Her Bodyguard

CHAPTER FOUR

Dearest Lara-Mommy,

Something told me that today I’d be SURE to get a letter from you!! I went to my mailbox four times—one. two, three, FOUR—but it never came. At least, the man behind the counter said it didn’t come. I’m starting to wonder about that guy. Could he be stealing my mail?!! He stares at me every time I come in now. But maybe that’s just because he thinks I look EXACTLY like the famous TV star Lara Leigh? People are always, I mean ALWAYS, staring at me on the street and thinking that. I stopped and gave one woman who was staring my autograph the other day. She thought that was so NICE of me to give it to her without her even asking.

But then, I’m not conceited like some people we know. And all I want to know is, WHY do I have to keep asking you for a letter? Asking and asking and asking and ASKING for one...CRUMMY...LETTER—what kind of mother makes her daughter beg for just the scraps—any old scrap—of her love? Just a crumb of attention? I guess the same kind of mom who sells her baby to finance her way through med school, huh?

Well, I’m getting very, very tired of asking. Tired of walking to my mailbox, then home again, then back again, then—I know every line in the sidewalk on the way to my mailbox. I play Step on a Crack and You’ll Break Your Mother’s BACK. Do you remember that game? It’s a children’s game. If you’d been there for me, Lara-Mommy, instead of devoting all your selfish life to your lousy CAREER, we could have played it together. And maybe then, if you’d been there to guide me I’d have amounted to something. Is that it? Is that why you won’t answer my letters anymore? Because you’re ashamed of me?

I promise you won’t be when we meet. Soon. It’s time for a mother and daughter reunion, don’t you think?

But till then,

WRITE ME, YOU BITCH! (HA-HA—Just kidding!!!) your loving Sarah XXX

WITH A SHUDDER of disgust, Trace dropped the letter on his desk. He stood, switched off the lamp, then moved to the window and leaned out, greedily breathing in the sweet night air, as if the letter’s cloying brew of need and hatred had contaminated his lungs as well as his mind.

His office looked out on the front grounds of Woodwind. Even with his thoughts elsewhere, his eyes roved automatically over the darkened lawn below, seeking movement, any shape that departed from the normal outlines of the lush landscaping. Nearly midnight and not even a skunk waddled across the lawn in search of grubs.

He glanced back to his desk. He’d been combing through Sarah XXX’s letters for the past hour, searching for any clue he might have overlooked. That letter was number four of the collection—rather, a copy of number four, since the original was filed with the Newport police. The stalking case against Sarah XXX had to be meticulously documented so that if—when, he corrected himself—Trace finally tracked her down, they could prosecute.

Like all the other notes, number four was a textbook example of the kind of mash note celebrity stalkers sent the objects of their twisted affections. Whatever the words, the underlying theme was the same: terrible, unappeasable neediness. The echoing emptiness of a person who has no identity in the normal sense of the word. Because for whatever pathetic reason—neglect, abuse, psychological dysfunction?—the typical stalker possesses no self.

Like Dorothy’s Tin Man, who realizes he lacks a heart, the stalker is still human enough to know he lacks something. Even if he can’t describe the problem, still he senses the void within—the black hole that in a normal person is filled by a sense of selfhood. By a soul.

And the stalker knows he needs to fill that void. Yearns most horribly to fill it. Believes with unshakable faith that to ever be happy, to ever be normal, he must fill it.

So just as the Tin Man set off to ask the Wizard of Oz for a heart, the stalker goes bumbling through life, searching and searching outside himself for a solution to the. problem that lies within.

Until one fine day the answer comes to him. He has a black, sucking hole where his identity should be? He’ll fill it with someone else’s identity! Someone else’s soul.

And since the void is so big, he’ll need a big identity to fill it. Somebody important, however the stalker defines importance.

A generation ago, importance was a politician. Today, importance is most often a celebrity. So one day, the stalker flips the pages of a magazine—and sees a photo. Or turns the TV channel just as a certain actress walks into a room—and wham!—there it is. A person staring into his eyes, seemingly speaking to him and him alone, promising him the solution to his whole rotten, lonely life. Promising recognition, belonging—identity.

All he has to do is win that person’s love, the stalker thinks. Except he doesn’t know what love is. His underlying urge is darker, deeper. He doesn’t want love; he wants possession. Wants to merge with. Become. Seize that soul and swallow it whole. To eat it.

Trace switched the lamp back on and sat again. So with zombies like that wandering the world, what does Richard Corday do for his new, beautiful young wife?

Already the creator of five hit TV shows, Corday sets out to create a showcase series for Lara. The perfect wedding gift for an actress, he must have thought. A role to die for. Like a master jeweler crafting the perfect setting for a matchless diamond, he creates an evening soap opera called Searching for Sarah.

In which, for the past thirteen years, Lara had played the part of beautiful young Dr. Laura Daley, who has a secret sorrow. At the age of seventeen, Daley sold her illegitimate baby in a black-market adoption and used the payment to finance her way through college, then med school. Lara had assumed the role when she was thirty—at that age, she could still play the part of a teenager—and she’d been playing it ever since. The role had evolved over the years, with Dr. Daley changing from career-driven girl, to brilliant med student, to sexy resident, to glamorous pediatric surgeon in a big city hospital. She needed only one thing to make her life perfect: reunion with her lost, never forgotten, deeply regretted daughter. Because, since episode three of the show, Dr. Laura Daley had realized her dreadful mistake. She’d been frantically searching for Sarah for thirteen years now.

The premise was guaranteed to speak to every wacko in the country—at least every female wacko, and doubtless some of the males. What could be more seductive to the loser nobody needs than a TV diva who needs you and you alone? For somebody lost to know that lovely Dr. Laura Daley is frantically searching for you?

Searching for Sarah was like a Help Wanted ad, broadcast one night a week for thirteen years. The one part waiting for an actor to fill it was the role of the missing, longed-for daughter.

Was it any wonder Sarah XXX wanted the position? The only wonder was that Trace didn’t have a dozen—a hundred—wannabe Sarahs to contend with. Lara had been damned lucky to escape a serious stalking as long as she had.

How serious a stalker was Sarah XXX? That was the question.

Six days after Sarah XXX mails this letter from Boston, promising—threatening—a mother-daughter reunion, somebody pushes Lara over a cliff. The simplest explanation wasn’t conclusive, but Trace firmly believed in starting with it first: one wacko, not two.

So all I have to do is find Sarah XXX.

And maybe he had. He reached for letter number five, then selected, instead, the top page from a thicker stack of papers. Gillian’s résumé.

He paused as the buzzer tucked in his pocket quivered soundlessly against his thigh. Lara. He waited, eyes unfocused, breath deepening, preparing himself for action if this was a call for help—then let out a little sigh of satisfaction when the buzzer stopped vibrating after three seconds. Good. And good night to you, too, Lara.

Buzzers were a bit of proprietary technology that Brickhouse used in any case where physical attack was a possibility. The client was instructed to wear a special locket on a chain around his or her neck at all times. Press the button concealed in the locket’s design, and a silent buzzer would alert the Brickhouse bodyguard that he was needed—and needed now.

He glanced at his watch. Midnight. Which meant it was nine in Seattle, not too late for his night-owl younger sister. He picked up his phone and dialed.

“Mmm, ‘lo?” a drowsy voice murmured in his ear.

“Asleep already?” he said easily. “Lazy bum.”

“Dozing,” Emily insisted. “I’m lying here on the couch with Duncan on my chest.” Duncan was one of her four tomcats, the surly orange one. “And he’s emitting sleep rays. I was fighting valiantly, but—”

“Well, throw him off and go look at your computer.” Trace had scanned Gillian’s résumé into his computer, then e-mailed it to Emily an hour ago. “Got somebody I want you to check out for me.” His younger sister was not a partner in Brickhouse, God forbid, but an associate. They farmed out much of their research to her, especially anything that could be learned over the Internet.

“Rush job or in my own sweet time?” she inquired around a yawn.

“Like prontissimo. I want it yesterday.”

“So my—lemme go, you cockleburr!” On the far side of the continent, something heavy hit the floor—twenty-two pounds of cat, Trace assumed. “So my brainstorm worked?” Emily continued. She’d suggested Trace run a want ad seeking a personal assistant for Lara, because if Sarah XXX had come to Newport in May, then maybe she’d stayed.

That wouldn’t be untypical—the stalker’s life spiraling inward in tighter and tighter circles around her target as her obsession grew. And if she’d stayed, then she’d be frantically seeking some way in past Woodwind’s unbreachable walls. “So offer her a way in,” Emily had urged. “Run a want ad with the Woodwind address and see who applies.”

“I don’t know if it worked,” he said, “but it turned up a few possibles. And this is the one I want you to start on.”

“Gillian S. Mahler,” Emily murmured, reading Gillian’s résumé on her screen.

“N. Mahler,” Trace corrected absently. “The first thing I want you to check out is—”

“S,” Emily interrupted, know-it-all kid sister to the end. “That’s an S. And I’d say your Gillian’s a leftie, correct?”

“S...” Trace stared at the spiky, backhanded letter. He’d taken it for a N in running script, not an S practically lying on its back. “By God, I believe you’re right!”

“That’s significant?”

“That, duckie, might be point, set and game. Okay, in that case here’s what I need from you, and I need it as quick as you can. What does the S stand for?”

“And if it’s Sarah?”

“Then bingo! I’ve found my pigeon.”

THREE DAYS LATER, on a morning as bright as her mood, Gillian leaned out her car window to study the device that apparently controlled Woodwind’s gates. Topping a metal post at a height convenient to the driver, it was an intercom of some sort, with a keypad and a speaker. Printed below the keypad was the instruction Press * To Call. She pressed the star sign, then waited.

“Yes?” the speaker said after a moment, in a metallic imitation of Trace Sutton’s voice.

It would be him, playing gatekeeper. “It’s G-Gillian. I’m here.” Lara had called her two days ago to say she was hired, and could she please report for work on Monday. So here she was at last, with all the possessions she’d acquired in Newport packed into boxes and suitcases that filled the trunk and back seat of her car. Because along with the job came an unexpected, quite wonderful bonus: a carriage-house apartment on the Woodwind grounds. Given Gillian’s recent problems with roommates, she might have accepted the job on those terms alone. Considering that the job and the housing gave her round-the-clock access to Lara, she couldn’t have asked for a better chance to get to know her.

There was no welcoming comment from Sutton, but slowly the gates swung inward and Gillian steered her ancient Toyota up the winding driveway. At the top of the low hill, the road divided. The right fork curved off grandly to lead front-door callers to the mansion’s covered portico. The left fork wound around back, past concealing shrubbery, to the carriage house built to one side of the mansion and a bit behind it.

On the raked gravel before the carriage house, Trace Sutton stood waiting, a sardonic half smile on his face, his hands jammed into the pockets of a pair of impeccable white tennis shorts. The very picture of a gentleman of leisure.

“That’s the door to your apartment.” He indicated a human-sized entrance to the left of the five garage bays.

She parked before it and stepped out. “Good morning.”

“Is it?” he said pleasantly.

Well, it was for me till now. Why did he dislike her so? She glanced past him toward Woodwind. “Where’s Mrs. Corday?”

“She’s not up and about yet. She had a bad night.” As he spoke, he opened the rear door of her car and lifted out a box. “So meantime I’ll show you your apartment and help you get settled.”

“Oh, that’s really not necessary!” She reached for the box, but he didn’t relinquish it. “If you’d just give me the key, I’m sure I can...”

But he’d already stepped around her and started off. “Nonsense. It’s no trouble at all.”

“But—” She didn’t want him intruding on her new space or on her new-job excitement. Fuming, she grabbed a couple of smaller boxes and followed him up the covered staircase that was built on the outer wall of the carriage house, then through a door at the top of the stairs. “Oh!” The slanted ceiling was set with skylights.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Sutton said from the far end of the long room, where he waited in a doorway. “I used to live here myself.”

“You did?” Perhaps that accounted for his proprietary air. Still, Gillian didn’t like it. He rubbed her wrong; the vibrations he’d left behind would bother her, too. Frowning, she followed him into the bedroom, and stopped short in delight.

The end wall was mostly glass, a gigantic Palladian window that looked out on the side lawn, then over the distant back wall. Beyond that all was blue—robin’s egg sky, a slash of aquamarine sea.

“Yes, I rented this place for a month this spring, before I moved in with Lara.”

So their relationship was quite new. Must have blossomed almost overnight, given that Lara had spent most of her spring and summer in hospital. One of those sickbed romances—he’d wooed her when her resistance was at its lowest, chocolate and flowers and reading to the invalid? “I see,” she said evenly. He’d set her box of clothes down on the bed. The top flaps, which she’d interlocked, had somehow come undone. She dumped her own boxes beside it. “What did you mean by ‘a bad night’? Pain?” She straightened to find his eyes locked on her face.

“Nightmares,” he said bluntly.

“Oh.” Yes, she could imagine that. She shivered, and watched him note it. Why was he staring like that? The memory of his arm sliding around her returned abruptly: She’d put any notion that he might have been making a pass aside after his obvious attempt to block Lara’s hiring her. Rationally, one action didn’t follow the other. If Trace was attracted, then why would he object to her working at Wood- . wind? He wouldn’t. Since he had objected, therefore that fumble at the windows had not been a pass.

Now, with his eyes lingering on her mouth, she wasn’t so sure of her logic. “Er, there’s lots more in the car.” She ducked out the door.

They brought up a second load, Trace in the lead again. He swung her suitcase onto the bed, then opened a sliding door to reveal a closet. “There’re plenty of hangers. Why don’t you hand me your things and I’ll hang them up.”

Funny, he didn’t look in the least domestic. “Thanks, but I’d rather do it myself.” Later, without an unblinking audience.

Her words hung between them in the small room, a little too emphatic, a little too prim. Maybe she was wrong to take offense. Maybe this was no more than the kind of service a slightly younger man grew used to giving an older, richer woman. She found herself wondering for the first time what Sutton did for a living.

His smile deepened at the corners, but he didn’t rush to fill the uncomfortable silence. So she did. “It’s just that I’ve been living crunched into a tiny apartment with too many roommates.” When she’d taken the place back in May, she’d signed on to share a two-bedroom apartment with its original tenant. Then Debbie had lost her job. To pay the rent, she’d taken in another two girls, college sophomores in Newport to party for the summer. “Dirty dishes in the sink, people coming and going at all hours or, worse, declaring parties at all hours. Laundry hanging all over the bathroom.” And Michele, who’d decided she preferred Gillian’s clothes to her own and who borrowed without asking. “It’s been too much togetherness by half. So it’ll be heaven doing for myself for a change.”

Trace cocked his head. “Let me guess. You’re an only child.”

One minute he doesn’t like me, the next he wants to know all about me. She was tempted to brush him off, but she didn’t need an enemy at Woodwind. Lara’s desire to hire her had overruled her lover’s opposition. Still, Gillian didn’t know by what margin. Better to play it safe. Try to win him over, too.

“Not quite,” she said lightly, leading him out of the bedroom and back toward the stairs. “I have a brother.” By adoption. “Chris. But he’s fourteen years older than I.” And when her adoptive parents had divorced back when Gillian was eight, Chris had gone with his father. She had stayed with Eleanor Scott—her adoptive mother—and had wondered for years why her father, Victor Scott, had dropped out of her life so completely.

Because I was never his in the first place! Because it was Mom who wanted to adopt a child, not him—he had Chris by a previous marriage and Chris was quite enough. So many mysteries of her childhood had come clear when she opened that safe-deposit box.

“And Chris lives back in Houston along with the rest of your family?” Trace prodded, coming down the stairs at her heels.

Houston. She hadn’t told him she came from there. He read my résumé, which listed Houston as her previous residence and the location of her last two jobs. “Oh, he’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere,” she said with a smile over her shoulder. “He’s a delivery captain. Moves other people’s yachts around.”

There wasn’t much family beyond that to claim, in Houston or anywhere. Aunt Susan, Victor Scott’s sister out in San Diego. And Ed Mahler, the lovely loony man who had married her mother when Gillian was fifteen and had adopted her, never knowing she was adopted already. He had been as thunderstruck as she at Eleanor’s deception. Ed was an engineer in the merchant marine, and after her mother’s death, he’d signed on for a regular run on a tanker between Kuwait and New Jersey.

Reaching the car, Gillian found herself still smarting at Trace’s invasion of her privacy. It was silly to be so irritated. Perhaps he’d helped Lara cull all the applicants, deciding which were worth an interview. Still, his big hands on a paper that described her life...she didn’t like it. “So what about you?” she said recklessly as she opened the trunk. “Any siblings?” Two could play the prying game.

She looked up to find a distinct frown on his face. You’d rather question than be questioned? Good. She cocked her head at him inquiringly. I bet you’re the youngest brother, with two older sisters. You’re comfortable hanging around with older women. Pleasing them.