Fade to Black (34 page)

Mallory glances up at her.

“I just want you to know,” she says at last, looking Mallory in the eye, “that whatever Frank is responsible for doing to you, he never meant to hurt you. You’ve got to talk to the police, tell them that he never—”

“He attacked me!” Mallory cuts in, anger transforming her hands into fists clenched tightly at her sides. “He broke into my home. He—”

“But he didn’t know who you were. He didn’t—”

“He sent me a card that said ‘I know who you are,’” Mallory retorts.

“But he didn’t realize that you were Mallory Eden. He thought you were just some porn actress trying to hide your past. He never stalked you in California, and he never tried to kill you. He never—”

“How do you know?” Mallory cuts in angrily.

“Because he told me.” Pamela’s voice is quiet, but her blue eyes are blazing as they bore into Mallory’s face. “He admits to what he did last night, and to watching you over the past few weeks, but he says that’s all there is to it. And I believe him. I can’t have him go to jail for a crime he didn’t commit. I know he’s telling the truth.”

“How can you say that?” Mallory is incredulous at this woman’s need to deceive herself, to believe a lowlife like Frank Minelli. “How can you listen to anything that comes out of a man who—”

“Because he’s my husband. The father of my children. They need their father. You’ve got to tell the police that—”

“The police are conducting their own investigation of Frank. I’ve already talked to them. I’ve told them everything I know.”

“You don’t have proof that he was the one who was stalking you, who shot you …”

“He was in California five years ago, at the exact time I was being stalked. Are you saying that’s a coincidence?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Pamela lifts her pudgy chin with conviction. “I met Frank five years ago. I know what he was like. He wasn’t some psycho who went around stalking movie stars, killing dogs, shooting people as they slept.”

“And yesterday, if someone had asked you if he was a psycho who prowled around spying on unsuspecting women—ransacking their houses, sending frightening letters, trying to rape them—what would you have said?”

Mallory’s words hang in the air.

For a moment she and Pamela Minelli stare at each other, and Mallory is certain that the fury she sees in her neighbor’s gaze is mirrored in her own.

She wants to shake this foolish woman who refuses to face the truth about her husband. Who insists on defending him even now, after what he’s done. Who actually expects Mallory to stick up for him, to tell the police that he’s not responsible for what happened in California.

Finally, Pamela breaks the eye contact, turning away.

She walks out the door without another word, and Mallory watches her cross the driveway and the yard, seemingly oblivious of the questions hollered by the hordes of reporters camped out in the street.

B
rawley had gone to the airport on impulse, bought the plane ticket on impulse—without waiting to hear from Mallory first.

Only now, when he’s sitting back in his seat, his head turned toward the window and the view of LAX disappearing below, does he stop to think about what he’s done.

His destination: T. F. Green State Airport in Rhode Island, via New York City.

He paid full fare for the last-minute first-class ticket, putting it on his one credit card that wasn’t maxed out.

It’s pretty damn close now.

But he doesn’t want to think about the serious debt he’s amassed over the past decade in an attempt to keep himself in designer clothing, and visible on the L.A. scene.

Nor does he want to think about the fact that he no longer has a job. Not after calling his boss this morning and saying he needs a few more days off from his job driving rich celebrities and out-of-town businessmen around in a stretch limo.

“I gave you last weekend off so you could do all those interviews,” his boss had groused. “You can’t have this weekend too. You know I need you this afternoon and all night.”

Brawley had tried to explain that he needed the time because his ex-fiancée had been found alive, which his boss must have known. No one with a radio or television set and a pair of functioning eyes and ears could not have known about Mallory Eden turning up in that rinky-dink Rhode Island town.

But his boss didn’t care.

His boss had told him not to bother coming back.

No problem
, Brawley thinks, turning abruptly away from the window as L.A. disappears beneath a bank of smog.

He won’t need to come back.

Not if he has Mallory.

Mallory …

And her money.

She’ll get him out of debt.

Hadn’t she always been happy to throw him a few hundred, even a few thousand here and there?

Well, maybe not
happy
.

But she had done it, if only to keep him quiet and out of her hair.

Now, after living alone for five years, she might be glad to see him …

To let bygones be bygones.

To pick up where they’d left off, back when she was a nobody.

Then again, she might not.

And if she doesn’t …

“Can I get you something to drink?” asks a pretty flight attendant, stopping in the aisle beside his seat.

She’s smiling at him, not in the way first-class flight attendants smile at all their passengers, but in the way a woman smiles at a man she wants.

Brawley smiles back even as he notices a slight space between her front teeth. And her eyes, while they’re a nice shade of blue, are set a little too close together.

“I’ll have a sparkling water,” he tells her, keeping his voice pleasant.

“No cocktails for you this afternoon?”

“No, thanks.”

He needs to keep his mind clear for what lies ahead.

B
ecky leaves the bathroom and hurries back down the hallway of the rooming house, moving with unseeing eyes past the jagged holes in the pea-green plaster and the water stains on the wall outside her room.

The door is ajar, just as she left it, and Gerry from down the hall is sitting dutifully on her bed.

“Did she call?”

Gerry shakes her head.

“You were here the whole time, waiting by the phone?”

“Ain’t that what you tol’ me to do? An’ you owe me another buck fifty for doin’ it.”

Becky sighs and dutifully digs into the pocket of her worn jeans to produce three quarters, five dimes, and five nickels. She thrusts the change into Gerry’s outstretched hand.

“Next time you need me to come down here to listen for your phone, you’re gonna give me five bucks,” Gerry says after shrewdly counting the coins twice. She walks out the door. “I ain’t no answering service, you know.”

“I know. Thanks for helping me out.”

She closes her door and looks at the phone sitting silently on the dilapidated table by the lone window.

“Ring,” Becky commands. “Ring. Now.”

Nothing but silence.

She scowls.

She doesn’t know why she’s expecting Mallory to return her phone call now.

She hadn’t done it years ago, when Becky had tried to reach her through the office of that fancy Hollywood agent of hers.

“Whom may I tell Ms. Eden is trying to reach her?” the agent’s snooty secretary had asked.

“This is her mother. Becky Baxter,” she had said.

Then, realizing her daughter wouldn’t recognize the last name she had taken from the long-dead junkie who had briefly been her husband, she had amended, “Becky O’Neal. Tell her it’s Becky O’Neal.”

“And where can you be reached?” the dubious-sounding woman had asked.

She’d had no number to leave.

She had been living on the streets of Chicago.

So she had hung up.

And, falling back into a drug-induced haze, she had forgotten about Mallory Eden.

At least, for a while.

Until Elizabeth had gotten herself into trouble.

Elizabeth …

Becky Baxter’s second-born daughter.

Two daughters, two chances.

The first child, she had quickly given up on, handing her over to her mother, Vera, to raise.

But the second…

She hadn’t wanted to make the same mistakes with the second child.

The second child she had raised herself. First, with very little assistance from the father, a no-good husband who finally got himself killed on the streets when Elizabeth was still in diapers. And after that she’d gone it alone, taking handouts where she could find them, turning tricks to support her child—and her own drug habit.

In the end, what she thought had been a mistake had turned out to be the best thing she could have done—giving her firstborn to Vera.

And what she had thought had been a responsible decision—to keep her second born with her—had turned out to be a serious error.

The child her mother had raised had grown up to be a modern-day princess.

And the child Becky herself had raised had grown up to be a lying, scheming junkie.

Just like me
.

It isn’t a new thought, but it disturbs Becky now as deeply as it always has.

She isn’t proud of who she is or what she’s done.

Still, it’s too late to change some things....

But not others.

Becky O’Neal Baxter, old before her time, will never erase her past, and she will never make amends with her mother.

Vera—who, Becky is certain, went to her grave despising her only child—isn’t coming back.

Elizabeth, poor Elizabeth, who had OD’d at seventeen, isn’t coming back either.

But …

Becky thinks of her other daughter, who has been in hiding for the past five years …

And calling herself by her dead sister’s name.

Maybe it’s not too late with Cindy.

Mallory.

Whoever she is.

she’s still your daughter
.

You’re still her mother
.

She might need you now, with everything that’s going on …

And she might not
.

But you sure as hell need her, especially now that You’re clean and ready to live a normal life. She owes you. If it weren’t for you, she wouldn’t have even been born. It’s time for payback
.

Will she agree?

Her gut twists as she stares again at the phone that refuses to ring.

M
allory picks up the phone when it rings, even though it’s almost midnight and she had almost fallen asleep.

“It’s me,” Harper’s voice says quietly in her ear, intimate as a lover’s whisper.

It’s me
.

Casual words that are used by people who have been together a long time, people who expect each other to call, to be there.

Not by two people who barely know each other.

And yet …

“Hi.” Mallory’s own voice sounds strangely breathless. She props herself on her pillows.

“Were you asleep?”

“Are you kidding?” She stifles a yawn.

“Are the reporters still stalking you?”

“The last time I peeked out the front window, there was an army of them in front of the house.”

“What about the police?”

“They’re still here too, keeping an eye on things.”

“Keeping an eye on you.”

“I guess. Not because I’m in any danger …”

She has to say it, has to hear the words so that maybe she’ll actually start believing that they’re true.

“But because of the press. I know.” Harper sighs. “They’re swarming around me too. I’m keeping my phone off the hook—do you still have my pager number?”

“I think so,” she says vaguely.

She doesn’t want to tell him that she tucked the scrap of paper into her wallet for safekeeping. Just in case she needed something…

Him.

“Good. If you have to reach me, use that,” he says. “Anyway, I was offered half a million to tell a tabloid what you’re like in bed.”

She sucks in her breath. “Oh, no …”

“I told them that if I knew,
they’d
be the last ones I’d tell.”

“Thank you.” She shakes her head ruefully, adding, “I’m sure half a million dollars would come in handy for you.”

“Nah,” he says, and she smiles.

“What are you going to do, Mallory?”

His question catches her off guard.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“About this. Everything that’s happened. Are you really going back to L.A.?”

“Who said that?”

“Some reporter on television.”

“I haven’t given a statement to anyone. I haven’t talked to anyone about my plans,” she says, her temper flaring.