John Saul - Faces of Fear

“I fast-forwarded to the end. And if I have nightmares, I’ll come crawl in bed with you like I did when I was little.”

“Not with me and Conrad, you won’t,” her mother told her. “Now off to bed. And think good thoughts before you go to sleep, okay? I think maybe I should call your father in the morning and lodge a complaint about the lovely Tina.”

“Come on — she’s just doing her job,” Alison said, then kissed her mother. “And no matter what you think,” she added as she left the room, “I bet I’m right. I bet it is some nut who’s got a thing about Margot Dunn.”

WHEN ALISON WAS GONE, Risa put the reading glasses back on and picked up her book again. But Alison’s words were like worms burrowing holes in her concentration, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to get through another page.

Margot Dunn? The image at the end of the show hadn’t looked anything like Margot.

Had it?

Of course not.

And yet…

Before she’d even made a conscious decision, Risa slipped out of bed, pulled on her robe, shoved her feet into her slippers, and made her way down the darkened stairs.

In the media room, she sat on the still-warm couch where Alison had curled up, turned the television on and fast-forwarded to the end of the special.

She paused it when the composite filled the screen, as Alison had not long before.

And as she gazed at the image, she realized that something about that face did, indeed, remind her of Margot.

But that was ridiculous. The woman depicted on the screen was pretty enough, but hardly beautiful. If she had a picture of Margot, she thought, the differences would be apparent. She’d see it, and so would Alison.

Except that there were no pictures of Margot in the house; the only ones she’d seen were in the weird room in the basement Conrad had called the Margot Museum.

Had he cleaned it out yet? Maria hadn’t said anything about clearing anything from the basement.

Risa turned off the television, got up, and walked through the house to the kitchen, then into the stairwell that led down to the basement.

She could hear the machinery of the house humming steadily.

She switched on the solitary light that was mounted halfway down the stairs, descended into the vast area beneath the house, and started down the dim hallway to the storeroom that had held all of Margot’s things.

Twenty yards away she could once again smell the sweet scent of the perfume that still pervaded the area.

She opened the door and reached in to turn on the light. The room was exactly as it had been before — though Conrad had told her he would have it dismantled, he obviously hadn’t. And as she gazed around at the pictures of Margot Dunn, she realized that Alison had been right: the resemblance to the composite image Tina Wong had created was definitely there.

Risa moved slowly around the museum, looking closely at each of the old photographs of Conrad Dunn’s first wife, and with each image she studied, the truth of it became clearer. It wasn’t that the features stolen from each of the dead women were different from Margot’s counterparts, but that Margot’s face had been shaped differently, the framework of her cheekbones and jaw and upper skull all combining to support each of her features at the best angle to show them off and meld them into the perfect beauty that had made Margot famous.

She scanned the images one more time. Yes, the resemblance, at least feature by feature, was uncanny. But what did it mean?

She turned away from the last one, the huge blow-up of the Vogue cover that had been Margot’s favorite, and her eyes fell on the mannequin that stood below it.

It had been displaying the dress Margot wore for the Vogue shoot, but it now stood naked, stripped of the elegant black dress.

Except she saw that it wasn’t quite naked; there was something pinned to it.

A photograph.

Another photo of Margot?

Risa moved closer, reached out, and pulled the eight-by-ten loose, holding it so the light from Margot’s vanity fell fully upon it.

And she froze.

The picture wasn’t of Margot Dunn at all.

It was of Alison.

And the dress Alison wore in it was the black Valentino that had hung on the mannequin the last time she’d been in this room.

The room seemed to swirl around her, and she sank onto the velvet vanity stool, the photograph of her daughter clutched in her hand.

CONRAD OPENED the closet door in the dressing room adjoining his private office and found a clean shirt, fresh from the laundry. The clean one would betray no evidence of his visit to Danielle, and the one he was wearing would soon be burned in the furnace below his house. He shook the clean shirt out and unbuttoned the collar, but before he could change into it, the cell phone buzzed in his pocket. Frowning, he glanced at the caller ID.

The silent alarm in the room where all of Margot’s things were gathered had been set off by the motion detector.

Damn.

Abandoning the clean shirt, he left his office and took the private elevator to the underground garage of Le Chateau. But instead of getting in his car and driving through the twisting streets that would get him up to his home, he unlocked a nondescript door that appeared to hide nothing more than a storage closet and turned on the lights.

Behind a sliding door at the back of the closet, a series of recessed lights illuminated a steep stairway that led directly up through a tunnel from Le Chateau to the private lab connected to the basement of his house.

The lab that only he and Danielle DeLorian had ever used.

Taking the stairs two at a time, he unlocked the laboratory door, switched on the lights, and looked quickly around.

Everything was as it should be. The tanks were undisturbed, the organs he’d harvested from Danielle floating in the gel exactly as he’d left them before he’d gone back to his office to change his shirt.

He moved through the laboratory and paused at the door that opened directly into the room where Margot’s treasures were on display.

He could see a line of light beneath that door.

Sighing tiredly, knowing what he would have to do, he opened the door.

RISA’S HEAD SNAPPED UP when she heard the sound of a door opening from behind the dressing screen in the back corner.

“Hello, Risa,” Conrad said softly as he stepped into the room.

She rose from the vanity stool, instinctively trying to hide the photograph of Alison behind her back, her mind racing. What was Conrad doing here? Where had he come from?

“Are you looking for something?” Conrad asked as he approached, then stopped and frowned. “What’s that behind your back?”

“N-Nothing,” Risa stammered, staring at the spatters of blood on his shirt.

Conrad’s gaze flicked to the mannequin, and a slight smile came over his lips. “Ah! The picture of Alison. Doesn’t she look lovely in that dress?”

He stepped closer, reaching out as if to take the picture from her, and Risa took a step back.

Conrad’s smile faded. “She’s going to be beautiful,” he said. “Did you know that her face has the exact same bone structure as Margot’s?”

And in an instant the truth — the unimaginable truth — exploded in Risa’s mind.

She had to get Alison out of the house!

She turned toward the door, but it was too late. In two strides Conrad was next to her, his right arm curling around her neck. “I’m going to show you something, Risa,” he whispered in her ear. “Something wonderful.”

The pressure on her neck grew, and though she could still breathe, she felt herself starting to black out.

“But you have to behave,” Conrad whispered. “Do you understand?”