Step On A Crack

Chapter 81

IN THE DARK CONFESSIONAL, Laura Winston lay curled on the cramped floor, sweating and shivering. The most fashionable woman on the planet, she thought, is in desperate need of a makeover.

In the twenty hours she’d been confined, she’d drifted in and out of consciousness. But ever since the dim light had retreated from the stained-glass skylight above her, six or seven hours ago, she’d been completely and atrociously awake with the fever and pain of withdrawal.

It was around noon when she had noticed her reflection in the polished brass kick plate of the door. Makeup eroded by tears and sweat, honey-blond razor cut flecked with vomit. At first Laura thought she was staring at some kind of religious carving, the image of a deranged, skeletal demon triumphantly slain by an angel. She recalled the last lines of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror” as she lay there, unable to look away from the terrible image. In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

It had taken a kidnapping, a violent ordeal of historic proportions to do it, but now, finally, she realized the truth.

She was old.

And she’d actually hurt people, hadn’t she? Laura thought. Women especially. Month after month after month in her magazine she’d perpetuated the hurtful myth of eternal chicness and supposedly attainable beauty. Draped impossibly expensive clothes on fourteen-year-old genetic freaks and called it normal, then implied to her readers that if they didn’t look like them, they were worthless, or at least not living up to their potential.

When she got out of this, if she did, she was going to change, she decided. Pack it in. Go to a good rehab facility. Downsize. Instead of building an empire, she was going to establish a charitable foundation. Insane as it was, this awful experience had fundamentally changed her for the better.

Give me one last chance, Lord. The fashionista prayed for the first time since she was a little girl. At least give me the chance to change.

It felt like something tore inside her ear when the gun went off just outside the confessional door.

When the ringing subsided, she could hear people screaming. The sulfurous stench of cordite wafted under the door and mixed with the sour smell of her vomit.

Her breath jammed in her throat as she heard a muffled curse and a body being dragged past her door.

God have mercy. They’d shot somebody else!

Laura felt her heart wallop against her chest.

Who could it have been? Who? Why? She hoped it wasn’t Eugena, who had been so kind to her.

The hijacking wasn’t really about money, was it? Laura concluded with numb horror. One by one, they’d be taken off to slaughter. Made to pay for their stupid, decadent sins.

She was running out of time. I’m next, Laura thought with a dry heave.