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  Praise for the powerful novels of New York Times bestselling author

  JOY FIELDING

  LOST

  “Fine-tuned details … [a] compelling tale.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  WHISPERS AND LIES

  “[A] page-turner … [with] an ending worthy of Hitchcock.… Once again, the bestselling author tests the complex ties that bind friends and family, and keeps readers wondering when those same ties might turn deadly.… Those familiar with Patricia Highsmith’s particular brand of sinister storytelling will recognize the mayhem Fielding so cunningly unleashes.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Fielding delivers another page-turner … a suspense novel with a shocking twist [and] a plot turn so surprising that all previous events are thrown into question. The author keeps the tension high and the pages turning, creating a chillingly paranoid atmosphere.”

  —Booklist

  “A very satisfying page-turner.… Fielding does a very good job in building her story to a totally unexpected denouement.”

  —Sun-Sentinel (Ft. Lauderdale, FL)

  GRAND AVENUE

  “It’s hard to sit down and read a few pages of one of [Fielding’s] novels and not want to read the rest. Right now.”

  —The Knoxville News-Sentinel (TN)

  “Riveting? You bet. Powerful? 10,000 horsepower. A real page-turner? And then some. Must-read? And how. Clichés, but so true of Joy Fielding’s Grand Avenue.”

  —The Cincinnati Enquirer

  “Fielding deals confidently and tenderly with her subjects, and her plots and subplots are engaging. It’s a comfortable, engrossing book for anyone who wants to spend some time with four average, and therefore remarkable, women.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “A multi-layered saga of friendship, loss, and loyalty. Grand Avenue reminds us of how fear, unfulfilled dreams, and a thirst for power can ravage the closest of relationships.”

  —Woman’s Own

  “Surprisingly moving.… Don’t forget to keep a family-size box of Kleenex handy in preparation for the tear-jerking finale.”

  —Booklist

  “Emotionally compelling … hard to put down.… Fielding fully develops her four women characters, each of whom is exquisitely revealed.”

  —Library Journal

  “With her usual page-turning flair, Fielding [writes a] romantic drama with a thriller twist.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  THE FIRST TIME

  “Every line rings true.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel (FL)

  “Dramatic and heartrending … the emotions are almost tangible.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “[An] affecting drama.… Fielding is good at chronicling the messy tangle of family relationships.… A three-tissue finale.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This is rich stuff.… Fielding has again pushed a seemingly fragile heroine to the brink, only to have her fight back, tooth and nail.”

  —Booklist

  National Acclaim for JOY FIELDING’S Previous Fiction

  “Fielding’s specialty is stripping away the contemporary and trendy feminine masks to reveal the outrageous face of female rage.… But like a good mystery writer, she creates sympathy for the character.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “If you’re in the mood to bury yourself in a book … pick up Joy Fielding’s latest novel … it’s guaranteed to reduce you to tears, and once they’ve dried, will leave you feeling a little readier to tackle life’s challenges.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “Fielding masterfully manipulates our expectations.”

  —The Washington Post

  Also by Joy Fielding

  Lost

  Whispers and Lies

  Grand Avenue

  The First Time

  Missing Pieces

  Don’t Cry Now

  Tell Me No Secrets

  See Jane Run

  Good Intentions

  The Deep End

  Life Penalty

  The Other Woman

  Kiss Mommy Goodbye

  Copyright © 2005 Joy Fielding, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Seal Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  PUPPET

  Seal Books/published by arrangement with Doubleday Canada

  Doubleday Canada edition published 2005

  Seal Books edition published December 2005

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67461-4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, chararcters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Seal Books are published by Random House of Canada Limited. “Seal Books” and the portrayal of a seal are the property of Random House of Canada Limited.

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To Warren, Shannon, and Annie.

  My heart, my soul, and my salvation.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A big thank-you to my two favorite cities in the world, Toronto and Palm Beach, and to the wonderful people in each. To Owen Laster, Larry Mirkin, and Beverley Slopen, my very own Three Musketeers, who keep me on the straight and narrow—or circuitous and flighty, as the case may be. To Aurora, who has been with our family for more than thirteen years, and for Rosie, who is always willing to help out. To Owen’s former assistants Jonathan Peckarsky and Bill Kingsland, and to his current one, Susanna Schell, all unfailingly pleasant in the face of often peculiar and pesky requests. To Julia Noonan with the Metro West Detention Center and to Berthe Cano at the Toronto Reference Library, for generously sharing their time and answering my many questions. To lawyers David Bayliss and Larry Douglas, who taught me more than I really wanted to know about the Canadian justice system. To my sister Renee, and all my wonderfully supportive friends in both Canada and the U.S., for being, respectively, my sister and my wonderfully supportive friends. To my toy poodle, Casey, who never fails to make me smile. To Emily Bestler, Sarah Branham, Judith Curr, Louise Burke, Seale Ballenger, Thomas
Semosh, and all the wonderful people at Atria and Pocket Books. To Maya Mavjee, John Neale, Brad Martin, Stephanie Gowan, Val Gow, and everyone at Doubleday Canada. To Corinne Assayag, who has done such a spectacular job designing and overseeing my website, and to my daughter, Shannon, for her advice, encouragement, and muchneeded assistance with my email. To Warren, for reading the manuscript in its final stages, and to Annie, for finally getting around to reading my last book. To the hardworking booksellers and author escorts I’ve met during my various book tours. And once again, to my readers everywhere. Thank you. You never cease to amaze me.

  ONE

  SOME of the things Amanda Travis likes: the color black; lunchtime spinning classes at the fitness center on Clematis Street in downtown Palm Beach; her all-white, one-bedroom, oceanfront condo in Jupiter; a compliant jury; men whose wives don’t understand them.

  Some of the things she doesn’t: the color pink; when the temperature outside her condo’s floor-to-ceiling windows falls below sixty-five degrees; clients who don’t follow her advice; the color gray; being asked to show her ID when she goes to a bar; nicknames of any shape and size.

  Something else she doesn’t like: bite marks.

  Especially bite marks that are deep and clearly defined, even after the passing of several days; bite marks that lie like a bright purple tattoo amidst a puddle of mustard-color bruises; bite marks that are all but smiling at her from the photographs on the defense table in front of her.

  Amanda shakes blond, shoulder-length hair away from her thin face and slips the offending photographs beneath a pad of lined, yellow legal paper, then picks up a pencil and pretends to be jotting down something of importance, when what she actually writes is Remember to buy toothpaste. This gesture is for the jury’s benefit, in case any of them is watching. Which is doubtful. Already this morning, she’s caught one of the jurors, a middle-aged man with thinning Ronald Reagan–red hair, nodding off. She sighs, drops her pencil, sits back in her chair, and pushes her lips into a pout of disapproval. Not big. Just enough to let the jury know what she thinks of the testimony being given. Which she would like them to believe is not much.

  “He was yelling about something,” the young woman on the witness stand is saying, one hand absently reaching up to tug at her hair. She glances toward the defense table, pulls the platinum curls away from their black roots, and twists them around square, fake fingernails. “He’s always yelling about something.”

  Again Amanda lifts the pencil into her right hand, adds Stouffer’s frozen macaroni and cheese to the impromptu list of groceries she is creating. And orange juice, she remembers, scribbling it across the page with exaggerated flourish, as if she has just remembered a key point of law. The action dislodges the pictures beneath the legal pad, so that once again the photographic impressions of her client’s teeth against the witness’s skin are winking up at her.

  It’s the bite marks that will do her in.

  She might be able to fudge the facts, obfuscate the evidence, overwhelm the jury with irrelevant details and not always reasonable doubt, but there is simply no getting around those awful pictures. They will seal her client’s fate and mar her perfect record, like a blemish on an otherwise flawless complexion, detracting from almost a year of sterling performances on behalf of the poor, the unlucky, and the overwhelmingly guilty.

  Damn Derek Clemens anyway. Did he have to be so damn obvious?

  Amanda reaches over and pats the hand of the man sitting beside her. Another salvo for the jury, although she wonders if any of them is really fooled. Surely they watch enough television to know the various tricks of the trade: the mock outrage, the sympathetic glances, the disbelieving shakes of the head. She withdraws her hand, surreptitiously rubs the touch of her client’s skin onto her black linen skirt beneath the table. Idiot, she thinks behind her reassuring smile. You couldn’t have exercised even a modicum of self-control. You had to bite her too.

  The defendant smiles back at her, although thankfully, his lips remain closed. The jury will soon be seeing more than enough of Derek Clemens’s teeth.

  At twenty-eight years old and a wiry five feet ten inches tall, Derek Clemens is the same age and height as the woman selected to represent him. Even their hair is the same shade of delicate blond, their eyes variations of the same cool blue, although hers are darker, more opaque, his paler, sliding toward pastel. In other, more pleasant circumstances, Amanda Travis and Derek Clemens might be mistaken for brother and sister, perhaps even fraternal twins.

  Amanda shrugs off the unpleasant thought, grateful, as always, for being an only child. She swivels around in her chair, looks toward the long expanse of windows at the back of the courtroom. Beyond those windows is a typical February day in south Florida—the sky turquoise, the air warm, the beach beckoning. She fights the urge to wander over to the windows, to lean her head against the tinted glass, and stare out past the Intracoastal Waterway to the ocean beyond. Only in Palm Beach does one find an ocean view from a courtroom to rival the view from the penthouse suite of a top hotel.

  Perversely, Amanda would rather be here, in Courtroom 5C of the Palm Beach County Court House, sitting beside some lowlife accused of assaulting his live-in girlfriend—five counts, no less, including sexual assault and uttering death threats—than sunbathing on the cool sand next to some underdressed, overnourished snowbird. More than a few minutes of lying on her back with the surf washing over her bare toes is enough to send Amanda Travis screaming for the hot pavement.

  “I’d like to retrace the events of the morning of August sixteenth, Miss Fletcher,” the assistant district attorney is saying, the deep baritone of his voice drawing Amanda’s attention back to the front of the courtroom as easily as a lover’s seductive sigh.

  Caroline Fletcher nods and continues playing with her overly bleached hair, her surgically amplified bosom straining against the buttons of her perversely conservative blue blouse. It helps the defendant’s case that the woman Derek Clemens is accused of assaulting looks like a stripper, although in fact, she works in a hairdressing salon. Amanda smiles with the knowledge this is less important than the image being projected. In law, as in so much of life, appearance counts far more than substance. It is, after all, the appearance of justice, and not justice itself, that must be seen to be done.

  “August the sixteenth?” The young woman uses her tongue to push the gum she’s been surreptitiously chewing throughout her testimony to the side of her mouth.

  “The day of the attack,” the prosecutor reminds her, approaching the stand and hovering over his star witness. Tyrone King is almost six feet six inches tall with chocolate brown skin and a shiny bald head. When Amanda first joined the law firm of Beatty and Rowe just over a year ago, she heard rumors that the handsome assistant district attorney was a nephew of Martin Luther King’s, but when she asked him about it, he laughed and said he suspected all black men in the South named King were rumored to be related to the assassinated leader. “You’ve testified that the accused came home from work in a foul mood.”

  “He was always in a foul mood.”

  Amanda rises halfway out of her chair, voices her objection to the generalization. The objection is sustained. The witness tugs harder on her hair.

  “How did this mood manifest itself?”

  The witness looks confused.

  “Did he raise his voice? Was he yelling?”

  “His boss yelled at him, so he came home and yelled at me.”

  “Objection.”

  “Sustained.”

  “What was he yelling about, Miss Fletcher?”

  The witness rolls her eyes toward the high ceiling. “He said the place was a mess and that there was never anything to eat, and he was sick of working the midnight shift only to come home to a messy apartment and nothing for breakfast.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I told him I didn’t have time to listen to his complaints, that I had to go to work. And then he said there was no way I was
going out and leaving him with the baby all day, that he needed his sleep, and I told him that I couldn’t very well take the baby with me to a hairdressing salon, and it just went on from there.”

  “Can you tell us what happened exactly?”

  The witness shrugs, her tongue pushing the gum in her mouth nervously from one cheek to the other. “I don’t know exactly.”

  “To the best of your recollection.”

  “We started screaming at each other. He said I didn’t do nothing around the apartment, that I just sat around on my bony ass all day, and that if I wasn’t going to do any cooking or cleaning, then the least I could do was get down on my knees and give him a …” Caroline Fletcher stops, straightens her shoulders, and looks imploringly at the jury. “You know.”

  “He demanded oral sex?”

  The witness nods. “They’re never too tired for that.”

  The seven women on the jury chuckle knowingly, as does Amanda, who hides her smile inside the palm of her hand and decides against objecting.

  “What happened then?” the prosecutor asks.

  “He started pulling me toward the bedroom. I kept telling him no, I didn’t have time, but he wasn’t listening. Then I remembered this movie I saw on TV where the girl, I think it was Jennifer Lopez, I can’t remember for sure, but anyway, this guy was attacking her, and she realized that the more she struggled, the more turned on he got, and the worse things got for her, so she stopped struggling, and that kind of threw him off guard, and she was able to escape. So I decided to try that.”

  “You stopped struggling?”

  Again Caroline Fletcher nods. “I kind of went all weak, like I was giving in, and then, as soon as we got to the bedroom door, I pushed him out of the way, ran inside the room, and locked the door.”

  “And what did Derek Clemens do then?”

  “He was so mad. He started banging on the door, yelling that he was going to kill my ass.”