Puppet (8 page)

“Please don’t call me Mandy.”

“Oh, sorry. Do only the men you sleep with get to call you that?”

Amanda struggles to stand up, when all she really wants to do is lie down. “Maybe you should go now.”

“Not till I’ve said what I came here to say.”

“I’m sorry. I thought you’d already … said.”

“This is all a game to you, isn’t it? Playing with people’s lives. It doesn’t bother you that people get hurt? That one night of mindless fun for you might equal a lifetime of pain for others? That my marriage might never recover?”

“I really think you’re making way too much of this. It was just one night. It didn’t mean anything to either of us.”

“It meant something to me,” Janet says simply.

A flush of shame washes across Amanda’s face. “I’m sorry.”

“Just stay away from my husband.” Janet walks quickly to the door, slams it behind her.

The vibration from the door zaps through Amanda’s body like an electrical charge. This would probably be a good time to get out of town, she thinks, then throws up all over her white living room rug.

When Amanda wakes up on the living room floor, it is almost 2 a.m. “Oh, shit,” she mutters, the smell of vomit still alarmingly fresh. She stares at the huge red stain in the middle of her carpet. It looks like blood, she thinks, knowing that no amount of soap and water is going to wash the stain away. “Shit,” she says again, her head pounding as relentlessly as the surf beneath her windows. She touches her hair, feels it sticky and covered with bile.

“You’re disgusting,” she says, stepping into her shower fully clothed, and standing under the gush of hot water that shoots from the oversize showerhead. She’s ruining her suit, she knows. Just as she’s ruined the rug. Not to mention her whole life, she decides melodramatically, pouring almost a full bottle of shampoo over her hair and digging her long nails into her scalp.

Oh, well. Like mother, like daughter.

Although she doesn’t remember her mother ever actually throwing up after one of her many binges. She’d drink herself into oblivion, and there she’d stay—aloof and unavailable, her physical presence defined by her emotional absence.

After her shower, Amanda strips off her wet clothes, scrapes her body raw with a large white towel, then crawls into bed. She’ll deal with the rug in the morning, although what can she do with it really, except roll it up and throw it away? Even with repeated professional cleanings, a shapeless puddle of blush will always be visible beneath the surface. She wonders what the manager of the Four Seasons hotel in Toronto has done with the rug in his lobby. Three bullets make for a lot of spilled blood. “Maybe I should call and ask him how he handled
the situation.” Amanda reaches for the phone beside her bed, presses in the number she hadn’t realized she’s already committed to memory.

“Hello?” the sleepy voice on the other end responds.

“What did they do with the rug?”

“Amanda?”

She pictures Ben scrambling to sit up, sees him brush several loose strands of hair from half-open eyes. “I’m assuming there was a lot of blood,” she continues. “I just wondered what they did with the rug.”

“I don’t know,” he answers, as if this were the most natural of conversations for them to be having at this hour of the morning.

“Who the hell is John Mallins?” she asks.

“We don’t have a lot of details.”

“What
do
you have?”

“We know he’s from England. That he was here on vacation with his wife and kids.”

“What’s his connection to my mother?”

“As far as the police can determine, there is none.”

“You’re saying that my mother shot and killed a total stranger?”

“Apparently.”

Amanda leans back against her headboard. This was excessive, even for her mother. “Was she drunk?”

“No,” Ben says. “You really need to come home, Amanda.”

Amanda hangs up the phone without saying goodbye. She walks to her window and stares out at the moon.

T
HE
plane from Palm Beach to Toronto takes off almost an hour late.

Amanda breathes a sigh of relief that they are finally taxiing down the runway, grateful that she no longer has the opportunity to run screaming down the aisle, hollering, “I’ve changed my mind. Let me out of here,” which she would surely have done had she not found herself at the very back of the crowded 737, squished between a gum-chewing teenage girl and a middle-aged businessman so engrossed in his spy thriller, he hadn’t even bothered looking up when she was climbing all over him to get to her seat.

More of the things Amanda hates: middle seats on airplanes; teenage girls who chew their gum loudly and crack it even louder, all the while flipping long, straight hair over their shoulders into her face; the shapeless black wool coat she’s wearing for the first time in eight years, a coat she should have thrown out years ago.

Why hadn’t she? Whatever style it once possessed is long gone, and it feels scratchy against her bare forearms. She thinks of taking it off, but there’s hardly enough
room in the tiny space allotted her to exhale properly, let alone to start shedding layers of clothing. Serves me right, she thinks, as several strands of her neighbor’s hair flick toward her cheek. Should have taken off my coat before I sat down. Should have thrown the stupid thing out when I left Toronto.

“Should never have gotten on this damn plane in the first place, is what I should have done,” she says out loud, then glances around self-consciously. But the teenage girl in the window seat is now cracking her gum to the sound of rock music leaking from her headphones, and the face of the man on the aisle is buried even deeper inside his book, so apparently neither has noticed her outburst.

Why didn’t I think of bringing a book? she wonders, trying to remember the last time she had the luxury of curling up with a good novel. A mystery thriller like the one the man beside her is so engrossed in, something that would help her pass the two and a half hours she’ll be spending in the air, something that would help her forget where she’s going. And why.

Amanda can’t remember at what point she actually made the decision to go to Toronto. After talking to Ben, she’d drifted into an uneasy sleep, only to dream about being chased down the middle of I-95 by a pregnant Jennifer Travis, an angry Janet Berg, and a sobbing Caroline Fletcher. Somewhere in the middle of this pursuit, she stopped to buy a painting from Carter Reese’s wife, Sandy, then awoke in a pool of sweat, thinking it was definitely time to get out of Dodge.

At barely 6 a.m., she called the airlines and was able to secure the last available seat on the nonstop flight that left Palm Beach for Toronto at two thirty in the afternoon.
Then she called her secretary at home, forgetting that the poor young woman might actually have preferred sleeping in a little later on a Saturday morning, and told her that she might not be in the office Monday.

“Any particular reason I can give people?” Kelly asked, her voice alarmingly perky despite the early-morning hour.

“No.”

“Will you be back Tuesday?”

“I’m not sure.”

A pause. Amanda could almost hear the wheels in Kelly’s head spinning, knew she was desperate to ask if this sudden change in plans had anything to do with the phone calls from Ben Myers.

“I’ll call you as soon as I know my plans,” Amanda said before hanging up. Then she threw a pair of black pants and a black turtleneck sweater into an overnight bag, along with her makeup bag and several changes of underwear, phoned Ben and told him she’d be arriving in Toronto at around five o’clock that afternoon, and took a cab to the airport, where she ate a slice of pepperoni pizza and gulped down a large Coke for breakfast, picked up her boarding pass, passed unchallenged through security, and fell into a mercifully dreamless sleep in the departure lounge while waiting to board her plane.

Luckily—or unluckily, she thinks now—someone saw her sleeping and shook her awake in time to make her flight. She bounded onto the plane just as the doors were about to close, squeezing her overnight bag into the already full overhead compartment before similarly squeezing herself into the middle seat in the second-to-last row of the plane. She was reminding herself about
beggars not being choosers when the pilot announced they were experiencing a slight mechanical problem, and there would be a ten-minute delay. Ten minutes stretched into twenty, then thirty, and eventually fifty, as Amanda grew increasingly hot and restive inside her black wool coat. And now they were finally making their way down the runway, whatever problem they’d been having apparently solved.

“And away we go,” Amanda whispers as the plane lifts into the air. She grips the armrests, tries hard not to panic. It’s been eight years since her last plane trip. Even her honeymoon with Sean involved boats, not planes. A Caribbean cruise, she recalls wistfully, remembering that she and Ben never had a honeymoon at all.

She shakes the image of Ben from her head. She’ll be seeing him soon enough. “Book me a room at the scene of the crime,” she instructed him over the phone this morning. “I’ll call you as soon as I’m settled in.”

The girl in the window seat beside Amanda cracks her gum loudly several times in rapid succession, so that it sounds as if someone were firing a small pistol. What kind of gun had her mother used to murder this mysterious stranger? Amanda wonders, feeling her body grow clammy underneath her heavy coat.

An old image appears, the unexpected memory taking root and growing, like a weed, before Amanda has the chance to pull it out. She sees herself as a child, going through the closet in her mother’s bedroom, looking for a pair of fancy shoes, something with high heels and pointy toes, preferably in silver or gold, something suitable for playing a fairy princess, but finding only a succession of sensible low-heeled shoes in black and brown
lined along the floor. And then looking up, seeing a shoe box on the high shelf above where her mother’s clothes were hanging, and thinking this must be where she keeps her special shoes, the ones a fairy princess would wear. She ran to the kitchen, retrieved the small stepladder that leaned against the side of the counter, returned with it to her mother’s bedroom, and climbed to its third and final step, stretching her arms toward the shoe box, her fingertips repeatedly grazing its side, unable to make full contact, until finally she succeeded in dislodging it. The box fell to the floor, narrowly missing her head, and bouncing awkwardly along the carpet, the lid opening, disgorging its contents at her feet.

A gun, Amanda remembers now with a gasp, as she must have gasped then. Small and black, and surprisingly heavy.

She watches the child Amanda lift the strange object into her hands, sees her turn it over, then lift it to her nose to inhale its cold, metallic scent. And suddenly her mother is in the doorway, crying and yelling and waving her arms like a deranged puppet, wresting the gun from Amanda’s fingers. The child flees the room in terror. Later, when Amanda goes to her mother’s room to try to explain, her mother stares through her as if she doesn’t exist.

The shoe box wasn’t there the next time Amanda snuck into her mother’s bedroom for a peek in her closet. Nor was its contents ever alluded to again. The question remained unasked throughout the years: What was her mother doing with a gun?

And now an addendum: Was it the same gun she used to murder John Mallins?

“Who the hell is John Mallins?” Amanda asks out loud.

“I’m sorry. Are you talking to me?” The man beside her stares at her with warm brown eyes.

“What? Oh, no. Sorry. I was just talking to myself. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“No problem. I do it all the time.” His eyes return to his book.

Amanda finds herself staring at his face in profile. It’s a pleasant face, she decides. Not particularly handsome. Although not unhandsome. Long nose, high cheekbones, full lips, strong jaw. Kind eyes, she thinks, wishing he would focus them on her again. “Is that a good book?”

“What?”

“You seem very engrossed in your book.”

“It’s all right.”

“Just all right?” Why is she badgering the poor man? Clearly he’s not interested in prolonged conversation. He has no need to be distracted and entertained.
His
mother didn’t shoot a stranger in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel.

“It’s pretty good so far.” He lays the open book across his lap. “But I’m prepared to be disappointed.”

“Why is that?”

“I read a lot of mysteries, and most of them start out okay, but then they kind of fall apart.”

Amanda nods as if she agrees, although she hasn’t read many mysteries. Life is confusing enough, she thinks. “And how does one prepare to be disappointed?”

The man smiles, takes several seconds to ponder the question. “One thinks about the past,” he says finally.

A line of perspiration immediately breaks out along Amanda’s upper lip. She feels her cheeks grow pink and
moist, as if she has just leaned over an open fire.

“Are you all right?” the man asks, brown eyes narrowing with concern.