep resisting. It was an endless chess game we played, and it gave me something to constantly complain about.

And complain I did. Mostly to Malone, who’d fast learned just to nod and make sympathetic noises.

As I rang Mother’s doorbell, I thought of Miranda and how she’d done all the things—
become
all the things—that I hadn’t. Many of those goals my mother wished I’d accomplished for myself; heck, for us both. But how had they benefited the late Ms. DuBois in the end, huh? What had titles and fame and perfect looks gotten her?

A tag on her toe at the county morgue.

Surely no one’s aspiration.

Some of my fellow geeks at Hockaday had openly hated Miranda’s guts, enough to wish her dead way back then. Would they be happy when they heard the news? Would they feel like they had triumphed?

There were plenty of girls I hadn’t exactly liked when I was younger; the kind who’d made me feel less than I was.

Miranda had been one.

She’d never been cruel to me, nothing like that, and I’d never despised her, or even been jealous. I’d just felt a great sense of distance, as if we were from two different planets, speaking languages the other couldn’t comprehend.

As kids, we’d been thrown together by our mothers fairly often, but the togetherness never stuck. Miranda had been winning local beauty pageants when I was still finger-painting. She was the only girl I knew who wore lipstick in third grade, and she graduated from knee socks to panty hose by grade five. To this day, I didn’t don either lipstick or panty hose except on occasions as rare as alignment of all the planets in the solar system.

As a grown-up, the world I’d chosen to live in hadn’t intersected often with my old classmate’s, unless I was coerced into doing something for my mother, like attending a charity function or volunteering at a fund-raiser. If, perchance, I bumped into Miranda, we’d exchange pleasantries. But that was about it.

Before the Pretty Party at Delaney’s, it had probably been at least a year since I’d last seen her—at the “Shoe-in the New Year” bash at the Jimmy Choo store in Highland Park Village that Cissy had co-chaired to raise funds to shod the homeless—and the always flashy Ms. DuBois had looked on top of the world. I hadn’t wanted to go, but the nonprofit that would reap the dough was one whose Web site I had designed and still managed. The party hadn’t been all that bad, though I hadn’t stayed long. Miranda was just arriving as I was leaving that night, around ten o’clock.

Who could have imagined she’d be dead within twelve months?

Certainly not I.

“Andy? Are you okay?”

I hadn’t even heard the door open, and, at the sound of Sandy Beck’s worried voice, I blinked to clear my lashes of unshed tears and brushed aside my dreary thoughts.

“No,” I said, and shook my head. “I’m not.”

“What is it, honey? Don’t tell me it’s Brian again?”

We’d all had cause to worry plenty about Malone during the mess involving the Oleksiy case, and I had never been happier than when we put that behind us. But it was over and done, and we’d moved on.

“Brian’s fine,” I assured her. “He’s home, sleeping off a deposition.”

“Thank God.” She put a hand to her heart, over the pearl buttons of a gray cardigan, and I was tempted to throw my arms around her familiar shoulders and bury my face in her neck, as I’d done often enough when I was little. Sandy always smelled like roses, and usually I found the scent reassuring.