“I didn’t—I don’t—No!”
The woman let go of Maggie’s shoulders and gripped her throat. With both hands she started shaking her by the neck.
“Always taking my things. Can’t have my things. Think you can fool me. No. You can’t fool me.”
“Agggh.” Maggie was choking. Her eyes bulged. “Agggh.” She kicked out, trying to scream, to get away. She blacked out for a second, then revived when the pressure eased.
“Bitch!”
Pain exploded in her head for the last time. The woman had slipped a cord around her neck and was yanking hard.
Twenty minutes later Maggie Wheeler hung from the light fixture in the storeroom in a five-hundred-dollar size-fourteen flowered summer dress that hung way down over her shoulders and hid her feet. Purple lipstick and blue eye shadow, grotesquely applied, further disfigured her mournful little face. The air conditioner, set on high and blowing on her, ruffled her hair and skirt, and gave her the appearance of eternal living death.
2
What was left of the former potato field stretched over several acres at least, flat and vegetation-free. Set back a hundred or so feet from the newly created road, the house in progress soared over the emptiness, straining for even a tiny glimpse of the ocean, a quarter of a mile to the south.
Charles stopped the BMW at the construction site with a jerk and jumped out excitedly.
“What do you think?” he demanded of his oldest friend in the mental health field.
Jason Frank, author of scholarly texts, teacher, and psychoanalyst, got out of the passenger seat slowly, as if both of his long, well-muscled legs had recently been broken and were not yet fully healed. For a minute he took in the Portosan, the construction trailer, the advertising signs of the architect, builder, landscape architect, and the dozen suppliers that littered the site. Without going a step closer he could tell that the eleven-room house would be fully air-conditioned, would have a tennis court and swimming pool, and was already alarmed against vandals and thieves. This was some beach shack for a psychiatrist whose hourly fee was fixed, like Jason’s, at a hundred and sixty-five dollars for those who could pay, and less for those who couldn’t. There was no way he could afford such a house on his earned income.
The familiar twinge of jealousy, now almost twenty years old, threatened to seize Jason in the region of his heart, probe around for the weakest place, and strike him down with despair. Charles was independently wealthy, had all the glamour and worldly goods, and Jason was stuck with the driving ambition to do something important and leave his mark on the profession.
Charles fixed Jason with the same look of eager anticipation that had charmed him when they met and became friends at the Psychiatric Center the first day of their training. Jason had just returned to New York from medical school in Chicago and Charles was finally home from Yale. Both were eager and idealistic about psychiatry, their chosen specialty; and both were unhappily married to their high school sweethearts.
The similarities between them went a little further. They looked like they could be brothers, were six feet tall and athletic. Jason had the body of a runner, the brain of a scientist, and the all-American good looks of a Kennedy. For him it was an unlikely mix, bred from five thousand years of dark Jewish angst in northern Europe, an unhappy childhood in the Bronx, and the iron will to do better than his forebears. His parents, his grandparents, and their grandparents had all been poor, struggling peasants. Brilliant and intense, Jason was not only tall, light-brown- haired, and handsome, but the first financial success in his family.
Charles, on the other hand, was more of the Mediterranean type. He was dark-eyed, dark-haired, passionate. He was also less angular in his features than Jason, had more of a nose, more flesh in his face and body, and was a good deal more hedonistic in his approach to life. The pampered only son of a rich Westchester family, he had always been able to do exactly as he pleased, and never hesitated to do it. While Jason was still struggling to support his family and first wife, Charles already had two children, two cars, and a house in the suburbs that he wanted to be rid of. Now, nearly fifteen years later, Charles had four children, two belonging to his second wife, Brenda, three cars, three houses, and, Jason suspected, a mistress. Charles couldn’t be happy with one of anything. He was also secretive. He never said a thing about this new plaything in all the months of its planning and construction.
Jason looked up at the looming structure with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. If he hadn’t been so heavily focused on his teaching, his patients, and his writing all these years, he might have at least a few possessions, too. He was on the brink of forty, and three months ago his second wife, the actress Emma Chapman, went to California to make a movie. After the shooting stopped, she told him she wasn’t coming back.
“Is this the living end, or what?” Charles demanded when no awed praise from Jason was forthcoming.
He put a protective hand on Jason’s shoulder as if to say, We’ve been through a lot together—two divorces, two remarriages, Emma’s kidnapping in the spring. Hell, we’ll find a way to get through the separation, too.
Jason nodded. It was the living end, all right.
He glanced over at Milicia Honiger-Stanton, who had hung back for a moment to get the fifty oversize pages of house plans out of the car. He watched her reach in, leaning all the way across the back seat, so that her short, tight skirt hiked up and displayed long, shapely legs and an extremely well-formed derriere. Charles caught the direction of Jason’s gaze and raised an eyebrow in approval.
“That’s it, take an interest, get the blood flowing again,” he murmured.
Jason turned away, frowning. When he first got off the train that morning and saw Charles and Milicia together waiting for him at the station, Jason suspected that the tall and extraordinarily dramatic Milicia, of the wild red hair and deep green eyes, must be the mistress Charles had hidden somewhere in the woodwork of his life.
It would be just like Charles to go so far as to actually build a house to provide a project for the architect he lusted after. Jason couldn’t imagine any other reason to construct a house in the Hamptons when he already had one in Bedford. Then they got to the house Charles and Brenda were renting while their new one was being built. When Brenda ran out to greet him all excited and pleased in a way he hadn’t seen her in a long time, he realized the house was for her. And Milicia was a red herring. He shook his head at himself. He missed the cue. Must be losing his grip.
As Jason crunched across the pebble drive, Brenda ran out to meet him, waving enthusiastically. “I’m
She was all in white—big white blouse, flowing white skirt. They made her dark hair and tanned skin stand at attention. She reached out her arms and engulfed him in a cloud of some floral-mix perfume that was both unidentifiable and immensely appealing. Jason had always liked her. Brenda was a small, elegant woman with a lovely shape and at least as much intelligence as her husband. Her embrace at that moment was devastating. Jason worked in a field where no one touched. He hadn’t received a hug in some time. He released himself from it quickly to stop his heart from breaking.
“How are you doing? I can’t not ask,” she said almost apologetically.
“You can ask. I’m fine. Fine.” He nodded to show how fine he was.
“I think about you and Emma all the time. What do you hear from her?” She took his arm as they walked to the house, shaking her head, as if baffled by Emma’s desertion after what Jason did for her.
The situation with Emma wasn’t what Brenda thought. Jason looked around, trying to hold on to his equilibrium. It was a pretty place. The rented house was surrounded by rose gardens, all in bloom. A wave of sadness swept over him as he thought how much Emma would have liked it. The smell of the roses, the smell of the sea, everything. He pulled himself together.
“She lets me call her on Fridays. We have a scheduled time. We talk. She’s still—” Traumatized, of course. He shrugged and changed the subject. “What about you?”
“Well, this is me. I feel good here.” Brenda laughed ruefully, letting the bruises from a difficult second marriage that she had expected to be heaven show for just a second.
“You know how I never could stand all those woods and trees. So closed in. Wait till you see
