by Jane Heller
I did want him to help Tara find Stuart and I had mended fences with her. It was just the history that was bothering me. Just me being insecure. “I’m fine with it,” I said. “If you both think Stuart might be in Florida, then that’s where you should go.”
“You’re a good sport, you know?” he said. “I’m more impressed with you every day.”
“You are?”
“Damn right. Most women wouldn’t be so generous, so self-confident. But you—”
He stopped, smiled, kissed me again.
“You just keep growing on me,” he said, finishing the thought.
“I’m glad,” I told him. I certainly didn’t feel generous or self-confident at that moment, never mind a good sport, but I wasn’t about to talk him out of his opinion.
“It’s true,” he said. “I haven’t been very clever about relationships—no bulletin there. I’ve made bad choices when it comes to the women I’ve been involved with. But spending time with you has given me a whole different perspective on what it means to commit, on what it means to value and respect a woman. My point is that you can trust me, Amy. You can trust me here in New York, down in Palm Beach, wherever I am and with whom.”
I stared into those soulful blue eyes of his, searched them, studied his face. He’d always been incredible-looking, but who knew he’d turn out to be so caring? Still, his reassurances aside, picturing him alone with Tara made me sick.
“Can I really trust you?” I asked softly.
“Let me show you,” he said, gathering me in his arms and kissing me until I almost believed him.
They left for Palm Beach later that morning and checked in at the Breakers after they landed. I was a nervous wreck, imagining them changing their plans the minute I was out of sight and deciding to stay together instead of in separate rooms. Paranoid, that’s what I was. Paranoid and stuck in the past. I felt only marginally better after Tony called me at the office to say they’d arrived safely and I fished for the specifics of their sleeping arrangements.
“Why don’t you knock on Tara’s door so I can talk to her, too,” I said.
“That would take too long,” he said. “Her room’s way down the hall.”
Thank God for small favors, I thought.
He went on to tell me that their first plan of attack in the search for Stuart was to go and see the real estate agent who’d shown Tara and Stuart houses.
“Do you really think this person will lead you to him?” I asked.
“It’s worth a shot,” he said.
While my “go-to guy” was running around a glamorous and sultry resort with the glamorous and sultry woman who’d stolen my fiancé, I spent the day trying to coax various media types to cover her publication party, which was a mere two weeks away.
“I’m definitely coming,” said the reporter from New York magazine, who, after a zillion pitches on my part, had agreed to do a feature on Simply Beautiful.
“That’s great,” I said.
“And I’m bringing a photographer,” she said. “I want to shoot the author.”
“Same here,” I said.
“What?”
“I meant that I want you to take a photo of Tara,” I said.
“Right. I’d like to get a few quotes from her husband, too,” she added. “And maybe a shot of them together.”
“No problem,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll be there.”
“I would think so, given that he serenades her with a violin.” She laughed. “Tell the truth, Amy. Are they for real?”
“Why don’t you decide when you meet them?” Notice I didn’t say “if.” I said “when.” I had faith that Tony would find Stuart and drag him back for the party. Unless, of course, he got distracted by a certain best friend of mine.
He called again after I got home.
“I’m checking in,” he said.
“You don’t have to do that,” I told him.
“Sure I do,” he said. “Besides, I have information.”
“Already? You’ve only been there a few hours.”
“It’s not good information.”
“Oh. The Realtor didn’t know anything?”
“He knew plenty. He just wasn’t talking. He remembered Tara, remembered showing her and Stuart houses. But when she asked him if Stuart had come back to buy a house, he clammed up. He wondered why Tara didn’t know where her own husband was, said he didn’t want to get in the middle of a domestic dispute, and told us to take the matter up with a lawyer if this was a fight over assets.”
“So now what?”
“Now I call Jimmy and tell him what I just told you. Then dinner and a bottle of decent wine, I hope.”
I felt my heart drop a few feet. “Oh, you and Tara are going out?”
“Actually, we’re ordering from room service,” he said. “She’s tired and wants to kick back.”
Kick back. That’s what I would do if I were down there. I would kick her back. “So you’re eating in your room?”
“Yeah. We’ve got to strategize for tomorrow. Basically, I think the next step should be to check recent issues of the local paper for real estate transactions. All closings have to be listed by law. If Stuart bought a house in the area, it’ll be right there in print—the purchase price and, more important, his name and his new address.”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”
“Thanks. How was your day? Everything okay up there?”
“I miss you, but otherwise I’m fine.”
“I miss you, too. I wish we could—”
There was a knock at his door. I could hear it through the phone.
“Hang on a sec, okay?” said Tony. “It’s Tara.”
I sat there with the phone pressed against my ear, straining to catch her voice, trying to detect even a hint of flirtatiousness in it. But mostly, I just detected that she was hungry.
“She wants to say hi to you,” said Tony when he came back on the line.
“Put her on,” I said.
Tara took the phone and told me how beautiful the hotel was and how fantastic the weather was and how it was a shame I couldn’t be there to enjoy it.
“Well, you’re not there for vacation,” I reminded her.
“I realize that,” she said. “I only meant that if you have to hunt for your rat-bastard husband, this isn’t a bad place to do it.”
“Sorry your real estate agent wasn’t much help,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow will bring better news.”
She yawned. “I hope so. Meanwhile, I intend to get a little drunk, have something to eat, and go to bed.”
Get a little drunk. Swell. Remember what happened the last time she got a little drunk with one of my men?
I gulped back the lump in my throat and wished her luck tomorrow.
“Don’t you want to say good-bye to Tony?” she asked as I was about to hang up.
No, I didn’t want to say good-bye to Tony. That was the problem. I wanted to hold on to him forever. “Just tell him I’ll talk to him soon,” I said.
The next morning, I was in the office bright and early so I could make more calls about Tara’s party and fudge my way around the Stuart issue yet again. After about my tenth call, I congratulated myself on being perfectly suited to public relations. Other than politics, what other occupation actually rewards lying? My job was all about fudging—spinning, slanting, hedging, exaggerating, what have you. Not lying, exactly, but manipulating the truth a little. Yes, I was good at this stuff. Everybody I spoke to bought every word.
Tony reported in around four o’clock that afternoon. I did not ask him how dinner went. I did not ask him what time Tara went back to her room after dinner. I did not ask him whether she did go back to her room after dinner. Instead, I said, “How did it go with your search through the local papers?”
“The good news is that the real estate market is booming down here,” he said. “The bad news is that none of the property owners was listed under the name Stuart Lasher or S. Lasher or even one of
his phony companies.”
“Sorry. Do you think you’re on a wild-goose chase?” Which was another way of asking if he was giving up and coming home.
“Not necessarily. I have a really strong hunch he’s in the area. We’ll keep going until it’s pointless.”
“How’s Tara?”
“Okay now.”
“Now?”
He let out a long sigh. “She was really bummed last night. I think all of it finally hit her—how miserable she’s been in her marriage, how difficult it’s been to keep up the happy front, how clueless she was about Stuart’s business activities. She had one glass of wine too many and totally unraveled.”
I sat up straighter in my chair. I think I also stopped breathing. “So you had to comfort her?”
“I don’t know how much help I was, but, yeah, I tried to be supportive. I mean, the woman was sobbing.”
“She always was a crier.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said she always was a trooper. I guess it was only natural that she’d break down eventually.”
“I guess.”
“Hopefully, she’ll feel better now that she’s gotten everything off her chest.” And a perky chest it was, especially when she wore those underwire push-up bras.
“Hopefully,” he agreed. “She was so wobbly by the time she finished dinner that I had to walk her back to her room. And then once we got there, she kind of pitched forward and passed out right in my arms.”
Okay, now I was about to pass out. Well? You try contemplating the scene he just described—the two of them staggering down the hall to her lair, then falling all over each other. “So you’re saying she got so drunk or overcome with emotion or whatever that she was unconscious?”
“Just about. I literally had to put her in bed.”
That did it. I was officially and undeniably crazed with jealousy. And don’t tell me you wouldn’t have felt the same way under the circumstances or that my imagination was playing tricks on me. It was Tara we were talking about. Tara hitting on my guy. The only thing that kept me from hopping on a plane and breaking her neck was this particular guy. Tony had made that nice speech before he left about how I should trust him, about how he valued me and respected me and felt committed to me. I was right to trust him. He would fend off her advances. He wasn’t Stuart. I could take heart in that, couldn’t I?
34
I awoke feeling a little better about things, but the day quickly went sour. First, there was the surprise visit at my apartment from the detectives who’d questioned me the last time. Apparently, they really were taking a renewed interest in the case. They wondered if I’d heard from Stuart. They wondered if I’d like to change my story about the day he disappeared. They wondered where his wife had gone, because they wanted to talk to her, too.
“She’s in Florida, getting a tan,” I said.
“Where in Florida?” one of them asked.
“Palm Beach. At the Breakers.”
Okay, so you’re thinking I was a skunk to lead them right to her. But they were bound to find out where she was. Cops have their ways, don’t they? Plus, it wasn’t as if she’d killed Stuart, so she didn’t have anything to worry about. The detectives would be a nuisance, that’s all. A distraction. A couple of guys to take her mind off mine.
The sourness continued after I got to me office. I sat there making call after call, trying to persuade more media people how awesome Tara was, even as I pictured her throwing herself at Tony, pleading with him not to resist her, and ultimately forcing him to cave in to temptation so they could screw their brains out. Like I said, I was not coping well.
Then came a fitting end to the day. I had misplaced my list of bookstores where Tara was supposed to appear on her publicity tour, and I was hoping Celebetsy would let me make a copy of hers.
She wasn’t in her office when I showed up, so I asked her assistant if she could find the file for me.
“I’m kind of busy,” she said. “Just go on in and take a look. Betsy’s in a meeting, so you’ve got the place all to yourself.”
I didn’t think Celebetsy would want me poking around in there, since she was so tight-assed about everything, but it was her own assistant who’d given me the go-ahead, so what the hell.
I was picking through the stack of files on her desk when I noticed a photo that was buried underneath all the papers. It was probably her husband, I decided. A normal woman would put his picture in a nice frame and display it, but Betsy? Leave it to her to hide it, the nutcase.
Curious to find out what the mystery man looked like, I slipped the black-and-white glossy out from under the files. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw that it wasn’t her husband in the picture, but Tony! It was the jacket photo from his last book for us, and I wouldn’t have gotten so hysterical about it except that he had written Betsy a love note on it! Well, not a love note, exactly, but he did write, “Let the good times keep rolling, sexy lady,” and then signed it with X’s and O‘s! Why would he have given her the photo (he hadn’t so much as given me an autographed book) and why would she have kept it? And what “good times” was he talking about anyway?
“Looking for something?”
I turned when I heard the familiar imperious voice, and there she was, standing in the doorway, her hands on her little hips, her face contorted with anger and maybe a little embarrassment, too.
“Betsy,” I said, sliding the photo back onto her desk. “I misplaced the list of bookstores that Tara is—”
“So now you know,” she said, cutting me off, kicking her door closed with the heel of her shoe, and stepping inside. “I’m glad you know.”
“Know what?” I asked, feeling as if all the air had been sucked out of the room.
“That I had an affair with Tony before he started seeing you,” she said. “A very passionate affair.”
“You what?” I said, incredulous. “I thought you were married.”
“I am, but my husband’s never around. He travels a lot.”
“So the affair happened while your husband was out of town?”
“Yes, but it wasn’t just an affair. It was a relationship. Tony and I were having a fabulous time together; then all of a sudden he broke up with me. He’s a commitment-phobic freak, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“How could Tony feel committed to you if you’re committed to your husband?” I said.
“He didn’t know I had a husband then,” she said. “I didn’t tell him until Alex—that’s my husband’s name—came home. Our affair was a big secret. We were completely under the radar. No one had a clue that we were going out, not even your nosy assistant.”
I tried to listen to what she was telling me, but the idea of her with Tony was truly repulsive. Had he really been seeing her? Romantically? No wonder I’d hated him back then. Her rotten disposition had probably rubbed off on him. “If you two were so hot for each other, how come he broke it off, commitment-phobic or not?”
“Because I finally told him I was married. He went ballistic, called me a liar, accused me of roping him into a sordid love triangle. I begged him not to shut me out, but he wouldn’t listen. I even followed him around like some pathetic stalker.”
A stalker. So Betsy was the woman who’d come to the restaurant in SoHo, the woman Tony had tipped the waiter to get rid of.
“He wouldn’t reconsider, wouldn’t take me back,” she went on. “And I wouldn’t accept it. I couldn’t accept it. Not when he’d been so crazy about me. And he was crazy about me, Amy. Me.” She pounded on her bony chest for emphasis. “I demanded to know why he wouldn’t give me another chance. I promised him I’d divorce my husband and never lie to him again about anything. I was willing to do whatever it took. But do you know what he said?”
“What?” I asked.
“He said he couldn’t see me anymore because he was engaged to you.”
Great. No wonder she’d been treating me like shit. “But we weren’t really engaged,” I ma
naged, still reeling. “It was sort of a prank.”
“I didn’t know that at first, so I backed off. I really believed you and Tony were tying the knot, because he was very convincing. He said, ‘I’m marrying Amy, so that proves I’ve moved on. I suggest you move on, too.’”
“But how did you find out our engagement wasn’t real?” I asked.
“Scott,” she said.
I did a double take. “Scott?”
“He’s the company snitch, isn’t he?” she said. “He was sleeping with Julie Farrell’s assistant, who is now sleeping with mine, which is how the news made its way to me.”
“I don’t understand. Scott would never—”
“Oh, grow up. Scott’s a gossip queen. He’ll sell you out in a minute if the tidbit is juicy enough.”
“But how did he find out about Tony and me?”
She shrugged. “I think he was sniffing around your office one day—sort of the way you’re sniffing around mine now—and overheard you and Tony laughing about how you were only pretending to be engaged. Naturally, he passed the morsel on. When I heard about it, I was furious. I confronted Tony, and he admitted that he’d agreed to the whole engagement ‘prank’ just to blow me off.”
“He said that?” I was floored.
“You bet. He wanted me to get the message that he and I were through, and that’s the reason he signed off on your insane idea.”
“No. That’s not how it was,” I said. “Tony pretended to be engaged to me to help me impress this friend of mine. Oh, and to research his next book. And then, once we spent a lot of time together, we realized we really cared about each other.”
She laughed. “Tony cares about Tony, period. He uses women. He turns on the charm, then moves on to someone else. Without a single second of remorse, by the way.”
“That’s not true,” I said, feeling the tears well up. “It’s different with us. He and I have a genuine connection.”