The Wrong Man: A Novel of Suspense (4 page)

She thought suddenly of the comment X had made after he’d asked her to bed. He said that in the next weeks he’d need to focus all his attention on a critical matter, and he’d looked troubled by the thought. Was that because he was on the run? Nothing, however, about his comment or his manner then, had
set off alarm bells for her. She’d simply assumed he was dealing with a personal, private challenge.

There was something else churning inside her, something she hated to acknowledge.
Disappointment
. Not only had the sex with X made her body feel as if it was on fire, but she had
liked
him, had found him more interesting than any man she’d met in ages, and had loved the effortlessness of being in his company. There’d be no repeat.

It was still drizzling out when she ascended the steps of the Spring Street station, and the air felt raw. She had a four-block walk ahead. Tightening the belt of her trench coat, she quickened her pace. All she wanted was to be home, curled up in bed with something warm to drink.

She turned onto her street and saw that it was almost empty, except for two people climbing into a van halfway up the block. A question suddenly recurred, one she had asked herself in Healy’s corridor.

Why had X
punked
her that way? Con artist or not, he’d seemed so thoughtful toward her. Though he’d been open about wanting sex, there’d been no pressure on his part, and he’d offered her a reason to pass. Besides, once he’d conveyed on Sunday night that he wasn’t interested in any entanglements and she’d accepted the fact, why not just leave it at that?

Had he derived some sadistic
pleasure
from doing it, chuckling malevolently as he imagined her arriving at Matt Healy’s building all lit up and then leaving with her tail between her legs. The thought chilled her.

He had her business card, she realized, a breath catching in her chest. It listed only her work address, but that, of course, was also where she lived.

She tried to tamp down her fear. She’d been tricked but there didn’t seem to be any real reason to be alarmed. X was
probably still in Florida, onto another play by now. She pitied the next girl in line.

Her building was just a few yards away now, and she made a dash toward it. The lobby was empty, forlorn almost, and she jangled her keys nervously as she waited for the elevator. When she was finally inside her apartment, she shut the door closed with such force that a framed print nearby bounced against the wall.

She threw the bolt on the door and set the chain.

After kicking off her boots, she grabbed her laptop and searched online for Ithaka, the hedge fund Healy had jotted down on the napkin. She quickly found the firm’s official website, tapped on it, and seconds later was staring at a bio of Matt Healy, complete with photo. It was the same guy she’d just met. There was no doubt now that he’d been telling the truth and that X had tricked her.

She thought of one more step she could take, mainly to satisfy morbid curiosity. X had introduced himself as Matt Healy and she wanted to know if he’d presented himself to the hotel that way or just to her. She called the hotel and asked for Matt Healy’s room.

“I’m sorry,” the operator said after a pause. “Mr. Healy has already checked out.”

So he’d definitely posed as Healy. But how had he paid the hotel bill? The real Matt had said that he’d cancelled his cards. Wouldn’t X have needed a credit card to check in? Had he somehow managed to get a new card under Matt Healy’s name, using the identity he’d stolen?

Even if she had the answers, none of them would shed any light on why he had duped her into going to apartment 18C.
She told herself to feel lucky that she’d escaped Islamorada with only her ego bruised.

She tugged off her gray jersey dress and hung it back in the closet. It looked mopey and morose on the hanger, as if its feelings had been hurt, too. She couldn’t help but picture herself three hours ago, shimmying into the dress and pairing it with a long silver pendent. How pointless all her efforts had been.

She forced herself to the fridge and rooted around for food. There was half a chicken breast, left over from a rotisserie bird she’d bought the day before, a bag of mesclun greens, and a chunk of blue cheese, not quite ripe enough to kill an STD but almost. As she stood at the kitchen counter, fashioning a salad from what she’d found, she thought of the meal she’d eaten that night with X—conch chowder, blackened red snapper, a slice of key lime pie, all so different from her usual fare.

There was something else that was troubling her, she realized, something that the memory of those dishes forced her to recognize. Her Florida trip was supposed to have been a turning point, the beginning of a more daring, more adventurous chapter in her life. Not so much a
new
Kit really, but the Kit she’d once been as a girl, before everything had unraveled in her family’s life. Well, so much for being a bit of a badass. Maybe she should take the whole episode as a warning.

The irony was that in her work she rarely held back. She’d started her own business, and when it came to the actual design work, she liked to turn things on their ear, like painting a wall to resemble awning stripes or upholstering a couch with the fabric inside out.

That was one of the reasons she’d been so excited about teaming with Baby, a bold decorator who advocated that every room have at least “a dash of clash.” She always pushed the envelope, like choosing Fanta orange for the accent color in a
posh Upper East Side apartment. The two of them loved tossing wild-card ideas back and forth.

“Oh, you naughty girl,” Baby would say to her.

But in other aspects of life, including love, Kit had always played it ridiculously safe. Risks scared her pants off, or rather, for the most part kept them on. She thought of herself as the total opposite of a woman who was buttoned-up all day at the office but after sundown turned into a whip-wielding dominatrix, with a name like “Madame Darke” or “Nurse Payne.” After a gutsy day at work,
she
turned into “Miss Goody Two Shoes.”

Of course her friends would probably have been surprised to discover she thought of herself that way. They referred to her as
spunky
—or at least most of them did. Kit suspected that after her bland, lame relationship with Jeremy, a few might have begun to revise their sense of her.

She crashed at eleven that night. The sound of a couple arguing on the street below woke her just after one, and it took her over an hour to fall back to sleep. She kept thinking of X, wondering how she could have done such a bad job of reading him. A few memories surfaced: X on the phone on the walkway, sounding slightly aggravated. Maybe he’d been talking to a cohort. X casting his gaze around the restaurant right after they’d finished eating. At the moment she’d supposed that he was searching for the waiter. But it could have been the instinct of a criminal who was always on the watch.

First thing the next morning, she emailed Matt Healy and told him that she’d drop by his office at noon. The sooner she got it over with, the better. She dressed casually—she planned to shop a good part of the day—grabbed a yogurt, and unlocked the door that led to her office from the apartment. The point of the door wasn’t simply for her convenience. Both she and Baby occasionally used the living space for client meetings—it was a great way to show off the kind of nontraditional aesthetic they
subscribed to—and the inner door gave them easy access back and forth.

Baby had beaten her into the office that morning. She’d laid trace paper over an apartment floor plan and was plotting out where the furniture ought to be positioned.

Baby had spent nearly four decades as one of Manhattan’s top decorators—not quite in the same league as Bunny Williams or Mario Buatta, but in demand by tons of well-heeled clients. She’d retired at sixty-four, planning to travel, entertain, and relish life, but when her adored husband Dan had died five years later, she’d decided that the best way to tackle grief was to jump feet first back into work. After meeting Kit at an event and getting to know her, she’d suggested partnering with her—and investing a small amount of money in the business. Kit had been ecstatic. This time, though, Baby had no interest in her projects being splashed in the pages of
Elle Decor
or
Architectural Digest
. She wanted out of the limelight and that’s why a small boutique business had appealed to her.

In the two years they’d worked together, she and Baby had become not only colleagues but also friends, often reaching out to each other for personal guidance. The day after her return from Florida, Kit had reported on her dinner under the stars with the man calling himself Matt Healy—and had admitted to spending the night with him. As soon as Baby set eyes on Kit this morning, she arched a brow mischievously, eager for a full report about the date.

After dropping into her chair, Kit blurted out what happened.

“That’s perfectly dreadful,” Baby declared. “The man should be shot.”

“Yes, but so should
I
. It was just so stupid of me to believe he was the real deal.”

“It’s not like you let someone convince you the moon landing was faked. Thinking an attractive, educated-seeming man is
who he claims to be isn’t stupid. It’s a mistake any woman could make.”

“I appreciate your saying that, Baby. But it was a lapse, a big one. The guy was a freaking con artist. I hate the thought of making a bad call like that.”

Baby tapped her hands together softly, her red nails gleaming.

“I don’t know if I ever mentioned this to you, but I was married briefly in my twenties before I met Dan. These days they call that a starter marriage, though back then the euphemism was ‘too young to know better.’ The man was a real cad and he cheated on me within months. For years, even after I married Dan, I beat myself up about it, really doubted my judgment. What helped me was to finally step back and ask myself what the warning signs might have been and why I missed them.”

“
Had
there been warning signs?” Kit asked.

Baby scoffed. “Does French kissing the maid of honor at the rehearsal dinner count? Unfortunately I didn’t learn that until much later. But there had been subtle signs from the very start, ones I’d chosen to ignore. Put this behind you, Kit. But there may be something to learn from it.”

Kit nodded glumly. The only lesson she’d gleaned so far was that taking a risk had blown up in her face.

“That said,” Baby added, “it’s time for you to meet someone new and wonderful. Why don’t you finally give Match a chance?”

“But I thought you said it was full of losers and lunatics.”

“Oh, in my age category—also known as the court of last resort—it’s positively swimming with them. I had a date two weeks ago with a man who told me he would never travel to Italy because the Italians inject sleeping potions into their train compartments so they can rob you while you are unconscious. But you’re in an age category with far more options. Plus, it’s a
numbers game. You have to cycle through a certain number of bad ones for something good.”

“Maybe I’ll give it a try,” she said half heartedly. She
did
want to meet someone. It had been five months since her split with Jeremy, a mutually agreed upon one, and she felt hungry for a real connection with a man, hungry, she had to admit, for love. But getting there seemed like such an awful lot of effort, something you needed to work at like a second job. That was part of the reason the night with X had been so gratifying. Instant attraction. No game playing. Or at least that’s how it had presented itself
then
.

“Just a word of caution,” Baby advised. “Don’t believe anyone who announces in the first email that his baggage is small enough to fit in the overhead compartment.”

“Ha,” Kit said, smiling. “I’ll watch for that.”

Baby’s face clouded.

“You don’t have any concerns that this man will try to track you down, do you?”

Kit sighed. “I have to admit, I’ve felt anxious since last night. But I’m banking on the fact that he’s one thousand miles away. And at noon, I’m going in to meet with the security chief at Healy’s firm. Who knows? Maybe there’s something they can do.”

“I’ll be eager to know how it goes.”

Kit turned her attention to work. Beyond the Griggses’ Greenwich Village apartment, she was juggling five or six other projects, including a one-bedroom Murray Hill condo for a recently divorced, fifty-something tax attorney named Barry Kaplan with the simplest of demands (“I just want a place women will dig and doesn’t have any of those little towels and soaps in the bathroom you’re never supposed to actually use”); a two-bedroom rental in Chelsea that a picky couple insisted be spectacular on next to nothing; and, of course, the Jersey Shore cottage that was supposed to have a Florida Keys vibe.

She knew the last project would make it difficult to put X out of her mind, but at the moment it had to be her priority. Following her return last Monday, she’d forwarded the owner, Avery Howe, some of the photos she’d snapped in Florida and explained that she’d soon be following up with a plan.

But something about the whole project had her stymied. Avery, the thirty-nine-year-old head of a hip, boutique PR firm, insisted she wanted a beachy Key West vibe in the cottage. That would be easy enough to pull off, but everything Kit knew about Avery seemed to contradict what she claimed to long for. Could anyone who wore earrings with two huge Chanel C’s on them and carried designer handbags too large to fit under the airline seat in front of her be happy in rooms decorated with bamboo shades and bleached coral?

Kit grabbed a sheet of paper and made a Venn diagram. In one bubble she scribbled down words Avery had tossed out during one of their exploratory meetings, words that also fit with the clippings Avery had pulled for her: spare, serene, creamy, bleached wood. In the other bubble she listed words she associated with Avery’s personal style: chic, sophisticated, glittery, over the top at times. Then she stared at the empty intersecting section and wondered what could fit there.

Nothing came immediately to mind. She made herself a cappuccino in the office kitchenette and as she stared at a small milk mug, one she’d brought back as a souvenir from a trip to Sweden, she suddenly had a crazy brainstorm. What if she went for beachy but mixed in touches of Gustavian design? It was a Swedish style from the 1800’s that called for cream colors, as well as splashes of pale gray, blue, or yellow. But it also featured crystal chandeliers and gilded mirrors. Done right, Gustavian could be both spare and glittery. It could give Avery what she
swore
she wanted as well as what she probably yearned for without knowing it.

Perfect, Kit thought. She sent Avery a long email describing the concept.

Dara, Kit and Baby’s assistant, arrived promptly at nine. She was wearing a fuchsia-colored turtleneck sweater that worked fabulously with her dark brown skin and hair. After they exchanged hellos, Kit asked Dara to start putting together Pinterest pins on Gustavian design for her to share with Avery.

“Oh, that era rocks,” Dara said. “And I’d love to know more about it.”

“You never cease to amaze me, Dara,” Kit said. And it was true. Dara was not only mature for twenty-four, but she also had far more understanding of decorating history than Kit ever possessed at her age.

“Well, it’s all that Swedish blood of mine,” Dara said kiddingly.

At 11:15, Kit slipped on her coat, said goodbye to her office mates—letting Dara assume she was off on an errand—and headed toward the subway. She still felt unsettled about her experience in Islamorada and wasn’t looking forward to revisiting it.

Ithaka was located on West 43rd, in a nondescript high-rise, but when Kit stepped off the elevator onto the twenty-ninth floor, she discovered that the reception area was sleek and modern; one entire wall was covered in glowing white Plexiglas with the word Ithaka in gray. She gave her name to the receptionist and a minute later Matt Healy appeared. He looked spiffier today, dressed in business casual—black slacks and a crisp button down shirt—but she could sense the edge still. Maybe the identity theft was weighing heavily on him.