Faces of Fear

conditioning compressors, and what looked like a powerful generator, along with half a dozen large gray metal boxes that presumably contained the electrical circuits and switches needed to keep the whole thing functioning. Risa closed the door, and seeing nothing ahead but the pool equipment room and then the stairs back up to the kitchen, turned the other way and ventured farther down the hallway, where it took a turn to the right.

An unmarked door lay at the end of the hallway, where the scent was stronger. It seemed to be emanating from behind the door.

Could something have broken open in a storeroom?

Risa approached the door and sniffed the air again. The scent was definitely stronger. She turned the knob, cracked open the door slightly, and a wave of fragrance washed over her. She set the two bottles of champagne on the hallway floor, then pushed the door the rest of the way open.

The disembodied face of Margot Dunn stared at her.

Risa gasped and took an involuntary step backward, tripping on the carpeting but catching herself just before she fell.

Heart racing, she peered into the room again and realized that what she’d actually seen was nothing more than a softly lit life-size photograph of Margot.

Her pulse starting to drop back to normal, she groped for the light switch that should be next to the door, found it, and flipped it on.

The light in the room came up, a warm glow that filled the room from invisible fixtures. Risa stepped farther inside, and saw a lighted vanity against one of the walls, the top covered with ornate, blown-glass perfume bottles, one of which was open.

Combs, brushes, and a hand mirror — along with a profusion of pots, jars, and bottles of creams, lotions, and makeup — were all carefully arranged on the vanity’s spotless glass top.

She moved to the middle of the room and gazed around her. Framed, poster-sized photographs of Margot Dunn at the height of her modeling career covered the walls.

A three-way mirror stood in a corner, another in the corner opposite. Three racks built along one wall held samples of Margot’s signature clothing. A mannequin, wearing a slinky black Valentino dress, stood next to a blow- up of the famous Vogue cover with the photo of Margot wearing that same dress.

Next to the vanity there was a three-panel changing screen with a silk robe casually thrown over it as if Margot were behind it even now, changing into something…what?

More comfortable?

What the hell was going on in here?

Though she knew it was impossible, Risa still found herself walking over to glance behind the screen to make certain that Margot truly wasn’t there. A pair of lace-topped, thigh-high black hose was draped over a small chair behind the screen, as if Margot had just taken them off a moment ago.

Risa shivered, though the room was far from cold, and her skin began to crawl with the feeling that she was not alone.

Could Conrad be home already? She stepped out from behind the screen, but nobody was there.

Except there was somebody there: Margot Dunn, who had been dead for a year, but whose essence filled this room to the point where the dead woman’s presence was almost palpable.

Risa opened one of the drawers in the vanity — Margot’s silk lingerie, neatly folded, filled it to the brim.

She opened the large jewelry box — apparently, every piece of Margot’s magnificent jewelry lay perfectly aligned, as if waiting to enhance their owner’s beauty. Unlike Risa’s own jumbled and tangled jewelry box, Margot’s earrings were sorted in matched pairs, her necklaces neatly coiled, her rings lined up in velvet slots.

And in the bottom drawer, lying alone on the black velvet lining, there was a key.

Risa looked around for something the key might fit, but saw nothing.

She closed the jewelry box, put the stopper back in the perfume bottle, and took a step toward the door, even while wishing she’d never come into the room at all. And then, as she stood alone amid Margot’s clothes and jewelry and makeup, with Margot’s eyes watching her from every frame on every wall, she recalled Conrad’s voice on that first night of their honeymoon in Paris.

Margot!

It had been Margot’s name he’d called out, not hers.

Before their wedding, he’d cleaned all of Margot’s things out of the closets, taken all the photographs off the walls, and removed everything that she might find difficult to live with, and she’d loved him for it.

But now she could see that he hadn’t gotten rid of it at all, hadn’t gotten rid of any of it. He’d only brought it down here to store it in the basement.

But as Risa took another look around, she knew this was no storeroom.

It was a shrine.

A shrine to a woman who was dead.

Except that to Conrad, Margot apparently wasn’t dead at all.

How often did he come down here? Did he prefer Margot’s perfume to her own?

She pictured Conrad prowling the room, caressing his dead wife’s lingerie, stroking the glimmering fabric on that black Valentino gown.

Was he happier down here, mourning at this memorial to his dead wife, than upstairs in the company of his warm, loving, living wife?

A terrible aching feeling of helplessness and hopelessness came over Risa as she gazed around the room once more. How could she ever compete with Margot’s beauty and grace?

Her eyes glistened with tears, tears she had no strength to fight, but just as they were about to overwhelm her, she remembered the night just over a year ago when Michael Shaw had told her their marriage was over, and why.

She had cried that night. Not so much because she’d lost Michael, but because there was no way to fight for him.

But Conrad was different.

Conrad wasn’t gay.

And suddenly Risa felt her strength flooding back into her, and she gazed up at Margot again, this time seeing her in a whole new light.

“You’re dead,” she whispered. “You’re dead and buried and no longer a part of our life. And you will not claim my husband.”

Margot was dead, and no matter how much time Conrad spent down here with his memories, Margot could not seduce him any longer.

Not the way she herself could.

And would.

Starting tonight.

Snatching one of Margot’s peignoirs off the clothes rack, a peignoir that was far more beautiful — and expensive — than anything she would have bought for herself, Risa left the basement room, closing the door firmly behind her.

By the end of this evening, she resolved, Conrad would never want to come back here again.

21

The fingers played over the keyboard with the deftness of Van Cliburn racing through Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. At the top left-hand corner of the computer screen there was a photograph of a mousy young woman named Molly Roberts — whose name was of no more interest to the mind than the names of any of its previous subjects.

The eyes gazed steadily at the screen as the facial-recognition software measured every aspect of the nose that was enlarged in the center of the screen.

Molly Roberts’s nose.