The Prada Paradox (18 page)

How glad I am that I thought of that.Not.

In order to take my mind off the really-not-comforting house history that I dredged up, I concentrate on walking and not falling on my face. The area we’re in is planted with neat rows of trees lining the road and opening onto the forestlike surroundings. Despite the dark, I know that when we get closer to the house, exotic flowers will peek out at us, birds-of-paradise and other beauties vying for attention.

I’m thinking about the flowers and trying to get my bearings when the road shifts and rises. We climb, and as we crest the small hill, the mansion itself is spread out in front of us, illuminated by both the moon and the security lights.

It glows like something alive and welcoming, and despite the purpose of our mission, I can’t help but smile. Beside me, Andy whistles.

“Wouldn’t I like something like that…”

“Would you?” I tease. “All those rooms to clean.”

“Who bothers to clean? With all the rooms in that place, you could just move to a new room. Do that once a month, and you’ve got—what?—five years before you’d have to hire a maid?”

I laugh, impressed by his mathematical prowess. “Works for me. Come on,” I say, cocking my head.

The light reflects on the gray slate roof tiles from which the building acquired its name, and we move closer carefully, hoping that we’re not too illuminated as well.

If I’m remembering right, the Willow Pond is in the garden at the rear of the house. The only trouble is, considering the roundabout way that we approached the house, I’m not entirely sure where the rear is. After all, this isn’t exactly your typical front door/back door kind of place. Frustrated, I manage to lead us astray for a good five minutes. During that time, we see a flashlight bobbing in the distance. Andy yanks me back behind a tree, and we stand there, not breathing, until the flashlight bobs away.

“Guard?”

“Not sure,” he says. “Better safe than sorry.”

I take a deep breath as reality bears down on me. A reality filled with assassins and stalkers and odds that really don’t skew in my favor.

The blackness starts to creep up again, that seductive place where I can get lost in my own head and not worry about the real world. I shove it away, because I know better. If I stop worrying about the real world, I’ll find myself without any world at all. If that’s not a motivation to stay sober, I don’t know what is.

Determined, I step out behind the tree and continue on in the direction where I think the house lies. After a few minutes, I still haven’t found the damn pond.

I stop, frustrated, and try to get my bearings. Andy stumbles to a halt behind me.

“Are we lost?”

“We’re right here,” I snap. “Everything else has just shifted.”

It’s a stupid thing to say, but I’m irritated. It’s dark, and I’m tired and I’m scared. I’m also lost. Not that I’m going to admit that to Andy.

I turn this way and that, trying to spot something familiar in the dark. Nothing. Finally, I just pick a direction. “This way,” I say.

“Wait.”

I look back at him, confused. “What?” Was someone out there? Had he seen something?

“We’re heading to the wrong place.”

I shake my head. “No way. It all fits. The clues all fit.”

“Except for the reflection part,” he says. “What was the language? ‘A reflection of grandeur, of good times once seen’?”

“Okay. So?”

“So that can’t have been thrown into the overall clue for no reason. It must serve a purpose.”

I swallow, because he’s right. But we don’t have time to follow rabbit trails, and I’m now pissed off at myself for leaping all over the koi pond thing. “Then what?” I ask. “Do you have any ideas?”

“You know the mansion,” he says. “Is there some sort of reflecting pond?”

The sense of doom that had been settling over me vanishes with a puff. “Yes,” I say triumphantly. “And I know right where it is.”

Five minutes later, we’ve found the reflecting pond. A long, rectangular shallow pool cut into a stone patio. At one end, a majestic fountain sprays water into the air, creating a blur of ambient noise that will hide any approaching footsteps.

“What now?” I ask, frowning at the pond.

“We search for the clue,” he says, slogging into the water, shoes and all. “You said Jack found something in the water, right? So the clue must be in here.”

“Right,” I say, shining the flashlight over the surface of the water. “In the movie, Jack Nicholson finds a pair of glasses. Is that what we’re looking for? Glasses?” I have a sudden mental picture of me wearing the special decoder glasses, then flitting around the property like Batgirl or something. I shake my head to clear the idiotic thought. Clearly, I’m getting loopy.

“I doubt it,” he says. “The game is never that literal. But I expect we’ll find something.”

As he tromps through the water, I move the light so that he can see what’s near his feet. After a few minutes of this, the beam hits something shiny in the middle of the pond. The light glints off it, making the item shine and spark like a beacon sending out a little Morse code signal.Look here! Look here!

“Andy!”

“I see it,” he says, and he’s already bending over, his head tilted at an odd angle so as to not get wet while his arm is submerged up to his elbow. He looks cockeyed and off-balance and more than a little goofy. He’s also grinning from ear to ear, clearly more than happy to be my white knight.

“My hero,” I say with a laugh.

“If I’m a hero just for grabbing the thing, what am I going to be when I actually pull it out of the water?” he asks.

“Golden,” I say.

He looks at me with a little too much intensity, and then he nods. “For now, that’ll do.”

I look away, because I can hear the undertone in his voice. I may want to put off the talk about the kiss, but I wonder if that’s going to be possible. Still, compared to the poison in my body, Andy’s lust is hardly a priority. As soon as we find the antidote—and I’m determined to think in terms ofwhen and notif —I’ll have the talk with him.

My rambling thoughts are interrupted when he stands up straight, triumphantly holding out a small metal disc.

“What is it?” I ask, reaching for it.

He slogs to the edge of the pond and hands it to me without looking at it, and I immediately start to scrape off the gunk.

“Anything?” he asks.

I squint at it, the silver emerging from the black ooze familiar. “It’s a silver dollar,” I say. “The old kind, like my grandpa used to keep in his coin box.” An Eisenhower dollar to be exact, with the president’s profile on one side and the Apollo 11 eagle insignia on the back. (Honestly, it’s amazing I remember that, but Grandpa knew everything about his coins, and that little tidbit stuck.)

“Does it say anything?”

He holds out his hand for the dollar, but I ignore it, instead looking more closely and running my thumb over the image, looking for secret codes etched in the metal. “Nothing I see.” I flip it over again and look one more time. Still nothing.

Discouraged, I pass it off to Andy.

He does the same routine, ultimately coming to the same conclusion. “It’s a silver dollar.”

“But it’s the clue, right? I mean, something perfectly innocuous can be a clue. Isn’t that how the game works?” My voice is rising, and I force myself to bring it down a notch. I might be screaming in terror inside, but the actress in me knows how to play the role of the calm, cool heroine.

“It must be,” Andy says. “And the clue will tie in to the movies. We just need to find the connection.”

I blanch. “But there could be a million possibilities.”

He puts a calming hand on my arm. “Then we go through the million one by one. Come on, Devi. We can do this.”

“Right,” I say, gathering my courage and confidence. “Sure.”

“So start naming some of those possibilities.”

Naturally, my mind goes horribly blank. “Um.” I’m floundering, a little fact that is particularly annoying since I was weaned both in and on the movies. My grandfather was a cameraman back in the day, and he worked on films now considered classics. I grew up watching films likeArsenic and Old Lace even while going to the premieres of movies starring me. A weird life maybe, but I liked it.

My grandmother, not to be outdone, read anything and everything about Hollywood itself. More than that, she wrote about it. That magazine,Confidential ? She was one of the secret sources that fed the infamous rag all of its devilish dish.

In other words, if anyone knows movies and Hollywood trivia, it’s me. But at the moment, my mind is a blank.

“Okay,” I say, trying again. “It’s an Eisenhower dollar. And there’s a movie calledWhy We Fight that had a lot to do with Eisenhower. It was all about the war, after all. And if the war is the key, then there was a documentary in the forties calledThe True Glory. ”

“But none of those are a place.”

He has a point, and for a moment it takes the air out of my sails. Still, I’m not to be deterred. “Maybe it’s not Eisenhower. Maybe the clue ties tosilver dollar. Or justdollar. Or eagle. Or even Apollo.”

“Apollo?”

I explain about the insignia on the back of the coin. “Could be a reference to the Apollo Theater. Except that it was demolished,” I add. “But you get the idea.”

“You’re doing great,” he says. “But we need to focus on places that still exist.”

“Well,” I say, racking my brain, “I know that Eisenhower gave a speech at the Hollywood Bowl in the fifties. Maybe we need to go to the Hollywood Bowl?” I toss the idea out there, almost lamely, but to my surprise, Andy jumps on it.

“Devi, you’re brilliant. That has to be the answer.”

“You think?” It certainly seems to fit, and I feel a swell of pride for coming up with the idea. “Butwhere in the Bowl?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “We’ll figure that out when we get there.” He starts to walk back the way we came. “Come on.”

I hurry to catch up, eager and excited. Maybe this nightmare will be over sooner than I anticipated. Maybe by morning, my life will be my own again.

Nearby, a bird squawks, its sleep interrupted by a rustle in the bushes.

I look at Andy, and see that his eyes are wide, too. And why wouldn’t they be? After all, we’re alone. So what the hell is moving in the bushes?

“Let’s go,” Andy whispers. “We have the clue. Let’s get the hell out of here. Check the Hollywood Bowl. I think it’s our best shot.”

“No.”A deep voice rings out from among the bushes, and I scream, the shrill sound of my voice piercing the sky even as a black-clad figure emerges.

“Go!” Andy yells, and I do, almost falling into the reflecting pool as I race in the opposite direction.

“Wait!” the stranger calls. But it’s not a stranger. I know that voice, and even as my terror subsides, a wave of anger washes over me.

“Blake,”I yell, skidding to a stop. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Helping,” he says, his voice perfectly calm. He nods toward the coin still clutched in my hand. “Are you sure you want to go to the Hollywood Bowl now?”

“What do you mean?” I ask. “Blake, I’m running out of time!”

“That’s my point,” he says. “What if you’re wrong? What if the coin isn’t the clue? What if the Hollywood Bowl isn’t the answer? What if there’s something else, and you end up right back here? You could be wasting hours. Hours you don’t have.”

My heart skips a beat, both from the information and from the way he’s watching me. I’m livid that he’s here after I specifically told him to stay away. And yet…

And yet my whole body tingles from the knowledge that, despite everything, he came.

Andy, however, isn’t feeling the love. He’s staring Blake down, his eyes as cold and as hard as if he believed thatBlake were the one pulling our strings. “All right, Blake,” he says. “You make a good point. But if the coin isn’t the clue, then what is?”

“I don’t know,” Blake says.

“Dammit, Blake, are you trying to get her killed? Are you trying to getyourself killed? Because we’ve been through this before, and you’re not supposed to be here.”

“Well, Iam here. And I’m staying. And until we’re certain that Hollywood Bowl is where we go next, you both are staying, too.”

Chapter26

Blake stood firm, determined to stand his ground.

“Maybe he’s right,” Devi said. “Maybe we should be sure. The coin’s pretty gunky, after all. What if it’s not the clue at all? What if it’s been in the water for months and months?”

It was a good argument, and Blake waited, watching Andy’s face. He could tell the other man didn’t like having his authority questioned—he was the one with all the experience in the game—but at the same time, what Devi said made sense. And after a few moments, Andy nodded. “All right. We look around some more and see if we find something else that might be a clue. But no more than half an hour. We can’t afford to waste any of your time.”

He said the last to Devi. She pressed her lips together and nodded agreement. Then Andy turned to Blake. “And I think you can leave now.”