Chapter 5
Five
She wasn’t used to running away, but Susan raced through the tangle of early-summer growth that strangled the access to the deserted garage, oblivious to the scratching branches and the uneven footing on the neglected path.
Her mouth burned, her skin burned, and she wanted, needed, to run away and hide.
She’d left her car parked by the edge of Matchfield Commons, and she fumbled with her keys, her hands shaking.
It was early afternoon on a weekday—the streets were empty, which was a damned good thing, she thought, shoving her hair out of her face.
She was driving like a maniac, with nothing more important than making it back to her mother’s house and the privacy of the guest bedroom.
She’d had too little sleep, too much stress.
A few hours of quiet, maybe a nap, would put it all in perspective.
She peeled into the driveway, much too fast, breathing a sigh of relief when she saw her mother’s Saturn was gone. She wasn’t in the mood to answer any questions at the moment, and her mother had the unfortunate gift of seeing through most of Susan’s most tactful evasions.
She slammed the door behind her and stared at her reflection in the mirror. It was a damned good thing Mary was out. Susan Abbott looked as if she’d been most thoroughly kissed.
As she had. She didn’t remember being that shaken by another man’s mouth in years. Maybe in her entire life. Edward wasn’t much for kissing—Susan suspected that deep down he considered it a bit unsanitary.
Her face felt tender from the scratch of Jake’s unshaven face.
Edward didn’t have that heavy a beard, and yet he still shaved twice a day.
She touched the faint red mark by her mouth, her fingers delicate, curious.
In truth, it hadn’t even been that much of a kiss.
She’d panicked before he could deepen it, which was a good thing.
She had already been close to succumbing to the erotic pressure of his mouth against hers.
If he’d used his tongue she probably would have dragged him over to the bed she’d been far too aware of.
She pushed away from the mirror in disgust, shaking her head. What in God’s name had come over her? She’d never been prey to irrational, surging hormones, she’d never been emotional, irresponsible, filled with the kind of aching desire better suited to a Titanic addict.
She heard the phone ring, but she ignored it. It was probably something she’d forgotten, one of those thousands of questions that only the bride could answer. They could leave a message and Mary would call them back.
The answering machine clicked on, and Susan started nervously as Edward’s disembodied voice floated toward her from the answering machine.
“Susan, dear, are you there? I’m afraid I’m going to have to stay in the city tonight, but I’ll need you to take care of a few things.
Have you got a pencil? There’s my dry cleaning at Cecil’s French Laundry on Dugan Street, and the jeweler told me the gifts for the ushers are in. And if you could possibly...”
She had her hand out to pick up the receiver, wanting, needing to remember why she was marrying him. But she couldn’t move. She just stood there listening to the list of errands as they sailed right past her consciousness.
She was still standing there, five minutes later, when she heard someone drive up the driveway.
Her immediate reaction was flight, out the kitchen door, but the backyard was a cul-de-sac, and there would be no escape.
Besides, what did she have to escape from?
As far as she knew Jake Wyczynski had no car—he wouldn’t be able to follow, her that quickly and finish what he started.
And Edward was still in the city—she was safe from him, as well. And she wasn’t going to even consider why she was suddenly considering Edward to be as big a threat to her peace of mind as Jake.
It was probably just a delivery company with more of the interminable wedding gifts. Susan liked crystal and silver as well as anyone, but she couldn’t really see centering her life around them. She’d simply pile the latest boxes in the garage and let Edward have tire joy of opening them.
She swung open the front door, then stopped. It was no brown-shorts-clad UPS hunk but a tall, older man. He looked beyond surprised to see her standing at the door, he looked frankly appalled.
“May I help you?” Susan managed to be deceptively polite. She wasn’t in the mood for religious fanatics or vacuum cleaner salesmen, though this man didn’t actually look like either. He looked vaguely familiar, and Susan knew she must have met him at some point in her life.
“Er...is Mary Abbott home?”
“Sorry, she’s out at the moment I’m her daughter. May I give her a message?”
A faint, reluctant smile formed at his mouth. “‘May you?’” he echoed. “She brought you up well.”
Susan shrugged. “She did, as a matter of fact Are you a friend of hers?”
“An old acquaintance. I should have called instead of just showing up, but I was in the neighborhood and I stopped by on a whim. I’ll call next time.”
He seemed to want to get away from her, back to the anonymous dark car he’d left parked in the driveway. And for some reason, despite her earlier desperate need for solitude, she didn’t want to let him escape.
She followed him out into the driveway. “You could come in and wait for her,” she suggested, wondering if she were out of her mind. A moment ago she’d been desperate for solitude. “I’m sure she won’t be long?—”
“No!” He sounded surprisingly vehement, and then he softened it with an oddly familiar smile. “I wouldn’t think of intruding. I’ll come back.”
Something wasn’t adding up, and Susan’s instincts were infallible. “Who are you?” she demanded abruptly as he reached his sedan.
“Who am I?” he echoed, startled, his hand on the door.
“Are you the police? FBI?”
“God, no. Why would you think such a thing?” He looked seriously bewildered.
“The bland rental car, the dark suit, the mysterious manner,” she said. “Of course, you aren’t wearing dark glasses and you’re not traveling in pairs, but still...”
“Maybe my partner is circling around the back.”
She suddenly realized how absurd the whole thing was. “Sorry,” she said. “I haven’t had enough sleep, and my imagination is going haywire.”
“You don’t have any reason to think the police or the FBI would be coming around, do you?” He suddenly looked worried, disproportionately so.
She shook her head. “No, my mother and I live very ordinary lives. It would make things more interesting if they did,” she said. “So who are you?”
“Just tell your mother Bill came by. Til be in touch.”
She stood in the yard, watching as he drove away.
Odd, he didn’t look like a Bill. She racked her brain for any of the Williams her mother might have mentioned over the years, but the tall, older man didn’t fit any of them.
She’d seen him before, she knew she had, but she couldn’t place him no matter how hard she tried.
She headed back into the house. It was mid-afternoon, and if she was going to accomplish any of Edward’s list of tasks she needed to get moving.
But she knew perfectly well she wasn’t going to do anything of the kind.
She was going to have a very tall glass of iced tea, stuff some carbohydrates in her mouth and take a long, long nap.
At least it was a relatively quiet night in this wedding week—she and her mother were supposed to go out for drinks, but it would be simple enough to cry off.
She was in the kitchen, mixing her iced tea and humming under her breath, a tuneless little hum. She didn’t particularly feel like singing, but she couldn’t get the song out of her mind.
She dropped several ice cubes in the tall glass of tea and brought it to her lips as the song danced through her mind. It was an old show tune, one that used to make her mother cry. Something about an ordinary guy....
The glass shattered at her feet, drenching her legs with iced tea, but she was frozen in place. The song was “Bill,” from Showboat, and it had been her parents’ special song for the short time when they’d been happy together. So special that Mary Abbott had called her husband Bill instead of Alex.
She cleaned up the mess in a daze, her brain simply shutting down.
She wasn’t going to think about the familiar/unfamiliar man who’d come by; she wasn’t going to think about Jake Wyczynski’s mouth; she wasn’t going to think about all the things that Edward wanted her to do.
She was going to her bedroom, and if everyone was extremely lucky she’d get up by her wedding day. But she was making no guarantees.
She closed and locked the door behind her, pulled the shades, stripping off the tea-stained clothes and dumping them in a pile.
Her doomed aunt’s wedding dress hung over the closet door, a reminder of all that lay ahead of her.
Right now she was feeling just as doomed as poor Tallulah had been. Maybe she was crazy to wear that dress.
On impulse she pulled it off the padded hanger and slipped it over her head. It slid down her body in a shimmer of satin, settling around her like a caress.
She stared at her reflection in the mirror.
The short-cropped, honey-blond hair, the high cheekbones, the green eyes stared back at her, familiar as always.
And then the image shifted and melted, and for a moment she was looking at a different reflection, wavery, as if through candlelight The woman in the mirror had a cloud of Chestnut curls tumbling to her shoulders, huge brown eyes and a full, red-painted mouth.
Her body was softer, less muscular, more rounded.
She blinked, and the image vanished, and it was Susan again, biting her pale lips, staring at her reflection.
“You’re out of your freaking mind, Abbott,” she said out loud. “You kiss a stranger you barely know, much less like, you start imagining your long-lost father showing up at your doorstep, and now you’re having hallucinations. Get a grip, woman!”
She glared at her reflection, daring it to shift again, but it stayed the way it was, a tall, frustrated bride in a beautiful dress who didn’t know what in the world she really wanted.
The reflection shimmered again, suddenly, like a funhouse mirror, and the other woman was back, with her mane of dark hair, her saucy dark eyes, and her lipsticked mouth curving in a naughty smile.
She looked like a movie star from the forties—a cross between Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner.
Susan reached out a tentative hand toward the strange reflection, and the woman in the mirror reached for her.
But it wasn’t Susan’s hand. This hand had nail polish, and the biggest diamond she’d ever seen in her life, glittering through the wavering glass, sparkling.
A shaft of light speared through the room, sending rainbows of light dancing around the room as if shot from a crazed prism.
Everything went black. Still and dark and black.
And Susan was gone.