Genuine Lies

cranky Pomeranians who had the run of her Bel Air mansion.
    “There are my babies, my sweet babies.” Charlotte cooed and clucked. Julia recalled that she had fed caviar from a Baccarat bowl placed right on the Aubusson rug to the yipping balls of fur.
    “Don’t be greedy, Lulu. Let your sisters have their share. What a sweet girl. What a good girl. Mommy’s baby. Now, where was I?”
    “You were telling me about Charlie and Eve.” Julia heard the suppressed laughter in her taped voice. Luckily, Charlotte hadn’t noticed.
    “Yes, of course. Well, he completely lost his head over her. Dear Charlie had poor judgment when it came to women, and Eve was unscrupulous. She used him to get a screen test, kept him dangling until she’d landed that part in
Desperate Lives
with Michael Torrent. If you recall, she was cast as a slut for the film, and the casting was superb.” She’d given a sniff as she’d fed her greedy dogs bits of salmon. “He was completely devastated when she and Michael became lovers.”
    “Isn’t that when your name began to be linked with his?”
    “We were friends,” Charlotte said primly. “I’m happy to say I gave Charlie a shoulder to cry on, and by attending certain functions and parties with him, helped him save face. That’s not to say Charlie wasn’t a little bit in love with me, but I’m afraid he believed Eve and I were of a kind. Which we most certain were not and are not. I enjoyed him. Consoled him. He was also having trouble around that time, financial trouble due to one of his ex-wives. There was a child, you see, and the ex-wife insisted that Charlie pay through the nose so the baby could be raised in high style. Charlie, being Charlie, paid.”
    “Do you know what happened to the child?”
    “I can’t say that I do. In any case, I did what I could for Charlie, but when Eve married Michael, he went over the edge.” There was a long pause, then a sigh. “Even in death, Charlie boosted Eve’s career. The fact that he had killed himself for love of her made headlines, and created a legend. Eve, the woman men would kill themselves for.”
    The legend, Julia mused. The mystique. The star. Yet the book wasn’t about those things. It was personal, intimate, honest. She picked up a pen and scrawled on a legal pad.
EVE THE WOMAN
    And there, Julia thought, was her title.
    She began to type, and was soon lost in a story that as yet had no end. Over an hour passed before she stopped, reaching for a watered-down Pepsi with one hand and opening her drawer with another. Wanting to check a minor detail from the pages she’d already drafted, she leafed through them. When a small square of paper fell out and landed on her lap, she could only stare at it.
    As fate would have it, the sheet had fallen faceup. The boldly printed words leered at her.
BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY
    Julia sat very still, ordering herself not to give in to a quick clutch of fear. They were ridiculous, even laughable, these clichéd aphorisms. It was someone’s poor idea of a joke.
    But whose? And she’d looked through those pages just the other day, after the break-in. Hadn’t she?
    Straining for calm, she closed her eyes and rubbed the glass, damp with condensation, against her cheek. She hadn’t found it then—that was the only explanation. Whoever had gone through the tapes had planted it there.
    She didn’t want to believe, couldn’t bear to believe that someone had come back after the security had been tightened. After she’d started locking the doors and windows whenever she left the house.
    No. Julia picked up the note and crumpled it in her hand. It had been there for days, waiting for her to find it. The very fact that she had shown no reaction was bound to discourage the author.
    Yet she found it impossible to stand inside, alone in the quiet house with darkness pressing on the windows. Without giving herself time to think, she ran upstairs and changed into her bathing suit. The pool was heated, she reminded herself.She’d take a quick swim, stretch her muscles, relax her mind. She tossed her frayed terry robe over her shoulders, and a towel around her neck.
    Steam was rising out of that deep blue water when she shucked her robe. She shivered once, sucked in her breath, dove. She cut through the water, swam deep, imagining all her tension floating up on the surface to become as insubstantial as the steam climbing into the air.
    Fifteen minutes later, she rose up in the shallow end,