Fade to Black (41 page)

Manny huddles on the floor in the corner of his room, trembling.

What if they can’t stop her?

Several sets of footsteps are pounding rapidly along the downstairs hall toward the stairs.

Grammy is crying now, yelling, “Stop it! Don’t go up there! Leave him alone!”

“Get back here!” Gramps hollers again. “Don’t you dare—”

His words are cut off abruptly with a gasp, and a moment later Manny hears a loud thump.

“Rafael!” Grammy shrieks. “Rafael! Oh, God, Rafael! It’s his heart! It’s his heart! Do something! Call 911! For Christ’s sake, he’s your father! Call 911! Please!”

Manny’s hands fly to his mouth and he squeezes his eyes shut, paralyzed in horror, listening as he hears his mother’s footsteps racing back toward the kitchen.

He half expects to hear the back door open and slam, but then her voice can be heard on the telephone, calling for help.

At the foot of the stairs his grandmother is wailing. “No! Rafael, don’t you leave me! No!”

And still Manny can’t move, can only sit motionless, listening, longing to somehow end the nightmare.

Elizabeth
, he thinks, tears streaming down his cheeks.
If I ever needed you in my whole life, it’s now
.

But You’re gone
.

You’re gone forever
.

R
ae’s car phone rings as she’s steering onto the Ventura Freeway.

She glances at it, then at Mallory.

“Are you going to get it?” Mallory asks.

“Should I?”

“Do you think it’s some reporter?”

“I don’t know how they’d get this number,” Rae tells her. “Only a handful of people have it.”

“Go ahead and answer it, I guess,” Mallory says with a shrug.

Rae picks up the phone, propping it between her ear and shoulder and steering the car into a center lane as she says, “Hello?”

“Rae, it’s me.”

“Flynn …” Rae glances at Mallory, who’s shaking her head.

Mallory mouths, “Don’t tell him I’m here.”

Rae nods. “How are you?” she asks. She glances in the rearview mirror, noticing a blue compact car moving into the same lane some distance behind her. Wasn’t that car behind her on the freeway on the way to the airport earlier?

“
Where
are you? I’ve been trying to reach you at home, on your cell phone …”

“I wasn’t carrying it with me.” She glances again at the car. A truck has entered the lane in front of it, and it’s out of her view.

“Where are you?” Flynn asks again.

“On the freeway.”

“Have you heard from Mallory?”

Rae tightens her grip on the steering wheel. “No,” she lies. “I haven’t.”

“I haven’t either. I just heard on the radio that she’s supposed to be flying back out here.”

He’s slurring, Rae realizes. He’s been drinking again. Damn.

“She may already be in town,” he goes on. “I figured she’d contact you or me.”

Rae nervously reaches down to adjust the volume on the radio. “Well, she didn’t call me.”

“Rae, look out!” Mallory screams in the seat beside her.

Rae glances up through the windshield, sees that the car in front of her has slammed its brakes on.

She swerves into the next lane, narrowly avoiding a collision.

“That was her!” Flynn’s voice accuses in her ear. “That was Mallory’s voice. She’s with you, Rae.”

“Flynn—”

“You lied to me. How could you lie to me, Rae? After what I did for you, setting you up with de Lisser?”

“Flynn—”

“Bring her over here, Rae,” he commands churlishly. “I need to talk to her.”

“I can’t, Flynn. We’re … we’re getting out of town for a few days.” She glances at Mallory.

Mallory’s face is pale, watching her.

“Where are you going?” Flynn wants to know.

Rae hesitates, stares out the windshield, looks again at Mallory.

Mallory shakes her head.

“I’m not sure,” Rae tells Flynn.

“Tell me, Rae!”

“Flynn, I have to go.”

“Rae—”

She disconnects the line.

“I’m sorry for making you he,” Mallory says. “I just can’t see him right now, Rae. I don’t want to see anyone yet. I need time.”

“I know.”

“Oh, God. I feel sick inside. Hiding from Flynn …”

“It’s okay, Mal”

“Was he angry?”

“He’ll get over it.” Rae keeps her gaze focused on the traffic.

She remembers to check the rearview mirror after a moment, and sees that the blue compact car is nowhere in sight. It must have been her imagination.

B
ecky O’Neal feels like a movie star as she steps into the terminal at LAX.

Lights and cameras are everywhere, all of them aimed at her.

And so are the questions …

So many questions.

“Have you been in contact with your daughter since she turned up alive?”

“Why did you abandon your daughter?”

“Is it true that you’re clean?”

“How long has it been since you last did drugs?”

Becky glances at Laura Madison, who looks calm. She takes Becky’s arm and leads her through the crowd, following two important-looking men in suits. They go down a long hall and through several doors, into a private lounge area.

“I need to make a call,” Laura tells Becky as they sit on two chairs off in a corner. “Then we’ll go out to the limo.”

“Limo?”

Laura smiles. “Sure, Becky. In exchange for giving us the exclusive on your reunion with your daughter, we’re making sure you get there in style.”

“Where
is
Cindy? Is she waiting for me?”

“she’s not waiting for you, no. We’re going to surprise her, remember? Everyone likes surprises.”

Becky nods. She remembers how little Cindy had loved the big, brightly colored plastic blocks she’d given her for her first birthday. Her little face had lit up and she’d clapped her chubby hands together in glee, squealing at her mama, holding her arms up for a hug.

But today’s surprise would be quite different.

Today Becky’s daughter might not be so eager to smile, to hug her.

I can’t take any more rejection from her
, Becky tells herself, tensely clasping her trembling fingers with the opposite hand, watching but not listening as Laura Madison talks on the phone.

If she hurts me today, in front of Laura and all those cameras, after I traveled so far to be with her…

Becky clenches her jaw and tries to stop the trembling.

“Okay,” Laura says, hanging up her cellular phone and turning to Becky. “We’ve got Mallory heading north up the coast.”

It takes a moment for Becky to focus, and even when she does, she doesn’t quite understand what Laura’s talking about. “What do you mean?”

“We had someone trailing an old friend of hers on the hunch that Mallory might have contacted her for a rendezvous. It paid off. The friend picked up a woman at the airport a few hours ago, coming in on a flight from Rhode Island. The passenger didn’t look like Mallory from what our reporter could see, but nobody’s seen her in five years, so we’re assuming it’s her.”

“Did you tell her I’m here?”

“No—remember? It’s a surprise, Becky.” This time Laura sounds impatient, and not as pleasant as she had been the whole flight out here.

“I’m sorry. I just … I guess I forgot.”

“Let’s go. We have to get on the road.”

“But how do we know where we’re going?”

“I told you. We have someone on Mallory’s trail. We’ll keep checking in with them until we get a destination.”

“Okay.”

Laura sure is smart. Becky would never have thought of looking up Cindy’s old friends in case her daughter had called one of them. She doesn’t even know who Cindy’s old friends are.

Her own daughter, and she knows nothing about her life from the time she was two years old.

Except, of course, for what Elizabeth had told her when she’d visited her sister in Los Angeles.

And that wasn’t much. Elizabeth was so far gone most of the time that she hadn’t noticed or conveyed many details.

Becky has spent too many years wondering about her mystery daughter.

And now she’s about to come face-to-face with her at last.

G
retchen closes the hotel room door behind her and lets out an audible sigh of relief. She tosses the keys to the rental car onto the table between the two beds and perches on the edge of one of them.

She made it.

She’s back in Los Angeles.

And she’s finally alone again, away from strangers’ gazes.

The flight was hell, and so was the endless wait at LAX for a rental car. Thank God the hotel is right across from the airport, so she didn’t have to deal with traffic on top of everything else.

Now all she has to do is figure out where Mallory would have gone once she landed in L.A.

At least she had remembered to bring her old Filofax, the one from her stint as Mallory’s assistant. The one that lists all of Mallory’s friends and business associates.

It had been packed away in a box in the attic, along with the rest of her belongings her mother had had shipped back to Connecticut after the accident.

Gretchen had never bothered to unpack anything. She hadn’t wanted reminders of that fleeting golden life she had lived on the West Coast.

But that morning she had hurriedly dug through first one carton, and then another, until she found the Filofax. She had left the rest of her stuff—the designer clothes and stacks of head shots and textbooks from her acting classes—strewn all over the attic floor.

The first call she places is to Rae Hamilton.

She, if anyone, will know where Mallory is. The two were inseparable.

Rae’s line has been disconnected.

It figures.

Not everyone is going to be in the same place they were five years ago, Gretchen reminds herself. But some people are bound to be.

Flynn Soderland is next.

Her heart leaps when she hears a click and then his voice, but she realizes then that it’s just voice mail.

Well, at least his number hasn’t changed.

Gretchen hesitates, uncertain whether to leave a message. She decides against it, opting instead to try his cellular phone, on the off chance that that number, too, has remained unchanged.

The line is answered almost before it finishes one ring.

“Yeah, this is Flynn.”

“Flynn Soderland?”

“Who is this?”

She hears the distant sound of traffic, horns honking. He’s on the road somewhere. Is Mallory with him?

“This is Gretchen Dodd,” she says, struggling to keep her voice from wavering. “I’m Mallory Eden’s former assistant, and—”

“Mallory’s assistant? Has she called you?”

“No.” Her hopes sink. “You haven’t heard from her either?”

“She hasn’t called me, no. But she’s with Rae Hamilton. They’re heading out of town.”

Gretchen’s heart is pounding. “Where are they going?”

“I have no idea. They wouldn’t tell me. Rae says Mallory needs a few days to herself.”

He’s slurring his speech, Gretchen notices. She suddenly remembers that Flynn had always had a drinking problem. In fact …

Jeez, how could she have forgotten that?

Mallory had been thinking of firing him that last year, Gretchen recalls, after he got into drunken public arguments with business associates.

Details come rushing back at her, triggered by the sound of Flynn’s voice, and being back in town.

She is seized by a sudden torrent of longing for her old life. Christ, how glorious it had felt to be a part of that fast-paced, high-powered, scandal-ridden world. She squeezes her eyes closed against the flood of memories.

“Listen,” Flynn is saying sloppily, “you wouldn’t know where they might be headed, would you? The two of them used to go off together on those long weekends all the time, remember?”

“I … I really don’t remember that, no,” Gretchen says, trying to stay focused on the conversation.

Where would Mallory and Rae be headed?

Again she is transported back over the years, back to the old days as Mallory’s assistant.

“They always went up to Big Sur,” Flynn says, “and I’ll be willing to bet that’s where they’re headed now.”

Big Sur
, Gretchen thinks.
Yes, that’s where they always went
.

“In fact,” Flynn continues, “I’m on my way up there myself. But do you know where I should start looking? I can’t seem to remember the name of that hotel Mallory loved so much. It’s on the fringes of my mind, but it keeps evading me.”