Fade to Black (21 page)

Until now, she had assumed her existence in hiding would mean spending every day alone, barricaded inside her house, or looking over her shoulder every time she’s forced to leave.

That’s how it’s been for five years.

No friends, no fun, no career, no …

Romance.

But now there’s Harper Smith.

And for the first time, Elizabeth dares to allow herself to hope … No,
hope
is too strong.

To fantasize …

About …

Companionship.

About someone to talk to, someone to care about, someone to touch, to kiss, to love …

But you know that can’t happen
.

Don’t get your hopes up
.

Nothing has changed since last week, before you got the card. The reality is, You’re still in hiding. You always will be. You have to be careful, and being careful means keeping a low profile. It means trusting no one
.

Or does it?

Maybe she had been wrong when she decided how she would have to live her life as Elizabeth Baxter.

There had been no question but that she would have to erase her past as Cindy O’Neal, and Mallory Eden....

And the past of the real Elizabeth Baxter.

But maybe enough time has gone by.

Maybe, if she dares to venture slowly out of her sheltered, lonely world, she’ll be okay.

Some things won’t change.

She’ll never get her career back.

She’ll never, God help her, realize her fondest childhood dream and become a perfect mommy.

She’ll never forget the horrors she has experienced, or what happened to Gent, and to Gretchen, and she’ll never see her old friends again.

But maybe the stalker has forgotten all about Mallory Eden, and maybe no one in town will recognize her if she dares to remove her sunglasses and stop scurrying around with her head down, and maybe …

You should have checked the post office box yesterday
, Elizabeth scolds herself again, spitting toothpaste into the sink and rinsing her brush.
If you had, you might already know what that card was all about. That it wasn’t meant as a threat. And that no one knows your true identity, or that Mallory Eden is still alive....

After the run-in with Manny’s mother in the park, she had come straight home, so jittery about what had happened that she had almost considered going to the police.

Or maybe just to Frank Minelli.

Considering her state of mind yesterday, if he had been outside working in his yard the way he sometimes is, she might actually have gone over to talk to him.

She might have explained that she had been threatened by the mother of a local child she had befriended, and she might have asked if Frank could look into it for her.

Just to make sure that the woman wasn’t going to harm Manny …

Or Elizabeth.

But Frank hadn’t been outside, and by the time she saw him pull into his driveway a few hours later, she had decided against talking to him, or reporting the incident to the police.

The only person she will tell, just as soon as she can find him, is Manny.

She reaches over, turns on the water in the tub, and slips off her nightgown.

P
amela stands with her hands on her hips, staring at the stack of magazines she just discovered, tucked way at the back of a shelf in the basement.

Upstairs, Hannah is chattering and banging her spoon in her high chair, and Jason, perched in his bouncy seat on the kitchen table, occasionally adds a high-pitched, happy gurgle.

Pamela knows she should get back up there; she can’t leave them alone longer than a minute or two.

But she can’t seem to make herself do anything but stare at her husband’s cache of reading material.

It’s not as though she had been snooping, looking for incriminating evidence against Frank.

She had gone down there looking for Hannah’s old bottles, which she had packed away about a year ago.

Last night she made the decision that it’s time to wean Jason so that she can stop breastfeeding and start seriously concentrating on getting back into shape.

She discovered that the bottles weren’t where she’d thought she’d put them, on the shelves inside a cupboard at the foot of the stairs.

What
is
there is this stack of magazines …

Pornographic magazines.

Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler
, and several others with raunchy titles she has never heard of.

According to the dates on the spines, they’re all fairly current. The issues on top of the pile are for next month, September. He must have just bought them.

Up in the kitchen, Jason is starting to fuss.

Hannah yells, “Mommy? Mommy, where are you?”

Pamela calls, “I’ll be right up.”

She narrows her eyes at the thought of Frank spending what little extra money they have on this filth. Money they could be using to put into the bank for the kids’ educations.

Isn’t he the one who’s always harping on her to watch the budget? Not to spend so much on groceries, on the kids’ clothes, on things for the house …

When was the last time she ever bought anything for herself? Anything—makeup, an outfit, a new summer purse to replace the one with the broken strap, the one Frank stapled together and pronounced “good as new, you can get a few more years out of it, easy.”

Damn you, Frank
.

I’ve been putting in all these hours, even though I’m already exhausted on clipping grocery coupons from the Sunday paper and sewing curtains for the nursery because it’s cheaper than buying them
.

Meanwhile you’ve been throwing away hundreds of dollars on these disgusting magazines
.

She picks up the one at the top of the pile. It promptly falls open to a dog-eared page featuring a spread-eagle, naked blonde with the most enormous breasts Pamela has ever seen.

“Damn you, Frank,” she mutters aloud, flipping through it and noticing that the corners of certain pages are folded down, and that those pages invariably picture beautiful blondes in impossibly provocative positions.

Up in the kitchen, she can hear Jason starting to wail, and Hannah is banging on her high chair tray, angrily shouting, “Mommy! Mommy!”

Pamela flings the magazine back into the cupboard, closes the door, and starts stomping up the stairs.

By the time she reaches the top, she knows she can’t do what she
wants
to do.

That is, she can’t storm into the living room, wake her husband—who spent the night on the couch, as usual—and demand to know what’s going on.

Whether he’s having an affair.

A stack of porn magazines in the basement doesn’t mean anything
, she reminds herself.

He always liked that sort of thing, she remembers. A few times, when they had stayed in hotels, he had insisted on renting X-rated movies from Spectravision. Though she had feebly protested, she had found them titillating herself. The sex she and Frank shared during and after those movies was incredibly hot.

What she wouldn’t give to have him make love to her that passionately again …

Even though back then, in those hotel rooms, she had often wondered—as her husband panted above her, pounding into her, his eyes screwed tightly closed in concentration—whether he was imagining that she was someone else, one of those buxom porn actresses.

Now she wouldn’t care what he was imagining, just as long as he still wanted to make love to her.

Which he doesn’t.

But the stack of dirty magazines in the basement aren’t evidence that he’s cheating on her.

Even though she’s positive that he is.

All she has to do is catch him in the act.

She’s been waiting.

Watching.

A blind, white, violent rage fills Pamela at the thought of her husband with …

Her
.

She pauses at the top of the stairs and takes several deep breaths before going calmly back into the kitchen, where both her children are now sobbing loudly and Frank is hollering, “What the hell is going on? I’m trying to get some sleep!”

Pamela takes Hannah out of her high chair, sets her on the floor with a hug, and reaches for Jason, who silences the moment she picks him up.

Then she turns to her husband, who is standing in the doorway, wearing only a pair of shorts.

“Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep,” she tells him sweetly, then turns away, seething inside.

M
anny spots a figure standing at the edge of the clearing around the park pavilion, and freezes on the path.

For a moment, with the sun glinting into his eyes, he thinks it’s his mother again.

But then the person takes a few steps closer, waves, and he realizes it’s her.

“Elizabeth!” he calls out, running toward her.

She looks so pretty, he thinks, in her blue and white sundress.

She has sandals on her feet, and her hair is hanging down loose today. She hardly ever wears it like that.

“Hi, Manny.” She smiles as he draws near.

But he can tell something’s wrong, even though he can’t see her eyes behind the dark sunglasses.

“What’s the matter with your face?” he asks, spotting a faint red mark, like a bruise, on her cheek.

She reaches up, her fingers touching the skin, and says, “Oh, this? I just … I bumped into a door.”

He thinks she might be lying, but he can’t imagine why she’d do that. “How come you’re here?”

“I knew you’d be going to rehearsal for the play … do you have a minute before you start?”

He nods, glancing over his shoulder at the stone pavilion. He sees Rhonda and a few other counselors and kids gathered around the picnic tables, but not everyone is there yet.

“I looked for you yesterday afternoon at the playground,” Elizabeth tells him.

“You did?” A bad feeling steals over him as he remembers what happened yesterday.

His mother.

At the playground.

“You weren’t there,” Elizabeth continues, “but somebody was. I met your mom, Manny.”

“She isn’t my mom,” he says quickly.

Elizabeth pauses, looking puzzled.

“She’s my
mother
, but not a ‘mom,’” he explains, and somehow she seems to understand.

“I know how you feel, Manny. And I want to help you.”

“Help me what? Did she tell you she’s taking me away?”

The expression on Elizabeth’s face reveals that no, his mother didn’t tell her that.

“What are you talking about? She threatened to take you away, Manny? When was that?”

He shrugs. “The other day. She said she’s going to take me, no matter what my grandparents say.”

Elizabeth frowns. “Did you tell anyone? Did you tell your grandparents?”

“Nah.”

He doesn’t tell her that he’s afraid they won’t mind—that maybe they’ll want his mother to take him so that they won’t have to take care of him anymore.

He wants so badly to ask Elizabeth to help him—to let him live with her. To be his new mom.

But he doesn’t.

He can’t.

He already knows, somehow, what her answer will be.

No.

She’ll find some nice way to say it, but no matter what, it would still be no.

And he can’t stand the thought of hearing that from her.

Because she’s the one person in the world who has never hurt him.

And if she does, he doesn’t know how he’ll stand it.

“What did my mother say to you yesterday?” he asks her, shuddering at the thought of his dear Elizabeth meeting up with that terrible, scary woman at the playground, the way he had.

“She wanted to know if I was trying to steal you away from her,” Elizabeth says. Again her hand flutters up to touch the red mark on her cheek, then back down again as though she’s realized what she was doing.

“But she doesn’t have me!” Manny feels sick to his stomach; the dry, stale toast he’d eaten for breakfast threatens to come up in his throat.

“Manny, I know she doesn’t have you.” Elizabeth places both her hands gently on his shoulders. “I know she hasn’t been a mother to you.”

He’s shaking. “What did you tell her?”

“Nothing. Just that I’m your friend, and that’s all.”

That’s all
.

Just a friend.

If he had been wondering whether she might want to be his mom—and he hadn’t been wondering, because he knows the answer, but still—

If
he had been wondering, he wouldn’t be anymore.

Elizabeth is just his friend.

Friends are good things to have
, he tells himself, trying to be positive despite the sinking feeling in his stomach.

But friends don’t live with you.