Younger (18 page)

She did find something, though: a feature on BarPharm’s spring retreat in March. Photographs showed a sprawling estate. But it wasn’t the one she’d stayed at, the one in which Barton had told her all retreats were held. Even the exterior was of a different color stone. “Our spring retreat for department heads and managers brought together key players from throughout Britain and Switzerland. Held at the company’s exclusive sea-view villa in Cornwall . . .”
Sea view?
Cornwall?
If this was the BarPharm estate, then where had she been taken for training?

Maybe the company had two estates, but that seemed unlikely. She was going to have to find the answer to that question for herself.

As long as she was online, she checked her BarPharm and personal emails, responding in the affirmative to one from Rob asking if she wanted to have brunch Sunday. Daytime was good; perhaps his way of saying he wouldn’t be putting the moves on her again.

Richard’s email said Madame X was doing well, “but it’s not the same without you.”

Allie’s message brought the happy news that Shawna was up for a TV sitcom, but with a disturbing note at the end.

Have you heard from Jan? She and George are going to London for the film’s British premiere, and she might want to meet up, even though she knows you’ve gone to Belgium. The movie’s a hit here, so George has become even harder to bear, and Jan’s drinking a helluva lot more than she should. She quit her job at the school—said it wasn’t ‘challenging’—and is working out with a trainer and secretly (she hasn’t said a word) getting Botox and bad filler from some quackatologist, judging how her face is now both puffy and unmoving. Think: ‘taxidermied squirrel hiding nuts.’ And her bitterness level is through the ceiling! Sad, but I feel something close to dread when I know I’m going to see her. So get bored with the rest of the world soon, Ms. A, ’cause we need you! xoxo, Allie Oop.

Anna sighed. She missed Richard and Allie and hated deceiving them. And, even though she didn’t miss Jan, she wished she could see her in London instead of lying. It sounded as if poor Jan could use a friend.

It didn’t take long for Anna to get a feel for the Ford Focus she rented when she showed up at the Luton Airport car rental counter the next morning, although she suspected she’d still be automatically starting to get in via the passenger-side door by the time she returned it. After circling the airport twice for practice driving on the “wrong” side of both the car and the road, she followed signs toward Northampton.

Last night, poring over a road atlas she picked up at a news dealer’s on the way home, she’d found a Dibden, Dibdin Village, and Dibden Village. She remembered only seeing “Dibden” or “Dibdin” when Aleksei had run into detour signs en route from the house to the clinic that one day. Dibden Village turned out to be the only one within two hours of London, in the area between Leicester and Northampton. How she might find the house or clinic, she didn’t know, but even if she passed her time driving in circles for nothing, it was a crisp, clear August day and she had nothing to lose.

Dibden Village turned out to be a quaint hamlet of brick and ochre stone buildings, but nothing Anna saw within a ten-mile radius looked familiar. Back in the village, she ate a pub lunch, then, while returning to the lot where she’d parked, she crossed the street for a closer look at a jacket in a boutique window. It was nothing special, but what she saw two doors along in the window of an estate agent’s office was. On a small easel stood a photo of the stately pile she sought, a placard at the side bearing directions to the house, the decorous murmur, “Price on request,” and the added note that today’s afternoon open house was from two to four.

As she sped out of the parking lot, Anna was close enough to an oncoming Range Rover to see the frightened face of the woman behind the wheel.
That
woman was, of course, driving on the left side of the road. Anna swerved to where she belonged, then slowed down, determined to solve the Mystery of the Mansion while still in one piece.

Soon, the surroundings became familiar. Small details she’d forgotten—an antique mailbox here, a brightly colored shed there—now stood out. Even without the estate agency sign, she would have turned left into the long drive. She was home.

When he came to the door, the real estate agent offered a disdainful glance, dismissing Anna as yet another looky-loo. Well, screw him.

“Hello, my name’s Lisa Harcourt Jones. I’d like to see the house.” Putting on her best Long Island lockjaw drawl, she delivered something between a request and an order.

He made no move to invite her in. “Something this large?”

“Not for me. For my employer.” Now it was her turn to smile patronizingly. “Silicon Valley? Software? He’s looking for a place in the English countryside. Exactly like this, I believe.”

She had his interest now, and the door and smile opened wider. “Please.”

Paul Timmons supplied his name like a coin doled out to a beggar, as if he were an old codger with a stick up his ass rather than someone under forty. As he steered her through the ground floor, he pointed out a feature she’d never noticed: a sliding pass-through disguised as bookcases. “Lord Haddon had it installed in the 1920s to turn two rooms into one large salon for entertaining.”

“Lord Haddon?”

His look implied puzzlement at her ignorance. “The family built this dwelling at the end of the nineteenth century as a residence for the soon-to-be fifth Lord Haddon and his bride. The fourth lord and his lady remained at Haddon Hall, and this was christened Haddon House. Your employer plans to live in England?”

“I believe he wishes to spend more time here.”
God, we’re vying to out-pompous each other now
. “His wife is British.”

“And he’s in computers?”

“We reserve ‘in computers’ for people who sell them.” She chuckled condescendingly. “I’m afraid I’m not authorized to tell you which at this point. What I
can
say is that he’d like to buy something he’d consider ‘top drawer.
’”

He smirked. “Well, a lord’s house would fit the bill. Let me show you the rest.”

By the time they’d reached the upstairs hallway, she and Paul were frigidly chummy enough for her to ask casually, “Who’s selling and why?”

“Our client is the town of Dibden Village. The sixth lord left it to the council, which can no longer afford either to pay the upkeep or to donate it to the National Trust and lose the income. They want a private buyer rather than an institution, so the rooms would remain intact. And there’s no question of selling to a commercial concern.” He pronounced the words
commercial concern
as if he were saying “toxic waste dump.”

She had thought she was past surprise, but it turned out she wasn’t. “It’s owned by the council?”

He nodded.

“Strange. Because a friend told me about the house. She visited here a few months ago.”

“Hmmm, possible. It was rented to an acting school for a short time, I believe. Before that, a family had it. Australians,” he said acidly. “It had already been listed before the school took it, but we arranged an occasional showing through them. Perhaps your friend knew someone with the school.” His narrowed eyes indicated that bohemians were as unacceptable as those from Down Under.

They had arrived at Anna’s old bedroom. How naïve she’d been when she’d slept there! Had it really been just a month ago? “And corporate retreats? I thought she’d been to some kind of corporate retreat here.”

“Definitely not,” he said emphatically, with both an eye roll and a moue. “The will forbade renting or selling to commercial interests. Even the acting school was a stretch, but the council needed the income.” Back downstairs, he handed her a glossy color brochure for her nonexistent boss.

“Are you from around here?” she asked.

“Norfolk. My wife’s from here. But I can assure you, your employer would find Dibden idyllic.”

“Speaking of finding, I think my family’s former housekeeper lives nearby. A Mrs. McCallum?”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. The name’s familiar . . . Ah, yes, I know. The discount auto supply shop near the motorway. But it’s a chain, not local, so no help there, I’m afraid.”

He was familiar with no clinic nearby where the supposed family retainer might now be working, either. His farewell was almost warm as he asked her to contact him to arrange a showing for her employer.

As she swerved her steps from the passenger’s side of the car to the driver’s, she congratulated herself on having retained at least a modicum of her acting skills. The fool didn’t have a clue her boss didn’t exist, no more than she’d suspected that neither the BarPharm retreat story nor Mrs. McCallum was real.

She wondered how the actress who’d played the housekeeper felt about being named after a place selling cheap tires and wiper blades. Bloody annoyed, no doubt.

Chapter 15

She’d just climbed out of the shower Sunday when her phone rang. To her surprise, it was Marina Barton.

“Please join us for dinner Friday. My younger brother will visit for two nights on his way back to Moscow from New York. You are available?”

“Well, I—” Did she really want to sit through another dinner with the Bartons? Or would this be a chance to see their house?

“Good, you can come. My brother knows only that you are Tanya and work for Pierre. Dmitri is very entertaining. I think you will have a nice time,” she said in her stilted way. She wouldn’t get to see the house, since dinner was to be at The Ivy. No relation to the California Ivy, the London one was even more impressive, the number one showbiz restaurant in the world, and reputedly harder to get into than five-year-old jeans.

She walked the mile to the Chelsea café where she was meeting Rob, who was, not surprisingly, smoking out front and looking very Eurocool and handsome.
Too bad I’m not really his age,
she thought as he held the door,
or I’d be giving that Prague babe a run for her money
. They ate waffles, drank cappuccino, and chatted until Rob said it was time for him to meet a friend at the gym.

She took the Tube to the East End and enjoyed her own company, mingling with the young and the carefree, window-shopping, stopping for a cider at a pub with tables outside. The mystery of Barton Pharmaceuticals nagged at her, but she pushed it away. For the moment, she wanted to enjoy pretending to be young again. She feared it might not be for much longer.

Later, after installing security apps and copying her files to her new laptop, Anna started a secret file, in which she put, in chronological order, everything that she’d learned or that had happened to her in relation to
YOU
NGER, hoping it would help her sort things out as well as create a record. It didn’t clear up anything, but it did astound her. How could she have been so malleable, so unquestioning? Why hadn’t she poked around Haddon House instead of just playing at being an acting student? And her coaches? Who the hell were they?

She chose the ones with unusual names first: Fleur and Leo-Nardo. Online, she switched to the untrackable VPN, then Googled “Fleur fashion blog” and stared in amazement at the ton of listings. Fleur was real! She clicked onto the link to Fleur’s Flares.

And then she sighed. Yes, Fleur was real. She was also chubby and fortyish. She moved on to “Leo-Nardo Deejay,” and, as she expected, no one could have mistaken the real thing for the Leo she’d known.

Imposters
. No doubt they all were. Actors and actresses, who’d been told—what?—that she was an eccentric American pretending she was an actress in a charade her wealthy husband set up to humor her? A harmless nutcase? An MI6 agent learning to impersonate an actress?

Was Marianne really a nurse? Had there ever been a doctor?

She had no answers. Only the question: Why had she been lied to over and over again?

No use asking Pierre Barton, whose easy charm had been woven from a tissue of lies. She couldn’t trust anyone at BarPharm; she wasn’t sure she could trust anyone at all.

Anna made Chas and Becca jump through hoops Monday morning. As long as she was here and they were working hard for her, she owed it to them to help them be better at their craft. She was in her element. She didn’t have Richard Myerson behind her or his hive of worker bees in front of her, but she didn’t need them now that the heavy lifting was done. She was content with her team of two, who’d turned out to be both sharper and nicer than she’d first thought.

In the afternoon, she met with Pierre and Hugh, the nominal VP of marketing, to go over the Madame X rollout, scheduled for March in high-end department stores as well as upscale chains like Space NK. She had detailed memos: lists of store publicists and press, packaging deadlines, ad deadlines, possible October dates for the press launch.

She hung around after Hugh left to thank Barton for inviting her to The Ivy. “Believe it or not, I’ve never been there.”

“You’ll like it, I think. Very good food and a comfortably unstuffy atmosphere.”

“I’m looking forward to it.” She started for the door, then turned around. “Oh, and I was wondering if the woman who was here before me who died—Olga?—might have filed any materials regarding the UK market for Madame X.”

Barton’s mouth hung open for a moment before he said, “Olga Novrosky? No, she had nothing to do with Coscom. If anything was filed, it would have been your own materials for the US.”

“Maybe there’s something,” she persisted. “I’m really trying to get a handle on the UK marketplace, and—”

“Do your own research. I’m paying you enough,” he said sharply.

“Sorry, I didn’t realize it was a sensitive subject, Mr. Barton.”

“Pierre,” he corrected her automatically. “And it’s not sensitive. It’s just always disturbing when a young woman takes her own life.”

“And she was young?
Genuinely
young?”

She could practically see the icicles hanging off his words. “Yes. She was. A tragedy.”

“Of course,” she agreed soberly.

He nodded dismissively. “If I don’t see you before, the booking is for eight o’clock Friday. Dress as you like, but not down. Got it?”

She nodded meekly and let herself out.

She went through anything in her office that wasn’t part of the furnishings, from drugstore magazines to old binders of press clips. She found nothing of Olga Novrosky. It was as if she’d never existed. Or had existed only for a brief period of employment at Barton Pharmaceuticals.

Wednesday, David texted her iPhone to suggest meeting in Soho at four Saturday afternoon.
Drink, decide on film, dinner after?
She replied in the affirmative, though the thrill she felt seeing his name on a text warned her she was entering a high-risk zone.

That night, she stood naked in front of the mirror. Even if she was in good shape physically, her reflection made her think of a funhouse mirror, Tanya’s glowing skin and firm facial contours stuck together with someone else’s slightly sagging belly, gently drooping breasts, loose thighs. She collapsed in sobs after she pulled on her nightgown, no longer able to hide the truth from herself. How had she imagined in her wildest dreams that Tanya would end up with David? Even if he didn’t look upon her now as someone who might be his daughter, she couldn’t let him see what an outlandish mutant she was!
No more mirrors,
she vowed when her tears had stopped. If she kept this up, she’d soon be carving “freak” on her midriff with a razor blade. As for David Wainwright, she needed to give up, however tenuous, the fantasy that they could be together. Or give him up altogether.

Though she had never dined at The Ivy, Anna knew a lot about the venerable theater district restaurant because Richard made sure he and his partner, Max, ate there whenever they visited London and always returned with tales of stars spotted in the dining room.

To banish the memory of that full-length mirror, she needed to feel young and sexy. So she wiggled into her little black dress with sheer stockings and the peep-toe shoes that were really too high for her, praying she’d make it to the table without a pratfall.

With her hair pomaded like Allie’s and eyes smoky with kohl, she was very Sally Bowles. She’d hammily blown herself a kiss in the hall mirror before going out the door. “You’re money, and you know it!”

Now she was seated at one of the coveted—she knew from Richard—banquettes in The Ivy’s main room, trying not to stare at Hugh Grant here and Stephen Fry there and one of the stars from
Absolutely Fabulous
arriving. In front of her was her third glass of a heady Bordeaux and the remains of what had to be the world’s most elegant shepherd’s pie—a freestanding stack of wine-rich meat and mashed potatoes.

Not only was she sated, she was enjoying herself. Marina had thawed slightly, and turned out to be, like Anna, a John le Carré fan. “But only the good ones, the older ones with Karla,” she’d said severely. Anna had suppressed a laugh; even when it came to secret agents, Marina preferred the Russians. Her brother Dmitri was her antithesis, charming and chatty, more international than Marina, openly gay.

“Moscow is an exciting city, and it is seeing a rebirth. But it is not cosmopolitan. It is cold and in many ways behind the time, isolated by weather, geography, and provincialism. My friend and I have a small property in Ponza, near Naples. You know this island? Very hot in summer. We are beach boys. Well, we are older, so perhaps more
Death in Venice
than
Blue Hawaii
.”

Dmitri laughed. Anna laughed. She couldn’t have said why his comment struck her funny bone so hard. Perhaps it was Marina’s lips tightening as if she were considering rapping her younger brother across the knuckles with the cutlery. Maybe just those three glasses of wine. But Anna and Dmitri dissolved in laughter.

And then it happened.

She felt someone materialize next to her. She looked up, and there was Jan Berger, swaying and red faced. “Anna! My God, what have you done to yourself?”

Her laughter died on her lips. She managed to smile apologetically. “Sorry, I think you have me mixed up with—”

“I have you mixed up with nobody, so don’t lie to me, you stuck-up bitch. After almost forty years, I’d recognize that laugh anywhere. And I want to know what you’ve done to yourself. Sitting here like a fucking princess looking twenty years old and acting too good for your real friends. You fraud!”

“Lady, if you’re someone’s real friend, I’d hate to see their enemies, but I don’t know you.”

“We’ll have her removed, Tanya.” Pierre was on his feet now, signaling to the waiter. Then George was there, his face purple with embarrassment, apologizing, dragging Jan away even as she turned to yell back, “You always thought you were better than me! Just wait. You can change your looks but not your karma.”

Then they were gone. People at the surrounding tables started speaking again. The mâitre d’ appeared. He, too, apologized profusely as he handed Pierre an envelope. “From the gentleman, sir.”

Anna watched in stunned silence while Barton opened it as gingerly as if the small, flat Ivy envelope might contain a letter bomb. Then he laughed wryly. “Man’s a writer. He apologizes for his
quote
‘jet-lagged wife’
unquote
and invites us to the premiere of his film next Saturday night. If we call him at The Savoy, he’ll put us on the VIP list.”

“As if we are peons?” Marina snorted at the idea that anyone might consider a VIP list a big deal for the Bartons.

“The film?” Dmitri asked.

Pierre shrugged. “Something called
Die with Me Again
.”

“Oh yes, of this I’ve heard . . .” Marina sneered. “Vampire rubbish.”

“Fitting, since he seems to have married something out of a horror film,” Barton quipped, refolding the note and slipping it into his pocket. “I think we’ll pass on it, shall we? And now, perhaps an after-dinner drink to cleanse that scene from our palates, if not from our minds.”

When Anna asked for more coffee instead, Dmitri reached over and patted her hand. “You’re not going to let that crazy drunk upset you, I hope,” he said.