666 Park Avenue (13 page)

And what am I doing now?

With a mumbled apology, she disentangled herself from Harris, whose striped green button-down was clinging to his now-damp chest in an extremely appealing way. She heard that she was slurring her words a bit and grimaced.
I have to remember to ask someone what the hell is in a Black Russian.

She tapped Maeve—who had easily found a dark-haired stockbroker to dance with—and gestured toward the door, waving good-bye and blowing an impulsive kiss to her and her brother. Seconds later, she was in a taxi heading silently uptown.

Malcolm will come around,
she told herself, watching the storefronts fly by in a ghostly parade.
I’ll make him. I deserve way better than someone who thinks he’s settling for me, and he’s got to be smart enough to realize that, too.
Her eyelids felt heavy, but when she closed them, the taxi spun unpleasantly, so she forced them to stay wide-open until she recognized a giant stone mansion that seemed taller, darker, and more sinister than the rest. Even from the street, in what was arguably the least conspicuous type of car in New York, she felt like someone was watching her from the highest windows.

“On the right side is fine,” she told the driver thickly. “I’m home.”

Chapter Twenty-two

J
ane tiptoed toward the dark living room, trying not
to bump into anything. Her suede ankle boots felt like blocks of concrete, throwing off her balance and making her clumsy.
It’s probably not just the boots,
she admitted to herself as she smashed into a doorknob.
Ow!
She put out a hand to steady herself and felt curious grooves under her fingertips.
The infamous family tree,
she realized.

Her fingers brushed across Malcolm’s name, and then Annette’s. She stopped short, suddenly, her fingers lingering over Annette’s birth year. She would have been twenty-four, just like Jane, if she’d lived.

The house was eerily still around her; not even the whoosh of cabs rushing down Park Avenue could penetrate the double-paned windows in this room. Jane wondered what Annette would have been like if she’d gotten the chance to grow up. Would Annette have been a friend? An ally even, someone she could count on and complain to and ask for advice?

As Jane slid her hand further along the wall, she felt the oddly smooth patch that she had noticed on her first night. She pushed away from the wall dizzily, her mind too wobbly to think the anomaly through.

She navigated the now-familiar turns of the hallway carefully, gasping once when her heel got caught in the fringe of a narrow Oriental rug. When she reached her room, she fumbled in the darkness for the doorknob, but her hands found nothing but empty air. After a moment, she realized the door was already open.
Malcolm’s not home yet? It’s three a.m.!
Not that she had the moral high ground here, but still—what kind of “guys’ night out”
was
this, exactly?

Her eyes adjusted quickly to the dim light from the street filtering through the heavy curtains, and she realized she’d been wrong. Someone was in the room after all, leaning over their bed.
And that thing that goes bump in the night is . . .

“Malcolm?”

The man straightened and turned to look at her, and she felt her stomach heave in a way that had nothing to do with alcohol. The height was right, and so were the broad shoulders, but even in the near-darkness, she could tell that the man in her bedroom was a complete stranger. His hair was longer and darker than Malcolm’s, and while the two men shared the same large frame, this man’s build was fleshy and slack, nothing like Malcolm’s taut torso and arms. Before she could speak again, he lurched toward the door, his meaty hands reaching for her.

“Get away,” she shrieked. She tried to spin on her heel, but it got caught again in the carpet. “Help!”

She’d only made it a few steps before a rough hand closed on her arm, forcing her to a stop so abrupt that she almost fell to the floor. She screamed again, trying to jerk her arm away, but the hand was like stone, pulling her ruthlessly against the man’s chest. She drew in a breath to scream, fight, beg, anything, but the air around the man was absolutely foul, and when it hit the back of her throat, she began coughing in choked spasms. She leaned backward as far as she could, fighting for breath and ignoring the pain in her shoulder as it twisted awkwardly to accommodate her still-imprisoned arm.

The moment of clear air allowed her mind to function just enough to come up with a plan. She spun her body as hard to her right as she could, bringing her left arm up to swing at where she hoped the man’s face was.

Missed,
she groaned silently as she felt her balled fist barely graze his cheek. With a bellow of rage, he tightened his grip on her arm and used it to shove her against the wall. She opened her mouth again, trying to ignore the stench, but just as she did, there was a soft click and light flooded the hallway.

“Charles!” a voice shouted, and the hand circling Jane’s arm disappeared—as did the smell.

There was more shouting, and then Jane felt strong hands on her shoulders, holding her up against the wall. She realized belatedly that they were probably necessary, since her knees had gone watery, but she flinched when they got too close to the bruise already forming on her right arm.
Stupid pale skin,
she thought randomly.
Shows everything.
She looked up then, and nearly cried with relief. There, his head bent so low that his dark eyes were only inches from hers, was Malcolm. Still wearing his leather jacket, she noticed, but looking every inch the loving and concerned fiancé.

“Did he hurt you?” he asked, his voice soft enough to be private but forceful enough to rumble the air between them.

She shook her head mutely and glanced over his arm. The stranger had vanished, and Lynne was storming down the hall, two terrified-looking maids trailing behind her.

“I’m okay, but how—who was—” She frowned; she didn’t even know what to ask. “I have questions,” she finished stiffly.

Malcolm nodded and drew her into their room, shutting the door behind him. She didn’t notice that she’d been holding her breath until he switched on the lights and the wall sconces illuminated every dark corner. As the air rushed out of her burning lungs, she realized she hadn’t believed that the room was really empty until she’d seen it for herself. Malcolm shrugged off his coat and slumped tiredly into one of the overstuffed chairs, gesturing for her to do the same. “I’m so sorry,” he began. He sounded sincere, but Jane didn’t move a muscle; she needed to know just what he was sorry for before she could forgive him.

“What the hell was that?” she demanded.

He picked at the nubby fabric of the armchair. The lamp cast a golden halo of light over his blond curls, but dark circles lined his eyes, and his mouth was drawn. He looked exhausted. “There’s a lot I should have told you about my family. But when you keep secrets for so long, well . . . I guess it just becomes a habit.”

She massaged her sore shoulder and waited for him to continue.

“I used to have a sister, Annette. She . . . well, she drowned when she was six.” He smoothed his jeans over his knees. He hadn’t met her gaze once, as if it was easier to tell the story without looking at her. “It was . . . awful, and Mom was devastated. I’ve never seen anything like it. She went off the deep end, actually,” he admitted, “and then she tried to fix it.”

“ ‘Fix it’?” Jane echoed. “How do you ‘fix’ a dead child?”

Malcolm inhaled deeply. “She decided to have another baby. She was sure she could have another girl, like she could just replace Annette and everything would be right again.” His lips twisted in a horrible approximation of a smile. “You’ve seen how her family is about girls. On top of everything else, they’d just lost their only shot at carrying on this incredibly long tradition, and she was convinced that she could just make it all better.” He frowned. The heat clicked on, hissing through the room like an angry snake.

“She was older by then, though. Even carrying Annie had been a risk. My parents fought about it a lot. Her first doctor said it was too dangerous, so she got another one, and another, and—well, you’ve seen Mom when she wants a certain color tablecloth. Can you imagine when she wanted a baby?” His dark eyes flickered up briefly, and Jane nodded, picturing Lynne flipping through a book of baby portraits, demanding that her ob-gyn give her the beautiful blue-eyed girl with the dimples.

“So she got her way. Except that there are things that
no
one can control—not even her.”

Another shout sounded from the hall, followed by a slamming door. Jane didn’t move.

“I was a kid—the medical stuff went right over my head—but I guess that she was taking something experimental, to make sure the pregnancy took. To make sure she got to have her one last shot at a perfect little girl.” He looked up, eyes burning with an emotion that Jane couldn’t name. “Except that he wasn’t a girl. And he wasn’t perfect, either.”

“Charles,” Jane breathed, remembering the shout in the hallway right after the lights had blazed on. She sank down into the chair next to Malcolm’s.

He nodded, looking absolutely miserable. “It was obvious right away that something was wrong. She said it was just one of those things, but between her age and whatever she took, I know she feels responsible.”

She is,
Jane thought darkly. But it was hard to judge the grief-stricken mother of a dead child too harshly, and she reprimanded herself silently for the thought.

Malcolm shifted in his chair. “Dad wanted to send him to a place—an asylum, I guess—where they could take care of him, but Mom didn’t want anyone to find out. She couldn’t face people asking about him, knowing about him. She’d been on bed rest for pretty much the whole pregnancy, so if we kept him here, he could stay a family secret.”

Jane’s jaw dropped open; this time the judgment was harder to suppress. “So no one knew he existed?”

Malcolm chuckled bitterly. “It wasn’t even hard to hide. After Annie died, people just stopped asking where Mom was. She had a perfectly good reason to shut herself in, and then a year later she announced that she was done with ‘mourning,’ and picked up right where she’d left off. Except that then I had a brother living in the attic who no one was allowed to talk about.”

A lump formed in Jane’s throat. The terror she’d felt when Charles attacked her fell away, replaced with heartbreak for Malcolm’s teenage self, for the loss of his sister, and the horrible secret he’d had to carry all these years. “I won’t tell,” she whispered.

He stared at her as if he didn’t know who she was, for a split second, and then blinked back to himself. “I know that. I was just so used to shutting him out by the time I met you that it was almost like he wasn’t real. And Mom promised that he was getting care around the clock. If he’d hurt you . . .” He dropped his dark-gold head in his hands.

Jane slid from her chair to his and settled into his lap. “He didn’t,” she murmured, stroking the waves of his hair. She felt a stab of guilt for questioning his feelings for her earlier. For a brief moment, she remembered the clean smell of Harris’s aftershave when she had pressed against him at the club. She winced as the guilt doubled.

“Everything’s okay now,” she whispered into Malcolm’s ear. “I promise.”

Chapter Twenty-three

J
ane awoke after a nightmare-filled four hours of sleep
to an empty bed. She reached over to touch Malcolm’s side; it was cold. Her compassion for him from the previous night evaporated, and anger flashed in her veins.

So he tells me this big secret
because
it nearly killed me, and now he’s gone again?
She struggled out from under the red-and-gold duvet and headed for the shower.
And now I get a full day of wedding planning with Grendel’s mother
and
I have to throw her a party tonight on top of it.
Not to mention that she would have to do all of those things with a throbbing headache, but she had no one to blame but herself for that . . . and maybe Maeve, just a little bit.

Jane had expected Lynne’s enthusiasm for wedding errands to wane following the mysterious argument that she had overheard, but Lynne was still going full-speed ahead. And dragging Jane—tired, bored, and confused—along in her considerable wake.

Even on the morning of the Dorans’ cocktail party at the MoMA, Jane hadn’t been able to wriggle her way out of wedding planning. She had tried to beg off, using the vague excuse of “last-minute arrangements,” but Lynne’s eyes had narrowed dangerously.

“Something was left until the last minute?” she purred in what Jane knew by now was a deceptively mild tone. “What on earth would have been left until today?”

Faced with the choice between looking incompetent and spending the morning with Lynne, Jane reluctantly decided that she had to pop a few Advil and opt for the latter.

First on the agenda was gown-shopping (“Monique Lhuillier,” Lynne had said, staring pointedly at Jane’s hips, “and maybe Marchesa?”), which Jane knew was supposed to be the most enjoyable part of the planning. But after ten minutes, it was clear that it most certainly would not be.

“Absolutely not,” Lynne snapped when the salesgirl, Andie, appeared with a dress that seemed to weigh less than thirty pounds.

“I love the waistline,” Jane interceded. “And the cap sleeves.” But the salesgirl vanished again without even looking her way, and Jane sighed heavily. The dress was the one thing that she cared about, the one battle she had decided to pick. Things weren’t going anything like the way she had pictured them, though, and she was beginning to worry. Was it possible that, somewhere between the caterer and the photographer and the brass band, Jane had lost her backbone for good? She closed her eyes and took a deep breath; she could remember how to assert herself. She had to. “Lynne, I feel like we have different ideas about what would look best. Maybe if I could try on one of the—”

“Perfect!” Lynne trilled, and Jane broke off, confused. Was it really just that easy? But Lynne’s abrupt approval became all too clear when Jane turned to see Andie struggling under the weight of what looked like two of Carrie Bradshaw’s wedding dresses rolled into one.

“No,”
Jane said reflexively.

“Nonsense,” Lynne’s snake-charmer voice drawled. “You were just saying how it’s impossible to tell without seeing the dress
on
.”

Oh, sure,
now
she listens.
How could Lynne stay so cool and polished while being so crafty, conniving, and stubborn? It might have been awe-inspiring, if it hadn’t been so thoroughly annoying.

“And Jane, dear, you should really nip that dreadful ring-twirling habit in the bud,” Lynne said, furrowing her arched (and perfectly tweezed) eyebrows at Jane.

Jane clasped her hands behind her back—she hadn’t even realized she’d been doing it again. She tried to communicate her desperation to the salesgirl with her eyes, but Andie seemed completely unaware of the conflict unfolding in front of her. “The sample isn’t in your size miss but I would be more than happy to clip it so that you can see an approximation,” she announced in an inflectionless monotone. There was no obvious reason to think that she
wasn’t
actually speaking to Jane, but somehow it was clear all the same.

“That would be lovely, dear,” Lynne smirked, shoving Jane lightly toward the curtained-off section.

Jane fought the urge to shake one or both of them while shouting “I’m the bride, damn it!” and allowed the girl to maneuver the massive pile of multilayered skirts over her head.

Once it was more or less on, Jane waited for the humiliating clipping process to begin, but the salesgirl appeared to have had a change of heart. “Actually, this one has a corset back”—
Of course it does!
—“so maybe if I just lace that loosely enough . . . there.”

All of the air was expelled from Jane’s lungs at once. “So apparently ‘loose’ is a relative term?” she grunted.

“Ooh,” the girl cooed automatically, seemingly oblivious to Jane’s labored breathing. “I’m sure your mother will love this one!”

“Mother-in-law,” Jane corrected sternly. “To-be.”
And only if she doesn’t send me screaming for the hills in the next month or so, not to mention that Malcolm will have to take some time out of his busy schedule to actually show up to the church.
She glared at her reflection in the three-way mirror: she looked like a Renaissance fair on steroids. Weren’t puff sleeves still “out”?

Closing the curtain separating them from Lynne more tightly, Jane lowered her voice. “I was leafing through your catalog, actually, and I saw this really pretty sheath I was hoping to try. In fact, there were a couple of styles that I loved.” She held out a scrap of paper where she had jotted down four style numbers, but Andie didn’t even glance at it.

“I really don’t think that any of those would be formal enough for the event Mrs. Doran described,” she droned.
Is there even a human being in there?
“You’ll definitely be more comfortable in a more traditional gown.” With that declaration, she flung the curtain open, and Jane was treated to the sight of Lynne in a near-swoon.

“I think we’re getting closer!” she trilled happily. “But I’d love to see something in a whiter white. She’s so pale,” she added, a crease forming on her forehead. “Practically monochromatic. And now that I see it on, I’m not sold on the seed pearls. More of the same Alençon lace on the bustier panel would be better, I think.”

“I absolutely agree,” Andie breathed, showing some signs of life now that she was speaking to someone other than Jane. She practically skipped out of the room, leaving Jane to glare balefully after her, still trapped in her Disney-princess nightmare of a dress.

Enough is enough.
Jane drew herself up to her full height and took advantage of the fact that the many layers of crinoline made her as wide as she was tall. “We need to talk,” she declared in her most authoritative tone.

Lynne’s eyebrow nearly shot off her forehead entirely, but she gestured for Jane to continue.

“I really appreciate your taste and input,” Jane told her firmly, “and for the most part I’ve been happy to do whatever you suggest. But a woman’s wedding dress is a very important and personal thing, and I don’t want to rush the decision.”
That sounds better than “Back the hell off, harpy,” doesn’t it?

Lynne blinked. She seemed to be struggling with this new and confusing information. For a moment, Jane expected a tirade; she could practically see it forming on Lynne’s peach-lipsticked mouth. Lynne’s hands clenched the pleats of her canary-colored Ralph Lauren skirt briefly, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, released. “Of course. I only want you to be happy,” she said so warmly that, for a moment, Jane assumed that she had misheard.

Andie bustled back in, loaded down with books of fabric swatches. Lynne turned her head smoothly. “I believe that my daughter-in-law asked about a dress you brought out. The one with the cap sleeves.”

“Oh.” Andie stopped short. An awkward beat passed while Lynne stared pointedly, and then the girl caught on. “Right, of course.” She dropped the books awkwardly on a bench and all but fled from the room, returning seconds later with the dress in question.

Jane grinned triumphantly as she slipped the A-line sheath over her head. Finally, finally, something was going her way.