Puppet

by Joy Fielding

  Amanda tries to pay attention, but gives up after ten minutes of the prosecutor’s hopeless posturing, only snapping back to attention when Ben rises to make an objection. He looks almost as good in his lawyer’s robes as he did in that Irish knit sweater, she is thinking, as the judge sustains Ben’s objection. What might have happened between them had Jerrod Sugar not been in her bed last night?

  What did she want to happen?

  Nothing.

  Been there, done that. Remember?

  Amanda assures herself she is just feeling vulnerable because of the fact she is back in her hometown after a prolonged absence, forced by crazy circumstance into spending time with a man she once loved, into remembering long-repressed details of their shared past. Under such circumstances, it’s difficult not to feel familiar stirrings. Probably he’s feeling them too, and that’s why he rushed over last night when he could easily have phoned in his concern. Amanda closes her eyes, tries not to picture the look of shock and dismay on Ben’s face when he flipped on the light and saw Jerrod Sugar in her bed.

  The judge announces an hour break for lunch, and Amanda glances at her watch, surprised to see it’s almost half past twelve. She rises as the judge sweeps dramatically from the courtroom, watching as Ben leaves the defendant’s side to approach the crown attorney. “Come on, Nancy,” she hears him cajole in his best Ben voice. “Why are you being so stubborn? She’s a good kid who got involved with the wrong guy. It’s a first offense. Let her do some community service.”

  “You’re wasting your breath, Counsel,” comes the retort from dry, pinched lips.

  “Community service, and everybody gets something out of the deal.”

  The prosecutor’s response is to arch one bushy eyebrow and gather her papers together, then walk from the room.

  “She’s a charmer,” Amanda states, listening to the clunk of the woman’s heavy shoes as they reverberate down the hall.

  “What are you doing here?” Ben asks without looking at her.

  “Your secretary said this is where you’d be.”

  “Mr. Myers?” A woman approaches, clutching her rosary beads. “Is it all right if I take Selena out for lunch?”

  “Mom, for God’s sake, put the beads away.”

  “Make sure you have her back in an hour,” Ben tells her as the woman surrounds her daughter with her arms and leads her from the room.

  “That’s got to be so hard,” Amanda says, watching them leave.

  Ben says nothing.

  “How about you?” Amanda ventures. “Can I take you to lunch?”

  “I’m not very hungry. Thanks anyway.”

  “Ben …”

  He looks at her for the first time since he saw her come in. “Look, if this is about last night, you don’t have to apologize. What you do with your life is your own business.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. I’m not here to apologize.”

  He looks surprised, maybe even a little disappointed. “Why are you here?”

  “Can you find out for me if John Mallins’s birthday is July the fourteenth?”

  “Why would you want to know that?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  “That’s a pretty strange hunch, even for you.”

  “It’s just that I was talking to this woman last night, and she said—”

  “What woman last night?” His eyes narrow. Was there a woman in your bed too last night? they seem to ask.

  Amanda quickly recounts the details of her meeting with Rachel Mallins, watching the expression on Ben’s face ricochet between curiosity and disbelief, admiration and anger.

  “Please tell me this is your idea of a joke,” he says when she’s through.

  “I know I shouldn’t have gone there on my own. You don’t have to tell me that. But I really don’t think she was bullshitting me. I went to the reference library first thing this morning,” she continues before he can interject. “I spent almost an hour going through the records of everyone who died in Toronto in the last month, and there was nobody on that list by the name of Mallins.”

  “Why should there be?”

  “Because Hayley Mallins told me her husband was here to settle his mother’s estate.”

  “Hayley Mallins? When were you talking to Hayley Mallins?”

  “I went to see her after you dropped me off at the hotel.”

  Ben shakes his head, trying to keep up with the steady barrage of information. “You had a very busy night.”

  “I didn’t plan any of it. Believe me. It just kind of evolved.”

  “Exactly what evolved?”

  Amanda describes her visit with Hayley Mallins.

  “I can’t believe she agreed to talk to you.”

  “I think I took her by surprise.”

  “Yes, you have a way of doing that to people.” They stand facing one another for several seconds. “All right,” he says finally. “You can buy me lunch.”

  They sit slurping hot cream of broccoli soup in the coffee shop of a nearby hotel. “That prosecutor seems like a real bitch on wheels,” Amanda says, then laughs out loud, a distant memory jumping in front of her line of vision, like a pedestrian darting out from between two parked cars.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Amanda shakes her head, as if trying to shake the memory away, but it digs in its heels, refuses to budge. “When I was a little girl,” she begins reluctantly, “I remember my mother referring to one of the neighbors as a real ‘bitch on wheels.’ And from then on, I was absolutely terrified of the woman. I used to go to great lengths to avoid walking past her house, even if it meant I had to go all the way around the block. I mean, not only was this woman a bitch, but she was on wheels.” Amanda laughs at her childish naïveté.

  Ben grins. “Nancy’s not that bad really.”

  “She isn’t?”

  “She’s just doing her job. You know prosecutors.”

  Not as well as you do, Amanda thinks, trying to picture his friend Jennifer.

  “They love nothing better than to see convictions on their records,” he continues.

  “Convictions without convictions,” Amanda muses. “Is your client guilty?”

  “Guilty of being young and stupid. It would be to everyone’s benefit to let her do fifty hours of community service instead of saddling her with a prison record.”

  “That doesn’t seem to be an option.”

  “Only because the powers-that-be are even more stupid than she is.”

  “Think you have a chance?”

  Ben laughs, bites into a warm roll. “It’s a slam dunk. I have them on a technicality. As soon as I get the chance to present my case, she walks.”

  “Ah, justice.”

  “That’s what happens when people get greedy.”

  Does Jennifer get greedy? Amanda wonders. “You look very attractive in your robe, by the way,” she says.

  “So did you.” He smiles, the gentle curve of his lips dissipating any tension that remained between them. “Sorry about barging in on you that way last night. I guess it seemed rather proprietary.”

  “Just a little. Anyway, I’m probably the one who should be apologizing to you.”

  “I thought you weren’t here to apologize.”

  “I’m not,” Amanda says. “I said I probably should be.”

  He laughs. “I guess you just caught me off guard. I didn’t realize you knew anyone in the city anymore.”

  “I don’t.”

  “He’s someone else you met last night?”

  “Actually I met him on the plane.”

  Ben digests this latest tidbit along with the rest of his bun. “A little old for you, isn’t he?”

  “I like older men.”

  “I hadn’t realized that.”

  “My second husband was an older man.”

  “And what was he like?”

  It’s Amanda’s turn to laugh. “I don’t know. I never really got to know him very well.”

  “Why is that?”


  Amanda rolls her eyes. She hadn’t meant to get into all this. “I guess I really didn’t want to. I mean, he was—is—a very handsome man. Wealthy. Cultured. Even nice. I guess that was enough for me at the time.”

  “When did it stop being enough?”

  “When he started talking about having babies.”

  “Babies don’t appeal to you?”

  “Hell, no. I wanted to be his baby. Why else does a woman marry a man twenty-five years her senior?” She pauses, looks around the crowded room, wonders if any of the other women present is talking to her first husband about her second. “Everything was fine in the beginning, as things usually are. He put me through law school, bought me anything my little heart desired, took me everywhere I wanted to go. Didn’t give me a hard time. Showed me off. I liked that. But then suddenly he started talking about how now that I was finished school, maybe we should be thinking about starting a family, and I’m going, whoa, hold on a minute here. Who said anything about starting a family? ‘I don’t know nothing about birthing babies,’ I kept joking. But it turned out he was deadly serious. He wanted kids. I didn’t. I believe he said something about it being time to resolve my ‘issues’ with my mother, that until I was able to do that, I’d be stuck in this kind of prolonged adolescence. I countered with a terribly mature ‘Fuck you, Charlie Brown.’ … Oh, hell. It doesn’t really matter what either of us said at that point. The marriage was over.”

  “And yet you kept his name,” Ben observes.

  “Whose name was I going to use?” Amanda frowns. “I’d never been very happy as Amanda Price. And I couldn’t very well go back to being Amanda Myers, now could I?” She finishes her soup, signals the waiter for a refill of her coffee. “Besides, Sean was a good man. It wasn’t his fault I had ‘issues.’ ” She lifts her freshly filled coffee cup to her lips, blows at the rising steam. “So what about you and Miss Jennifer? Think there’s a baby carriage lurking in your future?”

  Ben shrugs. “Anything’s possible, I guess.”

  Wrong answer, Amanda thinks, stabbing at the butter with her knife, then smearing it across the top of a bun she grabs from the bread basket. “Ever come up against her in court?”

  “It’s happened a few times.”

  “Who wins?”

  “I think the record’s tied.”

  “That means she’s, what, two up on you?”

  “Three.” They laugh. “This is nice,” he says.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “It doesn’t mean I’m still not pissed at you for going off half-cocked last night.”

  Amanda smiles, restrains herself from adding, So to speak, although she can tell by the glint in his eyes, he’s thinking the same thing. “You think I might be onto something?”

  “Like what?”

  “I wish I knew.” Again they laugh, something Amanda notices gets easier each time it happens. “Maybe if we do a recap …”

  Ben puts down his soupspoon, gives her his full attention.

  “Okay, so last week, my mother meets her friend, Corinne Nash, for tea in the lobby of the Four Seasons. She sees John Mallins and his family returning to the hotel, and according to Corinne, she looks like she’s seen a ghost. So, John Mallins is obviously someone my mother thinks she recognizes. Okay so far?”

  Ben nods.

  “The next day, she returns to the hotel, waits for John Mallins to show up, and pumps him full of bullets. So John Mallins is not only someone she recognizes but someone she hates enough to kill.” Amanda pauses, trying to corral her thoughts, put them in some form of cohesive order. “Now, according to Hayley Mallins, her husband was here to settle his mother’s estate. But the death notices in the local papers show nobody by the name of Mallins having died recently, which lends credence to Rachel Mallins’s theory that the man calling himself John Mallins is really an impostor, a man she knew only as ‘Turk,’ who may, or may not, have murdered her brother, the real John Mallins, twenty-five years ago, in order to steal his identity. Still with me?”

  “Hanging by a thread,” Ben admits. “But Hayley Mallins told you her husband was brought to England as a child by his father after his parents divorced.”

  “That may be what he told her.”

  “Or it may be the truth.”

  Amanda nods. “Which would mean that my mother either shot the wrong man or that she’s as crazy as everyone seems to think.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we need to find out who this man calling himself Turk really was.”

  EIGHTEEN

  AMANDA accompanies Ben back to court after their lunch, watches him succeed in having the case dismissed on a technicality, and derives more pleasure than she probably should from the pout of dismay that renders the crown attorney’s face even less attractive than it already is. “Way to go, Mr. Myers,” Amanda says, watching both Selena and her mother throw their arms around Ben’s neck in a congratulatory hug, and fighting the urge to do the same.

  “Piece of cake.”

  Amanda smiles, finding his arrogance even more alarmingly attractive than she had a decade earlier. “So what now?”

  “Hopefully she manages to stay out of trouble.”

  “I meant, with us?” A nervous laugh, an unnecessary clearing of the throat. “I meant, with our plans for the rest of the afternoon.”

  “Well, I don’t know about your plans, but I have to get back to the office.” Ben thrusts a fistful of papers into his briefcase and starts walking toward the escalator. His pace is brisk and Amanda struggles to catch up.

  “What about my mother?”

  “What about her?”

  “I thought we were going to see her.”

  “Can’t today.”

  “But aren’t we due in court tomorrow?”

  “There’ll be plenty of time to talk to her in the morning.” They ride in silence down the escalator. Amanda is about to ask why the rush to get back to the office all of a sudden, when Ben points toward the corridor on his left. “Room 102. Try to get here by eight forty-five, if you can.”

  “Wait!” Amanda runs to catch up with him as he steps off the escalator and marches toward the side exit. A splash of cold air whips against her cheek as he pushes open the door, causing her to cry out with equal measures of shock and pain.

  Ben stops. “You all right?”

  “Do you think you could do something about the weather?”

  “What’s the matter—you don’t like minus ten degrees?”

  “Why do you think I moved to Florida?”

  “I can’t answer that,” he says simply. “Can you?”

  Amanda ignores both the question and its implication. “I was thinking I should probably stay in town a few more days.”

  “I think that’s probably a good idea,” he concurs, his voice as crisp as the outside air. His lawyer’s voice, she thinks, the one he uses to talk to clients.

  “Look, how about dinner tonight?” She tries to make the invitation sound casual and spur-of-the-moment and is grateful her teeth are chattering loud enough to hide the tremble in her voice.

  “Can’t tonight.” He offers no further explanation as he strides south along University Avenue.

  “Ben, we really need to talk about my mother,” Amanda says quickly, as if her mother is the reason for the dinner invitation.

  “What’s to talk about?”

  Amanda grabs Ben’s arm, forces him to a stop at the corner of University and Queen. “You’re not really going to let her plead guilty tomorrow, are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “How are you going to stop her?”

  “It’s a bail hearing, Amanda. She doesn’t get the opportunity to enter a plea until Friday.”

  Amanda feels something akin to relief, then puzzlement as to why. “Okay. Well, at least that buys us a little time.”

  “You might think of buying something else if you’re planning on sticking around,” he says.

  “What’s that?”


  “A new coat.” He smiles, then hurries across the street before the light changes, waving good-bye over his shoulder without looking back.

  Amanda spends the next several hours navigating the stores in the Eaton Center, a huge, indoor, three-story shopping mall and office tower located in the heart of downtown Toronto. She remembers when Eaton’s was the number one store in the country, but that all changed sometime in her absence, and the once venerable department store chain went into receivership and was taken over by its chief rival. Can’t leave you alone for a minute, she thinks, spotting a black parka in the window of a small shop on the main level and going inside.

  “Can I help you?” a young woman, whose name tag identifies her as Monica, asks before Amanda even has a chance to browse. Monica has frizzy blond curls and a bare midriff that protrudes over a pair of low-slung designer jeans.

  “Aren’t you cold?” Amanda can’t help but ask. Even though the girl can’t be more than five years her junior, Amanda is starting to feel as if she belongs to another generation entirely. When did I start to feel so old? she wonders.

  Monica shakes her head, frizzy blond ringlets bouncing across her forehead and into close-set, gray-blue eyes. “Gets pretty hot in here. You looking for anything in particular?”

  “That coat in the window …”

  “The black parka?”

  Amanda nods as the salesgirl leads her through the crowded racks of merchandise to the fleece-lined parkas at the rear of the store. She quickly removes her coat and drops it to the floor, allowing Monica to help her into one of the black parkas, then appraising herself in the full-length mirror against the back wall.

  “Have you considered red?” Monica asks.

  “Red?”

  “The black’s nice and everything—don’t get me wrong, it looks great on you—but the red is fabulous. You should try it.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Trust me,” Monica says, and Amanda smiles. Since when have frizzy blond ringlets and a pair of low-slung jeans ever served as a shortcut to trust? However, in the next instant, she is willingly exchanging the black parka for the red one. “I knew it,” Monica says. “You look gorgeous. The red really suits you.”