inn that did not feature gambling, she cooled her heels and waited for news of a murdered woman. There was a little strip mall and grocery store nearby, a drugstore, a coffee shop, a Goodwill store and army surplus. She only went out after dark, with her bright white-blond hair covered. She purchased a sweat suit and tennis shoes, some cotton underwear, hair dye and a ball cap. Later she picked up some men’s clothing at army surplus, hiding her luscious body in the deep folds.
And every day she picked up a newspaper, and every day she stayed glued to the television.
There was no news regarding Barbara Noble. Four days had passed and there was nothing. She called the MGM and asked for Mr. Nick Noble’s suite and was told he had checked out. She started to wonder if she had overreacted. Maybe he hadn’t meant to get rid of the body, but just get the wife out of town. Should she just fly back to Florida, tell him his temper had scared her, apologize for being a flake, get back to work, get on with life? But first, she called the Noble household in Palm Beach and asked for Barbara.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Noble is not in.”
“Can you tell me when it would be a good time to reach her?”
“Mrs. Noble is out of the country and I’m not sure when she plans to return.”
Out of the country? The next day there was a small item in the newspaper, but it wasn’t about Barbara. It was about Jennifer. The headline read Missing. Her picture was beneath. It was from a photo taken when she was sailing with Nick. Her long blond hair whipped in the wind and her sexy smile was confident and sure; for once the newspaper photo wasn’t grainy. The story read:
“Jennifer Chaise, age thirty, of Fort Lauderdale has been missing for five days. She traveled to Las Vegas with friends, who say she disappeared suddenly, without taking any of her belongings with her. Her travel companions report missing a great deal of money and jewelry, and Ms Chaise is believed to be either a witness to a robbery, a victim, or a suspect, and police would like to interview her.”
She dropped the paper into her lap in shock. Oh, my God, she thought. And then with a wry smile her thought was, nicely done, Nick. Accuse me of a crime and, when the police find me for you, drop the whole thing. But you’ll have me.
There was one more sentence. “A generous reward has been offered for information leading to the whereabouts of Ms. Chaise. If you have information, please call…”
She fell back on the bed and thought, Just when I thought I had everything all figured out. Just when I thought I knew what I was doing, knew what I wanted, knew what it would take to get it. Just when I was thinking about my early retirement.
She rolled over on her stomach. Boy, talk about miscalculations.
Two
The effect of seeing her picture in the paper caused Jennifer to decide she’d better go a little farther afield than a Las Vegas suburb, so she got on a bus. She wasn’t sure where it was bound, so she just rode for a half hour through a stretch of desert and got off in the first little town she came to. She walked for about twenty minutes and, after passing several decent places, found a motel that had clearly seen better days. It was a seedy-looking place between a junkyard and a railroad track; there were only twelve rooms. Nick Noble would never find it. And if he did find it, he would never expect Jennifer to be there.
She looked at the phone book in room number eight and saw that she was in Boulder City. Good enough, she thought. She’d never even heard of the place. Surely she wouldn’t draw much attention here. She could have stayed at one of the casinos off the Strip; the bus had passed several of them, but they were large and their parking lots crowded. Too many people around, increasing the odds of being recognized as the missing girl in the newspaper.
She looked at the map the phone book provided. Boulder City, a small town a mere twenty-five miles from Las Vegas, on the edge of Lake Mead on the way to Hoover Dam. This was the last place Nick would expect to find the classy, bejeweled Jennifer Chaise.
She stood in front of the mirror for a while, not recognizing the woman who stared back at her. Wardrobe by army surplus—very unlike the wardrobe she had left behind. Her face, washed clean of makeup, left her looking very plain and pale. Her expensive artificial tan was fast disappearing. The shock of finding herself on the run likely contributed to her wan look. She flushed the colored contact lenses down the toilet and her eyes went from that sexy lavender to an ordinary brown. Her vision, fortunately, was perfect. She clipped her long acrylic nails and felt briefly crippled.
She had attempted to dye her waist-length golden hair to brown, but had ended up with a rather sickly gray—absolute proof that she’d tried to color it with drugstore supplies. Scissors in hand, she meant to rectify the situation, but a tear gathered in her eye. She’d pampered that sexy mane for how many years? Nick adored her hair; he loved to crunch it up in his fists and bury his face in it. Well, that would never happen again. “And if it does happen,” she said aloud, “it would probably be just one last crunch before he crushes my skull.” But the hand with the scissors trembled. “Oh, suck it up,” she told the reflection. “We’ll save a fortune. And it’s only temporary—until we figure out what to do and where to go.” She stared into her own eyes and, realizing she was talking to a mirror image, said, “Oh, my God, it’s hereditary. We have our mother’s wackiness.”
And then she lopped it off, close to the scalp. She continued this drastic amputation, tears running down her cheeks, until all she was left with was a short, spiky cap of really strange-colored hair. It looked as if someone had colored her hair badly—and then cut it badly. How different could she be? And what could she do to become invisible and utterly unrecognizable?
She thought about it for a moment and then she shaved her head. After brief consideration, the eyebrows that she’d spent a fortune having professionally colored and waxed into a curvaceous arch also went. If she remembered correctly, her original brows were black, bushy, shapeless and met over the bridge of her nose.
Then, despite her determination to be stronger than her circumstances, she cried in a bed with a lumpy mattress and a thin sheet. What had she been thinking, getting involved with a man like Nick? With any of the rich older men she’d attracted? It had only served to isolate her from the world. Had she really thought she was so smart, so immune to having her heart broken? This was proof positive that you didn’t have to be in love to have your heart broken. She was in a crappy motel in a tiny desert town outside Las Vegas with nothing. With no one. Even worse, now she was in actual peril. Talk about a plan gone awry.
The month was March and she awoke the following morning to chilly air and leaden skies, and the sound of rain. The heater in the room didn’t work and everything seemed inevitable.
The morning sky was just painting the dark clouds gray when she couldn’t take the cold, dank hotel room another second. She bundled up in a khaki-green windbreaker, her scarf wrapped around her neck and her baseball cap covering her bald head. All her worldly goods were tucked into a canvas backpack. The motel office was still closed; no one there to get the heater going in her room. So she set out to see if there was more to this place than a junkyard and train tracks.
A few blocks away the road forked—the highway went left and she went right. Another few blocks revealed a small town, a street lined with cafés and shops not yet open. She counted three restaurants, all apparently of the no-tablecloth variety. It was an old street with worn sidewalks, but some trendy shops and eateries were peppered amid the older ones, perhaps recent additions to snag the visitors to Hoover Dam, and travelers en route to the Grand Canyon as they passed by the town. The manager of Starbucks was just unlocking the door. A clock in the window of a gift shop read six-thirty. There
