Fade to Black (30 page)

Frank nods, watching her, wearing an expression she can’t quite decipher.

He doesn’t believe me
, she realizes.
He knows I’m lying
.

Again, she looks at the VCR clock: 8:25.

Oh, Christ.

Maybe she should just tell Frank the truth at this point. He’s a cop, and Smith must already be on his way over here. Maybe Frank can get his gun and hide in the next room. That way, when Smith tries something, Frank can—

“Are you sure that’s a wise decision, baby?”

She opens her mouth automatically, to reply to Frank’s question, then blinks.

What did he just say?

Did he just call her …

Baby?

She frowns slightly.

But what …?

Suddenly Pamela’s voice echoes in her muddled mind.

Babe has always been Frank’s nickname for me
.

Hadn’t she said that not too long ago, in one of those intimate confidences Elizabeth could have done without hearing, but must have filed away in her subconscious?

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.

R
ae 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.

“H
elp! 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.”

M
anny 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.

“G
retchen? 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.

B
rawley 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.

F
lynn 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.”