Puppet Read online

  “You’re saying you bit her in self-defense?”

  “I just wanted her to stop pulling my hair,” he says plaintively.

  “And then what happened?”

  “Then she grabbed the phone and threw it at me. I caught it and threw it right back. It was a reflex action. I didn’t mean to hit her with it.”

  “Did you confine her in the apartment against her will?”

  “Hell, no. At that point, I was begging her to get the hell out.”

  “What did you mean when you threatened to ‘kill her ass’?”

  Derek Clemens shrugs. “It’s just an expression. If anybody was afraid for their ass, it was me.”

  “How tall are you, Mr. Clemens?”

  “Five feet eleven inches.”

  “And how much do you weigh?”

  “A hundred and sixty-five pounds.”

  “And you’re trying to tell us that even though you’re five inches taller and approximately forty pounds heavier than Caroline Fletcher,” Amanda continues, knowing if she doesn’t ask this question, the prosecutor will, “that you were the one afraid for your life?”

  “Hey,” Derek replies with a self-effacing smile. “It’s not the size of the gun that’s gonna kill you. It’s those nasty little bullets.”

  The jury is still chuckling as Amanda rests her case.

  “So, how long do you think the jury will be out?” Ellie Townshend is asking between nibbles on her Cobb salad. Ellie Townshend is Amanda’s closest friend, although they rarely see each other more than once a month. Not even that, since Ellie and Michael got engaged.

  “Depends how smart they are,” Amanda answers, wondering if any of the jurors will be clever enough to realize that Derek’s story couldn’t possibly have gone down the way he described. All they’d have to do is reenact the sequence of events as described by the defendant to realize that if Derek Clemens had indeed been standing behind Caroline Fletcher, and she was pulling on his hair in the manner he claimed, his mouth wouldn’t have been able to reach much below her shoulders, let alone all the way down to the middle of her back. Such an act was simply impossible unless he was directly on top of her.

  Of course Amanda wasn’t about to challenge her own witness.

  “So, have you found a dress for the wedding?” Ellie is asking. Eager hazel eyes open wide with expectation. Soft amber waves frame round, dimpled cheeks.

  “Not yet.” Amanda looks down the busy main street. They are sitting in the open front window of the Big City Tavern on Clematis watching a desultory parade of tourists stroll by. A soft breeze plays lazily with the ends of the paper tablecloths. The temperature sits on the welcome side of eighty. Another perfect day in south Florida, Amanda thinks, feeling vaguely guilty for not enjoying it more.

  “What do you mean, not yet? What are you waiting for?”

  “The wedding isn’t till June,” Amanda reminds her friend gently.

  “Which is practically around the corner. Oh, my God. Don’t turn around.”

  Instinctively Amanda swivels around in her seat. “Shit,” she mutters under her breath, watching Sean Travis approach, his arm draped protectively around his new wife. Shit, shit, shit, she thinks, groaning audibly as he spots her. What are the odds? Two ex-husbands in as many days. Did her secretary forget to remind her it was National Ex-Husbands Week?

  “Amanda,” Sean acknowledges, his arm tightening around his young wife.

  “Sean, how are you?”

  “Well. And you?”

  “Well,” she replies. “You remember Ellie.”

  “Of course. How are you?”

  “Well.”

  Well, well, well, Amanda thinks. “You must be Jennifer.” She studies her former husband and his new wife dispassionately, finding the woman’s black hair and gray eyes a nice compliment to Sean’s graying hair and black eyes.

  The new wife shakes Amanda’s hand, then rests it on the slight bulge of her stomach.

  “We’re due in July,” Sean says proudly, noticing the direction of Amanda’s gaze.

  “Congratulations,” she offers sincerely.

  “We can’t wait,” Jennifer trills.

  “Well, nice seeing you,” Sean tells Amanda, sounding as if he means it. “Enjoy your lunch.”

  “Good luck,” Amanda calls after them.

  “Bastard,” Ellie bristles. “Rubbing her pregnancy in your face like that.”

  “I don’t think he meant to do that.”

  Ellie shrugs. The shrug says she isn’t convinced.

  “I’m the one who didn’t want children, Ellie.”

  “Which I’ll never understand. You’d be a great mom.”

  “Yeah, right. I had such a good example.” Amanda pictures her mother sitting in a Toronto jail cell, then immediately banishes the unwanted image. Stubborn traces of the woman cling to the periphery of her mind’s eye as she debates whether to tell Ellie about Ben’s phone call. When Amanda finally opens her mouth to speak, she realizes Ellie is already midsentence. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “I said, how did it feel, seeing Sean again?”

  Amanda shrugs the last vestige of her mother aside. “A little strange, I guess. It’s weird to think you have nothing to say to someone you once thought you’d spend the rest of your life with.”

  “Any regrets?”

  “Lots of them,” Amanda admits with a sigh. “I wasn’t a very good wife.”

  “It just wasn’t a very good match, that’s all.”

  Amanda smiles warmly at her friend. “That was sweet. Thank you.”

  “It’s the truth. Sean Travis may be a very nice man, but he was never the man for you.”

  Amanda sees Ben Myers lurking in the shadows of her vision and tries blinking him away.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look like there’s something you want to tell me.”

  “Tell you?” Well, all right. Since you asked. I got a rather disturbing phone call last night, just after having totally meaningless sex with an almost total stranger. The call was from my ex-husband, not the man we just talked to, but a man you don’t know even exists, my first ex-husband—I’m sorry, I don’t know why I never told you about him, please forgive me. Anyway, he was calling to tell me that my mother has been arrested for shooting a man in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel in Toronto. Amanda stabs at a piece of lettuce. Then she stuffs it inside her mouth before she can say these things out loud. “No,” she says instead, offering her friend her most reassuring smile. “There’s nothing.”

  After lunch, Amanda thinks of going back to her office, but decides against it, not feeling up to dealing with Kelly’s questioning eyes. Nor can she go to the gym, she decides, in case Carter Reese is there. And there’s no point in going back to court. It’s way too early. It could be hours, even days, before the jury returns with its verdict.

  On impulse, she hops on the old-fashioned green trolley that runs back and forth between Clematis Street and nearby City Place, a recently constructed mecca of shops and restaurants that occupies several city blocks. Maybe she’ll go to a movie, she decides as she disembarks the trolley and makes her way through the slow-moving crowd toward the tall escalator. But everyone in Palm Beach seems to have had the same idea, and the line for the multiplex is long and unruly. Amanda returns to the glorified shopping mall below and spends several hours peering absently into the line of store windows, looking for a dress for Ellie’s wedding. But even though she’s tempted by a long black dress she sees hanging on the far wall in Betsey Johnson, she doesn’t go inside. Instead she continues trancelike up one street and down another, then sits for a while on an empty bench beside the large decorative fountain in the middle of the busy square, watching as children duck in and around the adults eating on the outside patio of Bellagio, an Italian restaurant renowned more for the size of its portions than the quality of its food.

  Seeing Sean with his new wife has upset her, she realizes, althou
gh she’s not sure why. A touch of nostalgia maybe. He was a good man, a kind man, a man she’d literally run into while walking aimlessly down a crowded beach. They’d gone for drinks, then dinner. She’d found him easy to talk to. Or maybe she’d just felt like talking. And he’d obviously liked what he was hearing. At least in the beginning.

  Beginnings are easy, Amanda thinks. I’m great at beginnings.

  Endings too, she decides, jumping to her feet and almost plowing into an elderly couple carefully trying to navigate their way along the uneven stone surface. It was her decision to end her marriage to Sean, just as it was her decision to walk out on her earlier marriage to Ben. None of that growing-old-together nonsense for her. None of that till-death-do-us-part crap. Love ’em and leave ’em. That’s her motto. And it’s always preferable to be the one who says good-bye.

  Puppet, she hears someone shout. Over here, Puppet. This way.

  Amanda’s head snaps to her right. But all she sees is a group of children playing. “Over here, pea-brain,” a young boy is shouting at his friend. “No, stupid. This way!”

  Puppet! Puppet!

  Amanda ducks into the nearest store to escape the sound, grabs several hangers of clothing off a rack, and heads for the dressing rooms at the back.

  “Can I help you with that?” a salesgirl asks. She is maybe eighteen, the same age as Amanda when she married Ben.

  Has he remarried? she wonders. “No, I am not doing this,” Amanda says out loud, rubbing her forehead in an effort to erase Ben from her mind.

  “I’m sorry?” the salesgirl asks. “You don’t want to try these things on?”

  “What? Yes, I do. Of course I do.” Minutes later, she is standing in the cramped little space they called a dressing room, looking at herself in the long, narrow mirror, her mother’s youthful reflection staring back.

  Hello, Puppet, her mother says.

  Amanda shudders. She was six years old when her mother put a curse on old Mr. Walsh, who lived next door, and who insisted on parking his car right in the middle of their shared driveway. Two months later, the hapless man was dead. Such was her mother’s terrible power.

  And now another man is dead, Amanda thinks. Shot three times at presumably close range. What’s the matter, Mom? Curses not fast-acting enough for you these days?

  Puppet! her mother calls from outside the door.

  “I’m sorry. What?”

  “I asked how you were doing in there,” the salesgirl responds.

  “Fine,” Amanda says, although she has yet to try on a single item. “Thank you.”

  “Is that your phone ringing?” the salesgirl asks.

  Amanda becomes aware of a phone ringing somewhere beside her. “Oh. Oh, yes.” She reaches inside her black leather purse. “Hello?” she asks timidly.

  Finally wore you down, did I?

  “What?”

  “They just called from court,” her secretary informs her. “The jury’s back.”

  FIVE

  ON the charge of uttering death threats, how do you find?”

  “We find the defendant not guilty.”

  “On the charge of forcible confinement, how do you find?”

  “We find the defendant not guilty.”

  “On the charge of sexual assault, how do you find?”

  “We find the defendant not guilty.”

  “On the charge of assault with a deadly weapon, how do you find?”

  “We find the defendant not guilty.”

  “On the charge of assault and battery, how do you find?”

  “We find the defendant guilty.”

  “Thank you,” the judge says, dismissing the jury, and setting a date for sentencing.

  “What just happened?” Derek Clemens’s eyes flit between his lawyer and the buxom young woman he used to live with, who is quietly crying in the back of the courtroom.

  “You were acquitted on four of the five charges.”

  “Then how come they found me guilty of the fifth?”

  “Because you bit her, Derek,” Amanda reminds him.

  “I raped her too,” he says. “They acquitted me of that.”

  Amanda shakes her head, partly in disgust, partly in disbelief. To think she’d almost talked herself into believing even some of his story. “See you back here for sentencing.”

  “You think I’ll go to jail?”

  “It’s a first offense; you’re Tiffany’s primary caregiver. It’s more likely you’ll get probation.”

  “I swear I’ll kill that bitch if I end up in jail.”

  “Fine. Just remember to get yourself another lawyer.” Amanda slings her purse over her right shoulder and heads toward the back of the courtroom, Derek Clemens at her heels.

  “Hey, wait up. I thought we could maybe grab a drink. To celebrate.”

  Amanda doesn’t even bother slowing down.

  The full moon follows her as she drives north along Congress. Beside her on the front seat of her three-year-old black Thunderbird convertible is a freshly purchased bottle of expensive red wine. The Thunderbird was a gift from Sean on their fourth, and as it turned out, last anniversary. The wine was a present to herself. After all, hadn’t she helped make the world a safer place for nasty cannibals everywhere? “I did my job,” she reminds herself, turning left on Forty-fifth and heading toward I-95.

  It’s not her fault Derek Clemens is such a convincing liar. It’s not her fault Caroline Fletcher is her own worst enemy. The justice system is a crapshoot at the best of times, which is why a good lawyer is always preferable to a good cause. The innocent often suffer; the guilty regularly go free. And luckily, one face pretty much blurs into another over time, Amanda knows. By tomorrow morning she won’t even remember what Caroline Fletcher looked like, crying in the back of the courtroom. With a little luck, that is, and enough celebratory glasses of wine. Amanda pats the bottle on the black leather seat beside her. The new day will bring a fresh batch of lowlife to her desk to be processed and prepped. Pay your money; take your chance. Head ’em out, move ’em on.

  Amanda checks her rearview mirror as she switches into the right-hand lane, sees her mother’s eyes lurking behind her own. Some faces don’t blur as easily as others, the eyes warn.

  She takes the ramp a touch too quickly onto I-95, then cuts in front of a white Lexus SUV. The driver swerves and shakes his fist in fruitless indignation. Just where do you think you’re going in such a damn hurry? the fist demands, as Amanda stares slack-jawed at the stagnant lines of traffic heading north.

  The highway, as usual, is a clogged artery of cars. Weary commuters heading home from work, clueless tourists looking for the newest hot spot, barefoot teenagers with fake IDs heading for the hippest bar, seniors who should have had their driver’s licenses revoked years ago, not sure where they are, let alone where they’re headed. A typical Friday night in February. Probably an accident somewhere up ahead, judging by the volume of traffic and how slowly it’s moving. Her own fault, she thinks, checking the clock on her car’s dashboard. Almost seven. She shouldn’t have stayed so long at the office after court. She shouldn’t have spent so long in the liquor store choosing wine. She shouldn’t have picked I-95 at seven o’clock on a Friday night in February. What was normally a twenty-minute drive from here to Jupiter, and she’d be lucky to be home by eight. Amanda leans her head back against her headrest. No point in getting all bent out of shape over something she can’t control.

  This philosophy works for about ten minutes before she’s ready to explode. “Okay, enough of this. Let’s get a move on, people.” She glares at the creamy yellow moon overhead, as if the smiling face she sees carved into its side is somehow responsible for her predicament. Full moons are a dangerous time, she knows, glancing at the car beside her, seeing a woman in a matching pink sweater set talking on her phone.

  I could call someone, she decides, reaching for her purse. Although she’s not sure exactly whom to call. Ellie would think it strange to hear from her twice in one day,
and she vaguely recalls Kelly having mentioned she’d be at her parents’ house for dinner. “Ellie and Kelly,” Amanda says out loud, the names rolling off her tongue. “Ellie and Kelly. Kelly and Ellie. Everything’s swelly with Ellie and Kelly.” Oh, great. Now I’m a total lunatic, she thinks, deciding to call her friend Vanessa. “Oh, sure. Call Vanessa. She hasn’t heard from you in what? Two years?” Or how about Judy Knelman? You used to see her and her husband every few weeks when you were married to Sean. And that other woman, the one who married Sean’s friend Bryce Hall? What was her name? Edna, Emma, Emily? “Oh, yeah, all Sean’s friends are just dying to hear from you.”

  Why is she still thinking about Sean? Just because she ran into him at lunch? He’s turned up unexpectedly before. Once, at the Kravits Center, a couple of years ago. He was still pretty bitter then, even though she’d asked for nothing in their divorce, but still he’d pretended not to see her, ducking into the men’s room as she was walking over to say hello. She’d pushed the incident out of her mind, scarcely giving him another thought. When something was over, it was over and done. Out of sight, out of mind. Hadn’t that always been her motto?

  Of course Jennifer had yet to enter the picture. Jennifer with her peaches-and-cream complexion and long, shiny black hair. And swelling belly.

  Swelling belly, swelling belly, swelling belly.

  Is that what has her feeling so out of sorts?

  That could have been me, she reminds herself. I’m the one who insisted I didn’t want children. I’m the one who said I wasn’t cut out to be a mother. You’d be a great mother, Ellie had told her at lunch. Sure thing. Just like my mother—a woman whose maternal instincts manifested themselves in two ways: indifference and rage. Strangely enough, she’d always preferred the rage.

  Amanda glances back toward the woman in the pink sweater set, who smiles at her as she continues talking on the phone.