The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty (16 page)

I blanch. She’s absolutely right. The metal detector wouldn’t have picked up a tiny glass dart and straw, and neither would the frisking.

Penelope warning me of this method seems to indicate that she’s not the killer.

On second thought, if she were the killer, she’d still have plenty of reasons to tell me of this method. In a flash, four possible reasons go through my mind, and I’m sure there are more:

1) She wants to divert my attention away from another method she’s about to use.

2) She is curious to see how I would have protected Strad against this method, had she thought of using it.

3) She wants to make herself appear more innocent.

4) She knows that by telling me about this method, she is forcing me to increase Strad’s protection, which will escalate the weirdness of the evening to a degree that might cause Lily to finally lose any remaining hope that Strad could ever fall in love with her, which will help her move on with her life.

Barely breathing, I say, “Strad, get up.”

“Why?” he asks, getting up.

“Come right this way.” I lead him out of the room and around the corner, while shielding him from the others with my body as much as possible. I bring him his chair. “Sit down.”

He sits. From my seat at the table, I will be able to see both parties while they won’t be able to see or hurt each other.

This is only a temporary solution because I’m sure Strad will not want to stay behind that corner for two whole hours. Maybe not even for two whole minutes. Therefore, I must come up with a better system to protect him from possible darts. I wish I could ask Georgia for ideas.

Luckily, it doesn’t take me too long to come up with one. I set myself to work immediately.

I open the living room closet and withdraw the big sheets of transparent plastic I bought to protect my furniture when my apartment was painted a few months ago.

“Why am I around this corner?” Strad calls out to me.

“Punishment,” I reply.

“Oh. Was I bad?”

“No. They were bad.” My new location hides me from his view as I unfold the sheets of plastic.

“What’d they do? They didn’t seem so bad.” As an afterthought, he adds, “Apart from ganging up on me and telling me what a jerk I am.”

I don’t answer.

He says, “Anyway, how is my sitting around this corner
their
punishment rather than mine?”

I open a drawer, looking for my roll of transparent masking tape. I reply, “I’m depriving them of the sight of you.”

“Is the sight of me that good?” he asks.

“They thrive on it.”

“Perhaps I should just go home, then. That would deprive them of it very effectively,” he says.

“No!” I exclaim.

“Why not?”

I don’t know what to say. I hope my silence will alert Georgia to come to the rescue.

She does, with: “Barb’s kidding. We weren’t bad. This is just a game we like to play called Hide the Guest.”

Still hidden from Strad’s view, I climb on a chair and start taping one end of a plastic sheet to the ceiling, letting the rest hang like a transparent curtain. This creates a dart-proof partition between my friends and the dining table.

While I do this with a few more sheets, until all my friends are behind plastic, Georgia explains the game to Strad: “You have to try to remember what each of us is wearing and what we look like, including eye color, hair color, presence or absence of glasses, etc.”

From behind the corner, he sounds mildly interested in this game. But then she has to ruin it by adding, “The point of the game is to test your level of self-centeredness.”

I kick my socked foot in the direction of her face, intentionally missing her by only an inch, which sobers her up temporarily.

I finish taping the last bit of plastic to the ceiling. Just in time, too, because Strad says, “You know what? I don’t really like the sound of this game. I’m sure I’d be terrible at it, so I’d rather just have a normal remainder of evening with you—”

He stops mid-sentence as he emerges from around the corner and beholds the plastic curtain with my friends watching him through it. And me, still atop my chair.

Stupefied, he asks, “What are you
doing
?”

“We’ve entered the phase of the evening called Partitioning,” I say.

“It’s totally creepy-looking,” he says. “It looks like you’re setting up some sort of weird execution.”

“Oh, no, on the contrary. I’m about to serve them seconds. They go so wild for seconds, they often throw their cake.”

We keep the conversation going for another hour. Jack throws most of his cake at the curtain to support my story. Not being a fan of lemon, it’s no big sacrifice for him. The others merely throw large crumbs. No one attempts to shoot darts, thankfully, not that it would matter much with the plastic sheets.

When the cuckoo finally screams twelve times at midnight and the danger is over (according to KAY’s rules), my friends really start acting mad. They cheer and clank their chains, demanding to be freed.

I unlock their handcuffs. They all, except for Lily, shake Strad’s hand, saying, “Congratulations.” Penelope even says, “Congratulations, you’ve made it.”

“Into the group?” Strad asks, his face lighting up. “You know, it did occur to me that this might be some sort of initiation. If you tell me that I have made it into the Knights of Creation, you’ll make me a very happy man.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Penelope says. “I just meant that you made it through this strange evening. There is no such thing as ‘making it into the Knights of Creation.’”

Strad is disappointed though he takes it well. In fact, he doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave, now that everyone is so cheerful and authorized to go to the bathroom unaccompanied. We move to the couch area and Strad says he’d like some more coffee, but asks if he can get his phone back to quickly first check his messages.

I get him his phone. He’s surprised to see he has three new ones.

As he listens to each one, our attention is drawn to his gasps and facial expressions, which become progressively more despondent.

He finally turns off his phone and says, “Barb, you ruined my day, possibly my life, by taking my phone from me. I have to go.”

“Why? What’s wrong?” Lily asks.

He speaks quickly: “First, some chick tells me there’s a fantastic film audition I’d be perfect for, in an alley. She gave me the address. It’s just a few blocks from here. She said she spoke to the casting people about me and they really want to see me, but it has to be soon because they’re closing casting at midnight, no exceptions. She said not to bother coming after that. She left me that message at ten o’clock. It’s now after midnight.”

“In an alley?” I ask faintly.

“Yes.”

I can’t believe what a close call that was. I took Strad’s cell phone into my bedroom right before the cuckoo scared us at ten. If I’d waited another ten minutes, Strad would have answered the call and gone.

Strad glares at me. “The second message was from someone saying there’s a leak from our music store to the basement apartment and that if I don’t get there in the next hour, they’ll have to get a locksmith to force the door open because the super’s not there.”

We don’t comment.

“The third message is from someone who says he’s a friend of my friend Eric, and that they’re both at a party and just met this chick who’s unbelievably beautiful and who wants to meet me because they’ve been talking me up to her, but I’d have to go there right away because she’s only staying ten more minutes and doesn’t want to leave them her number. So he tells me to hurry on over. The message was left an hour ago. That woman might have been my future wife. And now she’s probably gone.”

I’m all too aware that each scenario could have led Strad to a probably deserted place, perfect for slaying him. If we’d accompanied Strad to the location, the killer among us would have committed the act personally by grabbing a weapon that was possibly stashed ahead of time at the scene or along the way. If we’d let Strad go alone, some hired killer might have done the deed.

Strad gets ready to leave, but as he begins putting on his shoes, he cries “Argh!” and withdraws his foot immediately from his loafer. His toes have something gross-looking on them. Hard to tell what. He slides his hand into the shoe to investigate and extricates a smelly mash, which I recognize as sardines from our dinner. There’s no mistaking it, thanks to a little sardine tail sticking up in the air.

“Why is there fish in my shoe?”

No answer from anyone.

“Who did this?” he asks.

I apologize profusely and say, “One of us has a serious mental problem and likes to leave this kind of gift for people he or she likes. Like a cat who brings a dead rat to its owner.”

“Which of you?”

“We don’t know.”

He dumps the sardines in the trash, washes his hands, cleans out the inside of his loafer, and leaves me his dirty sock.

About to plunge his other foot into his other shoe, he thinks the better of it and checks it with his hand. Instead of sardine mash, he pulls out a little piece of paper that he reads aloud: “If I could have, I would have.” Strad looks at us, clearly waiting for an explanation and a quick one.

“God only knows,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m sure it was meant in the nicest possible way. But as I said, serious mental problem.” I circle my temple with my finger, hoping that will be enough to satisfy Strad.

“If I had to guess, I would guess it’s you.” He approaches me, searching my face. “You’ve been acting like a lunatic all evening.”

“That was necessary,” I say. “But this wasn’t me.”

He sees it’s pointless to argue with me. He grabs his things and his engraved gifts, which I’ve turned over to him. We say our goodbyes and he departs.

As soon as I close the door, I grab Georgia’s arm to get everyone’s full attention, especially hers. I hiss at them all: “My compliments to whichever one of you is responsible for those voice messages he received. But it’s now after midnight. I hope it is understood that nothing,
nothing
bad will happen to Strad at any of these locations he may go to. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Now or ever. One of you is clearly a psycho, but I hope even psychos can have a sense of honor. You gave Gabriel your word that Strad would not be harmed after midnight tonight, KAY
.
” I look at one after another. They stare back at me.

“Well, I’m not the killer,” Georgia says, “but if I were, I would absolutely keep that promise. And I tend to think the actual killer will have that same decency.”

The others nod uncertainly.

She says, “I think we should get back on the horse immediately and have one of our Nights of Creation as soon as possible. Say, tomorrow night. I’m free.”

We look at each other but no one answers.

She says, “If we don’t make a big effort to regain a sense of normalcy right away, things could stay awkward between us forever. And that would be a shame because I love our group. I know we all do.”

So we agree to meet the next day for a Night of Creation.

Chapter Twelve

T
he following morning, Lily calls and thanks me for the “unbelievable amount of effort” I put into protecting the man she loves. She says she’ll never forget it.

I’m glad I didn’t schedule my dinner with Peter Marrick for tonight. I need this whole day to rest and unwind, though I did some Internet research on him and learned he’s thirty-five and won the Emmy for local news five years straight. In addition to anchoring the local news, he anchors the national news when the usual anchor is out, and he does regular special reports for
Newsroom Live
, the weekly current events show. As I already knew, he got a huge amount of attention nationally when he saved the three children from the fire. Soon afterward, he appeared on
The Ellen Show, Letterman
, and
The View
. He (along with his singed hair) was in
People
magazine’s 100 Most Beautiful People. The article under his photo talked about his “inner beauty.” He did a series last year about poverty in America that won a Polk Award, after which
Time
magazine selected him as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. All of this is a little intimidating. I love talking about current events but I’ve never had to hold a conversation with someone this well versed in world affairs.

Not wanting to get any more nervous than I already am about my dinner with Peter tomorrow night, I decide to distract myself by going to Strad’s store to find out if I was right about the voice messages being part of an elaborate plan to kill him. I bring him his sock, which I’ve cleaned twice to get rid of the sardine smell. I ask him if everything turned out okay with the leak from his store.

He places his palms on the counter and leans toward me. “You’re not going to believe this, but it seems that every single one of those messages was a prank.”

“Really?” I say, trying to look surprised.

He tells me there was no flood in the music store, no audition in an alley, and no beautiful woman at a party. In fact, no party.

This grim information chills me, even though it’s what I expected.

I must stop obsessing about Strad’s near murder. It’s in the past, he survived.

This evening, during our Night of Creation, I’m too tired and stressed to work on the hat. Instead, I read a script for a film I’ve been asked to costume design—not sure I’m interested. But it’s hard to tell, because I have a hard time concentrating. The fact that one of my friends is a killer is something I have to live with—not comfortably, but I have to endure it, because the alternative is worse. We all have to endure it. We don’t talk about it.

Nevertheless, I do watch my friends. And I notice them watching one another, too. I wonder if we’ll ever find out which of them did it. I wonder if we can live with never knowing. In truth, that may be the only way we can live with it.

We are all completely crazy to have decided not to tell the police. We are spending large amounts of our lives with a homicidal maniac who could, at any time, decide, on the spur of the moment, to kill anyone, kill all of us, kill strangers. We are crazy and I assume my friends realize this. I wish I could express it to them, but I don’t want to because I’m afraid my argument will be too convincing. I don’t want them to decide we must tell the police.