Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark (30 page)

E
IGHTEEN MONTHS LATER…

T
HE WOMAN WALKED INTO THE
S
TARBUCKS
unnoticed. There was already a long line. It was nine in the morning, right after school drop-off time, and the place was packed with moms picking up their iced lattes en route to the gym. The woman wore the same mommy uniform as everybody else: Hard Tail yoga pants, Nike sneakers and a Stella McCartney for Adidas running top just tight enough to emphasize her pert breasts and flat stomach without being showy. Her pretty face was hidden behind a pair of Chloé aviators, and her shoulder-length blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

Matt Daley didn't look up from his computer. He was supposed to be working, coming up with a first draft for a piece for
Vanity Fair
on the comedy business in Hollywood. Having left Azrael behind him, Matt had returned to his first loves, comedy and writing, and was enjoying something of a renaissance in his career. This morning, however, he was goofing off, scouring Marie Chantal online for cute baby clothes. They'd found out a few days ago that, quite
un
expectedly, Cassie was expecting. An elated Matt was convinced that the baby was going to be a girl.

“Is this seat taken?”

The woman was hovering next to him, coffee in hand.

“Oh, no. Please…” Matt moved politely to one side to make room for her to sit down. She did so, putting her coffee cup down on the table first. Something about her hand and the languid way she moved her arm caught his eye. She reminded him of someone, but at first he couldn't remember who.

“I'm not disturbing you, am I? It's just that the place is so packed…”

The voice.
Matt felt the hairs on his forearm stand on end.

Aware of him staring at her, the woman took off her sunglasses. “What's the matter?” She smiled. “You look like you've seen a ghost.”

 

T
HE PHONE WAS RINGING
. C
ASSIE
D
ALEY
dragged herself from the bathroom, where she'd just finished throwing up for the second time that morning, into the kitchen.

“Hello? Hello?”

Typical. The moment she got there, the person hung up. Perching at the kitchen counter, Cassie poured herself a tall glass of filtered water and sipped it slowly, nibbling at a piece of dry toast. She'd forgotten about morning sickness and how rotten it made you feel. It had been so long since she'd given birth to Brandon, and almost three years since her last hangover. Nausea felt like a novelty.

The ringing of telephones, on the other hand, was grimly familiar, the sound track to Cassie and Matt's marriage ever since they got back from Tahiti. Claire's warnings at the airport that day about the media circus following Sofia Basta's death had been depressingly prophetic. They'd walked into the hallway of their house to a cacophony of ringing telephones, home, office and cell, all competing for Matt's attention. Even the fax line buzzed insistently like an angrily trapped bee.

“Mr. Daley? This is CBS News. Do you have any comment on Sofia Basta's death…?”

“Mr. Daley, do you buy the coroner's verdict of accidental death…?”

“Matt, hi, this is Piers Morgan. I'm sure you must be inundated with offers right now, but I wanted to call personally to see if I could persuade you to talk to us first.”

Some callers were pushy, others respectful. The magazines, though, were the worst. The bitch who called from
Star
actually implied that unless he agreed to give them an exclusive interview, they were planning to
run a story about Matt and Sofia having met up for “trysts” on the days she'd been allowed out of the hospital. “Your wife would be shocked to read the stuff our sources have told us,” the reporter had the gall to say. “This is your chance to set the record straight.”

When Matt told her where she could stick her sources, the woman was as good as her word and ran the story anyway, a preposterous hodgepodge of grainy, blatantly Photoshopped pictures and conspiracy-theory nonsense. It was the biggest-selling issue of
Star
that year.

Cassie was furious. “Sue them! Sue them for libel. Force them to print a retraction.”

But Matt had persuaded her that engaging with tabloid morons would only add more fuel to the fire. That eventually, if they continued to maintain a dignified silence, the story would fizzle and die. And he was right. Two Altacito guards lost their jobs and the hospital's director was forced to resign. With public lust for vengeance at least partially satisfied, and no more salacious revelations forthcoming, the calls finally stopped. But not before Cassie Daley had developed a powerful aversion to the sound of ringing phones.

The message light was flashing. Hitting play, Cassie smiled when she heard Matt's voice.

“Hi, honey. It's only me. Listen, something came up with this
Vanity Fair
thing. I…I have to go meet someone. Anyway, I might be late tonight, so don't worry and don't cook for me. Okay, see you later.”

He's a terrible liar,
she thought lovingly. She wondered what surprise he was planning this time, what secret it was that he didn't want her to know.
Probably something for the baby. Or earrings to go with the necklace he got me last week. Or maybe he's finally booked that trip we've been planning, our “babymoon.”
Always generous, Matt had gone into gift-giving overdrive since Cassie became pregnant. He'd even started spoiling Brandon with a cell phone (at nine!) and a cool new thousand-dollar diving watch.

I'll talk to him when he gets home. He has to stop with the spending. The baby is blessing enough.

 

M
ATT CLOSED THE DOOR BEHIND THEM,
his hand shaking. The hotel was expensive, exclusive and discreet, just the sort of place where rich men brought their mistresses.

Is that what I am? A rich man with a hard-on?

Sofia Basta sat down on the bed. There was so much to say, to explain. She'd run through this scene a thousand times in her mind, but now that she was actually here, she had no idea where to begin.

“I know you're married now,” she said hesitantly. “I haven't come to spoil anything for you. To ruin your life again.”

“You never ruined my life,” said Matt. “I did that all by myself.”

“But I had to see you, to explain. You're the only person I can trust and I needed you…I needed you to know…” She started to cry. “I couldn't stay in that place. I couldn't. They were burying me alive!”

“Shhhhh.” Matt sat down beside her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “It's okay.” She looked so different. The surgery to her face was radical this time. But holding her felt the same. A wave of longing almost drowned him. He tried to think about Cassie, to picture her face, but her image too was swept away in the flood of desire.

“I got a new passport, a new ID,” she murmured through her sobs. “I changed my name…obviously. Here.” Fumbling in her purse by the side of the bed, she handed Matt a California driver's license. There were the same, haunting liquid-brown eyes gazing into his. The name underneath the picture read…
Lisa Daley.

“I hope you're not angry with me. It felt right.”

Dropping the license, Matt pushed her back onto the bed, kissing her with so much force she could barely breathe. She felt the weight of him, the power, the passion. Desperately he tore at her clothes and ripped off his own, biting and clawing at her like a man possessed. Finally naked, he plunged inside her with a scream that was half agony, half ecstasy. “Lisa!” This wasn't lovemaking. This was a man fighting for his life. He was consuming her, inhaling her, breathing her in like a half-drowned man finally breaking through to the surface and desperately gasping for air. It wasn't just Lisa who had come back from the dead. It was the old Matt Daley, the man Matt thought he had destroyed at Wildwood and buried on his wedding day.

“Matt!” She wrapped her legs around him, clasping his face in her hands, trying to hold him at bay, to calm him. She was the comforter now, rocking him like a baby, soothing him with the warmth and wetness of her body, drawing him in. “I love you! I'm sorry. I love you so much.”
Matt reached orgasm, grasping her hips and thrusting so deep inside her that she felt like he might pass right through her body and out the other side, as if she really were a ghost. But the sweat and heat and tears were no shadows. This was real, this joining of the flesh. An agonized celebration of life, like childbirth. Afterward Matt cried like a baby.

“Don't leave me. Don't leave me, Lisa, please! I'll do anything.”

And she knew he meant it.

 

T
HEY MADE LOVE AGAIN, FOR SEVERAL
more hours, then slept until dusk. When they awoke, Matt ordered room service—two deluxe cheeseburgers and fries—and they ate till their bellies hurt. Finally, at around seven, Lisa started talking. She told him about her illness. How after many years she finally seemed to have broken free of its shadow and was off her medication.

“I was scared at first, going off the pills. But taking them made me feel like I was in a fog. Now, for the first time I can remember really, I feel like myself.”

She told him how a “sweet man” named Carlos Hernandez, one of the psychiatric nurses, had helped stage her “accident,” rigging up a simple animal trap in the mountains to make it look as if she'd slipped into the crevasse, while in fact she was concealed in a cave just a few feet below the mouth of the ravine. Given that the only witness to her fall was an impressionable girl of nineteen who was being treated for, among other things, acute hallucinations, it was easy for Carlos to steer the rest of the group back to camp, buying Lisa enough time to climb out of the cave and make her way down to a remote hunting lodge Carlos had prepared for her.

“Were you lovers?” Matt was ashamed to hear himself asking.

“Nooooo.” Lisa frowned. “I think he would have liked to be. But no. He was my friend. He risked his own neck helping me and he lost his job, poor man. But he knew that I was well again, mentally, and that they would never in a million years have let me out. Especially after Frankie…you know. They needed one scapegoat to punish for all those poor men who died. I was it.”

“But you lived with Carlos?”

She shook her head again. “No. That would have been too dangerous. He paid for me to go to South America for the surgery. It's funny how easy it is to sneak over the border when you're coming
from
the U.S. I was in Brazil for eight months, recuperating and then working. By the time I got back, Carlos had moved on.”

“So you came back to California to be with him?”

Lisa laughed. “My God, Matt. What is it with the jealousy? Yes, I came back for him. To pay him back the money I owed him and to say thank you. But I also knew I had to see you. It was a risk, a big risk. But like I say, I needed you to know.”

“So now I know.”

Matt stood up and walked to the window. The L.A. cityscape, so familiar to him all his life, looked strange and somehow menacing tonight, as if he'd never seen it before.

Just a few miles away, in a safe, happy place, Cassie was waiting for him. Cassie and Brandon and their baby. Waiting. Trusting. Dear, sweet Cassie.

“You're thinking about your wife?”

Matt nodded. “She's pregnant.” The words were out of his mouth before he knew he was going to say them.

“Oh!” Pain flashed across Lisa's face. She hadn't felt guilty about being with Matt today. What happened, she felt sure, had been meant to happen. The love between them, the bond, was too precious not to honor. And she'd been without him for so, so long—didn't she deserve this, this one fleeting moment of true happiness?

But a baby…? That was different. What sort of a woman asked a man to leave his child? And what sort of man abandoned his family? Not Matt Daley, that was for sure. Matt was better than that. It was what Lisa loved about him.

“You have to go back.”

Matt turned around, too exhausted to cry anymore, but his face betrayed his desolation. Even he couldn't quite believe what he was saying, what he was doing.

“Yes, Lisa,” he whispered. “I have to go back. I'm sorry…It's time to say good-bye.”

E
VERYONE AGREED THAT
M
R. AND
M
RS
. Daley were an adorable couple.

Her baby bump was so tiny you could barely see it, but he was always patting it lovingly, guiding her with infinite care through the lobby or out into the sunny courtyard for tea. Sometimes he sat and wrote out there. At other times, the two of them would flip through the listings of homes that some local Realtors had given them. Like so many couples who came here on vacation, the Daleys had fallen in love with the city. Who knew, perhaps one day their unborn child would grow up to call this place home.

Matt looked up from his book as his wife came toward him. It had been a difficult decision, saying good-bye and leaving his old life behind. One of the hardest things he'd ever done. But watching the woman he loved cross the mosaic-tile floor in a flowing white caftan, her face alight with joy and the promise of impending motherhood, he knew he'd made the right decision.

“Do you want to come for a walk?” asked Lisa. “We can watch the sun set over the souk.”

Matt Daley did want to.

He wanted to very much.

 

M
OROCCO WAS A DREAM, A FAIRY
tale. It was where they were meant to be. Matt had taken very little money with him when he left the States. He wanted Cassie and the children to have everything. That was the least he could do for them after walking out the way he had, with no explanations other than a kiss good-bye. He did feel guilty. Of course he did. The last thing on earth he wanted was to cause dear Cassie any pain. But the truth was that the man she married had died the day that Lisa walked into that coffee shop. The man she married no longer existed. The best Matt could do for her was to leave her financially well taken care of, with a longed-for baby to remember him by and her son to comfort her. That and to disappear without a trace.

It would be harder for Claire and for their mother, of course. Matt did grieve about that, so much so that he was almost tempted to tell Claire the truth before he took off. But he knew that to do so would be to put Lisa at risk. Whatever else he might do in his life, Matt Daley would never, ever put Lisa at risk again. She was his family now. His destiny.

In any case, it didn't cost much to live well in Marrakech. Lisa had some money that she'd saved in Brazil, and they were both working—Matt writing anonymously as a freelance journalist, and Lisa teaching English at a local school and occasionally selling one of her exquisite paintings to the rich American tourists who frequented hotels like this one, the Palais Kasim, where Matt had booked them into a modest double room while they house-hunted.

Walking through the souk, as they did every evening, they drank in the scents of the market. Fruit stalls smelled rich and sweet, the remnants of the day's produce beginning to rot now in the late afternoon heat. Dirt and sweat, the aroma of thousands of moving, tightly pressed bodies, mingled with the floral tang of wild honey and the nutty richness of the baklava stalls, buzzing and alive with bees.

For Lisa, the sights, sounds and smells evoked a memory that wasn't a memory, but that felt as real to her as the air in her lungs or the baby not yet kicking in her womb. This was Miriam's world, the world of the book, the world of the childhood she'd never had but that she'd wanted so badly she could taste it. And now she was here living it for real, fulfilling her destiny at long last. Not Frankie's twisted, murderous version of her destiny, but the good version, the fairy tale, the happy ending where
she got to marry the man she loved—Matt. Matt, who had stood by her when nobody else would. Matt, who knew everything about her…well, almost everything…but who loved her still.

For Matt, the appeal of the souk, and its pleasures, were even simpler. Here was a maze, a buzzing hive of anonymous humanity where one could fade away, disappear, like a speck of ambergris lost in the dust. It was full of life and warmth and joy and human richness, the most convivial exile imaginable. And yet it
was
an exile. He felt safe here, cocooned by the crowds and wrapped in Lisa's love.

“Take my hand. There's something I want to show you.” Smiling over her shoulder, Lisa led him up a narrow, cobblestoned alleyway to a set of steep stone stairs. These wound round and round in a dizzying spiral, eventually emerging onto another narrow street. To the left was a row of ancient bakers' yards, the hearty, yeasty smell of which filled the air, then more stalls of silk and carved wood similar to the ones they had just passed below. To the right was a dead end with a single, dilapidated
riad,
a traditional Moroccan house, rising three stories high, loftily surveying the alley below.

“What do you think? I know it sounds ridiculous, crazy even. But it's exactly how I pictured Uncle Sulaiman's house.”

Matt frowned indulgently. “Wasn't Uncle Sulaiman rich? This place looks like it'd collapse if you sneezed on it.”

Lisa shrugged. “It hasn't collapsed in six hundred years. Appearances can be deceiving, you know.”

They both grinned.

“Is it even for sale?”

“I don't know. But wouldn't it be fun to find out?” Lisa enthused. “We could do it up together, make it our own. You have to admit it's a romantic house. Just think how happy we'd be there!”

Matt thought how happy they'd be there…and said a silent prayer of thanks.

Perhaps he didn't deserve his happiness. Perhaps neither of them did. But this was
their
book now, their story. Together, Matt Daley knew, they were going to live happily ever after.