Dune Road (6 page)

Kit was self-conscious, at best. She had never been a big girls’ night out person, but she had to admit she had fun, once the margaritas had loosened her up a bit; and the next time they arranged a night, she went all out with a flippy pink mini-dress and sparkly eyeshadow.

“That’s more like it!” Tracy had hugged her approvingly. “Now you look like one of the girls.”

“As opposed to what?” Kit said, bemused. “One of the boys?”

“I just meant you look gorgeous,” Tracy said, and Kit, who hadn’t ever managed to quit her search for approval from other women—thank you,
Mother
—had beamed.

Kit shouts up the stairs to hurry the children as their father is waiting, giving Adam an apologetic shrug. He smiles in return, and they both stand there, awkward suddenly, waiting for the children to thunder down the stairs.

“See you, Mom!” The kids whirl past her, not even stopping to give her a kiss good-bye.

“Hey!” Adam roars. “Go back and give your mother a kiss.”

“Sorry, Mom,” they say sheepishly, and she catches Adam’s eye as she straightens up from kissing Buckley and thanks him with her eyes. He nods, and for a minute she feels a pang of loss.

Then his phone buzzes, and he quickly reads through a text, a small smile playing on his lips as he does so.

She has heard through the grapevine that he is dating many women and she realizes this is from one of them.

Oh screw him, she thinks. Saying good-bye, she goes to clean up the kitchen while she waits for Edie.

Chapter Four

T
racy is the first to arrive at the bookstore, and seeing no one there she knows, she heads over to the coffee bar and orders a mint tea while she waits.

She has dressed carefully today. Not one of her usual skin-tight colorful dresses that show off her yoga-toned body to perfection, but something far more subdued. A white shirt tucked into jeans, and a big silver-buckled turquoise-studded western belt, suede ballet flats on her feet, her hair drawn back in a low, elegant ponytail, and glasses.

She wasn’t sure about the glasses, put them on, took them off, put them on again. Was it too contrived, perhaps? Too
Why, Miss Jones, I never realized you were so beautiful
?

She has worn contacts for years, was thinking about now investing in Lasik, except the thought of it terrified her, and she was so used to the contacts they never really bothered her. Wearing glasses has always made her feel like the nerdy schoolgirl she once was, long before she discovered the transformative effects of yoga, when her hair was dark and frizzy, and her thighs rubbed together when she walked.

At the ripe old age of forty-one, Tracy has mastered the art of transformation, morphing into a serene, peaceful yogini now she is in Highfield, and finally away from the storm of her early life in California.

Occasionally, Tracy will pull her pictures down from the attic of her house. She keeps them under lock and key, doesn’t want anyone to see who she was in any of her former lives, and even now she is stunned when she flicks through, studies the unhappy, chubby girl, the sullen teenager, the promiscuous twenty-something party girl and the wealthy, polished thirty-something housewife.

She had never been frightened of forty, had always felt that forty would give her the greatest transformation yet, lead her into the best years of her life, and so far this has been partly true, although there are pieces of her past she is not able to shake, no matter how hard she tries.

To look at her, you would never recognize her from the old photographs. True, there is something in the eyes that remains, a sadness perhaps, but almost everything else has changed. The dark untamed locks were finally tamed into a mass of tumbling curls in her twenties, when she also joined Weight Watchers, lost thirty pounds and discovered, for the first time, her power over men.

A series of rich boyfriends, then Jed, the long and painful love of her life. He rang her doorbell one day, selling wholesale gourmet food out of the back of a van, and she was taken in by his good looks and the twinkle in his eye. Soon he had managed to charm his way into her kitchen, then into her life.

He had been exactly her type. Tall, tanned, black hair and green eyes, and irresistibly confident, with a confidence that Tracy had always lacked, even though you would never know it, to look at her.

He piled boxes of food into her freezer, then threw in more because, he said, she was so pretty. She guessed he said that to all the girls, but the next day he rang her doorbell again, and this time, instead of holding a box of crab claws, he held a bouquet of flowers.

For a while, it was everything Tracy had ever dreamed about. He was loving, attentive, lavishing her with attention and presents. He adored her so much, he couldn’t bear for her to even talk to another man, and, in the beginning, she found it endearing to be loved so much.

Until the night they had run into an old friend whom she had hugged—and Jed changed. He said nothing, gave her the silent treatment until they got home, and as soon as the front door closed, he screamed at her.

She had humiliated him, he said, flirting with another man. How dare she, he spat, as she tried, in disbelief, to defend herself. He pushed her against the wall, hard, and she was so shocked, she told him to get out.

He left, coming back two hours later, weeping and telling her he didn’t know what came over him and he would never lay a finger on her again.

She should have left that night. Now, looking back, she thinks so often of how her life would have been different if she had left that night, but how did she know? How did she know what was to come as she sat on the sofa with this wreck of a man, who she knew she loved, weeping in her arms?

The pushing happened again. And again. And more. So much more. Each time he swore it would never happen again, and as time went by she became too scared to leave, tried to keep her head down. He told her he was insecure because they weren’t married, so they got married, and things got worse. She was now his. His property. His to abuse as he pleased.

Eventually, Jed started having affairs, and he left her, as she always hoped he would, for she knew she didn’t have the strength to leave him.

She moved house, changed her name, got a new job working as a secretary for Richard Stonehill, who had a penchant for redheads, and a penchant for her.

She became a sleek, glossy redhead, deeply tanned (aided by an excellent self-tanning spray), with huge diamond studs in her ears and an even larger ring on her finger.

It was easy to be a rich housewife, easier still to be married to one of the biggest movie executives in Hollywood. And it was fun, to go to all those parties, to have all those stars over for dinner, to call them friends, even though she knew the rules, knew that the friendship was entirely due to Richard’s power. As soon as they divorced she wasn’t surprised the friends all disappeared.

The divorce was easy. Setting it up wasn’t quite so easy. Under California law, spouses are automatically entitled to fifty percent, but not when they have signed a watertight prenup.

Luckily for Tracy, she knew about Richard’s secret before she married him. Hell, it was part of the reason he married her, for he believed she accepted him, loved him; she was able to dominate him like no one else, not even the mistresses he had paid over the years.

She often felt like giggling, in her costume of black latex, as she and several others tied Richard up and smacked him until he was sore and red; and soon she began to find Richard rather ridiculous.

She no longer needed saving from Jed, and she no longer needed Richard. The prenup she had signed was indeed watertight, but his reputation was not, and when Tracy decided the time had come for them to move on with their lives, all she had to do was produce some photographs she had taken over the course of some of their more . . .
elaborate
parties, and Richard was offering her whatever she wanted.

His manager stepped in. Tried to tell Tracy he would ruin her, but Tracy had laughed and said she was only a housewife, what did she have to lose.

In the end she got a settlement she was reasonably happy with, and a chance to reinvent herself. She grew her hair long and highlighted it blonde, let her skin tan in the sun, carried on learning more and more complicated yoga, Hatha, then Vinyasa, then finally Ashtanga, the yoga she had started all those years ago when she first moved to California.

And then, when her past threatened to catch up with her—it started with an associate of Richard’s, a regular presence at his parties, turning up at her house and requesting, no, in a menacing way
demanding
her continued participation, and this was followed by her phone ringing in the dead of night and no one being on the line—she decided to move.

She had had enough of California by that time, enough of Los Angeles, of the movie scene, and she went to New York for a couple of weeks, and found herself, one weekend, accepting an invitation to a beach house in Highfield, Connecticut.

She parked in the car park by the marina, walked down some of the cobbled streets in the old part of town, right by the beach, and stepped onto Main Street, where she saw the pelargoniums in full bloom, tumbling from the window boxes outside the high-end stores that lined the street; there were laughing teenagers strolling past with ice creams in their hands, sand on their ankles and flip-flops on their feet.

She had forgotten quite how much she had missed the East Coast. Not that she would ever go back to Long Island—God knows she had worked hard to lose that particular accent. But Highfield felt . . . right. It felt like home. She stood in the middle of Main Street with a broad smile on her face, and when she reached her friend’s beach house with a view of the water, she knew her days in California were over.

Tracy bought an old 1950s ranch out at Sasquatchan Cove and, thanks to her divorce settlement, promptly knocked it down and rebuilt a classic shingle beach house, with large picture windows that looked out over the water, and a huge open-plan kitchen/living room, with big squashy sofas for people to sink into with a glass of wine.

Some time after she moved to Highfield, she took over the lease at Navajo Hall. A former movie theater, it had been a pizza parlor, a video arcade, and in its last incarnation a hangout for teens, complete with pool tables and no-alcohol bar, but the wealthy teens in Highfield were far too busy taking drugs and throwing excessive parties at their parents’ huge houses while said parents were in Nantucket or Block Island for the weekend to bother with the shabby and somewhat decrepit Navajo Hall, and when Tracy made the owner an offer he couldn’t refuse, he didn’t refuse.

She had a vision for Namaste. A yoga center that would be more than a yoga center. A yoga center that would bring people together, become a center for the community. A place where people could hang out, have lunch, connect. A place that would attract all the best people in Highfield, Connecticut, and if any of them happened to be wealthy single men, well, what was wrong with that?

If only it hadn’t been for Facebook. If only it hadn’t been for one of those nights when she couldn’t sleep, when she decided, just for fun, to look up some ex-boyfriends. Her life was going so smoothly until then.

 

In the small bookstore that is hosting Robert McClore for the evening, there is a palpable frisson that traverses the room as the author appears, walking slowly toward the podium. He thanks the special-events organizer at the bookstore for introducing him, clears his throat, and starts to read.

Kit, seated between Edie and Charlie, smiles. God, he’s good, she thinks to herself. His voice is low and mellifluous, as he reads slowly, bringing the characters to life, pausing from time to time and looking up from the pages to catch the eye of someone in the audience, a couple of times Kit’s, and she is surprised that her heart leaps a little.

But he is an attractive man, she thinks. He is so much older than her and yet he is someone she would have noticed on the street, even if she had not known who he was. She sneaks a glance to the side, and sees Tracy, rapt, and the other women in the audience, strangers to her, watching him with half-smiles on their faces.

They all want to know him, she thinks. And I do! With that, she closes her eyes, the better to lose herself in his soft, seductive voice.

 

“I know that you’re a big Democratic Party supporter”—Tracy sits forward earnestly in her chair—“and in fact you were one of the main reasons Bob Riverside is now in office, so I was surprised when you made Troy Jenkins, the Democratic congress-man in
A Life Not Taken
, the villain. Particularly when the book you wrote immediately prior to that,
Safe House
, demonized the Democratic mayor. Can you tell us a bit about your choice of politics for your characters, and how that may conflict with your own personal beliefs?”