John Saul - Faces of Fear

All she wanted to do was go home.

RISA HAD a moment of déjà vu when she approached Conrad Dunn, who stood with his sister Corinne, quietly receiving the murmured condolences of his guests. Was it possible that it hadn’t even been a week since she had stood in line to greet him in a different hotel at the Dunn Foundation banquet with his wife at his side instead of his sister?

“Risa!” A wan Conrad took her hand warmly and kissed her cheek. “So good of you to come.”

“I’m so terribly sorry about Margot,” Risa said.

He nodded. “Thank you.”

“You remember Lexie Montrose, don’t you?”

“Of course.” Conrad nodded to Lexie, then his eyes shifted to Alison. “And who is this?”

“My daughter, Alison. Alison, this is Conrad Dunn.”

Conrad took Alison’s hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”

“It — It’s nice to meet you, too,” Alison stammered, instantly certain she’d said the wrong thing, but having no idea what the right thing might have been. She felt herself blushing, then breaking into a cold sweat of embarrassment.

“Is your husband here?” Conrad asked Risa.

Now it was Risa who blushed. “I’m afraid not,” she began. “We’re — well, we—”

“They’re separated,” Lexie Montrose said softly when it became clear that Risa was just going to go on stumbling.

“Oh,” Conrad said, his voice shifting from the impersonal tone of social platitudes to something much warmer. “I’m so sorry. I hope it won’t be permanent.”

Risa bit her lip. What was she supposed to say? But again — and to her own further mortification — Lexie jumped in again.

“It will be,” Lexie said. “Some things can’t be fixed.”

Risa felt her embarrassment deepen, but this time it was Conrad Dunn himself who stepped in to rescue her.

“Then we’re all in mourning today,” he said softly, and turned to Alison. “I’m so sorry — it has to be hard for you.” His gaze shifted back to Risa and he put a hand on her shoulder. “If there’s anything I can do, please call.”

“I’ll be fine, Conrad,” Risa said. “And today we’re here for you.”

Conrad smiled at her, and then his tired eyes moved on to the next guest in line.

“YOU CERTAINLY SHARED a lot of personal information that wasn’t necessarily yours to share,” Risa said as the three of them walked the few blocks back to her car.

“Hey,” Lexie said, dismissing her words with a wave of her black-gloved hand. “He’s single now, and so are you, and in Beverly Hills there is no such thing as a decent interval.”

“As I recall,” Risa said coolly, “last week you were the one who talked about getting divorced the minute Conrad was ‘back on the market,’ as you so graciously put it.”

“And I could be,” Lexie said, refusing to rise to Risa’s bait. “But he doesn’t have eyes for me.” She paused to let the meaning of her words strike home. “I think you should call him, just like he said.”

“Are you kidding?” Alison demanded. “He’s creepy — the whole thing was creepy. What they did to his wife’s face — I mean, it was like they were trying to make her look like she was still alive! And all those photographs! She was beautiful, but it was all fake, like you said, Lexie. She didn’t look like that at all until she met him!”

“Oh, sweetie,” Risa said. “He’s not creepy. He’s just a plastic surgeon, and fixing faces is what they do. And Conrad is not only a very good plastic surgeon, but a very good man as well.”

“Maybe so, but you still don’t need to call him,” Alison replied.

“Okay,” Risa said, giving her daughter’s shoulder a squeeze. At this point, she knew there wasn’t a man anywhere that Alison wouldn’t resent, but if Lexie was right, she wouldn’t have to call Conrad Dunn. If Conrad wanted to get in touch with her, he already knew her number.

If Lexie was right.

But of course she couldn’t be, given that Conrad Dunn wasn’t even over the shock of his wife’s death yet, and wouldn’t be for many weeks to come. Still, just the thought of hearing his voice on the other end of the telephone gave her more pleasure than she’d felt since the night Michael had moved out.

Perhaps, after all, there would be life after her divorce was final.

One Year Later

ALISON SHAW PUT HER LUNCH TRAY DOWN ON THE TABLE IN HER usual place — a place that hadn’t changed by even a single chair since last year — but glared at Cindy Kearns before sitting down. “I don’t even know why I’m sitting here,” she said, picking up a fork and jabbing angrily at the limp lettuce that was supposed to be a “garden-fresh salad.”

“You mad at me?” Cindy asked, a tiny forkful of macaroni and cheese pausing halfway to her mouth.

“That was a private message,” Alison said coldly. “It was personal, and now the whole school knows.”

“Knows what?” Anton Hoyer asked around a mouthful of his hamburger.

Alison threw a “don’t you dare” look at Cindy.

Cindy blithely ignored the look. “Alison’s mom is marrying Dr. Conrad Dunn,” she said.

“Who?” Anton asked, looking blankly from Cindy to Alison. “Am I supposed to know who that is?”

Cindy rolled her eyes. “He’s only like the most famous plastic surgeon in the world,” she declared. “Don’t you know anything?”

Anton ignored her tone. “So her mom’s marrying a doc. So what?”

“So she’s moving to Bel Air and she’s transferring to Wilson Academy.”

Anton’s eyes widened. “Wilson? That’s a great school. You can go anywhere from there. Harvard, Yale — you can practically pick it!”

“That’s not the point,” Alison said. “I like it here. ”

“UCLA is, like, four miles from my house,” Lisa Hess, the fourth of their lunch table regulars, chimed in. “And most of Bel Air’s even closer. Your new stepdad will probably buy you a car for your sixteenth birthday and you can come visit us. It’s no big deal.”

Cindy sipped a Diet Coke through a straw. “A car,” she sighed. “In what, two months?”

“Plus which,” Lisa went on, leaning across the table and dropping her voice so no one but her three friends would hear, “you can get as much plastic surgery as you want — for free!”

Alison could barely believe her ears. She was being dragged out of school in their sophomore year, moved out of Santa Monica, and getting stuck with a stepfather she didn’t even like, and all they could talk about was colleges, cars, and plastic surgery? “I don’t want any plastic surgery,” she snapped back at Lisa, “and I don’t care where I go to college, and I don’t like Conrad Dunn.”

A momentary silence dropped over the table at Alison’s outburst. Then Anton grinned mischievously. “You’ll all please note for the record that she didn’t say anything at all about the car.”

“And I don’t want a car,” Alison added, but felt a blush giving her away.

“See?” Anton said. “She’s turning the same color red her new Porsche will probably be.”

In spite of herself, Alison giggled. “I hate red,” she said. “If I get one, I want white. And not a Posrche. Maybe one of those little Lexuses.”

“Well, at least we know she can be bought,” Lisa said. “And stop worrying about the guy your mom’s marrying. Nobody likes their stepparents at first. Give the guy a chance — he didn’t do anything wrong.”

Alison shook her head. “It’s not that. There’s just something about him.”

“Oh, come on,” Cindy said. “I’ve had two stepdads, and at first I really hated the newest one. But he turned out to be pretty cool — in some ways he’s even better than my real dad.”