“I have no idea, but I’m sure he was after her alone, not me. What I want to know is why. Any luck with the detectives?”
“None. The trail is ice. They hadn’t even found out who her father was, but the police received a tip. Seems there are always tips from the same male voice.”
“Yeah. He planted a bug under the table in the cabin, and I’m sure there was someone outside during the night. The pattern in the birdsong was different.”
“Ace, you’re out of your element. This thing is big and it’s well planned. You’ve got to fight it with—”
“I know: money, guns, and lawyers.”
Mike’s voice was quiet and serious. “Lots of money, lots of lawyers. No guns.”
Ace paused, took a breath to calm himself. Fiona looked as though she were sleeping. “Mike, who is Kimberly?”
“Kimberly? Lord, Ace, where do you live? On this planet? No, I know, you live in the sky with those damned birds of yours. If you ever took the feathers out of your eyes, you’d know that Kimberly is a doll, a—”
“A doll?” he said stupidly.
“Yeah, a little, what do you call them? A fashion doll. My girls are mad for them, not to mention adult collectors.”
“You mean it’s a doll like that other one? Bar—”
“Don’t say that name. I mean it! The war between those two is very real. If you’re a Kimberly girl, you don’t buy Bar—” Michael broke off before he finished saying the name, and he sounded as though he were looking around to see if anyone was listening. “The other one,” he said, and his voice was so low Ace could barely hear him. “Your Miss Burkenhalter created Kimberly. That doll is a whole world. She’s got an occupation, and twice a year she’s reissued with new clothes, new friends, and a new task.” Mike’s voice dropped even lower. “And twice a year I have to spend new cash on the bloody things. I tell you, it’s one of the most brilliant schemes ever thought of to rook parents out of money. Every Christmas and birthday, Sam has to—”
“All right, I get the picture.”
“Okay,” Michael said in a normal voice. “Where do we meet you?”
Ace took a deep breath. “You mean to take us to the police?”
“Right. You can’t remain fugitives forever. This has to end.”
Ace took a while to answer. “We can’t go in like this. Her hair is dirty and … and …”
“Okay,” Mike said slowly, “I understand. Tell me where you are, and I’ll send a car. You can stay tonight at Frank’s place. And I’ll have Sam get things for … What’s her name?”
“Don’t send a car. I’ll drive to Frank’s. Just have his private elevator waiting and the room ready. Fill it with flowers and fruit and chocolates. And when we arrive, send up a lavish spread of food and champagne. And her name is Fiona, as you well know since it’s being broadcast all over the world.”
“Yeah, I know her name. I just wanted to hear you say it. You know, the photos of her remind me of someone.”
“Ava Gardner, the fifties movie star. Fiona can make herself up to be a dead ringer for her. She’s even got a faint cleft in her chin.”
“Does she?”
“Don’t use that tone with me. I want you to have Sam get her some clothes. She’s been wearing men’s clothes, and she’s tired of them. Get something in silk. And shoes. Size seven. And get her some jewelry. Something tasteful. And real.”
“She’ll have to relinquish it when you two go to the police,” Mike said softly.
“Yeah, but photographers will be there, and …” Ace’s voice trailed off, as if the coming scene was too horrible for him to imagine.
“Oh, by the way, Ace, Lisa flew in last night. She said you’d called her once, but she hadn’t heard from you in days, so she was coming apart with worry. She flew in on the same plane as Fiona’s fiancé.”
“Boyfriend,” Ace snapped.
“Oh. I see.”
“No, you don’t see anything. I’ll call Lisa soon. It’s just that all this takes precedence.”
“All this being Fiona, right?”
“All this being that we—the two of us—are charged with murder.”
“Ace, am I remembering correctly that you used to own a tape of some old movie starring Farley Granger and Ava—”
“Shut up, Mike,” Ace said, then closed the telephone and cut him off.
With a heavy heart, he walked back to the car. Fiona wasn’t sleeping as he thought, but just lying there, her eyes full of fear. When she saw him, she looked up. “I can’t take this anymore,” she said. “I want out.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll get you out.”
But when he started to get back into the driver’s seat, she said, in a panic, “Don’t leave me,” so he half carried her as he put her into the passenger seat, and all the way to the hotel, she explained to Ace why she was giving up, why she thought they should stop running. Why they had to turn themselves in.
Eleven
Fiona couldn’t seem to think clearly. There seemed to be something that she should remember, but she didn’t know what it was. She was vaguely aware when Ace opened the car door and helped her out. She was sort of aware when he led her into an elevator and the doors closed.
But when the elevator doors opened, she couldn’t really focus on the fact that they were in a marble-floored foyer and Ace was opening the door to a living room. Light flooded in on them, and she had the sense of bright, happy colors.
As she stood there blinking, Ace moved away from her, then returned with a plate full of food. Holding it under her nose as he would to a wary animal, he moved the plate back and forth. And Fiona followed him. There was nothing like the smell of warm, delicious food to perk one up.
When she was near the table, he picked up a fork and held a bite to her mouth. Out of habit, she opened her mouth.
“Good, huh?” he said, then gave her another bite. It was chicken stuffed with crab and meltingly delicious.
“Sit,” he said softly. “Eat, have something to drink.”
Maybe it was that she was at last in her element, not in a shack that had bugs crawling in through the cracks, but she began to wake up, began to come out of her stupor caused by too much too fast. “Will you stop treating me like I’m crazy and hand me one of those?” she said, frowning.
Ace grabbed the rolls she was pointing to and kissed her on the forehead.
“And stop kissing me,” she said, her mouth full.
“Right. Next time I’ll have to slap you to make you return to our world.”
She ignored his sarcasm. “Is there a bathroom in this place?” she asked, looking around. “A real bathroom?”
“Follow me,” he said, then led her through a sumptuous bedroom and into a bathroom of green-and-peach-colored marble. The sinks were shaped like shells and had gold faucets. On the counter was the unmistakable layout of toiletries of a fine hotel.
Turning, Fiona looked at Ace, frowning. “Where are we and who’s paying for this place?”
“Don’t worry about it. It belongs to someone I know, and it’s free.”
“But—”
“If you’d rather go back to—”
“Sorry I asked. Could you give me a little privacy?”
“Sure,” he said, “but don’t let the food get cold.”
Five minutes later Fiona was trying to decide whether she wanted to shower first or soak in the huge tub. One glance in the mirror at her hair, matted with dirt and sweat, and she turned on the shower taps. The steam coming from the water made her close her eyes in happiness. It was amazing how one could miss the simplest things in life the most, she thought.
“Aren’t you hungry?” Ace called through the door, his mouth full.
“I’ll eat later,” she said as she tore the dirty clothes from her body; then when they dropped to the floor, she kicked them across the room in disgust. She never wanted the horrid things to touch her bare skin again.
She got into the shower and lathered her hair three times, then p
ut some heavenly smelling conditioner on it and left it while she used shower gel to clean the rest of her body. And when she’d rinsed her hair, she got out, wrapped herself in a thick, warm towel, and filled the bathtub, dumping about half a cup of some expensive-looking bath salts into the water and watching the bubbles rise.
When she slid into the hot, hot water, she knew she’d never felt anything so wonderful in her life. She wanted to slide down under the water and close her eyes and float.
“Are you decent?” Ace called to her.
“No,” she called back, but she heard the door open anyway. He had a plate heaped with food in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. He also had his eyes closed, but since he was walking straight, she was sure he was pretending.
“Go away,” she said in feigned disgust, but truthfully, she was glad he was there. Too much had happened in the last days for her to want to be alone. If she were alone, she might start to think.
Ace sat down on the marble edge of the tub. “Nice bubbles,” he said. “Dense.”
“Very funny. Are you going to share that?” She lifted one soapy hand to take the fork, but he moved it around her hand and fed her a bite of scallops marinated in lime juice.
“So how do you feel now?”
“Better. Superficially.” She looked at him over the mountain of bubbles. “So what’s on the agenda? Handcuffs at dawn?” She was beginning to know him well enough that she could see that there was something serious on his mind.
As for Fiona, she had a feeling that there was nothing more bad that could happen to her, for the worst had: she had lost Kimberly. Right now she couldn’t seem to truly grasp what that meant. In a way, it was as though her life were over.
And maybe it was, because she had this feeling of, What the hell? that made her consider asking Ace to join her in the tub.
“Do you think we could discuss this later?” she said, frowning at him, trying to control herself. “Perhaps when I’m less …” She motioned toward the tub.
For a long moment Ace looked at her, and suddenly it seemed that the room grew a great deal warmer. Until now, they had been on the run and every moment had been charged with fear and anticipation. But now Fiona kept thinking that maybe this was her last night of freedom. Maybe tomorrow she’d be turning herself in to the police, and maybe tomorrow night she’d be in prison, and the next day—
She looked up at Ace and opened her mouth to tell him to leave the room, but he put down the plate of food and walked to the sink.
“We don’t have time to waste,” he said. “We have plans to make, and they have to be made now.”
“But couldn’t they wait until—”
She stopped because he’d looked about the counter and picked up men’s shaving gear and begun to lather his face.
“Don’t you think you could wait until after I’m out of the tub?” she said, trying to sound deprecating. But her tone seemed to be lost on him, and Fiona drew in her breath when—heaven help her—he removed his shirt.
For a few moments Fiona just lay there. Had bird-watching given him that body? She was looking at the back of him as broad shoulders topped a muscular back that tapered down to a small waist. Jeremy spent a lot of time at the gym, but he didn’t look like this man, not at all like Ace with his honey-colored skin and muscles that moved as he shaved.
She became aware of him when she realized that he was looking at her in the mirror. Quickly, she turned away and tried to think of something other than the man’s seminude body.
Ace started shaving again. “We have to plan how we’re going to turn ourselves in,” he said. “My cousin Frank has hired lawyers for us, two each, I think, so they’ll be with us all the way. At least as far as they can go with the police, that is.” He dipped his razor into a basin of water, then looked at her in the mirror. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Is there another razor there? Could I have it?” She had eaten all the food on the plate that Ace had left beside the tub, and when he handed her another razor, she lifted a leg out of the bubbles, soaped it, then began to shave her leg. “I hate shaving,” she said. “It leaves such a nasty, sharp stubble. Waxing is the only way to go.” When she glanced up, she had the satisfaction of seeing Ace staring at her in the mirror with an open-mouthed expression. Good! she thought, two could play at this game.
“What were you saying?” she asked sweetly.
“I was making plans for our surrender,” he said, then returned to shaving, but she could see that he was watching her. And when he let out a muffled, “Ouch!” she smiled. “My recommendation is that we wait until the morning, but if you want to turn yourself in tonight, we can arrange it.”
“No,” she said hesitantly, “I can wait.” When Ace said nothing else, she put down her left leg and started on the right one. “Will it be really awful?”
“I don’t know from experience, but I doubt that being fingerprinted and having your picture taken, then being put into a jail cell will be very pleasant.”
For a moment Fiona tried to picture that actually happening to her, but she couldn’t. She had never committed a criminal act in her life. She had never so much as cheated on her taxes. She didn’t even jaywalk! Yet tomorrow she was facing …
“But it won’t be for long, will it? I mean, lawyers can be very clever and they can get us off, right?”
“Truthfully, I don’t think so. My relatives have had private detectives on this for days, and they’ve found nothing. You and I figured out that our connection to each other was through your father. No one knows Smokey’s connection to Roy, or why you and I are Roy’s heirs. You going to be in there long? I’d like to take a bath.”
“Sure,” Fiona said thoughtfully, then watched absently as he left the bathroom.
Still thinking hard, she got out of the tub and put on a thick terry cloth robe, then went into the bedroom. On a table was a large white bag on which someone had written, “Fiona.” Opening it, she found it full of cosmetics and moisturizers. She could have wept at the sight of them.
As she was slathering Chanel cream on her face, she opened the closet and found it full of clothes, women’s clothes, that fit her. And in the drawers were underwear and a simple white cotton nightgown. As Fiona held up the deceptively plain nightgown, her New York eye calculated that the garment had cost someone at least eight hundred dollars. She tossed the heavy terry robe onto a chair, put on the nightgown, then pulled a silky peach-colored robe from the closet.
Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to furnish this hotel suite, she thought. “Chalk up more mystery to Mr. I’m-just-a-simple-guy Montgomery,” she said aloud.
Once she was dressed, with her face and body feeling less like sandpaper, she went into the sitting room, where Ace, still wearing only his trousers, was sitting on a chair reading a newspaper.
When he saw her, he didn’t seem aware of her dishabille. He just put down the paper and said, “I think you should read those so you can see what we’re accused of”; then he walked past her toward the bathroom.
When he was gone, she walked toward the stack of newspapers and picked one up.
“The Teddy Bear Killers,” one newspaper said. “ ‘He was just like a big teddy bear,’ the fellow employee of the brutally slain Roy Hudson told the press yesterday. ‘He was sweet and always had a joke for everyone. How someone could have killed such a teddy bear of a man, I don’t know,’ the woman said.”
Fiona sat down, and as she read on, her hands began to tremble, for she read horrible things about herself. According to the papers, she had been raised without love, abandoned to boarding schools. One magazine had an interview with a psychiatrist who told how Fiona’s upbringing had obviously made her cold and loveless. “Such a person wouldn’t be able to feel what others felt. My guess is that she’s a sociopath.”
“A sociopath,” Fiona whispered.
Her former assistant, Gerald, had given an interview in which he said that he th
ought that Kimberly had been a surrogate for the children Fiona never had.
It was when she was on the fifth paper that she realized that Ace was hardly mentioned. The press seemed to believe that she was the instigator, while he was just someone led about by her. There was even a hint that he was being held captive by her.
When Ace came out of the shower, wearing a terry robe and toweling his hair dry, she looked up at him.
“Horrible, isn’t it?” he said. “I guess we did the wrong thing in running. The press has cut us up pretty bad.”
“Me,” she whispered. “And my father. You seem to have been disregarded.”
At that Ace turned away, and again she knew he was hiding something. Did he have some underworld connection that could keep his name out of the papers?
He turned back to her. “Look, I swear that I’ll do all that I can to straighten out this mess and—”
“How?” she half shouted. “How can any of this be straightened out when no one is looking for the truth? All of these papers have condemned me. They’re all trying to figure out why I did it, not if I murdered some man. Or men.”
“But you did work for the toy company that was going to franchise the toys from Roy’s TV show. And you were in his will to make millions.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said loudly.
Ace put up his hands in mock surrender. “You don’t have to persuade me. I was there, remember?”
“Not really. You didn’t see anything, did you? You didn’t see someone else kill Roy, did you?”
“No,” he said. “Unfortunately, I didn’t. I was sleeping up on deck and heard a noise and came downstairs about the time you discovered his body on yours.”
For a moment, Fiona looked away. She didn’t like to remember that horrible night.
“How about if we make a pact not to talk about this tonight? The decision is made, and we have one last night to enjoy ourselves. We can’t leave this room, but we can have anything you want brought to us. You can try on all your new clothes and—”
“And what? Take them to jail with me? Will the police keep them while I serve a life sentence for a murder I didn’t commit?”
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