Nightlife by Thomas Perry Page B

in articles as though it existed solely to serve food and wine to people like her. She was sure David had accumulated enough money already. It seemed to her that the only reason he still traveled around chasing investments was that he’d had nothing better to do until he’d met Rachel Sturbridge. She could have made those years wonderful for him. But that was before he had betrayed her.
    She watched herself in the mirror as she said, “I’m heartbroken” again. She meant it. He had told his stupid private detectives to pry into her private life looking for incriminating information, and she was just lucky they had not found anything. It had been a cold, calculating thing to do. Men always wanted you to do impulsive, risky things because you let your passion for them get too strong to resist. They wanted you to trust them completely, holding nothing at all back to protect yourself. But then, after your body and soul had gotten to be things they had, rather than things they wanted, they announced that they had reserved the right to be suspicious and cautious about you.
    When David knocked and asked if she would go to breakfast with him, she called through the closed door, “No, you go ahead.”
    Rachel spent the next hour working efficiently and methodically to make herself beautiful. She had started beautician’s school the summer she had turned sixteen, and had learned some cosmetology and hairdressing before she had missed a tuition payment. But she had learned her most valuable tricks years before that, in the long succession of beauty pageants her mother had entered her in beginning at age four. She had been born with good skin and small, symmetrical features, and she had a quick, practiced hand with a brush, eyeliner, and mascara.
    She was good at dressing herself because she had a hard, objective eye. That was something else the pageant circuit had done for her. She could look at herself the way a contest judge would, with no sentimentality and no mercy. She accentuated her figure’s best points and hid the flaws. She tried all three dresses she had brought, chose the one that would give him the most haunting memory of her body, and put on spike heels.
    Rachel packed her suitcase, stood it upright on its wheels, and extended the handle. Then she went to the living room, arranged herself on the small couch, turned on the television set, and waited. David returned about an hour after that.
    When he opened the door and saw her, she could tell her effect was what she had intended. He stopped at the door and simply stared for a moment, then took a couple of deep breaths and walked toward her. “Rachel,” he said. “I need to talk to you. I’m really very sorry. I never imagined I was going to hurt your feelings or remind you of anything that caused you pain.”
    She raised her face to him. Her eyes were cold, as though she were looking at him from a great distance.
    He said, “I brought you a little something.” He took a velvet jewelry box from his coat pocket and held it out to her. “Will you please forgive me?”
    Seeing another jewelry box nettled her, partly because it showed he thought she was childish enough to be mollified by it, and partly because she wanted whatever lay inside the box. Her expression didn’t change. “I waited here for you only because I felt that I should say something to you for the sake of clarity. If you’ll remember, I never asked you to invest in my business.”
    “I never meant to imply—”
    “Please let me finish. I won’t be long.” She glared at him, holding him in silence for a breath before she continued. “It was a purely personal relationship, from my point of view. I never offered you anything or asked you for anything. When you asked questions about my business I answered them. When you offered to invest, I repeatedly refused your money. You called in detectives anyway and had me investigated. Well, that was a deal breaker. I’m leaving now. I want you to