He’d almost made it. They were only a couple of miles from Tuxedo Lake. He negotiated a curve through some overhanging elms, which were just beginning to go yellow. He glanced at her face, which looked slightly jaundiced in the glowing light. The shadows of the trees passing over her made it seem as if her mouth were moving silently, though he knew it wasn’t. It was a disagreeable sight.
He turned away and shrugged. “Sorry,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe you were actually going to leave right when Gavin’s part was coming up.”
She waved her hand. “You call that a part? I can’t believe he dragged us all the way out there for that. He made a fool of me, that’s for sure.”
Clenching the steering wheel, Mike tried not to react. This was pointless, and he knew it. He’d tried for years to make Justine think about any situation, anywhere on this earth, without viewing it through the prism of her own self-interests, but she simply couldn’t do it. He’d looked up sociopath once, and it fit perfectly. It was kind of scary, actually.
But, like an idiot, sometimes he just couldn’t stop himself from responding. He accelerated, whipping the passing trees into a batter of lemony green.
“He made a fool of you? Sorry, but you’re going to have to explain to me how Gavin’s school play can possibly end up being all about you.”
She didn’t answer right away, and he knew that was a bad sign. She was lining up her ammunition, which meant this wasn’t going to be just a skirmish. It was going to be war.
“That’s just so like you,” she said. “The perfect Mike Frome can’t make mistakes. If anyone dares to point out that you’ve done something wrong, like rough up your own wife, you just launch a counterattack, trying to change the subject. Well, I won’t be put on the defensive. You manhandled me, and I ought to go to the police.”
“You’re not my wife,” he said. That was stupid, too. That wasn’t the point. But she did that to him. She made him so mad his brain shut off.
“I’m your son’s mother. I think that is just as important, don’t you?”
“No. I think it’s tragic.”
“God, you’re so melodramatic.” She narrowed her eyes. “Tragic? Because I took a call on my cell phone? I’m sorry to tell you, but that doesn’t make me a bad mother.”
He’d had enough. “No,” he said. “What makes you a bad mother is that you’re a raging bitch. You’re the most self-centered, foul-tempered bitch in the state of New York. That’s what makes you a bad mother.”
He half expected her to slap him. He definitely expected her to start yelling epithets at him. But she didn’t do either of those things. Instead, she did something that shocked the hell out of him.
She opened her car door.
“Justine—”
“Stop the car.”
“Damn it, shut the door.”
“No. Stop the car. I’m getting out.”
He was already applying the brakes, but he had to be careful. She had one leg out. He didn’t want to fishtail on these narrow, curving roads. He was mad as hell at her. He might wish he’d never met her, but he didn’t want her to get hurt.
He maneuvered the car to a safe spot. His heart racing, he turned to her. “Are you insane? Do you want to kill yourself? Shut the damn door.”
She didn’t answer. She just picked up her purse and got out of the car, slamming the door shut behind her.
He rolled down the down the window. “Justine, for God’s sake.”
“Go to hell,” she said without looking at him. “Just go straight to hell where you belong.”
He looked at her, so messed up with contradictory, heart-racing emotions and adrenaline that he couldn’t even decide what he felt. It was about five o’clock, and the trees behind her were already full of shadows. She had on high heels, the better to impress the other Volunteer Mommies with, but no damn good at all for walking along an uphill cliff road.
“Justine. Okay, look. I’m sorry. Get back in the car.”
She didn’t even answer. She just began to walk.
He trolled along behind her for a few yards, leaning over to beg her through the window and steering the car with one hand. He felt like a fool, which was bad enough, but when another car came up behind him and honked impatiently, the embarrassment of it was just too much.
“Justine, get in the car right now, or I’m going to drive away, and you’re going to have to walk the rest of the way home. It’s nearly a mile.”
No response, except another short toot from the car behind.
“Justine, I mean it. It’s getting cold. I’m not coming back to get you.”
She didn’t even turn her head. She shifted her purse to her other shoulder and kept walking. The people behind him probably thought he was a stalker, or a serial killer.
Honk…
Well, screw her, then. If she wanted to walk all the way home in a snit, fine. She logged about five miles on the treadmill in the home gym every single day of her life. He figured she could handle half a mile out here.
He rolled up the window and hit the gas. He watched her in the rearview mirror, getting smaller but never once looking his way or acknowledging her predicament by the slightest twitch of a muscle.
Finally he came to a curve, and when he looked in the mirror again she was gone.
That was the last time anyone—except perhaps her killer—ever saw Justine Millner Frome alive.
CHAPTER TWO
Two years later
“HOLD STILL. You’ve got a spot of green paint on your face.”
Suzie Strickland waited while the man in front of her reached up and teased the bridge of her nose with his fingernail. She didn’t believe for a minute that she had any paint there. Ben Kuspit just wanted to touch her. He’d been flirting with her ever since she arrived an hour ago to take pictures of his son.
He was paying her four-and-a-half thousand dollars for a painting of Kenny, the youngest of his four kids. It was the largest commission she’d landed yet, and she needed it. Still, if they’d been alone, she would have made it very clear that the price didn’t include groping rights.
Unfortunately, nine-year-old Kenny was still in the room, and she was reluctant to embarrass Daddy in front of his kid.
And, to be fair, maybe Ben wasn’t inventing the speck of paint. She had been using viridian paint this afternoon as she finished up her current project, a pair of adorable two-year-old twins with green eyes, green dresses and green ribbons in their hair.
She’d come a long way since the early years, when, after a day’s work, she’d find splattered color everywhere. In her hair, under
