Frenzy Read Free Page A

to pretend to himself. He wasn’t sorry she was dead. That her death wasn’t an accident didn’t make that much difference, did it? Maude was planning on marrying his father and then killing him so Maude could inherit his fortune. Then Maude and Bill Phoenix would be rich and live happily ever after.
    That wasn’t all bad either, was it?
    It didn’t have to be.
    Not if you turned it this way and that in your mind, like Mrs. Jacoby had preached. Dwayne was grateful to Mrs. Jacoby, even if she was going to take money from Maude and Bill Phoenix to help lie to him and put him in a prison-like distant public school.
    She thought.
    Dwayne scooted back away from the cabana. Careful to keep to the shadows of the shrubbery, he made his way back to the house.
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    He lay in bed most of the night without sleeping, thinking about what he’d heard.
    Next week. Like Bill Phoenix had said, that wasn’t much time. Dwayne was sure that if Maude wanted his father to take her to Las Vegas and marry her, that’s what his father would do.
    Then what?
    Dwayne refused to be trapped again in the games adults played.
    He knew Maude, and knew his father. He didn’t want to go to a private school where life would be miserable. And he knew that when his father and Maude were married, and Maude was sleeping in the bed where Dwayne’s mother had slept, things would eventually become the same as when Dwayne’s real mother was alive.
    Then, after a long enough time that it wouldn’t seem too suspicious, Dwayne’s father would die.
    That was how it seemed to work.
    The family would be together again, at least for a while.

5
    New York, the present
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    W hen Andria Bell opened the door of her suite in the Fairchild Hotel in New York, she expected maid service or a bellhop. Instead, she found herself face-to-face with the worst thing she could have imagined.
    She’d seen the man talking to Grace in the Museum of Modern Art earlier that day, and there’d been something about the way he was looking at Grace, the subtle smile, the lean of his body toward hers, that suggested predator and prey.
    And here was the predator at her door.
    Still standing in the hotel hall, he looked beyond Andria. She saw a quick movement of his head and darting of his eyes, to make sure they were alone.
    His eyes.
    The predator again.
    Then he showed her a gun, which he drew out from beneath his light jacket that was still spotted with rain from the drizzle outside.
    It was a stubby gun of the sort operated with both hands, and it had what Andria had heard referred to as a banana clip. An automatic rifle, she believed. Rat-a-tat-tat. . .
    She knew little about guns, but she understood that the carnage could be astounding.
    Andria had never had a gun pointed at her. She taught art, not war. Her legs went rubbery as she stared into the black hole at the end of the muzzle. It was hypnotic, the way the gun’s dark bore seemed like an eye gazing back at her with malicious meaning.
    She retreated as if in a trance when the man pushed his way in and closed the door softly behind him. He raised a forefinger to his smiling lips in a signal—a warning—for her to remain silent. Then he clicked the gun onto a clasp on his belt so it dangled pointed forward. He smiled with his head cocked to the side, and shrugged while displaying turned up palms, as if to say, See. No problem here. Nothing to be scared of, lady.
    And like that, he had her by the neck.
    She knew immediately that she was in the hands of an expert, but it wasn’t a comforting thought. He knew exactly where to squeeze, and how hard. The room darkened, and Andria was aware that her hands had become fluttering, useless objects, as she clawed feebly at his iron fingers. She began to weaken, began losing consciousness. She knew she might never return to this world. This was it. The end of her life.
    Her left hand closed on the gun and fumbled at it,