happened to her and how she had really come to see them that day in California - but it just came out as sputtering tears.
It was Felix, of all people, who rescued her, taking her gently in his arms and speaking soft, soothing nothings. He led her to his chair and sat her carefully down and dragged up a chair for himself, all the time still murmuring reassuringly to her.
The others unfroze at last, Annabelle hip enough to fetch Kleenex and a glass of water, the men moving slowly, still more or less in shock, into seats of their own to listen. And it was kind of like the Inquisition, with them all circling about her suspicious and staring but she didn't mind. She deserved this. She deserved it for what she had done to them - or almost had done to them.
Because she hadn't come to do a story on them.
She had come to bring their killer.
She had left him in the trunk of that car she had been driving.
He was the fiend they had just slain, the one with the headband.
The little god.
His name was Ross Stewart and she had known him for ten years, since she was eleven and had taken Miss Findley's Dance Class for Young Ladies and Gentlemen.
Ross had been in the class. But he hadn't been a gentleman even then.
She started sputtering again. Felix leaned forward and took her hands in his and told her to relax, to relax and take deep breaths and start from the beginning. And she knew he was right, knew he made sense, knew she should do it that way, but now, looking into his eyes, closer to him than she'd ever been, she wanted to skip all that and...
And get right to the meat.
Get right to the shame.
She felt compelled - obsessed, really - as she had from the very first time she had seen him, to tell him this. To have him know all about what she had done and what she had been made to do.
She wanted him to know everything. Every nasty detail. But she did what he said. She tried again from the beginning. Not the very beginning, when she was young, but from when it had really started. Last spring. Easter vacation. Religious holiday.
Her Aunt Victoria had planned a wonderful party for her.
Aunt Vicky's house was the best-kept secret in north Dallas, a tiny, nondescript entrance on Inwood Road exploded, once inside the driveway, into a miraculous vision of a graystone mansion with multileveled terraces sprawling throughout the sculptured gardens and running brooks and towering trees that had tiny colored lights way up high in them, where the stars were. The party had spilled out over all the terraces and there was a band playing and people dancing and everyone was there, simply everyone she had grown up with, glittering and beautiful, the Sons and daughters of wealth and private schools, and you just knew by looking at them that it wasn't just the fortunes of the past represented here but the fortunes of the future certain to be made.
And Davette was the princess.
Because she really was beautiful, she knew that, and tall and blond and smart, too, editor of the university newspaper, and she laughed and talked and gloried in the attention, warm with friends when she wanted and unapproachable whenever she felt like it because Aunt Vicky had taught her that. You didn't really have to have that same conversation with every man.
But there were two details wrong and they nagged her. Her best friend, Kitty, had yet to show up. And Aunt Vicky was still abed.
Anyone else would still be "in" bed. But not Aunt Victoria, not in that huge three-hundred-year-old canopied bed in that immense bedroom full of all those beautiful chairs and settees and intricate knickknacks her brother, Uncle Harley, had brought home from around the world. The whole house was a treasure, but it was always this room, Davette had realized, that meant her aunt to her, meant romance and glory, which to Davette had always been one and the same.
She missed her mommy and daddy sometimes, so long dead now, but with Aunt Vicky and her brother, Uncle Harley, her rearing had been just as warm and loving - and a lot more fun. Uncle Harley, decorator to royalty, had shown her the world. And Aunt Victoria had shown her the ways of... the lady. Ways that made men sit up straight and turn their language