Mistress of the Game

“The good news is there’s nothing physically wrong with him, Mrs. Webster.”

Annabel tried to focus on the psychiatrist’s words. She was sitting in an office on the ground floor of a private sanatorium. It was a calming room, painted a restful sky-blue, with a large window overlooking the gardens. The psychiatrist, Dr. Granville, was about Annabel’s age, blond-haired and handsome in a preppy, unthreatening sort of way. He seemed kind. At the general hospital, the staff had been too busy to reassure her. All their focus had been on Max. Understandably. By the time Annabel got him to the ER, he’d started having seizures, frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog. He had to be sedated before the doctors could examine him. It was awful.

“There was no overdose. No attempt at self-harm. That’s good, too.”

Right. It’s all good. It’s all completely fabulous.

“So what is wrong with him?” Annabel wrung her hands despairingly.

“Try to think of his body as an electrical circuit, with the brain as its center. Your husband’s circuit simply overheated. All the fuses blew at once.”

“A nervous breakdown?”

Dr. Granville grimaced. “I don’t like that term. I wouldn’t describe your husband’s symptoms as a nervous condition. He is deeply depressed. I believe he may have lived with untreated schizophrenia for many years. There appear to be repressed memories-”

Annabel interrupted. “What can you do?”

Schizophrenia…depression…these were just useless labels. She wanted to know that Max was going to get better.

Dr. Granville was sympathetic. “I know it’s very difficult. You want answers, and I don’t have them for you. Eventually we will put him on drug treatment and into therapy. With the right combination of medication, symptoms can often be effectively managed.”

“But not cured?”

Dr. Granville looked at the beautiful, exhausted woman in front of him and wished with all his heart he had the magic wand she needed.

“No one can be cured of being who they are, Mrs. Webster.”

For the next two weeks, there was no change in Max’s condition.

Annabel begged Eve to come and visit him.

“He asks for you constantly. For God’s sake, Eve, he’s your son! Whatever he’s done, or not done, whatever happened at Kruger-Brent, can’t you forgive him?”

But the old woman’s brain was as addled as her son’s. Max was her husband, Keith. Max was her sister’s husband, George Mellis. Max had raped her, disfigured her, stolen Kruger-Brent from her.

“Don’t speak his name to me!” Eve screeched at Annabel on the phone. “He’s dead, dead and gone, and I hope he burns in hell!”

Stripping off his pajamas, Max felt peaceful. He was going to see his mother at last. Everything would be all right.

He made rips in the sleeves and pant legs with a loose bedspring and began to tear. He should never have slept with Lexi. That was when the poison got into his system. He’d been unfaithful to his mother. That’s why Kruger-Brent had been taken from him. He was no longer clean.

Calmly, methodically, he tied the strips of fabric together using a true lover’s knot, a camping knot that his father had taught him in South Africa when he was a little boy.

Come here, Max. Let me show you.

He had to remember to teach the knot to Edward and George. They’d go camping next summer. It’d be a blast. Now that he wasn’t working, he’d have more time for the family. My darling boys.

Standing on the bed on tiptoes, naked, Max threw the knotted fabric over the ceiling beam. The noose felt wonderful against his neck, caressing his skin like a lover’s fingers. He closed his eyes and let his mind drift back. His eighth birthday. The gun.

What is it?

Open it and find out.

Eve’s voice was low and sensual.

You’re too old for toys. Keith doesn’t understand that, but I do.

Max smelled her perfume. Chanel.

Do you like it?

His head was pressed against her soft breasts, breathing her in, adoring her.

I love it, Mommy. I love you.

Smiling beatifically, Max leaped into his mother’s arms.

TWENTY-SEVEN

LEXI SAT ALONE IN THE DOCTOR’S WAITING ROOM, GLANCING impatiently at her BlackBerry. How much longer were they going to keep her waiting? Didn’t they realize she had a business to run?

It was late October, ten days after Max Webster’s shocking suicide, and New York had suddenly plunged headlong into winter. In other years, Lexi’s spirits always lifted with the first frost. She loved the cold bite of the air on the city streets, the smell of the chestnut vendors outside her building, the blinding glare of winter sunlight in the crisp ice-blue sky. It roused some childish excitement in her: the promise of Christmas, Santa Claus, brightly wrapped boxes and ribbons, wood smoke, cinnamon. This year, however, the New York cold seemed to have seeped into her bones. She felt drained. Listless. Max’s death had neither elated nor shattered her. She was numbed with a cold that froze from the inside out, from her heart to the tips of her Gucci-gloved fingers.

“Ms. Templeton?”

The receptionist was a plump black woman dressed from head to toe in orange. Even her cheap plastic earrings were Halloween-hued. She tapped Lexi on the shoulder.

“We’ve been calling you, ma’am. Dr. Neale will see you now.”

Dr. Perregrine Neale had known Lexi Templeton since she was a child. A keen tennis player in his midsixties, he prided himself on his still-trim figure. With his distinguished gray hair, deep voice and strong, masculine features, Perry Neale was particularly popular with middle-aged women patients; a category to which Lexi now technically belonged, although looking at her clear skin and blond hair without so much as a hint of gray, it was hard to believe she was forty years old.