Sonia flushed. "I'll take you downstairs."
She led Serena through the upscale kitchen to a back stairway that led down to a laundry and storage room. The floor was cold cement. A musty smell came off the walls. Sonia unlocked a narrow door that looked like a gateway to a utility closet, but instead Serena found herself slipping inside a small but elegant bedroom. The wallpaper was gold with a burgundy pattern of interlaced squares. A queen-sized bed was decorated with shams and a ruffled fringe, as if it had been plucked from a showroom. There was a dressing table and mirror, a bureau, and a walk-in closet.
One wall of the bedroom was glass. It looked out on a large, plush open space, lit by candles. The temple.
Serena found her eyes drawn to the shadowy room. She felt exposed. "They can't see through the mirror, right? They won't know I'm here?"
"No, most members don't know about this space. It's kind of a VIP room."
"Is the other room wired for sound?"
Sonia nodded. "You'll hear everything."
Serena could see herself in the glass. "I hate this," she murmured.
"Give it a chance. You might be surprised."
"Not likely."
"You're a very attractive spy," Sonia said. "Jonathan has good taste."
Serena didn't reply.
"Did he tell you about him and me?"
"Yes, he did."
Serena tried to imagine Jonny as a teenager, drunk in a car with this woman thirty years ago. She herself would have been a child then, during the good days in Phoenix, before her mother became a slave to cocaine and her father walked out. Before Blue Dog.
"He's very intense," Sonia said.
"That's why he's good at what he does."
"I'm disbanding the club, you know. This will be our last party."
"Oh?"
"It's too risky now."
Serena knew she was talking about the risk to herself and Delmar and their reputations, not the risk to the alpha girls. The risk of being exposed.
"Do the members know?"
"No, I didn't think you'd want me to tell them."
"I don't."
Sonia eyed her figure. "It's a shame you won't be at the party. You could still join us on the other side."
"No thanks."
"Suit yourself. No one will know what you're doing in here. If it turns you on, there are vibrators in the bureau."
"This doesn't turn me on, Sonia."
"No? It's different when you put on the mask. It changes everything."
Sonia opened a dresser drawer and emerged with a gold mask, feminine and catlike. She slipped the band around her head and slid it down so that the elastic fell under her curly hair and nestled behind her ears. She reached around with both hands to adjust the mask gently.
Serena saw them both in the mirror, red hair next to black hair. Behind the mask, Sonia had become a stranger. Someone entirely different.
Sonia slid a warm arm around her waist, and Serena wondered if the other woman was about to kiss her. "Want to have a go with me?" Sonia asked.
"Pass."
"No one will ever know. I won't tell Jonathan if you don't."
"I'm not interested, Sonia."
"No? Women make the best lovers. I'll bet you know that."
Serena leaned into her ear and whispered with a smile, "Get the hell away from me."
Sonia's face darkened. She put on a false smile, too, as if she had brushed it on like makeup, but her eyes glinted through the mask with rage. She marched away and left Serena alone in the hideaway.
37
Maggie wanted to drive the memories of the club out of her brain, but it wasn't working. Not tonight. When she looked at her watch, she knew the party was going on. Serena was inside the secret room, and Kathy Lassiter was on the bed, as Maggie had been that night in November. She remembered exactly what it was like. The temple was open and dark, and the half-windows in the walls were blacked out with electrical tape and shrouded by curtains. She remembered thick carpet under her bare feet and hot air pouring out of the vents. The room was lit by a dozen candles flickering in glass bowls. Their aromas left an odd mix of fragrances in the air, and she caught traces of ginger and green tea, sage, lilac blossoms, and juicy orange. Soundscapes played softly from hidden speakers. She heard ocean surf, harps, and birdsong. There were wooden chairs, cocktail tables with open bottles of shiraz, and crystal glasses that reflected the numerous lights of the candles. Lush bearskin rugs. Sex toys. Condoms heaped in a bowl like candy. Subtle, shadowy erotic photographs of nudes on the walls.
The circular bed in the center of the room was draped to the floor in red silk, which was cool and slippery on her nude skin. She spent ten minutes alone before the others joined her. The alpha girl was always first, Sonia said. Do what you want. Drink wine. Listen to the music. Sleep. Touch yourself. Maggie simply squirmed on the silk and thought about running far, far away.
She had allowed Eric to pull her into this world because he said he wanted it so badly. Do this for me, let me see you like that. With other people. It was his ultimate fantasy. Looking back, she couldn't believe she had done it. Her face grew hot with humiliation.
They were so pathetic as they filed in and shed their robes. It was like going to the beach and realizing that, underneath everyone's clothes, naked flesh was the great equalizer. Models made their money because they were so rare. The sex club was a parade of paunchy rolls, cellulite, drooping breasts, and double chins. There were beautiful bodies among them, but en masse, the impression of so much skin was nauseating and ugly. She wondered again what she was doing there and why she had ever thought this was a way to be close to Eric. Or why she thought it mattered.
Most of the time, she kept her eyes closed. She had recollections of soft lips and sweet breath from one woman, garlic and cold hands from a man, panting and sweat, sounds of moaning, none of it hers. When she opened her eyes once, she saw Eric, standing in the shadows, rapt, with his hand around his stiff member. Then she closed her eyes again and felt time drag out through more sensations of rough fingers, tongues leaving wet trails like snails on her skin, and men who came and went quickly.
She wanted to pretend that she had simply climbed aboard the roller coaster and hung on for dear life, but that was a lie. Some of the dips and valleys excited her. Sonia was surprisingly talented. So was Mitchell Brandt. For a few moments in the midst of a closed-eyed nightmare, she found herself not caring what was going on around her, because she was into what was being done to her. Enough to climb the heights and come back down. She felt guilty, but she couldn't take it back. On some level, she had enjoyed it.
That was one of the reasons she didn't report the rape when it happened a few weeks later. She knew what Serena had told her about the questions she got from men who didn't know any better. Did you enjoy what Blue Dog did to you? If she went public, the sex club would be exposed, and people would talk about what she did that night, and somewhere along the line someone would wonder. Did she enjoy it? Was she asking to be raped?
"Fuck you, Eric," she said aloud.
She was angry that he had left these memories in her brain. She couldn't separate the sex club and the rape in her mind, and she blamed Eric for both. For an instant, she was glad that he was dead, and she wished she had been the one to pull the trigger that night.
Maggie wanted to be out on the street, not alone here at home, dwelling on her mistakes. She should have been in the car with Stride, not Abel Teitscher. She wanted to be there to track this bastard and catch him and see what his face really looked like. She wanted to know what Eric had found and how he had found it.
And who Helen Danning was.
She thought about Helen Danning and looked over to see her Black-Berry on the coffee table, its red light flashing. She had e-mail.
No one had sent her e-mail lately. Since the cloud of the murder began hanging over her head, she was a nonperson.