The Ex Read online

  But he’d seen her sudden anger and didn’t want to provoke her again.

  He stood in the shadows on West Eighty-fifth Street and stared for a while, puzzled. Her apartment lights came on again, but the living room drapes drew closed without him catching sight of her.

  He slapped at the gnats, who’d patiently awaited his return, then he shrugged elaborately and walked away.

  Molly pushed the empty stroller along West Eighty-fifth Street the next morning, after dropping off Michael at Small Business. Traffic was heavy, and the sidewalks were teeming with people on their way to Monday morning work.

  There was a store nearby that had a coupon sale on Healy’s Cat Gourmet Meatloaf, the only brand Muffin would eat—in various flavors, of course. Molly needed some other groceries, so she thought this was a good morning to buy them, at the same time stocking up on cat food for the week and hoping Muffin wouldn’t suddenly decide to switch brands.

  She was waiting for the traffic light to change at Columbus when she noticed a woman in a green dress entering a clothing store across the street.

  Molly stiffened behind the stroller.

  The woman had looked familiar.

  So had the dress.

  The light read WALK and the knot of people at the corner began to move. Molly sped up and shot out ahead of most of them, pushing the stroller so fast that the rhythmic squeal of one of its wheels was almost a steady scream.

  She crossed to the other side of Columbus and hurried to the clothing shop she’d seen the woman in the green dress enter. The sign in its window boasted that it sold both men’s and women’s quality irregulars and seconds.

  Molly peered through the window at the racks of clothes.

  Damn it! Deirdre, or at least the woman Molly had seen enter the shop, was nowhere in sight.

  Quickly she collapsed the stroller, lifted it by its light aluminum frame, and went inside. It was possible that the woman had exited the shop unseen while Molly was crossing the intersection, but Molly didn’t think so.

  The shop’s interior was somewhat dim, and crowded with racks of clothing, but it took Molly only a few minutes to look around and conclude that she and an elderly woman in Plus Sizes were the only customers.

  “Help you?” a blond sales clerk in her twenties asked.

  “I’m looking for a friend I’m sure I saw come in here,” Molly said. “But now I don’t see her. Is anyone in the changing room?”

  The girl shook her head. “No, ma’am.”

  “Would you look, please?”

  The girl stared at her for a few seconds, then walked away toward a curtained doorway at the back of the store.

  Less than a minute later she returned. “There’s no one in any of the changing rooms, ma’am. Like I told you, no one.”

  Molly thanked her and returned to the street and the warm morning sun.

  No one.

  Had she imagined she’d seen the woman? Seen the green dress that was like Molly’s dress or was Molly’s dress, and one of David’s favorites on her? Was she hallucinating these days?

  She unfolded the stroller, locked its handle into place, and continued rolling it toward the grocery store.

  Next I’ll be hearing voices, she thought.

  A man walking past glanced uneasily at her, and she realized she’d unconsciously spoken.

  Talking to myself now, she thought with some alarm.

  Maybe that was the step before hearing voices.

  32

  Traci Mack hung up the phone and sat back in her desk chair. Around her in her small office at Link Publishing were stacks of manuscripts, her computer, some shelves of published books she’d edited. A sign behind her desk said IF YOU CAN’T LEAD AND YOU DON’T WANT TO FOLLOW, SIT DOWN AND LET’S TALK.

  She’d just been on the phone with Winston Delacort, the author of Architects of Desire. He’d called to complain about Molly’s breaking up his run-on sentences in the portion of the copyedited manuscript Traci had sent him to work on. He maintained that the prose was more fluent his way and better able to express architectural lines. Traci had been diplomatic, but she felt like sending one of Link’s hard-boiled crime writers to bump off Winston Delacort.

  But that wasn’t the way the game was played. Instead, she would talk to Molly about fixing the run-on sentences by inserting conjunctions whenever possible. A safe, middle-of-the-road solution that should leave everyone only slightly miffed. That kind of philosophy had come to Traci early enough to help her professional life, but she still hadn’t gotten around to applying it to her personal affairs.

  She leaned forward and used a pencil eraser to peck out Molly’s number.

  The phone rang six times without an answer.

  Traci hung up. She’d try again this afternoon, after lunch. Or maybe she’d talk to Molly about this the next time they met. She was almost finished with the manuscript anyway, and what were a few more revisions, one way or the other? They were slightly ahead of the production schedule now, thanks to Molly’s fast and reliable job on the manuscript, and the art department supplying a jacket illustration that had thrilled Winston Delacort.

  She slid the manuscript she’d been reading into a drawer then stood up to leave. There was a new restaurant over on Lexington she wanted to try. Well, it was more of a bar, really. But they did serve food.

  She told Jock the receptionist she was leaving for lunch, then pushed through the heavy wooden door out into the hall and walked to the elevators.

  Plenty of other people in the building must have decided to go to lunch early. The elevator was packed. Everyone edged backward uneasily as Traci wedged her way inside far enough for the door to close.

  The elevator stopped again on the fifth floor, but the man and woman standing there wisely decided not to try to board.

  When the elevator reached the lobby, Traci was practically propelled out of it.

  The lobby was large, with street entrances at each end, and lined with shops. All hard, marble or wood surfaces, it echoed with footsteps and voices. It was crowded not only with the building’s occupants on their way to lunch, but with pedestrians cutting through to the next block.

  Traci was bumped by a large man in a blue suit. She made sure she still had her purse, then turned to make her way through the mass of people toward the East Fifty-sixth Street exit. A woman walking in the opposite direction, part of the flow of the crowd, caught her eye, but it took a few seconds for recognition to register on Traci.

  She stopped and looked in the direction the woman had gone, craning her neck. Almost at once she spotted the woman’s green dress only about twenty feet away.

  “Molly!” she called. “Mol!”

  The woman didn’t turn around. Instead she glanced at her wristwatch and began walking faster, elbowing her way through the crowded lobby.

  “Molly Jones!” Traci yelled. “Hey! Molly!”

  Still she wouldn’t turn around.

  Traci took a few running steps then stopped, realizing the hopelessness of trying to catch Molly or attract her attention. Actually breaking into a run in this mob was impossible, Traci thought; they were likely to turn on her if she tried. And maybe the woman wasn’t actually Molly. Traci really hadn’t gotten that good a look at her, and she’d been thinking about Molly because of Winston Delacort’s phone call.

  Either way, by now the woman would be out on East Fifty-fifth Street, lost in an even larger mass of people.

  Someone clutched Traci’s elbow.

  She jerked away with surprise, then turned and saw it was Beverly Malcolm from the art department.

  “Sorry, Trace,” Beverly said, dropping her hand from Traci’s arm. “Didn’t mean to stop your heart. I need to talk to you about that Civil War manuscript when you get back.”

  “Sure, Bev.”

  “Who were you shouting at?” Beverly asked.

  “I don’t know for sure. Somebody I thought I knew. Guess I was wrong”

  “Guess so. See you later.”
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  “I’m going to lunch at a new place around Fifty-seventh and Lex,” Traci said. “They’re rumored to serve food with their drinks. You want to come?”

  “I’d like to, but I’ve got a meeting. Next time.”

  Traci nodded, then continued on her way toward the exit opposite the one used by the woman in the green dress.

  Molly stood before her closet and shuffled through her clothes, first slowly, then so fast that the wire hangers sang on the metal rod.

  She withdrew an empty hanger from the end of the closet she only half-jokingly thought of as her dress-up side, where her more stylish and expensive outfits hung.

  Feeling anger, puzzlement, and a creepy kind of fear that itself alarmed her, she stood holding the empty hanger and staring at it. She was positive it was where her green dress had hung.

  The dress that was definitely missing.

  The dress she was sure she’d seen Deirdre wearing earlier that day.

  33

  That evening, Molly watched David as they ate a dinner of pizza and salad delivered from William’s Takeout over on Amsterdam. He seemed preoccupied, worried in a manner he wouldn’t share with her. When she tried to enter and understand his concern, he would deflect her with inane conversation about work, or friends they hadn’t seen for weeks and sometimes months. It occurred to her that they hadn’t seen many people or gone out much with each other since Deirdre had arrived in New York.

  Molly waited until they’d had dinner and Michael was asleep before telling David about seeing Deirdre wearing her green dress.

  He sat in the chair opposite the sofa and stared at her in a way that angered her. As if she’d become ill and had great bleeding sores on her face and he was too polite to mention them.

  He obviously wasn’t going to say anything, so she would.

  “Dammit! Stop looking at me like that! I’m sure she was wearing my dress.”

  “But you told me you didn’t actually see her face.”

  “I saw the rest of her. I saw my dress.”

  Now he furrowed his brow in concern, adding a decade to his face. “Maybe you’re imagining things, Mol. You’ve been under a hell of a strain, you know.”

  “I also know what I saw.”

  She realized she was becoming more convinced as she spoke that the woman had been Deirdre; she was digging a foxhole in the face of David’s disbelief and patronizing patter. Well, maybe she was being defensive, but that didn’t alter what she’d seen this morning.

  He smiled and looked curious as well as concerned. Infuriating.

  “Why would Deirdre wear one of your dresses?” he asked.

  “Why would she wear my perfume?” Molly said in exasperation.

  “Anyone can buy any kind of perfume, Mol.”

  Molly stood up from the sofa. It made her feel better to be looking down at him. “Do not treat me as if I’m some kind of mental case. If Deirdre didn’t take the dress, then where is it?”

  He turned his hands palms up. “I don’t know. Maybe you forgot it at the cleaners.”

  “Come off it, David. I’d know if it was at the cleaners. I always put the receipts from the cleaners in the same place, under a magnet on the side of the refrigerator, so I remember to pick up whatever’s there. There are no receipts. Right now we have nothing at the cleaners.”

  “So maybe you misplaced the receipt. Or it somehow slipped out from under the magnet and fell beneath the refrigerator.”

  Molly shook her head no. “I had a dress, David. Now I’ve got a hanger.”

  He let his hands float up and then dropped them down on the chair arms. “Well, I don’t have an explanation, but the dress will turn up.”

  “Bullshit, David.”

  Instead of getting angry with her, he stood up from the chair and walked over to her. He hugged her, but she merely stood with her arms at her sides.

  After a brief, final squeeze, he released her and stepped back. He was looking straight into her eyes. He’d been doing a lot of that lately, when the situation called for it. Heart-to-heart time.

  “I don’t believe you’re a mental case,” he assured her. “But I do have a suggestion. I have a friend named Herb Mindle. A doctor.”

  It took Molly a second to realize what he meant. She was incredulous that he would suggest such a thing.

  “A shrink?”

  David pursed his lips in disapproval of her denigrating a noble profession. Looking pained, he drew his glasses from his pocket and put them on, as if to read her more clearly.

  “You could talk to him, Mol. Maybe get something to help you through…whatever it is you’re going through.”

  “Oh, really?” She almost actually sneered.

  He acted as if he hadn’t noticed the sarcastic quality in her voice. “I mean, with Bernice’s death, everything else that’s happened, what could it hurt if you went and saw the man? He’s got a reputation as a superb analyst.”

  Molly had nothing against the art of analysis, but she certainly didn’t think she was in need of it. “No, David,” she said patiently, “I’m not going to a psychiatrist. It isn’t necessary.”

  “You can’t be the best judge of that, Mol.”

  “But I can be the only judge.”

  He pursed his lips again, then parted them and blew out air. She knew it was his way of showing disapproval along with his resignation. She was being unreasonable, he was telling her. “Okay, then. No it is.”

  “We won’t talk about it again,” she said, driving home the finality of her decision.

  She went back to the sofa but didn’t sit down. Instead she picked up the folded Times then laid it back on the cushion, feigning casualness, putting the subject of Dr. Mindle behind them.

  Time to steer the conversation down another road.

  “I don’t like the way things have been going lately,” she said.

  “No one does,” David replied.

  She sat down in a corner of the sofa. “I meant with my work. Traci called about the architectural manuscript. The author’s going to make trouble.”

  “Some of them do,” David said. “He’s probably relying on the fact that he knows more about architecture than do you or Traci.”

  “That’s the problem. He’s an architect and not a writer. Everybody in this goddamned world is trying to be something or someone else.” Like that fucking Deirdre. “Have you noticed?”

  He smiled. “Oh, I’ve noticed.” He walked over and sat down a cushion away from her. “I do have some good news for you, Mol. The company that manages this building says we can move to another apartment it manages a few blocks from here without violating the terms of our lease. We have our choice of two. You can look at them tomorrow while I’m at work.”

  “That’s great,” Molly said. And she meant it. Here was a significant first step in the journey away from Deirdre. “But what makes you so hot to move all of a sudden?” she asked. “You were resisting the idea before as if I’d suggested a vasectomy.”

  “Was I? Well, I thought about it and came to the conclusion you were right. It’d be better for all of us if we got out of this building.”

  Molly wondered if his “all of us” included Deirdre, but she decided not to ask. Instead she moved over to him and kissed his cheek.

  “You said the right thing, David. That does more for me than Doctor whatever-his-name-is could possibly do.”

  He patted her hand. “I thought you’d feel that way about it. I’m glad.”

  When he stood up, she reached for the remote control that sat on one of the sofa arms, aimed it at the TV, and pressed the bright red power button.

  At the soft electronic pop the TV made when it came on, he turned suddenly. “What are you doing?”

  Molly was puzzled by his reaction. And by something in his voice. Fear? “I was going to get Channel One,” she said. “Catch up on the local news.”

  “Is Michael asleep yet?”

  “Maybe,” she said, wondering what this was about.
/>   “Let’s take him and go out someplace. Maybe walk down and get some ice cream. He loves to do that.”

  “But he’s in bed.”

  “So? How much trouble can it be to get him up? Hell, he can go in his pajamas. There are only so many chances in life to get ice cream. You’ve got to take them.”

  She wasn’t going to argue against that philosophy She pressed the remote’s power button again and the television went silent and dark.

  “Are you restless, David?” she asked. “Or is there some reason you don’t want me to watch the news?”

  “No, no, it’s nothing like that. I don’t know why, but I don’t feel like watching television tonight. Any kind of television.”

  From her window overlooking West Eighty-fifth Street, Deirdre watched David, carrying Michael, walking with Molly toward the lights of shops at the corner.

  They paused for Molly to adjust her shoe or sock, and David moved over to walk on the curb side. An unconsciously protective gesture, Deirdre thought with envy. She’d read somewhere that the custom dated back to when gentlemen walked closest to streets of mud to shield against ladies getting their dresses stained from the splashing of passing carriages. She narrowed her eyes and for an instant her lips arced in a tight, grim smile. Wouldn’t want little Molly to get soiled.

  She placed the side of her forehead against the warm glass, leaning forward and staring with fierce attention at them, clenching her teeth so that her jaw muscles danced. Her hands were clenched too, into tight fists that she leaned on against the wooden sill.

  When the Jones family was out of sight, Deirdre straightened up and stared down as she unclenched her fists. She’d dug her long fingernails into her flesh so deeply that her hands were bleeding. The blood on her palms reminded her of photos of stigmata, before she’d become a lapsed Catholic.

  Leaving the window, she went to a cardboard box and dug out a Bible she’d stolen from a motel room outside Saint Louis. Then she went into the kitchen and got a sharp knife.

  She sat down in the living room and began methodically slashing the Bible’s pages, tossing them to the floor with abandon when they separated from the binding.