CHAPTER ELEVEN
Tabby
I zoomed in on the playground, focusing the camera’s eye on the massive winding tube slide. Though there miraculously wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the wind was freezing, blasting my face with its frozen fingers. I’d been back in Chicago for a week now, but after the warmer New Orleans temperature, my midwestern hometown’s December was more reminiscent of a snowball to the face. Hugging my coat closer, I snapped a few additional shots in case the first ones revealed my shivers.
“Did Roy take you to the indoor pool already? We have to have pictures of the pool. A huge part of the renovation budget went to the pool, and the board will want to make sure there are at least a few pool pictures in the new brochures. Plus, we want the pool to be the feature on the website homepage. Do we need to go to the pool next?”
Misty Barnes was the representative for my latest client, a hotel on the city outskirts that had recently come under new ownership, and she was the textbook definition of neurotic. She couldn’t have been more than thirty-two, but she reminded me more of a first-class housewife who fretted over the minutia of candlestick heights and benefit seating charts than a young, vibrant woman reaping the rewards of a hard-earned college degree. Every time I saw her, her raven hair was elegantly twisted up without a strand out of place, her matching blazer-skirt combo was wrinkle-free, and her nude lipstick was flawlessly applied to her clenched lips. She never stopped moving, never stopped worrying, and an innocent conversation with her tended to leave me with the same stress knots in my back I got when I was around Grace, but I lowered my camera and turned around to respond anyway because I would’ve screamed if she’d said the word pool one more time.
“No, I took care of that first,” I assured her, trying to keep my teeth from chattering. “Actually, this is the last location on the list, and I think I’ve got everything I need.”
“Are you sure? What about the banquet hall? Or the Executive Suite — did you get the Executive Suite?” she demanded.
“I got it all,” I said with a crisp edge in my tone.
She frowned, and I could see the gears turning in her mind as she racked her brain for anything she could point to and claim I’d forgotten. I didn’t bother trying to convince her otherwise, preferring to fetch my bag from the nearby bench and start disassembling my equipment. Usually, I did everything I could to ensure a more than satisfactory experience for my clients, but Misty was one of those people who wouldn’t be satisfied until her superiors sang her praises. I had something on my mind anyway. Or someone, rather.
My extended weekend with Owen had haunted me from the moment my plane touched down in Chicago. Two showers a day did nothing to cleanse the feeling of his fingers from my skin. Every rub of the seam of my jeans against my panties elicited a gasp. I was even having dreams about walls draped in black fabric and bright spotlights and a low voice whispering orders in my ear. He’d somehow managed to ingrain himself into my head and he consistently weaseled into my conscious without solicitation.
Yet, he was just a fling. He had to be. I was a simple girl living in a Logan Square studio apartment scrambling on a regular basis to make ends meet as a freelance photographer. He was rich, handsome, charming, and oozed the kind of sex appeal that could infect every heterosexual woman in a fifty-foot radius. There was a thousand miles between us and the lives we had built for ourselves — or were trying to build, in my case. We’d met, we’d hung out, we’d slept together, and I’d gone home. From the logistics to the clichés, my weekend in New Orleans with Owen Driscoll had only one possible classification — fling.
God, I wanted to be flung again.
The only outstanding factor that threw a wrench in my analysis of the New Orleans trip was my phone number. Owen had asked for it before we’d said goodbye after our night at The Blackjack Club. I’d given it to him, but I didn’t have any real expectation of a call for the reasons I’d already reiterated to myself over and over again. Plus, despite his frequent reminders about his lacking politeness, he was a gentleman and it stood to reason he’d only asked for my number out of some societal obligation to avoid looking like a sleaze who hit’em and quit’em. I didn’t mind. The thought that he’d asked for the sake of propriety didn’t offend me. But, no matter how hard I tried to convince myself otherwise, I had a flicker of hope burning inside me he’d call.
“I don’t have anything earlier, so I hope Tuesday works for you, but if the board doesn’t get a chance to look over the photos in time we may have to reschedule.” I hadn’t even realized Misty was talking, but it didn’t seem to matter much because she waved her hand frantically in front of her face a split second later and recanted. “No, no, never mind. Let’s not set any appointments yet. Why don’t you just send over the shots and I’ll forward them to the board, then I’ll give you a call when I hear something back from them?”
“That sounds fine,” I agreed. They were the exact same terms we’d discussed when I’d nabbed the gig in the first place, but I’d discovered Misty was the type to waffle back and forth between ideas before settling on the initial one in the end anyway. Zipping my bag closed, I slipped the strap over my shoulder and hoisted the weight. “I’ll go through them tonight, scrap any duds right off, and email the portfolio tomorrow.”
“Great.” She sighed with relief as she said it, and for the first time since I’d met her, her face relaxed. The lack of tension in her jaw took at least five years off, and she could’ve possibly convinced me she was actually thirty-two rather than in her mid-forties in that moment. “Great.”
My distraction continued into my drive back home. It was only mid-afternoon, but gigs were booked at all hours of the day or night and it wasn’t uncommon for me to find myself with a large portion of the day free. I normally would’ve been pleased to have the time, but not today. It seemed time alone this week meant time to muse over Owen, and that was the last thing I wanted.
“Let it go,” I muttered aloud as I pulled up to a traffic light queue. The gray-haired woman in the car next to mine squinted suspiciously at me like I was a crazy person who’d escaped from the asylum.
Perhaps the most frustrating part about being so mentally occupied by a man I was sure I’d never see again was that, as soon as I managed to expunge him from my thoughts, I instead became focused on the “unique set of interests” he’d told me linked the members of The Club.
According to him, they were dark and dangerous and had the capability of ruining reputations, but that was the only solid information I had. The rest was left up to my imagination, and my imagination was vivid. I wanted to know more. I was desperate to know more.
The little knowledge I had surrounding the subject was so open to interpretation that I could’ve been rubbing elbows with men interested in everything from leather to child pornography, and I couldn’t help feeling like it was necessary that I found out just how far into the extremes the spectrum went. How I perceived The Club and its members, and truthfully, Owen, had become solely dependent on learning whether I’d been in close quarters with people who just got hard sniffing sneakers or who possessed more sinister kinks that left their partners frightened, traumatized, or even harmed. For all I knew, I could’ve slept with a guy who got off on kidnapping women and keeping them locked in cages as slaves. Why it mattered to me so much, I didn’t know. After all, what was done was done. And who really knew anyone anyway? People could be married for twenty years and never suspect a thing until one day they find out their spouse has been dismembering neighborhood dogwalkers. It did matter, though. I felt like I was trapped in a moral mystery and couldn’t drop the obsession until it was solved.
As I pulled into the parking lot of my apartment building, I wondered if I should start dating. It seemed reasonable that seeing someone would help me to forget, or not care, about another someone. Then again, I had my doubts. Owen had been perfect, too perfect. I couldn’t fathom meeting another man who could come close to the bar raised by the slick Mr. Driscoll.
Before heading up to my studio, I stopped at the mailbox. Nobody else was around, for which I was grateful because my neighbors were on the strange side and tended to either be complete mutes lacking any semblance of manners or so nosy I couldn’t sneeze without being interrogated about my entire medical history. In the interest of getting upstairs undetected, I snagged the stack of envelopes, flyers, and magazines from the narrow compartment, locked the box again, and scurried to the stairwell.
I wasn’t quite as lucky as I thought. Shoving the key into my door, I heard, “Yoo-hoo!”
“Hello, Ms. Marcheski,” I said without looking. She was easily recognizable by her voice, as high-pitched as a doll with the kind of coarseness only decades of smoking two packs a day could bring.
“Oh, I see you’ve got your mail.” She padded down the hall in her raggedy slippers with her nose shoved forward curiously. “I wanted to tell you I saw a man putting an envelope into your box this morning.”
“Was he wearing a United States Postal Service uniform?” I asked a little dryly. It wasn’t characteristic of me to be so rude, especially toward a woman of Ms. Marcheski’s age, but my recent fixation was making me grouchy.
She shook her head, widening her eyes to buglike proportions. Her frizzled bangs swung limply around her forehead. “No,” she replied solemnly. “He wore a tuxedo. You know, like the kind actors wear for award ceremonies?” I paused with my hand wrapped around the doorknob and stared at her. “He didn’t have a key, of course, but he slipped that envelope right in through the bottom, and then he left. I looked out the door to get his license plate number in case it was anthrax. He was driving a spy car.”
“A spy car?”
“You know, like the kind they drive in the movies?” She stretched her arms out wide as if to illustrate the size of a true-to-life car. “It was black and shiny and looked expensive. I don’t know why someone driving that car would send you anthrax, but there’s a lot of weirdos out there.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, opting not to comment on the irony of her statement. “Well, thanks for letting me know.”
She rose up onto her tiptoes, the heels of her slippers flapping back against the well-worn hallway carpet, and tried to peer at the mail tucked in my hand. “Do you want me to open it for you? I’ve lived a long life, but you’re just a young thing with plenty of days ahead of you,” she offered.
I put on my friendliest smile and responded sweetly, “No, thank you, but I’ll let you know if I find something terrible in there.”
“Oh.” The disappointment on her face was obvious. “Well, all right. You just holler if you need me, then, dear.”
I thanked her and retreated into the safety of my apartment, taking care to lock the door and deadbolt behind me. Ms. Marcheski was a kind woman for all intents and purposes, but she was the biggest busybody anyone could ever want to meet, and the last thing I needed at that moment was her burrowing into my already muddled business.
The envelope in question was at the bottom of the stack. I tossed the rest of the mail onto my kitchen counter and studied the possibly anthrax-laden packet. Intricate gold foil scrolls swirled up the sides, and the paper itself glimmered at me in the sunlight filtering through my single window. The writing of my name and address was exquisite with the kinds of curves and flourishes common in calligraphy, and there wasn’t a stamp. There was, however, an unnamed return address. My stomach somersaulted.
P.O. Box 74
New Orleans, LA 70119