The Portal Page 2

  “Lucy,” she said. “Lucy Delrey. I was a little girl…”

  “Oh my God,” he said under his breath. “Little Lucy, of course. How little were you then?”

  “Seven. I’m thirty now.”

  “Thirty? God. Thirty is impossible.”

  “Not if you’re about fifty. That would be about right.” She couldn’t hold back a small, nervous laugh. It was his voice. She’d have recognized it anywhere. Although it had an unaccustomed seriousness to it, an adultness that she thought befit his new profession. “You’re a lawyer now?”

  “Only for the past twenty years,” he said. “Wow, Lucy.” Words seemed to fail him. “You looked me up?”

  “Googled you actually, yes.”

  “But…what are you doing? Where are you?”

  “I’m home, still in New York. I’m a…” But her business didn’t lend itself to easy explanation. “I’m a photographer,” she said.

  “So somebody’s still doing art,” he said. Then, in an awkward tone, filling in the space, “That’s good to hear.”

  “Yeah, well…” A silence settled for a minute, until Lucy surprised herself. “Listen, Mr. Millay,” she began.

  “Frank, please.”

  “Okay, Frank. It just happens that I’m coming out to San Francisco next week on some business. Would it be too weird if I came to see you? If we had lunch or something?” Sensing his reluctance over the line, she pressed on. “I wouldn’t blame you if you said no, but in spite of this call, I promise I’m not a flake or a stalker or anything…I just still remember what an incredible impact your paintings had on me. Still do, as I remember them. It…it would mean a lot. I just feel like I need to see you.”

  Silence for a long beat. “I’m married now,” he said. “I’ve got three children. I don’t know if my wife…” He let the sentence hang.

  “Please,” she said. “She doesn’t have to know. It’s so important. We need to talk, that’s all.”

  “You know I don’t paint anymore, Lucy. I haven’t touched a brush in twenty years.”

  “No, it’s more than that. It’s you, who you were.” Then, unsure of exactly what she meant, she added, “It’s not just that, either.”

  “No,” he said. “No, I suppose not.” Finally, when he did speak, his voice was nearly unrecognizable, constricted with that adult quality. “I’ll find some time,” he said. “What day next week?”

  * * *

  She didn’t sleep well over the next five days.

  Frank Millay’s colors, particularly that muddy blue, seeped into her dreams and woke her over and over again. It was a cold blue under a cold sky and she woke up, paradoxically, dripping with sweat. And sexually aroused.

  All the dreams had the same setting. Millay’s whole room was a womb enclosed in that dark, muddy blue—the river as he’d painted it endlessly flowing along the windowless walls over the bed.

  Which made no sense.

  She had no memory that she had ever been to his bedroom. She had never seen his bed.

  But something was stirring things up.

  The last dream was different. It started with the smells of must or animal or mold, and there was a bright light at the end of a dark green tunnel. Then she turned and walked through a red door and suddenly was in Millay’s muddy blue room. She felt the skin on her thighs rubbing together and realized that she didn’t have any clothes on. She was standing on a golden storage box and he was painting her picture, although she could only see his head behind the canvas. He had a blond beard that looked wet somehow. He kept saying something in a deep voice that seemed to echo in her bones and make her weak. Stepping around the picture, he walked right up close to her. He smelled like that other smell, and now she recognized that it was semen. He wore an orange tie-dyed T-shirt, but no pants and no underwear. Because she was standing on the storage box, their faces were at almost the same height and he held her eyes while he put his hand between her legs. Then she looked down and something muddy and blue was coming out of his penis and he was painting her with it. Stroke after stroke after stroke.

  She woke up, sobbing, in the middle of an orgasm.

  And finally it all came back.

  * * *

  She knew now that in a fundamental way, she had at last begun to heal. The recurring waves of what had been repressed memory now throbbed with the persistence of a bone bruise, painful enough on two more occasions to bring her to tears, but at least she was no longer numb. She almost called Dr. Snow to tell her that she’d begun to feel things again. If much of it was negative and painful, that was okay. It was the price to get back to normal. But she knew that she wasn’t quite finished yet. To complete the recovery, she would have to assassinate one last man. The one who’d all but destroyed her so many years ago.

  Frank Millay clearly didn’t want her to come to his office. He’d e-mailed her to say they should meet at the Slanted Door, a terrific and easy-to-find Vietnamese restaurant located in San Francisco’s newly renovated Ferry Building, at the foot of Market Street. He had one o’clock reservations there under the name York. He’d explained that it wasn’t a place where they were likely to run into too many of his colleagues on a weekday afternoon. She realized with a bit of a thrill that he was already afraid of exposure, even of being seen with her. And this led to the understanding that he only could have agreed to the meeting with her for one of three very different reasons—to somehow try to explain what he’d done, to beg her to forgive him, or to get the details of her blackmail.

  But Lucy knew fifty-year-old men. Once she started coming on to him, in spite of what he’d done to her, he would never suspect her true motive. He would believe that, sick as it might be, she was still, after all, attracted to him. She had her story down, her cameras and microphones hidden and primed in her hotel room at the Four Seasons a couple of blocks away.

  She was ready.

  Lucy, braless, and further turned out in a black slit skirt, low heels and a tightly fitted red silk blouse, arrived and got seated at their table—tucked away in a corner—twenty minutes early. It was a cool day, and cool in the restaurant. It calmed and somewhat gratified Lucy to realize that no man who looked her way seemed to be able to avoid a glance at her erect nipples.

  When Frank Millay came to the greeting station, she recognized him immediately, even though he was now the quintessential lawyer—clean-shaven, short-haired, dressed in a three-piece suit. He was still trim, still handsome, although slightly gone to gray. But the face had no slackness to it, the jaw was firm. Close up, she could see that the deep blue artist’s eyes still might have the power to captivate. But not her. Not anymore.

  When the hostess left him, he sat, assayed a bit of a worried smile and said, “My God, you’re beautiful.”

  “Thank you.”

  A waiter came by, introduced himself and presented menus, saying he’d be back in a couple of minutes. A busboy poured water. Out the window, on the Bay, the Sausalito ferry with its complement of screeching seagulls steamed out from its mooring under the scudding clouds.

  Millay’s eyes darted down to her breasts, then came back up to her face. He sighed. “This is awkward.”

  Lucy reached out her hand and placed it over his for an instant, then withdrew it. “It’s all right,” she said. “I guess I should have told you on the telephone. I contacted you because I wanted you to know that I forgive you.”

  “I don’t know why…” he began. “It’s why I left New York, to get away from what I was doing. It was all getting out of control, what I did to you was just part of it. I was going through a crazy time.” He brought his hand to his face, rubbed the side of his cheek. His look was something more than chagrin, touched by a brush—still—of fear. “I can’t explain it.”

  “You don’t have to,” Lucy said. “We all make mistakes.”

  “Not like that. I’ve got a seven-year-old daughter right now. The thought of what I did to you still makes me sick. I’m so sorry. So sorry.”

&nbs
p; “Were there others?”

  “No!” Frank Millay nearly blurted it out. “No,” he said again. “It was just you, the pretty little girl who loved my paintings. The only one who loved them, to tell you the truth. And who made me take her up to my room one time to see them.”

  “Was it only once?” Again, she touched his hand. “I really don’t remember.”

  “Just once,” he said. “Once was enough.”

  The waiter arrived and took their order. She said she’d like to have some wine, but only if he’d join her. By the time the waiter left, Frank Millay had visibly relaxed. Pushed back from the table, he sat with his ankle resting on the opposite knee. He wore stunning black shoes of knitted leather, black socks that disappeared into his pants leg. Lucy, fidgeting now as though she were slightly nervous, managed to undo the second button on her blouse.

  “So,” she said, “you’re married now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Happily?”

  “Well, seventeen years. We’re okay.”

  “That doesn’t sound very romantic.”

  “It’s really not very romantic.”

  “Do you miss it? Romance?”

  “Not really,” he said. Then, “Sometimes, I guess. Who wouldn’t?”

  “That seems a shame. You’re still a very good-looking man. You must know that. You must hear it all the time.”

  A small embarrassed chuckle. “Thank you, but I wouldn’t quite say that I hear it all the time. And I for damn sure wouldn’t call me good-looking anymore.”

  She put her hand on his again, and this time she left it there as she met his eyes. “I would,” she said. “Why do you think I’ve remembered you after all this time? Do you think, that day, it was all your idea?”

  After that, it was easy.

  * * *

  At the Four Seasons, they went straight up from the hotel entrance to her two-room suite. As soon as they were inside, Lucy excused herself for a moment, leaving Frank Millay in the living-room section while she went, ostensibly, to use the bathroom. One of her cameras that looked like a pen she had arranged on the dresser—it would automatically snap a picture every minute until she turned it off. The video camera was her cell phone, which she arranged and propped on one of the bed tables.

  In the bathroom, she flushed the toilet for verisimilitude’s sake, then stepped out into the bedroom, undoing her blouse now, taking it off, laying it on the bed. “Frank,” she said, “aren’t you going to come in here?”

  “Sure.”

  He appeared in the doorway and stopped, taking her in.

  She saw the hesitation now. He still had his coat and tie on. And it was one of her inviolable rules—she would give each of her victims one last chance to save themselves, to prove to her that they were better than they appeared. Even Frank Millay might still escape, although she didn’t want that to happen.

  She gave him what she knew was her finest smile. Winsome and seductive at once, playful but with a serious edge of promised passion underneath. “Are you sure you’re comfortable with this?” she asked him. “I don’t want to force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  He broke a small smile that seemed to mock himself. “If you hadn’t wanted to force me,” he said, “you would have left your shirt on.”

  She unclasped the hook on her skirt and let it drop to the floor. “Well, then,” she said, stepping out of it, sitting on the bed where she knew the cameras would capture everything. She patted the mattress next to her. “Why don’t you come over here?”

  Still, he seemed to hesitate for one last moment before he started moving toward her. When he got in front of her, she reached for his zipper, traced her finger down the bulge in the front. “Oh, my,” she said.

  She felt his hands in her hair, traveling down the sides of her head to cup her face, which he lifted so that she looked up at him.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said as his hands slipped lower.

  “No. You don’t need—” But suddenly she felt the hands pushing down on her shoulders, holding her where she sat, then slowly, almost as though he were caressing her, closing around her neck.

  “Don’t you see?” His face suddenly inches from hers. “I can’t take the risk. Someday you might tell.”

  “But no, I—”

  And then there was no way to make any more sound. She tried to call out, to straighten up off the bed, to kick at him, but he was nearly twice her size and now seized with an irresistible power. He pushed her back onto the bed and fell upon her, his hands closing tighter and tighter around her windpipe.

  Her vision exploded into yellows and purples and greens and then they all blended to a muddy blue, then a darker, colder blue.

  And then no colors at all. Only black.

  * * *

  I hadn’t heard from Lucy for two weeks when I turned on the news late one night and watched her face appear on the screen while a reporter described the brutal murder that had taken place in San Francisco.

  “The killing was recorded on Lucy Delrey’s cell-phone camera, which the police discovered at the scene.”

  Immediately in the hours, days and weeks afterward, Millay’s PR machine went into action and it was clear that by the time the case went to trial, his attorneys would have spun it so that the world at large would perceive Lucy Delrey as a psychotic nymphomaniac who got pleasure from setting up men sexually in order to destroy them. Frank Millay had been her hapless victim.

  The sympathy would be with him by then, but I’ve got to believe that even in San Francisco, if you strangle a woman on videotape, you’re looking at some kind of a stretch in prison. Millay’s career—his entire life—would be ruined. It could never be the same.

  And the strange thing was, just as I had asked her to, Lucy had found the complicated truth. No matter what had happened in those final minutes, she had gone out there to destroy him and she’d done it.

  * * * * *

  Author Biography

  John Lescroart is the New York Times bestselling author of the Dismas Hardy novels and the Wyatt Hunt series. His books have been translated into sixteen languages in more than seventy-five countries. He lives with his wife and their children in northern California. Find him at johnlescroart.com.

  M. J. Rose grew up in New York City exploring the labyrinthine galleries of the Metropolitan Museum and the dark tunnels and lush gardens of Central Park—and reading her mother’s favorite books before she was allowed. She is the copresident and founding board member of International Thriller Writers, and the founder of the first marketing company for authors, AuthorBuzz.com. She is the author of more than a dozen novels. Visit her online at mjrose.com.

  Be prepared to be thrilled as you’ve never been before…

  Discover more thriller stories that will tantalize and terrify. Offering up heart-pumping tales of suspense in all its guises are thirty-two of the most critically acclaimed and award-winning names in the business.

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  Lock the doors, draw the shades, pull up the covers and be prepared for these stories to keep you up all night.

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  ISBN-13: 9781488094484

  The Portal

  Copyright © 2006 By Lescroart Corporation & M. J. Rose

  First published as part of an anthology of works entitled Thriller in 2006.

  All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.