The woman at the door pointed at something in the window and then at her watch. Just a minute after closing, a tiny minute, she pantomimed.
Maggie clicked her tongue. It had been a long day. She wasn’t in the mood for the kind of person who didn’t care about the rules. Maggie knew she had to follow all the rules to be safe. All too painfully and well did she know what happened when she slipped and didn’t follow the rules. Still, it occurred to her that if she opened the door, she could find out the vital statistics of the dog. It looked so much like a lively monkey.
One thing she had learned in her short time in New York was that dog owners were the only people who truly enjoyed being approached and talked to on the street. They loved having their babies admired. If she let the customer in, she could probably play with the puppy.
Without considering the matter any further, Maggie smiled and unlocked the door. “We’re closed,” she said. “What an adorable dog.”
“Well, the sign’s up, but you’re still here. Can’t you make an exception for a few seconds? I wanted to buy that shirt for a friend’s birthday.” The woman was tall, imperious. She pointed at an array of blouses in the display window. “I’ve been meaning to drop by all week, but just haven’t had a minute to come in for it. I’m going away,” she said peevishly, “and if I don’t get it now, I won’t ever be able to.”
Through the half-open door, Maggie reached out to pat the dog’s head.
The woman smiled and pushed in. She backed Maggie into the store, moving her shoulder at the same time so the dog in the canvas bag was out of reach. The door clicked behind her.
Maggie’s attention was on the puppy. It was definitely a tiny poodle. The fur was still as fluffy as unspun silk, and
she wanted to touch its baby softness. As she reached out to pet it, the puppy’s velvety tongue darted out to lick her. “Oh,” she cried.
“Don’t touch the dog,” the woman said sharply. “You going to sell me the blouse or not?”
“Which one is it?” Maggie asked, putting her mind on the sale. There were several blouses in the window. Then, unable to resist, she added, “What’s its name?” about the dog. “How old is it?”
“Right there. The white one. Hurry up, I don’t have all night.”
“It’s the cutest dog I’ve ever seen,” Maggie cried, unable to take her eyes off it. The pale puppy fluff stood on end, as if it had just been brushed, or electrified. She reached out one finger to touch it.
“Can’t you
hear
? I said don’t touch the dog.” The woman backed away angrily. “Are you going to get me that shirt, or am I going to have to complain to your boss?”
Maggie flinched at her tone, suddenly uneasy. The woman’s face had frozen into a mask of fury. Maggie hesitated. What would Elsbeth want her to do?
“What’s your problem? I asked for that shirt. Get it for me.”
“The one in the window is a petite. I don’t think we have any white ones in your size left,” Maggie said slowly, glancing toward the back room by the dressing room, where only the blouses and cotton sweaters were stored. The door was open, but from where she stood she couldn’t see the shelves stacked with colorful items in plastic bags. She couldn’t remember if there was a white one left or not. In any case, she didn’t want to leave the woman alone in the shop while she looked. There was something odd about her.
“Well, go and look. Hurry up, I don’t have all night,” she repeated.
Well, Maggie didn’t have all night either. She was hungry and tired and getting anxious about the way the large, pushy woman was talking to her. A muscle jumped in her cheek and now she was looking around as if she planned to take something the minute Maggie turned her back. If the woman stole something, Maggie would have to pay for it
with her salary. What did the woman want? All kinds of things happened in New York. Maybe she was a criminal. Maggie hesitated, unsure what the right thing to do was. She didn’t want to make the wrong move. But what was the right move with someone like this?
The puppy winked at her, its head cocked to one side.
Angrily, the woman moved closer. “Just get me the damn shirt and I’ll get out of here.”
Okay. That was it. New Yorkers were something. They had to have what they wanted when they wanted it and didn’t care how they got it. Maggie decided to get the damn shirt. As she turned toward the closet, her elbow accidentally brushed the canvas bag. The puppy, poised like a panther, its front paws together and head drawn back, suddenly leapt out of the bag. Maggie caught it in her arms like a short pass in the end zone.
It was unbelievably soft and sweet. Like a baby, it clung to Maggie’s neck and covered her eyes, lips, and nose with warm, velvety kisses. They were the last kisses she would ever receive.
The woman grabbed the dog, wrenching Maggie’s arm in a fury.
“Ow.” Maggie’s eyes filled with tears. “Let go.”
“Damn bitch. I told you not to touch my dog.”
“Hey, what’re you doing? Don’t. You’re hurting me.”
The woman seemed to have forgotten the dog. The dog was on the floor, sniffing around. “You get it for me. You hear me? You
get that shirt for me.”
Ranting, she shoved Maggie toward the storeroom.
One of Maggie’s arms was twisted so badly she was sure her shoulder was dislocated. “Stop.” Suddenly frantic, she tried to pull away, get to the front door, and push the alarm. The woman was much stronger than she was. She pushed Maggie the other way, toward the back room.
Maggie resisted and felt something give in her shoulder.
“Help!” she screamed, but the door to the street was closed and locked. On the other side of it, the sidewalk was empty. No one was window-shopping. There was an alarm button by the money drawer. Maggie was dragged away from that, too. She couldn’t reach anything. For an instant
she saw the dog sitting on the floor in the shop, watching her struggle with great interest. Then it squatted and peed. Maggie’s last thought before she was shoved into the back room and the door slammed on them was that the dog was a girl.
“Bitch,” the woman cried. “I’ll teach you to touch other people’s things.”
“Ow.” Maggie clawed at the door with her uninjured hand.
“Stop that.” The woman started shaking her so violently that her head snapped back and forth. “Stop that! Stop taking my things. You can’t have my things.”
“I didn’t—I don’t—No!”
The woman let go of Maggie’s shoulders and gripped her throat. With both hands she started shaking her by the neck.
“Always taking my things. Can’t have my things. Think you can fool me. No. You can’t fool me.”
“Agggh.” Maggie was choking. Her eyes bulged. “Agggh.” She kicked out, trying to scream, to get away. She blacked out for a second, then revived when the pressure eased.
“Bitch!”
Pain exploded in her head for the last time. The woman had slipped a cord around her neck and was yanking hard.
Twenty minutes later Maggie Wheeler hung from the light fixture in the storeroom in a five-hundred-dollar size-fourteen flowered summer dress that hung way down over her shoulders and hid her feet. Purple lipstick and blue eye shadow, grotesquely applied, further disfigured her mournful little face. The air conditioner, set on high and blowing on her, ruffled her hair and skirt, and gave her the appearance of eternal living death.
W
hat was left of the former potato field stretched over several acres at least, flat and vegetation-free. Set back a hundred or so feet from the newly created road, the house in progress soared over the emptiness, straining for even a tiny glimpse of the ocean, a quarter of a mile to the south.
Charles stopped the BMW at the construction site with a jerk and jumped out excitedly.
“What do you think?” he demanded of his oldest friend in the mental health field.
Jason Frank, author of scholarly texts, teacher, and psychoanalyst, got out of the passenger seat slowly, as if both of his long, well-muscled legs had recently been broken and were not yet fully healed. For a minute he took in the Portosan, the construction trailer, the advertising signs of the architect, builder, landscape architect, and the dozen suppliers that littered the site. Without going a step closer he could tell that the eleven-room house would be fully air-conditioned, would have a tennis court and swimming pool, and was already alarmed against vandals and thieves. This was some beach shack for a psychiatrist whose hourly fee was fixed, like Jason’s, at a hundred and sixty-five dollars for those who could pay, and less for those who couldn’t. There was no way he could afford such a house on his earned income.
The familiar twinge of jealousy, now almost twenty years old, threatened to seize Jason in the region of his heart, probe around for the weakest place, and strike him down with despair. Charles was independently wealthy, had
all the glamour and worldly goods, and Jason was stuck with the driving ambition to do something important and leave his mark on the profession.
Charles fixed Jason with the same look of eager anticipation that had charmed him when they met and became friends at the Psychiatric Center the first day of their training. Jason had just returned to New York from medical school in Chicago and Charles was finally home from Yale. Both were eager and idealistic about psychiatry, their chosen specialty; and both were unhappily married to their high school sweethearts.
The similarities between them went a little further. They looked like they could be brothers, were six feet tall and athletic. Jason had the body of a runner, the brain of a scientist, and the all-American good looks of a Kennedy. For him it was an unlikely mix, bred from five thousand years of dark Jewish angst in northern Europe, an unhappy childhood in the Bronx, and the iron will to do better than his forebears. His parents, his grandparents, and their grandparents had all been poor, struggling peasants. Brilliant and intense, Jason was not only tall, light-brown-haired, and handsome, but the first financial success in his family.
Charles, on the other hand, was more of the Mediterranean type. He was dark-eyed, dark-haired, passionate. He was also less angular in his features than Jason, had more of a nose, more flesh in his face and body, and was a good deal more hedonistic in his approach to life. The pampered only son of a rich Westchester family, he had always been able to do exactly as he pleased, and never hesitated to do it. While Jason was still struggling to support his family and first wife, Charles already had two children, two cars, and a house in the suburbs that he wanted to be rid of. Now, nearly fifteen years later, Charles had four children, two belonging to his second wife, Brenda, three cars, three houses, and, Jason suspected, a mistress. Charles couldn’t be happy with one of anything. He was also secretive. He never said a thing about this new plaything in all the months of its planning and construction.
Jason looked up at the looming structure with a sick
feeling in the pit of his stomach. If he hadn’t been so heavily focused on his teaching, his patients, and his writing all these years, he might have at least a few possessions, too. He was on the brink of forty, and three months ago his second wife, the actress Emma Chapman, went to California to make a movie. After the shooting stopped, she told him she wasn’t coming back.
“Is this the living end, or what?” Charles demanded when no awed praise from Jason was forthcoming.
He put a protective hand on Jason’s shoulder as if to say, We’ve been through a lot together—two divorces, two remarriages, Emma’s kidnapping in the spring. Hell, we’ll find a way to get through the separation, too.
Jason nodded. It was the living end, all right.
He glanced over at Milicia Honiger-Stanton, who had hung back for a moment to get the fifty oversize pages of house plans out of the car. He watched her reach in, leaning all the way across the back seat, so that her short, tight skirt hiked up and displayed long, shapely legs and an extremely well-formed derriere. Charles caught the direction of Jason’s gaze and raised an eyebrow in approval.
“That’s it, take an interest, get the blood flowing again,” he murmured.
Jason turned away, frowning. When he first got off the train that morning and saw Charles and Milicia together waiting for him at the station, Jason suspected that the tall and extraordinarily dramatic Milicia, of the wild red hair and deep green eyes, must be the mistress Charles had hidden somewhere in the woodwork of his life.
It would be just like Charles to go so far as to actually build a house to provide a project for the architect he lusted after. Jason couldn’t imagine any other reason to construct a house in the Hamptons when he already had one in Bedford. Then they got to the house Charles and Brenda were renting while their new one was being built. When Brenda ran out to greet him all excited and pleased in a way he hadn’t seen her in a long time, he realized the house was for her. And Milicia was a red herring. He shook his head at himself. He missed the cue. Must be losing his grip.
As Jason crunched across the pebble drive, Brenda ran
out to meet him, waving enthusiastically. “I’m
so
glad you came. I’ve been thinking about you.”
She was all in white—big white blouse, flowing white skirt. They made her dark hair and tanned skin stand at attention. She reached out her arms and engulfed him in a cloud of some floral-mix perfume that was both unidentifiable and immensely appealing. Jason had always liked her. Brenda was a small, elegant woman with a lovely shape and at least as much intelligence as her husband. Her embrace at that moment was devastating. Jason worked in a field where no one touched. He hadn’t received a hug in some time. He released himself from it quickly to stop his heart from breaking.
“How are you doing? I can’t not ask,” she said almost apologetically.
“You can ask. I’m fine. Fine.” He nodded to show how fine he was.
“I think about you and Emma all the time. What do you hear from her?” She took his arm as they walked to the house, shaking her head, as if baffled by Emma’s desertion after what Jason did for her.