The Woman In the Mirror: (A Psychological Suspense Novel) (Alexandra Mallory Book 1)

by Cathryn Grant

  They ordered a bottle of Chardonnay and bowls of clam chowder.

  “I’m not that hungry,” she said. “Chowder might be all I want for dinner.”

  He nodded.

  She reached for a slice of sourdough bread and spread butter across it, sliding the knife back and forth several times even though the entire surface shone with creamy white.

  She talked about her job.

  When the chowder came, she refilled their wine glasses before the server could take the bottle out of the chiller.

  She took a sip of wine. “I just remembered, I never told you what really happened with the mirror.”

  “What about it?”

  “She attacked it with a butcher knife.”

  “That’s…” He shuddered. “Did she say why?”

  “She’s jealous of me, and I guess her feelings got the best of her. Or something.”

  He wanted to ask her whether she was planning to find new housing, but that might lead to blurting out the suggestion they find a place together. She would say no.

  He hoped he didn’t appear weak for putting up with Noreen’s bullshit. Alexandra didn’t seem interested in his reasons for staying. Possibly she was more concerned about her own situation. There was so much he didn’t know about her. Everything. Her job must pay well, all high tech jobs did. Maybe she lived hand to mouth anyway. She had a lot of clothes. It must be that she blew through every paycheck and this was the best she could do. Maybe she had family obligations.

  “It was such a bizarre thing to do, scratching it up like that. But she explained it so casually, it actually came out sounding like something rather ordinary. As if she was telling me she was upset and not paying attention and accidentally broke a wine glass.”

  He thought about the rat. He wouldn’t mention her thong. “There was a dead rat in my room. Under my bed.”

  She laughed. “That sucks.”

  “I think she put it there.”

  She took a sip of wine and dug into her chowder.

  “Do you think we made a mistake?” he said.

  “We?”

  “Renting rooms from her. I…she’s creeping me out more every week,” he said.

  “Look. She has a thing for you. She’s jealous of me, worried you’re interested in me, and she’s playing silly games. It’s nothing.”

  He put down his spoon and reached across the table. He touched her wrist.

  She pulled back slightly.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “I’m trying to eat.”

  She scooped up a spoonful of chowder and put it in her mouth. She chewed carefully, her jaw hardly moving around the tiny bits of clam and soft potatoes. She made it seem as if the soup was the center of her life, as if she was eating something pure that transported her beyond mere taste to an intense pleasure that dominated every part of her body. It made him want her. He pushed his bowl away.

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “In a minute.” He took a sip of wine. “So you’re not worried?”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know, that she’ll take her butcher knife and stab us in our beds.”

  “Like Psycho?” she laughed.

  “That was the shower.”

  “I lock my door. Don’t you?”

  “Yes.” He couldn’t make sense of it — Alexandra was absurdly concerned about Noreen overhearing them, finding out they were having sex, but she was completely nonchalant about the possibility that Noreen might be demented to the point that their lives could be in danger.

  Any normal man would take this opportunity to announce he was looking for another place to stay. But her lack of commitment, her seeming disinterest except when they were having sex, or the most banal conversation, made him certain she would respond by wishing him the best, picking up the tab for their chowder and wine, and walking out the door. He’d never see her again, aside from a silent nocturnal good-bye in his bed. He’d wake and she’d be back in her room, the door locked, and that would be the end of it.

  He should give up. She wasn’t interested and he was making a fool of himself. But it was impossible. He couldn’t stop looking at her, couldn’t stop thinking about what it felt like to touch her skin, the things she did to his body. His face grew warm. He picked up his wine glass and held it close to the side of his face as if the chill of the glass would drift across his enflamed skin. He lowered the glass and took a sip. She’d taken absolute control of his being. Although he could never remember the details, he knew that his dreams were filled with her. He was possessed even when he was unconscious. Her dark, heavy hair was soft and alive. When they were in bed, it fell across his skin and made him feel she was weaving silken blankets around his body. Her eyes glowed like the opening to a dark, quiet cave, pulling him toward her, magnets preventing him from looking anywhere else.

  He closed his own eyes, tying to calm the ache in his bones. He wanted to take her away from here so no one else in the restaurant could look at her, no one else could hear her voice. He wanted to kidnap her out of her office and prevent anyone from talking to her or taking one single moment of her time. If he could, he’d find a secluded cabin by a river that wound through a quiet forest, and they’d live in solitude until they died. He shook his head.

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  “Sure.” He pulled his bowl back toward him and stirred the soup, burying the skin that was trying to form in the cooling evening air. “I just don’t understand you.”

  “Maybe that’s deliberate.” She smiled in a friendly way, but her tone was threatening.

  “I like you a lot, and I want to hang out. I want to get to know you better. I know almost nothing about you.”

  “You know every crevice of my body.”

  “I want to know you.” He tapped the side of his head.

  “I don’t have a lot of data on you, either. Aside from your disinterest in sports and your religious quest. Maybe you should go first. Maybe once you trust me with more, I’ll trust you. Let’s start with how you can afford to live without even thinking about work.”

  “I’m not trying to hide anything. I just don’t like to talk about it. My first gig after biz school was a startup, okay? The company was purchased by Cisco.”

  “And?”

  “Do I really need to explain it?”

  “How much did you get?”

  “Well I’m living in a run down bungalow that’s hanging off a cliff with a mad woman as a landlord, so I think you can infer I’m not rolling in it. I have a decent enough nest egg to not think about work for a while. A long while, if I’m careful.”

  She smiled as if she’d won a contest of some kind. Was it that she got him to reveal something and she continued to sit there, an inscrutable smile on lips that shimmered, despite drinking wine and eating a bowl of chowder? Was it something else? Would he ever be able to call her his own? But the more she pulled back, the more he refused to give up, digging in deeper every day.

  37

  Los Angeles

  Twitter is a fascinating phenomenon. It seems to me, people don’t really get the power of it. You can talk to anyone in the world, a person you’d never in a million years stumble across in a bar or at work or even on an international trip. It’s possible to meet and strike up a conversation with any living soul on the planet. Of course there are language barriers, so it’s not completely open to the entire human population, but the feeling of possibility is there. You might find your twin, you might find your soulmate. It feels like the first step toward physical transportation to any place you want to go, like they did on Star Trek. That was decades ago and we’re all still waiting. Twitter connections aren’t limited by passports and airfare. They aren’t limited by the odds of coincidence that a particular person you’d connect with psychologically leaves the bar ten minutes or ten hours before you arrive, instead of sitting beside you the moment you open your mouth and order a vodka martini. It stretches the imagination to consider
how amazing it is. I think about this a lot.

  Three hundred million Twitter users, give or take, scattered across the planet, shouting about what they think and how they feel. Three hundred million people expressing their opinions, complaining about the weather, lamenting their food cravings, shrieking about politics and injustice and fear, and broadcasting their sometimes successful attempts at wittiness. The flood of messages and images feels as if the entire planet really is simultaneously talking to each other, or at each other. A massive tide of words capable of poking a new hole in the ozone with its heat. Of course, all those voices represent only four percent of the people walking about on the earth. That’s a lot of noise coming from a very small portion of the human population. I suppose the rest of them are screaming inside an echo chamber.

  Of those three hundred million, how many are real? I have two Twitter personas, neither of which bears my name. It’s possible to have five personas. Or ten. Or a hundred.

  Because of that easy anonymity, without fear of law enforcement watching his feed, Randy tweeted from @Slacker81 to @GirlStuff29 twelve days after Dianne was found face down in the pool. The cops might be watching @RandyF100 and @ALX342, if they watched at all. They needed access to my digital world to do that, and my digital doorway was always a coffee shop.

  @Slacker81: Got time for a toke? Just you and me.

  I’d never seen the @Slacker81 ID before, but knew immediately it was Randy. Pretty obvious from what he tweeted. And even more obvious from his ironic identity — Dianne’s mother called him a slacker and Dianne had shared the compliment with Randy.

  @GirlStuff29: Tell me where and when.

  @Slacker81: Majestic Park. 10pm Thursday.

  @GirlStuff29: You won our game.

  @Slacker81: Yep.

  @GirlStuff29: People want to talk 2 U.

  @Slacker81: Guess I’ll lose you after all :(

  @GirlStuff29: After all?

  @Slacker81: C U there.

  38

  Aptos

  Tess and I were sitting in the coffee shop drinking our Monday morning lattes, talking about the upcoming week. The week would be dominated by a 3-day engineering review. These reviews had nothing really to do with me, but she liked me to attend so I could gain a sense of the big picture of the product portfolio and understand where new products fit in with the rest of the line. The reviews were boring beyond description. I’m sure the engineers were on the edges of their seats, but it was all so much nonsense and terminology and acronyms floating over my head. The only flow I followed were the discussions of software bugs and their ability to delay a product launch and the raised voices regarding the late discovery of said bugs. That was fascinating, mostly because of the raised voices, and the way the bugs managed to remain anonymous until late in the game.

  Occasionally the discussion veered into other territory I understood — marketing and sales. Those discussions had their moments. It was interesting to hear debates over sales compensation or how to move the needle against the competition. There was a surprisingly steady flow of jokes that were sometimes quite funny. Laugh out loud funny.

  Tess finished her latte and stood up. “I need to get going.”

  I put the lid back on my half full cup and pushed back my chair. I took one last sip. I hadn’t secured the lid correctly and latte splashed onto my chin and dribbled down the lapel of my pale green jacket. “Shit.”

  Tess laughed.

  I looked up at her. The laughter stopped abruptly.

  “What is it?” I wiped my chin and stood up.

  “I’m going to lose my mind if I don’t remember where I’ve seen you or your photograph before. It’s really annoying that you won’t help me figure it out.”

  I turned and carried my cup and the dripping lid to the trash bin. I dropped them in, grabbed a napkin, and wiped my fingers. I stuffed the napkin in the trash. There was no way she’d seen me anywhere and I was starting to wonder whether it was possible that through some against-all-odds fluke, she’d seen the pictures Charlie took of me.

  We left the coffee shop and started walking the two blocks back to CoastalCreative.

  “Why won’t you help me with this?” she said.

  “How am I supposed to know where you think you’ve seen me?” I laughed. “That’s an impossible puzzle.”

  “You can help by telling me where you might have had photographs appear — online, in a magazine — I don’t know.”

  “What does it matter?”

  She stopped and turned. She hoisted the strap of her leather bag higher on her shoulder. “It makes me think I shouldn’t trust you as much as I do. That you’re hiding something.”

  “So you think you’ve seen me, or my picture, and because I can’t read your mind back through the past five years of your life, or more, you don’t trust me?”

  “I have this weird sense that you’re deceiving me. Playing me.”

  I stared at her, not blinking, waiting for her to hear how ridiculous she sounded, waiting for her to drop my gaze. She didn’t.

  “It’s Jared too.” She looked down.

  “What does he have to do with it?”

  “There’s something not quite right about you.”

  I started walking again.

  She hurried to catch up. “There are a lot of little things.”

  “You’re my boss, you don’t get to dictate my sex life.”

  “I’m not. But you’re so cold about it.”

  “You don’t know me as well as you think you do. You can’t judge whether or not I’m cold.”

  “That’s how you come across.”

  I felt my pay increase, and possibly my job security itself sliding through my fingers like egg yolk — slippery, impossible to hold, ridiculous even to think I could hold on. I took a deep breath. “If it’s that important to you, I’ll try to think where you might have seen my photograph. It’s just hard to know where to start.”

  “Facebook. Twitter. A blog?”

  “I don’t use Facebook. I use Twitter, but I don’t have a photograph.”

  “See. That’s what I mean that you’re hiding something.”

  “What?”

  “Everyone uses Facebook.”

  “That’s a bit sweeping.”

  “Nearly everyone.”

  “I like Twitter better, and I’d feel like I have a split personality if I go on all these different social media sites and try to keep people and conversations straight.”

  She stopped walking again and nodded. “It’s not that complicated, but I guess I see your point.”

  I let out my breath slowly. She seemed slightly less worked up. “I don’t have much of a public presence, so I really can’t think where…”

  “It’s when you spilled the coffee and you looked up with that extremely irritated expression on your face. That’s what I remember. And your eyebrows, of course. They’re perfect.”

  “You have quite a memory.”

  “It’s semi photographic. Didn’t I tell you that?”

  I shook my head. “If it’s photographic, won’t it come to you?”

  “Yes. But it’s your refusal to help that almost bothers me more than the actual details. It seems like you don’t want me to remember.”

  “I’ll try harder.”

  “And Jared…”

  “What about him?”

  “If you don’t like him, you shouldn’t dangle him like you are.”

  She had no right to delve into my personal life, but I’d opened the door, so I couldn’t really complain. Before, I’d thought her personality had gone through a rather sudden and unnerving change from a hard-driving, singularly focused woman bent on getting to the top and staying there, but now I wondered if I’d misread it and she hadn’t changed at all. She was a control freak, and being in control of the work life of her employees wasn’t enough. She was so smart, she needed activity for all that excess brain matter, so the natural thing was to venture into other arenas. And I had invited her,
trying too hard to bond as females rather than just colleagues. I never expected her to start advising me on how to live my life, and I wasn’t about to listen. “I don’t think I ever said I don’t like him.”

  “He wants more than you’re willing to give.”

  “He does.”

  “It’s not fair. By seeing him, you imply you might want more, in the future.”

  “I’ll give it some thought.”

  She actually smiled. It was all about control. She was happy now that I planned to spend my after work hours considering her advice, letting her influence creep further into my life. Maybe the raise wasn’t denied. Maybe she was withholding it because she thought she could buy me, make me belong to her entirely.

  But the photographic memory was more concerning. She’d eventually remember, and if it was one of Charlie’s pictures, what did that mean? It had to be one of his because there just weren’t any other pictures of me out there, floating around the world. I avoid photos so carefully, I didn’t even show up for my senior portrait and didn’t appear in my high school yearbook.

  If he’d passed it around, under what context had he distributed it?

  39

  Mountain View

  Charlie and I were eating chicken enchiladas at a Mexican place, drinking martinis, much to the despair of our server. It wasn’t the best martini, but better than a margarita, ever. Popping an olive in my mouth, I suggested it would be fun to get high on Friday night, do a few shots, or whatever. I’d sleep over. If we were too wasted for sex, there was always the next morning. Charlie lit up. I’d never spent the night and his ego prevented him from thinking he’d ever be too wasted for sex. He was busy imagining several repeat performances. His eyes glowed with the images passing behind them.

  I dipped a chip in the salsa and held it up to his lips. He opened his mouth and ate it in one bite.