Unraveled by Her (6 page)

Tamara takes Pluto outside for a walk in a flurry of “Come to Mommy,” “Mommy loves her little boy,” and “Fetch, Pluto, fetch!!”

Georgiana motions me to sit next to her on the white couch. I position myself as far as possible from her, but she still reaches out and pats my knee.

“Now, sweetie pie, I’d appreciate it if you would tell me exactly how you go about ghosting an autobiography for a celebrity,” she says, and my jaw drops.

“Why the fuck should I tell you anything, when yesterday you made me tell Robert that I conned him, never loved him, and never want to see him again!”

Her eyes narrow.

“I’m not asking you, Miranda, I’m telling you. And you don’t have any choice except to answer my question, and right now,” she says, and I have to clench my fists to stop myself from hitting her.

But what do I do now?

“When your enemy is stronger than you, evade,” Sun Tzu once said.

Thanks for nothing, Sun Tzu. How the fuck can I evade my enemy when she’s got me chained up in a marble mausoleum, even if by a very long chain?

“Wipe that scowl off your face, Miranda, because this really is your lucky day! I’ve got some wonderful news for you; I’ve chosen to afford you the unparalleled honor of ghosting my autobiography!” she says, and to my shame, at that moment the professional ghostwriter in me suddenly kicks in; Miranda Stone, best-selling ghostwriter to the stars, forever on the lookout for her dream gig ghosting an autobiography that is destined to become a massive global bestseller.

And—although I can’t believe that I’m actually having this thought—the story of Lady Georgiana Hartwell’s disappearance, the way in which she faked her death, how she came back to life again, her sensational memoir in all its tabloid glory, will outsell every book published since time began!

Then I come to my senses; there’s no way in the universe that I should, even for a nanosecond, contemplate ghosting a book for this insane woman, this global icon—dead or alive.

I blush with shame at my own professional wantonness.

“Pussycat got your tongue, cupcake?” she says, then flicks an imaginary speck of dust from her shoulder, as if she were swatting a fly, and the symbolism is not lost on me.

I shake my head.

So this is why I was kidnapped and brought here; Georgiana needs a ghostwriter and has bizarrely opted to pick me.

One mystery solved.

I am just mulling what exactly that means to me and how I can somehow use my ghostwriting skills to break out of here when the mausoleum door bursts open, and in bounds a rain-sodden Pluto with Tamara in hot pursuit.

“Pluto, baby, let Mummy dry you, baby, please!” she says, and grabs him.

Whereupon Pluto wriggles out of her arms and races over to me. Quick as a flash, I slip some waffle crumbs into his mouth. He swallows them and then licks my face and neck.

Crazy as this may be, I am flooded with warmth at the thought that in the midst of all this insanity, I’ve actually made a friend, an ally, who—against all odds, given his evil owner—is sweet and gentle.

“Gimme him,” Tamara says, and yanks Pluto away from me.

“Bad dog!” she says, then glares at me, attaches a collar and leash to Pluto, and attaches the leash to a table leg opposite me while he whines pitifully.

Chained up in a mausoleum by a crazed witch? Who can fucking blame him!

Georgiana switches on the tape recorder and gives me an imperious look. “Ask me your first question, Miranda.”

“Okay, Georgiana, here it is: Why do you want to publish your autobiography?” I say, hoping against hope that her answer will give me an insight into her crackpot plan to railroad me, of all people, into ghosting her autobiography.

She throws back her head and laughs her tinkling laugh.

“Oh, my dear little cupcake! I can’t believe that you are stupid enough to think that I want to publish my autobiography! Why on earth would I possibly want to do that?” she says.

“Then why the hell did you kidnap me and drag me here to interview you for it?” I say, feeling my temperature escalate.

“Because I want you to ghost my autobiography. An autobiography that will never be published. An autobiography written as a means to an end,” she says.

I’m speechless.

She looks deep into my eyes and says, “Now ask me that same question again. Only this time, don’t ask me why I want to publish my autobiography. Ask me why I want to have it ghosted,” she says.

I don’t give a fuck, Georgiana, I don’t want to ask you anything, I don’t want to look at you, to be with you, to smell the scent of violets for another second, or to sit here in this marble fun house and look at the casket inside which you are supposed to be. I just wish to God that you really were in there and dead and gone.

“Ask it! Ask me the fucking question the way I told you to ask it, Miranda!” she says, and stamps her foot.

“Don’t think you can bully me, because that definitely won’t get you what you want from me. Quite the reverse,” I say, and glare at her.

A shot rings out as Tamara fires the Glock into a cushion just inches from my back.

When I’ve stopped shaking, I square my shoulders.

“All right, Georgiana, you win. Here’s your fucking first question. Why do you want to have your autobiography ghosted?” I say.

“Thank you, Miranda. I’d be delighted to tell you,” she says, with a glowing smile.

All of a sudden, against my will and despite the fact that she’s my mortal enemy, I can’t wait to hear her answer.

“Because I still love my husband and I want him back,” she says.

Chapter Five

I’m white as a sheet, dumbstruck.

“Pour the silly goose a shot of whiskey,” Georgiana orders Tamara, who rushes to get me one.

Then Georgiana turns to me.

“It’s very simple, my dear. Unless you ghost my autobiography to the very best of your considerable abilities, you will never see the light of day again.”

“I’d rather die than be your ghostwriter,” I say.

“That can easily be arranged,” she says, and I’m reminded how dangerous she is. Not to mention Tamara.

Then she gives me her glittering Lady Georgiana smile.

“But let’s not go there, shall we? Far better for us to remain good friends, don’t you agree?”

I gawp at her in disbelief.

“Let’s rise above all our differences and focus instead on our goals: producing an autobiography that will tell the real and heartwarming truth about me. The truth about my deprived childhood, the setbacks I faced throughout life, and—most important of all—how forces beyond my control conspired against me and on pain of death forced me to blackmail Robert,” she says.

I am so shocked that I am suddenly unable to silence an unwelcome voice from the past:
When in doubt, say nothing.

“Very well, if that’s the way you want it,” she says when I fail to react to her words, shrugging her elegant shoulders.

“Let me make this plain to you: I expect you to craft my autobiography in such a way that when Robert reads it, he’ll understand exactly who I am, what I am, why there was no alternative for me but to do what I did; that I deeply regret my actions; and that I want to make it all up to him. Then he’ll fall in love with me again, much deeper than before, and I’ll get him back,” she says.

“But what about me? Robert loves me!” I scream.

“You, my little lamb? You will be far too far away from him, and for far too long, for him to care about you anymore,” she says.

She plans to make me ghost her autobiography, and then when I’m done, she’ll kill me!

“So why not get it over with and kill me right here and now?” I say.

“Because you haven’t even begun to outlive your usefulness to me yet,” she says.

While I digest her latest threat, she jumps up and gets a silver hairbrush from the dresser.

“You look a trifle wan, Miranda, and your hair is frightfully matted,” she says, then proceeds to brush my hair, in long, slow, hypnotic strokes. I sit there and battle hard with myself not to rip the hairbrush out of her hand and stuff it down her throat.

I tense all over. At the same time, I can’t help but notice the initials
GH
engraved on the handle and grip my whiskey glass so hard that I’m surprised it doesn’t shatter.

I thought I’d far transcended my jealousy of Georgiana, after Robert told me the shocking truth about her. But the emotion I’m experiencing now is far worse than jealousy. For I’m not torturing myself about his imaginary passion for Georgiana anymore, but about a stark reality: she is married to him and she now wants to win him back.

But surely she doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of achieving her crackpot goal? Robert will never take her back, not in a million years. Unless, of course, he actually believes the lying words of that monstrous letter, the letter in which I was forced to confess to him that I am a cheat and that I never loved him at all.

I feel myself plunge into despair.

“In any event, cupcake, writing my autobiography will be enormous fun. For both of us,” she says, and I want to scream in anger and frustration.

Fun? How in hell can it be fun for me to be forced to ghost an autobiography for my worst enemy, an enemy who wants to use that autobiography as a weapon, a weapon that could lure Robert back to her again?

The truth is that I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that if I ghost her autobiography with my customary passion and dedication, there’s a strong chance that Robert will read it and be captivated by her all over again, just as she dreams he will.

My mind is reeling at the same time that my heart is breaking.

“But given that this is our first day working together on my book, I’ve made the decision to allow you a short respite before we start in earnest. In a few moments, I shall be showing you an important movie that will provide you with a sense of the rationale behind the prologue with which I wish you to commence my autobiography,” she says. Not for the first time, I wish that the bitch could speak in plain American. Because I really don’t know what the fuck she means.

I soon find out.

I can’t believe this isn’t a dream—well, a nightmare. I’m sitting on a couch, my left leg chained to it, with Georgiana and Tamara on either side of me, their bodies pressed uncomfortably close to mine, and we are about to watch a movie together.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“This is the best movie in the universe, Miranda, and the perfect example of how I expect you to begin my autobiography. An anatomy of love at first sight,” Georgiana declares.

Love at first sight? Is she kidding herself? She and Robert met at Le Château, and her only motive was to rob him of his fortune. I guess she’s even more cuckoo than I first thought she was.

“By rights, you ought to enjoy a romantic French movie, but I do hope that your enjoyment of this one won’t be tarnished upon hearing the dialogue spoken in Gigi’s tongue now that you know the part she played in your undoing. However, the main thing is that you understand the parallels between the movie’s story and my own with Robert,” she says.

“But she oughta like it, because she’s got that off-the-wall French nickname, ‘SeeElle’ or something,” Tamara cuts in helpfully, and I have to force myself not to grab the silver hairbrush and hit her over the head with it.

But much as I’d love to, I know that even if I did manage to attack one witch, the other would still be alive and cackling.

Aside from that, I still don’t have a clue how to get out of here, off the island and to safety. For the millionth time, I wish to God that I knew how to swim.

But I don’t. So I lean back on the couch and try to resign myself to my residency in a lunatic asylum. The only sane one in the place is Pluto, who seems to have taken to me and is now curled up on my feet.

Then the movie starts. Long as it is, and in French with English subtitles, I quickly lose myself in the whole romance of the story, and temporarily forget all about my terrifying circumstances.

And Now My Love,
directed by Claude Lelouch, explores the universal phenomenon of love at first sight through the saga of three generations of the girl’s family, and ends with the achingly romantic moment when fate finally brings her and the boy with whom all the centuries have prepared her to fall in love at first sight together at last.

The movie is so heartbreakingly romantic that the entire way through it, all I can do is think of Robert, how we were born to meet and fall in love with each other, but how we are now parted, perhaps forever. During the last ten minutes of the movie, I fight to choke back my tears.

When the movie is over, Georgiana turns to me, her voice full of emotion.

“I knew that if you saw it, you would finally comprehend my decision that the central theme of my autobiography must surely be that the destiny of two lovers is set in stone generations before either of them ever met, just like it was with me and Robert, sweetie,” she says, an angelic smile on her face.

I don’t think I’m going to survive this unless I scratch her eyes out or crack up myself!