So Pretty It Hurts

Chapter 18

I shivered—from both the cold and the words I’d just heard.

“Murdered?” I asked. “But how? I was told Fiona died from anorexia.”

“To understand how Devon murdered my sister, you first have to understand their relationship,” he said. “Devon befriended Fiona—in part, I believe, because she knew Fiona could never come close to her in terms of success. Devon derived her strength from having more of something than anyone in her immediate universe. It was almost like a game for her, watching her own star rise while Fiona’s simply stalled.”

“Did they become estranged for some reason?”

“No, no. The games simply intensified. Devon enticed my sister into a partnership of starvation.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“They became anorexia buddies, enabling and empowering each other not to eat. Fiona died of malnutrition, and Devon survived. Proof once again that Devon always came out on top.”

For a moment I felt too stunned to talk. I had never heard of such a thing.

“Why did none of this ever come out in the press? Was there a cover-up?”

“No cover-up,” he said. “The official story that my mother perpetuated was that Fiona died from dehydration, following a long illness. My mother and stepfather were horrified and ashamed about what had happened and wanted it all kept hush-hush. The press didn’t bother looking into it—Fiona wasn’t on anyone’s radar, really. And though there was some buzz about Devon’s weight then, there wasn’t any link to Fiona. My sister just wasn’t famous enough.”

“Fascinatingly,” he added, his voice tight with bitterness, “Devon began to recover from her anorexia shortly after Fiona’s death.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” I said. “How old was Fiona when she died?”

“Nineteen. My mother was never the same after that.”

It sounded as if Richard Parkin had never been quite the same either. So had he spent the last fourteen years biding his time, waiting for the chance to pay Devon Barr back? It was the English, after all, who had coined the phrase, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

“So what was the real reason you went to Scott’s?” I asked quietly.

“Morbid curiosity,” he said. “As soon as Scott mentioned that he was having Devon up for the weekend, I started angling for an invitation, claiming I might be open to doing a profile of her. Once I’d procured it, my better judgment nearly convinced me to back out, but in the end I couldn’t resist. I’d not laid eyes on Devon since weeks before my sister’s death—she never came to the funeral, never got in touch. Oh, I’ve been forced to look at her bloody face a hundred million times like the rest of us, but our paths never crossed. I wondered what she would be like, wondered if she would even put two and two together when she saw me.”

“Fiona had a different last name than you, of course.”

“Yes, and I was just a reporter when she died—well known in certain circles but hardly in the ones Devon Barr had begun traveling in.”

“Are you sure she didn’t pick up on who you were? I found her crying in the woods Saturday morning, and she told me she was afraid.”

“Absolutely not. She looked right through me the entire weekend, and it was very clear she had no bloody idea.”

“I appreciate you being straight with me,” I said, after taking a few moments to digest what he’d shared.

“Why are you so concerned, anyway? From all I can tell Devon was a vile human being, and her only real contribution to humanity may have been teaching us how to pair the right boots with a bustier.”

We rounded the back corner of the gardens, and the wind tore through the trees. We were headed back to the front of the conservatory, and the street was in view farther up ahead.

“Like I said, I think she was murdered. I’d like to know who did it.”

He snickered and shook his head.

“Oh, someone forced her not to eat?” he said. “‘Take a bite of that red velvet cake or you’ll never sit in the front row of a Marc Jacobs show again’?”

Because Richard was a dogged reporter, I was sure he probably had checked out the full police report and knew about the Lasix.

“Not that way, no,” I said. “You may be aware that Devon was taking diuretics. That’s a very bad thing for someone with anorexia to do. I’m wondering if one of the houseguests was slipping them to her—putting them into her water perhaps.”

He snickered again but leveled his gaze at me now.

“My, my,” he said. “Quite an accusation. Any ideas who?” In the glow from the lamppost light I saw him narrow his hooded blue eyes even more, and then widen them in surprise. “I hope you’re not suggesting it was Mr. Parkin . . . in the barn . . . with a diuretic?”

I swallowed, glancing out of the corner of my eye toward the far-off street.

“You tell me, Richard,” I said.

He suddenly yanked his hands from his pockets, and I drew my upper body back involuntarily. It took him a second to realize what had happened—that he had startled me—and he chuckled in amusement.

“Trust me, Bailey, I have no intention of offing you in the middle of the Central Park Conservatory. I come from a long line of people who took great care of their gardens.”

He rubbed his ungloved hands briskly back and forth. I couldn’t tell if it was to generate warmth or from pure glee at having made me flinch.

“I’ve told you what you wanted to know,” he added. “And now I’m off to Hanratty’s to warm my bones.”

Hands stuffed back in his coat pockets, he mounted the stairs without looking back at me and turned south on Fifth Avenue. Despite the droll tone he’d just used, I could tell I’d rattled him by having learned about his sister. Was it simply because I’d drudged up painful memories that he ordinarily didn’t share with anyone? Or was it because I was getting closer to the deeper truth—that he’d concocted a fitting scheme to kill the person who’d helped ruin his family?

I jogged up the steps and headed down Fifth Avenue myself. I could see Richard up ahead of me, though before long he crossed over from the park side of the street and headed east from there. I stayed on Fifth, retracing the route I’d taken from the subway. Along the way I kept replaying our conversation, hoping my gut would answer a question for me. Richard had clearly hated Devon. But had he hated her enough to kill her?

Closer to the subway, I passed the Christmas tree stands again, and this time I stopped in front of one of them and breathed in the intoxicating scent of spruce and pine. Christmas was just weeks away, and the only present I’d bought so far was a little cap and scarf for my brother Cameron’s new baby. And even worse, I had no plans for the holidays. My brothers would be with their wives. My mother would be in Mexico. Beau would be in the Caribbean and/or out of my life for good. And I’d be all alone in my apartment. What was I supposed to serve myself? A trifle layered with cat food and old newspapers?

And what was I supposed to do about Beau? I wondered, despondently. We were clearly at a stalemate. If I were going to talk to him, I’d have to be the one to make the first move.

Back home, I nuked a package of frozen mac and cheese and jotted down the conversation with Richard in my composition book. It was ironic. Yesterday he hadn’t been on my radar at all as a suspect, but today he was the one person with a firm motive. Tommy or Cap might have been angry at Devon; Whitney or Tory might have been insanely jealous; Christian—or even Scott—might have been panicky over something Devon had stumbled on. But there was no might have been with Richard. He held Devon responsible for Fiona’s death.

Curious about the dynamic between Devon and Fiona, I went online and searched eating disorder partnerships. There were several articles, including a first-person account. When two women took on the challenge of staying superthin together, they empowered each other. It was as if they were part of a special club with a secret code only they communicated in. One woman wrote poignantly about having gone through this horrible dance with a friend. In the end, she had survived but the friend had died.

After I finished eating, I decided to check in on my mother. It had been over a week since I’d spoken to her, and several weeks since we’d discussed her Christmas trip to Mexico. Part of me was hoping that her plans had fallen through and she now felt desperate to roast me a Christmas turkey.

“How’s the weather there?” she asked. “It’s absolutely freezing here.”

“Yeah, pretty cold.”

“Is your apartment warm enough?”

“Yes, yes. Believe it or not, I upgraded a couple of years ago to a heated one.”

“And your job is good? What are you working on?”

“Not too much.” I’d learned years ago that the best time to tell my mother about any dangers related to my work was after everything was over. “The usual celebrity-train-wreck stuff. How about you, Mom? What’s happening on your end?”

“Things are good. I’ve decided to teach a course next term after all. I won’t be able to travel as much, but it will be nice to be back on campus again.”

“Speaking of travel, are you still planning on going to San Miguel?”

I found myself holding my breath before she answered, which seemed so damn pathetic.

“Oh, yes, everything’s lined up. They have a pool, and I don’t have a suit yet, but I suppose I could wear that black one I wore on the Cape this past summer. Was it too dreadful? I kept expecting people to yell ‘Orca!’ every time I emerged from the water.”

“No, you looked quite smashing in it,” I said as jovially as possible, though my heart was sinking. What the hell was I going to do for the holidays?

“I do feel weird being away from you kids this year,” she said. “But you’ll all have fun. And the less Cameron has on his plate right now, the better.”

“Is he just overwhelmed with the baby?” For a brief moment I couldn’t even remember my new nephew’s name.

“Yes. But your sister-in-law seems even more so, and he’s got that to contend with, too. She has this perpetual whine going these days. I feel awful complaining, but it’s becoming tiresome.”

“What’s she whining about, anyway?”

“How her life is out of her hands now. She says she has no time to do anything for herself. I do feel a little bit sorry for her. Babies change your life so much. Nothing is ever the same after that. How’s Beau, by the way?”

Yikes, she’d ricocheted from babies to Beau in one second. Was she subconsciously linking the two in her mind? Through no real fault of my mother’s, the conversation was starting to depress the hell out of me. I felt suddenly desperate to end it.

“Oh God, Mom, my dishwasher is making a weird noise,” I blurted out. “Like it’s going to blow up or something. Can I call you back later?”

“Shouldn’t you call the super?”

“Yeah, yeah. I better call him. I’ll try you later—or sometime tomorrow.”

I rested my head in my hands for a few seconds and then stood up and began pacing the living room. A weird feeling had suddenly snuck up on me, and I couldn’t define it. Yes, there was a twinge of guilt over the dishwasher hoax, and the melancholy from knowing I’d be on my own for Christmas, but something about the conversation I’d just had was nudging me slightly, like a breeze you see rustling the leaves of a tree far across the yard but don’t feel yourself.

I knew I had to distract myself, because only then would it come to me. So I trudged to my desk and looked online at the route I needed to take to Pine Grove the next day. After familiarizing myself, I laid out the disguise I planned to wear—baseball cap, an old black ski parka, and hiking boots.

And then I took a deep breath and called Beau. It was torturing me not to talk to him, to not know what was going to happen with us. He picked up right away, sounding as if he was on foot someplace on the streets of Manhattan.

“Hi,” I said. “I was hoping we could talk.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” he said. A part of me relaxed a little. I’d been fearful of hearing a comment like “I don’t think we have anything to discuss, Bailey.”

“I can tell you’re out, so probably right now isn’t good. I’m going to Pennsylvania tomorrow—to Devon’s funeral—but I should be back late in the day.”

“Actually,” he said after a moment’s hesitation, “I’m not far from you at the moment. Just off Washington Square Park. Want me to come by?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll see you in a few minutes then.”

I hadn’t glanced in a mirror since my return from seeing Richard, and when I did, I discovered that I looked like hell. I had a wicked case of hat hair from the wool cloche I’d worn, and my makeup had vanished, exposing the dark circles under my eyes. Quickly I brushed my hair back into a ponytail, applied concealer, lipstick, and mascara. The buzzer rang just as I was tugging on a fresh sweater.

When I swung open the door and set eyes on Beau, with those deep brown eyes of his and his hair tucked sexily back behind his ears, the jitteriness I’d felt in anticipation of his arrival ballooned into something bigger: fear about where our discussion would lead. And then came a heart-squeezing sadness over the fact that our relationship might be doomed. Beau shrugged off his coat, letting it drop on a chair; I was surprised to see he was wearing a jacket and tie.

“Do you want a beer?” I asked.

“Yeah, thanks.”

When I returned with two bottles, Beau was sitting on the couch. He cocked his head toward my composition book and a pile of folders on the dining table.

“Have you figured anything out yet?”

“No, not yet. But I’m not giving up.”

“How’s the situation at Buzz, by the way? Have they accepted your version of things?”

“Not even close,” I said. “That’s why I’m going to the funeral. I need to figure out who’s tight enough with Devon’s mother to have put her up to this.”

“But the person wouldn’t be stupid enough to tip his hand in front of you.”

I offered a grim smile.

“I’m not going to let anyone know I’m there,” I said. “I’m going to spy, watch everything from a distance.”

“And if you don’t learn anything tomorrow?”

“I have no clue what I’ll do next. I like to think that the cops will determine Devon was murdered, and it will become clear that the killer wanted to sully my reputation. But the cops upstate don’t seem to buy my theory. So if I can’t prove to Nash that I’m innocent, I’ll be out of a job. And it might affect me getting work elsewhere.”

Beau shook his head in concern and tugged the knot of his tie away from his neck, loosening it.

“You’re all dressed up,” I said. “What were you doing tonight?”

I didn’t mean it as any kind of accusation—it was curiosity plain and simple—but when the words emerged from my mouth, there was a definite edge to them.

“Jeez, Bailey. I can’t make a move, it seems, without you wondering if I’ve been up to something totally clandestine and sinister. What is it? Do you think I’m really 007? Or just your garden-variety cheater?”

“I wasn’t wondering anything just now,” I said. “You said you were in my neighborhood, and I was simply curious about what you’d been doing.”

He sighed.

“Okay, maybe this time it was innocent enough,” he said. “But we’ve got a problem. You don’t trust me, and when you fester enough about it, you feel you have to pay me back somehow. Is this always going to be our pattern? I end up needing to go out of town or don’t tell you every detail about my past, and then you feel obligated to pour your heart out to some actor who plays a mortician on TV?”

“As I explained to you,” I said, “he was helping me with the Devon Barr case and nothing more.”

I was tempted to add, “And for your information, he plays a forensic detective with the medical examiner’s office, not a freakin’ mortician,” but I had the surprising good sense not to.

“You’re missing the point, Bailey,” Beau said. “It’s going to be some kind of payback. You feel a need for it because you don’t trust me.”

I’d perched on the edge of an armchair, directly across from Beau, but I rose now, crossed my arms against my chest, and paced a few feet in one direction and then a few feet in the other.

“On the one hand it seems I—I should trust you,” I said. “You say all the right things. And believe it or not, I’m not one of those maniacal women who rummage through a guy’s drawers or hack into his computer. But sometimes you just seem oddly vague about your actions. Take Sedona, for instance. You suddenly announce you have to see this guy, and yet you don’t want to give away much in the way of details about him. Like—God, I don’t know . . .”

“Like I was just making him up?”

“You said it, not me.”

“I’ll give you his cell phone number, and you can call him. The bottom line is that you should know me well enough by now to realize that I’m not a fan of the unessential. I needed to include the guy in the film, but frankly he’s too boring to get into a discussion about.”

“What about that British girl in Turkey? Was that really unessential information?”

“You and I weren’t in a relationship at that time.”

“But when you came back to the States, you implied to me that Turkey was a bore socially—it was just you and the dust and a lot of ancient stones.”

“It was a bore. If you really want the truth, yes, Abigail and I were having sex, lots of sex, but it was not a particularly satisfying experience for me. I was beginning to realize that I really wanted to be with you—and only you. When I got back I made a commitment to you, so what good would it have been to share the gory details?”

Try as I could, I was unable to chase away an image of Beau and Abigail naked in the sack. Abigail was bouncing up and down on him, the spitting image of Pippa Middleton.

I felt suddenly tongue-tied.

“Look, I’m sorry for being so blunt,” Beau said. “But I am at my wits’ end here.”

“No, I appreciate the truth. As you say, we hadn’t made any commitment before you went to Turkey. And I see now that there was nothing to be concerned about in Sedona. But—” I halted a moment, trying to pull my thoughts together. “I think deep down what’s really bothering me is that your vagueness when you tell me something shows a kind of hesitation on your part. I worry that I’ve pushed you into making a commitment, and you’re really not ready for it.”

Ouch. I couldn’t believe I’d said it. Beau set down his beer bottle on the coffee table and tapped his finger gently on his lips a few times. I could tell by his eyes that he was deciding exactly how to respond. Finally he let out a big sigh.

“Bailey, I know there are guys out there who don’t know their own minds, but I’ve never considered myself to be one of them. I said I was ready, and I am. But it seems more and more to me that you’re the one who has the problem making a commitment. I feel you look for excuses to push me away—and then you blame me. Pardon me for playing shrink, but I honestly feel as if you’re trying to transfer your own fear of being in a relationship to me.”

I absolutely cringed at his words—not only because they stung but because I’d heard them before. I struggled to find some way to respond, but nothing came out.

“Okay,” he said, tossing his hand up. “You have lots of other stuff to contend with right now, and I don’t want to put extra pressure on you. But the ball’s in your court, Bailey. You’ve got to decide what you want—or we both need to move on.”

He rose from the couch, crossed the room, and reached for his coat. That was enough to jump-start my vocal ability. “I—I really want to think about what you said, Beau,” I told him, walking toward him. “Will you give me a couple of days?”

“Of course,” he said quietly. He leaned down and kissed me lightly on the lips. As he slipped out the door, I had the sinking sense that things between us were now totally tenuous.

I paced the living room for a few minutes, beer bottle in hand. My stomach was churning big-time. Did the problem really lie with me? I asked myself. Jack Herlihy, the psych professor I’d broken up with last winter, had said I had a problem committing, and Chris Wickersham had suggested the same. Was it all part of a life pattern with me, the result of having a father who’d died when I was twelve and an ex-husband who lied again and again to cover up monstrous gambling debts? I winced, just thinking about how clichéd it all sounded. If they made a Lifetime movie of my life, I realized, it would have to be played by some triple-named actress like Jennifer Love Hewitt or Tiffani-Amber Thiessen.

My cell phone rang from inside my purse just as I drained the last of my beer. It was Jessie.

“I just wanted to check on how you were doing,” she said.

“Thanks, Jess. I’m trying not to wallow in my misery, but it’s tough.”

“Did you definitely decide to go to the funeral tomorrow? If you did, there are a couple additional details I wanted to share.”

“Yep, I’m headed out there—but incognito.”

“Okay, from what I could find out, Thornwell is going, and so is that girl Stacy, the senior editor who just started. And there’ll be a bunch of freelance paparazzi. Some of them might recognize you if they saw you.”

“Good to know. I’m going to have to do my best not to let anyone spot me. If Nash finds out, it will make matters even worse.”

“I can barely look at the guy without puking. Have you found out anything more?”

I told her about my investigation so far, the revelations I’d dug up, including the info about Richard’s sister. Also, because she was my friend and not simply a work pal, I told her about my harrowing experience with the gypsy cab driver. Just talking about it made my pulse start to pound.

“That’s horrible,” Jessie exclaimed. “Did you tell the police?”

“Yeah, but they weren’t very helpful. To be honest, I’m more upset about what’s happening to me with Buzz. Do you think that Nash is really trying to clear me?”

Jessie sighed.

“He may be,” she said, “but from my vantage point out on the floor, it looks like he’s just going about his business. I thought something was up this morning. He was in a pissy mood, and later he was talking to a bunch of guys in his office, but someone told me those were dudes from the circulation department. Our newsstand numbers are down, like all the other tabloids. That seems to be his main focus, from what people are saying.”

“I wonder if he turned the investigation over to the legal department.”

“I don’t know. I arranged to have lunch on Monday with one of the younger lawyers I know on the corporate floor. I’m going to see what I can find out from her.”

“Jessie, I so appreciate your help. Just don’t make trouble for yourself by snooping around.”

“Don’t worry. This chick is a real busybody. She gossips an awful lot for a lawyer.”

“Wait,” I said. My heart had just done a weird lurch. “What did you say?”

“She likes to gossip.”

“No, before that.

“She’s a busybody.”

“Um, okay,” I said, distractedly. I had to fight for a second to catch a breath. “Look, I better sign off and get ready for tomorrow. I’ll call you when I’m back and let you know how it went.”

I tossed my BlackBerry in my purse and collapsed on the couch. My heart was beating hard now. Because I finally knew what the gypsy cab driver had yelled to me from his window. Not “Stop. Be a body.” He’d said, “Stop being a busy body.”

It was a threat. As if he knew exactly who I was and what I’d been up to.