Now You See Her

Book Three. NEW YORK NINA

Chapter 50

I SIT IN WHITENESS, getting ready for my wedding. I’m wearing a fluffy white robe and white curlers in my hair. Even the separators between my freshly polished toenails are a chaste virginal white.

I smile as I suddenly notice the white roses that cover the bathroom’s entire countertop. They glow almost painfully in the undiluted Florida light that fills the room.

As I put the finishing touches on my mascara in the makeup mirror, there’s a pounding on the door.

“Come out with your hands up!” Peter says through a bullhorn. “And those little panties of yours held high!”

I begin to laugh but stop as I hear the coughing sound of a gas engine being started with a rip cord. Is it a lawn mower? I think, turning toward the door.

Immediately bits of wood explode inward, spraying my face, and I see the tip of the chain saw as it cuts a slot in the door. As I watch, the spinning blade disappears, and through the hole a face appears, like Jack Nicholson’s in The Shining. I think it’s Peter, but it’s not. It’s the almost Asian face of the Jump Killer.

“How’s my fair Nina?” he says, flashing me his white capped teeth.

As I turn to run, I trip on the lip of the tub. I grasp the edge of the shower curtain, but the rings pop off the rail one by one, and I fall backward into warm water. As I scramble up, I see it’s not water at all but blood, and in the tub beside me, spooning like a honeymooning couple, are the dead bodies of Elena Cardenas and Ramon Pena.

Covered in blood, I scream, flailing as I see that half of Ramon Pena’s face is missing, the white of his skull stark against the sea of red.

I woke up. Struggling to catch my breath, I looked up into darkness while my heart clubbed the inside of my chest. And I really thought I was going to have a heart attack when I saw a dark figure was hovering above me.

“Angel of Death,” I spat out.

“Mom?” Emma said, clicking on my bedside lamp.

My eyes burned as she started shaking my shoulder.

“Wake up, Mom,” she said. “We both overslept. I can’t find my new AE shirt. You know, the nice blue one? Jeez, you’re covered in sweat. Are you sick? Don’t tell me you’ve got the swine flu?”

I wish, I felt like telling my daughter as I pulled the sheet over my head. You could get over the swine flu. I mopped my clammy brow on the other side of my pillow.

My recurring nightmares, on the other hand, were the gift that kept right on giving.

Even after almost twenty years.

“Oh, I know,” Emma said. “Too much champagne at my party last night. That’s it. You’re hungover.”

Emma was teasing, of course.

“Ha, ha, wise girl,” I said, lifting the cover and suddenly smiling. “Your blue shirt’s crisply ironed on a hanger in my closet, Little Miss Sweet Sixteen. And you’re welcome for last night’s party. It wasn’t like it was expensive or anything. I think it was worth having to eat cat food when I’m old, don’t you?”

Emma stuck out her tongue. I stuck out mine right back. Emma and I were close, like sisters and best friends put together, only better. We even shared clothes. Which pissed her off. I guess it would piss me off a little, too, to have a mother who could fit into my jeans.

“As if you’ll ever be old,” Emma said, climbing into the bed and wrapping me in a headlock. “You know how many of my stupid friends’ mothers asked if you were my older sister? Even some of Mark’s Collegiate buddies were checking you out. It’s really not fair. Isn’t Snow White supposed to be the fairest one of all? Come on, Evil Queen. Step aside already.”

“Never,” I said with a cackle.

Again, Emma was teasing. Due to a death-march regimen of treadmilling and starvation, at forty I was just still in the ballpark of merely pretty. Emma, who had inherited Peter’s dark, beguiling looks on the other hand, was already nearly six feet tall and a heart-melting beauty.

I wasn’t the only one who thought so, either. Every once in a while, she’d get legit offers for modeling from friends of friends. Which I told her that I’d let her do over my dead body, of course.

As much as we were friends, I was very protective of her. Probably overly so. I didn’t care. I knew what the world was like, how precarious, how quickly and completely destruction could follow from just one false move.

Emma was going to have a good life, a normal life, a safe life. It was all that mattered.

“The last thing I’d worry about is your looks, kiddo,” I said, knocking on her head with a knuckle. “Now, that brain of yours, well, that’s another story.”

I ducked as she swung my pillow.

“Shit!” I screamed as I finally glanced at my iPhone charging on the night table and saw the time. “Why didn’t you tell me we were so late!?”

Chapter 51

IT WAS POURING RAIN four hours later when, umbrella-less, I decided to race from my triple-parked taxi toward the crowded Aretsky’s Patroon on East 46th Street. Not good. It was only a hundred feet or so, but I got completely and utterly hosed in the monsoon.

Of course, I thought, as I finally squished my way inside. It always rained when you were running late for your very first power lunch with your boss and forgot to check the weather.

To make matters oh so much better, there was a lithe and perfect Nordic hostess behind the podium inside. She acknowledged my sopping presence with a slight lift of her eyebrow. But then she smiled nicely.

“Welcome to Patroon. Name?” she asked.

I stood there as tall and regally as I could, doing my damnedest to pretend that being as wet as a drowned rat was the new black.

“Nina,” I said, flicking my ruined hair out of my eyes with a hopefully gracious and professionally competent smile. “My name is Nina Bloom.”

I’d lucked out. My boss hadn’t arrived yet, so I was able to do some rehab work on my makeup and hair in the ladies’ room before I returned to the discreet banquette where I’d been seated.

As I waited, I kicked back for the first time and drank in the vista. Carefully seated inside the modern power-lunch mecca, big-hitter media elites in bespoke tailoring were cutting deals beside Botoxed A-list fashionistas. Among the bottles of San Pellegrino, I spotted Ivanka Trump and Anderson Cooper chatting it up.

Well, it was more like I studiously ignored Ivanka and Anderson, like we were currently not speaking. I had picked up on one or two things living in Manhattan for the last couple of decades.

After a moment, I smiled and raised my own glass of sparkling water toward the room of power players and took a sip. Given my arrival in New York in 1994 with nothing but the clothes on my back and Emma in my belly, I had good reason to toast myself.

Most of all just for surviving.

I thought about all the craziness of those first few years. The skeevy dive bar around the corner from