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For Karen,
the best stepmother-in-law a girl could have
When love beckons to you, follow him, though his voice may shatter your dreams.
—KAHLIL GIBRAN
PROLOGUE
Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, and Katharine Hepburn had been Sarah Wells’s babysitters when she was growing up—which explained a lot about how she turned out. She’d go to her neighbor Miss Gloria’s apartment in the afternoons and watch old movies while her mother entertained one of her “guests.” Mom’s guests could get violent sometimes; a couple of them had even suggested they preferred Sarah’s undeveloped body over her mother’s, so Sarah had learned to stay gone most of the time. Miss Gloria, an eighty-year-old black woman who’d grown up in Brooklyn, liked to drink black coffee wearing a muumuu and house slippers and watch the classics until she fell asleep on the couch. Sarah felt safe surrounded by the floral wallpaper and the old-fashioned images on the tiny black-and-white screen Miss Gloria wiped down with Windex every morning.
“That was true beauty,” the old woman would croon every now and then when she’d wake up and see Marilyn or Greta on the screen.
Sarah figured that if Miss Gloria was right, her mother qualified as truly beautiful. She had big eyes, big, pouty lips, and clear, flawless skin. Even after years of smoking, Sarah’s mother was still beautiful; but that didn’t stop her from getting pushed around by her clients every now and then, or drinking herself into oblivion. Those were the worst nights, the nights when her mother would get drunk and talk about Sarah’s father, about how he’d kill them both if he ever got out of prison. She’d made Sarah promise, over and over again, that if he ever got out, Sarah would run away, as far and as fast as she could. Sarah didn’t understand why her mother was so certain he’d come after them or why he was even in prison in the first place, but she knew well enough that if her mother considered him dangerous, he was someone to avoid.
Bad things happened all the time in their neighborhood; women and girls were snatched off the streets, stores were robbed, people were killed. Sarah was certain that the Desert Palms apartments had always been dingy and nondescript since they were first built in the fifties, but by the early nineties, things had gotten even worse. Graffiti covered most of the walls and the sign outside. The palms that had been planted around the buildings had long since died. Only one lone cactus remained, which she admired for its sheer stubbornness. Even spray-painted with crude lettering, it somehow managed to look defiant.
When Miss Gloria was transferred to a nursing home, Sarah stayed at the library during the afternoons, and in the evenings her mother would take her to the club she worked most nights, a place with a large black man guarding the door, lots of bright purple lights, and women dressed in sparkles. The club, Dominoes, hidden pretty deep in the middle of nowhere, had always been a popular destination for wealthy foreigners. Sarah had loved the clothes the women wore there; she had wanted to wear feathers and diamonds and high-heeled shoes, too. Sometimes the strippers would dress her up and tell her that someday she would be a heartbreaker.
“Probably,” Sarah usually agreed, although she didn’t see how being beautiful had helped her mother, or any of the other strippers.
Some of them thought they had power when they danced. Sarah heard them talking about how all the men in the audience had been begging for it, and how much the strippers liked keeping it from them. Sarah could understand that. She supposed that if she were at the mercy of the vicious men who ran the club, she’d be looking for power any way she could find it, but she wasn’t about to spend her life taking her clothes off for money.
One night, just after she turned fourteen, she was doing her homework in the dressing room of the club when she realized that a couple of the dancers were looking at her and whispering. Sarah was used to this kind of behavior at school, where her rather large breasts and pretty porcelain skin were the subject of many hushed conversations, but the girls at the club rarely bothered to notice her.
“What’s up?” she asked, curious.
Colleen, a frowsy redhead, looked a little worried, chewing on her lower lip with her teeth.
“Nothing, honey. We just can’t find your mom.”
“What do you mean?” Sarah demanded. “She’s dancing.” She set her schoolbooks aside and stood. “Show me where she’s supposed to be.” Even though Sarah was only fourteen, people tended to do what she asked of them.
The girls, Megan and Colleen, led her out of the dressing room into the curtained-off area where the dancers waited for their cues. Feathers were floating cheerfully in the air, the liberated plumage of a boa that had been used in one of the acts before a dancer had accidently ripped it in half onstage.
Colleen pulled her away from the center of the curtains where the girls stalked out onto a type of runway and led her down the side of the crescent-shaped waiting area to another opening in the curtain.
Her long nails dug into Sarah’s arm.
“She’s supposed to be over there,” Colleen whispered, and pointed to the far corner. “She never misses a dance.”
Sarah knew that—that’s why she was worried.
“Let’s go,” Sarah whispered to Colleen and Megan when she managed to get her breath back.
They hurried to the dressing room, but there was no sign of her mother anywhere.
“You should go,” Megan told her in the weird, garbled way she talked. She didn’t like to show her teeth and covered them with her top lip as she spoke, so every now and then a low whistling sound would accompany her words.
“Okay,” Sarah agreed, knowing something must have gone wrong. “Where exactly? I don’t have a car.” One of the girls had picked them up and brought them to the club tonight.
“Ask Toby,” Megan said and quickly walked off, her chest leading the way.
Toby, one of the bouncers, was a former football player who’d suffered one too many head injuries, but he was nice enough. He’d give Sarah a ride if she asked him.
Sarah retrieved her books from the gold chair and gathered her shoulder bag from the floor beside it. Something fell off—a note—just as she picked up the bag. It was a note in her mother’s handwriting.
Run, baby. He’s out.
Sarah read the note three times, her hands shaking. She didn’t want to do this, didn’t want this to be real. She’d hoped—believed—that her mother’s drunken rants were just that—rants. She didn’t want to leave.
Sarah hurried out of the building and nearly ran into Toby, who was smoking a cigarette with some of the other bouncers under a dim overhead light at the back entrance. They usually hung out and smoked on their breaks, especially now that the nights were mild.
“Hey, Toby, can you take me home?” Sarah asked in a breathless rush, looking up at the shadowy figures of the men. Some of them were strangers with odd clothes. One of them said something she didn’t understand; she thought maybe it was in Russian.
All the men laughed except Toby, who looked a little confused.
“Sure, girl. You got your stuff?” He threw his cigarette down on the gravel and ground it out with his foot.
“Yeah.” Sarah nodded, ignoring the looks the other men were giving her, an
d moved closer to the big man.
“All right, then,” he told her, covering her shoulders with a friendly arm and leading her away.
The men laughed again. Sarah walked a little faster, tugging on Toby’s arm.
He moved with her, probably not understanding her urgency but responding to it nevertheless. He opened the door of his classic 1968 Chrysler New Yorker, a huge blue boat of a car that he maintained with pride.
She waited impatiently, looking out the back window as he checked all his mirrors and turned the key. The car roared and shook as its massive engine turned over. Gravel crunched beneath the tires and all Sarah could think was, Hurry, please, hurry.
They pulled out of the lot without incident, and before long the bright purple and white lights that spelled out DOMINOES disappeared, and there was only desert all around them. Toby drove carefully, humming to himself.
Sarah relaxed in the front seat. Maybe I overreacted, she thought, picking at her thumbnail, but the knot in her stomach told her otherwise. She was hyperaware of everything around her, the sharp, percussive thumps of exhaust from the muffler, the dark, dense navy blue of the leather on the dash, the bright reflective sheen of the chrome in the streetlights as they drove.
“Toby, can you hurry?”
“Sure,” he said. He seemed to hesitate, as if he knew it was wrong to ask but didn’t know what else to do. “Can you tell me how to get there?”
Sarah nodded. “Sure, just take the next exit.”
She directed Toby to pull into a space well away from her apartment. She never took an obvious route and made sure to change things up each time. Her go-to entrance when she felt unsafe was one of the fire escapes in the back that led to the kitchen window.
“Thanks, Toby,” she told him as she shoved the car door open. “You better go back to the club now.”
“Okay, Miss Sarah. You be safe.”
Sarah hurried out of the car and let the weight of the door slam it shut before she moved quickly toward the back of the building.
She didn’t see any strange cars in the lot but didn’t want to take any chances.
She squeezed between the dark shadow of the apartment Dumpster and the rough stucco of the building, disturbing some of the feral cats that slept on or beneath it during the heat of the day. One of them yowled at her and she hissed back.
She located an old umbrella she kept hidden nearby and used it to tug down the bottom rung of the fire escape. It hit the ground with a crash that made her wince, but she began climbing quickly, hanging the umbrella on one of the rungs. It didn’t take her long to reach the landing on the third floor, where the window into the breakfast room was cracked just enough to allow her to lift it open.
She slid the window open quietly and eased her way in, careful not to make a sound, placing her feet very carefully and deliberately, keeping the curtain between her and the rest of the room, holding her shoulder bag securely so it wouldn’t swing and hit anything.
Once she was all the way in the room, she stopped and listened carefully. She didn’t hear anything, but she waited another minute, breathing slowly and carefully. When she was reasonably sure there was no one in the apartment, she eased out from behind the curtain and went to the armchair where she kept a purple JanSport backpack full of emergency supplies. In it were a couple extra sets of clothes, keys to an old car parked nearby that belonged to one of her mom’s clients, three hundred dollars in cash, and some snacks. She undid the small zipper in the front and went to a painting of Elvis that hung on her dining room wall.
Taking a small flathead screwdriver out of the bag, she dug carefully at the velvet in the corner of the painting. It peeled up reluctantly, revealing a hidden compartment with a driver’s license, a credit card, a Social Security card, and a birth certificate, all bearing the name Lillehammer Marceau. The driver’s license had a picture of Sarah on it, but it said she was eighteen years old. She’d been twelve when the photo was taken, but she’d started to develop early, and with makeup she could pass for eighteen even then.
Her mother had told her, “If you think something bad is going to happen, or I tell you to run, you come and get these papers and run away, okay? Take the old car and go. Don’t tell anybody. You understand?”
It had been Sarah’s idea to hide the emergency ID in the painting, and before she hung the picture back on the wall, she’d asked her mother, “Where will I go?”
Her mother’s beautiful lips, usually pouting and full, had compressed into a tight line, and her eyes had seemed to be looking somewhere far away. “I don’t know, sugar, but don’t you call and tell me where you are. You’re a smart girl. Find a new life.”
Sarah slipped the identification cards into the small pocket of the backpack and zipped it up carefully.
She picked up the backpack and swung it over one shoulder and went back the way she came, this time as Lillehammer Marceau. She left town that night and never returned.
CHAPTER One
Lille sat on the bumper of the cream-colored Mercedes convertible that Paul had bought her as an engagement present and looked out at the South Florida waves. It was strange to be near the beach without a sweater. Even during the spring and summer, San Francisco Bay tended to be chilly. The wind threatened to tear off the scarf that covered her hair, but she wasn’t too worried about it. She had a dozen others in her red leather shoulder bag, and this one was hardly her favorite.
She glanced down at her naked ring finger in the early morning light and rubbed it absently. She didn’t regret breaking off her engagement; she’d known from the beginning that Paul wasn’t right for her, but she missed the sparkle of the ring on her finger.
A smile flickered over her full lips. Maybe I am my mother’s daughter, she thought with just a hint of self-mockery. Mom was still in Vegas, still bouncing from one man to another, always trusting her new man to take care of her, buy her pretty things. Lille didn’t understand her and probably never would. She’d gotten in touch with her mom several years after she’d run away—she’d tracked her down with the help of a private investigator—and discovered that her father had beaten her mother to within an inch of her life right after Lille had fled, and then he’d been sent back to prison. But he’d been let out on parole a year ago, around the time Lille had started dating Paul. Paul had proposed to her three months later.
Lille brushed a strand of hair away from her face and leaned back, sighing a little. Poor Paul, she thought, vaguely ashamed. She’d let him believe that she was sweet and charming, but she’d never let him see her darker side, the side that enjoyed, more than a little, the thrill of dominating. She’d been pretending—in one manner or another—her whole life, but she’d never looked for a man to take care of her until Paul. She’d thought it would make her feel safe—to be in a relationship with someone so normal. Instead she’d felt . . . trapped.
Before Paul she’d always dated guys who made no bones about the fact that they were self-centered and arrogant. She liked the thrill of charming them—of making them realize that they were as susceptible as everyone else to a pretty face. She liked it when they begged her to take them.
Issues of control, absolutely, Lille silently saluted her therapist. But I like what I like.
It hadn’t taken a therapist for Lille to realize that her need for control came from her past. For months after she’d run away to San Francisco, she’d had to protect herself any way she could. Finally she found work in a nicer part of town. She’d learned to use both her beauty and innate fashion sense to her advantage and had found a job in a boutique, working for a gay couple. They’d rented the room above the shop to her, and a few years later she’d started going to college part-time to learn fashion merchandising. She’d met her best friend, Mary, at a craft fair on campus. Mary was one of the only people Lily had ever learned to trust, largely because Mary herself was so trusting. Lille had always felt like
she had to look out for her.
A month ago, Mary had shocked the hell out of her by moving to Florida. Mary’s mother, whom Mary had never met, had passed away and left her a sex store called the Fetish Box. Mary had asked Lille to help manage it, which Lille hadn’t considered at first, not really, but the thought of it, the chance to manage a store that unlocked your wildest fantasies, the idea of starting somewhere fresh, nagged at her.
And then she got the call that changed everything: someone had broken into the store and attacked Mary. Lille suddenly felt powerless and out of place, as if she wasn’t where she belonged. As if she was needed somewhere else.
In the end, it was an easy choice. She’d run away before—she could do it again, only this time she would be running toward something. So she’d done it. Two weeks after she’d given the ring back to Paul, she’d packed her things into the car and driven all the way from San Francisco to Hollywood, Florida.
The smile grew into a battle grin as the waves crashed in front of her and the wind finally won the battle with her scarf, tearing it from her hair and sending her smooth, golden locks whipping in the wind.
The sun chose that moment to break free of the low clouds on the horizon and send shafts of golden white light over the waves. She’d never seen the sun rise over the ocean, she now realized, and between the wind whipping through her hair and the clean light of the sun, she felt energized, almost reborn, just as she had felt when she first looked out at the waves in San Francisco at fourteen, when she’d decided who Lillehammer Marceau was going to be.
It was time to decide again, she thought, and stood, brushing sand off her 1950s-style suit and smoothing her hair. She marched to the driver’s side, opened the door, and slid onto the immaculate white leather seats. She fetched another scarf from her bag and used the rearview mirror to tie her hair back again and freshen her lipstick.
The Fetish Queen, Part One: Reborn Page 1