Pretty Is (37 page)

“Our agents put us in touch,” Lois interjects, which isn’t exactly true but sounds true and is very vague in terms of details like time and place.

“Really!” says Fiona, raising her majestic eyebrows. “Somehow I got the impression you two went way back. I don’t know what it is, exactly, that gave me that idea.” She studies us quite openly, as if she’s trying to figure it out. “You’re sure you’re not hiding something?” It’s a joke, of course. She means to unsettle us. But it’s creepy.

I raise one shoulder, an exaggerated gesture of dismissal. “Who knows? Maybe we knew each other in another life.” I didn’t mean to say this, didn’t intend to sound flippant. Lois looks a little alarmed. Exit Chloe Savage! I raise my empty glass and wave it in the direction of the bar. “Time for another splash, I think! Anyone else?” I saunter off without really waiting for an answer; both of their glasses are pretty much half-full, though I’ve learned in the past week that Fiona is no lightweight in that respect. As I move away, I hear Fiona change the subject. “So my husband is absolutely
fascinated
by his character, this charming madman, this tragic kidnapper,” she begins. “And I was wondering how…”

I move faster, block her out. I don’t even want to hear it. I feel a twinge of guilt, ever so slight, for ditching Lois.
She can handle it,
I tell myself, cruising barward. And I’m sure she does.

Lois

I don’t even know I’m asleep until I hear a phone ring and realize that it has woken me up. The room is dark; it could be any time of night. I am nested in soft cushions on the floor, half-covered by a cashmere throw; I can hear Carly breathing on the sofa just feet away. It is her phone that’s ringing. “Carly,” I say. “Chloe?” She stirs. She drank quite a bit more than I did; she seems to be dragging herself up from some deep place. I reach for the phone, convey it into her groping hand, am relieved when she finally mutters, “Yeah? Do you realize what time it is?” (Which is sort of funny, because she can’t have any more of an idea than I do what time it is. I wonder if we fell asleep midsentence; I can’t remember a line between talk and sleep. I dreamed that our conversation continued.) “Billy! What the fuck? Slow down. Repeat yourself.” She listens for a minute, then swings her feet to the ground with surprising alertness. “I’ll be there. Wait … fuck, no, never mind. We’re there. Two minutes. Tops.”

She jumps to her feet, slides her shoes on in the dark. “The girls are missing,” she says, and it takes a minute for me to understand what she means. (We are the girls; we are both missing and not missing, depending on how you look at it.) “The actresses,” she says impatiently. “Natasha and Justine. They’ve disappeared. They aren’t in their room. Someone went to check on them and found them gone. They’re forming a search party. That was Billy Pearson on the phone—he was just coming in from the pub, and one of the mothers told him. Get up. Don’t change, just put on shoes. Grab us a couple of bottles of water; I think I might still be drunk. Let’s go.” Practically passed out no more than a minute ago, suddenly Chloe is alarmingly functional.

“To join the search party?” I say stupidly. I look down at myself. We fell asleep in our party clothes. I can feel makeup crusted on my eyes.

“There’s no time to change,” she says urgently. “Just put on shoes you can walk in. Did you fucking hear what I said? The girls are
missing.
What the
fuck
does that mean?” she says, but to herself, like this is some kind of riddle she has to solve.

I am thinking
missing.
Taken, by someone. Someone who knows they’re here. Someone who knows the story. I shake my head and run my fingers through my tangled hair, trying to clear my mind. I take two bottles of water from the minibar and shove my feet in my sneakers, vaguely aware of how ridiculous they will look with my dress, vaguely aware that this is absolutely beside the point. My last text to Sean appears before my eyes.
Where are you?
No answer …

Perhaps two dozen people have assembled on the patio behind the main inn, their faces garish and strained in the powerful security lights that have replaced the festive torches that burned here just hours ago. Chloe and I are among the most ridiculous, but the competition is stiff. Fiona is wearing a trench coat belted over a slinky nightgown; the director’s gray hair is standing straight up, and his shoes are untied; other cast members still sport ravaged party makeup and suggestively disheveled clothes. The girls’ respective parents are wearing their hotel bathrobes and look oddly interchangeable and seriously befuddled; one of the mothers weeps quietly and steadily. Only Billy Pearson looks wide awake and as crisply dressed as ever, and he seems to be in charge.
He’s throwing himself into the role,
I find myself thinking, then reproach myself for the uncharitable thought. He can’t help acting; it doesn’t mean he isn’t sincere. He continues, his voice at once commanding and full of emotion. “We need to know if anyone else has any information that might help us: anything you saw or heard or noticed, even if it seemed totally irrelevant at the time.” No one says anything.
Where are you?
No answer.

“Have the police been called?” I ask, eying the bleary-eyed rescue party dubiously.

“They have not,” Billy tells me. “The parents want to wait until we are certain they’re actually missing. And chances are the police would consider it too early to act, anyway.” Everyone has seen enough cop shows to know that missing persons aren’t taken seriously for at least twenty-four hours, although this situation seems enough out of the ordinary to me to warrant bending the rules. I’m surprised at the parents; you’d think they would want the police involved right away.
Why are they hesitating?
I wonder.
What are they thinking? What did my parents think when they noticed I was missing? How long did it take them to call the police? When did they start to be afraid?
It seems odd that I never asked them. I suppose I still could. In the shadows, Billy looks more like Zed than ever. That he is coordinating the search, not necessitating it, sets off a strange series of ripples in my mind. Currents are clashing, roiling the surface. I wrench my gaze away from him before I can get sucked in, drawn down; this feels dangerous.
Think,
I order myself.
Be rational. You’re known for it, Lois, deservedly or not.
Calm, collected, sensible Lois.

“Has everyone been accounted for?” I ask, perhaps too loudly. “All of the hotel staff, for instance?”

“We can’t be sure,” Billy answers, sounding a little sheepish at having to admit a gap in his detective work. “We have the manager looking into it. But in the meantime…”

“I have a dreadful sense about this,” Fiona pipes up, her voice deep and vibrating. “How many people know what this movie is about? Plenty, I imagine. This could be someone’s idea of a macabre joke, abducting the actresses playing the abductees, or it could be something even more twisted, more diabolical—”

“For God’s sake, Fiona, don’t,” says Billy. Chloe has grabbed my arm, and in fact I, too, find Fiona’s words disturbing, though not for the same reasons as Billy. “Don’t be so melodramatic. There’s nothing to suggest anything of the kind. Their room is neat, there’s no sign of struggle, no sign of a break-in, no reports of strangers. We have no reason to suspect anything violent. All we know is that the girls aren’t in their rooms. And that their beds haven’t been slept in.”

I picture the girls at the reception, doll-like in party frocks and age-appropriate flats, flitting in and out of the crowd, alternately descending on someone temporarily deserving of their attention and retreating to the periphery, whispering together, laughing at everything. I caught them guzzling champagne dregs once or twice. They had been very sweet to me:
“Chloe didn’t tell us you were coming! She never said you were so pretty! Why didn’t you ask for a part in the movie? Because that would have been so awesome!”
They looked happy, vibrant; they glowed with life. Could something really have happened to them? Surely not. But I glance toward the woods, a dark blank wall looming behind the bright lights of the inn, and shiver violently.
Where are you?

“We’ve already checked every room in the inn, and we have someone going back over it and double-checking right now. What the rest of us are going to do is spread out and form a line and sweep the property,” Billy is saying. “Just like, you know, in the movies.” A few people laugh a little at this; the others shoot them disapproving glances. “If you don’t have a flashlight, make sure you stand between two people who do. This is how far apart we should be.” He uses the people closest to him to demonstrate. “If they are here, we will find them. And after we’ve done the grounds, we’ll move into the woods.” Here his voice trails off, and there’s an uncomfortable silence. Sweeping the well-kept grounds is one thing, but those dense woods are not going to give up their secrets easily—not to amateur detectives in plush white bathrobes, armed with nothing more than incipient hangovers and cell phones.

We are swept forward with the search party. Automatically, my eyes scan the ground in front of us, as if the girls could possibly be crouching nearby in the midst of this racket. I’m using my phone as a flashlight but thinking that what I should really do is text Sean again. If only I could be sure that he was still in New York. Could I have underestimated him so badly? Is he really capable of such a terrible game? As yet he has done nothing violent, not that anyone knows of. He’s interested in pursuit, in information; he’s interested in control. He’s disturbing and disturbed; he’s decidedly creepy. But is he dangerous? Should I say something?
Do
something? My mind spins as we stumble along. There’s a bit of low chatter along the line, but most of us are searching in silence, straining our ears as well as our eyes.
Don’t be missing, don’t be missing …
I picture the girls arranged on the forest floor, blood drying on their neatly sliced throats; they look like the cover of one of the novels we read that summer. A knife glistening with red rests nearby, no doubt wiped clean of fingerprints.

We have covered a broad swath of lawn when I feel Chloe tugging at my arm, pulling me back out of the light, away from the crowd. As the others surge forward, Chloe neatly separates us from them. No one appears to notice. “This is ridiculous,” she hisses. “I have a better idea. Follow me; I’ll explain when we get to your car.”

I finally have to give voice to what I’m thinking, even though it can’t be true, if only because it’s very possible that Chloe is thinking it too. “It’s not Gary—not Sean, I mean,” I say, as much to myself as to Chloe, horrified by my slip. “It couldn’t be Sean, I just heard from him yesterday.”
But where was he? He could have been anywhere
. “It’s not him, if that’s what you’re thinking.” I hear something like panic in my voice. But I’m right, I know I am. Sean isn’t in this story anymore; he’s shaping his own plot. He may do dreadful things; it wouldn’t surprise me at all. But not this one. History wouldn’t fold back on itself so neatly, so perversely. Life isn’t like that.

Chloe, walking fast, turns and shoots me a strange look. “I don’t know who the hell Gary is, but you better hope this isn’t your little stalker friend. I think you should definitely fucking call him, though, don’t you? Just to see what he has to say? Anyway, I told you, I have an idea. I just don’t want to say anything yet. In case…” She sounds shaken. It’s rare for Carly—for Chloe. In a flash I remember standing in the rain, agreeing to climb in the backseat of Zed’s car, Carly May smiling mysteriously from the front seat. These girls would never do what we did. They’re wary; they know the world is dangerous. Which doesn’t mean … but I won’t put my fear into words. I won’t.

I fumble with my phone as we hurry toward the parking lot. I jab a finger at Sean’s most recent text and press
CALL.
I lift the phone to my ear as it begins to ring. I already know he won’t answer, no matter where he is. He’ll see that it’s me, and he won’t answer. I end the call before I get transferred to voice mail.

Chloe gives me directions without saying where we’re headed, but I recognize the way to the hunting lodge replica, where shooting is scheduled to begin tomorrow. I don’t ask questions; I just drive. Suddenly, without permission, Gary rears his head, and a new section of plot unfurls:

Gary gets a job on the set of the movie the actress would be starring in if he weren’t holding her captive. He encounters two impossibly pretty young actresses and realizes that they are a better prize than the actual girls, now grown up, though of course he can’t release the actress and the professor because they can’t be trusted to keep quiet, and besides, shouldn’t they pay for what they’ve done? For robbing him of a father? But he wants the young girls too, so pretty, so sure of themselves. He makes a point of meeting them on the set, and they can barely conceal their indifference. As a random member of the crew, he ranks low in their world, it’s clear; who do they think they are? Someone needs to show them …

“What are you thinking?” Chloe asks suddenly, breaking the spell. I shut Gary down, remind him he’s done, finished.

“Oh … I thought for a minute I had an idea for my novel.” For an irrational instant, I fear that Chloe can see inside my head, watch me spinning stories out of this crisis. I blunder on: “It’s nothing. It won’t work; I just remembered something else. Never mind.” I have abandoned the novel, written it off, left it behind. Gary released his prisoners and went home, fizzled into nothingness. The fact that this slipped my mind so easily disturbs me. Carly is gazing at me with peculiar intensity, I realize. The road is so dark that I am reluctant to take my eyes from it, but I glance quickly at her, wanting to read her. She is giving me a hard, hard look, so hard it feels like a blow.

“You’re using this, aren’t you?”

Using what
, I don’t say. I know what she means. It is always a mistake to underestimate Chloe. “Not exactly,” I say. I want to say more, to excuse myself, to explain that I changed my mind, stopped just in time—but I don’t. I let my answer hang in the air. This is, after all, the thing that lies between us: my telling of the story. Our story. Making it mine.