Amy smiled. Anger flared in her eyes with a hard, flat intensity that was the antithesis of the secretive, liquid mystery of April’s eyes.
Like Doug had said. You can’t hide your lyin’ eyes.
Unless you were someone like April Destino, someone who could bury anger deep in the pit of her heart. If she sat in front of April’s mirror for a million years. Amy would never understand that kind of restraint.
She straightened April’s cheerleading sweater, smoothed her short blue skirt, and daubed her wrists with April’s perfume before rising from the little chair that sat in front of the dresser. Even in the dim light of a whore’s bedroom, the one thing Amy had overlooked was obvious. Two things, actually. Things that even red lamp shades and deep shadows couldn’t hide.
Amy grabbed a box of Kleenex from the dresser. Each tissue escaped the box with a tired whisper, and with each whisper Amy blushed a little deeper because she knew she needed several tissues and at the same time didn’t want to know the exact number.
Doug’s words rang in her memory: “You do a good job of it. You make it real, right down to the tits. If it isn’t real, the deal’s off. And believe me when I tell you that I want to see two full scoops…”
Amy raised the heavy sweater and stuffed April Louise Destino’s blue bra, molding breasts that were generous and voluptuous. The experience was both humiliating and ridiculous and she knew it.
She reached for another Kleenex.
The box hadn’t been full when she started- Amy realized that even as humiliation burnt a hole in her very core-but now it was empty.
Lipstick. She’d forgotten lipstick.
She searched the dresser but found none.
She opened April’s nightstand drawer. Dug through a pile of tubes until her fingers brushed something cold.
A pistol. Amy shivered. Her stomach rolled. Just seeing a pistol made everything seem so much more dangerous. And touching it… touching it was like touching something that was dead.
She could do without lipstick.
She closed the drawer.
Amy tidied up as best she could. She returned April’s cosmetics to a dresser drawer. She ruffled the shag rug in the dresser’s dead space, erasing the indentation marks left by the box that had held the cheerleading outfit. That done, she replaced the drawer that held April’s bras. Finally, she hid the empty box in a garment bag in the closet and returned to the living room.
Amy knew that such a simple clean-up wouldn’t keep a determined-or lucky-cop from learning of her visit. After all, there was the matter of her little run-in with the lot manager, a man who obviously enjoyed the sound of his own voice. She had given the manager her attorney’s card. A cop who had both luck and determination might make something of it, but that was extremely doubtful. A first-class attorney like Wendy Wong probably handed out ten or twenty cards a day.
Even if a cop tracked Amy down, what could he do? She certainly hadn’t murdered April Destino. April had done that to herself.
Amy didn’t think she had much to worry about. Not on that score, anyway. But before tonight she hadn’t been worried about April Destino, or Doug Douglas, or any of the ghosts from her past. Now, facing a row of cheap paperbacks filled with crazy, impossible ideas, she had to admit that there was something about being involved with April that frightened her, even if April was dead.
The idea that she had unfinished business with a dead woman circled Amy’s thoughts like a buzzard closing in on fresh carrion. Spooky stories had always frightened her. The man with the hook hand, the hitchhiking ghost, the woman with the golden arm-she still shivered just thinking of those stories. They stirred completely irrational fears, but these were fears that she could overcome.
Just as she would overcome her fear of April. Doug Douglas was another matter entirely. He wasn’t dead. He was very much alive. She had seen raw hatred burning in his eyes. Fearing Doug was not irrational. Doug was unstable. Hell, Doug was loony.
She wasn’t accomplishing anything by standing here. The old yearbook was on the third shelf from the bottom, nestled among April’s reincarnation books, just as Doug had promised. Amy pulled it free and turned to page 131. A map-this one with a key taped to it-slipped from between the pages and fell to the floor, but Amy hardly noticed it. Her gaze had locked on one of twenty or thirty portraits on the page.
Peyton, Amelia. Yearbook Editor. I want it all!
But Amy couldn’t see her portrait. A heavy black circle eclipsed it, and there was a message above the circle.
I’ll always be with you.
Love, April
“No you won’t.” Amy glared at all the silly books about reincarnation and ghosts and psychic phenomenon. “You’re dead in the ground, April. You been boxed and buried and I’m closing your account.”
Amy bent low and collected the map and the key. She was tired of thinking, tired of being scared. She returned to the bedroom. Dumped the nightstand drawer onto the dead whore’s bed. Most of the lipsticks didn’t have caps. Amy hated sloppy women. She batted the lipsticks aside, leaving bloody streaks on the bedspread.
Amy’s fingers brushed cool metal. The pistol small and silver. She didn’t know much about guns, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure the thing out, check that it was loaded.
She replaced the yearbook. Her anger receded, making room for fear, and she nearly replaced the gun. Maybe it was part of April’s plan. Maybe April wanted her to have the gun. Maybe- No. April really was playing with her mind, and that was going to stop right now. Amy was going to keep the gun. Playtime was over. Spooky stories, all forgotten. This was the real world.
In the real world, April Destino was dead. And Doug Douglas was insane.
And Amy Peyton, for the first time in well over an hour, was in control.
Amy exited the trailer park and turned onto the old highway. The shadows were deep and the road was narrow-there wasn’t much development this far from town-but Amy felt secure behind the sturdy steering wheel of her Mercedes. She tried to concentrate on the things she would say to Doug, but shouldn’t seem to plan the confrontation. Excitement was burning a hole straight through her. Maybe things were going to get a little more dangerous, a little scarier. The idea didn’t frighten Amy. She had disassembled her fear rather than giving in to it. She had channeled her anger, just as the pop psych books advised. That empowered her. That, and the gun. She was ready for anything.
Amy passed through town-Mercedes tires hissing cool and quiet over the empty road, waxed hood reflecting streetlights and the dull dead neon glow that spilled from the windows of closed businesses. She almost laughed at the idea of Doug Douglas trying to pull her strings. She intended to scare him with the gun. She would do a good job of it. And then Doug, being Doug, would cave. She’d get the film and some answers. About the nature of a man’s fear, and about April Destino.
Amy ran a red light. Annoyed at herself, she shook her head. Farrah Fawcett curls tickled her eyebrows and she brushed them away. This was no time for stupid mistakes. She had made her stupid mistake of the night by giving her attorney’s card to the lot manager, and she wasn’t going to make another.
She tried to concentrate on the big steering wheel, on the road and on the rhythm of the shifting gears, but her thoughts returned to April Destino, playing with the edges of the idea that maybe there were more surprises in store. Maybe April had only been toying with her tonight. Maybe she had only wanted to prove that she wasn’t such a sad little loser. Or maybe April was playing her like a puppet, driving her forward, driving her into a dangerous- Christ! The man stood frozen in the middle of the road, twenty feet from the Mercedes’ front bumper, staring at the headlights with the uncomprehending expression of a trapped animal. Amy mashed the brake pedal and simultaneously twisted the wheel. She tried to gear down but her foot slipped off the clutch and the engine died with a jolt. The car slipped into a slow spin. Icy headlight beams revealed the frightened whites of the man’s eyes and then the car spun sideways and he was swallowed by the darkness.