around. “Hey, you can’t do that. Someone might come by.”
“I’ll take that chance, especially since everybody and his little brother is down at the Reunions lunch eating and drinking to their heart’s content.” She undid the waistband of her pants and lowered the zipper. Then she stepped out of the legs, lifting one foot as she hopped in the water, and then the next.
She threw the trousers at him.
He caught them before they thwacked him in the face. “What about the cops?”
“What about the cops?” She stood there naked except for the wisps of nylon and silk that comprised her demi-cup bra and bikini underpants. The slippery, nude-colored underwear was wet and, she knew, just as transparent as his shirt. She reached behind for the clasp on her bra.
His jaw dropped open. “You could, you could be arrested.” He gulped visibly.
She unhooked her bra and let it slide to the water below. The jets from the fountain hit the undersides of her small breasts. The chilly water made her nipples pucker tightly. She slipped one thumb in the side of her underpants. “You think I won’t do it?”
“No, that’s the problem. I think you just might.”
“So you’re attuned to me after all.” This time Mimi threw back her head and laughed. Then she looked him straight in the eye, put her other thumb in the other side of her panties and did a little wiggle. “So what do you intend to do about it, Mr. Look-But-Don’t-Leap?”
She wiggled some more as she worked the elastic waistband down her thighs.
“Well, I’m certainly done looking.” He came in after her.
“My, my, you didn’t even take off your shoes. Now that’s impulsive.” She held open her arms.
He slogged through the water to reach her.
And that’s when the police sirens came wailing down the street.
CHAPTER ONE
A LOUD WAIL INTERRUPTED Mimi’s whimpering. The mechanical, incessant noise went on…and on. Mimi pressed her forehead down. She wanted to cover her ears, and even though logically she knew that movement was impossible, she reflexively went to raise her arms.
She expected to feel the binding restraints and the shooting pain. Miraculously, there was none. Just the incessant ringing and ringing…
Then the noise stopped.
Mimi rolled over and opened her eyes. And realized she was lying on her own queen-size bed in her own apartment on the Upper East Side in Manhattan and not…not captive in that hellhole in Chechnya—blindfolded, beaten, alternating between bouts of despondency and glimmers of hope.
She turned her head on the downy pillow and gazed out the window toward the light—something she’d been deprived of for months, something that was now so precious. It didn’t disappoint.
It was one of those rare winter mornings in Manhattan when the gray clouds of January had decided to take a holiday. The sun streamed in through the glass like some visionary painting.
It should have warmed her. It didn’t.
Mimi still hadn’t gained any weight back after she’d been kidnapped while on assignment in Chechnya, a forced confinement that had lasted almost six months. Two months had passed since her television news network had secured her release, but she still suffered an almost bone-numbing coldness.
She wriggled deeper under the white duvet cover. The feel of the expensive Egyptian cotton material reassured her without fully erasing the nightmare.
Mimi had never been introspective for a variety of reasons. She freely admitted the obvious one that she simply never had the luxury of time to stop and think. The other reasons she kept private, even from her best friend from college, Lilah Evans. But since…since the kidnapping—there, she’d said it—she was beginning to appreciate just how bizarre time and memory were.
For instance, off the top of her head, she had virtually no idea what she’d done all day yesterday. Yet the exact events of the day she was abducted remained crystalline clear. Not surprising, really, since every night when she sought comfort in sleep, she instead kept reliving that day over and over, each detail more vivid, each smell more penetrating, each sound more ominous, the pain…
She forced herself to focus on the cream-colored walls of her room. They were bare except for a few framed photos of colleagues and friends. Several showed her family: her mother blowing out candles on a birthday cake; her half-brother, Press, who’d graduated from Grantham University last year and was now in Australia; and her little half-sister, Brigid, a bundle of energy who was eight going on sixteen. There were none of her father. The photos showed people laughing, happy. She was in a few, too—laughing, happy. She sniffed, trying to recall the feeling. She couldn’t. That was the thing about memory. It was selective, even when you didn’t want it to be.
Mimi shifted back to the bank of metal-framed windows that looked out from her twelfth-floor apartment on East Seventieth, off Lexington. After years of renting various places around the City, she’d finally bought the condo when the real estate market hit a low a few years ago. And for the Upper East Side, it had been a bargain, all because her building was one of those white brick high rises built with good intentions but a total disregard of aesthetic appeal. Ugly didn’t come close, and no self-respecting equities analyst or art gallery owner wanted to be caught dead in something so gauche. One day, though, she figured, white brick would be the new Art Deco, and she’d be laughing all the way to the bank.
The loud wail of the cell phone started up again.
She rubbed her eyes and turned to find her BlackBerry on the nightstand. Its slim black case jiggled across the glass surface. Mimi peered closely, not at the phone number displayed on the screen but at the table, checking for dust. It was spotless. The cleaning lady she’d hired since returning home came in twice a week. She was considering having her come in three times, but even she admitted that was absurd. This obsession she’d developed to maintain spotless control would pass. Still…
The phone rang on.
Mimi sighed and finally reached over. “Yes?” she said without much interest.
“Is that any way to answer the telephone, Mary Louise?” It was her father, Conrad Lodge III. Only he would use her given names instead of her nickname. “I suppose I should thank the heavens that you even picked up—as opposed to my many emails that you’ve ignored completely.” His upper class, lockjaw manner of speaking sounded even more pronounced over the phone.
Mimi inhaled. “I didn’t answer your emails because I haven’t had time to open them.” It was a lie, but then her family was good at lying. She hadn’t actually bothered about the messages at all.
She shifted her position under the covers and stared at the wall with the photos again, zeroing in on the black-and-white shot of her mother wearing a silly party hat and holding forth a birthday cake adorned with lit candles. It had been Mimi’s ninth birthday. She’d been in third grade at Grantham Country Day School.
Mimi recalled that birthday vividly. More than anything she had wanted to get her ears pierced. Her father had refused. “Who do you think you are? An immigrant child?” he’d asked
