Dedication
For Sheila
Epigraph
And most of all would I flee from the cruel madness of love,
The honey of poison-flowers and all the measureless ill.
—Tennyson, Maud, IV, x.
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
Part One Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part Three Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Part Four Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Peter Robinson
Credits
Back Ads
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword by Michael Connelly
AUTHENTICITY. I THINK IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT aspect of both writing and reading. As a writer, you want your characters, your places, your dialogue, your message to crackle with authenticity. As a reader you want the story in front of you to be so real that you are nodding your head in agreement as you read without even realizing it. You are submerged in a world that might be wholly alien to you but it nevertheless holds true to you. You think this is how it is. This is true because you are there.
So it is no surprise then that the most important aspect of writing is one of the most difficult. Getting it right. And this may be sacrilege to say, but research is not the answer. Fifty words of authentic description can’t do what one word of telling detail does. One line of dialogue is completely undone if it suffers from what I call the writer-behind-the-words syndrome, the malady that occurs while reading when you see the writer at work behind the prose.
So it is no wonder that writers tend to stay in their comfort zones. That is, the places they know, the accents they’re used to, the slang they need no interpreter for, the world they have written about before. I’ll raise my hand right here and admit I am one of them. I can’t say that I have strayed too far from the groove that I have been in for a long time. I talk about it, yes. Talk about the big challenge almost every time it is time to start a new book. And then . . . you get where I’m going.
The reason I bring all of this up is that the “Big Challenge” is out there for all of us but only a few of us meet it. In this book, you witness it happen. Peter Robinson is an Englishman by birth and a Canadian by home, and this is a terrific Los Angeles novel by any measure. Before reading it, I remember asking myself Why did he do it? After I finished reading it the question was How did he do it?
I first read this novel almost twenty years ago. I was impressed with it then but I am even more impressed with it now after a second reading. Because now I know better what a feat this was to pull off. Back then I said to myself this guy Robinson really did his research. Now I know that research is the easiest part. It takes an author with amazing empathy, a snare-trap ear for dialogue and a clear eye for the telling detail to make something like this work. And No Cure for Love works.
But on top of that—getting away from who wrote it and from where—it is that rare book that entertains, enthralls and also teaches. Somehow this story from back then has something to say about right now. In a world that increasingly is fascinated with fame and all media spirals into celebrity-centricity, it is always good to step back and take a look at the dark side of all of that. From that angle this novel transcends its time and place and becomes important. How does it do that? You guessed it. Authenticity.
Michael Connelly
Los Angeles, 2015
PART ONE
1
14 December
My Darling Little Star,
Thank God I have found You again. When I lost you I entered the darkness. Lost in the dark silent Room with only the Hum of my Machines and my Memories and Images of you.
I told myself you could not have known what I feel for you. Love strikes me Dumb. I see all that now. Thank you for giving me another chance, thank you for seeking me out. This time there will be no mistaking my Love. This time I will prove myself to you again and again until you feel the Power of my Love and come to me. I won’t let you go this time.
You think you do not know who I am, but you do. They took you away and Seduced you and stole you from me, just as the others did before. They have tried to blot out your Memory of me. And I failed you, Sally. Yes, I did. But everything is clear now. The months I spent Lost and Wandering in the dark Room have made everything bright as Day, the Visions I bore witness to have made my Purpose clear, they have revealed our Destiny. Now I watch you on the Screen and I know you are speaking only to me.
As I labor to prove myself to you, you will remember me and you will come to me. Then, my love, will we lie together and I will bite your Nipples till the Blood and Milk flow down my chin. We will hack and eat away the Corrupting Flesh, the Rank Pollution of Tissue and Sinew, and go in Moonlight shedding our Skin and spilling our Blood on the Sand through the Mirrors of the Sea where all is Peace and Silence and no one can harm us or tear us apart ever again Forever and Forever.
Be Strong, my Love. I have much to Plan and Execute before we can be together as Fate intends. My mind Boils and Seethes with the Burden, the Weight and the Glory of it. All for you. Let me prove I am more than equal to the Task.
With all the love in my bursting heart,
M.
Sarah Broughton’s hand shook as she let the letter drop on the glass-topped table. She wiped her palm on the side of her jeans.
It was the third letter in two weeks, and by far the most detailed. The others had merely hinted that she should begin to prepare herself for a special event. This was also the first one to contain anything even remotely sexual.
Sarah walked over to the sliding glass doors. Beyond the deck and the narrow strip of lawn, the rocky promontory on which her house stood dropped twenty feet. Below, fine white sand sloped down to the Pacific Ocean, darkening where the breakers pounded the shoreline not more than fifty yards out.
Sarah stood and watched a wave swell until its rounded peak turned translucent green then burst into a crest of foam that rushed horizontally along its length until everything churned into a roiling white mass. Sometimes she thought she could stand and watch the waves forever. The roar was deafening, and through the open door she could smell salt and seaweed and something dead, that odor of primordial decay that always seemed to linger around the edges of the sea.
Though the temperature was in the mid-sixties, Sarah shivered and hugged herself. Her nerves weren’t that good to begin with, hadn’t been for over a year, and now she felt defiled, violated and scared. But even as she trembled, she found herself probi
ng the feeling, storing it for later use. If she ever had to play a victim again, this memory could be useful.
She walked back to the table, picked up the letter and made to rip it up like the others, but she stopped herself in time. No. She would show this one to Stuart. No more procrastination.
It was close to eleven in the morning, and she was due to have lunch with him in a couple of hours. She would show him the letter then. Stuart would know what to do.
She looked at the envelope again. It was postmarked Pasadena, dated 14 December, which was Friday, four days ago, and addressed to Sarah Broughton at the beach house address on the Coast Highway.
So how had “M,” whoever he was, found out her address and phone number? Like most people in the movie and TV business, Sarah guarded her privacy well. Or thought she did.
He could have found out from the article in TV Guide that mentioned she lived in Malibu. Which wasn’t quite true. Strictly speaking, the house was in Pacific Palisades, close to the Los Angeles city limits, but that probably didn’t sound quite as glamorous to Josephine Q. Public, Ottumwa, Iowa, who liked to read about actors and actresses in TV Guide.
All in all, Sarah supposed, the secrecy was probably something of an illusion. When it came down to it, no address was that hard to come by in Hollywood. Everything was for sale.
Stop worrying, she told herself, folding the letter and putting it back in its envelope. There are millions of perverts out there drooling over actors and rock stars, and this is probably just one of them. A harmless one, more likely than not.
She imagined some overweight, pimply nerd with Coke-bottle glasses, dandruff and halitosis masturbating in a candlelit room with nude pictures of her plastered all over the walls. Somehow, it wasn’t a comforting image.
Sarah slipped the letter in her purse and decided to take a walk on the beach. She slid open the door, walked down the wooden steps from the deck to lawn, then down the stairs carved in the rock. At the bottom stood a gate made of six-foot-high metal railings, painted black, all with very sharp points. It didn’t offer much security, though, Sarah realized. Anybody who really wanted to could climb up the rocks beside it easily enough.
On the beach, she slipped off her sandals and wiggled her toes in the sand. Though the sun was only a white ball through the haze, its brightness made Sarah squint and reach in her purse for her sunglasses.
There was hardly anyone around. For Sarah, the mid-sixties was warm enough for sunbathing, but it was chilly to the natives. Also, while this area of the beach wasn’t exactly private property, access was difficult because of the solid wall of houses, flanked on both sides by low-rise office buildings.
Out toward the horizon, water and sky merged in a white glare. A light ocean breeze ruffled Sarah’s cap of short blond hair. It would soon dispel the sea-mist. She walked with her hands in her pockets, eyes scanning the beach for interesting shells and pebbles.
To the north, the mountains were almost lost in the haze, and to the south she could just about make out the Santa Monica Pier with its restaurants and amusement palaces. Funnily enough, it reminded Sarah of childhood holidays in Blackpool, staying at Mrs. Fairclough’s boardinghouse. Of course, it was rarely over sixty degrees in Blackpool—more often than not it was about fifty and raining—but her mum and dad would always splurge on one good variety show at the pier theater, and it was there that her love of show business had begun. And just look at her now. Top of the world, Ma. Well, getting there, anyway. Such a long journey, such a long, long way from Blackpool to Hollywood.
As usual, thinking of her mum and dad brought her other problem to mind: the family she had put off dealing with for too long. She hadn’t been home in two years now. Her mother was dead, had been since long before the rift, but there were still Paula, her dad and the kids. Well, she would be facing them at Christmas.
And now, on top of everything else, the letters.
As she walked along the edge of the beach, Sarah felt uneasy. Not for the first time these past couple of weeks did she keep looking over her shoulder. And whenever she did notice anyone walking toward her, she felt herself tense, get ready to run.
There was something else as well. Earlier that morning, when she was coming back from her run, she had seen something flash in the sun, way up on the crest of the hills above the Coast Highway. Of course, there were a lot of houses up there, and there could be any number of explanations—windows opening, even car windshields glinting in the light—but she had felt as if someone were looking down on her through binoculars.
Now she thought she saw something flash again, further up the beach this time. But she was being silly. It could be someone’s glasses, a ring, anything at all. Maybe just a birdwatcher.
She told herself not to be so paranoid, but she couldn’t shake the feeling. There was something else that bothered her, too. This time, in the letter, he had called her Sally.
2
SHE SHOULD HAVE LEFT FOR WORK HOURS AGO, BUT he hadn’t seen her go. Usually a cab or that gray-haired man in the Cadillac picked her up to take her to the studio around eight-thirty. Not today. She had to be still in the house. He hadn’t seen her leave, and he knew he couldn’t have missed her; he had been in the area for four hours, since before dawn, watching her house just like he had every day for the past two weeks, first up in the hills, now down on the beach.
As usual that Tuesday morning, he had found his safe, secluded spot in the hills before dawn and watched her run. His powerful Zeiss binoculars silhouetted her moving image against the slowly brightening sea. Every morning she ran at least a mile up the beach and back as the sun came up. She was always alone, the only one out at that time.
As he had lain high above her, though he could sense the city throbbing and buzzing behind him, hardly a soul stirred nearby. He could see the lights of ships twinkling out at sea, the headlights of cars on the Coast Highway, already pale in the light of the rising sun as they arced around the long curve between Topanga and Santa Monica.
She timed herself against the sunrise, as if following and emulating its natural rhythms, in tune with it, like the dawn goddess. Or so it seemed to him. Every day now the sun rose a little later, but it was always just hidden behind the eastern hills when she started out and balanced on top of them like a huge fireball when she got back.
He watched the tide, too, how it ebbed and flowed. She always ran right along the water line. He had seen the spent waves foam and sparkle around her feet as if she were the very rebirth of Venus.
Suddenly, here she came again. Walking out of the gate onto the beach. Not to run this time, but just walking, looking contemplative. His heart expanded so much he thought it would explode in his chest. She was thinking about him. He knew it. She must have received his latest letter and read it. Now she was walking alone on the beach thinking about him.
He lay on a rock about a quarter of a mile further west, on the Topanga State Beach. It was eleven in the morning now and there were a few people around, some brave surfers and couples walking hand in hand. They didn’t bother him, though. He knew he just looked like someone lying on a rock watching the seabirds. Plenty of other people did that. It didn’t look strange at all.
In fact, living here, you would have to think very hard to find anything that really did seem weird, he thought. His kind of city. The place where he had finally become what he had been from the start but had only vaguely sensed before; where he had recognized himself at last; the place where he had both lost and found his soulmate, his life’s companion.
He pulled her into focus through the lenses. The binoculars were so strong that he could fill them with her head and shoulders. She wasn’t silhouetted now, and he could see her downcast eyes, see her chewing softly on her lower lip, that slightly crooked tooth overlapping at the front, the only blemish on a perfect face. Well, that could easily be altered.
He could almost hear her thoughts, how she was racking her brains to remember who he was, who it was loved her so
much, so she could come to him. He felt her calling out to him. But no, not yet. There was still much to do before they could truly be together. For a moment, he felt guilty for torturing her so, but it passed. After all, wasn’t anticipation one of the sweetest parts of conquest? And he had yet to conquer her.
While he didn’t know what would happen after the consummation—when he thought of that, everything turned red—he knew that he would continue to feel this exquisite blending of aching and longing, of joy and desolation, while he courted her from a distance. And he knew that she could feel it too.
There was also something special, something subtly erotic about watching her through the binoculars. To the naked eye, she was nothing but a dot in the distance, but when he raised the lenses, there she was, right in front of him, in his face, her thoughts clear for him to read in her almost-perfect features. And when she made those little unconscious gestures, the things he loved her for so much, like scratching the side of her nose with her pinkie, and he knew he was the only one in the world watching her, he felt such pride and power in his possession that it was all he could do to stop himself from jumping up and running into her arms.
But no. Not yet. For now, he must give himself up to the alternate waves of ecstasy and terror that swept through him, made him dizzy and wild, that whispered to him what he must do to win her love. He must worship her from a distance. It was all too new; he wasn’t ready yet, and he didn’t think she was either. Oh, he loved her; Lord knew how much he loved her. But he had to make her realize that she loved him, had to make her see that he was the one. Soon, it would be soon . . .
As he lay there on his stomach watching her poke at small shells and pebbles with her bare toes, her little nails painted pink, his hands started to shake and he felt himself getting hard against the rock.
3
THEY ATE LUNCH AT ONE OF THOSE HOLLYWOOD restaurants where six red-coated valets drag you out of your car and drive off with it if you so much as slow down out front. The first time it had happened, Sarah had seriously thought they were being carjacked, having read about such things in the papers, but Stuart had just laughed. He often laughed at her English ways. Stuart himself was Southern Californian all the way through.
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