So Pretty It Hurts

Chapter 8

With each roll of my body, the same thought kept shooting through my brain: Please don’t let my neck snap in two. Though I tried to grab on to something, all I could reach was air or the edge of each stair step, and neither was any help. Suddenly my head thwacked hard against something—maybe the base of the banister—and my hand slammed into the ground floor. I stopped rolling. I lay on the ground, eyes closed. A million little lights pulsed in my brain.

I moaned. My head hurt and so did my butt and left wrist. And then there was a light nearly piercing my eyelids. I felt a rush of panic, thinking it must be the person who had knocked me down the stairs. But as I opened my eyes, squinting, I saw that it was Scott who was standing there, holding a flashlight.

“Are you okay?” he demanded.

“Uhhh, I’m not sure,” I groaned.

“I don’t want to touch you—in case something’s broken. Can you just wiggle your fingers and toes and make sure you can move?”

“Yeah, just give me a second to catch my breath.”

Though I knew I was probably bruised in places, it didn’t feel as if anything was broken. One at a time, I lifted each arm and leg, making certain I could move them.

“I think I’m okay,” I said after a minute. “Could you just give me a hand?”

Taking my arm, Scott eased me into a sitting position and then helped me stand. For a second I felt a wave of dizziness, but then it subsided.

“What happened, for God’s sake?” Scott asked.

“Someone knocked me down the stairs. I’m not sure if they did it on purpose or were just trying to get around me. They were hiding in the dark up there.”

“What? What do you mean, hiding in the dark?”

I described what had happened up until he’d found me sprawled at his feet.

“I thought I heard a knock,” he said. “And my phone ringing. But it took me a minute or so to figure out if I was dreaming or not. Just as I reached the door, I heard someone tumbling down the stairs.”

“And you didn’t see anyone when you opened the door?”

“No, no one. My God, this is crazy.”

He directed his flashlight around the ground floor of the barn. Lying in a small heap near the door was one of the dark green rain ponchos from the pegs.

“I think the person was wearing that,” I said. “I felt something slick like it against my skin. Oh, and look there.”

I pointed to a rusty branding iron, one of the old farm tools I’d seen displayed on the walls. It was lying a few feet away from the poncho.

“That must be what the person used to scratch on the doors,” I said.

“What a fucking mess,” Scott said. “Who in God’s name would do something like that?”

“Good question.”

“What about you?” Scott said. “Should we try to get you to a hospital?”

Wow, wouldn’t it be sweet to see this place in the rearview mirror, but I didn’t feel in dire need of medical attention—and I couldn’t abandon Jessie.

“My wrist seems to be the only thing really hurting, but I think it’s just a bruise. Why don’t I just put ice on it for a while and see how it feels.”

He scooted upstairs to the fridge, returning in a minute with ice wrapped in a dishrag, two ibuprofen, and a glass of water. He’d also managed to locate another flashlight. I winced as I touched the pack gingerly to my wrist.

“Let’s get you back to your room,” Scott said. “Plus I want to check it out over there.”

He walked me back to the small barn, and we surveyed the damage to each door.

“I need to let the police know about this,” he whispered. “But it’s probably best to wait till morning. Otherwise we’ll freak everyone out. Just to be on the safe side, I’ll have Ralph sit on the ground floor of the barn and keep an eye out.”

I asked him to leave me at Jessie’s door, and as soon as she’d opened it, he took off. Jessie went bug-eyed at the sight of the ice pack. As I filled her in on what had happened, she began to tear up.

“What if something worse had happened to you?” she said, wiping at her eyes. “We’ve got to get out here.”

“The road should be clear tomorrow morning. We just have to tough it out for a few more hours. Try to get some sleep, okay?”

The second she closed her door, I heard her drag the table back against the door. I stood for a few seconds in the hall, examining the scratch marks on her door with the flashlight, trying to determine if there might be message a there—a word or a symbol. But there wasn’t. And none on my door either. They were just random scratch marks.

Back in my room I barricaded my own door and then, shivering, climbed into bed. As I lay there, taking a few long, deep breaths to try to relax, I heard male voices rising from the first floor. Scott had obviously brought Ralph, as promised.

Once the voices subsided, I replayed in my mind those few seconds at the top of the stairs. Come on, I urged myself. There had to be some kind of clue that would point to the night raider’s identity. But the only thing I had to go on was that awful stench of sweat. It suggested a man, and yet a woman could sweat heavily too if she was racing around playing a nasty trick and then was forced to hide, fearful of being caught.

Scott had asked who in God’s name would do something like that, and I honestly had no clue. It might be some kind of warning. One thing suddenly occurred to me. If Cap or Whitney or Tory or Tommy were the culprit, his or her partner had probably become aware of the sudden absence of the person sharing the bed.

Finally, at around four, I drifted off into a fractured sleep, fraught with vague, scary dreams.

When I opened my door the next morning at seven, bundled up in two sweaters, Scott was standing right there, his hand raised to knock.

“I’m getting everyone up,” he announced. “The police are due shortly, and the morgue van won’t be much later, since the road will be cleared within the next hour.”

The power was still out, which meant no hot water. So I skipped a shower and just splashed cold water on my face and torso. There was enough light from the bathroom window for me to study my bruises. I had black and blue marks on my ass and legs and a small bump on my forehead. My wrist was sore, but it was clear nothing was broken. I popped two ibuprofen, dressed quickly, and picked up Jessie before heading to the big barn.

There were already a few people waiting when we arrived, including Sandy, who had set out bagels and muffins on the counter. The two stoves were working their butts off, but there was a chill to the room. As each new person came up the stairs, they demanded to know what was going on. All Scott would say was, “Grab a mug of tea. There’s been a new development, but let’s wait until everyone arrives.” Once we were all seated, he broke the news—the vandalism of the doors, me being pushed down the stairs, and the fact that the cops would be back this morning. Every person sitting there glanced quickly around at the others, looking shocked. Clearly one person was faking it.

“I saw the marks when we were leaving the room just now,” Cap said. “Are you saying one of the guests made them?”

“Yes,” Scott said soberly. “I hardly think Sandy or Ralph came over here during the night and played a prank on us all.”

“Now that you mention it, I thought I heard someone at my door last night,” Tommy said, “but to be perfectly honest, I thought it was Bailey dropping by for a late-night interview. I was just too spent to answer.”

Oh, yeah, just me and a can of Reddiwip.

“Well, I don’t care if I have to hike out by foot and pick Devon’s car up next spring, I’m getting the fuck out of here,” Jane declared.

“Aren’t there rescue workers who can help us?” Tory wailed. “We’re trapped—like people in that Hurricane Katrina.”

Tommy started to say something, and Scott raised his hand to quiet everyone. He explained that the road would be plowed by the time we were done speaking to the cops again, and then everyone would be free to leave.

“Shouldn’t we be asking how poor Bailey is?” Richard said, though his tone didn’t suggest much sympathy.

“Much better, thank you,” I said.

The police arrived twenty minutes later, and my conversation with Detective Collinson went far less smoothly than the earlier ones. As I described my tumble down the stairs, an irritated look formed on his ghost-white face, as if I’d just announced I’d accidentally rear-ended one of the town’s police cruisers.

“You’ve no idea who it might have been?” he asked impatiently.

“None,” I told him. “Except of course that it had to be one of the houseguests. I doubt a stranger broke in and decided to go on a branding rampage.”

He sighed. “And you thought it was a good idea to just follow this person in the dead of night?”

“I wasn’t really in pursuit. In fact, I thought the person had probably gone back to his or her room. I was going to wake Scott, and when he didn’t answer, I went upstairs to find another flashlight.”

“Where do you think he was?”

“Probably crouched behind one of the couches in the great room.”

“No, I mean Mr. Cohen.”

Interesting question.

“He said he was in his bedroom but didn’t wake up right away.”

Collinson told me to call him if I learned anything new, and in turn I promised to be in contact with him as I followed the story. He seemed positively thrilled.

When I returned to the great room, people were buzzing about the fact that the road was finally navigable. As soon as Jessie’s interview with Collinson was over, we walked back to our rooms, packed up quickly, and prepared to leave.

“Can you take our bags out to the car?” I asked her. “There’s one last thing I need to do.”

Following Devon’s death, I’d managed to talk to everyone but Sandy and Ralph. Now, with people in exit mode, it might be a chance to catch at least one of them alone.

I found Sandy wiping down the top of the island. Dressed in a camel turtleneck sweater and puffy sleeveless brown vest, she looked ragged, as if she’d gotten little sleep herself. Her short blondish gray hair was pressed flat against her scalp. Like me, she’d obviously decided to skip the cold shower.

“I just wanted to say thank you for everything you did this weekend,” I told her.

“You’re welcome,” she replied crisply. “That’s nice of you to say.”

“This must have been a pretty harrowing couple of days for you.”

“You could say that. But we get through—we always do.”

She made it sound as if it wasn’t all that unusual for one of the houseguests to leave the premises in a morgue van.

“You heard about last night, of course. Any ideas about who scratched the doors?”

“Why would I? I was fast asleep in my cabin.”

“Well, you’ve probably got a sense of the houseguests by now. Does one of them seem crazy enough to do something like that?”

She finally stopped wiping and stared at me, her unblinking blue eyes telegraphing the fact that she thought we were all freaking crazy.

“Afraid not,” she said.

“You didn’t seem to like Devon very much,” I said.

“I don’t make it my business to like or not like the people who come here.”

“She didn’t eat anything you made. I had the feeling that annoyed you.”

“Wouldn’t it annoy you? Going to all the effort and having someone just stare at it in disgust—as if you’ve served them a slab of lard.”

“I’m pretty sure she had an eating disorder. Her behavior may have seemed rude, but it wasn’t anything personal. Devon wouldn’t have eaten anything from anyone.”

“If you ask me, she was just used to doing as she darn well pleased and having everyone at her beck and call. What do you call those women in New York? Divas?”

“Did she give you a hard time?”

“In every way you can think of. She didn’t like her sheets, and we had to change those twice. We originally put Jane in one of the smaller bedrooms downstairs, but she wanted Jane next to her, come hell or high water, and so Mr. Parkin got stuck with the smaller room and Jane was moved upstairs. Even her water. She had told Scott to stock plenty of this Fiji water—can you imagine having to drink water all the way from there?—and then she complained about the taste. Ralph had to drive into town and buy another kind—Evian—and she complained about that too. I suggested she try our well water, which suits us just fine, and you would have thought I’d told her to run buck naked through the woods. Though she probably would have liked that.”

Her face had turned red as she was speaking, not just a flush to her cheeks but a splotchy, angry red that exacerbated her dry, weathered skin. She pinched her lips, aware that she’d said more than she should have.

“I really do need to finish up here,” she said. “Do you need help packing your car?”

I told her I didn’t and made my way back downstairs. I pushed open the front door to see if Jessie was out by the car, and I found her saying an awkward good-bye to Scott. I tried to make my own good-bye as cordial as possible, since I knew I might need to be in touch with Scott. As I climbed into my Jeep, I noticed that several cars were already gone. People had wasted no time beating a retreat.

The drive toward the main highway was dicey, since there were still patches of ice on the road. My phone was totally out of battery, but Jessie still had a little power in hers. She called Nash to let him know we would be in the office in about two hours.

Next I tried Beau. He picked up his cell phone on the first ring.

“I’ve been really worried about you,” he said and sounded it. “I keep trying your phone, and it won’t even let me leave a message.”

“We lost power in a storm, and I wasn’t able to charge my phone. But thank God, we’re on our way back now.”

“What’s the latest?”

“Things became a lot more complicated. But why don’t I fill you in later—there’s a lot of ice on the road, and I need to focus.”

“I assume you’ll have to work late tonight.”

“Yup. But I’ll keep you posted.”

“Drive carefully, Bailey. I love you.”

“Same here.”

“Things back to normal?” Jessie asked after I signed off.

“Yeah. It’s terrible to say, but Devon’s death may have done my relationship some good.”

Though Jessie and I felt grungy as hell, after deliberation we decided that the smartest course of action would be to dump my Jeep in a midtown parking lot and go directly to Buzz. We’d buy time that way, and it would mean I might be able to leave work earlier that night. It turned out it had rained rather than snowed in Manhattan, and we had to leap over huge puddles as we hurried up Broadway to the office.

The first thing I did, after putting off Leo’s barrage of questions, was to head for Nash’s office. Nash was handsome (if you like barrel-chested guys about forty-four with gray-tinged hair slicked back at the sides), fun, flirty, and occasionally moody. Rumor had it that he’d had flings with several different women in the office and his wife had apparently given him an ultimatum: Keep it in your pants or get kicked to the curb.

“I’ve got Devon slated for the cover,” he told me, shoving his reading glasses from the middle of his nose to the top of his head, “unless something better happens in the next ten hours.”

“What could be better?”

“Katie leaving Tom. Angie leaving Brad. Katie hooking up with Angie. So what’s the deal? She o.d.?”

“No sign of that. Of course the tox report might turn up something. We won’t know anything official for a couple of days.”

“What’s your hunch?”

“I keep coming back to the eating disorder angle. There’s definitely a fatality rate connected with that. Your heart can give out from the strain.”

“Keep me posted twenty-four/seven, okay? You’ll write the main story. When the issue hits Thursday, I want you to do most of the TV for this. We could get you on sooner, but I want to sell as many copies as possible, and that means waiting for the right moment. The fact that you were at the scene is perfect. Everybody’s going to be eating their hearts out.”

I hoped so. From what I’d been hearing, sales had been sluggish this year, and it would be nice to see a boost.

As soon as I was back in my cube, I wrote an update for the Web site and then typed up a timeline of the weekend. Over the next few days it would just be too easy to lose track of the sequence of events. I met with the art department after that and reviewed the layout they were putting together for the story, and I also touched base with one of the writers working on the sidebar about Devon’s life—just to make sure our stories didn’t overlap in any way.

Next it was time to focus on writing my piece for the magazine. Back at Scott’s, I’d e-mailed one of the interns and asked her to pull together everything Buzz had done on Devon in the past. A stack of magazines, with colored Post-its poking out from the pages, had been left on the floor by my desk.

As I thumbed through the past issues, I soon saw that about 80 percent of the coverage of Devon was devoted to her fashion acumen. Buzz is notorious for its weekly “Fashion Tragedies” spread, where celebs get slammed for the lame job they sometimes do getting dressed, but one person always gets singled out under the heading: “She Got It Right!” Not infrequently that person was Devon. She’d had a knack for putting together a totally hip look in a way that seemed completely effortless. Nothing was ever matchy-matchy, and though all the pieces appeared to have been plucked randomly from her closet, the final result was the embodiment of cool. She’d been a risk taker, too, and when major style trends were traced back, she was frequently at the epicenter. There was one shot of her from a while back in suspendered jean shorts and a black Amish-style hat. If I’d worn that outfit, people would have wondered if I was attempting to reprise the Harrison Ford role in Witness, but on Devon it was edgy and fab.

What was interesting to note was that though Devon had been model thin, there weren’t any shots that suggested an eating disorder. The problem must have reared its ugly head again only recently.

As for actual articles on her, there wasn’t much. Devon had kept a fairly low profile, and just as I’d known, she’d never agreed to interviews, so the press had little to play with. There was a flurry of stories a few years ago when she was arrested at Heathrow for carrying a small bag of pot. She’d ended up with a suspended sentence. And between February and August of this year there were about five or six photos of her and Tommy together—sucking face in the street, leaving clubs looking shit-faced. You know, the typical model-and-rocker-in-love shots.

But then a picture of Devon from an issue a year ago this past November suddenly snagged my attention. She was striding along the street in SoHo with her coat flopping open. Over her photo was a slug that asked, “Isn’t that a bump?”

I had to admit she did look pregnant—but I’d worked long enough at Buzz to know that things in photos weren’t always as they seemed. For instance, someone’s breasts could appear enlarged or their nose slimmed, but it was due to the angle of the camera, not plastic surgery. I rolled my chair over to Leo.

“See this photo,” I said, shoving the page in front of his face. “Can you get me other shots from that same day?”

“There are lots better shots for your story, you know. I mean, she was just shopping that day.”

“I don’t need it for the layout—I think it might be significant for another reason.”

“Yeah, okay. Give me a few minutes.”

While he searched, I left a message for one of the top eating disorder experts, whom I’d made a note of during my Internet search on Sunday. I also checked online for pieces that simply mentioned Devon. When she first burst on the scene eighteen years ago, she was referenced frequently, particularly in articles about pop culture. She was heralded for her haunting beauty but also criticized for propagating the heroin chic look. Initially she seemed just naturally scrawny, but about two years later, when she was eighteen, there were rumors of anorexia—and the photos seemed to back it up. But within a year or two, she seemed to have a handle on the problem.

“Here you go,” Leo said about ten minutes later, handing me a batch of photos he’d printed out.

There weren’t many shots from that day—apparently just one roving paparazzo had captured her during her SoHo shopping spree. But what was remarkable is that she looked pregnant in every single picture.

I wheeled my chair back over to Leo.

“Do me a favor, will you? Tell me if you think Devon Barr could possibly have been pregnant at this moment in time.”

“I’m a gay man,” Leo said. “I try not to think about anything that goes on down there in a woman.”

“I’m not asking you to take a Lamaze class with me, for God’s sake.”

He sighed and flicked his eyes over the photos.

“Well, I don’t think she looks so pregnant someone is going to get up and give her their seat on the subway—if Devon Barr ever even took a subway—but there does seem to be a noticeable protrusion there.”

Jessie, who’d just hung up the phone, slid her chair over and asked what was going on. After I explained, she took one of the photos from me and studied it.

“Maybe it’s just belly bloat—from PMS,” she said. “Some women really get a paunch there.”

“This is more than I can bear,” Leo moaned. “I feel like I’m in a Midol commercial.”

“You know who would know?” Jessie asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah, I know.”

She meant the team who worked on Juice Bar, the hardcore gossip section in Buzz. Under Mona Hodges, the section had been particularly venomous, often running unattributable quotes. Nash had toned it down just a hair, but it could still be cruel. The whole magazine was filled with gossip, but this was the ugly rumor stuff. Let me put it this way: If you ended up on their radar and they determined that your life was worth covering, you were almost better off going into the Federal Witness Protection Program.

I’d already made one enemy on the Juice Bar team, so I decided to target another member of the squad, an unctuous, preppie guy named Thornwell Pratt, who had chatted me up a couple of times lately. I was never sure if he was being flirtatious or just thought I might have info he could use.

After grabbing a cup of coffee I popped over to the Juice Bar area. It was toward the back of the floor, far away from the bullpen, as if the work they did required grade-nine security clearance or gave off a toxic odor that needed to be contained as best as possible. I would have expected to find Thornwell with two phones to his ears, but he was just sitting at his desk staring off into space, with his elbows on the table and his too-small chin in his hands. I imagined a caption above his head: “The Day the Rumors Stopped.”

“Hi there,” I said as charmingly as possible, hoping to detract attention from the fact that with my matted, unwashed hair, I looked about as good as a yak.

“Well, don’t we have a big story this week,” Thornwell said, leaning way back in his chair. He had the prep thing going today—blue-and-white-striped shirt, sleeves rolled; khaki pants.

“Yeah, pretty incredible story, isn’t it? You never covered Devon much, right?”

“Not really. She was actually a bore for someone so self-absorbed. She never talked to the press, and she tended to date B-level people. There was that one little drug bust at Heathrow a few years back, but that blew over pretty quickly.”

“I was checking out some pictures of her from last November, and I noticed she looked pregnant in one. We even implied it might be a baby bump. Anything to that? I mean, could she have been pregnant at the time?”

He studied me with an amused, superior air and then shook his head slightly, as if my approach had involved a blunder of judgment on my part. I suddenly flashed on the scene in Silence of the Lambs in which Hannibal Lecter scolds Clarice for becoming too eager in the interview after doing so nicely at the start.

“What?” I asked.

“I might have some information. But we’re not real generous back here, Bailey. When we offer anything up, it’s always quid pro quo.”

“I’m not opposed to a barter arrangement,” I said. I was tempted to add, “As long as it doesn’t involve you and me in a bar together.”

“Scott Cohen.”

“What about him?” I asked, more than curious but trying hard not to show it.

“I’ve been holding back on running a blind item on him until I score a tad more information. You just spent the weekend at his house. What can you tell me about him?”

“What kind of item?”

“Now, now—I asked first. But I will tell you that it has nothing to do with how he runs his record label. It’s of a more personal nature. So what was it like to be his houseguest?”

I wondered if it had anything to do with Scott’s fondness for threesomes, but I certainly wasn’t going to spill anything.

“Nothing leaps to my mind, but let me mull it over. I’m sure when the dust settles about Devon’s death, something may come to me.”

He looked at me without answering for a minute, his pointer finger pressed against his mouth. I was about to invoke Nash’s name, but finally Thornwell leaned forward in his chair, a signal, I thought, that he was ready to talk.

“How long is this so-called mulling-over going to take?”

“Come on, Thornwell,” I said. “I said I’d try to think of something, and I will—after I get my story out of the way.”

“And what was your question again?”

“Devon Barr. Do you think she might have been pregnant last year?”

He smiled malevolently.

“I don’t think,” he said. “I know. Devon was as preggers as the day is long.”