she wondered, her thoughts dazed and confused.
She heard Robin clattering down the stairs. Quickly she shoved the picture in her pocket. “Mom, Cassie reminded me that I’m supposed to be watching the Discovery Channel now. The program is about what we’re studying in science. That doesn’t count as entertainment, does it?”
“No, of course not. Go ahead.”
The phone rang again as Kerry sank into a chair. It was Geoff Dorso. She cut off his apologies. “Geoff, I just opened the mail.” She told him about the picture. “Robin was right,” she half whispered. “There was someone watching her from that car. My God, suppose he had pulled her into it. She’d have disappeared, just like those kids in upstate New York a couple of years ago. Oh my God.”
Geoff heard the fear and despair in her voice. “Kerry, don’t say anything else. Don’t let Robin see that picture or realize that you’re upset. I’m on my way. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
56
Dr. Smith had sensed something amiss in Kate Carpenter’s attitude toward him all day. Several times he had caught her staring at him with a questioning look. Why? he wondered.
As he sat in his library that evening, in his usual chair, sipping his usual after-office cocktail, he pondered the possible reasons for her odd behavior. He was sure Carpenter had detected the slight tremor in his hand when he performed the rhinoplasty the other day, but that wouldn’t explain the looks she had given him. Whatever was on her mind now was something more troubling, of that he was certain.
It had been a terrible mistake to follow Barbara Tompkins last night. When his car was caught in traffic in front of her apartment building, he had turned away as much as possible, but even so, he thought she might have seen him.
On the other hand, midtown Manhattan was a place where people did frequently catch a glimpse of people they knew. So his being there really wasn’t so unusual.
But a quick, casual glimpse wasn’t enough. He wanted to see Barbara again. Really see her. Talk to her. She wasn’t due for a checkup for another two months. He had to see her before then. He couldn’t wait that long to watch the way her eyes, now so luminous without the heavy lids that had concealed their beauty, smiled at him across the table.
She wasn’t Suzanne. No one could be. But like Suzanne, the more Barbara became accustomed to her beauty, the more her personality enhanced it. He recalled the sullen, plain creature who had first appeared in his office; within a year of the operation Suzanne had capped the transformation with her total change of personality.
Smith smiled faintly, remembering Suzanne’s provocative body language, the subtle moves that made every man turn to look at her. Then she had begun to tilt her head just a little, so that she gave whomever she was talking with the sense of being the only person in the universe.
She had even lowered the tone of her voice until it had a husky, intimate quality. Teasingly she would run a fingertip over the hand of the man-and it was always a man-who was chatting with her.
When he had commented on the personality transformation she had undergone, she had said, “I had two good teachers, my stepsisters. We reversed the fairy tale. They were the beauties and I was ugly Cinderella. Only instead of a fairy godmother, I have you.”
Toward the end, however, his Pygmalion fantasy had begun to turn into a nightmare. The respect and the affection she had seemed to have for him had begun to fade. She seemed no longer willing to listen to his counsel. Toward the end she had gone beyond simple flirting. How many times had he warned her that she was playing with fire, that Skip Reardon would be capable of murder if he found out the way she was carrying on?
Any husband of a woman that desirable would be capable of murder, Dr. Smith thought.
With a jolt he looked down angrily at his empty glass. Now there wouldn’t be another chance to reach the perfection he had achieved in Suzanne. He would have to give up surgery before a disaster occurred. It was too late. He knew he was in the beginning stages of Parkinson’s.
If Barbara wasn’t Suzanne, she was of all his living patients the most striking example of his genius. He reached for the phone.
Surely that wasn’t stress in her voice, he thought, when she picked up the receiver and said hello.
“Barbara, my dear, is anything wrong? This is Dr. Smith.”
Her gasp was audible, but then she said quickly, “Oh, no, of course not. How are you, Doctor?”
“I’m fine but I think you might be able to do me a favor. I’m stopping in at Lenox Hill Hospital for a moment to see an old friend who is terminal, and I know I’ll be feeling a bit down. Would you have mercy on me and join me for dinner? I could stop by for you at about seven-thirty.”
“I, I don’t know…”
“Please, Barbara.” He tried to sound playful. “You did say that you owed me your new life. Why not spare me two hours of it?”
“Of course.”
“Wonderful. Seven-thirty then.”
“All right, Doctor.”
When Smith hung up, he raised his eyebrows. Was that a note of resignation in Barbara’s voice? he wondered. She almost sounded as though he had forced her into meeting him.
If so, it was one more way in which she was beginning to resemble Suzanne.
57
Jason Arnott could not shake the feeling that something was wrong. He had spent the day in New York with fifty-two-year-old Vera Shelby Todd, trailing after her as she took him on her endless hunt for Persian carpets.
Vera had phoned him that morning and asked if he could be available for the day. A Rhode Island Shelby, she lived in one of the handsome manor houses in Tuxedo Park and was used to getting her way. After her first husband died, she had married Stuart Todd but decided to keep the Tuxedo Park place. Now, using Todd’s seemingly unlimited checkbook, Vera frequently availed herself of Jason’s infallible eye for rare finds and bargains.
Jason had first met Vera not in New Jersey, but at a gala the Shelbys gave in Newport. Her cousins had introduced them, and when Vera realized how relatively close he lived to her Tuxedo Park home, she had begun inviting him to her parties and eagerly accepting invitations to his gatherings as well.
It always amused Jason that Vera had told him every detail of the police investigation into the Newport robbery he had committed years ago.
“My cousin Judith was so upset,” she had confided. “She couldn’t understand why someone would take the Picasso and the Gainsborough and pass up the Van Eyck. So she brought in some art expert, and he said that she had a discriminating criminal:
The Van Eyck is a fake. Judith was furious, but for the rest of us who had had to listen to her bragging about her peerless knowledge of the great masters, it’s become a family joke.”
Today, after having exhaustively examined ludicrously expensive rugs ranging from Turkomans to Safavids, with Vera finding none of them to be exactly what she had in mind, Jason was wild to get home and away from her.
But first, at her insistence they had a late lunch at The Four Seasons, and that pleasant interlude perked Jason up considerably. At least until, as she finished her espresso, Vera had said, “Oh, did I forget to tell you? You remember how five years ago my cousin Judith’s place in Rhode Island was burglarized?”
Jason had pursed his lips. “Yes, of course I do. Terrible experience.”
Vera nodded. “I should say. But yesterday Judith got a photograph from the FBI. There was a recent burglary in Chevy Chase, and a hidden camera caught the robber. The FBI thinks it may be the same person who broke into
