Frank must have slipped, Elizabeth realizes, glancing at his casual expression. He must have said babe out of habit …
Except that she could have sworn he’d said baby.
Not babe.
She forces her attention back to whatever it is that he’s saying.
The lights flicker.
Thunder crashes.
“… because it’s not that I’m so sure that Smith is that fugitive we’re looking for. But I didn’t really think he was your type.”
Again she’s startled.
So startled that she forgets to check the clock again.
“What … what do you mean?” she asks Frank Minelli slowly, knitting her brows and trying to ignore the warning signals going off in her mind.
“I mean, I thought I knew your type, baby.”
Baby?
She’s unable to speak, just watches him, her mind racing, her hands clenching into fists at her sides.
“I thought that I was your type.”
Her jaw drops.
This can’t be happening.
Not now.
“What are you talking about?” she asks, her voice a ragged whisper.
“Remember? ‘Married men with children really, really turn me on.’ Isn’t that what you said?”
She backs away, starts to rise. “Frank, I don’t know what you’re—”
A steely grip on her forearm forces her back down, and he pushes her backward on the couch, then leans over her.
“Isn’t that what you said?” he asks again, his brown eyes boring into hers, suddenly gleaming with an expression she never in a million years expected to see there. “And then you took off your clothes, remember, baby? You took off your clothes, and you danced. Take off your clothes for me. Dance for me, baby …”
Baby.
Babie.
Babie Love.
It hits her all at once, with stunning clarity.
He’s talking about that film, that horrible porn film she made back in the eighties, at Brawley’s insistence.
He’s the one, she realizes. He knows who you are.
Oh, Christ.
He’s been right under her nose.
It was Frank all along.
“When did you figure it out?” she asks him weakly, feeling his breath hot against her face as he looms over her, pressing the hard length of his aroused body into her.
“Figure what out?” he asks, breathing hard.
“That I’m …” She trails off, feeling his hand moving over her belly, up to grope at her breasts.
“Say it,” he murmurs, his eyes closing as if in ecstasy. “Say it. Say your name.”
She can’t speak. Sirens are screeching in her brain. She has to get away.
“Say it,” he barks, his eyelids jerking open, his menacing gaze burning into her face. His hand lifts from her breasts, comes down to painfully seize her arm. “Tell me who you are. You aren’t Elizabeth Baxter. Say your name.”
“Mallory,” she says in a whisper, struggling not to give in to the utter panic that threatens to overtake her.
“What? I can’t hear you.” He glares at her, shakes her impatiently, painfully. “Say it again. Say it louder.”
She summons every bit of willpower not to struggle against him, every bit of strength to project her voice as he’s commanding her to.
“I’m Mallory … Mallory Eden,” she tells him.
As she speaks over the clamor of the storm outside, the lights give a final flicker and go out …
Just as she hears a faint footstep in the next room.
Rae Hamilton sits on the small, bare stone terrace of her apartment, a glass of Chablis in one hand, a framed photograph in the other. The one from her dresser.
In the distance she can hear the rush hour traffic on the Ventura Freeway and, close by, through an open window, the sound of her upstairs neighbor laughing on the telephone.
The blue linen shift is in the basket to go to the dry cleaner’s; the matching pumps are back in her closet; the carefully applied makeup has been scrubbed from her face. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, her feet are bare, and she wears her black workout leotard.
She had been on her way down to the gym when Flynn called a few minutes ago with the news.
Are you sitting down, Rae? Well, then sit …
You did it! You’re going to be the new Mallory Eden.
The new Mallory Eden.
She wipes absently at the sudden moisture in her eyes as she gazes at the woman in the photograph.
It isn’t one of those posed head shots, but a regular snapshot Rae had taken during one of their long-ago trips up the coast to Big Sur.
It shows a beautiful blonde with dazzling light-blue eyes, eyes that laugh up at Rae as though they haven’t a care in the world.
But Rae was Mallory’s closest friend. Rae knows what her short life was really like, especially toward the end.
You did it, Rae!
You’re going to be the new Mallory Eden....
“I’m sorry, Mallory,” Rae whispers softly, shaking her head and swallowing hard over the lump in her throat. “I really am so sorry. But … I need this. God, I need this so badly.”
Then she puts the photo aside and raises the glass of wine to her mouth as tears trickle down her cheeks.
“Help! Please help me!” Elizabeth screams shrilly, frantically praying that she isn’t in more danger from whoever is lurking in her kitchen than she is from Frank Minelli.
The only reply is a deafening clap of thunder outside, and the steady whoosh of blowing rain.
“Shut up,” Frank says above her in the dark, clamping a rough hand over her mouth.
She lets out another muffled scream.
“Shut up! No one’s going to hear you, so you might as well—”
He’s cut off, then, by the figure that rushes into the room, leaping on him and tackling him to the floor before Elizabeth realizes what’s happening.
She huddles on the couch, violently trembling, for only a moment before coming to her senses and focusing on the two shadowy silhouettes wrestling on the floor.
They crash into furniture and tip over a lamp, grunting and cursing.
Frank rolls over, landing on top. “You son of a bitch,” he bites out, panting.
The thought seizes Elizabeth that he might have his gun with him, that he might use it, not just on his attacker, but on her.
She glances wildly about the darkened room, then leaps to her feet and gropes blindly in the shadows for the first possible weapon that’s within reach.
Her fingers close over the heavy metal andiron sitting on the hearth.
She doesn’t stop to think before rushing toward the struggling pair, triggered by adrenaline—and stark fear.
She brings the heavy andiron down on Frank Minelli’s skull, becoming aware only in the moment after he crumples to the floor that she had used enough force to have killed him.
For a moment, the sole sound in the room is that of heavy breathing—her own, and Harper Smith’s.
She can barely see the murky outline of the man lying on the floor, the man who has made her life a living hell.
“Is he dead?” she asks Harper.
She hears him move, dimly makes out his silhouette as he reaches down to feel for a pulse at Frank’s neck.
He’s silent for a moment, and when he speaks, his tone is matter-of-fact.
“No, he’s alive. And apparently, so are you … Mallory Eden.”
Chapter
10
Manny Souza is awakened in his bed by his grandmother shaking his shoulders.
“Get up,” she says urgently in Portuguese, and then again in English.
“What?” He rubs his eyes. Why is she waking him up? She never wakes him up, not even when he asks her to, so he won’t be late for day camp.
Something must be wrong.
“What time is it?”
“After ten,” she says. “Get up.”
He
blinks up at her from his pillow, trying to erase the fog from his mind. Is it after ten at night?
She’s wearing one of her shapeless sleeveless cotton nightgowns and her hair is in sponge curlers, but that doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes she doesn’t get dressed until afternoon.
His gaze darts around the small room and realizes that it’s morning, though the light coming in the window is gray with the summer storm that continues outside, rain pattering against the house in the same comforting rhythm that had lulled Manny to sleep the night before.
“It’s your friend,” Grammy says hurriedly, pulling him by the arm. “They’re talking about her on the radio. On the news.”
“What friend?”
“The one who called here yesterday—the one who brought you home from Providence.”
“Elizabeth?” he asks, incredulous.
Why would they be talking about her on the radio?
Unless …
Did she get hurt? Was there an accident?
Please, Don’t let anything have happened to Elizabeth. I need her....
His heart pounds as he follows his grandmother down the stairs to the kitchen.
“Gretchen? Are you awake?”
She frowns at the sound of her mother’s voice calling up to her room and continues to stare out the window, where the morning sky is just beginning to clear after the storm that passed through Connecticut overnight. A cool breeze from the west is finally fluttering through the window, blowing her hair back from her ravaged face.
“Gretchen?” There are footsteps on the stairs now, and her mother’s voice is more persistent. The door bursts open and Gretchen jerks her head around to find her mother standing there on the threshold of her room.
“What’s wrong?” Her irritation mingles with curiosity at the unsettling expression on her mother’s face. She runs a hand through her sleep-tousled hair.
“Hurry—come downstairs. There’s something you have to see on television.”
“On television? But I was just going to take a—”
“Gretchen, hurry. Come on! You won’t believe what’s happened.” With that, her mother dashes back down to the living room, where the volume on the television set moves up a notch, and then louder still.
Puzzled, Gretchen scurries down to join her mother and find out what the fuss is all about.
Brawley Johnson stares at the television screen, oblivious of the woman behind him on the bed. A naked woman, beautiful by some standards, but not by his. A woman whose name will escape him by afternoon, when he has left her behind and done his best to forget her, the way he has forgotten every woman since…
Cindy O’Neal.
“Brawley, what are you doing?” A pair of willowy arms snake around his bare chest from behind as she sits up and presses her full breasts into his back. “How can you just stop in the middle of—”
“Shhh!”
The woman falls silent, but still he reaches for the remote control on the bedside table, raising the volume until the news announcer’s voice is deafening in the small bedroom.
Flynn Soderland stands motionless on his Alpine Walker, his gaze fixed on the television set built into the wall of his home gym.
He had been plodding through his workout, doing his best to overcome the throbbing in his head caused by too much booze and too little sleep the night before.
Just this once, he had told himself then, caught up in the celebration over his casting coup and his return to the business.
And when he woke up that morning, he had sworn it really was the last time. He can’t afford to risk it all—not when he’s poised on the brink of success once again. Not when he’s responsible for giving the world “the new Mallory Eden.”
In fact, when he heard that name from the television announcer’s lips a moment ago, his first thought was that it was in reference to the open call for the de Lisser film.
But it wasn’t.
No, that’s not what’s causing the latest media furor. Not by a long shot.
Flynn never moves his gaze from the screen as he dismounts his exercise machine and reaches for the phone.
Who can be calling at this hour?
At …
Rae lifts her head and glances at the clock radio on the nightstand.
… seven o’clock on a Saturday morning?
She pulls the quilt over her head and squeezes her eyes shut, hoping whoever it is will go away.
But the phone rings a second time …
A third …
A fourth …
And the machine picks it up, clicking on in the next room with her familiar recorded message.
“Hi, this is Rae, and I’m not in. Please leave your name, number, and the time you called, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks.”
A beep.
And then, “Rae, it’s me. Flynn. Are you there? Pick up, Rae. You’re not going to believe this …”
Harper Smith skipped his morning jog today, and not just because of the rain, which is still falling over coastal Rhode Island.
For one thing, he hasn’t slept a wink, though he went through the motions of climbing into bed when he got home in the wee hours of the morning, after the police let him go.
For another, he’s been waiting by the phone, thinking she might call. That she might want to talk to him.
Apparently not.
But the world wants to talk about her.
He sits on his futon with a cup of coffee in one hand and the television remote in the other, focused on the screen, where a breaking story has interrupted regular programming on every local network affiliate.
A story about her.
Elizabeth Baxter.
AKA Malloy Eden, who has just turned up alive and well and living in Windmere Cove, Rhode Island.
“Mrs. Minelli, how does it feel to discover that your husband is actually the man who stalked and tried to murder Mallory Eden five years ago?”
Pamela clenches her jaw and stares straight ahead, shouldering her way past the reporter who leapt at her out of nowhere as she got out of her father’s car in the police station parking lot.
“Did you ever realize your husband was fixated on Mallory Eden?” someone else calls, rushing toward her with an outstretched microphone.
“What about you? Were you aware of your next-door neighbor’s true identity, and that she was the reason your husband wanted to move to this particular town, to that particular house?”
Good Lord, the place is crawling with reporters, Pamela realizes, trying to move on, up the steps to the police department.
How many times has she been there in the past? she wonders vacantly, gazing at the familiar building. How many times, with the kids in tow, dropping off something that Frank forgot, or stopping in to say hello and show off her babies to the guys on desk duty?
The kids aren’t with her today, of course.
They’re at home with her mother, asleep and—hopefully—unaware of the furor that’s erupted, surrounding their father.
Pamela takes another step, then realizes that her path is blocked by a camera crew that’s up on the steps, shining an obnoxious spotlight right in her eyes.
She blinks, feels her father’s arm coming around her.
“Ignore them, honey,” he tells her, guiding her around the camera crew and into the building, where detectives are waiting to question her about her husband.
“I told you, I had no idea who she was until I happened to see her in that video,” Frank Minelli says, keeping his voice steady and his gaze focused on the two grim-faced detectives seated across from him in the interrogation room.
They’re more likely to believe you if your voice is steady, he knows, and if you look them in the eye.
But damn, it’s nearly impossible not to find yourself shifty-eyed and warbling all over the place under tense circumstances like these.
He reaches up to wipe a bead of sweat from his brow.
“You’re saying that you are
not responsible for stalking Mallory Eden in California, for following her here to Rhode Island after she faked her suicide, and for resuming the stalking?”
“That’s what I’m saying. Look, I already admitted that I sent the card to her post office box—”
“You had no choice. We’ve confirmed that the handwriting belonged to you.”
“I didn’t deny it.
“No, and you didn’t deny that you broke into her house,” one of the detectives puts in. “Or that you went to the library and used the computer there to investigate her background. Or that you were sneaking around at night, looking into her windows.”
“No, that’s not true. I couldn’t see into her windows,” Frank mutters. “The blinds were always down.”
“Such a shame,” the detective says in a mocking tone.
“You also admit that you were living in California five years ago when Mallory Eden was stalked and shot,” adds the other. “I’d say it looks like—”
“I was staying there,” Frank cuts in, careful not to let his voice rise. He clenches his fists beneath the table, away from their view. “I stayed there temporarily. With my brother, at his house. He lives in Pasadena. Check it out with him. I was out of work, so I went out there for a few months—but I swear I had nothing to do with stalking Mallory Eden. I didn’t even know she was Mallory Eden until last night.”
“Oh, come on. Then why send her the card?” asks one detective.
“A card that reads—” the other detective checks his notes, and continues—“‘I know who you are.’ What did you mean by that if not—”
“I meant that I knew who she was—that she was Babie Love. Not Mallory Eden.”
“Babie Love and Mallory Eden are the same person.”
“But I didn’t know that then. Look, I’m not the guy who stalked her in California and made her jump off a bridge. This whole thing is a coincidence.”
“You mean your winding up as Mallory Eden’s next-door neighbor?”
“Of course it’s a coincidence. How could I have followed her here, the way you think I did, knowing that the house next door would suddenly go up for sale when the old lady died, and I would be able to buy it?”
“You tell me,” one detective says.
“We’re looking into the old lady’s death,” the other puts in.
Fade to Black Page 22