Birthday Girls (35 page)

Sophie shook her head in exasperation. “You worry me, Madeline. I don’t know what’s happening to you.” She turned to leave.

A mixture of shame, embarrassment, and annoyance blended together in Maddie’s waking-up mind. “Mother?” she called. “Why did you come in here so early?”

With a sigh of frustration Sophie said, “Your friend Kris Kensington called. She wanted to let you know she’s gone to Phoenix.” She left the room, slamming the door behind her.

Maddie lay back and tried to decide how she was going to convince her mother that it was all right that she and Parker had slept together, that it was what she wanted, that it made her happy. Then her thoughts turned to Kris. Why the hell was she going to Phoenix? Beneath the sheets, Parker took Maddie’s hand and drew it to his morning-hard penis.

“I can’t possibly leave your bed in this situation,” he whispered.

Maddie knew what he wanted. She lowered her head and moistened her lips and decided to worry about Sophie and Kris later, once her husband was properly satisfied.

By the time
the plane touched down, Kris was exhausted. The surge of adrenaline that had propelled her to hunt for the bottle, throw her things together, jump into Edmund’s Mercedes, and speed to JFK had dissipated somewhere over the Rockies. She knew she could have phoned Louisa, but she’d felt compelled to see the woman in person, to talk with her face-to-face, to jog her memory if necessary—
anything
to get the damn bottle. Besides, Kris couldn’t have called Louisa at three in the morning, and there was no way she could have withstood hanging around the estate until it was a civilized hour to phone Pacific
Coast Time or Mountain Time or whatever the hell time it was in Arizona in January.

Impulsive
, Devon called it whenever her energy kicked in and she couldn’t be patient.
Spontaneous
, Kris preferred to call it.

The pilot announced it was 11:08
A.M.
Mountain Time as they taxied toward the gate.

Louisa’s
sister lived in the Arcadia district on the outskirts of town—with “a marvelous view of Camelback Mountain,” Louisa had told Kris when she’d phoned from the airport to say she was in town doing research and would very much like to drop by.

She steered the rental car through the streets of beige-stucco, red-tiled-roof ranch homes and turned off 44th Street. At the mailbox marked “21704,” Kris pulled into the driveway.

Open arms greeted her. As Louisa guided her out to the screened porch, Kris noted that the woman looked as rested and peaceful as if she’d been in the desert for months, rather than only a few days.

“My sister is out shopping,” she told Kris as they sat on the floral-covered patio furniture. Louisa picked up a remote control, muted the volume of a television game show, and poured lemonade from a tall pitcher. “She’ll be disappointed if you’ve left by the time she gets back. Did I ever tell you she’s read every one of your books?”

Kris was a little taken aback. An elderly woman addicted to Lexi Marks was a concept she’d never considered. She cleared her throat and remembered her mission.

“How is Edmund?” Louisa asked. “I had a call from Harriet Lindley. She’s concerned about him.”

“Edmund is fine.” She didn’t want to tell the woman about the police harassment. There was no need, and there
would be no need, as soon as Kris had her hands on the bottle of birthday wishes. “It’s difficult for him,” she went on, following her prepared speech. “It’s difficult for everyone.”

Louisa turned her gaze to the brown-and-rust landscape of the mountain, then up to the clear blue of the sky. The woman who had been like a mother to Abigail—indeed, the woman to whom Abigail was like her only child—did not have the right to cry, did not have the right to mourn. She was, after all, not Abigail’s mother. “Disenfranchised griever” was the term Kris had heard somewhere, not a blood relative, not entitled to grieve.

“I miss her, too,” Kris said quietly. “It’s odd, you know. We hadn’t seen each other in all those years, and then … well, it was as if we’d never been apart. I guess that can happen with childhood friends.”

“Or with sisters,” Louisa said, her spirit seeming to brighten again. “Ruth and I have been having a wonderful time …”

“That would have pleased Abigail.” Kris needed to turn the conversation back to Abigail, back to their childhood. “Abigail never had a sister,” Kris said. “Neither did I. I guess that’s why we were such good friends. Maddie, too.” She did not mention Betty Ann. “Which brings me to why I wanted to stop by, other than to see you. There’s something that’s been bothering me, and you might know the answer.”

Louisa’s eyes drifted back toward the television, as though she’d rather be watching the program than listening to Kris ramble on.

Leaning forward to get her attention, Kris asked, “Louisa, do you remember when Abigail and I were girls and we had those group birthday parties?”

The woman nodded and turned her eyes back to Kris. “I always baked you girls a special cake. With all your names on it.” Her eyes gleamed at the memory.

“Remember the year we smeared the frosting all over everything?” She was glad she’d looked back at the pictures.

Rolling her eyes, Louisa laughed. “You girls! You were always up to something.”

Kris laughed along with her. “And remember the way we always wrote down our birthday wishes? ‘By the time I am … whatever …’ and then put the wishes in a bottle?”

The woman frowned. Her eyes drifted back to the television, where carnival-like lights were flashing and a man was jumping up and down. “Birthday wishes?” she asked.

Kris felt her hopes plummet. Surely Louisa would remember. She
had
to remember …

Then a smile crossed the woman’s face. “Oh, I remember! The milk bottle! You put them in a milk bottle …”

“Until the next year,” Kris interrupted. “When we took them out to see if they’d come true …”

Turning to Kris, Louisa nodded. “I remember now. Yes, I remember.”

Kris sucked in her breath. “Do you remember the bottle, Louisa? Do you remember where Abigail kept it between birthdays?”

Louisa’s eyes shifted back to the television. Kris followed her gaze. The opening graphics for the KNXV Channel 15 Noon News splashed on the screen; Louisa had missed the grand finale of the game show.

“No,” she said. “I don’t know what she did with it. I never paid attention.”

Kris’s heart sank. She opened her mouth to try and jog Louisa’s memory, just as the woman said “Oh, my” and aimed the remote at the screen. “Isn’t that Edmund on the news?”

Over two
thousand miles away, in the twenty-eighth-floor offices of Hardy Enterprises, Larry and Sondra were
tuned into CNN, watching the same footage of Edmund walking up the steps of an official-looking building, flanked on either side by men in gray suits. Larry had been alerted by a friend at the all-news station, and he’d called Sondra in to witness the event.

“In a bizarre twist to a recent explosive story, the husband of Abigail Hardy is apparently undergoing extensive questioning by police. It has been a month since the woman media icon was declared missing-and-presumed-dead after a suicide note was found in her abandoned car on the Tappan Zee Bridge north of New York City.”

The image of Edmund’s face froze. The camera returned to the anchor desk.

“Edmund Desauliers, Miss Hardy’s husband of twenty years, also an international art dealer, admitted yesterday to a two-year affair with Helen Larson, the now-estranged wife of Herbert Larson, CEO of the media software giant of the same name. We’ll keep you posted on further developments as they occur.”

Larry smiled and clicked off the television. “Well, isn’t that interesting.”

“Interesting?” Sondra shrieked, pushing her weight up from the chair. “That’s my father!”

“Of course it is, Sondra,” Larry said. “And he’s going to help catapult you to success. Exposure is always good for business. Especially scandalous exposure. Didn’t your stepmother ever teach you that, darling? Oh,” he chirped as he began pacing the room, “royalties will go through the roof. We’ll be rich beyond our wildest dreams.” He turned quickly and faced Sondra. “Let’s do a book! The inside look at Abigail’s private life!”

Sondra stomped toward him. “You idiot!” she screamed. “That was my
father
. He didn’t kill Abigail!”

“It doesn’t matter if he did or not. Now that she’s dead, as long as her name is still in the headlines, the deals will come pouring in.”

Sondra smacked him across the face. “You’re sick! I never should have listened to you in the first place.” Then she pivoted and fled from the office.

As she left, Larry touched his stinging cheek and grinned. “I didn’t know you cared,” he said smugly, savoring his victory.

It was all falling into place. Of course he couldn’t do it without Sondra. But she would be back. There was no way she’d pass up the fame and the fortune that lay ahead. She was, after all, Abigail’s stepdaughter.

With visions of an explosive, tell-all bestseller, talk shows, and tabloids dancing in his head, Larry returned to his chair and congratulated himself on the brilliant move of tipping off the media to Edmund’s affair.

Devon
couldn’t get through to the estate. “You’ve reached Windsor-on-Hudson,” the machine said. “Please leave a message after the beep and we’ll get back to you.”

“This is Devon Reynolds,” he said into the receiver. “I’m looking for Kris Kensington. Kris, if you’re there, please call me right away.”

He hung up the phone and stared at the floor. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t called him. Then again, he’d told her he hadn’t wanted to know what was going on with this business about Abigail Hardy. He’d told her he wasn’t going to interefere. But that was before this had happened. That was before the police had publicly pointed a finger at Edmund Desauliers as a murderer.

Devon sighed and wished he had a cigarette to light, wished he hadn’t quit smoking back when he and Claire had married and he’d made a promise to himself to change his life, to be an upstanding citizen, to be respectable. Back when he’d realized that Kris Kensington could never be his.

He stood up and shoved his hands into the pockets of his respectable gray flannel pants and tried to fight the
gnawing suspicion that Kris was in trouble. And that she was not going to ask for his help.

Across
Puget Sound, it was raining in Seattle. Abigail sat on the too-soft bed in the damp, drafty room of the rambling bed and breakfast and stared at the television. She turned to the nightstand beside her, lit a cigarette, and reached for the half-full bottle of wine. As she did, she looked at the bottle that stood next to it. The bottle of Cristal champagne that was empty, except for the three tiny slips of paper that lay quietly at the bottom.

It wasn’t
, of course, news to her. Abigail had known about Edmund’s affair almost from the beginning. Even at the time she’d felt no jealousy, no pangs of terror at the thought that her husband was sleeping with another woman. She sipped her wine now and admitted that what she’d felt, instead, was relief.

Larry had not understood. “Jesus, Abigail,” he’d whined, as though Edmund were
his
husband, as though Edmund were cheating on
him
. It had been right before her first network special, and Larry was intimidated by everything. “This could screw us up!” he cried. “What if you and Edmund get a divorce? What if our backers pull their money? What if …”

She’d told Larry to stop it. She did, after all, know her husband well enough to be certain that he would never leave her. Not because he wanted her money or her fame, or the prestige of living at Windsor-on-Hudson. No, Edmund would stay with her because he was a proud man. And Abigail knew that somewhere deep inside he must be riddled with guilt over his actions. She also knew
Helen Larson and suspected that it had been the country-club-hopping, bridge-playing Helen who had seduced Edmund, not the other way around. But though Helen was most likely bored with her much older, stuffy husband, she was certainly not going to walk away from his billions.

Setting down her glass now, Abigail wished she had never told Larry about Edmund’s affair. Just as she wished she’d never made that scene over Edmund and Kris. Lately she wished so many things, but only one wish had seemed to come true.

Rising from the bed, still in yesterday’s clothes, she walked to the window.

Seattle
, she thought, looking over the slate-colored waters of the sound at the pewter skyline beyond. It had been amazingly easy to get here. She’d slipped on the brunette wig in the ladies room at the bus station and changed from her Ellen Tracy dress into leggins and a sweatshirt. Her telltale green eyes easily became brown with the help of contacts, and the large-framed, tinted glasses made her disguise even more believable.

She could not, of course, have flown. Security measures at airports require photo IDs today, and she’d decided not to involve Kris’s friend, not to indebt herself to that woman ever again. Besides, she hadn’t had enough time to set aside twenty thousand to pay a gigolo, moonlighting G-man. She hadn’t, after all, expected her departure to happen so soon. Thank God she’d at least come away with the jewels.