Gray is My Heart

Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

THE WORLD CAME slowly back into focus as somebody half-carried, half-dragged me across the floor. I cringed when I realised I had a gaping run in my pantyhose, from knee to ankle, and I’d lost one of my pumps. Odd that I should feel so upset about that, given the circumstances, but it was yet another layer of my dignity that had been peeled away.

I was dumped onto a couch, one of the beige ones next to a matching coffee table where the club served up drinks and a selection of petits fours if you didn’t feel like ordering a proper meal.

What just happened? My thoughts were hazy, a black fog so thick it was suffocating. Sucking in each breath took effort as the air weighed heavy in my lungs.

In. Pause. Out.

In. Pause. Out.

I tried to sit up straighter in the chair—Mama told me never to slouch—but I didn’t slide freely across the leather. My ass stuck like a piece of gum on a ballet pump.

I gingerly reached a hand up and touched my back. The hand-woven silk jacket came from a collective in Afghanistan, sold by the wife of one of my father’s friends as part of a project to empower women. Once, it had been soft as clouds. Now something gloopy covered it, but what? My fingers were splodged with maroon liquid, almost black. I sniffed, and as the coppery tang wafted under my nostrils, it all came rushing back. My pen cap. The screaming. The waiter. Oh-hell-oh-hell-oh-hell! It was his blood. I was covered in his blood. My other hand brushed against the back of my neck, and it came away wet. I stared down, marvelling at the redness, a brighter shade this time, interspersed with lumpy little cauliflowers that clung to my fingers. Another second passed as I processed that.

Bile rose in my throat, and I clutched at my stomach, leaving a crimson handprint on my cream wool sweater. It was no good—I couldn’t hold it in. I threw up right on the coffee table, the smell of vomit mingling with the odour of a dead man.

I clawed at silk, at cashmere, at my hair. “Get it off! Get it off! Get it off!”

A woman in a spa uniform rushed over to me. “Calm down, ma’am, please.”

She spoke with a Mexican accent, panicked, her words so fast I barely understood what she was saying.

“No, I won’t calm down! His f*****g brain is on me!” I batted her hand away and tore at my jacket. It ripped as I yanked it away from my body and flung it as hard as I could across the room.

“Please, it will be all right. Please, ma’am.”

“Just get away from me!”

I struggled out of the sweater, forgetting to undo the buttons at the neck. For a moment, it got stuck halfway over my head, and I gulped for air, feeling dizzy as it covered my nose. I tugged harder, writhing from side to side until the seam gave way and I was free. The garment was left inside out, but the blood had soaked all the way through, and the stain spread out like a gruesome Rorschach test.

I could almost hear my therapist, his reedy voice needling at my brain. “So, Georgia, tell me what you see here.”

“Death, you imbecile! I see death! Isn’t it obvious!” I yelled in my head. Or maybe I shouted out loud, because all the people in the room who weren’t already watching me swivelled their heads in my direction.

I’d become an exhibit in a sick circus.

My fingers were slick with blood, and I lost my grip on the tiny zipper as I tried to undo my skirt. Tears streamed down my face and my nose ran, all mixing with the gore that covered me.

I’d got the damn zipper halfway down when a man rushed in and smothered me with a blanket. He pinned my arms to my sides, and I fought to get them loose as he hung on tight.

“Let me go!” I shrieked. “I need to get out of these clothes.”

“Calm down, ma’am.”

“Get off me!”

No matter how much I wriggled, I couldn’t escape from his grip, but I did hear his yelp of pain as my one remaining high heel made contact with his shin. Then my feet left the floor, and he carried me away from the gawking onlookers, out of the restaurant, through the bar, past the squash courts. I went limp as three-day-old arugula, my energy sapped as I resigned myself to going wherever I was being taken.

The man’s steps sped up, his heels clicking on the stone paving until he pushed through a door. Next thing I knew, I was sitting on the floor, still wrapped in the blanket, then a rain cloud burst over me. Torrents of water fell, washing all the blood and flesh and brain off me. When the blanket released its hold, I scrambled to my feet, kicking it to the side of the shower stall. I didn’t want that filth anywhere near me. The rest of my clothes followed. I spied a shelf full of complimentary toiletries and poured the contents of a tiny bottle of shower gel into my hand. Then another and another, scrubbing at myself until my skin turned as pink as the water once ran.

The bubbles swirling around the drain took on a new fascination as I tried to block the waiter’s misshapen head from my mind. Don’t think about it, Georgia. But the images wouldn’t leave. I turned the temperature up and stood under the scalding stream, concentrating on the burn until the Mexican lady called me again.

“Ma’am, please, you need to come and speak to the police.”

I wanted to tell her to go away, to tell the police to get lost as well, but I was Georgia Ann Rutherford-Beaumont, and I’d been brought up not to be rude. So I shut off the water and wrapped myself in the robe hanging outside the cubicle.

The woman from the spa didn’t speak as she led me into an office and pointed at a plastic chair. I dropped down into it, grateful I didn’t have to try and stand any longer. The plain, functional furniture was a world away from the elegant decor and relaxed elegance of the public areas of the club, but I was beyond caring.

A grey-haired man perched on the edge of the desk and held his hand out to me. I stared at it. What had he touched? The waiter? Had he touched the waiter? The blood? After a few seconds, he shrugged, dropped his hand into his lap, and cleared his throat. A woman was standing behind him, but she didn’t seem so friendly.

“Mrs. Beaumont, you seemed a little confused after the shooting,” the man said. “Do you remember what happened?”

I focused on his face. He had kind eyes. In fact, his expression reminded me of my grandfather’s that awful morning I found my first hamster stiff in her cage. Sympathy mixed with sorrow, two emotions Douglas had never quite mastered. I’d been eight years old when Fudge died, and Grandaddy had helped me to bury her in a shoebox in the yard.

“Was that man shot? I mean, his head… He looked like he was shot. But I didn’t hear a bang.”

“He was definitely shot. We found the bullet embedded in the wall behind him.”

“How is that possible? Did the shooter use a silencer?”

“We don’t know for sure, but it seems likely.” The detective consulted his notepad. “You would have been facing the direction the shot came from. Did you see anything? Any movement? Maybe around the tree line?”

“Nothing.” I hadn’t even been looking out of the window. “I was talking to Monica and Mindy just before it happened.”

The policewoman spoke up. “Have you quarrelled with anyone lately? Received any threats?”

She didn’t seem as easygoing as her partner. She’d scraped her hair back in an unforgiving ponytail and looked tougher than he did. The way she fidgeted, I imagined she’d rather be out chasing robbers than interviewing a spoiled country club brat.

“Why would anybody threaten me? What’s that got to do with anything?”

She ignored my question. “It might not have seemed significant at the time, but we do need to know about any disagreements, no matter how petty.”

“I haven’t had any disagreements, petty or not. Why does that matter?”

The woman sucked in a breath and gave her head a little shake as if she didn’t believe me.

“We’ve talked to your friends,” the man said. “It seems a second before the victim was shot, your head was right in front of his. He might not have been the intended target.”

It took a few seconds for that thought to penetrate. Thank goodness I was seated when it did. The room went blurry, the cops in front of me fading in and out of focus the way my husband did after I’d drunk one too many glasses of champagne.

The policewoman stepped forward and shoved my head down. “Put your head between your knees if you feel faint.”

I didn’t have much choice, not with the way she was pressing on it.

My mind started to clear, the fuzz receding. Was the cop right? Could the shooter really have been aiming at me? If I hadn’t bent to pick up my pen cap, would that be me lying on the floor with my brain splashed across the wall like one of Jackson Pollock’s creations?

“B-b-but I can’t think of anyone who would wish me harm. I mean, I did tell Bettina Rossiter that she was a mean old cow last year at Lucinda Wahlberg’s birthday dinner when she called Sophie Marchand fat, but everyone else agreed with me, and Bettina hates everybody anyway. Apart from that, I don’t think I’ve ever had an argument with anybody.”

I truly hadn’t. Calling Bettina a cow was totally out of character for me, but she’d made Sophie cry, and Sophie was such a sweet girl. And she fit in the sample size, for crying out loud. Just because Bettina threw up everything she ever ate, she thought she had the right to belittle people. Probably she’d mellow out if she let herself have a donut. Anyway, something inside me had snapped, and I told her to stop being so horrid and apologise. She was so shocked that she actually did.

Of course, when Douglas heard about the incident, he told me in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t to happen again.

“It reflects badly on my campaign if you go around bad-mouthing the wives of potential donors.”

“I’m sorry. It just came out.”

“Well, next time make sure it stays in.”

Since donors were Douglas’s lifeblood, I’d tamped down any spirit I had left and made sure my interactions at future birthday parties were restricted to buying a suitable gift and making small talk. And being bored to tears.

The policewoman scribbled something in a notepad. “We’ll make sure we talk to Bettina, just in case. Are you sure nothing else comes to mind?”

Talk about putting me on the spot. “Oddly enough, it’s not something I’ve spent much time considering. If you want a list of enemies, perhaps you should talk to my husband and father? Do you know who they are?”

“We’ve been made aware of your father’s position and your husband’s aspirations.” Her sneering tone left me in no doubt as to her opinion of politicians. “We’ve got officers tracking them both down. In the meantime, it would be best if we took you into protective custody for your own safety.”

Custody? What? No! “I don’t want to go into custody. I want to go home.”

“You don’t—”

The male officer cut off the woman with a glare. “Mrs. Beaumont, it’s not really custody. It’s more like a little vacation. We’re just worried that as the shooter missed, he may try again. There’s a good chance he knows where you live, and if you go home, it could put your family in danger.”

Oh hell, I hadn’t thought of that. What if he tried again and shot Douglas by accident? Or the maid or the gardener or the pool boy? What if one of them got in the way like the waiter had? I couldn’t live with myself if I put someone else in that position.

“So what happens? Do you lock me in a cell? Will there be armed guards?”

Grey-haired grandpa gave a chuckle. “No, nothing like that. We’ll take you to a safe house. It’ll be just like a normal house except it’ll have several policemen inside and outside, and because it’s not associated with you, the shooter won’t know where it is.”

Okay, that didn’t sound so bad. “Will I be able to stop and pick up some clothes? Maybe a few books?”

“I’m afraid not, but we can have one of our people collect personal items for you.”

“How long will I have to stay there? I have an appointment at the hair salon tomorrow at three and a gala dinner to attend the day after that. Douglas will be upset if I start missing functions.”

“It depends. We’ve got a lot of leads to investigate.” The policeman shrugged. “A few days at least. You’ll need to cancel the haircut and the dinner.”

A chill washed over me, another layer of ice on top of the numbness that had already taken hold.

“Do you really think the shooter will try again?”

This time, the woman answered. “It’s a possibility. He seems to have got away clean, which suggests he could be a professional. If he is, we can expect another attempt because if he doesn’t kill you, he doesn’t get paid.”

I leaned forward and stuck my head between my legs again.