John Saul - Faces of Fear

Risa frowned, still unconvinced.

“Okay, then try this,” Lexie went on, leaning back and picking up her fork to stab the last escargot. “Ask Michael to talk to her. You two are still on good terms, right?”

Finally Risa smiled. “‘Good terms’ doesn’t quite do it justice. Who’d have thought he’d turn out to be my best friend? Best male friend,” she quickly added as Lexie started to put a hugely hurt look on her face.

“Thank you,” Lexie said. “I’d have hated having to sling a snail at you right here in public.”

“But you’d have done it,” Risa archly observed. “Anyway, it’s weird how once I realized that Michael’s leaving truly didn’t have anything more to do with me than the fact that I’m a woman, I stopped being mad at him. And it’s impossible not to like Scott — if he was straight, I might have fallen for him myself.” She paused. “If I hadn’t been married to Michael, of course.”

“All right, all right, I get it,” Lexie interrupted. Not being on speaking terms with any of her own ex-husbands, she wasn’t about to listen to Risa extolling the virtues of the man she’d divorced less than a year ago. “So Michael’s a saint, and Scott’s a regular Mother Teresa. Between the two of them, they ought to be able to set Alison straight, you should pardon the pun. And for God’s sake, eat something. After the wedding, Conrad can give you back the perfect figure with a little liposuction.” She raised an envious eyebrow. “You’ve got it made, girl.”

Risa finally smiled. Her head had been clogged with wedding plans since the night Conrad proposed over dinner at Spago, presenting her with an emerald-cut diamond, and since then the only problem had been Alison’s dark disapproval of what she’d decided to do. But maybe Lexie was right — maybe she should have Michael talk to her. At least it was worth a shot.

“So what’s in your bouquet?” Lexie asked, determinedly changing the subject from Alison back to the wedding plans.

“Don’t know,” Risa said, her smile spreading into a grin. “Henrik is going to surprise me.”

“You trust a wedding planner to make that decision on his own?”

“I do,” Risa said. “He found the designer and dressmaker for me, and you should see what she’s sketched for Alison. And every time I think up something to worry about, Henrik has already taken care of it.”

“Okay, that’s it,” Lexie said, wiping the last of the butter from her lips. “I’m divorcing Dick and getting married again just so I can use Henrik.”

Risa laughed out loud, looked longingly at her tiny, unfinished salad, then covered it with her napkin and smiled at her best friend.

Lexie, she decided, was right.

Thanks to Henrik, everything was going to be perfect, and in the end even Alison would come around.

CONRAD DUNN GAZED at the marks he had drawn on Lucinda Rose Larson’s face. Lucinda Rose lay anesthetized on the operating table, draped with green sterile sheets, awaiting her annual tune-up. Today he was performing liposuction under her chin and along her jawline, a simple procedure, as well as taking a few tiny tucks on her eyelids. He’d drawn the dotted lines on her face earlier, when she was standing up, and now he tugged on the crepey skin around her eyes to gauge its elasticity. Although only fifty-seven, Lucinda Rose had inherited thin northern European skin, and too many sun-worshipping years on the Spanish Riviera had wrinkled her far beyond her years. An annual tune-up kept her at least comfortably fashionable among her peers, and Conrad was good enough that even though everyone always asked their friends who had done their work, no one ever thought Lucinda Rose had had anything done at all.

“Kate?” he asked, the rest of the question unnecessary.

“Vitals are stable,” the anesthesiologist replied. “She’s ready to go.”

“Music, please.”

Judy, who had been his scrub nurse long enough to know exactly what he wanted, turned on the MP3 player, and light strains of Stravinsky flowed through the room. Conrad felt himself relax into a mood of serene, utterly self-assured competency.

This was his world, his theater, and nobody anywhere was a better performer. In this room, Conrad Dunn truly was king of the world. “Scalpel,” he said, uttering the command, initiating the procedure that in the end would add a little more beauty to a far-too-ugly world.

Just the sound of the word sent a tingle of excitement through his body, but the hand he held out was rock steady.

Judy deftly and firmly placed a scalpel in his palm, and after a quick glance at the big clock on the wall, Conrad made the first cut along the black line above Lucinda Rose’s right eye.

“How are the wedding plans coming along?” Kate asked when she saw that Conrad had settled into his groove.

“Good,” he replied. “Risa had the final fitting on her dress today, in fact.”

“You’re a lucky man. She’ll make a beautiful bride.”

With tweezers, Conrad lifted a tiny strip of skin from Lucinda Rose’s eyelid and placed it on a square of gauze. “Not as beautiful as Margot.”

Startled, Kate and Judy glanced at each other.

“Don’t tell me you’re already planning to remodel her,” Kate said. “Can’t you at least wait until you’ve married her?”

Conrad chuckled. “Risa is just fine the way she is. She’s happy with her looks, and so am I. I have no surgical plans for Risa at all.” He matched the two sides of Lucinda Rose’s eyelid incision and began sewing them together with nearly invisible stitches. “I was just talking in the abstract. Even you have to admit that Risa doesn’t quite have either Margot’s perfect symmetry or her beauty.”

“Margot didn’t, either, when you first met her,” Kate retorted. “But it’s nice to know that even you have finally figured out that looks aren’t everything.”

“Still, they pay our bills,” Conrad reminded her. “And very handsomely, too.”

“I’m not arguing that point,” Kate said, scanning the monitors on the wall above Lucinda Rose’s head. “But look at Risa’s daughter. Alison’s a plain girl, but after talking with her for even a couple of minutes, you see what a lovely girl she is on the inside, and she becomes beautiful on the outside as well.”

Conrad tied off the last suture and blotted away the few drops of blood that leaked out. Satisfied, he repositioned himself to begin work on Lucinda Rose’s left eyelid. “It isn’t all about personality with Alison,” he said, receiving a clean scalpel from Judy. “She’s got a lot more than that. She has the bone structure.” He looked up at Kate. “The next time you see her, take a good look at her facial bones. The cheekbones, the jawline, even her chin.” He rested his hand on Lucinda Rose’s chest for a moment, visualizing Alison in his mind’s eye. He had studied her face for over a year now, and could picture it from every angle. He could even see the muscles under the skin and the bones beneath the muscle.

He knew the anatomy of Alison’s face as well as he’d known Margot’s.

Kate again peered over her mask at Judy, who waited with a gauze square. Judy gazed back at Kate with one raised eyebrow.

“Vitals stable,” Kate reported, hoping to shake Conrad out of the reverie that had fallen over him.

“Yes,” Conrad said. He began the second incision. “Classic bone structure. She’s a plastic surgeon’s dream.” His fingers tightened on the scalpel just a little too tightly and the blade slipped through a centimeter more skin than he had planned.

Judy gasped.

Conrad glared at her. “It’s nothing,” he said as he finished the incision, then placed the small slice of skin onto Judy’s waiting square of gauze. “I can fix anything.” He took the sharp needle and began the fine stitch work, then looked up at Kate and smiled, although he knew she could not see his smile behind his surgical mask. “I could even make Alison Shaw beautiful.”