“I’d like to kill you.”
Eve laughed. “But you won’t, because you want to own the company as much as I do… You’ll never hurt me, George, be cause if anything ever happens to me, a friend of mine is holding a letter that will be delivered to the police.”
He did not believe her. “You’re bluffing.”
Eve raked a long, sharp nail down his naked chest. “There’s only one way you can find out, isn’t there?” she taunted.
And he suddenly knew she was telling the truth. He was never going to be able to get rid of her! She was always going to be there to taunt him, to enslave him. He could not bear the idea of being at this bitch’s mercy for the rest of his life. And something inside him exploded. A red film descended over his eyes, and from that moment on he had no idea what he was doing. It was as though someone outside himself was controlling him. Everything happened in slow motion. He remembered shoving Eve off him, pulling her legs apart and her cries of pain. He was battering at something over and over, and it was indescribably wonderful. The whole center of his being was racked with a long spasm of unbearable bliss, and then another, and another, and he thought,
Oh, God! I’ve waited so long for this.
From somewhere in the far distance, someone was screaming. The red film slowly started to clear, and he looked down. Eve was lying on the bed, covered with blood. Her nose was smashed in, her body was covered with bruises and cigarette burns and her eyes were swollen shut. Her jaw was broken, and she was whimpering out of the side of her mouth. “Stop it, stop it, stop it…”
George shook his head to clear it. As the reality of the situation hit him, he was filled with sudden panic. There was no way he could ever explain what he had done. He had thrown everything away. Everything!
He leaned over her. “Eve?”
She opened one swollen eye. “Doctor…Get…a…doc tor… “Each word was a drop of pain. “Harley…John Harley.”
All George Mellis said on the phone was, “Can you come right away? Eve Blackwell has had an accident.”
When Dr. John Harley walked into the room, he took one look at Eve and the blood-spattered bed and walls and said, “Oh, my God!” He felt Eve’s fluttering pulse, and turned to George. “Call the police. Tell them we need an ambulance.”
Through the mist of pain, Eve whispered, “John…”
John Harley leaned over the bed. “You’re going to be all right. We’ll get you to the hospital.”
She reached out and found his hand. “No police…”
“I have to report this. I—”
Her grip tightened. “No…police…”
He looked at her shattered cheekbone, her broken jaw and the cigarette burns on her body. “Don’t try to talk.”
The pain was excruciating, but Eve was fighting for her life. “Please…” It took a long time to get the words out. “Private…Gran would never…forgive me… No…police… Hit…run…accident…”
There was no time to argue. Dr. Harley walked over to the telephone and dialed. “This is Dr. Harley.” He gave Eve’s address. “I want an ambulance sent here immediately. Find Dr. Keith Webster and ask him to meet me at the hospital. Tell him it’s an emergency. Have a room prepared for surgery.” He listened a moment, then said, “A hit-and-run accident.” He slammed down the receiver.
“Thank you, Doctor,” George breathed.
Dr. Harley turned to look at Alexandra’s husband, his eyes filled with loathing. George’s clothes had been hastily donned, but his knuckles were raw, and his hands and face were still spattered with blood. “Don’t thank me. I’m doing this for the Blackwells. But on one condition. That you agree to see a psychiatrist.”
“I don’t need a—”
“Then I’m calling the police, you sonofabitch. You’re not fit to be running around loose.” Dr. Harley reached for the telephone again.
“Wait a minute!” George stood there, thinking. He had almost thrown everything away, but now, miraculously, he was being given a second chance. “All right. I’ll see a psychiatrist.”
In the far distance they heard the wail of a siren.
She was being rushed down a long tunnel, and colored lights were flashing on and off. Her body felt light and airy, and she thought,
I can fly if I want to
, and she tried to move her arms, but something was holding them down. She opened her eyes, and she was speeding down a white corridor on a gurney being wheeled by two men in green gowns and caps.
I’m starring in a play
, Eve thought.
I can’t remember my lines. What are my lines?
When she opened her eyes again, she was in a large white room on an operating table.
A small, thin man in a green surgical gown was leaning over her. “My name is Keith Webster. I’m going to operate on you.”
“I don’t want to be ugly,” Eve whispered. It was difficult to talk. “Don’t let me be…ugly.”
“Not a chance,” Dr. Webster promised. “I’m going to put you to sleep now. Just relax.”
He gave a signal to the anesthesiologist.
George managed to wash the blood off himself and clean up in Eve’s bathroom, but he cursed as he glanced at his wrist-watch. It was three o’clock in the morning. He hoped Alexandra was asleep, but when he walked into their living room, she was waiting for him.
“Darling! I’ve been frantic! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Alex.”
She went up to him and hugged him. “I was getting ready to call the police. I thought something terrible had happened.”
How right you are
, George thought.
“Did you bring him the contracts?”
“Contracts?” He suddenly remembered. “Oh, those. Yes. I did.” That seemed like years ago, a lie from the distant past.
“What on earth kept you so late?”
“His plane was delayed,” George said glibly. “He wanted me to stay with him. I kept thinking he’d take off at any minute, and then finally it got too late for me to telephone you. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, now that you’re here.”
George thought of Eve as she was being carried out on the stretcher. Out of her broken, twisted mouth, she had gasped,
“Go…home…nothing…happened”. But what if Eve
died? He would be arrested for murder. If Eve lived, everything would be all right; it would be just as it was before. Eve would forgive him because she needed him.
George lay awake the rest of the night. He was thinking about Eve and the way she had screamed and begged for mercy. He felt her bones crunch again beneath his fists, and he smelled her burning flesh, and at that moment he was very close to loving her.
It was a stroke of great luck that John Harley was able to obtain the services of Keith Webster for Eve. Dr. Webster was one of the foremost plastic surgeons in the world. He had a private practice on Park Avenue and his own clinic in lower Manhattan, where he specialized in taking care of those who had been born with disfigurements. The people who came to the clinic paid only what they could afford. Dr. Webster was used to treating accident cases, but his first sight of Eve Blackwell’s battered face had shocked him. He had seen photographs of her in magazines, and to see that much beauty deliberately disfigured filled him with a deep anger.
“Who’s responsible for this, John?”
“It was a hit-and-run accident, Keith.”
Keith Webster snorted. “And then the driver stopped to strip her and snuff out his cigarette on her behind? What’s the real story?”
“I’m afraid I can’t discuss it. Can you put her back together again?”
“That’s what I do, John, put them back together again.”
It was almost noon when Dr. Webster finally said to his assistants, “We’re finished. Get her into intensive care. Call me at the slightest sign of anything going wrong.”
The operation had taken nine hours.
Eve was moved out of intensive care forty-eight hours later. George went to the hospital. He had to see Eve, to talk to her, to make sure she was not plotting some terrible vengeance against him.
“I’m Miss Blackwell’s attorney,” George told the duty nurse. “She asked to see me. I’ll only stay a moment.”
The nurse took one look at this handsome man and said, “She’s not supposed to have visitors, but I’m sure it’s all right if you go in.”
Eve was in a private room, lying in bed, flat on her back, swathed in bandages, tubes connected to her body like obscene appendages. The only parts of her face visible were her eyes and her lips.
“Hello, Eve…”
“George…” Her voice was a scratchy whisper. He had to lean close to hear what she said.
“You didn’t…tell Alex?”
“No, of course not.” He sat down on the edge of the bed. “I came because—”
“I know why you came… We’re…going ahead with it…”
He had a feeling of indescribable relief. “I’m sorry about this, Eve. I really am. I—”
“Have someone call Alex…and tell her I’ve gone away…on a trip…back in a few…weeks…”
“All right.”
Two bloodshot eyes looked up at him. “George…do me a favor.”
“Yes?”
“Die painfully…”
She slept. When she awakened, Dr. Keith Webster was at her bedside.
“How are you feeling?” His voice was gentle and soothing.
“Very tired…What was the…matter with me?”
Dr. Webster hesitated. The X rays had shown a fractured zygoma and a blowout fracture. There was a depressed zygomatic arch impinging on the temporal muscle, so that she was unable to open or close her mouth without pain. Her nose was broken. There were two broken ribs and deep cigarette burns on her posterior and on the soles of her feet.
“What?” Eve repeated.
Dr. Webster said, as gently as possible, “You had a fractured cheekbone. Your nose was broken. The bony floor where your eye sits had been shifted. There was pressure on the muscle that opens and closes your mouth. There were cigarette burns. Everything has been taken care of.”
“I want to see a mirror,” Eve whispered.
That was the last thing he would allow. “I’m sorry,” he smiled. “We’re fresh out.”
She was afraid to ask the next question. “How am I—how am I going to look when these bandages come off?”
“You’re going to look terrific. Exactly the way you did before your accident.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You’ll see. Now, do you want to tell me what happened? I have to write up a police report.”
There was a long silence. “I was hit by a truck.”
Dr. Keith Webster wondered again how anyone could have tried to destroy this fragile beauty, but he had long since given up pondering the vagaries of the human race and its capacity for cruelty. “I’ll need a name,” he said gently. “Who did it?”
“Mack.”
“And the last name?”
“Truck.”
Dr. Webster was puzzled by the conspiracy of silence. First John Harley, now Eve Blackwell.
“In cases of criminal assault,” Keith Webster told Eve, “I’m required by law to file a police report.”
Eve reached out for his hand and grasped it and held it tightly. “Please, if my grandmother or sister knew, it would kill them. If you tell the police…the newspapers will know. You mustn’t…please…”
“I can’t report it as a hit-and-run accident. Ladies don’t usually run out in the street without any clothes on.”
“Please!”
He looked down at her, and was filled with pity. “I suppose you could have tripped and fallen down the stairs of your home.”
She squeezed his hand tighter. “That’s exactly what happened…”
Dr. Webster sighed. “That’s what I thought.”
Dr. Keith Webster visited Eve every day after that, sometimes stopping by two or three times a day. He brought her flowers and small presents from the hospital gift shop. Each day Eve would ask him anxiously, “I just lie here all day. Why isn’t anyone doing anything?”
“My partner’s working on you,” Dr. Webster told her.
“Your partner?”
“Mother Nature. Under all those frightening-looking bandages, you’re healing beautifully.”
Every few days he would remove the bandages and examine her.
“Let me have a mirror,” Eve pleaded.
But his answer was always the same: “Not yet.”
He was the only company Eve had, and she began to look forward to his visits. He was an unprepossessing man, small and thin, with sandy, sparse hair and myopic brown eyes that constantly blinked. He was shy in Eve’s presence, and it amused her.
“Have you ever been married?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I—I don’t know. I guess I wouldn’t make a very good husband. I’m on emergency call a lot.”
“But you must have a girl friend.”
He was actually blushing. “Well, you know…”
“Tell me,” Eve teased him.
“I don’t have a regular girl friend.”
“I’ll bet all the nurses are crazy about you.”
“No. I’m afraid I’m not a very romantic kind of person.”
To say the least
, Eve thought. And yet, when she discussed Keith Webster with the nurses and interns who came in to perform various indignities on her body, they spoke of him as though he were some kind of god.
“The man is a miracle worker,” one intern said. “There’s nothing he can’t do with a human face.”
They told her about his work with deformed children and criminals, but when Eve asked Keith Webster about it, he dismissed the subject with, “Unfortunately, the world judges people by their looks. I try to help those who were born with physical deficiencies. It can make a big difference in their lives.”
Eve was puzzled by him. He was not doing it for the money or the glory. He was totally selfless. She had never met anyone like him, and she wondered what motivated him. But it was an idle curiosity. She had no interest in Keith Webster, except for what he could do for her.
Fifteen days after Eve checked into the hospital, she was moved to a private clinic in upstate New York.
“You’ll be more comfortable here,” Dr. Webster assured her.
Eve knew it was much farther for him to travel to see her, and yet he still appeared every day.
“Don’t you have any other patients?” Eve asked.
“Not like you.”
Five weeks after Eve entered the clinic, Keith Webster removed the bandages. He turned her head from side to side. “Do you feel any pain?” he asked.
“No.”
“Any tightness?”
“No.”
Dr. Webster looked up at the nurse. “Bring Miss Blackwell a mirror.”