Too Pretty to Die
Praise for the Debutante Dropout Mysteries
While writing
Too Pretty to Die
, I went through a pretty scary patch in my life, and I wondered if I’d be able to focus enough to finish the book. Somehow, I did. And I’d like to dedicate every word to the wonderful people who got me through the worst. Thanks in particular to my amazing mom, Pat McBride, the love of my life, Ed Spitznagel, and my fabulous “second mom,” Alice Spitznagel, who took such good care of me and made me laugh instead of cry. I am blessed with terrific friends who did their share of hand-holding (many from long distance), and I adore you all. To my readers who sent well wishes, thank you so much. To the doctors, nurses, and rad techs who made me well again: y’all rock. Finally, to the women who battled breast cancer before me—and alongside me—and after me: I am in awe. I have a whole new set of heroes, and every one is a regular person who had to suddenly become extraordinarily brave.
This one’s for you.
“I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?”
Jean Kerr
Prologue
Dear Miranda DuBois
:
Due to your current unfortunate circumstances, your membership in the Caviar Club has been revoked. We wish you luck in your recuperation. Should your situation improve, please reapply, and we will give your application our prompt attention.
Sincerely
,
The Caviar Club
She used to be so pretty.
Perfect, some would say.
Her eyes had always been so blue and wide, her smile so bright; her skin without a blemish. She’d never gone through an awkward stage, having blossomed from beautiful baby and skipping through puberty without a hitch; ending up the fully spun butterfly everyone knew she’d become.
She was the one who Daddy had called “my own little Grace Kelly,” showing her off at the country club when she was a toddler in rompers and saddle shoes. Even in grade school, the boys from St. Mark’s had tripped over themselves to be near her when they’d mixed with the Hockaday girls at dances. Her mailbox had always overflowed with love notes on Valentine’s Day, many from names she didn’t even recognize.
She’d grown accustomed to being adored, and thrived on it. She figured her looks were her gift, and there was nothing wrong with that. Some savants played piano like Mozart or painted like Chagall. Miranda knew that her talent was in keeping up her appearance. And it had been so easy for her, really.
Sure, she’d had to deal with Venus envy. Girls hated her for no other reason than that she was prettier. But there would always be people who wanted what they couldn’t have, wouldn’t there? If people didn’t like her, it had more to do with them than her, or so her mother had always suggested.
Such was life, and Miranda had fast learned how to shrug off the jealous whispers. She’d been blessed where it mattered most when the eyes of Texas were upon you: her shiny chassis.
And she’d never, ever taken it for granted.
If she’d been pug-ugly, she wouldn’t have been a Pi Phi at UT-Austin, and she certainly wouldn’t have been a Symphony Deb (okay, maybe she could have, since her daddy had practically paid for the entire string section with his annual donations).
She’d surely never have won Miss Dallas or first runner-up at the national pageant.
Homely girls didn’t wear sashes, and they damned sure didn’t get tiaras unless they bought them at Oriental Trading.
When she’d graduated from UT, she’d gotten a gig right off the bat doing on-air consumer reports at KXAS-Channel 5 in Big D, before the news director had claimed she was being underutilized and moved her to the anchor desk. And, really, it had everything to do with all the viewer e-mails about her Southern charm, the breezy way she read the teleprompter, and her movie-star looks, and not a whit to do with the fact that she was sleeping with her married boss—call her naïve, but she’d believed him when he said that he loved her and planned to leave his boring wife.
My God, but it had been so easy when she was beautiful, when all she had to do was smile and the world fell on its knees to please her.
She used to pray to God every night, thanking Him profusely for blessing her with good features. Her mother had raised her to think of others, too; so she’d prayed as well for the ungainly, the gawky, the brace-faced, and pimply, because, Lord knew, they could always use the help.
Now her prayers had changed.
They’d become more like an SOS.
Thirty-one years old, and she’d been ruined for life.
She was a freak, a loser, a big, fat (okay, skinny) nothing.
Through moist eyes, she read the letter from the Caviar Club one last time before she crumpled it into a ratty ball and tossed it across the room. It bounced off the open screen of her laptop and dropped to the carpet.
So that’s how it ended?
With an impersonal note?
After all the lip service when they’d embraced her about how special she was, how extraordinary on the inside and out?
Tears slid down her cheeks, and she brushed them off, angry and disappointed at once.
Screw them all! she thought.
Even
him
. No, especially him.
She’d barely heard a peep from the man she’d been seeing, not since Dr. Sonja had turned her into a pariah. Then, wham, he’d sent a text message earlier in the afternoon saying,
NEED TIME 2 THINK. GIVE ME SPACE, OK?
Space?
Wasn’t that the precursor of the infamous “can’t we just be friends” brush-off, dating back to junior high?
What had happened to all the gushy messages before Dr. Sonja turned her into a freak? Had his professed adoration been a lie? And how had he found out? She hadn’t told him, not personally. So how had he learned?
Someone must’ve spread the word, and Miranda was fairly certain she knew who was responsible, despite how hard she’d tried to keep her disfigurement under wraps, wearing dark glasses and a scarf around her hair every time she ventured out, telling fibs, avoiding everyone as best she could.
Pretty soon it wouldn’t matter what disguise she donned or how many excuses she made up. The world would know what she’d become: the Park Cities’ version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
She’d forever be known as the Ugly Chick with Botched Botox, or how about, Your Friendly Neighborhood Sideshow Freak?
She’d no longer be Dallas’s “Most Beloved On-Air Personality,” that was for darn tootin’.
Because she wouldn’t be on-the-air anymore; no one would want her.
It didn’t matter that her co-anchor, the smarmy Dick Uttley, looked like he was 101. He had a million tiny creases from a fifty year nicotine habit and the broken capillaries of a lifelong drinker. But did he ever get e-mails about his hairstyle or the color of his lipstick? Did anyone care that he’d cheated on his wife about a hundred times with every intern at the station?
Noooooo
.
If Dick had been the one scarred by a permanent eye twitch and an Elvis sneer, the viewers likely wouldn’t have even noticed.
But they expected Miranda DuBois to be perfect. They demanded that she look gorgeous from the tip of her pedicured toes to the roots of her shiny blond hair.
The only trouble was, she would never be perfect again.
Her breaths became rushed, and she felt dizzy, on the verge of hyperventilating.
Oh, God, she couldn’t breathe!
She gulped down the last of her gin and tonic, struggling up from her Barcelona chair only long enough to pour another—minus the tonic this time.
“Just try a little around your eyes, Randa, and let’s do your laugh lines. Then you’ll look as perfect as you did when you were twenty,” Dr. Sonja had cajoled her, and who wouldn’t have listened? Sonja Madhavi was cosmetic dermatologist to all the pretty people in Dallas. Everyone and her pedigreed pup had Dr. Sonja show up for glycolic peel parties and Botox bashes.
So she had done it, too, like a sheep.
The one truly bad thing about being born with pretty genes was seeing that first wrinkle and glimpsing the future.
She’d been afraid of growing older, knowing how women who aged disappeared from TV news like old soldiers who’d faded away. She’d decided, what the heck? Enough of her friends had gone under the needle and raved about it. No one ever talked about the “what ifs,” as in, “What if Dr. Sonja hit a nerve or injected a bad batch of botulism?”
What a fool she’d been!
Now she was a walking example of those “adverse reactions” that Dr. Sonja had so quickly glossed over. Who ever paid attention to the warning labels until it was too late? What woman truly cared that the FDA hadn’t put its stamp of approval on a product if it was featured in
Vogue
and lauded by doctors in France and Italy?
Those French were always ahead of everyone else in matters of beauty. They were willing to take risks, throw caution to the wind. It wasn’t fair. Why should they have dibs on everything?
But she should’ve read the fine print. She should’ve erred on the side of caution instead of being so fast to jump on Dr. Sonja’s better-than-Botox bandwagon; should’ve wised up to the fact that Dr. Sonja had never seemed to like her.
If she had, things would be different.
As it was, she would never be the same.
It had been three weeks since her injections, and she’d had to call in sick at work, claiming “female troubles,” which prevented any of the producers from asking probing questions. They had the weekends-only anchorwoman sitting in temporarily “while Miranda DuBois takes a much needed vacation,” or so they told viewers.
But what she had was a case of botched wrinkle filler: a serious tic in her left eye that wouldn’t stop, and a droop in the corner of her mouth, so she appeared the drooling idiot. She’d been to Dr. Sonja’s for a follow-up, begging her to fix things, but Dr. Sonja had blamed her, said she must be overly sensitive, and told her to wait it out.
Wait out ugly
?
Good God!
What if that took forever?
She had on-air news to read, celebrity charity events to chair, commercials and public service announcements to tape, not to mention countless promotional gigs for the station.
But Dr. Sonja didn’t care. She’d stopped returning her phone calls, was intentionally avoiding her, despite Miranda threatening to report her to the BBB and the AMA if she didn’t do some kind of quick fix. And she would do it, too.
She had never felt so abandoned.
Oh, Lord, she would die alone, wouldn’t she?
Forget the tiaras and sashes! She’d be lucky if any single, attractive, heterosexual male would pay attention to her ever again.
The one man she’d believed loved her—who used to ring her cell spontaneously to whisper dirty little come-ons, who’d made a million excuses at work and at home so he could squeeze in a half hour at her place in the mornings or at night—had vanished off the radar after her face was ruined.
She knew she could make his life a living hell if she wanted to; hurt him as much as he was hurting her. And she might—she could—but she wasn’t sure he was worth it. He had never really been hers.