Puppet Page 8

  “Where do they keep the goddamn taxis?” she mutters without moving her lips. Already she feels the bitter cold February air sliding along the floor toward her legs, like a deadly snake. She’ll probably have to buy a pair of boots, she thinks, irritated already, and she hasn’t even left the airport. “Damn this weather,” she says out loud.

  “Talking to yourself again?” a voice asks, and Amanda freezes on the spot, refusing to look around. “You always did like talking to yourself.”

  Amanda’s heart rushes into her ears, deafening her to everything except the pulse of her own anxiety. “You didn’t have to come all the way out here,” an alarmingly calm voice responds from somewhere far away. “I said I’d call you as soon as I got settled in.”

  “I thought you might appreciate a friendly face.”

  “Is it friendly?” she hears herself ask.

  “Why don’t you turn around, see for yourself?”

  Slowly, Amanda shifts her position, turns toward the voice. Reluctantly, she lifts her eyes, absorbs the man standing before her, the details of his face sinking into her consciousness, like water into a sponge.

  Ben Myers looks exactly like the man she ran away from eight years ago, and yet nothing like him at all. He is still tall and lanky, handsome in the casually disheveled way that used to drive her wild, but his brown eyes are now more wary than wounded, and his posture is more purposefully erect, quiet confidence having replaced noisy bravado. The heavy, black leather jacket he wears is utilitarian rather than rebellious. Amanda understands that her bad boy has become a man. And a good one, at that.

  “Ben,” she says, as her ears begin to clear and her heartbeat returns to something approaching normal.

  “Amanda,” he acknowledges. “You look wonderful.”

  “Thank you. So do you.”

  He takes the overnight bag from her shoulder, tosses it easily over his own. “Is this everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not planning on staying around very long, I gather.”

  “I thought a day or two would be …” She breaks off, decides against finishing the thought. Besides, he is already walking away from her, and she has to scamper to keep pace with his long strides.

  “Car’s this way,” he says over his shoulder, walking toward the elevator. “Button up,” he advises as the elevator stops at the fifth floor. “It’s cold out.”

  The arctic air hits her, like a glass of ice water tossed in her face, as soon as she steps off the elevator and into the parking garage. Except that water would freeze before it reached her, she thinks, clasping the collar of her coat tightly to her throat, silently berating herself for not thinking to bring a scarf. Or a pair of gloves. What the hell am I doing here? she wonders. What am I doing in this frozen wasteland, trailing after a man who used to be my husband, who’s about to drive me to the hotel where my mother, whom I haven’t talked to in years, shot and killed a man I’ve never even heard of?

  “This way,” Ben says.

  “The Mercedes?”

  “Not exactly.” He points toward an old, white Corvette.

  “My God. You still have it.”

  “You know me. I have a hard time letting go of things.”

  Amanda ignores the implication, rubbing her hands together in a futile effort to generate some heat as he unlocks the car doors and throws her overnight bag in the small area that passes for a backseat. She touches the side of the old car, warm memories dulling the sting of its frigid surface.

  A decade ago, she’d watched Ben, a cocky kid in skinny black jeans and a ratty black leather jacket, emerge from the pristine, white sports car and bound up the steps to her front door. She’d rushed outside to meet him, hoping to see her mother’s disapproving stare from her bedroom window as she defiantly thrust her hand inside his. But when she looked up, she saw that the drapes to her mother’s bedroom were closed, as usual, and that no one was watching. Just as there was no one waiting up to berate her when she snuck in the next morning at almost 4 a.m.

  So much for warm memories, Amanda thinks now as she climbs into the car.

  The car should have told her what kind of man Ben really was. He’d paid for the the damn thing himself, working every weekend and summer since he’d turned fourteen, and putting aside every penny earned to purchase the secondhand car of his dreams. This should have told her something about his drive, his determination, his will to succeed. But all she could see was the black leather jacket and the white Corvette. She may have understood the surly cock of his head, but she’d missed entirely the steel of his backbone. She’d listened to the defiance in his voice as he railed against authority without hearing the authority in his own voice as he railed.

  She knew she wasn’t the first woman to be seduced by an image, to be betrayed by the projection of her own needs on someone with needs of his own. What she wanted was style; what she got was substance. What she wanted was her mother’s worst nightmare; what she got was a man to make any mother proud. Which was the last thing she wanted.

  “You really didn’t have to come all the way out here to pick me up,” she tells him now, as he pays the parking lot attendant and waves away the receipt.

  “Maybe I was afraid you’d chicken out when you got here, hop on the first plane back.”

  “The thought occurred to me.”

  “I thought it might.” He smiles, as if he still knows her after all these years, as if he ever knew her at all.

  “So, how is she?” Amanda doesn’t say whom, and he doesn’t ask, for which she is grateful. They both know whom she’s talking about.

  “Holding up surprisingly well.”

  “She’s not the one who took three bullets at close range.”

  “True enough.”

  “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  “I’ve already told you.”

  “My mother shot and killed a total stranger in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel,” Amanda reiterates. No matter how many times she says it, it makes no sense. In fact, if anything, the words make less sense with each repetition. Like clothes that fade through repeated washings, the words lose their luster and grow pale. She might as well be speaking a foreign language. “What else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “Ben, I didn’t come all this way for nothing else.”

  “Don’t you think if I knew anything else, I’d tell you?”

  “So tell me again everything you do know.”

  He pauses, gulps air like water, then releases it slowly, his warm breath spreading across the car’s front window like a slow stain. “It’s my understanding that your mother was sitting in a corner of the lobby of the Four Seasons when one of the registered guests, a man by the name of John Mallins, approached the front desk. According to numerous witnesses, your mother calmly got up from her chair and cut across the lobby, withdrawing a gun from her purse and shooting John Mallins three times, whereupon she returned the gun to her purse, reclaimed her seat, and quietly waited for the police to arrive.”

  “You’re saying she did this without provocation of any kind?”

  “Apparently.”

  “She never said anything to him?”

  “Nothing anyone heard.”

  “He never said anything to her?”

  “He didn’t get the chance.”

  “She just walked over and shot him,” Amanda states.

  “Apparently,” Ben says, as he said earlier.

  Why does he keep saying that? Amanda wonders. Nothing about any of this is even remotely apparent.

  “According to a hotel clerk, she’d been sitting in the lobby all day,” Ben continues, unprompted.

  “What are you saying? That she was waiting to ambush him?”

  “It would seem so.”

  Amanda tries to imagine her mother sitting in a corner of a hotel lobby, patiently waiting to pounce on some unsuspecting stranger. “What’s this guy look like anyway?”

  “Average height, a little stocky,
dark hair, a mustache.”

  “How old is he? Was he?” she corrects immediately.

  “Late forties.”

  “Late forties,” Amanda repeats, trying to draw a picture of him in her mind. “I don’t get it. Who is this man?”

  “Amanda …,” Ben says patiently.

  “Ben,” she interrupts, “my mother might be a nutcase, but she’s not crazy enough to sit in a hotel lobby all day waiting to murder a total stranger. Obviously, she knew the man. She knew he was in town, and she knew where he was staying. That means there has to be a connection between them.”

  “If there is, your mother isn’t sharing it with the rest of us.”

  “She’s saying she randomly selected—”

  “She isn’t saying anything,” he says.

  Amanda stares at the foot of snow carpeting the flat landscape along Highway 401, shaking her head in growing frustration. “Is it possible she’s in the middle of some sort of menopausal breakdown?”

  “She’s a little old for that sort of thing, isn’t she?”

  Amanda regards him quizzically. She’s always regarded her mother as a relatively young woman, even though she was thirty-four when Amanda was born. Which would make her almost sixty-two now, Amanda calculates. Definitely past the age for menopausal breakdowns. Although when had her mother ever followed anybody’s schedule but her own?

  “You think it could be Alzheimer’s?”

  “I guess that’s a possibility.”

  “But you don’t think that’s it?”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” he admits.

  “Why?”

  “She just seems very …”

  “Very what?”

  “Very sane,” he says after a long pause.

  “My mother seems very sane,” Amanda repeats. “Now I know she’s nuts.”

  Ben laughs, and Amanda realizes how nice a sound his laughter makes, and how rarely she has heard it.

  “Has she been seen by a psychiatrist?”

  “Seen being the operative word,” Ben says, “since she refused to talk to him. She’s not making this any easier on herself.”

  “And that surprises you because …?”

  He laughs again, although this time the sound is strangled, as if a rope is being slowly twisted around his throat. “Maybe she’ll talk to you.”

  Amanda closes her eyes, tries remembering the last time she and her mother talked. She hears voices raised in anger, accusations tossed carelessly, like a rubber ball, back and forth between them. Well, with a daughter like you, no wonder your father had a heart attack!

  “When can I see her?”

  “I thought we’d drive up tomorrow around one o’clock.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Metro West Detention Center.”

  “What’s that like?”

  “It’s not the Four Seasons.”

  “Well, then, maybe she won’t kill anybody else.” Amanda shakes her head, as if to ask, Can this really be happening? Are we actually having this conversation? “Will there be any problem getting me in?”

  Ben shakes his head. “I’ll tell them you’re my assistant.”

  Amanda ignores the playful twinkle in his eyes. “Does she know I’m here?”

  “No.”

  “You think that’s a good idea? She’s not big on surprises.”

  “I didn’t want to say anything in case …”

  “I didn’t show up?”

  “Something like that.”

  She glances back out the window, sees the words Second Skin printed large across the side of a low brick building. What a good idea, she thinks, shivering inside her black coat. I could use a second skin right now.

  “Still cold?” Ben adjusts the heater. A fresh gust of hot air blows against her feet.

  “I guess I forgot how cold it gets here at this time of year.”

  “Some years are worse than others.”

  Amanda nods, studying him in profile. His nose is longer than she remembers, his cheekbones more defined. A handsome man by any standards, she thinks, feeling an old twinge, willing herself to look away. “So, how’ve you been?” she asks after a pause of several seconds.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You like being a lawyer?”

  “I do. And you?”

  “I do.” She laughs. “We sound like we’re getting married.”

  He smiles weakly. “I think once was enough, don’t you?”

  She nods. “You haven’t remarried?” His hands are hidden inside massive black leather gloves, but she doesn’t recall noticing a wedding ring in the airport. She wonders what he did with his old wedding band, if it was easier to let go of than his old Corvette.

  He shakes his head no.

  “Girlfriend?”

  “A friend,” he admits after a pause, clearly reluctant to share the details of his personal life with her.

  “A friend who’s a girl,” she teases, although she finds herself curiously annoyed at the idea he might be involved with someone else. Why? she wonders, surprised by this almost visceral reaction. She’s been through dozens of men in the years since she left, including another marriage and divorce. Did she seriously think he’d been pining for her all these years, just waiting for her to come to her senses and return home? Is she even remotely interested in rekindling the fragile spark that obviously still exists between them? She scoffs out loud, pushes the troubling thought from her brain.

  “Something wrong?”

  “What does your girlfriend do?” Amanda asks, ignoring the question and deciding that while it might be nice to sleep with Ben, for old times’ sake, she certainly isn’t in the market for anything more. Been there, she reminds herself. Done that.

  “She’s a lawyer.”

  “She isn’t.”

  “With the Crown Attorney’s Office.”

  The crown attorney was the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. district attorney. “So you’ve been sleeping with the enemy.”

  Ben says nothing. Amanda notices the sharp creases around the knuckles of his black leather gloves as his fingers tighten their grip on the steering wheel.

  Who’d have thought? she thinks, then repeats out loud, “Who’d have thought?”

  “What?”

  “Everything.”

  He nods. “Who’d have thought?” he agrees.

  EIGHT

  TRAFFIC along the highway is mercifully light, although everything slows to a crawl once they reach the Allen Expressway. Somewhere between Lawrence Avenue and Eglinton, Amanda closes her eyes and pretends to be dozing. She has no desire to see the changes to the city time has wrought, and even less desire to pursue the conversation. Amazingly, the ruse drifts into reality, and Amanda awakens just as Ben is pulling into the driveway of the beautiful midtown hotel.

  “I fell asleep?”

  “Snores and all,” Ben confirms.

  “I snored?”

  “I guess some things never change.”

  Amanda feels her cheeks grow warm despite the cold blast of air that hits her face as the uniformed doorman pulls open the car door. “Women don’t snore,” she tells Ben testily, grabbing the doorman’s hand and pulling herself up and out of the car. “I don’t snore.” She can’t decide if she’s angry at him for his casual—and somewhat proprietary—reference to their shared past, or at herself for falling asleep, as if, by doing so, she has exposed her vulnerability and thereby allowed him the upper hand. The upper hand at what? she wonders, reaching into the backseat for her overnight bag, feeling the leather fingers of Ben’s gloves brush against her bare knuckles. “I can do that,” she tells him, as he lifts the bag from the backseat and carries it toward the lobby. “You don’t have to come in.” But he is already inside the revolving door, and by the time she pushes her way through, he is only steps away from the reception desk.

  Amanda stops abruptly, feeling the whoosh of the glass door as it continues revolving behind her. So, this is where it happened, she thinks, sni
ffing at the perfumed air for the merest whiff of blood. This is where my mother shot and killed a man.

  She stares at the large, rectangular, floral-print rug that cuts across the middle of the large, well-lit lobby, searching for maroon-colored stains anywhere along its dark wool surface, but she finds none, which means it’s undoubtedly a replacement. Can’t very well let a large pool of blood be the first sight that greets unwary travelers. Not exactly the stuff of good first impressions.

  A glorious arrangement of real flowers sits in the middle of a mahogany table in the center of the rug. Coppery brown marble covers the walls and floor. Mirrored-glass columns stretch toward the high ceiling. A bank of ornate elevators line the far wall, the reception desk to their right. A lobby bar is on the left, as are several comfortable seating areas, each with a sofa and two chairs in complementary shades of beige. This is where my mother sat all day, waiting to murder one of the guests, Amanda realizes, trying to guess exactly which chair her mother might have chosen.

  “Amanda,” Ben calls from the reception desk. “They need some identification.”

  Amanda pushes herself toward him, although it seems she’s lost all sensation in her legs. She feels her knees about to give way, and she stumbles. Instantly Ben is at her side, his hand on her elbow, guiding her forward.

  “Are you all right?”

  “They cleaned things up pretty quick,” she mutters, brushing aside his concern with an impatient toss of her head, and proffering her passport to the clerk.

  “Good evening, Ms. Travis.” The young man’s smile reveals at least a dozen more teeth than necessary. “Nice to have you with us. I see you’ll be staying here for seven nights.”

  “No,” Amanda corrects sharply.

  The desk clerk visibly blanches, his teeth disappearing behind the thin line of his lips.

  “Two nights will be more than enough.” Amanda glares at her former husband, as if to say, What on earth would make you think I might consider staying a full week?