Puppet Page 6

The last time Amanda saw her mother, her mother was wearing a blouse in almost that exact shade of pink. Her short, honey-blond hair was freshly washed and neatly coiffed, as always. Indeed, Amanda can’t remember a time when her mother didn’t look as if she’d just come from the beauty salon. Even if she was drunker than the proverbial skunk, and falling all over everything, her hair was always picture-perfect.

  What’s she done now?

  Really, this doesn’t concern me.

  Who’d she kill?

  This is not my problem.

  She’s your mother.

  Not anymore.

  Amanda pushes her mother’s image aside with a swat of her hand, as if shooing away a pesky fly. “Can we please get this show on the road?” she begs the other drivers, and mercifully the cars in front of her begin to pick up their pace. “Thank you,” she says to the smiling face in the moon.

  Forty minutes later, she is home.

  “Hi, Joe.” She waves to the doorman.

  “You get stuck in that mess on I-95?”

  “I sure did.”

  “Radio said there was an accident at the exit to Riviera Beach.”

  “There were still police cars at the side of the road,” Amanda tells him.

  “Expecting company?” He nods toward the bottle of wine in her hand.

  Amanda feels her spine stiffen. Is it curiosity she hears in his voice or judgment? “Not tonight.”

  He smiles. “Well, have a good one.”

  “You too.”

  He was just making idle conversation, she reassures herself in the elevator, grateful that the ride to the fifteenth floor is mercifully uneventful. No unnecessary stops. No former lovers. No suspicious wives. “Just me and my bottle,” Amanda says to the empty hallway as the elevator doors open. She walks briskly to her unit on the southeast corner, almost tripping over a piece of ivory-trimmed red carpet that has come loose from the ivory-colored wall. She’ll have to call the building manager in the morning, tell him to send someone up to repair it before anyone gets hurt. Wouldn’t want some ambitious young litigator, such as herself, to sue.

  Not that personal injury lawsuits are her area of expertise, Amanda thinks. No, her specialty is defending creeps who try to swallow their girlfriends. Not to mention those who beat up strangers in a bar or rob a 7-Eleven and shoot a few innocent bystanders. Of course if the creep who does the shooting is the son of a prominent local politician, or if one of the bystanders happens to be young and beautiful, and therefore likely to make the front page of the Palm Beach Post, then it becomes a case for Jackson Beatty or Stanley Rowe, who keep all the really good stuff for themselves.

  “The good stuff,” Amanda says out loud, wondering when she became so jaded. And what has her more upset—the fact Derek Clemens was acquitted on four charges or found guilty of one?

  She stands for several seconds outside her apartment door, almost reluctant to go inside. How many messages from her former husband will she find waiting on her voice mail? Although, surprisingly, there were no further messages from him at work.

  Nor are there any now. “Good,” Amanda says, standing in the middle of her all-white kitchen and uncorking the bottle of red wine. “Good,” she repeats, feeling curiously slighted. She fills a large wineglass almost to the top and takes a long sip, deciding she should probably eat something. She opens her fridge, finds nothing but a bottle of orange juice and a dozen containers of assorted fruit-flavored yogurt. She checks the best-before date of a strawberry-kiwi yogurt and sees that it expired five days ago. Which means all the other yogurts are likewise past their prime, since she bought them all at the same time. How long ago? When was the last time she went shopping for groceries? There isn’t even any milk, for Pete’s sake.

  What kind of mother is she, she doesn’t make sure there’s any milk for the baby?

  “Luckily, I don’t have a baby,” Amanda states, as if pleading her case. Carrying her wineglass in one hand and the bottle in the other, she walks into the living room. “See? No baby.” She takes another sip of wine, kicks off her shoes, and flops down on her white canvas sofa, downing half the glass in one prolonged gulp, the way her mother used to do.

  It’s not really surprising that Ben hasn’t called, she decides. He was never one of those men who couldn’t take a hint. He always knew when to stop, when to give up, when to cut his losses and run.

  What is surprising is that he called her at all.

  Amanda giggles. Of course the circumstances are rather unusual. It’s not every day your mother commits murder.

  Then again, who knows how many people her mother has killed over the years. John Mallins may be the first man she’s dispatched so publicly, but Amanda is convinced there are bodies everywhere.

  She downs the rest of her drink, then pours herself another, spilling a few drops on the white tile at her feet, and just missing the corner of her black-bordered white rug. She should really get a few more pieces of furniture for this room. Another chair to fill the empty space by the left wall, perhaps a coffee table, another lamp. Her apartment has always looked vaguely unfinished, as if someone were just preparing to move in. Or out.

  Just the way I like it, she thinks, taking another swallow of her wine as she examines the bare white walls, feeling her shoulders finally starting to relax. “To the man in the moon,” she says, nodding toward it, and taking a sip. “And to Ben, my first ex-husband.” Another sip, longer this time. “And to Sean, my second.” Another sip, and then another. “Hell, to all my ex-husbands, past and future.” She tops up her glass, raises it in the air. “And to all my mother’s unsuspecting victims: Old Mr. Walsh. John Mallins. My father,” she whispers, struggling to her feet. “Oh, no. We are not going there. We are definitely not going anywhere near there.”

  The doorbell rings. Amanda stares at the door without moving. After several seconds, it rings again.

  “Come on, open up,” a woman’s voice commands.

  Amanda goes to the door and opens it without asking who it is. “Janet,” she says to the woman whose light brown bangs all but swamp her forehead. What’s the point of having your brow lifted, she wonders, if you’re going to cover the whole thing up? She thinks of asking, To what do I owe the honor?—but decides she already knows. Instead she settles on, “Would you like a drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Amanda smiles and pours what’s left in the bottle into her glass.

  “Can I come in?”

  Amanda steps back to allow Janet entry, follows her into the living room, motions toward the sofa. “Please sit down.”

  “No, thank you. I won’t be staying long.”

  Then why did you ask to come in? Amanda wonders, but decides not to ask. She is too busy staring at Janet’s unnaturally swollen lips. What possesses attractive women like Janet to do such horrible things to themselves? she wonders, then stops herself because she knows the answer. The answer is women like herself. Amanda takes another sip of her drink.

  “I’m sure you know why I’m here.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been meaning to return your call. It’s just that I’ve been so busy—”

  “You’re not fooling anyone, you know.”

  “I think I better sit down.” Amanda sinks down into her sofa, feels the room spinning around her.

  “I know about you and my husband.”

  Amanda says nothing. She remembers something about the best defense being a good offense, but has neither the energy nor the willpower to engage in a debate.

  “Victor told me all about your little affair.”

  Amanda shakes her head in bewilderment. What is it with men and their horrible need to confess? Again she knows the answer. Confession may be good for the soul, but it’s even better for passing off the guilt.

  Janet mistakes Amanda’s bewilderment for denial. “You’re trying to tell me you didn’t have an affair with my husband?”

  “I’d hardly call it an affair.”

  “Really? What would
you call sleeping with somebody else’s husband?”

  Amanda is much too tired to mount a good rebuttal. “Thoughtless,” she hears herself say. “And stupid. Very stupid.”

  “Well, at least you’ve got that right,” Janet agrees, looking distinctly uneasy, as if she’d come prepared for a good fight and wasn’t ready to accept victory so easily. She glares at the wineglass in Amanda’s hand.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to drink?” Amanda asks.

  “What’s the matter, Mandy? No married men left to drink with?”

  “Please don’t call me Mandy.”

  “Oh, sorry. Do only the men you sleep with get to call you that?”

  Amanda struggles to stand up, when all she really wants to do is lie down. “Maybe you should go now.”

  “Not till I’ve said what I came here to say.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought you’d already … said.”

  “This is all a game to you, isn’t it? Playing with people’s lives. It doesn’t bother you that people get hurt? That one night of mindless fun for you might equal a lifetime of pain for others? That my marriage might never recover?”

  “I really think you’re making way too much of this. It was just one night. It didn’t mean anything to either of us.”

  “It meant something to me,” Janet says simply.

  A flush of shame washes across Amanda’s face. “I’m sorry.”

  “Just stay away from my husband.” Janet walks quickly to the door, slams it behind her.

  The vibration from the door zaps through Amanda’s body like an electrical charge. This would probably be a good time to get out of town, she thinks, then throws up all over her white living room rug.

  When Amanda wakes up on the living room floor, it is almost 2 a.m. “Oh, shit,” she mutters, the smell of vomit still alarmingly fresh. She stares at the huge red stain in the middle of her carpet. It looks like blood, she thinks, knowing that no amount of soap and water is going to wash the stain away. “Shit,” she says again, her head pounding as relentlessly as the surf beneath her windows. She touches her hair, feels it sticky and covered with bile.

  “You’re disgusting,” she says, stepping into her shower fully clothed, and standing under the gush of hot water that shoots from the oversize showerhead. She’s ruining her suit, she knows. Just as she’s ruined the rug. Not to mention her whole life, she decides melodramatically, pouring almost a full bottle of shampoo over her hair and digging her long nails into her scalp.

  Oh, well. Like mother, like daughter.

  Although she doesn’t remember her mother ever actually throwing up after one of her many binges. She’d drink herself into oblivion, and there she’d stay—aloof and unavailable, her physical presence defined by her emotional absence.

  After her shower, Amanda strips off her wet clothes, scrapes her body raw with a large white towel, then crawls into bed. She’ll deal with the rug in the morning, although what can she do with it really, except roll it up and throw it away? Even with repeated professional cleanings, a shapeless puddle of blush will always be visible beneath the surface. She wonders what the manager of the Four Seasons hotel in Toronto has done with the rug in his lobby. Three bullets make for a lot of spilled blood. “Maybe I should call and ask him how he handled the situation.” Amanda reaches for the phone beside her bed, presses in the number she hadn’t realized she’s already committed to memory.

  “Hello?” the sleepy voice on the other end responds.

  “What did they do with the rug?”

  “Amanda?”

  She pictures Ben scrambling to sit up, sees him brush several loose strands of hair from half-open eyes. “I’m assuming there was a lot of blood,” she continues. “I just wondered what they did with the rug.”

  “I don’t know,” he answers, as if this were the most natural of conversations for them to be having at this hour of the morning.

  “Who the hell is John Mallins?” she asks.

  “We don’t have a lot of details.”

  “What do you have?”

  “We know he’s from England. That he was here on vacation with his wife and kids.”

  “What’s his connection to my mother?”

  “As far as the police can determine, there is none.”

  “You’re saying that my mother shot and killed a total stranger?”

  “Apparently.”

  Amanda leans back against her headboard. This was excessive, even for her mother. “Was she drunk?”

  “No,” Ben says. “You really need to come home, Amanda.”

  Amanda hangs up the phone without saying goodbye. She walks to her window and stares out at the moon.

  SIX

  THE plane from Palm Beach to Toronto takes off almost an hour late.

  Amanda breathes a sigh of relief that they are finally taxiing down the runway, grateful that she no longer has the opportunity to run screaming down the aisle, hollering, “I’ve changed my mind. Let me out of here,” which she would surely have done had she not found herself at the very back of the crowded 737, squished between a gum-chewing teenage girl and a middle-aged businessman so engrossed in his spy thriller, he hadn’t even bothered looking up when she was climbing all over him to get to her seat.

  More of the things Amanda hates: middle seats on airplanes; teenage girls who chew their gum loudly and crack it even louder, all the while flipping long, straight hair over their shoulders into her face; the shapeless black wool coat she’s wearing for the first time in eight years, a coat she should have thrown out years ago.

  Why hadn’t she? Whatever style it once possessed is long gone, and it feels scratchy against her bare forearms. She thinks of taking it off, but there’s hardly enough room in the tiny space allotted her to exhale properly, let alone to start shedding layers of clothing. Serves me right, she thinks, as several strands of her neighbor’s hair flick toward her cheek. Should have taken off my coat before I sat down. Should have thrown the stupid thing out when I left Toronto.

  “Should never have gotten on this damn plane in the first place, is what I should have done,” she says out loud, then glances around self-consciously. But the teenage girl in the window seat is now cracking her gum to the sound of rock music leaking from her headphones, and the face of the man on the aisle is buried even deeper inside his book, so apparently neither has noticed her outburst.

  Why didn’t I think of bringing a book? she wonders, trying to remember the last time she had the luxury of curling up with a good novel. A mystery thriller like the one the man beside her is so engrossed in, something that would help her pass the two and a half hours she’ll be spending in the air, something that would help her forget where she’s going. And why.

  Amanda can’t remember at what point she actually made the decision to go to Toronto. After talking to Ben, she’d drifted into an uneasy sleep, only to dream about being chased down the middle of I-95 by a pregnant Jennifer Travis, an angry Janet Berg, and a sobbing Caroline Fletcher. Somewhere in the middle of this pursuit, she stopped to buy a painting from Carter Reese’s wife, Sandy, then awoke in a pool of sweat, thinking it was definitely time to get out of Dodge.

  At barely 6 a.m., she called the airlines and was able to secure the last available seat on the nonstop flight that left Palm Beach for Toronto at two thirty in the afternoon. Then she called her secretary at home, forgetting that the poor young woman might actually have preferred sleeping in a little later on a Saturday morning, and told her that she might not be in the office Monday.

  “Any particular reason I can give people?” Kelly asked, her voice alarmingly perky despite the early-morning hour.

  “No.”

  “Will you be back Tuesday?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  A pause. Amanda could almost hear the wheels in Kelly’s head spinning, knew she was desperate to ask if this sudden change in plans had anything to do with the phone calls from Ben Myers.

  “I’ll call you as soon
as I know my plans,” Amanda said before hanging up. Then she threw a pair of black pants and a black turtleneck sweater into an overnight bag, along with her makeup bag and several changes of underwear, phoned Ben and told him she’d be arriving in Toronto at around five o’clock that afternoon, and took a cab to the airport, where she ate a slice of pepperoni pizza and gulped down a large Coke for breakfast, picked up her boarding pass, passed unchallenged through security, and fell into a mercifully dreamless sleep in the departure lounge while waiting to board her plane.

  Luckily—or unluckily, she thinks now—someone saw her sleeping and shook her awake in time to make her flight. She bounded onto the plane just as the doors were about to close, squeezing her overnight bag into the already full overhead compartment before similarly squeezing herself into the middle seat in the second-to-last row of the plane. She was reminding herself about beggars not being choosers when the pilot announced they were experiencing a slight mechanical problem, and there would be a ten-minute delay. Ten minutes stretched into twenty, then thirty, and eventually fifty, as Amanda grew increasingly hot and restive inside her black wool coat. And now they were finally making their way down the runway, whatever problem they’d been having apparently solved.

  “And away we go,” Amanda whispers as the plane lifts into the air. She grips the armrests, tries hard not to panic. It’s been eight years since her last plane trip. Even her honeymoon with Sean involved boats, not planes. A Caribbean cruise, she recalls wistfully, remembering that she and Ben never had a honeymoon at all.

  She shakes the image of Ben from her head. She’ll be seeing him soon enough. “Book me a room at the scene of the crime,” she instructed him over the phone this morning. “I’ll call you as soon as I’m settled in.”

  The girl in the window seat beside Amanda cracks her gum loudly several times in rapid succession, so that it sounds as if someone were firing a small pistol. What kind of gun had her mother used to murder this mysterious stranger? Amanda wonders, feeling her body grow clammy underneath her heavy coat.

  An old image appears, the unexpected memory taking root and growing, like a weed, before Amanda has the chance to pull it out. She sees herself as a child, going through the closet in her mother’s bedroom, looking for a pair of fancy shoes, something with high heels and pointy toes, preferably in silver or gold, something suitable for playing a fairy princess, but finding only a succession of sensible low-heeled shoes in black and brown lined along the floor. And then looking up, seeing a shoe box on the high shelf above where her mother’s clothes were hanging, and thinking this must be where she keeps her special shoes, the ones a fairy princess would wear. She ran to the kitchen, retrieved the small stepladder that leaned against the side of the counter, returned with it to her mother’s bedroom, and climbed to its third and final step, stretching her arms toward the shoe box, her fingertips repeatedly grazing its side, unable to make full contact, until finally she succeeded in dislodging it. The box fell to the floor, narrowly missing her head, and bouncing awkwardly along the carpet, the lid opening, disgorging its contents at her feet.